by Garry Disher
She tried telling herself she hadn’t really done anything wrong, or not deliberately. Also, it was ages ago, two, three months at least. She’d moved on, other guys, other experiences. When Eddie stopped returning her calls, she shrugged, no big deal. If you don’t invest much, you don’t lose much.
She recalled the way he just appeared at the gym one day, a good-looking older guy with a twinkle in his eye. Calm, collected, well-dressed, not some try-hard twenty-something loser. She let him chat her up, spend some money on her. The sex was good without being spectacular; an older guy, he knew how to take his time and pay attention to a woman’s needs. Gave her a little coke, some speed from time to time.
He liked to lie with her afterwards, with her head on his chest or in the crook of his arm, and they’d talk about everything under the sun. She told him about the hidden compartments in the big Audi. She told him about Le Page’s visits, how they coincided with the Furneaux brothers’ sales run and the new stock in their estate-jewellery display.
Sneakily done, she thought now, the bastard. Eddie had told her some stories about bosses he’d endured over the years, scams he’d twigged to or been part of. He drew her in, flattering, patient, and she fell for it. Then he stopped calling and she supposed there was another woman but she wasn’t going to humiliate herself over it.
Eddie didn’t like to use his place. ‘Bachelor pad,’ he said, ‘a side of me you don’t want to see.’ Ambiguous, yeah? Like maybe he’d welcome a change in status sometime? So they fucked at her place.
But she knew where he lived. So as soon as the cops finished questioning her, and Henri said she could take the rest of the day off, she’d headed straight here to Eddie’s.
And the bastard wasn’t home.
* * * *
Le Page photographed the girl several times in the act of knocking, and again when she returned to her car and drove away.
He elected to stay. Danielle was the known quantity. The unknown was the person who lived behind the white door. ‘I need to talk to Danielle again,’ he said, into his mobile phone. ‘You will detain her for me.’
‘She’s not here,’ Henri said.
Le Page closed and opened his eyes. ‘I realise that. I want you to seize her at her house.’
‘I’ll send Joseph,’ Henri said.
Le Page settled in to wait.
* * * *
Wyatt was edgy after the doctor’s visit. He could be patient for long hours if there was a score at the end of it, but nursing an invalid brought him nothing. He needed to move.
Maybe Eddie Oberin was hiding in plain sight. Pocketing Lydia’s house keys, Wyatt darted through a brief sun shower to the underground car park of an adjacent apartment complex, where he kept an old Falcon. It meant a handy $100 a month to the Malaysian accountancy student who rented the slot to him.
The building was on a corner, meaning two exits, one onto the street that passed Wyatt’s apartment building, the other onto the street at right angles to it. Wyatt drove out of the second one, wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses. Then he steered into his street and prowled along it, blessing the speed bumps, which obliged him to drive slowly and gave him time to eyeball the parked cars. They were all empty and at that moment the footpaths were clear of pedestrians. There was only a woman in uniform delivering the mail, and she’d been working in this part of Southbank ever since Wyatt had moved into the area.
Satisfied, he drove to Abbotsford. The little river suburb was mostly prettified cottages now, but brewery and river odours still lingered at the back of a man’s throat, dingy factories and weatherboards still crouched in the side streets. Here and there the sun penetrated, coaxing dirty rainbows out of greasy potholes. Dirty old town, Wyatt thought.
Lydia’s house was a semi-detached cottage dating from the 1890s, heritage stripes on the little veranda roof but otherwise in need of upkeep. He watched from the car for thirty minutes, then let himself in. After making a rapid sweep of the interior, he took a closer look at her letters, calendars, computer files, wardrobes, drawers and bathroom cabinets for signs of a hidden life or partner. Finding nothing that didn’t belong, he began to select changes of clothes for her, cramming a garbage bag with underwear, T-shirts, jeans, tops and shoes. The fabric moved softly in his grasp, leaving him faintly unmoored.
* * * *
While Wyatt searched and packed, Le Page waited. His rental car ticked as it cooled. Still no GPS signal from the transponders he’d stowed with the bonds, no sign of life at the house with the white door. Meanwhile pedestrians wandered by, and they all glanced in at Le Page sitting there. He knew that some of them would wonder, it would grow and niggle at them. With a curse, he left the car, taking the camera with him. .
Opposite the house with the white door was a small, two-storey structure, vaguely Mediterranean villa in style, with creamy rendered walls and fat columns. A woman dressed in black was watering the concrete in front. Le Page advanced on her in his stylish clothes, his fleshless face severe, and flipped open his wallet. ‘Police. I need your upstairs front room for a couple of hours.’
He’d made a snap judgment, seeing a widowed Turkish or Lebanese woman who would naturally fear all kinds of authority. She wouldn’t interfere.
‘You live alone?’
She shrank away and stared at the garden path, so he let himself in and made a rapid search of the house, finding only unoccupied rooms outfitted by the kinds of furniture barns that advertise on late-night TV. Plenty of chunky dark wood, gold piaster and velvet. It must be universal, Le Page thought, recalling the homes of the Algerians he’d known in Marseilles. He stationed himself at the window above the street and stared out with all the patience in the world. The time was 1 p.m.
* * * *
Wyatt parked in the customer-parking zone of a Subway store two blocks from Eddie Oberin’s house, rear bumper toward the wall so that he could get away quickly. He kept a gym bag of props in the boot of the car: tools, some generic items of workmen’s apparel, official-looking forms and a hand-held gauge. Shrugging into a yellow safety jacket, he pocketed a glasscutter and set off on foot, carrying a clipboard. A clipboard is one of the oldest props and the most effective. It made Wyatt invisible. He was a meter reader, maybe, or a guy checking for potholes.
He made one rapid pass of Eddie’s street, striding along as though bound for a particular house at the far end. Then he came back slowly, looking at numbers and making nonsense notations on his clipboard with a ballpoint pen, trying to imagine Eddie living here. Not all of the houses up and down the gentle slopes and tightly packed streets had been gentrified. Mean little brick and weatherboard cottages crouched here and there, unaltered in a hundred and forty years, behind verandas and light-choking hedges. Old battler couples lived in them, too poor and hidebound to renovate or move out. Where would they go, anyway? Far away to the edges of the city, to some new estate where there was no love, pride or public transport? And so they stayed until they died. Eddie’s parents had died fifteen years ago and Eddie had moved back into the tiny weatherboard where he’d been raised.
The place was a ruin but this was North Melbourne and the location was worth a fortune. Even so, Eddie had told Wyatt he had no intention of selling. ‘I’d only gamble or piss it away,’ he said. ‘Besides, I love the joint.’
Love it enough to return to it after this morning’s debacle? Wyatt walked to the other end of the street, the early afternoon sun around him lying bright on asphalt, parked cars and dispirited front gardens. The owners of those gardens were at work, young professionals mostly, with large salaries and larger mortgages, in love with the idea of life in the inner suburbs, close to the university which had insulated them when they studied there, and engendered in them a fearful narrowness of range. If lured to powerful jobs elsewhere, they would always come back, to architect-designed boxes alongside the student houses in which they’d first smoked dope and lost their virginity. That made them like everyone else, in Wyatt’s view. Afraid to
roam, an instinct for the herd.
He walked to the other end and back again, checking every car, a mix of student wrecks, old codger Holden sedans from the 1980s, Saabs, Golfs and Subarus, and a Hertz Falcon. No engine heat rising from any of them. No one sitting behind the wheel, pretending to read a newspaper or make a phone call. Two young women entered the street, wheeling prams, one with a toddler clinging to her jeans. They entered a house midway along. Two guys were hammering a new roof onto a house half a block from the main road, but they’d clearly been there for days. An old couple sat behind a screen of vines and creepers on a nearby veranda. That was all.
* * * *
Le Page saw the man stroll with an easy lope up and down the street. The clipboard was reassuring, but the covert examination of every car wasn’t, and no man with a clipboard was this dark and sinuous. Le Page went on full alert and snapped off a few photographs.
The woman came in behind Le Page and said, ‘Coffee or tea, sir? You are hungry?’
He ignored her. The stranger was making another pass of the little street.
‘Sir?’
‘Get out.’
* * * *
Wyatt turned his head to the side, catching a brief glimpse of the right flank of Eddie’s cottage; then he was passing along the front; and now he caught a glimpse down the left flank. The place looked shut up and empty. A hedge on either side divided it from the neighbours, one a 1970s house of pale yellow brick and the other a new, pastel-grey structure that looked like a stack of corrugated iron cubes, the kind to have his’n’hers Peugeots in the driveway. Wyatt walked to the end of the street and came back again.
Shortly after that, the old couple went indoors. Wyatt opened Eddie’s gate, closed it behind him and mounted the front steps.
* * * *
Le Page saw the man knock on the white door, just as Danielle had. He tried to imagine their motives. They have come to divide the spoils but their partners have doublecrossed them. They have come to ambush the thieves. They were betrayed and seek revenge.
Now the stranger was hunting for something.
* * * *
19
First Wyatt searched for a spare key, turning over Oberin’s garden rocks and pot plants, running his hand along the top of door and window frames, fishing around inside the fuse box.
It was an old-style fuse box, with gauges, metres and needles. Just a trickle of power showing—probably the refrigerator. He turned off the main switch and darted into the shelter of bushes at the side of the house to see if the alarm would sound and Eddie Oberin come charging out with a gun.
Nothing happened. Wyatt edged around to the rear of the house. The back yard was a tangle of weeds. The sunlight revealed a garden shed in bright aluminium, a clothesline and a wheelbarrow loaded with grassy old bricks.
It was a nasty place to get trapped in, so he checked the back fence, which overlooked a narrow lane of bluestone cobbles, jasmine-draped fences, cat piss and sodden drifts of cardboard. The gate was unlocked, but the bottom edge struck a cobblestone and wouldn’t budge. He tested the fence: the rotting boards left a scum of green-black mould on his hands. He wrenched a couple of boards away, making a hole he could slip through into the lane.
Wyatt returned to the yard and settled to watch the house from the shelter of the little shed. He scarcely moved. Most people are poor sentinels, but Wyatt’s life was built on stillness, watching and thinking. The waiting and thinking were steady and natural, like breathing. He was comfortable inside his skin. The wind moaned, and the city charged on around him, and he tried to visualise Eddie Oberin in the aftershock of what had happened that morning. He asked himself what Eddie knew or guessed, and what, consequently, he would do. No doubt he’d monitor the radio and TV news. He’d wonder why there was no mention of bodies being found at the scene of the burning Audi. That would throw him off balance. If he thinks I’m alive, Wyatt thought, he’ll be scared. If he thinks I’m dead, he’ll wonder why the cops aren’t saying anything.
There was also Eddie’s relationship with Lydia. Was shooting her always part of the plan? Had the mystery woman been brought in later, or was she in it from the beginning? Perhaps Eddie hadn’t known that his partner would start shooting and bring the whole thing undone.
So, would Eddie risk coming back to this house? It seemed to Wyatt that Eddie’s thinking would hinge on Lydia. By now he’s assuming the police have identified her, he thought. He’ll know the police can link her to him, and he’ll know not to come back— especially if he thinks there’s any chance I’m still alive.
Satisfied that he’d be able to pick over Eddie Oberin’s life without interruption, Wyatt looked for a way into the house. He started with the back door, which was heavy, behind an iron and wire mesh outer door. Both doors had been fitted with top-class locks. He checked the windows. They were all locked and alarmed—a thin, unbroken metal strip ran around the perimeter of every glass panel. If he broke the glass and severed the metal strip, an alarm would sound. It hadn’t sounded when he turned the power off because it had its own power supply.
The solution was simple. Using the glasscutter on a window at the side of the house, Wyatt cut out the entire panel without damaging the security strip and propped it on the sill. He saw a narrow room, grimy carpet, nothing else. He climbed through and dropped to the floor.
Wyatt waited again. It was a house of shifting joists and rafters, but none betrayed the presence of Oberin or his friends or pursuers. And the air was stale. Admittedly the guy had spent the past week in a motel, but the house felt abandoned. Wyatt stepped into the corridor and then from room to room. The sensation intensified.
There were some scraps of furniture, but nothing of any worth, such as TV set, sound system, refrigerator, computer. The remainder pointed to a life of unrealistic and disappointed aims. Wyatt found lottery and raffle tickets, betting slips, some weary porn, a crusted sock in a dusty corner, a rickety wardrobe with a busted door. Nicotine painted the walls and ceilings of the main rooms and furniture shapes shadowed the carpet. Over the kitchen sink was a cobwebby electric clock, evidently worth nothing to a second-hand dealer and the reason why the meter box had shown a slow seep of current. The time was 1.20.
A couple of business letters and flyers lay inside the front door. A letter from Optus confirmed that the phone had been cancelled and the account closed with a nil balance. A bank had written: for the foreclosure to be official and final, Mr Oberin’s presence and signature were required, at his earliest convenience.
Wyatt went through the place again and found a strip of matches, the flap vivid navy with a writhing black silhouette, the words ‘Blue Poles’ in gold and an address in Flinders Lane.
There was a knock on the door.
* * * *
20
Then another knock, and a voice calling, ‘Eddie? You there? It’s Danielle.’
Wyatt nodded to himself, putting it all together. He yanked open the door, clamped his fingers around the woman’s forearm and pulled. When she was over the threshold he slammed the door. Now his fingers were around her windpipe and she was backing up the wall, climbing onto her toes. The odours of scorched meat and spicy sauce were caught in her hair, on her clothes and hands.
He released the pressure. ‘Did you come straight here from work?’
‘What? Who are you? Where’s Eddie?’
But it was feigned. Her eyes were hooded; she was looking for angles to play. Wyatt didn’t have time for it and choked her again. ‘Did you come straight here?’
He saw her switch gears. He stood back and watched her swallow and stroke her throat and finally shake her head.
‘Not exactly. I was here earlier.’
‘And?’
She shrugged. ‘No one home, so I went to get some lunch and saw you.’
Wyatt thought. ‘The Subway parking lot? You recognised me?’
‘Yes.’ She was half-proud, half-scared to admit it.
Wyatt dragged her away fr
om the door. ‘We have to leave. Right now. Out the back.’
She struggled against the steel of his fingers. ‘Ow. Why?’
‘You were probably followed.’
‘Followed?’
Wyatt ignored her and took her at a stumbling run through to the rear of the house. ‘You’re hurting me,’ she said.
He opened the back door, glanced into the miserable yard and used her as a shield down the steps to the flourishing weeds. Men were shouting somewhere on the street in front of the house. He hauled Danielle through the grass to the rotted planks of the alleyway fence.
