Dead Point ji-3

by Peter Temple

  A few days later, Lester knocked on my office door. He was carrying a sports bag and he didn’t appear overjoyed. ‘How much?’ he said. ‘You?’

  I wrote out a bill for $120. He studied it, looked at me, studied it again. Then he unzipped his bag and put wads of notes on my table, fifties, twenties, perhaps five or six thousand dollars, more, in used notes.

  Temptation had run its scarlet fingernails down my scrotum. What did it matter? A success fee, that’s all it was. Merchant bankers took success fees. But I wasn’t a merchant banker. People like that grabbed what they could within the law. In my insignificant way, I represented the law. I was a sworn officer of the court. I was a thread in an ancient fabric that made social existence possible.

  I was the law.

  Sufficiently psyched up by these thoughts, I leaned across the tailor’s table, plucked two soiled fifties and a twenty, pushed the rest back his way.

  ‘Lester,’ I said, ‘not all lawyers are the same.’

  Now I said, ‘Lester, it’s Jack. Any chance of Bruce dropping off some food?’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘Jack, you want prawns?’

  ‘Lester, I need prawns.’

  A glass later, the buzzer sounded and I went downstairs and opened the door to bright-eyed Bruce, the elder of Lester’s two teenage sons. He’d come on his bike, cardboard box on the carrier. I tried to give him some gold coins but he was under instructions. ‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘My dad says no-one’s allowed to take money from you.’

  Virtue may be its own reward, but there are other possible spin-offs.

  I said, ‘I wish that were a universal principle, Bruce.’

  He smiled, he got it. No shonky lawyer was ever going to get fat on this new Australian.

  Upstairs, the phone rang. I made haste up the old, squeaking stairs, both hands on the food box. Lyall had been known to ring on a Wednesday night, Thursday night, any night, from any time zone, usually from some troubled place, satellite phone borrowed from the CNN person or a UN person or, once, from the head of the Chechen mafia.

  ‘Irish,’ I said, winded. It was a handy name, you could say it as a sigh, one syllable, a longer surname would have had to become double-barrelled.

  ‘Jack, Jack,’ said Cyril Wootton, his resigned voice. ‘Whatever became of obligation, of sense of duty?’

  My breath came back in a reasonable time. Recently I’d been running around Edinburgh Gardens in the early morning, going up Falconer Street and down Delbridge to Queen’s Parade, running and walking, limping really, streets empty, sometimes a dero lying on the pavement, clenched like a fist against the cold, the occasional pale young man with dark eye sockets and a stiff-legged walk, and always the three women at the tram stop, head-scarves, smoking and talking quietly, perhaps the last sweatshop workers to live in the gentrified suburb.

  ‘Got no idea, Cyril,’ I said. ‘I don’t follow the greyhounds. Never bet on anything that’s trying to catch something else, that’s the principle. Good names, though.’

  In the moment before he spoke again, I heard the sounds of his midweek haunt, a pub in Kew he stopped off at to slake the thirst he developed after leaving the Windsor in Spring Street.

  It was a raffish spot for Kew: two financial advisers had once fought to tears in the toilet, and the legend was that three pairs of women’s underpants were found in the beer garden after a local real-estate agency’s Christmas party in 1986.

  Wootton expelled breath. ‘There is considerable anxiety,’ he said. ‘I am under pressure to produce results. And you cannot be contacted.’

  I felt some contrition. I hadn’t done any serious looking for Robbie Colburne, occasional barman.

  ‘Feelers are out, Cyril,’ I said.

  ‘What feelers?’

  ‘He’s not using his vehicle, that narrows things.’

  ‘Narrows?’ There was no belief in Cyril’s voice. ‘Are you saying he hasn’t gone anywhere?’

  ‘Within limits.’

  The trawl through the airlines hadn’t produced the name but that meant nothing. You could give any name if you paid cash to fly or you could travel by bus or taxi or a friend could give you a lift or you could ride your bicycle out of town, rollerblade, run, walk, limp.

  ‘Quite,’ he said in his assumed Coldstream Guards officer’s voice. ‘Is he spending?’

  ‘He’s a part-time barman. What would he have to spend?’

  ‘So you’ve got nothing to show for three days?’

  ‘Cyril,’ I said, ‘I’m probably being over sensitive, but, at this moment, my inclination is to say bugger off, get someone else. Silly, but that’s my state of mind.’

  While Wootton weighed up his options, I listened to a surf of witty real-estate and financial-advice banter, the women shrieking, the men baying like hounds, randy hounds.

  ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘it’s serious.’

  Even against that background of happy parasites at play, I recognised a Wootton plea.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘My total attention to this matter.’

  He caught my tone, knew that I was in earnest. ‘Yes. Give me a ring, old chap.’ I’d be giving him more than a ring. I’d be paying him a visit, and the thought gave me no pleasure.

  By ten, I was in bed, betwixt fresh linen sheets, steaming Milo on the bedside table, classical FM on the radio. In my hands, I held a novel about young Americans undergoing rites of passage in Venezuela.

  All alone at the end of the day. Lyall no doubt in some godforsaken country.

  Outside, a cold rain was falling on the city. I didn’t need to go out to know that. I could feel it in my heart.

  4

  I woke before daylight without need of an alarm, splashed my face, put on the saggy old grey tracksuit and went shuffling through the park, around the streets. In Delbridge Street, an insane Jack Russell terrier threw himself against his front gate with a hideous bark-shriek, catching me by heart-stopping surprise for the fiftieth time. The dog would have to die. There was no other way.

  Back home, I lay in the huge cast-iron bath for an hour, drinking tea, tapping off cold water, running in hot, reading the Age, ruminating on creeping flab and aching knees and other matters of the corpus. Then I dressed in sober business clothing and drove to Meaker’s in Brunswick Street for breakfast. Meaker’s had been the writing on the wall for working-class Brunswick Street when it opened in the late 1970s, serving breakfast at all hours to people with vague artistic leanings who didn’t know what time it was and couldn’t afford to eat at home because of the infrastructure required. Now the whole street provided that service and lots, lots more.

  ‘The look I like,’ said Carmel, the newest waiter. Despite having the appearance of a fourteen-year-old waif, she had been married twice and now, sensibly, had retired from dud men, any men, and was the companion of a sleek home-wares buyer for a shop called Noir. I knew this because she had told me, unbidden and unencouraged, when we met by chance early one evening soon after her debut at Meaker’s. Much has been learned, not all of it life-affirming, at the Brunswick Street laundromat. Something about the place — its tropical warmth, the sullen chugging of the machines, the way the newly cleansed garments swirl and flirt and twine in the perforated stainless-steel drums — encourages intimate revelations.

  Down there on the left bank of the river Brunswick, Carmel spoke freely about her life and aspirations. Then her companion arrived to fetch her, a severely edited person, nothing more could be subtracted from her dress or manner or speech without her being rendered partially unclothed or immobile or incomprehensible.

  ‘Good tie that,’ said Carmel now.

  I said thank you.

  ‘My first only ever used his ties to tie me up,’ said Carmel. ‘Mind you, they were school ties, greasy, ballpoint marks and bits of food on them. He went to Wesley.’

  ‘That’s really the only use for old Wesley ties,’ I said. ‘Melbourne Gramm
ar boys sometimes tie theirs around their waists when they’re naked or use them to commit suicide.’

  Carmel nodded. ‘Or for scarfing,’ she said. ‘Like that singer. What can I get you?’

  ‘Just toast and tea,’ I said. ‘Italian breakfast tea.’

  ‘One latte,’ she said.

  Afterwards, I caught a tram into the city, stood all the way to Collins Street with the barely awake and the glowing pre-dawn joggers, the perfectly made up and the bloodily shaven, the hanging out and the merely hungry.

  Offloaded, I took myself up the stairs of the stone building to face Mrs Davenport. I found the bureau chief to Cyril Wootton, CEO of Belvedere Investments, in her usual rigid position behind a desk in the firm’s panelled reception room.

  ‘Corporal Wootton fronted yet?’ I asked. I’d known the man when he was a redistributor of military stores, an illegal wholesaler of Vegemite and Tim Tams and Tooheys beer, a saboteur of the war effort in Vietnam.

  The silver-haired exemplar drew breath and it pinched her nostrils. Nothing else ever moved. There was no knowing her age; she had mummified her face through discipline. ‘I’m afraid Mr Wootton’s engaged,’ she said. ‘Would you like to wait indefinitely or make an appointment?’

  Mrs Davenport knew precisely how dubious Wootton was, how thin and swaying was the rope he walked, and yet she had no difficulty in presenting herself as if she were Moralist-in-Residence at the Centre for Applied Ethics.

  ‘The former,’ I said, ‘I’ll just sit down and look at you and puzzle over how a person so coldly beautiful can also be so warm and caring.’

  She left the room, came back inside ten seconds and said, ‘Mr Wootton will see you.’

  Wootton was behind his big oak desk, palms on the top, every centimetre the bank manager of the 1950s, essence of jovial probity, careful with the bank’s money but decent and understanding, a man who never failed to count that air shot on the golf course that no-one saw. He pointed to the client’s chair.

  ‘Early for you. Reforming your habits?’

  I didn’t sit down. I went close to the desk, loomed over him.

  ‘Cynthia.’

  He frowned. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Cam thinks you might be the one.’

  Wootton’s hand went to his collar, fingers inserted above the tie knot, four fingers, not much room there.

  ‘Fuck, Jack,’ he said, ‘are you…?’

  I didn’t say anything, just kept looking into the brown eyes of Corporal Wootton, a corporal of stores. There wasn’t much to see.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, emotion in his voice, ‘he can’t be bloody serious. Jesus, Jack, he’s not serious? Don’t tell me Harry…’

  ‘Cyril,’ I said, ‘if you are the one, say so now. I’ll give you two hours to arrange to give the money back, plus a hundred and fifty grand for Cynthia’s pain and suffering. And that’s letting you off lightly. You then disappear. Forever. I’ll try to keep Cam from coming after you. Try, that’s all I can do.’

  He looked at me in despair, mouth opening and closing. ‘No, Jack,’ he said, ‘no, no, no. You can kill me but no, never, I don’t know anything about it, she’s a friend of mine. I would never… Cam’s mad, I’d never ever do anything…’

  He tailed off, closed his eyes, squeezed them tight, shook his head like a dog with a grass seed in an ear.

  ‘Say so now, Cyril. You don’t want to wait for other circumstances. Hanged through the Achilles tendon from a meat hook, those circumstances.’

  ‘I swear. I swear. No. Jesus, no.’

  I sat down. ‘I’ll take your word on that,’ I said. ‘I hope that’s not a foolish thing to do.’

  Cyril opened his eyes, blinked rapidly, straightened his pinstriped shoulders, regained some composure. ‘Don’t take my word,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to take my word. Tell Cam to check me out, every last thing.’

  ‘I’ll tell him I believe you when you say you had nothing to do with it.’

  Cyril looked away, stroked his tie, a regimental tie, though certainly not the tie of his regiment. ‘Do you?’ he said.

  ‘For the moment.’

  His head turned. ‘I should bloody well hope so,’ he said in a cub-lion growling tone, recovering rapidly. ‘This your idea of fun?’

  ‘Of kindness, more,’ I said. ‘It was me or Cam. Or worse. Both. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy your snivelling.’

  ‘Christ,’ he said, sniffed, ‘threatening me, you’re supposed to be a lawyer.’

  ‘Things not always incompatible. I’m going to tell Cam I don’t think you need shaking. That’s an act of faith. If I’m wrong, Cyril, I’ll be there to see you dropped into that compactor in Hopper’s Crossing. They say it makes a noise like a dog chewing chicken bones.’

  ‘Jack.’ He cocked his head in pain.

  ‘Moving on then. I can’t look for this Colburne prick on what you’ve given me. What’s the story?’

  Cyril composed himself in an instant. ‘In that matter, your services are no longer required.’

  I shook my head. ‘What’s this, revenge? Don’t be petulant, Cyril.’

  He pointed to a copy of the Herald Sun on his desk. ‘Page five,’ he said, an expression of distaste on his face.

  I opened the paper at the page. The first item in a single-column collection of briefs had the headline: Body in garage.

  The story said: A man was yesterday found dead in a car in a garage in Rintail Street, Abbotsford. Police identified him as Robert Gregory Colburne, 26, a casual barman.

  The story went on to say that police were treating the death as accidental but were keen to talk to anyone who had seen Colburne recently.

  ‘There endeth the lesson,’ said Wootton, cold as the widow’s lips. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have matters to attend to. People depend upon my understanding the concept of urgency.’

  I saw no reason to prolong this encounter or to say goodbye. Time would heal. Or not. At the door, turning the big fluted brass knob, I heard Wootton clear his throat.

  ‘In his own vehicle,’ he said, ‘in his own garage.’

  I continued on my way. As I passed Mrs Davenport in the anteroom, her nostrils contracted fractionally. ‘This has been prepared for you, Mr Irish,’ she said.

  I stopped. She held out a hand, pearl-coloured nails, perfect ovals, and young hands, hands far too young. What secrets had this woman learned during her long stint in the pay of a specialist in sexually transmitted diseases? I shuddered inwardly, took the envelope she was offering and left the premises.

  On the tram, enjoying the presence of a few teenage drug dealers heading for Fitzroy, I opened Mrs Davenport’s envelope: a cheque for three days’ work at the usual rate.

  Out loud, I said, ‘Cyril, oh Cyril.’

  One of the adolescent drugporteurs not on his mobile heard my utterance, misunderstood completely, turned, made the selling signal.

  I gave him the look and the continental flicking fuck-off sign. Although he was probably untravelled, he got the message.

  As I had received Cyril Wootton’s message. That he behaved honourably even when I did not.

  5

  Detective Sergeant Warren Bowman had the good-humoured manner of a man in sales, not any old sales, specialised sales, motor spares or plumbing supplies or bearings, some secure line of work where the pros know stock numbers off by heart and the customers expect them to say things like ‘Almost got me there, mate’ and ‘We have the technology’.

  ‘They’re sayin it’s an ordinary OD,’ he said.

  We were sitting in the Studebaker Lark just off St Kilda Road, the day turned irritable, periods of sunshine, sudden snarls of rain. Detective Sergeant Bowman was speaking to me courtesy of another policeman, Senior Sergeant Barry Tregear, someone I’d known since I was a boy sent to fight abroad for my country. At the request of some other country, the way it had always been for Australia.

  ‘Family doesn’t want to know that,’ I said, lying.

 
; Warren turned his long head and appraised me. He had bushy black eyebrows that he brought together and parted: quick, slow, slow, quick, an eyebrow Morse code.

  ‘Yeah, well, not always your best judge,’ he said, dot, dot, dash. ‘The family.’

  ‘No. Funny place to OD.’

  Dot, dash. ‘Well, they don’t set out to OD.’

  ‘Shooting up in his garage? Be more comfortable in his unit.’

  Dash, dot. ‘No knowin. It’s like suicide. Go a long way, some of em. Mountains, some, they like to go to high places. But there’s others want to creep away. Toppin’s a bit like hide and seek, know what I mean? Some kids always go for the wardrobe.’

  Expertise in dark matters. Warren knew these stock numbers.

  A couple walked by, young, handsome in black clothing, arguing, heads flicking, spurts of words. He stopped, she stopped, he raised a hand, inquiring. She knocked it away in contempt, walked. The man waited for a few seconds, turned and came back towards us, jaw moving, small chewing movements.

  ‘He’s bin screwin around,’ said Warren. ‘Some blokes got no idea when they’re lucky.’ There was a stain of resentment on his tone.

  ‘So Robbie went into his garage, locked the door, got into his car, shot up, that’s it?’

  He nodded.

  ‘The fit’s there?’

  A nod.

  ‘Tracks?’

  ‘Yeah. User.’

  ‘User ODs alone in his Porsche parked in his garage. That would be unusual, wouldn’t it?’

  Warren shifted in his seat, looked at me, dash, dot, dash, took his lower lip between thumb and forefinger, gave it a tug. ‘I’m in the box here, am I?’

  You forget that people are doing you a favour, at some risk to their careers.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Get carried away.’

  He kept looking at me, a long dash.

  The angry young woman in black was coming back, in a hurry, full of regret, hoping to catch the man. Her calf-length coat was unbuttoned and it flapped open at every stride, long legs flashing, pale legs.

  ‘Jesus, women,’ said Warren, tone pure resentment now. ‘Fucking looks, all the bastard’s got is looks.’