by Peter Corris
‘Good on you, mate,’ Clarrie said.
It was impossible to tell now what weight to give to the story. I questioned them about what the occupants of the car were doing but Clarrie admitted that he didn’t know. There was a man around but he thought he might have just been taking a piss in the bushes.
Merv laughed. ‘You were taking a few pisses in the bush that night. Shit, we were shickered after winnin’ the fuckin’ election.’
Which might have been a confirmation of a kind, but didn’t really increase my confidence in the information. I took the photograph out of the plastic sleeve and showed it to Clarrie, keeping my hand across the woman’s body and showing only her face. ‘Could this be the woman you saw, Clarrie?’
He rubbed his eyes and tried to blink away the effect of decades of sun, salt, sand and booze. Merv reached into the esky for another can but Clarrie seemed to have forgotten his. Yeah,’ he said, drawing the word out. ‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah, what?’
‘The woman I saw looked like this one. She had on this tight dress. Great tits. Let’s see her tits.’
I put the picture away, gave them the money and took a can of beer from the esky. I plodded away along the dunes to the track that led up to the shack on Bert’s block. I’d have bet any money that Merv’s can went into the ti-tree as soon as my back was turned.
It was hot, even in the shade, and there was no breeze to speak of. The shack was more solidly built than the boatsheds and had been less exposed to the weather, but it was still a crumbling ruin with cracked and broken window panes, a sagging roof and a list to the right where some hardy vine was trying to pull it down.
There was only one door and it opened as I put my foot on the plastic milk crate that served as a doorstep. The man who stood there had once been an athlete; you could tell from the set of his shoulders and the lines of his body inside a gaping, buttonless pair of pyjamas. But that was a long time and many bottles ago. He was a once-sound but now battered and faded ruin, like his house.
‘Who’re you?’
‘Name’s Cliff Hardy. I’m doing a job of work for Bert Russell.’ I stuck out my right hand to be shaken and held the can of beer close by in the left. If you wanted the one you had to take the other. ‘Merv and Clarrie sent this up for you.’
We shook hands. The bones stuck out through the thin, dry skin. He dropped my hand, grabbed the can and popped the top immediately. He slightly tilted his grey, grizzled head; the faded pale blue eyes slid back as he raised the can to a mouth that was just a space, the lips having sunk into the toothless hole. He sucked the beer down in three long gulps, barely pausing to take in two wheezy breaths. I produced another twenty-dollar note.
‘I need to talk to you, Stan.’
He wiped his mouth and looked at me as if he’d been waiting for me to arrive. ‘It’s happened, has it?’
‘What?’
The pale, red-rimmed eyes went shrewd. ‘You first. Better sit down.’
I thought he meant we should go inside but he merely kicked the milk crate away from the door with his bare foot and squatted down in the doorway with his feet dangling. I sat on the milk crate while he took a last, pessimistic suck on the can.
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Forever.’
‘How come?’
‘You know Jessie, Russell’s wife?’
‘I knew her, yes.’
‘I’m her stepbrother. Her mother married my father, poor bitch. Jessie said I could stay here after I had my breakdown. I was in the war. Vietnam. Got shell-shocked. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I fought in Malaya,’ I said. ‘Different kind of war, but I’ve got some idea. Bert told me Jessie’s brother had died.’
‘That was her real brother.’
‘Does Bert know you’re his brother-in-law, sort of?’
He laughed, a surprisingly rich sound out of that ruined mouth. ‘No. She didn’t tell him anything about our fucked-up family or much about Gerry, I suspect.’
‘Gerry?’
‘Are you offering me that money?’
‘For information, yes.’
‘We’ll swap, then. You look like an insurance man or a lawyer who’s gone a few rounds. My guess is something’s been found?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah. What? Where?’
‘You haven’t given me anything, Stan.’
‘All right. Try this. Young Tom Russell’s not Bert’s son. Did you know that?’
‘No, and it’s not worth twenty dollars.’
‘How about this then? Tom’s been asking me for years about something hidden here someplace. What’s that worth?’
I gave him the money. He folded the note carefully and tucked it into the pocket of his pyjamas. Once he started talking it was hard to stop him. He paused once, remembering that he was being paid, and I gladly forked over another twenty. He told me that Jessie Russell had been married to a man named Gerry Slim, known as Slim Gerry, who was a tall, pale skinny man. He was Tom’s real father. The boy was about six or seven, Stan calculated, when Gerry Slim was shot dead in his white Mercedes. Slim was a drug dealer and conman who’d formed a close association with some high-ranking American army officers who were stealing everything they could lay their hands on in Vietnam. Something went wrong and Slim paid the top price.
‘Would Bert know anything about this?’
‘Not a thing. She met Bert about a year later and grabbed him. Jessie wouldn’t have said a word. Too much to be ashamed of.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Jesus, I’m really emptying out the family skeletons. I wish I had a drink.’
I gave him another twenty. ‘You can buy something that won’t rot your guts.’
He gave the rich laugh again and put the money in the pocket along with the other notes. ‘Rotted away long ago. Christ, I’m glad to let it all out at last. The money’s a bonus.’
He told me that he had a sister named Vi who went to bed with Gerry Slim two days after they met at Slim’s wedding to Jessie. I produced the photograph and showed it to him in the way I had to Clarrie and Merv. He cleared his throat and spat over my shoulder. I was distracted and he snatched the photo from my hand.
‘No need to cover it up. I’ve seen it all before. Handled it, too. Told you we were a fucked-up family, didn’t I? Jessie was the only decent one among us. Just doesn’t make sense that she should go before me.’
I took the photo back. ‘This is Vi?’
‘That’s her. She was a great root, anyone’ll tell you. Except Jessie. Vi had a go at her, but Jessie wouldn’t be in it.’
There wasn’t a lot more to it. As I brushed away the flies, he told me that Jessie had agonised over her half-sister’s affair with Slim, but she was in love with him, bore his child and couldn’t break away. When Slim was killed she distanced herself from Vi and swore Stan to secrecy about it all in return for letting him live in the shack. About five years back, Tom had been up at the house with a couple of his mates getting drunk. For fun they had supplied Stan with all he could drink and he and Tom had had a drunken conversation in which a lot of what Stan was now telling me had come out. Tom had revealed that his father had told him before he was killed that there was something hidden at Dugong Beach, but he hadn’t said what or where.
‘Tom kept at me about it but I mostly said I knew bugger-all, which was true. I might have hinted around a bit sometimes, because he was free with the grog when I did. He searched the place inch by inch over the years, but he never found anything. Got a bit excited a few weeks ago and came up late one night. Bottle of Johnny Walker that time, but I didn’t know anything.’
‘Excited how?’
‘I don’t know. As if something had happened. He’s got bad blood in him, that boy.’
‘What happened to Vi?’
‘Drug overdose not long after Slim Gerry got shot. She had some money. Had a flat in Vaucluse, flash car, the works. She bought some heroin that was way
better than the stuff she was used to and … pfft! Out she went. That’s one thing about the grog, it’s hard to kill yourself with it in one session. ’Course, a couple of million sessions, that’s a different thing.’
I left him with his sixty dollars and flies and made way through the scrub to the house. My shirt was sticking to my back and I was looking forward to one of Bert’s beers. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for having sorted the whole thing out quickly and at very little expense. There’d be a few legal tangles to work through, but I thought I also stood a good chance of the twenty-five thousand. I noticed that my car was in the sun so I skirted around the house and put it under a tree. Bert’s 4WD where it had been but there was another car in the yard—a yellow Monaro with a black racing stripe. I’d seen the car before, parked outside the liquor store in Glebe.
I went into the house through the shaded porch and was about to call out to Bert when something told me not to. I stopped, listened and sniffed the air. Previously, the house had smelled of disinfectant and I hadn’t noticed any flies. Now there was another smell, urine, and flies were buzzing strongly. I rushed through to the kitchen and found Bert on the floor. The back door stood open. His trousers were stained and soiled and the flies were swarming. He lay on his back with his eyes closed and his mouth open. The room was disarranged, with a chair turned over and plates and saucepans and a frying pan that had been neatly stacked on the sink lying on the floor. I knelt down and felt for Bert’s pulse but it was a waste of time. He was well and truly dead and had been for a while. The open mouth was twisted in a grimace; some kind of froth had dried on his chin and there was a bruise on the right side of his face.
I stood up and looked out the back window. Tom Russell was squatting in the vegetable patch. I watched as he lifted a couple of the gold bars out of the strongbox and put them in a backpack. He tested the weight, added another bar and lifted the bag. I waited until he’d straightened up before I went through the door, jumped down the steps and moved quickly across to block his path.
‘You can put that down, right now.’
‘Get fucked. It’s mine.’
‘Your father’s in there dead and you’re out here robbing him, you little shit.’
‘He’s not my father.’
‘He’s been like a father to you. Better than you deserve. Put the bag down.’
I was only a few metres away and very angry. He looked scared. Suddenly, he swung the bag up and heaved it at me. It would have done some damage if it’d hit but I sidestepped and it sailed over my shoulder. Tom grabbed a shovel and made a wild swipe at me, missing by centimetres. I lost balance and fell. He came at me bellowing and wielding the shovel like a battleaxe. I rolled out of the way and it dug into the earth. He reached for it but he was watching me at the same time and he fumbled long enough for me to get to my feet. He got hold of the handle but he had to change his grip to do anything useful with it and I hit him with a short right to the ribs. He let go of the shovel and flailed, gasping for air. I hit him again in the pit of the stomach and he collapsed, spewing beer and whatever fast food junk he’d eaten out over the grass.
‘You hit him and killed him,’ I said.
Tom was sitting on a chair in the kitchen. His face was chalk white and his pleated drill trousers and smart white cotton shirt had dirt and vomit on them. I was having trouble stopping myself from hitting him again.
‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘He fell over and hit his head on the table. The old bugger had a weak heart. He died of a heart attack.’
I’d covered Bert with a sheet, but his shirt had been buttoned to the neck. ‘I bet you did a lot to help him.’
He shrugged.
‘I had a look at that bruise. I reckon you clocked him with the frying pan when he tried to stop you getting the gold.’
He was rapidly regaining his cool. ‘You’d have a fuckin’ hard time proving that.’
He was right but I had to push him a little more.
‘The way you came at me, that was because you knew you’d killed him.’
‘Crap. That was because you were going to stop me from taking what’s mine.’
I had the solution right then and I smiled. He didn’t like the smile much. ‘You think it’s yours, do you?’
‘I know it is. My dad, my real dad told me about it. It was his, now it’s mine. Even if it was his,’ he looked down at Bert, ‘it’s still mine. I’m his heir.’
‘Your father was a conman and a pimp and a thief and probably worse. If you think you’re going to get anything out of this you’d better think again.’
He summoned up enough courage for a sneer and felt in the pocket of his shirt for his cigarettes. He got them out and I knocked them flying across the room. I put my hands around his thin neck and pulled him to his feet. I gripped beside the carotid arteries. ‘A good squeeze and you go out for twenty minutes. That’s long enough for me to take you down to the water and drown you.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
I increased the pressure. ‘You’re a worthless piece of shit. It wouldn’t worry me one bit.’
‘It’ll leave marks, like …’
‘The frying pan? Maybe, if they found you. But that wouldn’t do you much good, would it.’ I squeezed almost enough to cut off the blood supply, enough to give him a taste of it.
‘Don’t. Please, please, Mr Hardy.’
I eased up a fraction. ‘The alternative is you do everything I say. One refusal and I swear I’ll drown you and anchor you to the bottom. And I’ll wait until you’re awake to do it.’
‘Okay. I’ll do what you say. Okay.’
I had him load all the gold into the back of Bert’s 4WD, including the ones he’d already put in his Monaro. Then he drove the vehicle down to the boat ramp and got the dinghy into the water. By the time he’d loaded the gold into the dinghy he was almost too tired to row but he was too scared not to. When he was utterly exhausted I got him to lie face down in the boat. He blubbered but he did it. I started the outboard and took the dinghy well offshore. Then I made Tom take off his shirt while keeping his head down. I made a solid blindfold from the shirt and tied it hard around his head.
‘Sit up!’
He groped and shuffled onto the seat. I took an oar and jabbed it gently into his crotch. He winced and I left it there. ‘Now, one by one, you take up those bits of metal and you drop them over the side.’
It took a while and the sun was fierce in the sky. By the time he’d finished his neck and shoulders were bright red from sunburn and his tears had soaked through the blindfold.
