by Iain Ryan
Harris returned to the house and to the kitchen. He looked at Romano’s empty beer can on the bench. He looked at the files of paperwork. He opened a plastic shopping bag on a chair by the table and removed the book. It was the dead kid’s journal. He turned to the pages in Cantonese. It was like The Theodor was calling him. Jackie Vang worked at The Theodor. Jackie spoke Canto, did translation for the Chans. Jackie did a lot of things.
He went to the phone, dialled the number by heart. “It’s Jim Harris. Yeah, yeah, been a while. When’s Jackie on next?”
Thursday evening.
The excuse was nearing on complete.
“Okay,” he said.
He breathed.
“Hold off,” he said. “I’ll call back.”
He went to put the phone down and stopped. He brought the receiver back up to his mouth.
“Is Lean there?”
She wasn’t.
“No,” said Jim. “No message.”
17
Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Denny’s eyes widened when she said the name.
“Jim Harris?”
“That’s right,” said Romano.
He wheeled himself across the room on his chair and shouted into the corridor, “Chandler, you better come down here.”
Chandler appeared. He had a half-finished croissant in his hand. “This better be good,” he said.
“Tell him,” said Denny.
“I ran into a bloke called Jim Harris last night. Said he was a retired copper and that he was taking over this thing up at the Gold Point.”
Chandler bit his fat bottom lip and slowly shook his head. “Just ran into him, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“Fucking hell,” said Chandler and walked out. After a moment, he shouted “You coming?”
Chandler’s office had a small window overlooking the courtyard. Light blasted in from it, but the room was dark otherwise. He sat down at his desk, punched a number into the phone and stared at her while they waited. The call connected.
“Lana, it’s Chandler from Turnell. You got a minute? Okay. I’m putting you on speaker.”
He flicked a button, and a woman’s voice said, “Who am I on with?”
“It’s just me and Constable Romano, the new girl.”
“Hello, Laura,” said the voice. “We met on the beach not long ago. I was with the Inspector.”
The conversation paused as Romano tried to remember. She shrugged.
“I gave you the bathers,” said Lana.
“Oh, right,” said Romano.
“What can I do for you this morning?”
Chandler leaned closer to the phone. “Young Romano here had her first run-in with Jim Harris last night, by the sounds of it. Do you have him working this OD and suicide up at the Gold Point?”
“Let’s see,” she said. She turned paper. Someone typed in the background. “I don’t… Can you hold a moment?” she said. Without waiting for a response, the call cut to hold music. Soft rock, shrill in the phone’s tinny speaker.
Chandler chuckled. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What?” said Romano. She didn’t recognise it.
“LRB. I fucking hate Little River Band.”
The music cut back to Lana. “You there? I just had a word with O’Shea, and apparently Harris is on it, but on the down low. Your vic’s father has some pull. The case is still filed with Brisbane CIB but…”
“So that’s that, right?” said Chandler.
“Pretty much,” said Lana. “The word is that it’s an open and shut one. It’s only ongoing because the father wanted a second opinion.”
“Well, against my advice, Constable Romano here has been sniffing around.” Chandler leaned back into his chair and smiled. “Can you please direct her further, regarding this matter? I’m sick of talking about it.”
“Brisbane CIB told me to handle it,” said Romano.
“Well, now the Inspector wants Harris to handle it,” said Lana. “So you should stay clear.”
“Lana, this Harris guy was in the house of one of the victim’s last night. And he didn’t have access to the crime scene or my notes. He shouldn’t even know who died. This doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s not for you to decide, Constable.”
“This is ridiculous.” It sounded more desperate than she’d have liked.
“Constable, I’ll remind you that you are exactly that, a constable. You were bounced down from Detective years ago. That is not your job. You’re over there by the good graces of mutual friends interstate, and you need to do as instructed. You understand, you—”
Romano walked away. As she came through reception, she kept her eyes off Denny.
“Where are you going?” he called.
“Out,” she said.
Romano drove back to the house and took a shower, her second for the day. In the warm pouring water, she ran a hand through her hair and, slowly, she began breathe a little.
Then she started to smile.
This only looks like a problem.
They were so scared of this.
Bluffing.
The likes of Senator Bachelard were bigger than Tunnel Island. Canberra was bigger than Matt Dyer, bigger than her trouble with Vic Police. This was a lifeline. This Harris character was trouble, but the Senator’s dead son was a golden ticket. Her golden ticket out of here.
It was ten-thirty AM.
18
Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Back at the Marr house, Jim Harris stood with a hose and sprayed the garden in long arcs. He gave Romano a wry look as she came up the path. “I guess I checked out.”
“For the moment,” said Romano. “When are they due back?”
“The Marrs? I don’t know. What’s that?”
Romano carried a bundle of files and notes under her arm. “Everything so far. The scene write-up, interview logs, photos…and whatever else I could scrape together from Brisbane.”
“You speak to O’Shea then?”
“Lana.”
He whistled. “Even worse. You want a cuppa? Figure you could use one.”
“What I want is this,” she said, lifting the files a little. “I don’t know exactly what the hell is going on with you and O’Shea, but that crime scene was no routine suicide—like the other ten dozen you’ve had over here in the last couple of years.”
He squinted in the sunlight. “That’s not a topic you really want —”
“I’ve had enough good advice to last me a lifetime lately. You really want to help me? Sit down and talk to me about this case, because I’m not backing off. I’ll spend the rest of my career writing to that senator from the DPU before I let this out of my sight.”
Harris crimped the hose. “You know, it might be hard to believe but some of these people are actually looking out for you,” he said.
He went to the tap and turned it off.
Harris had an office above a real estate agent down on the foreshore of Robinson Beach. It was clean, cold almost. Windows glazed with sea spray. The surf club dotted the headland on one side of the vista, the endless beach trailed out on the other.
“I don’t even have a window,” said Romano. “So what is it you do, Jim, officially?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Unofficially, then?”
“I’m retired.”
“Who did you used to work for?”
“The people who run things over here.”
“Who are?”
Harris looked out the window and took a sip from his mug. “The people who own everything. The hotels, mainly.”
“And O’Shea.”
“O’Shea’s involved, yeah.”
Romano went to the apartment’s round dining table and started to sort the files. “So what’s the plan, then? You want me to walk you through what I have?”
“I guess,” said Harris. He stayed by the window.
“Or do you know who did it?” She wait
ed a beat, to see how that went down.
“No,” he said.
She saw it then. He did have the weary look of a veteran cop. There was an uneasiness to him. And something else as well. Anger. The moment passed and he recomposed himself. The uneasiness disappeared. Romano felt her scalp itch. The idea of spending time with him suddenly felt jarring, like a bad idea.
“How about I start,” he said. “That might be a better idea.” He sat himself on the couch, his eyes still fixed on the beach outside. “Grab that package on the bench there.”
Romano turned to find a single orange envelope on the counter. She opened it and found a handful of printed crime scene photographs bound to a small black journal with an elastic band.
“What the fuck is this? You were there?”
Harris looked over. “The kid was asking for trouble,” he said.
Romano sat. She opened the journal. It was written in an erratic shorthand, more log-book than confession. Half was in English, the rest in something else—some Asian dialect. It belonged to Thomas Bachelard. It had his name and an address listed inside the cover. As she turned the pages, Romano felt pangs of recognition. The scrawl of obsession, a big open loop. Like her own notes, there was a point where they stopped making sense. The book started orderly enough—some kind of investigation—and by the end, it was a mess of doodles, mud maps, part names and addresses, and whole pages marked by single sentences or a list, many abandoned after two or three points. Harris had some of the pages marked with Post-it notes.
“Those are the things I recognise,” he said.
“And?”
“It’s about her sister, Sophie Marr’s sister. She died two years back. As far as I can tell, a lot of that has to do with her.”
“So Bachelard was looking into it? Why? From what I could tell he’s some rich kid, over here to have a good time.”
“I don’t know,” said Harris. “I’m waiting on a call back from his father’s people but I’m not holding my breath. I think this is all damage control for them. My brief was pretty much along those lines. Look into it, make sure the kid didn’t leave any more disasters in his wake. That’s the message O’Shea passed down.”
“Does anyone actually care that he was probably raped and murdered?”
“I’m not sure how far that information has travelled,” said Harris. “My guess is that O’Shea kept that detail to himself, for the moment.”
More leverage. Romano made a mental note. “So you agree then?” she said.
“What?”
“That someone did these two in,” said Romano.
“I don’t care,” said Harris. “The girl, Sophie, has been on the way out half her life, and her sister was the same way. I liked her sister but… The Bachelard kid, whatever he was doing, he did it in the wrong place and he was too dumb to take a hint. From what I hear, he got plenty of hints. My gut feeling is that someone gave Bachelard a good excuse, and Sophie’s OD pushed him over the edge.” Harris cracked his knuckles. “People get up to all sorts of shit over here. This is a dangerous place, under the surface. Especially if you start sticking your nose in other people’s business. You may as well put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. There’s not much in it. You can be anyone’s son, work for anyone, and if you just shit all over what’s happening here, to these people, you get stood on.”
“He didn’t rape himself and break his own hand,” she said, turning back to the notebook.
“Like I said, people pay for all sorts of weird stuff over here. You don’t know what he was up to.”
Romano flicked to end of the notebook and noticed a list of numbers and names written in a more orderly hand. As she looked at the list, she said, “Was it you, Jim, standing on people, before you retired? Or did you just give out the warnings?”
“Most of the time a warning was enough.”
“Uh huh.”
“Look, I had nothing to do with this. I only know most of this by looking at that notebook of his.”
It sounded like bullshit. Romano turned the pages. “Some of these numbers look like they have mainland area codes. Tomorrow, I want you to go back to the Gold Point. If you’ve got all this clout, maybe they’ll give you what they should have given me a week ago: camera footage, financial records, anything they have. And I want to talk to the Marrs as well. Get them back here. You and me, we’re going to work this thing out.”
“Are we now?”
“The sooner you help me, the sooner I’m out of your hair.”
“You hard of hearing?”
Romano let out a sharp breath and said, “Look, Jim, no one is going to touch up a cop this week, especially not one who’s looking into this. So, you know, you and O’Shea can imply all you like but the smart play here is to help me put this to bed quietly. Let me curry favour with the senator, at least. It sounds to me like you’ve let this get far enough out of hand on your own anyhow.”
His eyes locked on hers. An ugly smirk crossed his face. “If this turns around, I’m not going to help you,” he said. “You’re on your own. You can’t trust any of these people you’re messing around with.”
“We’ll see,” she said. She checked her watch. “Now I could use a drink. You want a beer, Jim? You look like you could use one.”
“Get fucked,” he said, but when he stood up he added, “The surf club does a pretty decent special on Wednesdays.”
They sat outside on the deck, under a high warm sun, and Romano drank her beer and watched him. Everyone knew Harris. In the fifteen minutes it took for their food to arrive—coming before a neighbouring table who ordered first—Harris nodded at people, shook hands, whispered in ears as they leaned over the table. Again, Romano noted, he was a man who could change gears quickly. There was a veneer.
She swallowed the last of her beer. “How long you been over here?”
“A while now,” he said. He picked a chip from his plate. “Came over in eighty-six. Twenty years almost. It was a lot different back then.”
“And you’ve been doing this for all that time.”
“Pretty much. I was the local bloke when I first got here, like yourself.”
Romano lit a cigarette, tilted her head back to exhale. “And you got dry over here?”
“Yeah, been sober twelve years in January. Dev got me into it.”
“Good for you.”
“It is what it is,” he said.
“Sounds like you miss it?”
“I miss a lot of things I don’t do any more.”
In the afternoon, he was eager to set some sort of schedule. He had things to do, he said, and a desire to not let this drag on forever. Romano complied. She made a list of questions and Harris sat across the table in his office and answered them, pretty much as a suspect might.
“How do I find out how long Bachelard was over here?”
“He’d been on Tunnel for at least a month or two,” he said. Bachelard had been on Harris’s radar. The Gold Point Hotel would probably give up some part of their records, if Harris greased the right gears, but there wouldn’t be much. The toll station down at Arthurton, on the other hand, was a bust. They would never let anyone see the logs. It was law on the island. People came and went unchecked.
“Tell me about the Marrs?”
Local fuck-ups. Donald Marr was shady. Links to local drug supply. A violent past tucked in under a calmer retirement. No brain surgeon. Donald’s wife Mary was a good churchgoing woman. “Let me tell you, she needed it,” said Harris. The daughters were both tearaways from a young age. Silvia, the oldest, flunked out of high school and worked in the Point Burgess servo for a time. She was up to her eyeballs in drugs, stripping, and hooking. She ended up down in the south of the island for a while, a place Harris called Drainland. “It’s a camp on the beach, a fucking nightmare, but we have to keep it out of the North.”
“And she died there?”
“No,” he said. “She moved around, in and out of the camp. They found her in a vacant lot
down in Domino. She OD’d. It was an open and shut thing, I saw the body myself. The family wanted to keep it off the books, and Bill was never one for paperwork, so it’s probably unlisted at the station.”
“Off the books? Jesus.”
“It works. Or it did,” he said.
According to Harris, the younger sister, Sophie—their victim—was headed down a similar path. A better-looking woman, Sophie worked the casinos, seducing high rollers, partying for chips and tips. “She loved a drink,” said Harris. “Came to a meeting once a year, when it suited her.” She was more popular than her sister—Silvia sounded like a whining junkie—and more adept too, with more ambition. Sounded like she had a talent for juicing rich men.
“And drugs?” said Romano.
“She dabbled. Who wouldn’t, living every other day in the casino. Most of the concierges have packed her into a cab at some point. It sounds to me like she finally hooked her fish with Bachelard, and the new money did her in.”
Marr and Bachelard had been seen together around the island, but it was no newsflash, Sophie doing what she did for a living. When Romano asked what Donald and Mary Marr thought, Harris shrugged.
“They probably didn’t know.”
“Where did she live?”
“She moved around. She had some sort of arrangement with the Gold Point lately. I haven’t been able to dig up anything else yet. She hasn’t been home for months. Last time Donald saw her, she was on the street, in a cafe, or so he reckons. They’d given up on her.”
As the sun started to fade, Romano asked for the rest of the files. “I figure, if you’ve got the pathology reports, you’ve probably got the rest of the stuff I’m waiting on.”
Harris put the kettle on and went to another room. He returned with the paperwork.
There wasn’t much:
No usable prints found on the scene.
No startling results from the fibre samples.
His version of the autopsy report matched hers.
