Crooked

by Camilla Nelson

‘In that old rattletrap?’

  Gus laughed, then put his foot to the floor and flew up the rise. He reached Kings Cross during the worst hours of traffic congestion. Sailors waving beer bottles caroused in the gutter, and a man in a striped butcher’s apron, with a large orange fish on his head, wandered aimlessly through the cars. Further along, under the glittering puffball of the El Alamein Fountain, a young couple were spooning and an old geezer sang out his encouragement, beating the rhythm on a bottle of metho in a brown paper bag.

  Gus parked the unmarked and pounded the pavement. He went over the case in his mind and gradually things took on a whole new complexion. If O’Connor was coming from the Kellett Club on the night he got shot … well, there was something odd about it, something that could stand further scrutiny. Gus passed a well kept terrace with a fragrant frangipani in the front garden, and a dilapidated flat building with red stuccoed window boxes a-riot with angry geraniums. He passed a tumbledown mansion cut into squats, with wet laundry looped about the spiked iron railings and a flower garden blossoming with urine-stained mattresses and unloved appliances.

  Then he saw it. The missing blue Holden sprouting four tail fins and a week’s worth of parking tickets. ‘Jee-suss,’ he swore.

  Gus stared at the battered blue vehicle for a very long time. The bonnet was up and the carburettor was gone. The rear tyres and four hub caps were missing. Breathless, he scrambled to his feet and strode up the block, not pausing for breath until he was standing on the footpath outside the Kellett Club.

  Ernie Chubb, Reilly’s squinty-eyed gnome, was squatting on his haunches in front of the door. He was dressed in a pair of pink checked trousers, with his shirtsleeves rolled meaningfully above the elbows, showing the matching chrysanthemums tattooed on each arm. He blew out a large fan of smoke. ‘Hang about, mate. This is a private establishment.’

  ‘No worries,’ said Gus, spreading his fingers. ‘I just want a word with Dick Reilly.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Chubb, dropping his fag into the gutter and standing up. ‘But it could be this Dick bloke doesn’t want a word with you.’

  ‘How about you ask him?’

  Chubb put a hand on Gus’s chest, and gave him a shove. But Gus didn’t move. He hesitated, then said, ‘Tell him I’m an old mate of Harry Giles’s.’

  Chubb fell back. ‘Mate of Harry’s? Why didn’t you say so?’

  Chubb banged on the peephole and ducked through the door, returning a few minutes later to show Gus down a cruddy-looking hall to the back of the club. There was a door at the far end with a light underneath. Chubb pushed the door open, and Gus stepped inside.

  Reilly was cocked back on a mauve rondo couch in the corner, shirt-collar unbuttoned, tie yanked down, blue sock-feet propped on a straight chair in front. He looked up as Gus entered.

  ‘So you must be Harry’s little mate?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said Gus, slowly.

  Reilly mused, ‘Quiet sort of bloke, Harry was. I disremembered him for a minute there, you know. But Harry’s done me a couple of turns, before it all came unstuck. Poor bastard.’ He let his socked feet plop gently to the floor and drew his thick eyebrows together. ‘Do you want a drink then?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’ said Gus, feeling awkward.

  Reilly heaved himself up off the sofa, and walked round a stubby glass bar piled up with decanters. He slopped out some whisky, put a green plastic coaster down on the table, and put the glass on it. He picked up a soda siphon and squirted some fizzy water into another glass. He was talking all the while, ‘My mother, God rest her soul, she never approved of drinking or cursing and wasn’t afraid of dressing the knots off us kids neither, and do you know what? I reckon she was right. I can tell you I’ve tried to knock off from swearing hundreds of times and I may as well sprout wings. But drink …’ Reilly took a steady gulp. ‘I reckon that was your mate Harry’s problem. Cigarette?’ he added, pushing a green agate box across the table.

  Gus shook his head. The drink was obviously a mistake. He wasn’t about to compound it.

  ‘You a cigar bloke then?’ said Reilly, extracting a cigar from his outer breast pocket.

  Gus shook his head again.

  ‘Well, good for you, copper.’ Reilly reached out and slapped Gus on the knee. ‘I never had a smoke in the whole of me life neither.’ He laughed and grinned then, after a minute, put down his glass. ‘I reckon this must be about Ducky O’Connor.’

  Surprised, Gus said, ‘I was hoping you could help us out with a couple of questions.’

  ‘I’m always happy to help out the coppers,’ said Reilly, causing Chubb, who was standing behind him, to splutter and cough. ‘Jeez, Ernie.’ Reilly whipped his head round. ‘You swallow a blowfly or something? Here, get some of this into you –’ He shoved the half-empty tumbler of water into Chubb’s hands, then turned back to Gus. ‘I heard Ducky shot himself by accident or something.’

  ‘There are some unexplained features.’

  ‘You reckon it was deliberate then?’

  ‘We’re not sure. I’m trying to find out.’

  Reilly scratched at his ankle and frowned. ‘Ducky, see, he was a highly complex and tragical sort of character. He came to see me a couple of years back, I reckon that must’ve been when it started. He’d been beating the crap out of them bennies and purple whatnots and the white stuff he gets from the chow-slushies and snorts up his nose. He wasn’t real pleasant to be around and everybody was complaining. I asked the bloke, “Have you got a problem?” He tells me, “Nah, I’m not addicted.” Of course, I don’t believe him, but I let the matter drop. And that was my mistake. Because it’s not long after that that he gets himself arrested for shoving his good time up some sheila and it turns out she was a kid. He says to me, “The coppers set me up.” Me?’ Reilly stretched a hand out in front of his face. ‘I reckoned his brains were running that far out his nose that he dunno the difference.’

  Gus offered, ‘I reckon he did his time for that at Long Bay.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. Ducky, he does his prison quiet like he’s done it every other time and then he comes back to see me and I give him a monkey so the bloke can keep going. Only this time he’s twitching all over and acting peculiar. So I say to him, “Look, mate, you’ve got to take some time out and readjust to society.”’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Well, I reckon I wouldn’t be telling you anything you dunno already. He hops down to Melbourne and murders somebody.’ Reilly shook his head. ‘Like I told you already, it was the whatnot that he snorts up his nose.’

  ‘You never laid eyes on him since he got back?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He wasn’t up here on the night he got shot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Excuse me, copper. But that’s not polite. You want some civil answers then you’ve got to be polite. Show some respect.’

  ‘I got information says Ducky came to see you on the night he got shot.’

  ‘Who gave you the drum?’

  ‘His car is parked less than five minutes away.’

  Reilly got up. ‘Bulls, that is. Ernie,’ he added, swinging round. ‘I dunno why I’m listening to this.’

  ‘Was it you who got McPherson to knock Ducky?’ said Gus, but he’d already lost. Chubb had a hand on his shoulder and was steering him forcefully out the rear exit and into the night.

  Gus stood alone in the alley for a minute, rallying his thoughts, listening to himself breathe. He tightened his shoelace on a crate labelled ‘Sunlight’, adjusted his hat, then walked back via Roslyn Gardens in search of the Holden.

  He had just reached the top of the rise when a Datsun started up. The glaring headlights picked him out – his shadow elongated over the road. He threw himself over the bonnet as the car came towards him. He grabbed hold of the wipers, but they tore away in his hands. He strove to force air into his lungs as the car swerved and turned. He found himself falling through a soundless upr
ush of black air and breathed the smell of wet leaves.

  ‘It’s a yeah or no answer. Yeah or no, that’s what your choice is. Either O’Connor’s come into the Latin Quarter to whack you, and you whacked him first. Or you flat out and whacked him.’ Reilly was pacing across the carpet, his eyes watery and distended with anger, swinging around every now and then to glare at McPherson, who was standing in front of the couch.

  ‘Sure, the bloke had a few problems, but so what? He was a mate. And sometimes I reckon you’ve forgot what that means. Just like them hairies and conchies out on the street who don’t got no values. Thing is, a bloke is a mate then you’ve got to back him up, no matter what happens. I mean, what flaming kind of organisation is this I’m running, the kind that lets one bloke knock another bloke without asking me first?’

  ‘Okay,’ said McPherson. ‘So I made a mistake.’

  ‘Bloody oath you made a mistake.’

  ‘It won’t happen again.’

  ‘Start talking like that and you’re making me nervous.’ Reilly glanced at McPherson suspiciously, but he tried to simmer down. ‘I reckon we must’ve known each other since you was nothing but a two-bob crook and I got you that job at the Colony Club out at Tom Ugly’s Bridge.’

  McPherson’s face began to harden, but Reilly barely noticed.

  ‘Remember that big awful nightclub with the orchestra pit in the shape of a clamshell, and the ballet girls in white swimsuits, and everything squared off with the coppers? Those days, a bloke ran into trouble, he knew that his mates were standing behind him. Anybody tried to take him they’d have to take the crowd at the back of him too. Seems to me there’s no other way that a crook can do business.’

  ‘Those were the old days,’ said McPherson. ‘Right now we can’t afford to have mad buggers like O’Connor running around, upsetting the coppers and attracting attention.’

  Reilly turned round, catching the tide of anger in McPherson’s face. He grabbed McPherson by the lapels of his coat and thrust his own flushed face right up to his. ‘So you knock off his block in a room packed full of people and that makes it better?’

  McPherson didn’t twitch. He stood under Reilly’s sweaty flushed face and waited, until there wasn’t a sound but Reilly’s breathing. Then Reilly let him go. He spread his fingers in the air and stepped back.

  Reilly went on in an altogether different tone. ‘Me and you, we’ve always got along. In fact, the only times we haven’t got along is when we sit down for a chinwag and you go off and do the exact thing that wasn’t discussed.’

  ‘I already said that I ought to have handled it better. What else do you want?’

  Reilly crumpled unexpectedly onto the sofa. It was as if all of the fight had suddenly gone out of him. ‘I dunno,’ he said, gazing into vacant space.

  Reilly sat alone in the gloom for maybe an hour after McPherson walked out, the light of a green aluminium lamp spilling over his face and the furniture around him, though the walls and corners of the room were in darkness. He was motionless and absorbed, but not calm.

  Reilly had known things were going badly for him since before the election when, one by one, the weekly disbursements of banknotes began to return with their envelopes unopened. He wasn’t the sort of bloke who was easily frightened, but it was a terrifying thing when your money wouldn’t flow. He hadn’t heard a word from Charlie in almost a month, and was starting to think the bloke would never come through for him. Just a few days ago, in a last, desperate attempt to stave off the court order that would shut down the club, he had arranged to see his old mate Jack Mannix, Minister for Justice in the former Renshaw Government. Reilly pictured himself standing on the corner outside the Rex Hotel, watching a tawny-coloured moth trapped in the frosted light of a street lamp.

  He walked down the mouth of the alley and saw the car. ‘Jack?’ he said, knocking on the window.

  Mannix opened the door and Reilly clambered in. Mannix was red-faced above his tight-fitting blue pinstripe. ‘Dick, mate. What can I do for you?’

  ‘They’re closing me down.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, but there’s probably nothing I can do.’

  ‘Is this how you’re treating me after all these years? I thought you had judges sewn up in your pocket.’

  Mannix looked genuinely hurt. ‘I had it and I lost it, Dick. Not just me, but the whole bloody lot of us. I dunno how it happened. One day you’re up there, on top of this town. Some bloke is driving you around in this great shiny car and other blokes are chasing you down the street, wringing your hand. Next day, nobody’s taking your calls anymore.’

  Reilly wasn’t prepared to let things go lightly. ‘There’s still the small matter about those Mandarin Club shares. If the press got hold of that –’

  ‘Are you going to go the mongrel at me now?’ Mannix pulled out a yellow silk handkerchief and mopped the sweat off his forehead. ‘I wish I could help you, Dick. Honest, I do. But I’ve got no more power to fix this than you do.’

  Outside the car small drops of rain started falling. Mannix leaned forward and turned on the wipers. Reilly stared out through the clear space they carved in the breath-misted window.

  Mannix took in the space beyond the headlights with a sweep of his hand. ‘Look at this city. You wouldn’t bed a dog in it. This ratbag bloke Askin wins himself another election and there’s not a workingman for a hundred miles round that will get a fair shake after he’s through. We’re all of us up against it together.’ He sighed. ‘But I reckon you’ve got more juice left in you than what you let on.’

  ‘You and me both,’ Reilly muttered quietly. Mannix brightened almost immediately, and Reilly felt suddenly sheepish. ‘Sorry, Jack, I didn’t mean to go crook on you.’

  ‘It’s all right, mate. I can understand the sort of pressure you’re under. I mean, remember that hokey wall chart we kept nailed to the wall of the Chief Secretary’s office, showing all the gambling franchises we let out for fifty a week?’

  ‘Nothing but daylight robbery that was.’

  ‘It was a licence to print money and all in a good cause. I swear there wasn’t a Labor man came into Parliament with the seat hanging out of his trousers who didn’t leave it with the air conditioning still there.’

  Reilly laughed, ‘I reckon you’re too much of an idealist for a politician, mate.’ He dug up more courage. ‘There’s maybe one thing you can do for me, Jack. There’s a bloke – name of Johnny Warren – who’s started up a joint on the main street of Liverpool –’

  ‘It’s in my electorate, there’s something I can do.’ Mannix nudged him, and winked. ‘I can get the local coppers to shut it down, lawful-like.’

  Reilly put his arms on the chair rests and heaved himself up. He picked up his wallet, gathered some spare coins off the top of the desk, and made his way down the stairs.

  He stood on the front step and pulled a wedge of fresh air into his lungs. Outside, the night was dark and lurid, an unseasonable chill hung in the air, diffuse with the faint milkiness of moonlight. He peered down a side alley where a wino in a slouch hat and pink slippers was stirring a garbage can with a bit of broken stick. Further along, a bordello madam was trailing a rabbit-fur stole into Darlinghurst Road with a string of molls fishtailing behind her. Reilly blundered away in the opposite direction, their laughter seeming to follow him along as his thoughts turned full circles, without ever arriving at anything new.

  Reilly was stunned by the look of contempt he had read on McPherson’s face, and on the faces of others around him since his troubles began. He found himself avoiding their eyes, fearing their pity and scorn. He was disgracefully unhappy and this feeling was intensified by the knowledge that he was utterly alone in his misery. He also knew that if his present state of unhappiness continued there were some who would use it to tear him apart. It made him embarrassed just to think about it, a bloke such as he was – a criminal for decades! – crabbing his heart out with such pathetic complaints.

  He walked blindl
y on. Reilly had come up in a very hard school and nobody had ever done him any favours. He had got nothing but grief from the coppers and some others he could name, when all he had done was try to better himself and his family. For the first time in a long time he thought of Lyla, his wife. The wild times they’d had, the way she’d always put it over the coppers, the way she’d always stood by him the years he was banged up and how she’d always been there waiting at the prison gate, the minute he was out. Even when things started kicking along for them, money was tighter than most people supposed. He’d sold the flat three times (when they’d only ever owned the lease and owed sixty quid on the furniture). Looking back, he nearly died laughing, with Lyla sick to her knees that one of his customers would bang into the other on the doorstep, though she always swore that she couldn’t imagine a situation Reilly couldn’t wangle out of.

  Aileen was a good-looking sheila, but Reilly knew he’d be flat out to find a woman with as much go in her as his Lyla. He stopped on the footpath and listened to the wail of cheap music coming out of the dance clubs, hearing the synthetic strains of the pop charts with their ob-la-dees, ob-la-das and their zip-a-de-do-fucks. He thought of the clubs of his youth, their ceiling fans churning heat and music out onto the footpath, and the old blokes who could contain a whole life in a single blue note blown out of a trumpet.

  He thought how Jimmy Carruthers had once landed 147 punches in two minutes and nineteen seconds to win the World Championships by a knockout – and how the Sydney Stadium was, as often as not, crowded with pop stars weeping and writhing in the place where the great men of his generation once hammered each other.

  Reilly walked the bright and beaten streets, watching the kids they used to call bodgies. They were laughing and crowding together as if they had no need to bother with him or any of his kind. They thought they were rebels and outlaws … but they were tame. They knew nothing of Life. Couldn’t they see he was a bloke they ought to be frightened of? They ought to run shouting from? Was he just an old man to them?