Master's Mates

by Peter Corris

  As far as I could judge, Bryce O’Connor QC had performed adequately under extreme difficulties. The surprise was the inept contribution from Master himself. For a silver-tongued conman with an imposing physical presence he came across as limp and unconvincing, insisting that the heroin had been planted. After the report on the sentence there was no further mention of Master. All this had happened nearly six weeks before and I scribbled a couple of questions as I finished the last article and the scotch simultaneously. Why no appeal? And why the quickness of the trial—a few weeks only after the arrest?

  My eyes were hurting. I logged off and went downstairs to scramble some eggs and drink some wine. In a moment of weakness I’d bought a case of cheap chardonnay advertised by leaflet in the letterbox. The wine was okay but the offers kept coming by snail mail and email until I was sick of the sight of them. Also, having a whole case of wine ready to hand didn’t help my periodic attempts at moderation.

  As I ate, I thought about prisons. I’d been briefly on remand in Long Bay many years before and had visited people there, but not recently. I’d served a short sentence at Berrima for obstructing the course of justice a while back and that was about it for personal experience. I’d heard that things had changed in the prison system but I didn’t know anything about the changes and nothing about Avonlea. Another web search.

  I rinsed the saucepan, plate, knife and fork and glass, ate an apple and brewed a pot of coffee. I sorted through the mail I’d brought in and dumped most of it in the bin. I poured the coffee and was about to go up for another computer session when the door bell rang. I wandered down the passage with the mug in my hand and opened the door without turning on the porch light. Didn’t want to look too welcoming. A large figure loomed up and shoved me aside as it bullocked its way inside.

  ‘Hey!’ I yelped, partly from surprise and partly because hot coffee had hit my hand.

  I spun around. My intruder had taken a few strides inside and was leaning against the wall, panting hard.

  ‘What does she want?’ he shouted.

  I don’t take to being brushed aside and scalded. I put the mug down, kicked the door shut, and moved up on him prepared to pay him back. He was a surprise packet. He levered himself off the wall and came at me swinging. I caught a strong smell of alcohol and sweat as his punch missed and his suit jacket swung open. I dropped my shoulder and hit him hard in the sternum. I felt it bend. His flailing hands fell away and I caught him with a solid left to the ribs. All the breath went out of him and he sagged back against the wall, knees buckled. He was a sitting duck and I didn’t have the heart to hit him again. Besides, he was very drunk and I didn’t want him throwing up on me.

  He was wobbling, close to tears. He wore a dark suit, blue shirt and red tie like a banker or a politician, except that the tie knot had slipped down below where I’d hit him. I grabbed a handful of shirt and tie and eased him along to the stairs. He didn’t resist and I dumped him on the third bottom stair the way you handle a bag of clothes destined for St Vinnie’s. He reached for the banister and winced. A good rib shot hurts. He was pale and having trouble catching his breath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘You fucking should be. Hang on. I’ll get you some water.’

  I recovered the mug and swilled down the remainder of the coffee. In the kitchen I filled a big glass with water and took a quick swig of scotch.

  ‘Here you go.’

  No response.

  I reached the stairs and found that he’d stretched out with his legs splayed forward and his top half resting comfortably. He was out cold.

  I wasn’t copping that. I took careful aim and splashed the water in his face. His eyes opened, he coughed and spluttered and tried to go back to sleep. He was as tall as me and heavier by ten kilos. Younger by at least ten years. Heavy. I hauled him up and dragged him into the kitchen. His head bounced off the doorjamb but just hard enough to trigger some adrenaline, not to knock him out. I placed him so that his head hung over the sink. The first retch started around his ankles and shook him like a dog coming out of water. He vomited hard, drew in a laboured wheezing breath and did it again. And a third time. The kitchen smelled as if I’d dropped a bottle of whisky on the tiled floor, a thing I’d never do. I wet a tea towel and put it in his twitching hand. Still bending over, he wiped his face, dry-retched a couple of times and turned slowly around to face me.

  The light in the passage and over the stairs is dim, the kitchen light is a harsh fluorescent. It bleached him and gave him a greenish tinge. Dark stubble showed through the pale, stretched skin; his eyes were bloodshot and pouchy. Some vomit had splashed up onto his shirt. The paper towel dispenser had busted long ago, but I keep a roll in the same spot. I tore off a couple of sheets.

  ‘Clean yourself up and then you’re going to tell me what this’s all about.’

  He nodded and turned on the tap. When he’d finished he ran water in the sink until it was cleanish. Good manners. The coffee sat in a beaker on a hotplate. I poured a mug for myself and held the beaker up enquiringly. He shuddered and shook his head. I handed him a glass and he filled it with water and drank.

  ‘You better keep that down,’ I said.

  ‘I will.’

  ‘How’s the chest and ribs?’

  ‘Sore.’

  ‘Good. Who are you and what’re you doing here?’

  ‘My name’s Tony Spears. I’m Lorrie’s . . . Lorraine’s husband.’

  ‘Her husband’s in gaol.’

  He managed a thin smile, then thought better of it and set his mouth against his rising gorge. He gulped and his Adam’s apple moved in his thick neck. ‘That bastard’s her third husband,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m her first.’

  3

  TONY Spears told me that he’d been married to Lorraine

  Van Hewlen, as she was, for two years seven years ago.

  ‘I met her at university,’ he said. ‘We were both doing economics and I was a year ahead. I helped her because she was struggling. I did pretty well and got a job in an investment firm. We got married at the beginning of her final year. I drilled her hard and she did brilliantly, topped everything. She got a job in a merchant bank and dropped me the next day. Two years, but it was more like a tutorship than a marriage, except that . . . except that I was in love with her and I still am.’

  Poor bastard, I thought. ‘What about husband number two?’

  ‘Bloke in the bank. Fat, bald, rich as shit. She took him for a packet. She’d made all sorts of connections under his wing and she set up on her own. She’s flying high.’

  ‘But married to a career crim.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem to have done her any harm, professionally.’ He’d regained some colour and was pulling himself together. He asked to use the toilet and when he came back he’d 16 spruced himself up a bit and accepted a mug of black coffee. He sipped the brew and gave a despairing sigh.

  ‘I don’t understand it. A man like Master. Okay, she used me and Lance Robbins, but him . . .’

  ‘Some women go for men like that. They marry them in gaol. Want to have their babies, smuggle out sperm. Look at that woman with the helicopter.’

  ‘Is Lorrie trying to help Master escape?’

  I laughed. ‘Do I look like an idiot to you?’

  ‘No, I do. What’s she up to?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. And what’s it to you anyway?’

  ‘I told you. I still care about her. I thought once Master was out of the way . . .’

  ‘Mate, she’s gone. She mentioned kids.’

  ‘Yeah, one by Robbins and one by Master. She was on the pill when we were together and she still made me use condoms.’

  ‘So what happened today?’

  ‘I . . . I snapped, I guess. I saw her go to your office. Then I followed you back here and—’

  ‘You saw her? Are you stalking her?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You’re sick.’

  ‘I know. Look, I’m so
rry I burst in like that. Can I help in any way with what you’re doing for Lorrie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I could charge you with assault.’

  ‘You were the trespasser, and no one’s going to say that a bit of a shoulder jolt and a punch in the ribs is excessive force.’

  I got up and took the empty mug from his hand. I pulled him to his feet by his tie and walked him out of the room and down the passage to the door. He struggled at the very end but I had a firm grip. I opened the door, pushed him through and slammed it.

  I watched him through the peephole. He reached to ring the buzzer and thought better of it. He stood there for a minute or so and then squared his shoulders and marched down the path to the gate. He fumbled for the catch and swore before he managed to get the gate open. Was he sober enough to drive? I really didn’t care. I spiked another mug of coffee with a good slug of scotch and went back upstairs to the computer.

  Nine o’clock the next morning found me on the road to the Avonlea complex, forty odd kilometres from the CBD. My computer searches the night before had told me that Bryce O’Connor was a member of a city firm specialising in criminal law. He was a partner along with a McPherson and a Williams—all the Celtic bases nicely covered. The website for Lorraine Master’s firm, LP Consultants, told me very little and didn’t allay my scepticism. About investment consultants I tend to take my cue from a Woody Allen line in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy: ‘I’m an investment adviser. I advise people how to invest their money until it’s all gone.’ Maybe it’s just because I’ve never had any to invest. A couple of stray thoughts crossed my mind as I drove. Was the money Lorraine Master spoke about giving me to splash around in New Caledonia actually hers? And could I believe her about Stewart Master and drugs? What about body builders and steroids, and one thing leading to another?

  At least I knew what to expect at Avonlea. Or not quite. The website had said that the Avonlea Correctional Centre housed mainly young offenders between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. Stewart Master’s age had been variously given as thirty and thirty-one. Hard to see him squeezing in, except for that ‘mainly’.

  For an inner-city liver the Western Highway is a dreary stretch that seems to take you further and further away from what Sydney is all about. A narrow view. Prejudiced. I tried to resist it as I made the drive to Parramatta and beyond, reflecting that this was now the demographic heart of Sydney and an area that held almost as much history as Sydney Cove. Almost. Trouble was, the turn-off to Sunnyholt Road towards Blacktown and Avonlea only reinforced the pessimistic impressions. How could so many car salesmen, mechanics and auto electricians make a living? Surely all these secondhand cars couldn’t be sold and, if so, what happened to them in the long run?

  It was hard to arrive at Avonlea in an optimistic frame of mind and I wondered how the lawyers, like O’Connor, coped. How did they feel when they saw the acres of housing estates, one dwelling much the same as another, without privacy or individuality, springing up and being occupied in what was essentially a wasteland? Shut the eyes, enjoy the air conditioning and look forward to lunch. The wooden frames were sprouting like mushrooms on the approach to the prison, as if people couldn’t wait to live there. But the completed houses, fenceless, with struggling gardens and not a tree in sight, told another story. You couldn’t get to anywhere else from here unless you had a car. If you didn’t and you were old, you probably stayed put; if you were young, you probably ‘borrowed’ one.

  The Avonlea Correctional Centre announced itself in big letters on a brick pillar one side of a security gate. The pillar on the other side said ‘Young Offenders Program’. I looked the place over from the car park before I approached the gate. At this distance the sprawl of buildings behind a series of fences looked like a cross between a cash-strapped provincial university and a Christian holiday camp. The sky was overcast, keeping the temperature down, and there was a mild breeze. In high summer, low lying as it was, it’d bake like an oven, and in winter the winds would cut you to the bone.

  I showed some ID and was buzzed through the first gate. Then I went through another gate and was divested of my mobile phone, ‘Hot item in here, mate,’ the guard said. He put the phone in a locker and handed me the key. No charge. Then this friendly type ushered me along a one hundred metre path further into the prison. We went past an exercise yard where a few inmates were walking, talking and smoking. I wouldn’t have called it exercising. The yard was divided into sections and I had a feeling that the dark skins and the lighter skins were being kept apart.

  I showed the pass I’d been given and was admitted to another area where my escort left me. Up a set of steps and into a sterile room divided up into glassed-in cubicles. I submitted my pass and the name of the inmate I wished to see and a guard said he’d be paged. I waited, looking back to the exercise yard where nothing physical seemed to be taking place.

  ‘Cubicle four, sir,’ the guard in charge announced.

  I took a seat in cubicle four. I wasn’t the only visitor. At least three of the other cubicles were occupied, including the one next to me. An intense conversation was being carried on between a youngish woman, a lawyer to judge by the papers she was passing across, and an even younger inmate dressed in the bottle green uniform—tracksuit pants, T-shirt.

  A buzzer sounded, a door slid open and a man stepped out and headed towards the cubicle. Almost everything about him surprised me. He wore the greens as if they’d been his own choice. He wasn’t tall, 175 centimetres at most, but he looked as if that was all the height he needed. Lorraine Master had told me he was a body builder, but he had none of the misshapen exaggerations that often go with that tag—the excessive muscularity behind the sloping shoulders, the wide arm carry and the crotch-splitting thighs. This man was all of a compact, well-developed piece. I ruled out steroids. And he looked young. Younger than Lorraine. Almost young enough to be here.

  ‘Stewart Master.’

  We shook.

  ‘Cliff Hardy.’

  ‘How is she?’

  I studied him. Long term prisoners get a certain look in their eyes, as if they can’t quite focus on the here and now. As if the past, the present and the immediate future are too painful to think about. Master had nothing of that. He was intensely aware of the moment, engaged in it as an actor.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know her well enough to say.’

  He nodded. ‘You better fucking keep it that way.’

  4

  WHEN did you last see your wife?’ I asked Master. ‘Six weeks ago.’

  ‘Speak to her on the phone?’

  ‘Just as long, or longer.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘That’s how I want it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘None of your fucking business.’

  ‘She’s making it my business.’

  ‘She’s wasting her money then.’

  ‘You mean you’re guilty.’

  ‘No, I mean the only thing worth spending money on is a lawyer—get the sentence reduced, get parole, get me moved somewhere else. That sort of thing.’

  ‘You knew your wife sent me. How?’

  ‘She told O’Connor. He advised her against it but she went ahead. That’s what she’s like. She does what she thinks best. Usually it is.’

  ‘Like marrying you?’

  ‘Fuck you.’ He started to get up.

  I said: ‘Your mates and your playground—Reg Penny, Gabriel Rosito, Rory McCloud, Jarrod Montefiore, Le Saint Hubert, the Salon de Fun.’

  He sat down with a bump. The guard by the door had moved as Master had half risen, now he settled back down. ‘Where did you get all that?’

  ‘From your wife. Where else? Did one of them set you up?’

  He shrugged. ‘One of ’em. All of ’em. Who knows?’

  ‘I’m going there to ask around. Are you going to help me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you want to get out of here?’

  �
�I’ll get out.’

  ‘In ten years.’

  ‘I told you, we’re working on that.’

  ‘I can’t fathom you, Master. You don’t look stupid. Don’t tell me you’re thinking of escaping.’

  ‘Don’t you be stupid. If I was, would I tell you?’

  ‘Why did you agree to see me?’

  ‘I just wanted to see what sort of a dickhead you were and to warn you to keep your distance from Lorrie.’

  I studied him and thought I saw something behind the tough exterior. It’s a look you see in lonely people, a neediness behind the defensive shell. I pushed my chair back. ‘Well, you’ve done that. You can rot in here for all I care, but I’ll take the job and see if I can give satisfaction.’

  He seemed about to say something but thought better of it. He signalled to the guard, got up and walked away without a backward glance. I sat stunned. Some pretty heavy discussions were going on in some of the other cubicles and I was tempted to listen to find out if these contacts were going as unsatisfactorily as mine. But the voices fused and I couldn’t make any sense of what was being said. The guard signalled for me to leave and I did, retracing my steps with another escort who had nothing to say. I was grateful for that.

  I couldn’t say I liked Stewart Master but I was certainly interested in him. I was intrigued by his indifference, even hostility, to what I’d been hired to do. You’d have thought a man in his position would be clasping at straws. His relationship with his wife was unusual evidently, but marriage is an unusual institution. I recalled a remark a friend had made: golf is like marriage and marriage is like golf—they’re designed to make you unhappy. I was interested enough to have decided to take the job but I needed to see Lorraine Master again to clear a few things up; among them, Tony Spears.