Line of Sight

by David Whish-Wilson

  ‘This is a scam, Don. Knowing about it might even be what got Ruby Devine killed.’

  Andrews thought about that, but not for long. ‘Two thousand bucks, man. Right then and there. That lawyer guy said if ever anybody asks me about it I just have to say a bloke came up to me in the pub, offered me a hunj for my signature. And that I was drunk so I did.’

  ‘That company’s designed to go bankrupt, Don. They sign on directors who can’t be found, or who can be trusted to keep their mouths shut. Meanwhile Mancuso keeps all the merchandise. Did you see any other names?’

  ‘Just mine and some guy called Casper Murray, a Painters and Dockers bloke I remember from years back.’

  ‘What was the name of the company?’

  ‘Hannan Enterprises, something like that.’

  ‘They’ve got a sense of humour, at least. Sands must have stumbled over this tax loophole the way Paddy Hannan stumbled over that lump of gold.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that.’ Andrews bent over and tucked his boots inside the cuffs of his jeans. ‘I’m leaving here, anyway. All that doesn’t matter to me, or my girl. But before I go I’m still keeping an eye on Mancuso and the biz. As soon as I see something, beyond piles of money, I’ll let you know. You can count on that.’

  The earnestness in his voice was genuine, his need to please something Swann had always taken advantage of. And yet all this talk of leaving town – for Don’s sake Swann hoped he meant it.

  Swann was running late for his next meet, with Cooper in Nedlands, and was relieved to see the de Ville parked in shadows alongside the jetty, across from Steve’s Hotel. It was quiet on the foreshore except for some prawners wading out in the black water down near the breakwall, head torches jumping in the low swell.

  The parking spaces next to the de Ville were empty and Swann pulled into one. Cooper was sitting on the bonnet of his car, legs folded beneath him, drinking from a bottle of champagne. Beside him was a punnet of strawberries and a styrofoam tray containing the empty shells of a dozen oysters on a bed of melting ice. The radio drifted out of the open windows of the de Ville, dash speakers heavy on the treble.

  ‘You heard this? Elton John. Saturday night’s alright for fighting.’ Cooper shuffled his arse around to get comfortable. ‘I met Elton once, at a party at Ruby’s house. Great party too. Even Elton ended up in the pool. Have some champers, Swann?’ He held out the bottle.

  Swann took in the label and thought about it, but declined. ‘Tastes better from the bottle, does it?’

  Cooper shook his head. ‘Last-minute thing, this, no time to get glasses.’

  ‘Every day’s a celebration, eh?’

  ‘Yeah. Every day.’ Cooper wiped his mouth with the back of a silken sleeve. ‘Y’know, I used to spear cobbler under this jetty. There’s a sunken boat down there in about twelve feet. Couldn’t ever see a bloody thing, but stab a gidgee in any gap of that boat and you’d come up with a cobbler. Used to sell them to the fish-and-chip shop back there. Door to door too. Fifty cents a fillet. Made a bit of money over the years selling ’em, but now I can’t stand eating ’em. Probably a lesson in that.’

  Cooper didn’t look drunk, which told Swann that his preamble suggested something else. ‘About what you were saying this morning,’ he began.

  Cooper shook his head. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about there.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Seriously, I have blackouts. I woke up this afternoon with my head near the porcelain altar. Seems I didn’t make it in time. Shat myself in my sleep. You don’t want to know the rest.’

  There was no point pushing him on what he’d said in his phone call – the Mancusos would never corroborate it anyway. Better to chip away where Cooper was really vulnerable.

  ‘After that pretty picture, Cooper, I will have some of that champers.’

  ‘No hard feelings?’

  Because if Cooper had covered his tracks, why had he contacted Reggie to arrange the meet? The answer was obvious: he was worried about the federal taxman, thousands of kilometres away in Canberra, who, unlike the local coppers, couldn’t be bought. Whether Cooper admitted it or not, remembered it or not, what Swann had heard in his voice this morning was fear, and misery.

  The bottle was nearly full and Swann drank the shoulders off it. ‘Thought you were in the red?’ he said.

  ‘I won’t lie to you, Swann, I’m in some serious debt to some serious people.’

  ‘Explains the champagne and oysters.’

  ‘Got to keep the morale up. My dad taught me that.’

  ‘Let me guess, Cooper. There was a break-in at your offices and all the paperwork relating to Ruby Devine’s investments was pinched.’

  Cooper laughed, pleased with himself.

  ‘And,’ Swann continued, ‘a backdated police report on the theft has been subsequently filled out, to the letter.’

  ‘To the letter,’ Cooper agreed.

  ‘Anything else?’

  Cooper looked at him speculatively. ‘I called my good mates at Crown Law; they’ve never heard of any tax investigation into me.’

  ‘According to my mate in Canberra, they don’t trust the local Crown Law prosecutors with shit. Over here, only the bottom of the barrel end up working for the state.’

  ‘Well, that’s true, if nothing else.’

  ‘It’s all true. They don’t give up, those boys. Once they get a sniff. Look what happened to Ruby.’ Swann took another long draw before passing the bottle back.

  ‘For old time’s sake then, Swann. Lest old acquaintances be forgot.’ Cooper toasted the glittering yachts out on the dark river, the sounds of laughter and music on the wind. ‘You tell your taxation mates they should be looking elsewhere instead of wasting their time on me. And that if they can see their way past my minor indiscretions, then I’ll point them towards some very big fish. There’s no shortage of the bastards, either. Half the Liberal Party are into this shit, they’re getting greedy and fat. You seen how many new houses are coming up in Dalkeith, Applecross, City Beach? New money, all of it.’

  The way Cooper said new money, his mouth puckered in disgust, told Swann what was coming next.

  ‘There’s a new boy in town.’

  ‘I know about Solomon Sands. Perhaps you could get on with the specifics.’

  Cooper laughed, spraying champagne over his shining bonnet. ‘And there we were getting all nostalgic. Okay, if you’re that impatient.’

  ‘No need to pretend this is about anything other than bloody-mindedness, Cooper. If you’re going to stick it to Sands, do it good. Then I’ll finish with a little word of my own.’

  ‘You aren’t taping this, are you? Because I’m just telling you so you know.’

  ‘Get on with it, Cooper. I’ve got other places to be. And I want time to explain to you that the only reason you’re not dead already is because then you wouldn’t be able to pay back the people who want to kill you.’

  Cooper stared, suppressed a shudder. ‘Ease up, Swann. I’ve already shat myself once today.’

  ‘Get on with it, I said.’

  But Cooper didn’t. Instead he bent forward and held his guts. When he finally spoke it was in an eerily quiet voice. ‘No joke, mate, I’ve got ulcers. These bastards, the new types, they make me sick.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘Good-time charlies, every one of them. Most are dumb micks who’ve got it in for people like me. Bloody cowboys acting like they already own the place, trying to take what my people built up over a hundred and fifty years.’

  ‘Where’s the money come from? Drugs?’

  ‘Damn right it’s drugs. Drugs and share-market scams. Tax rorts and gold cons, real-estate swindles and other miscellaneous rip-offs. But yeah, plenty of it’s drugs. Ruby Devine used to pay Donald Casey five hundred a week to keep her brothels running. That’s a lot of money over a year but it’s got to be spread around, right up the food chain. You know how much a kilo of heroin costs in Kuala Lumpur and how m
uch it sells for here, wholesale?’

  ‘These new-money types are smuggling?’

  Cooper laughed. ‘No, they’re investors. You wouldn’t have learnt it in cop school, but it’s basic share-market capitalism. It shares around the risk. Suppose I want to bring in heroin, for example, but I don’t want to invest any money myself; I want to keep my financial exposure to zero risk. So I find five investors who want to make some quick money but don’t want to risk direct involvement, have reputations to protect, et cetera, and I get them to put in ten grand each. Then I pay a few grand to a couple of couriers who bring me back five kilos within the week. I pay the investors triple what they put in, and if I sell it wholesale to the Italians I’m up almost three hundred grand. Not bad for a week’s work. Then those investors put in another ten grand and off we go again.’

  ‘I’ve heard rumours that the Mancuso brothers —’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s the other alternative, and even more lucrative. Instead of wholesaling it, assuming I’m a certain detective inspector with the power to do whatever the fuck I want, I can set up people like the Mancusos, or Dom Franchino, Leo Ajello, someone with a respectable business face, pillars of the church and community, give them the green light and take an even bigger cut. So everybody’s making money. Detectives are happy. They in turn make judges and politicians happy.’

  Swann wondered how many of Cooper’s ancestors had done exactly this – developed a conscience and a loose tongue right about the time the competition was getting the upper hand.

  ‘And all the investors are happy,’ Cooper was saying, ‘and of course the really clever ones go to a bloke like Solomon Sands.’

  ‘I get where he comes in, recycling the money, asset stripping and the rest, but what are these investors using the money for?’

  ‘Influence. That amount of money can buy you a lot of authority, a lot of protection with certain people. These investors have already started to make donations to the political parties. Even the Liberal Party’s taking their money, no questions asked. It’s like the colony’s starting all over again, like we’re right back at the beginning. It’s the future but it’s all been done before.’

  ‘Except this time your mob’s on the outside.’

  ‘In a few years nobody’s going to remember that these cocky bastards were once heroin dealers. Their start-up capital’s going to buy them companies that get preferential contracts awarded by their new mates in government. It’s only a matter of time before one of them opens his own bank to finance everything. Then they’ll get the really big infrastructure projects. They’ll start to make the old money look small-time. They’ll buy the newspapers and the television channels and the pollies will love them even more. And the north’s opening right up. All that iron ore. All those diamonds. All that gold. Who do you think will get the green light there?’

  Cooper’s voice had grown shrill but now it tailed off as he pressed the bottle to his lips and drank, long and deep this time.

  ‘Ruby didn’t know any of this, before you ask. But she always took their money if they were paying customers. At least prostitutes aren’t hypocrites, unlike our pollies.’

  ‘Never had you down as a moralist.’

  ‘You got me on a bad day.’

  ‘The trust-fund money you hold for your clients, the money you’ve been using to pay off your debts – some bad people are watching. And not just the taxman.’

  Cooper peered down into the bottle, held it up and shook it around. ‘This is nearly empty. You feel like some more? I’ve got credit behind the bar at Steve’s.’

  ‘You want to stick it to Sands and the people he’s rorting for? You want the taxman to take it seriously, back off a bit? Put it all down on paper. All the details, all the names, on paper. We clear on that?’

  Cooper nodded, lifted a forefinger into the air like an antenna. ‘Hear that? Boz Scaggs. I met that bastard once too. He’s even shorter than me.’

  Swann knew something was wrong as soon as he got out of the car, but by the time he saw the men rise from the shadows opposite his hotel it was too late. There were three of them, wearing balaclavas and carrying revolvers. One of them looked like Sherving but it was hard to tell in the dark. They had the draw on him and he didn’t reach for his .38. He didn’t shout for help. He was conscious of this moment being preordained, right down to the ritual movements, the ritual fear.

  There was nobody else around. There was all the time in the world.

  The men spread out along the length of the Holden, one on either side of him, aiming at his chest. When the third stepped towards him Swann launched himself and punched, landing a right on the man’s jaw, punching again as he doubled back. But he was pistol-whipped on the side of his neck, and the back of his head. He had his hands around the other’s neck now, reaching for his eyes, but felt a numbness in his arms and then was paralysed, letting go but not falling, being held up. He took the blows to his stomach and ribs, was slung to the ground and kicked, stomped on. They worked him over methodically. The first time he heard a voice was when he was kicked in the back of his head: ‘Not his face.’

  Then the beating stopped and someone knelt over him and spoke in his ear. ‘Little message from Casey about your lovely daughters. The two that are left. We’re gonna fuck ’em, Swann. We’re all gonna fuck ’em. Hard, like they like it. And you’re gonna be there to watch.’

  Laughter, as the speaker put a hand into Swann’s jacket, pulled out his revolver. ‘We’ll be keeping this for down the track. When it all gets too much. We’ll be right there to help you. See you down the track then, Swanny.’

  So this wasn’t to be the end of him, just yet. The kicking started again, and amid the flares of black and red inside his head he thought of his stepfather, who had taught him how to take his punishment, using fists and boots, and his mother just standing there watching.

  He was parked in exactly the same spot as the brothel madam’s Dodge on the night she was murdered. The rear of the Valiant faced the freeway, its lights cut, windows down. Behind him was the river, the caving-lights of prawners and people spearing catfish, the faint strains of the Raffles house band blowing up from the south.

  One block in front of him was the zoo. He listened to the howling and whooping of the monkeys and thought of the animals who must have heard the four shots from the .22 on that rainy night. The bears and the great cats and the other carnivores who’d smelt her blood on the wind.

  He knew from Marko that there were numerous rumours about who’d pulled the trigger and why. There was the diver who crawled out of the river and killed her and then went back in. There was the country cop from Merredin who came up for the day on his motorbike then buried his gun in the wheatbelt. Another story had it that the murder was linked to an armed robber currently doing a lag in Fremantle prison. Others claimed that a colourful racing identity, a silent partner in Ruby’s brothels, had shot her, or that Ruby had threatened to name some Chinese who’d invested in her business. Or DI Casey had done it, while sitting on the bench seat beside her. Or a couple of uniformed rookies, on Casey’s orders, for the promise of a yearly payment for life and their kids’ school fees looked after. Or a Sicilian gangster by the name of Franchino. Or Abe Saffron, on behalf of one of his local madams. A Painters and Dockers hitman who’d shipped in on a merchant vessel called the Iron Yampi the day before and shipped out the following day.

  There were so many rumours he had stopped listening. From his experience the deliberate mixing of fact with fiction always worked in the interests of the killer: it reinforced the message intended by the killing while obscuring the perpetrator.

  The rumours did tell him one thing, though – how much Perth had changed in the decade he’d been away. Growing up the son of a copper hadn’t meant the people he met ever bothered to hide their loathing of the police. But tinged with that loathing was a kind of respect, an understanding of the way things had to be. In his father’s day, the same police who were on the take from
bookies and brothel owners would yet have dragged a bloke like Leo Ajello out into the bush and made him dig his own grave. They wouldn’t have let someone like that get bigger than the law, even if he was an informer. Taking money off bookies and brothels did nobody any harm, that was the old way. But those days were gone. He knew better than most how it worked now. The brothel madam’s murder was a sign of the city looking into its future, although the historians would probably see it differently.

  He looked across at the empty passenger seat and it wasn’t hard to put himself there. If things had been different it could have been him who pulled the trigger on the woman. Even as a junior cop he had still been out there stealing cars and moonlighting as security on the doors of clubs in Perth and Fremantle. He hadn’t been the only rookie to know both sides of the street, although he wasn’t like the others.

  He hated the uniform, all the saluting and yessirs, nossirs. And when his father died, while he himself was still in the academy, and he went to the funeral and saw all his father’s purple circle mates looking straight ahead, heard the speeches full of lies, he’d hated it even more.

  But it wasn’t his hatred of the rules and hypocrisy that got him out of the force. His first kill had been an accident. He was working the door at a club in the west end of Fremantle when a drunken stevedore wanted for murder came at him with a metal pipe. He’d pulled his knife and stuck it into him.

  It was one of his father’s detective friends, a man he’d always called uncle, who kept him out of jail on the manslaughter lag. The detective sergeant suggested he do a bolt east until things calmed down, join the army in the meantime; the guy had even pulled the arrest sheet out of the register and opened the cage at the Fremantle lockup.

  Not a soul in Sydney knew he’d once been in the uniform, or that his father had been a detective, not even his wife.