by Peter Temple
‘That Lada strong enough?’
‘Artie’s tired. Engine block fell on his leg.’
‘Don’t tell me any more. I’m a respected suburban solicitor.’
Cam led the way through the front door of the house. We were assailed by the smell of burnt cooking oil and cat urine with a strong underlay of blocked toilet.
‘Well,’ said Cam, ‘where’d you reckon he’d keep it? Tried all the usual places.’
‘Appliances?’
‘Only got a beer fridge.’
‘With money, they’re scared of fire.’
I went from room to disgusting room, shining my new truckstop torch over everything, unwilling to touch anything. The kitchen was the worst, cats lived there, dozens of them.
We went out the back door. Off the porch was a washhouse, the bottom of its door rotted away leaving jagged wooden teeth.
‘Looked in there?’ I said.
‘Yup.’
The door was jammed. Cam opened it with a kick.
It was the cleanest room in the place, just an old concrete laundry sink, a boiler the size of a 400-pound bomb, and grey dust and cobwebs.
I shone the torch on the boiler, tentatively tried the fire door. It opened with a screech, ashes spilling out.
‘Course it could be out there somewhere in a wreck,’ said Cam. ‘Probably is. Boot of some scrap iron.’
I was looking at the boiler’s fluepipe. The ceiling collar had come loose, tilted.
‘Hold this.’ I gave Cam the torch.
The top of the boiler was at shoulder height. I put both hands around the fluepipe just above where it entered the boiler and twisted.
It turned easily.
I lifted.
The fluepipe went up into the roof, its bottom end came out of the boiler.
I pushed it to one side, let it hang from the ceiling, stuck a hand into the hole in the boiler, found something to grip with my fingers, lifted.
The top of the boiler came off.
I dropped it into the sink, put my arm down the boiler, touched something wet, recoiled.
‘What?’ said Cam.
‘Don’t know.’
I reached in again, touched the thing.
Plastic, something plastic. Rain had come down the pipe.
I took hold, pulled. It was heavy. I got some of it out. Cam put the torch down, helped pull the rest out.
A heavy-duty garbage bag, grey, closed with a plastic tie.
Cam opened it. I held the torch.
‘Sweet Jesus,’ said Cam. ‘My sweet lord.’
On the way out, down the dark avenue of dead machine bodies, Cam carrying the bag, he said, ‘Artie’s storin chemicals down the back. Thought I came for em.’
‘As in?’
‘Amphie cook.’
‘That’s punishable by law.’
‘Law doesn’t know. The big man says drop in for a drink. Good day’s racin.’
We passed through the gate. Cam put the bag in the boot of the streetslut. I read my notebook by torchlight, found the number.
Cam lounged against his vehicle, looking at me.
A woman answered, no name. I gave her mine. Barry Tregear came on.
‘What now?’ he said.
‘Arranging your promotion,’ I said. I gave him the directions. ‘The shed on the back boundary,’ I said. ‘That’s where the fun stuff is.’
‘Never thought you’d end up my dog.’
‘Also there’s a bloke chained to a Lada Niva.’
‘Cruel and unusual,’ said Barry. ‘Chained to an old Ford Prefect’s bad enough.’
‘Help’s on the way,’ I said to Cam.
I drove to Harry Strang’s house in Parkville, got there just after Cam. Lyn Strang let us in, robustly sexy as always, flesh an alluring shade of pink. She left us in the study, standing by the fire. Only the table lamps were on and I could see the flames reflected in the glass doors of the lower bookshelves. Charlie Taub bookshelves, made long before my time.
Harry came in, freshly shaved, hair oiled, brushed, a herringbone sports coat over a fine-checked shirt.
‘Jack, Cam,’ he said. ‘On the little mudeater, Jack?’
‘Handsomely,’ I said. ‘My creditors send their thanks.’
‘Pleasure. Element of risk there. Bollie’s in order, I reckon.’
Harry was looking at the canvas bag on the floor next to Cam.
‘Brought your swag, I see,’ he said. ‘Always welcome to stay. Plenty of room.’
Cam picked up the bag and put it on the desk. He gestured to me to open it, long fingers, puffy tonight, the knuckles puffy.
I shook my head.
Cam unzipped the bag, opened it.
‘Stuff,’ he said.
Harry stepped over, looked. He put his hand in and took out a bundle of notes, fifties, put it back, eyes on Cam.
‘Ours,’ said Cam. ‘And the Hales’.’
A smile grew on Harry’s face. He looked like a teenager, a naughty teenager, discoverer of sex.
‘Well, bugger me,’ he said, eyes going back and forth. ‘Chance maybe I thought, coupla bright fellas like yerselves.’
He went to the door, opened it, turned back to look at us, left the room.
‘Darlin,’ we heard him shout, ‘forget the Bollie, coupla bottles of the Krug.’
An inaudible response.
‘And an emergency one,’ shouted Harry. ‘No knowin.’
He came back, closed the door. ‘Violence,’ he said. ‘That wouldn’t be involved.’
Cam looked at me, looked at Harry, brushed fingers across his lips. ‘Not that you’d notice,’ he said.
Krug singing in the veins, all fatigue and guilt banished by the tiny silver bubbles, I parked outside the boot factory.
Lights on upstairs. A moment of fright.
Linda’s car parked in the shadows. She had a key. As my breath went out, my carefree mood returned.
She was on the sofa, lengthwise, watching television, drinking what was probably Campari and soda.
‘This is what it comes to,’ she said. ‘The little woman at home, washing socks and waiting for the man to come home from drinking pots and pots of beer with the blokes at the pub.’
I took off my coat. ‘Did that for a while. Went on to drinking Krug with a sexy woman in a little black dress.’
‘You bastard. Come closer.’
I came closer, stood over her.
She put out a hand, ran it over me. ‘Just as I thought,’ she said. ‘You’re still excited.’
I leaned down and undid the top button of her shirt. ‘No,’ I said. ‘This is a new excitement. I am capable of several excitements in the same evening.’
‘Better damn be,’ she said as she pulled me down. ‘I’ve got a newsagent waiting.’
‘Butchers are meatier,’ I said as I sank.
When the lust was spent, we warmed the duck pies Linda had brought, sent them down with a Mill Hill shiraz. Mid-pie, Linda looked at her watch, found the remote control.
‘News, got to have the news,’ she said. ‘News is my life.’
I said, ‘I was taught it was rude to have sex wearing your watch.’
‘Not if it’s on your wrist.’ She blipped through channels, found what she wanted, a dollwoman speaking.
Six people have been found dead at a remote house on the Gippsland lakes. One of them is Susan Ayliss, a member of the panel that decided the multimillion-dollar Cannon Ridge ski resort and casino tender.
I saw Dead Point from above. Then the television helicopter went in low. I didn’t want to watch.
The item went on for a long time. At the end, dollwoman said: The Premier has announced a full-scale inquiry into the Cannon Ridge tender process.
Linda cut the power. She didn’t look at me, snuggled down on the sofa, looked at me.
‘What would a seedy suburban solicitor know about that?’ she said, suspicion in voice and eyes.
‘No more than a newsagent. What he hear
s on the news, reads in the paper.’
She sat up. ‘Shit, I forgot. A courier came. It’s next to the front door.’
It was a square package, stoutly wrapped, taped like an injured footballer. I took it to the kitchen, performed surgery on it.
An album. An album with a red leather cover. I opened it, paged through it.
Mr Justice Colin Loder was a person of much greater versatility than I’d imagined, a man of wide-ranging interests and exotic tastes. The problem was he didn’t photograph well. He had a tendency to slit his eyes.
‘What exactly are you doing in there?’ said Linda.
‘Opening a bottle.’
I closed the album Xavier Doyle had decided he didn’t need, put it in the cupboard with the dud French frying pan that had a hot spot, opened a bottle of Seven Hills.
‘I’m not finished with you,’ said Linda.
‘And nor am I complete.’
I took the bottle and went next door.
‘You’ll tell me,’ she said, athlete’s legs on the arm of the sofa, bare. She opened my old dressing gown, revealing more flesh.
‘I’ve taken an oath,’ I said. ‘You must respect that.’
‘Put that down and come here.’
‘It’s late. I run in the mornings.’
‘Come here, sunshine.’
All bad things come to an end. Almost. Now all I had to do was get justice for Enzio and the Meaker’s gang. I put this out of my mind for the moment. A long moment, but not long enough.
Keep reading for a thrilling excerpt from
Shooting Star by Peter Temple.
The house was in a street running off Ballarat Road. Doomed weatherboard dwellings with rusting roofs and mangy little patches of lawn faced each other across a pocked tarmac strip. At the end of the street, by the feeble light of a streetlamp, two boys were kicking a football to each other, uttering feral cries as they lost sight of it against the almost-dark sky.
Outside number twelve stood an old Ford Fairlane. I went up a concrete path and onto a springy verandah. The front door was open and, at the end of a passage, I could see a glow and hear the television, a game show, shrieks and shouts.
I looked for a bell, found a scar where one had been, knocked.
A figure appeared at the end of the passage, then a dim light came on. It was a big man, spilling out of a singlet, fat face, long straight hair falling over his eyes, wearing a plastic neck-brace. He didn’t move, said nothing, just looked down the corridor at me.
‘Mr Joseph Reagan?’ The trick was to sound like someone from Tattslotto with good news.
He wiped a finger under his nose. Even in the gloom, I could see that he didn’t have a ticket in the lottery.
‘My name’s Frank Calder,’ I said. ‘I’m a mediator.’
‘What? Whadya want?’
‘I help people having disputes.’
‘Sellin’? Don’t wannit.’
‘Your wife’s asked me to talk to you…’
‘What?’
‘Your wife’s…’
It was like pulling a trigger. The man lurched forward, came down the passage at a run, arms held out like a wrestler, a fake wrestler on American television. I waited till he was almost on me, lunging, roaring, an out-of-control alcohol tanker. Then I stepped left, helped him on his way by grabbing his right forearm and swinging him. The roar changed to a different sound as he went through the rotten wooden verandah railing, falling into a mass of dead and dying vegetation.
I went down the stairs and inspected Mr Reagan. He was rolled into a ball, groaning, tracksuit pants ridden down to show the cleft of his buttocks. I stepped back, balanced myself, began to take my right leg back.
This is not normal mediation practice, I thought, but perhaps there is a place in dispute resolution for the solid kick up the arse.
The verandah light came on. A woman was in the doorway, young, exhausted. She was holding a child, its red hair like a flame against her cheek.
‘Well, I’ll be on my way then,’ I said. ‘Just called in to remind Mr Reagan that he owes Teresa twenty-five thousand dollars. She’d appreciate any loose change he can spare.’
I went down the path. In the street, the boys who had been kicking the ball were standing wide-eyed.
‘Go to bed,’ I said. ‘Or hold up the corner shop.’
They drifted away. I hope to Christ the car starts, I thought. Men like Joe Reagan often sought to redress slights with hunting rifles they had lying around. I turned the key. The Alfa started as if it never did anything else.
‘Small bloody mercies,’ I said. ‘Bloody small mercies.’
I drove off, trailing clouds of exhaust smoke. At the corner, waiting for a chance to turn right, I thought about life, how the wide vista of childhood shrinks to a passage in Footscray with a man in a plastic neckbrace charging at you.
I was suffocating, someone sitting on me and holding something over my head, saying, ‘Die. Just die.’ I woke up, gasping, on the couch in the sitting room, an old unzipped sleeping bag pulled up over my head. My breath had condensed inside it, wetting my face.
I put my legs over the side of the couch and sat with my face in my hands. When I lifted my head, I saw the dry black blood on the insides of the fingers of my right hand. For a moment, I was blank, alarmed. Then I remembered the lid of the tuna can gashing me.
I got up, went into the bathroom and took off my clothes. Under the shower, eyes closed, shaving with care, I made resolutions, not many but major. Half-dressed, I went into the kitchen and took two vitamin B complex tablets, big ones, like horse pills.
When I came back into the sitting room, pulling on a shirt, Detective Senior Sergeant Vella was sitting on the sofa, popping a can of beer.
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘How’d you get in?’
‘Through the front door. Open front door. Where do you think you’re living? Druggie kicked an old lady to death for a VCR just around the corner.’
‘A VCR, that’s motive. Not much motive around here. Drinking before lunch now?’
Vella took a big drink, looked around, and said, ‘That’s right. About eighteen hours before lunch. It’s 6.30. P fucking M.’
I went to the window and looked out through the blind.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Evening. Testing you. Now, day of week and date?’
Vella picked up a book from the coffee table. He examined it like an object from a lost civilisation. ‘What the fuck’s this?’ he said. ‘A Guide to Propagation. Any sex in it?’
‘Manual of sex,’ I said. ‘Cover to cover rooting.’ I was putting on shoes. ‘I’ve got a horticulture class to get to.’
‘Career number five. How’s number four going?’
‘Terrific. Had a really productive session last night with a man owes his wife twenty-five grand in maintenance.’
‘Mediation,’ Vella said thoughtfully, a frown on his long face. ‘Get someone to hold them down, hit them with a spade.’
While I looked behind the sofa and found a jacket, I thought about how I had almost kicked Mr Reagan. ‘Precisely the attitude that drove me into civilian life,’ I said. ‘You spend many hours trying to convince deranged people that no harm will come to them. Eventually, they believe you. Then your colleagues kill them.’
‘On the subject,’ he said, ‘the inquest’s put back another two months.’
‘They’re hoping I’ll die first. Of old age. Either that or they’re having trouble putting out the contract.’
He drank half his can, wiped his mouth. ‘Today we heard they want to make negotiation civilian. Put it with the shrinks.’
‘A really good move,’ I said. ‘Lateral thinking. Must have called in Dr de Bono. That shrink who sucks off the post-traumatic stresses, she’ll be good lying on the lino in her bra and pants talking to some psycho on speed wants to waste his whole family.’
‘The reason I’m here,’ Vella said, ‘is that Curry comes sliming around today, says to tell you, subject to certai
n conditions, he’ll back you for one of the jobs.’
I scratched my head. ‘Tell Curry I’ll take the job subject to certain conditions. One is he comes around here and kisses my arse, say around lunchtime every day. Two, he goes on permanent undercover public toilet duties. In a school uniform. With short pants.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ Vella said. ‘Tell him how you don’t need the money.’
‘What conditions? Change my statement, is that a condition? You the messenger boy now? Doing the swine’s bidding?’
He stood up, a gangling figure. ‘Fuck you. Got to go. A family not seen for two days. Been in Benalla, where some arsehole knifed an eighty-two-year-old lady.’
‘A family. Lucky man. On the subject of family, Marco good for a loan, you think? Say ten grand.’
Vella’s brother-in-law, Marco, owned the block of units I was living in. He owned lots of things, horses, tabledancing clubs, people.
‘In another life,’ said Vella. ‘What happened to the payout?’
‘What there was of the payout,’ I said, ‘I gave to a charity for bookies. Bookies and barmen. The double B charity. See a briefcase?’
He didn’t look around, pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the passage. I found it and we went down the stairs together. It was cold outside, sky grey with dark patches like oil stains. Much like the oil stains the old Alfa was leaving on the concrete driveway.
‘My brother-in-law’s not going to like this,’ said Vella, looking at the marks.
‘Marco doesn’t get around here much,’ I said. ‘Your sister know he’s fucking her F-cup cousin in that unit in Brighton?’
‘E-cup. At least it’s in the family,’ Vella said. ‘Don’t tell my sister.’
I got in, tried to start the car. Angry whine. It wouldn’t start.
‘Man and machine,’ said Vella. ‘In perfect harmony.’ He drained his can, dropkicked it towards the street. It bounced on a parked car.
‘Do that in your street?’ I said. ‘Kick beer cans onto cars? I’m coming around to piss in your neighbour’s letterbox.’
‘Feel free,’ said Vella. ‘A bouncer. Well, ex-bouncer. Presently awaiting trial for throwing a bloke across King Street. Landed on a parking meter.’
