by JR Carroll
So the day had started badly, not least because he now felt guilty about getting Tony into trouble. He wondered how he had been punished—probably just a carpeting from Grimshaw. He hoped it wasn’t anything more serious than that. The man had done practically nothing wrong, but brass didn’t appreciate not having full control over the activities of the troops, especially, he liked to think, if those activities were connected in any way with himself. He wondered about the letter. It had probably been thrown out, he decided. Under pressure Gilhooley would have given it to Grimshaw, and after checking with Stannard he would have dismissed it as a fabrication, another example of attention-seeking by this sick individual. But how had Gilhooley been sprung, anyway? Someone would have had to put him in to Grimshaw. Some officious, backstabbing bastard. Someone big on accountability and not big on Tony. And then Grimshaw would have phoned Frank.
Now the link was gone and he was back to square one again. Nothing back from Steve Donohue yet, either. It was starting to go into the ether.
During his midday break Dennis went for a sit in the backyard with the paper, thinking about Mr Power and Mr Grant. Since he didn’t know either of them, it stood to reason that they didn’t know him either and therefore couldn’t have anything against him. That meant there had to be a third party, someone behind the scenes directing operations. These bastards were just muscle for hire. They could walk brazenly around town for that reason. But if so, who were they fronting for?
It was always possible that the third man could be a cop, someone who simply could not afford to come out into the open. His mind went back to Gavin Spicer, a fellow Homicide sergeant whose nose had been in the trough for years, since he had been bought off by distributors and dealers while working in the Drug Squad. And although Homicide was a whole new ball game without much potential for graft, he continued to play by his old rules, running rorts on the side with the worst crims in Melbourne. Gavin had plenty of reason to hate Dennis. Dennis had spoiled his plans by blowing off a steroid operation that was going to make Gavin rich—rich enough to quit while he was still winning. Gavin had lots of contacts who would carry out this kind of work. He would only have to call in favours and probably wouldn’t even need to shell out for it.
But somehow it didn’t seem to be Gavin’s style. Gavin was motivated by one thing and one thing alone—money. There was no profit in revenge. Why would he waste his time? And Dennis was pretty sure he’d protected his arse from Gavin the night Dennis had broken into the Argyll Hotel and creamed the psychopath Capriati in front of Gavin’s amazed eyes. He’d given Gavin nowhere to go without getting into deep shit himself.
On the other hand, perhaps he had underestimated Gavin. Maybe Gavin had been waiting for a couple of years to go by just so he could pull the chain on Dennis—ruin his life as Dennis had ruined his. With a sleazebag like that you could never be sure. Gavin hears down the line that his old enemy is running a bush pub with his new wife, life’s a ball, he’s wide open, and sees a perfect chance to get even. He can take Dennis down piece by piece, starting with the wife, and he wouldn’t even have to be personally involved …
Gavin Spicer. Why not? It would clean the slate for him. The hired muscle wouldn’t even have to know who had hired them, because he would be cunning enough to do it all through middle-men, bottom-feeders from backstreet pubs with severe personality disorders. It would be impossible to track the thing back to Gavin.
Dennis didn’t know what Gavin Spicer was up to these days, whether he was still in the job or not. He’d try to find out, somehow. Gavin was firming fast as a possibility. In fact, if he was ex, that would make him more likely. There was no one meaner than a bitter ex-cop with all that loose time on his hands.
Who else? Well, what about Kenny Butts, ex-union standover man and hardline crook, suspected at one time of fire-bombing a Chinese restaurant because someone he didn’t like ate regularly there? During that period Dennis was riding shotgun with a CIB crew who called themselves the Wild Bunch. It was at a time in his life—about ’84 or ’85—when Dennis was more off the rails than on them, drinking too much and running around, and he and this crew of cowboys used to go to a well-known nightclub, get a decent skinful and then pick a name out of the hat and pay the lucky man a visit. This night it was Ken Butts’s turn. They knocked on the door of his Brunswick home, asked him politely to come with them down to the station for a chat, got him into the car and then drove around for a couple of hours, beating him senseless in the back seat and demanding confessions to every unsolved crime in Melbourne. The guy had taken a swipe at Dennis, split his lip, and Dennis had seen red, jabbed him a couple of times in the leg with his Swiss Army knife. Buttsy hated that. Then when they’d had their fun they stopped the car somewhere ridiculous like Laverton, relieved him of any cash he had on him so he couldn’t get a cab home, and then pushed him out onto the street together with all the empty beer cans they had in the car.
Ken Butts was a violent sociopath and committed recidivist. The older he got the more unmanageable he became. He had a big family and a lot of mates, although one by one they were dropping off from drug overdoses, accidents on building sites or mistaken killings by police. Butts, though, was a survivor. When Dennis unexpectedly ran into him outside the Magistrates’ Court a few weeks after they’d given him his magical mystery tour, Buttsy having just been granted an adjournment on a case he had going, he walked right up with his gold chains glittering in the sun and said to Dennis, ‘You’re going to have serious bad luck one day, Gatz. I’ve got your number, mate. Can’t help bad luck, can you? I’m going to see you out the back door. I’m going to teach you not to fuck with Ken Butts.’ With those last words he had jabbed Dennis’s chest. Dennis had grabbed his chains and abused him, and then Butts had walked away into the crowd with his finger in the air. Not long after that he went inside for a spell, and possibly he was back in right now for something else. Possibly he was dead. But Dennis never did forget that eyeballing Butts had given him in the street. Ken Butts did not make idle threats—he made promises, which he always kept. You can’t help bad luck, he had said. When Butts got out of prison, one of the Wild Bunch had had both his legs crushed one night in a hit-and-run. The man had been sideswiped while getting into his car after a session in his regular pub. Dennis had been nervous for a time, and relieved when he learned that Butts had gone back to prison.
In the evening he sat at his usual table in the corner of the lounge, eating steak and kidney pie and working his way through a bottle of his favourite red, Blue Pyrenees Estate. Dennis had lots of cases of it in his cellar, going back to 1988, and although it was premium local wine he didn’t sell a lot of it because of the twenty-five dollar plus price tag. As a result he and Karen had come to regard the Blue Pyrenees as their own private collection, although they managed to restrict themselves to two or three bottles each week.
It was quarter to eight by the time he pushed his plate to one side and looked up to see busty Monica Raitt come through the door in her trademark black jeans and black plaid shirt, not tucked in. Monica and her husband Malcolm had bought an old school and turned it into a guest house, which they called Blinky Bill’s. They were very big on native flora and fauna and had made that the theme of their establishment. Dennis had never been inside it, although Karen had, and apparently Monica had gone to a great deal of trouble to decorate each bedroom with models and paintings of various Blinky Bill characters, even planting a gum tree in the middle of the main room with fake koalas and rosellas perched in it and hand-made lizards and other creatures sitting around the room on rocks. Malcolm had done all the structural work, stripping and polishing everything down to the bare timber, putting in a mezzanine floor and massive oregon beams. A small fortune had been put into it, all of which had now gone down the drain.
Monica spotted Dennis and smiled.
‘Hi, Monica,’ he said.
‘Hi, Dennis. How are you?’ She said this in a piping-and-fluting kind of voice, coming down o
n the ‘you’ so that it wasn’t a question, and touched his arm.
‘Shithouse. What about yourself? Why don’t you sit down and talk to me? Everyone around here treats me as if I’ve got some sort of disease.’
Monica laughed and immediately pulled up a seat. Forthright and good-hearted, she was the kind of woman who laughed and smiled even when there was nothing to laugh and smile about, who bore up stolidly and whose conversation was always accompanied by lots of touching. She had thick blonde hair which used to be straight and long but which now looked like a mass of corkscrews framing her big-boned, blue-eyed face. It was a face that absolutely demanded to be looked at. In her early or mid-thirties, Monica was essentially Nordic in appearance. In fact, she did have some sort of Scandinavian blood in her, although Dennis wasn’t sure which—Swedish or Danish, one of the two.
‘You sound pretty cheerful tonight,’ she said.
‘Must be the wine. Would you like some?’
‘If you insist.’
He poured and said, ‘I do. It’s very special, you know. Gets you drunk in the nicest possible way.’
‘Well, that’s for me then. Cheers.’
‘Karen and I used to say that if we ever got into deep water we’d be able to get out of it by selling off the Blue Pyrenees. There’s half a paddock of it down there.’ He sank visibly for a moment, then added, ‘But it looks as if you need more than a few bottles of wine to do that. Here’s to it, anyway, Monica. Good luck.’
‘Good luck.’
They drank. Monica sipped attentively, tasting and swallowing the wine as if to detect its special qualities. Dennis watched her. She had need of good luck. Without knowing the full story, Dennis had heard enough to understand that Monica’s world had recently taken a decent nosediving too. Believing that they were on to a sure-fire thing, she had borrowed heavily in the late eighties to set up the place. Too heavily, as it turned out. The recession hit, no one came to stay and things in general turned shitty. They hung on but found it increasingly difficult to make the loan repayments. Finally the bank intervened and called in the mortgage. Blinky Bill’s had to be sold even before it had got going properly, and they had got nothing—less than nothing—from the sale. Somewhere in amongst all this, Malcolm had become seriously infatuated with a nineteen-year-old Ballarat girl, a student, and he cleaned out the joint bank account and vanished into smoke with her, telling Monica nothing and leaving her desolated and broke at the same time.
Dennis said, ‘I’m going to sell the pub, Monica.’
‘Are you?’
‘Yep. But first I’m going to drink all the Blue Pyrenees.’
‘Well, why not? What a pity, though.’ She drank a little, then said, ‘I hope you do better out of it than I did with my place. It’d be hard not to. I’m still paying the damn thing off even though it’s not even mine any more. Well, it never was mine, was it? Christ, what a shambles. Don’t get me started.’
‘You’ve had a rotten run.’
‘I don’t do much singing in the shower these days. Or anywhere else.’
‘You’re a good singer. We haven’t seen enough of you around here.’ It was not empty praise. In happier times Monica used to come into the lounge on Saturday nights when there was live music—a man on a synthesiser—and with a little persuasion from the crowd, she would perform her repertoire of country and western numbers, specialising in Johnny Cash. She even looked the part in her black outfit, which on these occasions included a matching Akubra. Her ability to reach the lower registers was impressive, particularly when she sang ‘I Walk The Line’, her signature tune. That was the one everybody waited for. But Monica hadn’t done that in a while.
They finished the bottle of wine, and Dennis fetched another. The bar and lounge were both unusually busy for a Thursday, but he wasn’t working tonight. He asked Monica if she’d heard anything from Malcolm, who’d been gone for a few months now—long enough for the girl to have lost interest in him. Dennis didn’t think Malcolm was a man with much magnetism. In fact he couldn’t understand what a nineteen-year-old would see in him. He said all this to Monica, who seized the opportunity to assassinate her husband’s character.
‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘I don’t care about the girl. He has a history of it actually, going back before my time. Seems to prefer them half his age, for some reason. Maybe to compensate for the fact that he can’t deliver the goods himself.’
‘Can’t he. I wonder if the girlfriend knows that.’
Monica took a hefty mouthful of wine and took her time swallowing it. ‘Dennis, he’s a fuckwit. He’s a worm. Built like one, too. The reason he picks young girls is that they’re too naive to see through his bullshit. Malcolm is a very shallow and immature man, but he can come across as someone incredibly sophisticated and interesting—for about five minutes. No, look, I truly don’t care about that. She’s welcome to it, poor silly girl. What really hurts is that he took the money, Dennis. He left me with fifty dollars in the bank and eight hundred a month to pay off. How am I supposed to do that? And, of course, no warning, not a word. Just—gone.’ She put her glass on the table and wiped a tear from her face. Dennis had watched her eyes fill. She looked at him squarely and added, ‘The man has no guts. I hate him. I hate myself for having been dumb enough to marry the bastard and then go and take out the loan in my name—at his suggestion, of course. I mean, what future have I got now? I’m only thirty-four, but shit.’ She cried a little, recovered, and said, ‘If I could afford it, I’d pay someone to hunt him down and kill him. I’d really do that. How much would I need?’
Dennis said, ‘More than you’ve got. More than fifty dollars.’
‘Would you do it for me?’
It was such an unexpected question that he laughed involuntarily. ‘No.’
‘Why not? You used to be a policeman. You must know about these things.’
She’s serious, Dennis thought. No, she’s upset. He leaned across and took hold of her hand. ‘Monica,’ he said levelly, ‘you’re having a very bad time, right? You think no one’s suffered the way you have. You think you’re not going to come out the other end. You’re wrong, though. As you said, you’re only thirty-four. Look at it this way: you’ve unloaded your old man, who was no good anyway. You’re free! Don’t worry about the fucking money. If you can’t pay it, you can’t pay it, and that’s all there is to it. It’s the bank’s problem, not yours. They can’t put you behind bars, for Christ’s sake. What you’ve gotta do is shut your eyes, grit your teeth and wait for it all to blow over. After a while you’ll wake up one morning and say to yourself, “Hell, this ain’t so bad—how’d I manage that?”’
‘Will I?’ The sincerity and apparent authority of his words seemed to mollify her somewhat.
‘I’ve seen it happen.’
‘I want to be dead some days. Most days.’
‘I know. So do I. You get used to it, like herpes or a club foot.’
Monica laughed through a tissue. Dennis said, ‘Tell you what. I’d rather be you than him. Than Malcolm. His problems haven’t started yet. You should pray that he manages to get her pregnant, then when she leaves him and takes the baby too his life will be completely fucked.’
Monica laughed through her nose and said, ‘He couldn’t duff an ant.’
‘Well, even better, I guess. She’ll leave him for that and he’ll be humiliated as well. Why not put an ad in the paper? This is to certify that Malcolm Raitt could not duff an ant. He wouldn’t be able to sue.’
Monica really laughed then. Dennis topped up their glasses and she studied the hair and the raised veins on the back of his hand and wrist.
‘Have you ever seriously considered killing yourself?’ she said.
‘Hell, yes.’
‘When Karen died?’
‘Yes. Then and at other times.’ He fished for a cigarette, lit it and said, ‘The day after that happened I put a gun in my mouth.’
She flinched and said, ‘Shit.’
�
�I’m still here.’
Watching him, watching the smoke trail from the cigarette still in his mouth, she said, ‘Why didn’t you do it?’
‘Brett stopped me. He doesn’t know it, though. Don’t tell him.’
Letting that pass by, she said, ‘What about the other times?’
‘Good question. I don’t know the answer. Too gutless, I guess. It’s a big move.’
‘You could call it that.’ Smiled, seeing him differently.
‘There’s something else. A little thing I have deep down about going out cheap. Getting wasted.’ He took the cigarette out of his mouth at last and said, ‘Let me tell you a story, Monica. It’s a short one.’
‘Take as long as you like.’
He waited a moment, then said, ‘We were in the back of a truck being driven into the bush for a three-day search-and-destroy. This is Vietnam I’m talking about, November 1970. The search-and-destroy is a bit of a joke in the platoon because no one, not even the officer, who was a conscript like most of us, has any intentions of engaging the enemy if that can possibly be avoided. We were on short time, thirty days and counting down. The bloke sitting next to me in the truck is trying to work out the odds on making it through the rest of the trip. Michael Horan his name was, a maths teacher in real life. His theory was that the longer you survived the more your chances diminished, which stands to reason, especially near the end of a tour when you tend to slack off, and there we were in that danger period. I remember he made a joke to the effect that if someone had to die it would more likely be the scout or tail-end Charlie, so the thing to do was to hide yourself somewhere in the middle. Anyway we arrive at the drop-off point and everyone’s getting off the truck. Michael and I are the last two, and he goes ahead of me. I think he must have been putting his notepad in his shirt pocket and not paying attention, because when he jumps I hear this clear metallic sound from somewhere on his body, a familiar ringing sound, but I didn’t recognise it immediately. Then I jumped off too. As soon as I hit the ground I realised what the sound was. I looked at Michael and he was examining his web belt. He’d snagged one of his grenades on the truck and the cotter pin had been pulled out, triggering the lever and activating the fuse. I looked at him and he looked at me. He was pure white. It’s a four-second fuse, you see—no time at all. The others are just standing around. I manage to scream, “Look out!”—dumb, it should have been “Grenade!”—and Michael’s trying to get the fucking thing off his belt but it won’t come, and I run and dive. Lucky me. Michael and three others bought the farm.’
