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high into the air and fell heavily onto a table, sending a bottle crashing to the floor. If Ted could do that every night, Peter thought, then maybe he’d have something.
    ‘You treat me like I’m a common whore. You’d be nothing without me. I should never have left Captain Capers to further your career.’ The walking stick clattered to the stage and Ted stormed off, his tap shoes sounding like small explosions with every step.
    ‘Ted, come back,’ Concheetah pleaded. ‘Stop being so bloody sensitive.’
    Poor Ted, Peter thought, poor Concheetah. It looks like another overdose waiting in the wings. A modern day Romeo and Juliet. Concheetah turned and glared at Peter.
    ‘Got your story now? Famous drag queen in lover’s tiff. Lover threatens suicide.’
    Peter thought it over back in the Shag. It was tempting to use the argument as a story. He should have taken Mad Dog. Deadline was tomorrow and still he had no story. Well, there was that lead he had been given about the Collingwood player and a politician’s wife. That was sinking low. He did have some ethics. Never betray your footy team. That was like betraying your family. He was glad Bob understood, especially since Bob sat on the Collingwood committee.
    When Peter returned a little before eleven o’clock, Shazza was not at her desk and the other journalists were out. Maybe she had crawled off to some darkened corner to die like a poisoned dingo. The others were probably trawling through Melbourne’s dirty knickers to find that titillating story that The Truth was renowned for. Reg Whitlock would probably be at Moonee Valley today. The rest of them would be scouring the pubs, clubs, brothels and gutters, mostly based on titbits of information supplied to them by Joe and Joan Public. In Peter’s experience, that information was usually unreliable and largely distorted by whatever mental illness Joe or Joan had been most recently diagnosed with.
    Peter rarely dealt with the great unwashed these days: he had his own sources, or puppies , as he liked to call them. He had painstakingly built up his puppy farm over the years. When he first met them, some of them smelt and only a few were housetrained, but they were his puppies. When you had reached the top of your game you had your own sources, all carefully cultivated, manicured, fed and watered, and lovingly paid for out of his expense account. Listed as postage and sundries on the company accounts. No more said.
    Over the years, puppies had come and gone. Where once he had had a virtual lost dog shelter full of them, over recent years, it had reduced to a mere handful as they had been progressively murdered, found a conscience or retired. Or began dogging to more lucrative media outlets. At the peak, Peter had a puppy at Russell Street police headquarters, another at Parliament House and a third who was a madam at a prominent St Kilda brothel. Kitty . Kitty had been a greatsource until she had discovered religion and taken up a missionary position somewhere in Africa. And then there’s the frigging commercial television stations! They paid far more than Peter could ever afford. TV had cornered the market and made sleaze stories ever harder to get for the paper. Headlines like S&M Dungeon Discovered at Celebrity Singer’s House or Mass Orgy Weekend Planned in Boy’s Boarding School were drying up. The Truth was peddling more petty suburban tattletales, neighbourhood disputes and alien abductions these days, although why they always happened to folk in rural Healesville instead of toffy Toorak remained a mystery. The puppies were finding greener pastures to frolic in.
    Peter fell into his chair and mustered all his energies towards generating a lead story. The argument between Concheetah and Tapping Ted would have made a great front cover story, something The Truth readers expected: Celebrity Drag Queen and Boyfriend in Violent Confrontation . Pity he hadn’t taken Mad Dog to capture the action. Concheetah