Aftershock ch-14

by Peter Corris

  ‘Me and Gina and Ronny’ Roper said.

  I nodded and returned the picture. ‘You and Gina went to bed in Bach’s house,’ I said. ‘One day he came home and caught you.’

  He had the can almost to his mouth. He was about to drink, wanted badly to drink, but he stopped. ‘How d’you know?’ The fear in his voice was like electronic distortion; the sounds trembled and warped. ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘Drink up, son,’ I said. ‘It’s an old, old story. You’re not the first young dickhead it’s happened to and you won’t be the last. Bach caught you. What happened then?’

  Roper drank some beer and put the can down. It rattled as it touched the table. ‘He… he said he would tell Gina’s brothers unless she let him do it to her, too. He said he’d tell them he caught me raping her. But it was him! He raped her! She didn’t want him to do it, she fought him. She hated it. I was so scared I just stood there.’

  Foster’s isn’t my favourite beer and right then the mouthful I took didn’t taste of anything. I swallowed it just to be doing something. Roper’s head slumped forward and he banged it on the table three times, hard.

  ‘I just stood there,’ he sobbed. ‘I just stood there.’

  What was there to say? A hero would’ve stopped Bach, a villain would’ve helped him. Like most of us, Mark Roper was something in between and paying the price for it. Guilt and remorse. Heroes and villains don’t have to worry about either. I reached over and patted his heaving shoulders.

  ‘Take it easy, son. Is the girl all right?’

  His lowered head bobbed and he snuffled. ‘Yes. But she doesn’t see me anymore. And her brothers…’

  ‘Tell me about them.’

  He lifted his head and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his overall. The close-set eyes made him look almost defective and the snuffling didn’t help. I decided he was younger than I’d at first thought-nineteen, tops. He drank some beer and got another cigarette going. ‘Gina’s got three brothers, all older than her.’

  ‘How old’s she?’

  He dragged in smoke and sniffed. “Bout sixteen.’

  Great. Say he’s stretching it by a year. That put her underage at the time he was screwing her. Still, this is the nineties. I said, ‘Go on about the brothers.’

  ‘Mario, Bruno and Ronny.’

  ‘Ronny? The guy in the photo.’

  ‘Yeah. Renato, but he’s called Ronny. He’s the youngest and the toughest. He’s crazy. He’s a bikie and if he found out…’

  ‘Don’t get into that again. They haven’t found out so far, why should they now?’

  ‘ You’ve found out.’

  ‘That’s my job. What do these blokes do? Locals, are they?’

  He nodded. ‘Kahiba. Their father did real well around there after the war, bought a lot of land and built houses and stuff. Shops, you know. Mario had his own real estate business and Bruno works for his father. Ronny doesn’t do anything much except bludge money off Mr Costi and scare people.’

  I’d finished the beer and I took out my notebook and starting jotting down names just to give him some confidence. I got addresses for Mario and Bruno; Gina and Ronny lived at home, so I got an address for Costi senior as well. ‘Why did you say Mario had his own business? What went wrong?’

  ‘Nothing went wrong. He got hurt in the earthquake. They found him wandering around Hamilton. He got hit by a sign or something. He was in a coma for a long time. I think he still is. I’m not worried about him, or Bruno. Bruno’s a bit of a wimp, just does what his father tells him. It’s Ronny, really’

  He looked at me as if he was seeing me for the first time. Something like hope appeared in his puckered face. ‘Maybe you could go and talk to Ronny. See if he knows anything. I’m scared stiff that he’s just waiting for the right time to get me.’

  I put the notebook away. ‘I might have to talk to him. I can’t tell yet. If I do, I’ll let you know what I think.’

  ‘You won’t tell him, will you?’

  ‘I can’t see why I would.’ I tried to say it as firmly as possible, but this was very shaky ground. I’d found out something about Oscar Bach that my employer wouldn’t want to hear. Always tricky. But Roper’s statements would need corroboration and Gina Costi was the only other possible source. Even trickier. One thing I was sure of, Mark Roper was no kind of a suspect. I fished out the two keys I’d found in Bach’s leather jacket and showed them to him. ‘Recognise these?’

  He fingered them briefly. ‘That’s the key to the van. Are you going to take it? Is Mr Jacobs going to stop me from…’

  ‘Don’t worry. Nothing like that. What about the small key? Ever see that before?’

  Interest in something else than his own misery made him look less limited. He touched the small barrel key. ‘Don’t think so. But there’s a sort of box in the van, like a trunk. It’s locked. That’s the sort of key that might fit it.’

  I stood with only a slight creaking of bones. ‘Let’s take a look.’

  I followed him out the back door and down some steps to a treeless yard that was half dirt and half grass. Nice things look nicer by moonlight, bad things look worse. This yard was a museum of things half-done or completed things half-decayed. The fences sagged, the grass was cut in spots and long and bushy in others; there had been an attempt to collect cardboard boxes, bottles and cans into one area but either animals had re-distributed them or the steam had gone out of the attempt.

  ‘Looked better when Mum was alive,’ Roper muttered as he led the way towards the garage. ‘I haven’t got much of a knack for house-keeping. She always did everything.’

  He opened the garage door, which sagged on its hinges, and turned on the light. An old red Bedford van stood on the oil and grease blackened cement floor. The garage was dark out of the immediate circle of the light but I got an impression of a tool bench, boxes, oil drums, bits and pieces. The place smelled of rust and neglect. No doubt it had looked better when Dad was alive. No fancy sliding side doors on the Bedford. Roper opened the swing-out back doors and climbed inside. He swore as he knocked his shin against something, then there was a scraping of metal on metal. He pushed a box about the size of an esky towards me. I got hold of it and lifted it clear, not hard because it only weighed about as much as a brick.

  ‘You can put it on the bench,’ Roper said, pointing, ‘there’s another light over there that Dad worked by’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I dunno. He just worked out here all the time.’

  He switched on a bare bulb mounted on the wall above the bench. The Ropers hadn’t gone in much for wattage. The box was metal, painted grey. In the dim light I couldn’t see the keyhole. Youth has its uses-Roper turned the box and stuck a black-rimmed fingernail in the hole. I produced the key, put it in the lock and it turned smoothly.

  ‘Always wondered what was in it,’ Roper said as I lifted the lid.

  ‘It’s a credit to your honesty that you didn’t take a jemmy to it.’

  ‘Never thought of it, even.’ The first thing I felt in the box made me drop the lid and lock it.

  ‘Hey,’ Roper said. ‘I wanna see.’

  ‘Forget it. I’m taking this with me.’

  ‘You can’t do that. It’s… I’m the… ‘

  ‘You’re not anything,’ I said. ‘Mr Jacobs is the de facto executor of Mr Bach’s estate. I’m acting as his agent. I’m taking the box.’

  He shrugged. His moods seemed to range all the way from despair to apathy Mum and Dad had done a great job. I carried the box straight up to the street and put it in my car. Roper followed me, slouching, hands in pockets. He’d left his cigarettes in the house and I could tell he was twitching for one. I remembered the feeling. The sight of the smashed window seemed to put some life into him. ‘What about me?’ he said. ‘You can’t just go off.’

  ‘You haven’t done anything, have you?’

  ‘No,’ he groaned, ‘that’s the trouble.’

  I got into the car and started
the engine. He trotted around to stand by the window. ‘I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about. If I have to make any use of what you’ve told me I’ll make sure you’re protected. Just carry on as normal.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  My patience with him gave out. ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself,’ I snapped. ‘Clean your house and yourself up a bit and go out and find a new girlfriend. Thanks for the beer.’

  I revved up and drove off leaving him standing under a street light looking like a shoeless orphan. Hardy’s therapy. Strong medicine. Good for what ails you. If you’re always bigger than your problems. Not for the first time, I tried, automatically, to wind up the window before I remembered why it wouldn’t wind. The night air was cool on my face, a little too cool. I felt in need of tender loving care and where was there to look for it? Those thoughts were too confusing. I fiddled with the winding knob as I drove and wondered if I could charge Horrie Jacobs for the damage. That’s better, Cliff, I thought, now you ‘re thinking like a professional. I stopped at a liquor barn on the way back to the hotel and bought a half bottle of Haig-one good professional thought deserves another.

  What I’d found in Oscar Bach’s locked box was a knife and it’s a funny thing about knives-you can tell from the feel of them whether they’ve been used to chop up vegetables or clean fish or do something else. This is my gypsy grandmother in me talking, of course, but there’s something in it. Back at the motel I poured myself a scotch and unlocked the box again.

  By the time I’d laid everything out on the bed I was feeling sick. I’d had two solid scotches on an empty stomach, but that wasn’t the reason. The box had held the knife, a ballpoint hammer, some light rope, a pair of handcuffs, a clump of wadded tissues and an old leather razor strop. Inside a manilla envelope was a collection of newspaper clippings. These had been cut from several different papers; they were cropped and large sections of the reports had been blacked out with an oil pencil. What remained detailed the case of Werner Schmidt, thirty-seven, who’d been convicted of the abduction, sexual assault and malicious wounding of Greta Coleman, sixteen, of Heathcote. He’d picked up the girl on the Audley road, driven into the bush, threatened her with the knife, raped her and hit her twice on the head with a hammer. The prosecution alleged that only the arrival of a National Park ranger, who’d been surprised to see a car on the little-used fire trail, had saved Greta’s life. As it was, she was permanently brain-damaged. The ranger had over-powered Schmidt and taken him to the police.

  Schmidt had been sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. Official documents, also in the envelope, showed that he’d served twelve years of the sentence, mostly at Parramatta. He’d been released four years ago, after opting to serve his full sentence, less remissions, rather than apply for parole. One of the cuttings carried a photo of Schmidt being escorted to court: round face, thin hair, burly build, could have been anyone.

  The documentation was pretty worrying. But what really worried me was the knife, hammer and rope, the story about the rape of Gina Costi and a map with four crosses marked on it.

  12

  The map had been torn from a copy of 200 Kilometres Around Sydney and the crosses were at Mittagong, Wentworth Falls, Richmond and Taree. I fingered the paper, trying to decide whether it was from a new edition of the guide book or an old. New, probably. The big question was whether the crosses represented actual victims, intended victims or something else? I eyed the scotch bottle, wanting another drink but knowing that, with nothing in my stomach, it’d set me on my ear. The answer wasn’t in the bottle anyway. I put the stuff away, then locked the box and put it in the boot of the Falcon which I also locked. I put the distributor cap in my pocket and walked out of the motel courtyard towards a service station advertising just what I needed-’EATS’.

  Over a greasy hamburger with chips and something pale green and pink they called a salad, I tried to work my way through the moral and professional thicket. If Bach/Schmidt, call him Bach, had still been alive, my duty would have been obvious-go straight to the cops because people are in danger. But Bach was dead and what I had was no more than evidence leading to the possible solution of possible crimes. Pretty thin. But there was more. If young women had been attacked or killed in those places, their families had a right to the information. I knew from experience that it’s the silence, the never-knowing that eats the lives out of the parents and friends of missing kids. But if there had been no such crimes then the information I had was, strictly speaking, something that had been purchased by Horrie Jacobs. And it was the last thing he’d want to hear about his late friend.

  I sat in the little cafe along with a couple of truckies who were complaining about the new speed restrictions and the drug testing. They agreed that the fun was going out of the work. One said he was thinking of selling his rig and buying a taxi. The other said he was thinking of going into the pleasure cruise business. Men on the move. They appeared to enjoy their food and the bitching, and they were in good spirits when they went back out to their trucks. I wondered if they were going to race each other to Sydney. I didn’t taste the meal but I ate it for stomach lining and comfort. I had another problem with the contents of Bach’s box. Did they give any clues as to who had killed him, if that’s what had happened? Plenty to chew on.

  There was a liquor store at the other end of the block and I bought a six-pack of light beer and a bottle of white wine, thinking that it was going to be a night that would need lubrication rather than the wipe-out the scotch would provide. As I walked back to the motel I found myself thinking about two women-Helen Broadway and Glenys Withers. There were good reasons for contacting both, quite apart from the fact that I was alone in a country town on a Wednesday night in spring.

  I made instant coffee in the motel room and wrote some notes on the day’s work while I drank it. That still left me with three hours before I could go to bed and expect to sleep. I could’ve read fifty pages of Lonesome Dove in that time. I could turn on the TV and probably get to sleep a little sooner, or abuse alcohol with the same result. I cleaned my teeth, poured a glass of wine and called the number I had in my book for Broadway, Helen. My heart was hammering in my chest as I punched the last button.

  ‘Hello. This is Michael Broadway. Can’t come to the phone just now. Please leave a message after the tone. If you want Helen Broadway, her number is Kempsey 56 0594. Thank you.’

  More dialling. More heart hammering. More wine.

  ‘Helen Broadway’

  ‘Helen, it’s Cliff.’

  ‘Cliff. Jesus. Wait till I get a cigarette.’

  I waited. Smoking more than her avowed two a day, eh? Living apart from Michael. Strain in her voice. And pleasure? Need?

  ‘Cliff. Where are you?’

  ‘Near Newcastle. I’m working for Horrie Jacobs. You gave me a referral.’

  ‘Oh, yes. That nice man. Good. That’s good. God, it’s amazing. I was just thinking about you.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Her tone was hard to judge over the phone. Not exactly cool, not exactly warm either. ‘How’ve you been, Helen?’

  ‘Lousy. Michael and I have split, finally. I suppose you gathered that from the answering machine? That’s all I’ve spoken to for weeks- that bloody answering machine. Oh, well, it had to happen.’

  ‘How’s Very?’

  ‘Not bad. She’s old enough to cope. I’ve got a house in town. She floats between us.’

  I remembered Verity, Very for short, as a lively kid. Bright, interested in a lot of things and happy with herself. Well equipped. I heard Helen expel a breath and I could see her with her Gaulois and the quizzical, amused expression on her face. Kempsey was, how far? I could probably get there if I sobered up and drove for a few hours. But we’d done all that, the midnight driving, the passionate arrivals and bitter departures. ‘So,’ I said, ‘what brought this on? Did you

  … find someone else?’

  Her laugh was throaty the way I remembered it, but
harsh from smoking. ‘Me? No. Michael did. A lady vigneron. She’s installed out there now and I suppose they’re lapping up a good red. Actually, she’s a nice woman and I’m happy for him. She’ll give him peace and be interested in what he does. Not like me. It’s just a bit hard, being on your own after all those years. Doing things solo. Including sex.’

  That was Helen, direct and earthy. I could feel myself getting aroused-300 kilometres away and holding onto a telephone. What a world. I said something inane about marriage and asked her about her job at the radio station.

  ‘Really good,’ she said. ‘I’ve got this morning program-guests, talk-back, raves. I love it.’

  ‘I’ll listen tomorrow.’

  ‘You won’t. You’ll mean to, but you’ll forget or be off chasing something or somebody. I wanted to do more work on Mr Jacobs’ story but all this with Michael and Michelle blew up. Her name’s Michelle, would you believe it? Jesus. Anyway, Mr Jacobs and all that… it just all got away from me.’

  ‘I’m working on it. I wondered if you’d found out anything more.’

  ‘No. Is that why you rang?’

  ‘Yes. No, not really. I… I wanted to hear your voice…’

  ‘My voice! Radio and twenty fags a day is ruining it. You sound a bit pissed. Are you?’

  ‘Not really’

  ‘I know you. You’ve got a slight buzz on but it wouldn’t stop you doing anything-go for a walk, read a book, go to bed. Shit, Cliff, I can’t handle this. I’m hanging up.’

  ‘Helen…’

  ‘Don’t say a thing. Not a fucking thing. I’ll give you a call in Sydney or something, sometime. I don’t know. ‘Bye, Cliff.’