by JR Carroll
‘Okay. Thanks, Steve, I’ll think about it in the cold light of day. But no promises.’
‘Of course. Now let’s drink.’ A crowd had come in and there was a buzz in the air. ‘This place has got real atmosphere,’ Steve said. ‘I like it.’
‘So do I.’
But for how much longer? Dennis thought. Steve, calculating bastard, had been right about Dennis having his hands full from now on. He’d slipped that in very smoothly. Something told Dennis he wasn’t going to take no for an answer very easily.
Lying awake on his bed at around one, Dennis thought back over the episode of Steve Donohue and the After Lunch Bandit. The picture had filled in his mind now. The cop who’d died in the bush had been shot, but no one seemed to know by whom. Steve’s defence had been that the kid did it, but then the kid died too, shot himself apparently, so he never got the chance to give his side of it. That was convenient—for Steve. Then there was the question of half a million dollars, the bandit’s swag, which was never recovered after the bandit himself died grotesquely in what seemed to be some sort of attempt to rip him off. Dennis wondered about that. He wondered about the brick it cost Steve Donohue to buy the ChainLink franchise and where that had come from. A lot of fingers pointed to Steve Donohue. Maybe Dennis was being a bit ungenerous to him, but Steve was not a man to be underestimated. He had admitted responsibility for the fatally flawed plan and the unsound tactics, let them nail him on that. But he had been very selective with his confessions. He had copped general flak, but nothing specific. All they could do was speculate about the dead cop and the kid. So there was no alternative but to give him his choice of doors, and no doubt Steve Donohue left the firm a relieved—and possibly richer—man.
Put him together with Greg Moss, a cross-eyed fucking commando, and ChainLink didn’t shape up as the kind of team Dennis wanted to be on. But if he could extract some intelligence from Steve, the meeting would not have been wasted. He’d used Tony Gilhooley enough and didn’t want to jerk him around much more. Someone would have to take his place, though. Someone who could tell him all about the Pipic brothers.
ELEVEN
He lay there for a long time in the silent room with a cigarette stuck in his mouth, eyes wide open and both hands clasped behind his head. Remembering. Like Dennis, Steve Donohue had been an unusual detective. He had not always played it by the book, especially towards the end of his career, when he’d become an unguided missile. Dennis could relate to that. Funny thing how in the face of a common enemy their rather tenuous past connection had become, in Steve’s eyes at least, something a lot more solid. They were firm allies now. Survivors. Dennis laughed and in so doing broke the ash on his cigarette. He brushed it away distractedly. In reality they were a pair of disgraced policemen now, not heroes. It had been said as a joke but even as they clinked glasses Dennis knew that for Steve the pain of that disgrace stayed with him still. He had got a lot off his chest tonight and had been lucky enough to find a perfect listener in Dennis. Dennis had got the very clear signal that Steve had waited a long time to say these things out loud, to drag up the past and see if it was still as he remembered it, how it had happened. He had probably made statements tonight that he’d never made before, edging closer to truth. But in the end he would not be able to tell the difference anyway. Like a lot of criminals, Steve Donohue struck Dennis as the kind of man who finally came to believe his own lies if he repeated them to himself often enough. Dennis took some comfort from the belief that at least he did not delude himself in that way. Or was that just another form of delusion?
Without looking at the clock he realised that it was two-fifteen. It was going to be one of those long nights. He crammed another butt into the ashtray sitting on his stomach. Remembering again—and now he’s in the unmarked car streaking along the Nepean Highway towards the Mornington Peninsula. He had just joined the Homicide Squad then, no slight achievement in view of the fact that only two applicants had been successful from a field of one hundred and sixteen. He was feeling pretty good about himself at that time. Dennis sat in the front alongside the driver, a senior detective named Ashley Delacroix. In the back was the boss of the Squad, Chief Inspector Don Hammond, who had considered this trip important enough to warrant his own presence. Or perhaps, Dennis thought, he’s here to see how I handle myself.
‘If we can’t get more men into the Squad,’ Hammond said in his distinctively dry voice, ‘we’re going to be up to our tits with unsolved murders in this State.’
‘Already are,’ said Ashley.
Dennis watched the scenery flash by. He had been thrown in the deep end, all right. Just recently a disco dancer had been raped and strangled in bizarre circumstances, a woman had been stabbed to death in her bookshop while her horrified ex-husband listened to her screams on the phone, a four-month-old baby had been drowned in Edwardes Lake, north of Melbourne, a union official had been found buried at the bottom of an excavation site in South Yarra and an Italian greengrocer had been blasted in the face with both barrels of a shotgun and robbed as he left his house early in the morning to go to the market. In none of those cases had there been a breakthrough. Dennis knew as well as anyone that the first few days were crucial in murder investigations and without exception these cases had gone nowhere. Information from the public had been thin on the ground so far. Not even the baby’s mother had been identified, and that one ought to be a shoo-in for a quick clean-up. So there was nothing gratuitous about Don Hammond’s gloomy projection and Dennis took it to mean that since there’d be no additions to the Squad they’d all better get the lead out and do something.
This was not a propitious time in other ways: unsubstantiated rumours persisted that a cell of well-placed detectives, the so-called Club of Three, met with active criminals on a regular basis, providing information on impending busts, police rostering and other useful details in exchange for kickbacks—even assisting with the execution of bank robberies and payroll heists by using their positions to sabotage investigations and deflect police attention from the gang, in this way earning a share of the spoils. Scuttlebutt went so far as to speculate that the Club of Three, whoever they were, enjoyed sponsorship and protection from top cops, themselves on the take. Actual identities, however, remained the subject of baseless, often malicious gossip—no one seemed able to say how the number of three had been arrived at in the first place. The Top Floor dismissed such allegations as ‘fanciful’, demanding that ‘muckrakers concealed in anonymity’ put up or shut up, counter-accusing them of groundless mischief-making that ‘actively undermined the integrity of the Force’. The issue sputtered and died—there followed, however, disaffection in the ranks, a general dispiritedness eagerly fuelled by press reports and interviews with unnamed officers who spoke bitterly of ‘blinkered administrators’ who ‘lacked the courage of their convictions’.
‘You’ve been around cadavers before, haven’t you Dennis?’ Hammond asked.
‘A few, yeah. Last year there was that Vietnamese restaurateur in the compactor at Glen Waverley. That was a sight.’
‘I remember. Triads, wasn’t it?’
‘Yep.’
‘Guy wouldn’t pay his dues.’
‘That’s right. He took a stand against them.’
‘Brave but foolish. They don’t mess around, those boys. They don’t care what they do, do they?’
‘Nope. They do not.’
‘You were in Vietnam, weren’t you Dennis?’ Hammond asked after a break, during which they passed through Frankston. Obviously Triads were still on his mind.
‘Yes, I was there.’ His stomach tightened. Dennis always hated these exchanges.
‘Which arm of the services?’
‘Infantry.’
‘Well. You’ve seen your share of cadavers, no doubt.’
‘There were a lot.’ He turned around to face Hammond for the first time during the journey. ‘Worst I saw was in this VC village on the foothills of the Long Hais. The Yanks had been pounding
it for days, then we went in to mop up. They’d done a terrific job. There wasn’t much left at all, just bomb-craters. You wouldn’t even have known a village had been there. Bits of bodies were up in the trees, hanging off branches, everywhere you looked. A man had tried to protect himself under a sheet of iron and his whole body had melted into it. Then we found a naked woman, apparently the sole survivor, sitting with her baby in her arms on the edge of a field. There were dead oxen lying in the water and the stench was horrendous. She didn’t seem to notice it, though—just rocked backwards and forwards the way they do, staring in front of her. The baby was wrapped in bloodstained rags and the woman’s ears had been bleeding. Dried blood was caked around them. Both drums had been ruptured by the bombs, apparently. She was in this catatonic state, wouldn’t respond to us at all, or let us see the baby. When our officer finally coaxed it off her and unwrapped it, it didn’t have a head and the biggest maggots I’ve ever seen were crawling all over it. So anyway we wrapped it up again and gave it back to her. Then we got the fuck out of there.’ He faced the front again, then added, more or less to himself, ‘I don’t know what she did after that. What became of her. I used to wonder.’
‘I see,’ Hammond said. ‘That must have been quite an experience. You’ll be well prepared for this one then.’
They went along quietly for a minute and then Ashley said, ‘Was that National Service, Dennis?’
Reaching for his cigarettes, Dennis grinned at him. Ashley was somewhere in his late twenties, about ten years younger than Dennis. ‘It sure was, Ashley. Only raffle I ever won,’ he said, lighting up.
Twenty minutes later they arrived at Sorrento, a popular coastal resort for the well-heeled, drove through town and came to a stop near one of the high bluffs that overlooked the surf beach. There were blue-and-whites everywhere. It was a cold June day and when they got out of the car a stiff wind straight off the sea smacked them hard in the face, making their eyes smart. Dennis’s tie flicked up and stuck on his face before he brushed it away and buttoned his coat. There were police, uniformed and plainclothed, all over the bluff. Following Don Hammond, Dennis and Ashley bent under the crime scene tape and joined the main group, consisting of a uniformed Inspector directing his troops. The Dog Squad had already arrived and a couple of dogs ran around happily, sniffing all over the place and digging up sand.
Hammond, assuming control, made introductions and then asked the Inspector what he had for them so far.
‘Two body parts,’ the Inspector said. ‘An arm and a torso, male, wrapped separately in orange plastic bags and buried about a metre into the sand.’ He then explained that young children had found the arm, which had been partly exposed by wind action, and alerted police. Shortly afterwards they’d dug up the torso close to the first find, and now a full-scale search for the rest of the body was under way.
‘We’d better take a look-see,’ Hammond said.
The plastic bags sat side-by-side where they’d been found, as a couple of white-faced and shivering young constables stood guard.
‘Care to do the honours, Sergeant?’ Hammond drawled in his cracked voice, raised against the wind.
Dennis held a handkerchief to his face and squatted. Both bags, tightly secured with wire, had been sliced neatly open with scissors or a sharp knife for ease of inspection. In the first one the arm, hacked from just below the shoulder and bent in a V at the elbow, lay in its own blackish liquid, a stinking swill that looked like squid’s ink. Dark hairs, made inordinately conspicuous because of the shrinking tissue from which they had once grown, coated the forearm. The hand was outstretched and contained all five fingers. It was a left arm, adult, and there were no rings on any of the fingers. The limb was in an advanced stage of decomposition and showed evidence of having been feasted on for some time by sand lice and other minute creatures.
He turned his attention to the other bag, and straight away the sight of the chunky torso made him gulp to hold down his gorge. Also in a pool of disgusting liquid, it was black, hairy and cut open at the stomach to reveal a sickening mass of twisted, half-rotted entrails wriggling with worms. Dennis turned away to gasp, then proceeded to examine the appalling spectacle with all the professional objectivity he could muster. It’s just dead meat, he told himself. It doesn’t mean anything.
There were numerous perforations and eruptions in the chest from corruption, or possibly they were wounds. But then something a lot more apparent caught his attention. From the region of the heart a stick or shaft of some kind that had been broken off near its base stuck out about ten centimetres. He studied the thing as closely as he dared without touching it. This shaft, which seemed to be made of wood, looked to be deeply embedded—deeply enough to have penetrated the heart and been the cause of death.
The victim’s head had been crudely hacked off in the same manner as the arm, perhaps with a machete or even a chainsaw. Strands of severed arteries, the sand-clogged windpipe and other ragged tissue protruded from the neck. Dennis relayed his observations to Inspector Hammond, standing by impassively with black leather gloves on and arms folded. When Dennis had finished, he stood up. The backs of his knees hurt from squatting but by and large the repulsiveness of his task had ceased to affect him by this time.
Next day the rest of the body’s parts, except the head, were found in the same vicinity. The head’s whereabouts were to become a permanent mystery. Presumably the killer or killers believed that without it, identification would be made difficult or even impossible, but that hope was a false one. One good thumbprint was enough. The victim was Jacob Wheems, aged fifty-nine, a St Kilda cafe owner and a man of many parts, even in life. A refugee from post-war Germany, Wheems had worked hard in his adopted country, turning his hand to anything and everything, from cabinet-making to building construction to selling cars, before buying the Confetti Cafe in busy Acland Street, renaming it Louisa’s, after his wife. He was a well-known and popular figure locally who had only come to police notice in the last six or seven years of his life, during which time he had made numerous short visits to Southeast Asia, alone.
Jacob Wheems was widely believed to be the biggest importer of Pink Rock into Australia, although he was astute enough never to actually handle the drug himself. A task force consisting of both Federal and State police had tapped his telephone, followed him around, photographed him with long-range cameras in the company of many people and even sent in their own undercover men to try and set up deals with him. But Wheems was either too smart or remarkably lucky. Apart from a relatively minor firearms offence, which at least allowed police to fingerprint him, they could never assemble enough hard evidence to bust the chubby and congenial little man. The general consensus was that he used a number of Asian middlemen and couriers to muddy the waters, bringing the stuff back in relays in small, concealable quantities, through different points of entry. Whatever it was, Jacob Wheems had a good system going for him. He had become a multimillionaire, and owned one of the biggest houses in the sand belt. Sometimes his smiling, prominently gap-toothed face, resembling the actor Ernest Borgnine’s, was to be seen on the back page of the paper after one of his horses had been ridden to victory.
Eventually police interest in Jacob Wheems diminished, as limited manpower and resources had to be redeployed elsewhere and in-fighting broke out among task force members. A low-level watching brief of sorts was maintained, but for all practical purposes the operation was dismantled.
But then two weeks ago, his Targa Porsche, bearing the personalised plate JW, had been found apparently abandoned in the long-term car park at Melbourne International Airport. The first theory was that he had fled the country, perhaps fearing that the law was closing in on him. There was no blood in the car, nor any sign of a struggle. Wheems was known to possess a variety of passports for all occasions, so it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to slip through immigration undetected. He’d never got to use any of them, though. His luck had run out in another way entirely.
De
nnis was put in charge of the case with the begging request to please bring something off soon. He took this to mean that he’d passed his test on that windstrewn bluff. The first thing he did was to organise a house-to-house doorknock in the back-beach area of Sorrento to see if anyone had noticed any unusual goings-on on or around the bluff on the night of June 2, the date Wheems’s car had turned up at Tullamarine, or on the following night. Then he and Ashley Delacroix interviewed the wife, Louisa, who wept incessantly throughout the interview, cradling a framed photograph of Jacob taken on their wedding day. She insisted that he was a good man, a wonderful husband and father, and could not understand why anyone would do such a shocking thing to him. When Dennis suggested that he might have been involved with the drug trade, she became angry, accusing police of victimising her husband and hounding him to the grave. He was innocent of all their charges. He had worked hard all his life and helped many people. Jacob hated drugs—he was always warning their two daughters against using them. He did not even drink or smoke.
Their strongest lead was the broken shaft in Wheems’s chest, which proved to be a steel-tipped arrow. The arrowhead had skewered his heart, destroying it, then come to rest against his spine, which meant that the arrow would have had to have been fired with tremendous power and from close proximity. Apparently the killer had tried to pull the arrow out, but could not, so snapped it off instead.
Investigations revealed that the arrow had not been fired from a traditional bow, but a powerful crossbow of a particular make. Like spearguns, hunting knives and other deadly weapons, these crossbows were freely available in many sporting goods or disposals stores. No licence or registration of ownership was necessary, and no records of sales were kept. So it could not be traced.
