Out of the Blue

by JR Carroll

  They ran pictures of the make of crossbow and the actual arrowhead that had killed Wheems in the daily papers, asking the public for information that might lead them to the killer. A number of people did phone, enthusiastically nominating friends and neighbours, but it was always the wrong sort of bow, the wrong sort of arrow, and in every case the individuals concerned could not be connected with Wheems in any way. They were all subsequently eliminated as suspects.

  The doorknock at Sorrento failed to produce any useful leads. Everything led nowhere. They interviewed scores of Wheems’s friends and business associates, to no avail. An inspection of his bank accounts revealed nothing untoward except that substantial amounts of money had passed through them over a period of years. They set up a van at Sorrento, distributed pamphlets, tried ‘Crime Stoppers’ on TV. Nothing happened. Dennis was starting to feel that the case had slipped from his grasp even before he had hold of it.

  One morning he sat drumming his fingers on his desk, trying to dream up a new angle. When you got to a dead end you could either give up and move on to something else, or try a different tack, get an idea, do something. Dennis had always operated on that principle. He did not believe in sitting around on his hands waiting for the phone to ring. It was important to keep shaking the tree, no matter what. Not for nothing had he come to Homicide with a name, and now the time had come to justify it. But how? Don Hammond provided the answer.

  That same day he sought and obtained, through a contact of Don Hammond’s, permission to borrow the task force files on Jacob Wheems. They included reports, running notes, scribbled messages, departmental memos, countless photographs with annotations on the back and the transcripts of hundreds of telephone conversations that were legally taped from both his home and his upstairs office at Louisa’s. These transcripts interested him in particular. He called his wife Lauren to say he would not be home until late, then buried his face in manila folders.

  By eleven-thirty he was tired and the back of his neck throbbed from an encounter with a billiard ball during a pub brawl years earlier when he had been in uniform. Someone’s name kept cropping up in the transcripts. Laszlo. Other names did too, but this one stuck in his mind for some reason. He wasn’t sure if it was a first or second name. Fucking Laszlo—where had he heard that before? It was an unusual name, Hungarian or something like that. However, an annotation declared unequivocally that ‘Laszlo’ spoke with a broad Australian accent. Dennis went back through the transcripts. Wheems had been taped speaking with this Laszlo a total of thirty-eight times, mostly from the office above Louisa’s. Wheems himself had made most of the calls, no doubt in the belief that if his home phone was bugged the office one was probably safe. The conversations were all heavily coded nonetheless, full of ums, ahs, expletives, ‘fuck him’, and ‘fuck that cunt,’ ‘fuckin’ right’, and so on, repeated reference to ‘Muslims’ (someone had written in the margin that this probably meant drugs from Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim country), and figures that might have represented dates or amounts of money. There was also mention of something called Kalamazoo, with a circle around it and the comment, ‘Not in Bus. Register’. The thing was, Dennis had come across this Laszlo, or someone calling himself Laszlo, before. Fifteen months before, in fact. This Laszlo spoke in broad Australian and swore a lot too.

  TWELVE

  At that time Dennis had been a CIB detective at Mitcham, an outer eastern suburb along the Maroondah Highway. Through a tip-off they’d got onto this lawyer, a six-thousand-dollar-a-day QC, in fact. His name was Reginald Blair Campbell-Potts, although to his credit he insisted on calling himself Rex Campbell. However, since he believed that he was distantly related to Donald Campbell, the speedboat champion, perhaps the shortened and more dashing version of his name could be more cynically explained. Friends claimed that Rex was quite nuttily obsessed with the Donald Campbell idea, although no one had put up their hand to publicly dispute it.

  Whatever his fantasies he was certainly a blueblood, from the wealthy Western District Campbell-Potts family. As a young bachelor he lived for a time at the Windsor Hotel, where his parties became the stuff of legend. Spotting him climbing out of his Morgan car in Toorak Road, resplendent in Geelong Grammar scarf and blazer, women were apt to say, ‘There’s Rex Campbell. Isn’t he wonderful?’ South of the Yarra Rex was only slightly less famous than Andrew Peacock and, like Andrew, was an absolute must on all the important guest lists around town. Gossip columns and women’s magazines made an industry of reporting on his latest goings-on, revealing which stunning beauty he had been seen with at Rogalsky’s or Glo Glo’s and speculating on who would be the lucky one to get him in the end.

  Nowadays, although not yet forty, Rex Campbell’s hair was absolutely white, as white as his QC’s wig, always perfectly groomed, and his skin was brown all year round, from snow-glare in winter and tropical sunshine in summer. He was startlingly handsome in a completely manufactured way, like a model or film actor, and as photogenic as one. He knew it, too. Because of his good looks and drawing power, Rex was regularly invited to take part in TV programs such as ‘Hypotheticals’, and on these occasions he never had any trouble at all finding the camera. In fact he unfailingly knew where the camera was, whether on TV or in the pages of Mode magazine, where he could be found sipping champagne at a product launch or film premiere. And every year his name was among those asked by newspaper journalists for their Melbourne Cup selection, an event he religiously attended each year in morning dress, feasting with his wife Sam and their party on Veuve Clicquot and a spread of delicacies laid out on a tartan rug next to his white Rolls-Royce. On those days he generally discovered a camera nearby too.

  The word that had reached Dennis on Rex Campbell was that, through a complicated system of two-dollar shelf companies set up in the names of brazenly fictitious individuals (‘Popeye’, ‘Maxwell Smart’, ‘Isadora Duncan’ were just a few of the more obvious ones), he was laundering the proceeds of criminal activity, functioning as a conduit for the biggest drug dealers in Australia and New Zealand, and avoiding having to pay tax in the process. This was in the mid-eighties, when laundering and tax-avoidance schemes in one form or another were an industry up and down the country.

  Remaining at arm’s length, a small group of detectives headed by Dennis kept tabs on Rex, following his movements when he wasn’t in court, making discreet enquiries, nibbling around the edges. Then they tapped his telephone and recorded all of his conversations for a period of three months. Rex spoke a number of times to a man called Laszlo, a crudely-spoken Australian who made most of his calls to Rex from a public phone box or a pub. The conversations, peppered with ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’ and ‘fucking right’ on Laszlo’s side, mostly seemed to be about forthcoming business transactions that were being organised ‘overseas’. There was talk of importing ‘soccer balls’ and amounts of money were mentioned.

  The evidence accumulated to the point where Dennis decided to show his hand and bring Rex in for preliminary questioning. He was not to be charged with anything yet. The idea was to try to convince Rex that they knew a lot more than they really did about his activities, that they were getting ready to bust him and that he was going down the gurgler unless he co-operated fully. Good plan, but it didn’t work. Rex Campbell knew the law and his rights better than they did. He wasn’t intimidated in the slightest, or so it seemed.

  Interviewing him, Dennis gained the distinct impression that Rex Campbell was homosexual, although he had all the trappings to demonstrate otherwise: lovely blonde wife, three blonde kids, big family spread in Templestowe complete with horse paddock and horses to go in it. This magnificent establishment had been featured in Home Beautiful, accompanied by photos of a relaxed and happy Rex en famille. In addition, he owned a beach house in fashionable Blairgowrie, where he was a member of the local yacht club.

  Yet under questioning, his speech and body language had a tendency to become effeminate, such as his richly intoned ‘Oh, come on now, Serge
ant, that won’t do,’ invariably accompanied by a dismissive flick of the wrist whenever an incriminating suggestion was put to him.

  When Dennis asked him who ‘Laszlo’ was, Rex said, ‘Laszlo? No, I’m afraid I’ve never heard of any Laszlo. Except perhaps the one in Casablanca. Is that who you mean? Have you been watching too many old movies on TV, Sergeant Gatz? Do you think you’re Sam Spade?’ And he smirked, a trademark of Rex’s whenever he said anything he regarded as witty. Dennis said that he agreed it was an unlikely choice of name for someone who was obviously Australian and that the Laszlo in Casablanca was a hero, if he remembered correctly, a member of the underground fighting the bad guys. ‘So that’s an irony, isn’t it Rex? Perhaps your friend has a sense of humour, like you—Popeye.’

  ‘Irony?’ Rex said with a sneer. ‘I’m surprised you know what the word means, Sergeant. Can I go now?’

  But Dennis persisted over the weeks, convinced that if he could just get a decent grip on the tail the whole thing would come through. In the end he charged him with a number of offences, including the catch-all, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and a dozen others that were all of a technical nature and which had Dennis sitting at his desk until late every night boning up on Company Law. Now at least Rex Campbell was obliged to retain a team of lawyers who were even more expensive than he was.

  At the committal hearing the Judge declared the prosecution’s case to be ‘cynical and unsafe in the extreme’, especially in view of the fact that a statement it had tendered to the court was shown to have been amended from its original form. An overzealous and inexperienced constable had, without Dennis’s knowledge, erased certain passages of the statement and rewritten them in what he thought was more correct English. He had tampered with the evidence. Dennis was utterly devastated. After everything he had put into the operation, he simply could not believe that anyone could be stupid enough to undo it all in one stroke. Rex Campbell walked jubilantly from the courtroom, whispering ‘Eat shit, flatfoot,’ to Dennis as he passed by.

  Laszlo, Dennis thought. Laszlo. It had to be the same man. There could not be two Laszlos with so much connecting them. They had never got anywhere near finding out who he really was, and in fact the whole operation against Rex Campbell had been abandoned immediately after the committal hearing. It was costing too much and the likelihood of a worthwhile result was minimal, if not invisible. So Dennis cut his losses and tried to forget about the whole thing.

  But now he was remembering it again. Checking the Wheems files, he saw that the dates roughly coincided. ‘Laszlo’ was having conversations with Jacob Wheems on the subject of Pink Rock at about the same time he was discussing business transactions with Rex Campbell. So possibly he was the middleman between them, the criminal responsible for carrying out all the dirty work. Crisscross. Fucking right. Had to be.

  He came hard at Rex Campbell this time, ripping a fist into his soft belly when no one was around. Rex got a shock and saw that he had a different situation on his hands now. A man had been murdered and he was being lumbered with it. He insisted that he had never heard of Jacob Wheems, just as he had never heard of Laszlo fifteen months earlier. Dennis wasn’t having any of it, not after that committal farce.

  ‘You should be in fucking jail right now, Rex,’ Dennis said. ‘Consider yourself lucky.’ Rex was gasping on the floor; Dennis had hit him again.

  ‘I don’t know any Jacob Wheems,’ Rex croaked. ‘Eat shit, flatfoot. You’re good at it.’ Dennis kicked him in the balls and then threw him out. Even though Rex was a lawyer it seemed unlikely that he would lodge a complaint, if only because Rex would not want to put himself in the spotlight again. It would be bad for his professional standing, which had already taken quite a hammering lately. He was beginning to develop a bad case of ‘notoriety’.

  In the middle of the night, asleep next to Lauren, Dennis woke up with a start. At first he didn’t realise why, but then he did, vividly. Rex Campbell was still very much on his mind. He’d been dreaming about him, about Rex riding a horse around his Templestowe property while his wife and children watched him from the fence. There was the roar of surf in the background, too. In the dream Rex was naked and the horse kept shitting hugely, producing great piles of it. Looking at the camera, at Dennis, Rex smirked and said, ‘Eat shit, flatfoot.’ And Dennis shot him off the horse.

  Dennis sat up straight in bed. Rex Campbell had a beach house at Blairgowrie. Blairgowrie was right next to Sorrento. Crisscross.

  He got a warrant to search the Blairgowrie house, without Rex’s knowledge. There was no one present when he and two other detectives including Ashley Delacroix got there. He broke into the garage and found, well-hidden, a crossbow matching the murder weapon. He also found matching steel-tipped arrows, with one missing from the quiver. He knew there was one missing because each arrow had its own individual hole in the quiver, and one of the holes was empty. They also found the other part of the arrow that had killed Wheems, thrown into bushes in the back yard. Tests later showed it to be a perfect match. And if that wasn’t enough, there were bloodstains on the concrete floor of the garage. Someone had tried to clean it up with some kind of solvent, but not very effectively. It was not a lot of blood, and could not positively be identified as Wheems’s because of the solvent. But it was damning enough. They decided that Wheems had been killed there, then the body must have been taken somewhere else to be cut up.

  Rex Campbell was charged with the murder of Jacob Wheems, who, the prosecution alleged, had fed profits in the order of four or five million dollars, all from Pink Rock imported from Malaysia, through Rex’s system of shelf companies. But somewhere along the line there was a falling out, ‘a classical falling out among thieves’, the Judge said in his summing-up, and as a result Rex Campbell, in concert with person or persons unknown, saw fit to murder Wheems. Rex protested his innocence to the bitter end, claiming he’d been set up by police who had a grudge against him, but he was found guilty and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. The identity of ‘Laszlo’, who in the Judge’s opinion had brought the two men together, was never determined, although everyone had a theory. Certainly someone else had to be involved to carry out the execution successfully. Overpowering Wheems after luring him to Blairgowrie, killing him, cutting him up, taking the remains to Sorrento and burying them, getting the Porsche to the airport—it would all have been too much for Rex Campbell alone. He would have needed the skills of ‘Laszlo’.

  Dennis had cracked his first homicide case. Don Hammond was extremely pleased with him. ‘Auspicious beginnings,’ he said to Dennis, shaking his hand after the trial. ‘Well done, digger.’ Then he took him out to celebrate. Dennis got home late yet again, happily drunk this time.

  He turned on the radio, a combination of light music and early-morning chitchat. It was really just to break the silence, to get him out of his own brain for a while. It was half-past three. Finishing his last cigarette, he undressed, got under the blankets and dozed off in minutes, the announcer’s voice and the song lyrics mingling strangely with his dreams, as if these words were actually determining the shape of his dreams a millisecond in advance of them. He slept close to the surface, not moving at all except for the twitching of his eyelids but dipping in and out of real life, like a patient who has not been given enough anaesthetic. Later he woke to the sound of birds, switched off the radio and subsided into a deeper place, this time with Don Hammond looking severely down at him, black gloves on and arms folded. In the dream Hammond said, ‘Shot through the heart, would you say?’

  ‘It’s too hard to tell,’ Dennis answered. He was conscious of being new in the Squad and not wanting to make a mistake.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Hammond said.

  ‘It’s too obvious. There’s not enough blood. I think we’re being set up. It’s all happened somewhere else.’

  When he woke up the words revolved in his head, and he wondered what he’d meant by them.

  THIRTEEN<
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  Graham had suggested to Teddy that they drive to Avoca in the one car, Graham’s Toyota Tarago van. It was extremely comfortable, he assured Teddy, had air-conditioning and what he called ‘oodles of room’. Teddy wasn’t having that though, preferring the freedom of his own wheels. He hated being a passenger in someone else’s car at any time, could not tolerate bad driving, but especially in this case when it would mean being trapped next to Graham for three hours, putting up with his brand of bullshit as well as his suffocatingly strong aftershave, which in Teddy’s opinion would mostly serve to attract flies—or maybe it was a come-on for other poofters. For the same reasons he didn’t fancy Graham next to him in the VK, either, so the only alternative was for them to travel separately and meet up somewhere. He explained this to Graham by saying, ‘I like to control my own destiny, Graham,’ and in reply Graham had raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Well. You and me both, brother. If only we could.’ Typical, Teddy said to himself. Always the smartarse. Always taking the mickey in that sly manner of his, coming at you sideways and never quite overstepping the mark. He’s only got to go too far once, Teddy thought. Funny about Graham, though. Unlike nearly everyone Teddy came into contact with, he showed no fear or concern for himself at all in Teddy’s presence. Teddy wasn’t sure whether he liked that or not, but at least he had to concede that the guy had more juice than most. Either that or he was extremely stupid.

  In the end he agreed to link up with Graham at a lay-by outside Ballarat, just before the Avoca turn-off, near a public lavatory there. The idea of meeting a guy like Graham anywhere near a public lavatory sent a little shiver up Teddy’s spine, but he wouldn’t need to get out of his car, just follow Graham’s Tarago for the last leg of the trip.