Crime Story
Page 8
He took clothes from the cupboard and put them on. He put his old sneakers on and went out with the bag into the night. Cars were parked on both sides of the street, some dark, some coloured where the street lamps hit them. He walked along to his Escort, but it was under a lamp, green although it was blue in the day. He did not want to go into the light and open the door where anyone could see him, and did not want to leave his prints on the car. Shit, his prints were everywhere, all over Wellington; wherever he touched things there they were. Rosser felt his hands were diseased.
He turned back at the edge of the light and went out the other end of the street. It climbed left and climbed right, losing its footpath, and levelled out between walls covered with graffiti. The concrete was broken back to reveal the clay, and the lower holes were stuffed with beer cans and old sacks. He could push his bag in there; but it was too close to home. Light shone down in this gully too from houses high on the banks and people could look at him from the windows there. He put his head down and walked fast and turned into a narrow street, keeping away from a seven-day dairy on the corner. The Indian was leaning on the counter, adding up, but his eyes kept looking out after each sum. He seemed frightened of the night outside his shop. Rosser went away, showing his back, down and left and right and up again. His idea had been to drive out to the Ngaio gorge and put the bag in the charity bins by the auction yard. Now he did not know where he was going. He was looking for a rubbish skip. He was looking for a hole. Brooklyn was above him and Mt Cook behind, and Newtown lay spread across the flat. Brent wasn’t sure where he was. The streets ran below a row of trees.
He came to a place that showed Adelaide Road. A red light stopped cars one by one, banking them up. An ambulance went through, using its siren, and a police car nosed out and followed it, flashing the light on its roof. They only had to stop him and look in his bag and he was gone. It felt like a hump. Eyes were looking at him everywhere.
He went into a park where children’s swings hung over worn grey patches in the grass. They squeaked in a breeze, iron squeaks almost too soft to be heard. Over against the black trees, cigarettes: someone there. He sat on a bench and put his bag beside him. He wanted a cigarette himself but did not want to light up his face. He sat still; kept very still. Tried to make the voices out. Kids. Islanders? Maoris? Now and then a laugh. Now and then a mask, a gleam, as one of them sucked on his cigarette.
Rosser thought, I’ll leave it here, they’ve got to come out. They would find the bag and share what was inside. It would go all ways and none of it would ever be found. Better than the clothing bin. Nothing would be given to the cops. He felt a lightness as he stood up. He felt as if something had been scooped out of him and a hollow left. He crossed the grass and stepped outside and clanged the gate. That would bring them. He felt that he could show his teeth again.
Feet padded on the grass. ‘Hey, man.’
So they had found it. In the still night he heard the zip.
‘Mine. Hey, I found ’em. Give ’em back.’
Let them fight as long as they took the stuff away. He walked back the way he’d come and lit a cigarette and went into the dairy for a new pack. The Indian took his money, gave him change, without a word.
‘Cheer up, mate.’
He went out and stood on the corner. I’ve got five thousand dollars, he thought. He wanted to see someone, knowing what he knew. Leeanne, he thought. She was down there somewhere, in the hollow. He’d know the street as soon as he saw it; it had a panel beater on the corner. He went past narrow houses and tiny front yards. Leaves brushed his face and a scent of flowers came and went in a single breath. He reached a corner, saw the panel beater’s leaning shed, and turned right into a street of houses more hunched up and closed in than before. It made his own place look like Kelburn. Leeanne should find somewhere better to live. He walked along by windows he could have leaned across the fence and touched – opened, climbed in, taken what they had, if anything worth taking was in there. Rosser curled his lip. No money. No jewels. Just TV sets and beat-up heaps parked in the gutter and kids’ broken toys on the path.
Leeanne was at the end. Her house was dark. He pushed the gate open and stepped on to a wooden porch as closed in as a wardrobe. He knocked on the door, one, one two. She shouldn’t be in bed yet; it was only eleven o’clock. He heard someone swear, and feet bang on the floor. A window squealed up beside his head. He saw a torso gleaming and tattoos on huge arms.
‘What the fuck you want?’
‘Leeanne. I want Leeanne.’
‘This fucken late?’ The man turned his head into the room. ‘Leeanne,’ he shouted. He vanished and a door opened inside the house. ‘Leeanne. Some joker for you.’ Feet came back, the window slammed, a bed creaked, a man’s and a woman’s voice rumbled and breathed in the dark.
Rosser waited. He heard another door and heard bare feet. The front door opened a narrow crack and Leeanne said, ‘Who’s there?’
‘It’s me, Brent. Let me in, Leeanne.’
‘What’s the matter? What do you want?’
‘I just thought I’d call in. I haven’t been round lately.’
‘This late? Jesus, Brent.’
‘It’s only eleven. What’s everyone in bed for?’
‘They have to work. Keep your voice down.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Jody’s boyfriend. Go down in the kitchen. I don’t want Sam to wake up.’
He went half a dozen steps down the hall, found an open door, turned on the light. A sink, a sideboard, a table and two chairs. He sat in one. A smell of fish and chips and sour milk and old rags. His mother should see this, she’d have a fit. Leeanne came in. She sat down and shivered in her nightie.
‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing. I was passing. I dropped in.’
‘No one passes here.’
‘I do. Make us a cup of tea, eh? I’m thirsty.’
‘Listen, Brent, I need my sleep. Sam wakes for a feed at two o’clock.’
‘Who’s Sam? Ah, the baby.’
‘Yeah, your nephew. Don’t pretend you’re bloody interested.’
‘Sure I am. It’s hard to get used to. How old is he now?’
‘Ah, shut up.’ She closed the door and put the kettle on. Skinny, skinny. Stringy legs. Big boobs, from feeding he supposed. And stains on her nightie from her milk. He looked away. He felt ashamed of her. She had been good-looking once and everyone had been after her.
‘You got a job yet?’ she said.
‘There’s no jobs. Have you?’
‘With Sam? Grow up. How do you live, Brent? You can’t run a car on your benefit.’
‘Who says?’
‘You’re in some racket, aren’t you? Pinching or something.’
‘Bullshit,’ he said.
‘Don’t get caught. I’m enough for Mum and Dad.’
‘Do you go and see them?’
‘A couple of times. You should too.’
‘So the old lady can tell me off? No way.’
‘She’s not so bad now. She’s giving up.’
‘Not before time. How does she like … ?’ He hooked his thumb at the wall.
‘Sam? Not much. Dad’s good with him though.’
‘A coconut grandson.’ He grinned to take the sting out of it.
‘Yeah, he is. He’s real brown, Brent. I love his brown.’ She smiled at him, which made her pretty again. He wondered what she would say if she knew how much money he had.
The kettle boiled and she made tea, using the same tea bag in each cup. She gave him the strong one.
‘Who’s Jody?’ he said.
‘A friend of mine. We share the rent.’
‘What about the boyfriend? Jeez he’s big.’
‘Yeah. You be careful if you’re coming round here. He’s got a temper. He whacks her round.’
‘Does he touch you?’
‘Ssh. No. The walls are thin.’
‘Do you have to share with them?’
‘There,’ Leeanne said, ‘your nephew. What do you think?’
‘He’s brown all right. He’s browner than before.’
‘He loves his mum. He can’t get enough of his mum.’
‘Is his father ever coming back?’
‘No. He’s not.’
‘I thought the Islanders didn’t like to let their babies go.’
‘Yeah, well, Sione doesn’t know. And that’s the way I like it. Okay?’
‘Sure. Okay.’
‘You going now?’
He wanted to stay and talk, but not with the baby making sounds that turned him in his stomach. The brown of him against her skin was wrong. Leeanne was blonde and white. It was like one of those pictures you saw in the paper, one animal being sucked at by the babies of another.
‘Yeah, I think I will.’
‘Come around sometimes, Brent. Not so late though, eh.’
‘Okay.’ But he would not, unless she sent the baby back, got rid of it somewhere. He put his hand in his hip pocket; a five and a ten there, he didn’t know which would come out. ‘Hey, Leeanne. Can you use … ?’ It was the five. He was relieved and put it on the table.
‘Sure I can. I can always use money. Thanks.’
‘See you.’
‘Don’t bang the door, eh. Danny gets stroppy.’
‘I treat big fellers real careful.’
He left her and went up the hall and out of the house. Closed the door with care. Left her happy. She was happy. Rosser couldn’t understand it. As long as it was sucking she was happy, he supposed. He shivered and turned away in the dark street.
Leeanne was the only person he had ever liked.
Rosser stayed at home the next day. He heard the people in the flats on either side of him: heard their radios and heard them cooking and shitting, and Mrs Casey crying after her husband left for work, and heard her smash something, a cup or plate, on the wall. He hadn’t heard them screwing the night before, which was unusual. He lay on his bed and listened to the radio, and went down to Adelaide Road and bought a Dominion at ten o’clock. He carried it home before reading it. There wasn’t much there, and hadn’t been much on the radio. The woman was serious, that was all. Her name was Mrs Ulla Peet, which was German he supposed, a name like a joke. It shouldn’t worry anyone if she died. He hoped she would because she’d seen his face. So had the girl. If this was a movie he would go after the girl. The killer always had to get the ones who saw his face. Killer, he thought. He liked it, and it scared him. But serious meant she’d live; they hadn’t said she was critical.
The same description of him, and nothing about fingerprints. Maybe they hadn’t found them. Maybe they just did doorhandles and stuff like that. Rosser felt his confidence come back. He bought two pies for lunch and threw a half he couldn’t eat to the Laverys’ doberman in the yard. In the afternoon he swept his floor and wiped the lavatory seat with disinfectant and squirted Harpic in the bowl. He always thought of his mother when he did that. He thought of her cleaning the fridge and the hand basin and the bath – wiping away at things already white. His mother was, he knew, a little mad. ‘She’s disinfectant crazy,’ Leeanne used to say. He would like her to see how clean he was keeping his place. He would like to tell his father that he had five thousand dollars.
Later on he watched the tennis on TV. Tennis didn’t interest him, but the running and the sweating and the serious way they took it, he liked that. He liked to see them swearing under their breath and banging their rackets on the ground. The names were good too – Andrea Stradnova, Sabine Hack; names like that just up the road and round the corner, in the wind. You could find a name like Ulla Peet there. He watched their shirts get sweaty and stick to them and their legs scissoring and their ankles straining and teeth flashing and he admired the way they kept on hitting and did not stop, each one closed up in herself. He wanted both of them to win. Stradnova did. That was okay. She was a big good-looking girl, not trying to be sexy.
Mrs Lavery came home and fed her dog. She kept it, Lavery said, because she was scared of getting raped. Casey came in, and laughing sounded through the wall. Rosser cooked potatoes and peas and lamb chops, and was eating when Lavery came in from the pub. Silence on that side. She’d freeze him until they started shouting later on. Both lots would have kids soon, with names like that and Jesus on the wall, but they’d shout and laugh and break things and creak the bedsprings until they did. When kids started crying Rosser thought he would get out. He could afford a better flat than this. He drank some Coke and washed his dishes. He walked out for a Post and found nothing new. And nothing new on the radio or on TV. He had a sense of all the streets and houses in Wellington. How could they find one person there?
He slept well. The house groaned and shifted in the wind but he felt the walls around him hard and firm, and no cars, no dog barks in the night had anything to do with him. There were sirens at a quarter to two – he read his watch glowing in the dark – but they were fire not police, and he imagined the house in Kelburn burning, with flames like sheets wrapping round the walls and the girl screaming in a window, and maybe he would rescue her and maybe not. The next thing he knew Mrs Casey was busy with her pots beside his ear.
He would shift soon, he thought, lying in bed. He didn’t have to get woken up by women in the kitchen, that was something he had heard all his life – and it meant get up, get washed, get dressed, do something with yourself son, the world wasn’t made for lying in bed. A pity he couldn’t show her his five thousand. The biggest thing she’d ever seen was probably a tenner. Tenner, said his dad in his old slang, I wish I had a tenner on me now, that nag will bolt in. Rosser slept. He woke with his cock hard and he held it and stroked it for a while, thinking of the tennis players, then stopped because he’d promised himself only once a week. After a while it went down. I’ll shift, he thought, I’ll go to Auckland. I might even go to Oz. The Laverys were quiet, and so were the Caseys, and soon she went and he went to work, and Lavery sloped off to do whatever he did in his no-work day, and Mrs Casey started the wash. Stuck in here between two lots of Catholics, he thought. His mother would get thin in her mouth if she knew. Romans, she would say. ‘The tykes,’ said his dad, ‘the biggest boozers of the lot. It’s okay for them, son, they can go and tell the priest and start all over again.’ Sometimes Rosser felt in danger, caught at the arse end of the house, with Romans on two sides and the dobie chewing his bones in the yard. I’ll go, he thought, I’ll go to Oz. I’ve got five thousand dollars. I’ll sell the car and take off. He thought of himself doing houses along Sydney harbour where the millionaires lived. They didn’t have his fingerprints over there.
He got up, he washed, he had his breakfast. He counted his money again. I should have given Leeanne more than five. I’ll give her a hundred when I go.
At lunch time he was at Oriental Bay, parked under the Norfolk pines, watching swimmers in the choppy sea. They didn’t stay long. A cruise ship was tied up at the overseas terminal, as big as half a city, shining white, and rich Americans were probably all over town. He smoked and dropped his butts out the window. If I could get on there, he thought, and get in some of those cabins. He felt like a shark again, cruising underwater; and coming up the sides in black, with suckers on his palms, and through the open hatch and down the corridors, and no one sees. Rosser laughed. He’d fill his bag with dollars and watches and rings until it wouldn’t hold any more. ‘Yeah,’ he said.
He drove around the bays and saw the hill road to Wainuiomata, and thought of his mother there pegging out the clothes, and his father thinning carrots in the garden. He wouldn’t tell them when he left, they didn’t need to know. A letter f
rom Oz, that was what they’d get. He saw the prison on the hill and a Qantas jet taking off over Lyall Bay, leaving its exhaust in the sky, and swinging right as it climbed over the strait. Okay, he thought, I’m going. I’ll get my money out, I’ll buy a ticket. He could be on that plane tomorrow.
Rosser drove back to town through the tunnel. He drew three thousand six hundred dollars from his account, and left a few dollars to keep it open. He might come back some time, you never knew, and it saved messing round to have an account. The teller didn’t say anything about the amount, just asked him for ID and how he wanted it. She didn’t put it in an envelope. He thought they always did that when you took out a lot. He frowned and looked the other way when she told him have a nice day.
Rosser stopped at a car yard and asked for a price on his car.
‘It’s not much use to us, mate, not in that condition. I can let you have two-fifty, that’s top price.’
‘Hey, come on.’
‘No one wants these things any more.’
Stuff you, Rosser said under his breath. He went away. The pleasure had gone from his afternoon. The Escort was worth a thousand. Had to be. He didn’t drive it hard, he kept it tuned, the warrant was up to date, the rubber was good. All cars that age had a bit of rust. He would ask Ponder about it. Ponder knew the price of everything. She might even buy it herself. There was nothing you could name that Ponder didn’t buy if the price was right.
There was no need to tell her he was leaving for Oz.
He found a park off Tory Street – ‘Don’t you put your car in front of my place, young Brent’ – and walked across to the top of Cuba. Up the hill the houses in Central Terrace made a jagged edge on the sky. He could not pick out the two he had been in, and if he stopped to work it out people would notice him. Anyway, that was gone, ancient history. He crossed the street, heading towards the big crane over the new foundations in Ghuznee. Sunlight reflected from the driver’s box, blinding him. That was what he’d always wanted to be – not a pilot, not a truck driver: he had wanted a crane. Wanted to climb up high, on the iron ladder, and sit in the glass box, leaning forward, with the city spread out below, the men in hard hats, the concrete trucks, and turn the whole circle with his load and drop it neat. Seeing everything. He watched the arm swing slowly and the counterweight come round. The glass made the driver invisible. I could still do that, Rosser thought, there’s got to be a way of getting that.