Sucked In

by Shane Maloney

  ‘Plenty more where that came from,’ I said. ‘I’ve got one in an envelope addressed to the police, matter of fact.’

  He kicked the paper ball with the toe of his dirty trainer. ‘This doesn’t prove anything.’

  ‘Who said it did, Sidney?’ I asked sweetly. ‘You seem to be missing the point. That thing,’ I pointed to the paper at his feet, ‘is just an example. An illustration, if you like. You send your piece of cir-cum-stantial evidence to the coppers, we send ours. You point the finger, we point the finger. This stir-the-possum game, two can play at it.’

  ‘Evidence of what?’ He sucked at his can and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘Smartarse.’

  I gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Jeeze, Sid, do I have to spell it out for you? You reckon the bankbooks will make the cops think Charlie Talbot and Barry Quinlan were on the fiddle, giving them a reason to knock off honest Merv Cutlett. By the same token, this photo of you and your watch will make them wonder why you lied to them. Maybe even wonder if you mightn’t have given Merv a helping hand on his way to the bottom of the lake. You had a chance. You were out on the lake looking for him. You had a motive. He was selling you out. Just your bad luck that he grabbed your watch while you were pushing him under.’

  Gilpin laughed, spraying spit and beer at me. ‘What a load of crap,’ he said. ‘Give me the money or fuck off.’

  He crumpled the can and tossed it aside. Then he shuffled over to the ice-cream cooler and got himself a fresh one. There were cans all over the floor. Christ, the bloke was a bottomless vat.

  The last of the daylight was fading from the dirty windows. I’d been too optimistic, I realised, thinking I could bluff Bozo Brainiac with a bit of cut-and-paste and a tangle of half-baked logic.

  ‘You’ve had your money already, Sid.’ I said. ‘There’s no second helpings. Do yourself a favour, just give me the bankbooks.’ I extended my open palm and waited patiently.

  Gilpin stared at me sullenly. ‘Fuck off,’ he said.

  I gave a disappointed shrug, took out my mobile and pushed a couple of buttons. While I pretended to wait for an answer, I gave Sid a you-asked-for-it look.

  ‘Senator,’ I said, turning my expression serious. ‘No go, unfortunately.’

  Gilpin moved closer to the mesh, head tilted. He pulled off his beanie, the better to hear me. I listened again, nodding into the phone. ‘Understood. You’re the boss.’ I thumbed the phone off and put it back in my pocket.

  Casting a saddened glance at Gilpin, I grabbed a couple of old paint cans and tossed them at the base of the mesh fence. I added another pair, then another. I prowled through the array of old junk spread across the floor, selecting items and flinging them towards the partition. Speaker cases, rotary phones, a wooden stool, a milk crate of old textbooks. Anything flingable, all of it flammable.

  ‘You’re a greedy bastard,’ I said, shaking my head dolefully. ‘And this time you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.’

  Gilpin stood rooted to the spot, comprehension dawning across his puffy, booze-ravaged dial as I poured a bottle of sump oil over the pile. I wiped my hands on a rag, tossed it aside, and looked around.

  ‘This joint’s a hazard, mate. One spark from that grinder and whoompf.’

  Gilpin scratched his stubble and spat on the floor. ‘You’re bluffing,’ he said. ‘You’d never get away with it.’

  I took out my cigarette lighter. ‘If the senator can’t have them, nobody can. And let’s face it, Sid, you won’t be missed.’

  Once again, I extended my palm to the latch and waited. My other hand held the lighter, thumb on the striker. If this didn’t work, I was fucked.

  It worked. He fumbled in his coat, pulled out the bankbooks and poked them through the gap. I snatched them from his grasp. Sweat was trickling down my back.

  Gilpin hooked his fingers through the mesh and rattled the cage. ‘Let me out, you prick.’ He looked pathetic. Sad, sick, trapped, abandoned.

  ‘You need help,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t be mixing your medications. I’m going to call a doctor, get somebody down here to see to you.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said.

  Yeah, I thought, and fuck my doctor. We’d been through this before. I turned and walked up the aisle to the front door, the chain mesh rattling behind me.

  ‘I’ll fucking kill you,’ Gilpin shouted. ‘That prick Quinlan, too.’

  I consigned the bankbook in Charlie Talbot’s name to the toxic inferno of the petrol-drum incinerator, slid open the bolt on the back door and drove away without a backward glance.

  The bogus Quinlan I tucked snugly into my back pocket.

  When Inky Donnelly stuck his leprechaun phiz around my door in the Henhouse at nine-thirty the next morning, it had hot dispatch plastered all over it.

  ‘I’ve just been chatting with your mate Vic Valentine,’ he said, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. ‘Looks like we’re off the hook with the Merv Cutlett rigmarole.’

  I was unaware that Inky had ever been anywhere near the hook, but I let it pass. His usual dishevelled self, Inky plopped himself down in my visitors’ chair, eager to explain the nature of our un-hooking.

  As part of my penance to the Whip, I’d agreed to put in a couple of extra sessions of bum-time in the Council chamber. Inky had caught me trying to get on top of the morning’s agenda before kick-off time at ten. I leaned back and gave him my undivided.

  ‘Seems that our intrepid chrome-domed ace reporter was present during a long and well-lubricated session at the Wallopers’ Arms last night. In the course of which he picked up the latest mail on the bones-in-the-lake saga. Apparently forensic science has run into a dead-end, so to speak. DNA has met its match, you might say.’

  Inky was clearly enjoying himself, so I simply sat and enjoyed the show.

  ‘You’ll recall in the last nail-biting episode, the coppers were gearing up to exhume Cutlett’s parents’ grave in the Mooroopna cemetery, where they have been enjoying their eternal rest for some several decades? Well, it seems that the passage of time has taken its toll on the headstones in that forgotten corner of a Mooroopna field that will be forever Cutlett. The exact location of their graves cannot be determined with sufficient precision to meet the requirement of modern science. So, no parental DNA.’

  ‘What about the daughter?’ I said.

  ‘Killed in a car accident in New Zealand in 1990 and cremated,’ he beamed. ‘And what with the watch drawing a blank at all corners of the compass, the remains have now been relegated to the Unsolved Mysteries file.’

  ‘The hole in the head?’

  He shrugged. ‘Borers?’

  ‘So there was never anything to worry about all along?’

  ‘Who was worried?’ He massaged his stomach. ‘Cautious, that’s all.’

  ‘Well that’s certainly good news, Inky,’ I said.

  ‘I knew you’d be pleased.’ He slapped his knees and heaved himself into the vertical. ‘And good news about Leppitsch being cleared by the tribunal. He should be worth four or five goals against the Eagles on Sunday.’

  ‘And we’ll need every one of them,’ I said, returning to my reading material. ‘But do me a favour, Ink. Next time you’re curious about something, just look it up in the fucking encyclopaedia, will you?’

  He tossed me a parting cheerio as he went out the door. ‘Looking sharp today, Muzza.’

  I had to agree, for Inky’s was not the only welcome news I’d received that morning. While he was waiting his turn at the toaster during the breakfast rush, Red had got around to mentioning there’d been a phone call on Tuesday evening.

  ‘Didn’t you see the note?’ he said, hovering impatiently as my post-run slices of multigrain took their own good time to turn brown.

  I most certainly hadn’t. ‘What note?’

  ‘It’s round here somewhere.’ He said, elbowing me aside and prematurely ejaculating my toast. ‘Her name was Anthea Lean or something like that. From your Greek class, she said. Wa
nted you to ring her. I wrote down the number.’

  He simultaneously fed bread into the toaster, stuffed his homework into his backpack, did up his shoelaces and gestured vaguely towards the midden of scrawled notes surrounding the telephone.

  He’d been out the door for ten minutes before I managed to find and decode his hieroglyphics. The deplorable penmanship of the younger generation was a matter that had long concerned me in a general sense. Now it had come home to roost. Was that a three or a five? A nine or a seven? Dammit, I’d try all of them if necessary.

  But seven-fifteen in the morning was a tad too early to call on a matter like this, however impatient I was. So, hoping for the best, I dusted off my Hugo Boss dress-to-impress suit, drove to Parliament House and bided my time until nine-twenty.

  A chirpy young voice answered. ‘You’ve called the Lanes, Nicole and Andrea. Please leave a message and we’ll return your call when we can.’ There followed an encouraging tinkle of classical piano music. Mozart, or one of those guys.

  ‘Er, this is Murray Whelan, returning your call, Andrea,’ I said. ‘Sorry I missed you. Um, please call me back on my mobile. The number’s on the card.’ To be on the safe side, I recited the numbers. My fingers were still crossed when Inky arrived.

  What with speed-reading the agenda papers and chatting with Inky, I barely made it to the chamber in time for the kick-off. Not that the legislative pace was exactly cracking that morning. The condolence motion had drawn a near-full house, but that was just good form. The second reading of the brucellosis clauses of the Livestock Disease Control (Amendment) Bill had pulled only eight members. Five of theirs, three of ours.

  We were the short-straw corps. Kingers of Geelong, Butcher of Dandenong and Whelan of Melbourne Upper. Personing the post was our sole role. Kingers and Butcher took the far extremities of the front bench and I sat in the middle up the back. The expression ‘thin on the ground’ came to mind as I subsided into the plush.

  Across the floor of the chamber, the enemy ranks joshed among themselves until the siren sounded and the President bounced the ball. The Minister for Agriculture, an old-style National with a military moustache and enviable silver hair assumed the position and began to read from a bulldog-clipped sheaf of papers.

  ‘Pursuant to the matters covered in section five, subsection nine…’ The public gallery was deserted. Kingers was doing a crossword puzzle, his newspaper buried in a departmental file. Butcher was checking the government benches, scouting for a possible interjection. Ambitious fellow, Butcher.

  The preselection vote was Saturday afternoon, less than forty-eight hours away.

  Unless Barry Quinlan already knew that the police investigation into the Lake Nillahcootie remains had been shelved, he still had very good reasons for wanting the bankbook out of circulation. By early next week, however, he’d probably be better informed, and its threat value would be nil.

  A personal savings account, decades old. That’s all it was. A name. Some dates. Money in, money out. Like the man said, not exactly a smoking gun. Its sole significance lay in the construction that might be placed upon it at a certain time under certain circumstances. Sid Gilpin had opened and operated it with exactly that point in mind. Two decades later, he thought he’d found a different purpose for it. Now it was my turn.

  Blackmail is an ugly word. Perhaps that’s why it appears only twenty-seven times in the official ALP rule-book. If Senator Quinlan was doing what he promised me beside the wishing well in Canberra, it would never need to be uttered. In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt to mouth it silently in his direction.

  Ayisha had already let me know he was back in Melbourne, shoring up his authority. When we adjourned for lunch, I scuttled down to the Henhouse and gave him a call. As we talked, noises leaked through the thin partition wall from the staffroom next door. Staffers and MPs were tucking into cut lunches, opening take-away containers, microwaving Cup-a-Soup and nattering among themselves. Outside, the sky was overcast. The temperature had risen overnight and an almost-pleasant humidity had superseded the previous day’s damp chill.

  ‘That thing we discussed,’ I said, when Quinlan came on the line. ‘It took quite a bit of doing, but I’ve got it in my possession. I thought you might like it as a souvenir.’

  ‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Murray.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ I said. ‘You haven’t forgotten your promise, I hope?’

  ‘I said I’d do my best and that’s exactly what I’m doing. But the situation is very fluid at the moment.’

  Fluid? From what I’d heard, it was forming an oil-slick under his hand-stitched size sevens.

  ‘So I understand,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t care to hazard some numbers?’

  ‘Later in the day perhaps.’

  ‘I look forward to it,’ I said. ‘You don’t happen to be going to this casino shindig, I suppose.’

  As well as every state parliamentarian and city councillor, the casino bosses had invited all Victorian members of federal parliament to partake of their hospitality. Barry was a big man for the gee-gees and a keen plier of the knife and fork, so it was odds-on that he’d taken up their offer.

  ‘Excellent suggestion,’ he said. ‘We’ll get our heads together over a post-prandial snifter. They’ll be laying it on in spades, I daresay.’

  I called Ayisha. She was out of the office, escorting Phil Sebastian to lunch with a Frank Abruzzo, a salami manufacturer with an over-inflated sense of his influence with the Italo-Australian small business wing of the Melbourne Upper component of the Coolaroo rank and file.

  My mobile had been switched off while I was sitting in the chamber. I’d turned it on the moment I got out, but it still hadn’t rung. I checked the message bank. Lanie had called.

  ‘It’s about tonight,’ said her recorded voice. ‘I’m not really contactable at the moment. I’ll call you back, okay?’

  There was a questioning tone in her voice. I’d been too late getting back to her. She wasn’t sure we were still on for it. Damn, shit, bugger.

  I hung up and rang Mike Kyriakis. He’d been sussing out the likely disposition of the union votes on the central panel through his wife’s brother-in-law, an assistant state secretary of the Construction Workers Federation.

  ‘Len Whitmore’s considering a last minute jump into the ring,’ Mike reported.

  Whitmore, National Secretary of the CWF, had long been touted as a parliamentary contender. He ponced around the country in a bomber jacket, getting his photo in the paper at every non-industrial opportunity. A blatantly obvious attempt to position himself as a common-sense, good-bloke candidate should the parliamentary seat allocators ever have the wit to utilise his talents.

  ‘Here’s hoping,’ I said. The CWF was militant. If Whitmore nominated, the moderate unions would be backed into Quinlan’s corner.

  We talked for a while, then I rang Helen Wright to touch base. She was out and about, so I grabbed a slice of quiche in Strangers Corridor and hit the benches for the afternoon session.

  With the sick cows out of the way, our numbers had been beefed up to five for Question Time. I slung the Health Minister a curly one about the negative impact of hospital waiting times on senior citizens in the northern suburbs, then proceedings moved to final passage of the Gas Industry Privatisation (Further Amendments) Bill. Carriage was a fait accompli, but the least we could do was put our objections on the record. Con Caramalides had supplied me with a magazine of bullets, which I fired at the required moments, working from Con’s crib-sheet.

  Thereafter, when I wasn’t contributing to the general spear-rattling and name-calling, I ducked outside to the portico, switched on my mobile and checked the messages.

  And a fat lot of good it did. Still no Andrea Lane.

  The session adjourned at six, giving me a comfortable thirty minutes to drop my bundle in the Henhouse, try Lanie’s home number again, stick a collapsible umbrella under my arm and trudge the five despondent blocks to the Adult Education C
entre.

  As usual, the stairs and corridors were congested with self-improving mature-age students of Introduction to Computers and Resume Writing for Success. I got to Greek for Beginners with five minutes to spare. Lanie hadn’t yet turned up. Exchanging yasous with my arriving classmates, I lingered in the hallway.

  And lingered and lingered and lingered. By the time everybody else was seated and Agapi, our teacher, was making starting noises, Lanie still hadn’t shown.

  When Agapi gave me the coming-or-not, I took a seat at the back next to the children’s book illustrator and we proceeded immediately to .

  Lanie arrived just as we were åôïéìïé íá âïõôçîïõìå óôï íåñï. She broadcast an apologetic look to the room in general and grabbed the only spare seat, two rows in front of me. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and carrying a sports bag. She’d just come from the gym or she was bound there immediately afterwards; either way the casino clearly didn’t feature in her plans for the evening.

  ‘Malaka fungula,’ I muttered silently.

  The rest of the lesson passed in a self-pitying funk. I’d been stood up in favour of a Stairmaster. But then maybe the gym wasn’t such a bad idea in Lanie’s case. Those jeans did nothing for the woman’s bum.

  At seven-thirty, Agapi collected our worksheets, handed out fresh ones and closed the lesson. In the general mill of departure, Lanie made straight for me. ‘I’m really, really sorry,’ she gushed. ‘You must think I’m hopeless.’

  ‘No, no.’ I shrugged and laughed. Aha-ha-ha.

  ‘I’ve been on tenterhooks all week,’ she said. ‘We’ve had the state netball finals and we didn’t know if Nicole’s team would be playing tonight or not. That’s why I couldn’t be sure on Sunday. Depended if they got through the semis, and in the end they didn’t. Got knocked out last night. Still, she played well and there’s a good chance she’ll be selected for the national under sixteens.’ She beamed proudly. ‘And I’ve been up to here with new students.’ Her finger drew a line across her redoubtable poitrine. ‘And on top of everything else, bloody Telstra cut the phone off on Wednesday because of some mix-up with the bill. You were probably getting the no-longer-connected message when you called. How embarrassing. So, when you finally got through…’ She paused abruptly. ‘You must have asked someone else by now.’