Prime Cut

by Alan Carter

  ‘Stuart, I don’t want you bothering them just to satisfy your curiosity. They’ve been through enough already. How would that help find him?’

  ‘Fair point. I just ... I don’t know, they might say something which means nothing to them, or you, but makes absolute sense to me.’ He gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Look I really need to see the case notes. I’m working half-blind here.’

  ‘No can do, mate. Not allowed.’ Another thought pause from Delaney’s end. ‘There’s a brother; I’ll call him and see if he wants to talk to you. Don’t hold your breath.’

  Delaney rang off. Stuart Miller sat with the phone in his hand and a stupid smirk on his face. He hadn’t pulled a stunt like that in over thirty years.

  Friday evening in Hopetoun, nearly mid-October, summer just around the corner. In another couple of weeks the clocks would go backwards, or forwards, or whatever it was they did for daylight saving and it would still be light right now. Not dark, cold, windy, and pissing down. If Tess woke up this instant and somebody told her it was still mid-winter she wouldn’t have been surprised. In fact it would come as a relief. It was really all a dream, no Flipper, no Cato. No Johnno Djukic.

  ‘Want one?’ Greg Fisher held out a bag of jelly dinosaurs.

  ‘Thanks.’

  She took a couple and stuffed both in her mouth: green and purple flavour. She washed them down with a gulp of thermos coffee. They were parked on the gravel by the new tennis courts, halfway along Veal Street, waiting for patrons to come driving up from the pub so they could breathalyse them. Simple pleasures, but in this weather nobody was going anywhere.

  Tess had called in at home for a shower, a bite to eat, and to fill the thermos before joining Greg for the evening shift. Melissa had texted her to say she was at a friend’s house and would probably sleep over. Tess hadn’t met any of her daughter’s friends properly yet but was relieved that Melissa had some. Greg crunched away absent-mindedly on a packet of chips. ‘Thins,’ it said on the packet, as if just saying it made it magically true. Cops: if the bad guys don’t get you, the junk food surely will. Tess looked at her partner. Greg was already beginning to show evidence of the jowly, slack-gutted, forty year old he would become. Not that she could talk. It was a while since her figure showed the benefits of the regular netball she used to play, a long while.

  Greg misread her look. ‘Want one?’

  He offered his packet of Thins up for inspection. Honey soy chicken, sort of. Tess dug her hand in and grabbed a few.

  ‘Play time.’ Greg chucked his chip packet onto the back seat, started the engine, flicked on the flashing lights and put the wipers up to full blast to clear the screen of driving rain.

  A low-slung souped-up white Falcon ute was tearing up the road from the pub, veering a little from side to side and doof-doofdoofing at full blast. The lit-up police wagon could have been a pensioner on a gopher for all the notice the ute took as it passed in a rain-soaked blur. Tess held on to the sissy handle above her door and braced herself: the paddy wagon skidded on the gravel as they screeched away from their parking spot in hot pursuit. Ahead of them, at the top of the hill leading out of town, was the one and only roundabout. The ute sailed across it without slowing. Tess yelled at Greg not to do the same. He didn’t, quite. Now it was open road for fifty kilometres to Ravensthorpe. If the ute felt so inclined, it could leave Tess and Greg behind; the paddy wagon would be no match for its speed, and visibility was so bad they were never going to get a fix on the rego number. Instead the ute slowed and stopped. Greg Fisher thumped the wheel with the palm of his hand.

  ‘Fucking dickheads.’

  It was a dangerous look in his eyes, the kind Tess had never seen before, not on him anyway.

  ‘You stay here. I’ll deal with this.’

  She unclipped her seatbelt and got out. Greg stepped out of his side but stayed put with the door open and called in the ute rego for a check. Tess walked forward braced against the wind and rain, torch in one hand, breathalyser in the other. As she neared the driver’s door the window rolled down, double-doofing the world outside.

  ‘Turn the music off please.’

  The driver: late twenties, three days’ growth of stubble, and a strong smell of cigarettes, Jack Daniels and Coke. And BO. Nice.

  ‘Sure mate. Any problem?’

  ‘Speed and dangerous driving for one thing.’

  ‘That’s two isn’t it?’

  The ute erupted into hoarse cackling as if it was the wittiest line this century.

  Tess held out her hand and snapped her fingers. ‘Licence please.’

  While the driver fumbled for it, Tess leaned down to look at his fellow travellers. In the front passenger seat a similar model: male, late twenties, grungy bogan. In the back another male: same vintage but slightly cleaner cut, verging on a pretty-boy, what she could see of him. He was flanked by two females, maybe he was the bait. One of the women seemed to be conjoined to the pretty-boy’s face and was tugging at his zipper, oblivious to the audience. Tess ahemmed and shone her torch on to the happy couple. They disentangled and heads turned.

  ‘Oh, hi Mum,’ said Melissa, as if she’d just come home from school.

  12

  Friday, October 10th. Nearly midnight.

  Amphetamines, ecstasy and GHB – fantasy, the so-called date-rape drug – all in small amounts, for personal use, and enough grog to fuel the First Fleet. That was the haul from the souped-up Falcon ute and the cashed-up mine contractors. Plus a video camera and some stick mags. Melissa and her mate Stacey were both high as kites on the eckies and at least half a dozen alcopops. The men all stone cold sober according to the blood tests. Tess shuddered at the thought of where and how the night might have ended. The men were in custody at the Ravensthorpe lockup. Given what they had in the car, their apparent intentions, and superior horsepower, Tess still wondered why they stopped, and why, once busted, they remained calm and compliant with just the two cops on a dark and stormy night with no one around. Maybe it was just that they were old hands, they’d been there before and knew that the odds were in favour of them being back on the streets tomorrow.

  Melissa’s friend Stacey was back in the bosom of her family. No gushing thanks from her parents for rescuing their daughter from the clutches of evil intent, just dirty looks for Tess and Greg as if they somehow were responsible for their wayward child. Finally Melissa too was back in the bosom of her family, Tess Maguire. Tess sitting at the kitchen table at midnight with a lukewarm Lemon Ruski and her fourteen year old daughter down the hallway sleeping off a big sesh. Senior Sergeant Tess Maguire in her government-issue kitchen that was yet to feel like a home. Maybe if she put some photos on display instead of always leaving them in the tattered envelopes now in front of her on the kitchen table. Outside the wind was howling as if in terminal pain. Rain pounded the tin roof. Somewhere nearby a loose gate banged with each gust and a dog barked itself hoarse. Tess’s throat and chest felt so tight she thought she might never breathe again. What scared her much more though was the realisation that she wished it so. She could quite readily go to sleep and not wake up.

  The photos: a wedding in Broome at Cable Beach, her first posting after Cato; flowers in her hair, a simple dress. Slim. Barefoot. Her new husband, Mike, with his arms around her, looking down into her eyes. Another one where he’s standing behind her, his arms crossed over her shoulders and resting low on her stomach, Melissa already in there kicking to be free. Tess looking straight at the camera, challenging it to contradict this happy day and the camera obliging, catching Mike looking elsewhere. In the direction of that woman from the bank.

  More photos. Mike no longer there. Tess with Melissa, now four: a birthday party, pink everywhere. Still in Broome, in the backyard, Tess waiting for Mr Right. He was a no-show. Then another: Melissa, a pre-teen beginning to discover black, both in her dress and her moods. Another backyard party, Tess’s fortieth? Another posting; another town; another government-issue house; yet another school for M
elissa for year seven, Karratha Primary.

  John Djukic. He had tried to take her life away, she was sure of it. He’d failed. Or had he? Tess had felt utterly hopeless and powerless as those boots and fists rained down on her. She had been completely violated. It was a shock that still numbed, long after the fractured bones, ruptured organs, cuts and bruises had healed. Something was broken in there and it would never mend. Melissa had picked up on it. How could she not? Melissa had picked it up and taken a portion of it into her own fragile young soul, a darkness shared. Tess took a gulp of the Ruski; it tasted sickly sweet. Where had she picked up the taste for this crap? Mike? The Pilbara? The Force? She was well rid of all three – except she hadn’t left the Force, yet. She flushed the remains of the drink down the kitchen sink and flopped on to her unmade bed. Tess needed to sleep but knew it wouldn’t come quickly. It never did. She looked at the bottle of prescription sleeping pills on her bedside table. Looked for longer than she usually did, then turned off the light and lay there.

  The rain drumming on the air-conditioning unit outside his motel room was loud enough to wake the dead. Cato Kwong was already wide awake and it was nothing to do with the full cup of instant coffee in his hand. He sat on the bed with the lists of names from the mine and the contractors collated by Greg Fisher at the end of the day. Also strewn across the floral-patterned doona, the photographs of Flipper taken at the post-mortem. Was that only two nights ago? Dr Harry Lewis’s preliminary findings had been typed up into a hard copy. That and the photographs were waiting for him in an envelope at motel reception when he got back from the tour of the mine. Pam the inquisitive receptionist had reluctantly handed it over with curiosity creasing her face.

  ‘Package for you, Inspector.’

  Cato wondered how his game of Chinese Whispers was going, what twisted form his little rumour had assumed by now, and whether anything would come of it. Already, news of the floating head had sparked an inquiry from the Esperance Express and Cato had flick-passed the journo over to DI Hutchens for a snow job. It was only a matter of time before he’d be fielding more calls. He estimated another day at most before the goalposts shifted on the Flipper inquiry.

  Jim Buckley had headed out to the pub to grab a meal and, by the determined look on his face, a skinful of drink. Cato bought takeaway fish and chips from the Taste of the Toun and watched some TV in his room. Friday night crime, solved in an hour – if only. He’d phoned Jane, hoping to talk to Jake, and talked instead to an answering machine. Maybe that wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. He and Jane were running out of civility. She hid hers behind a mask of determined happiness. Fair enough. She’d borne the brunt of his bitterness and disappointment at being hung out to dry by the corruption inquiry. Who would want to continue living with that? Jake was somebody he hadn’t really got to know yet, his own son. He wondered if it was already too late for that now.

  Around mid evening a vehicle had gone thundering past Cato’s window with the kind of doof-doof racket he hadn’t heard since he left the city at the beginning of the week. It almost made him homesick. Almost. Friday night in Hopetoun had rolled over into Saturday and here was Cato Kwong sitting on his bed thinking about a dead man, a dead Chinaman. He’d seen that look on their faces. Buckley. Tess. Greg. The ranger. A dead Chinaman, should be right up your street. Like a dead whitey should be right up theirs? He’d had it in Perth as well. Gang fights in Northbridge; he’d been part of the Gang Squad for a while. They figured he’d have an insight into the Vietnamese street thugs and their way of thinking. Sure. Insight. It comes with the shape of the eyes.

  There were times when Cato forgot he was of Chinese descent. He didn’t know the language; the last person to speak it in his family was a great-grandparent over in Victoria, a survivor of a goldfields pogrom. But now his little sister, Susan, was combining study of Mandarin with her MBA, aiming to cash in big time on the mining boom and the voracious Chinese appetite for Australian red dust. Chinese-ness had not been a significant part of their upbringing. Indeed, his parents, in particular his father, seemed at pains to make it not so. Cato Kwong didn’t feel Chinese, however that was meant to feel. He could go for hours and hours, even days, forgetting that he was Chinese. But usually, as the song goes, there was always something there to remind him.

  Cato looked at a photo of Flipper lying on the steel table at Ravensthorpe Hospital, then at the list of names. All accounted for, all present and correct. So who was Flipper? Cato thought back to day one and the Chinaman he’d seen in the phone booth as he drove into town. He remembered now the fluoro overalls the man was wearing, yellow and blue. Tess had filled him in on the boomtown colour code: so he was a contractor, not the orange of mine staff. Cato scanned the contractor lists. There were four major contractors and a couple of minor subcontractors. Four of the lists had no Chinese-sounding names on them at all. That left Dunstan Industries and SaS Personnel, twenty Chinese on the first and sixteen on the second. He grabbed a pen and notebook and jotted down a to-do list for the following day.

  Jim Buckley terminated the call and put the mobile in his jacket pocket. He stood on the short fishing jetty at the end of the groyne, did a long loud satisfying piss into the Southern Ocean and belched a bourbon and Coke concoction. The rain had eased to a spiteful persistent drizzle that sent cold rivulets down the back of his neck. The wind was still blustery but had done its worst; in another few hours it would be as weak as a kitten. In another few hours it would be dawn. A gust lifted the lid on the rubbish bin and added a pungent mix of fish bait and beer to the salty breeze. Shadows flitted across the spill of yellow lamplight and a jittery seagull took flight from its perch on a mooring post. The clouds were already breaking up; a half-moon and a million brilliant stars that would never be seen in the city shimmered through.

  Jim Buckley saw none of the stars and felt not one whisper of the wind. The cold drops of rain running off his face and down his neck might have been the soft warm breath of a lover for all he was aware. Jim Buckley had cancer. It was eating away at his colon and secondaries were spreading through the rest of his body. The biopsy results had confirmed it. Game over. He should have been given the results at a face-to-face but his GP had finally relented, they went back a long way, and over the phone late today he’d at last been prepared to confirm what Buckley had known and denied to himself for the last two months. Jim Buckley, widower at fifty, grandad at fifty-two, would most likely be dead at fifty-three.

  Buckley thought about his parting words to his brother-in-law and smiled grimly at the idea that he might have done one last good thing before he kicked the bucket. In the morning he’d get Kwong, Tess, and Greg Fisher and together they’d wrap up a last little bit of business. Real police business, not this fucking ghost-chasing bullshit. He flicked his cigarette into the churning water below him and belched some more Jim Beam into the cold night air. He was sick of Hopetoun, he was going to pack his bags and go home to die.

  The gravel crunched softly behind him. When it came, the blow to his head felt like a sweet release.

  13

  Saturday, October 11th. Dawn.

  The way the body was lying, it was obvious he hadn’t seen it coming. Dark blood stained the old wooden planks of the jetty. Jim Buckley’s legs were twisted at a grotesque angle. Cato Kwong rose from his crouching position and rubbed his eyes with the palms of both hands. He wished he could erase the image, rub out the day and start again.

  The call had come at about five from a fisherman, keen to get out early to take advantage of the calmer conditions and clear skies. He’d rung Tess and she had passed the news on to Cato and Greg Fisher. They were all together now in a stunned silent circle around Jim Buckley. Dr Terhorst had been roused from his bed and was concluding his preliminary examination but the results were plain to see. Jim Buckley’s skull had been caved in by a soccer ball–sized rock which lay about a metre away spattered with hair and blood. Cato shook his head trying to clear it; he already felt out o
f his depth with the Flipper case. Now this.

  The rain had only ceased in the last hour or so. They might get a partial or full footprint from the soggy gravel but Cato wasn’t feeling optimistic this morning. CSI Hopetoun, good luck. He snapped on some crime-scene gloves and crouched down again, reaching under Buckley and into his jacket pocket. A mobile phone, still turned on. Cato checked the recent call lists, outward and received, and made a note of the numbers. The trouser pockets yielded keys, loose change, and a wallet. Cato flipped it open: credit cards, a Medicare card and eighty-five dollars in notes. An ATM receipt timed for mid evening the previous night. Driver’s licence, police ID, a Perth video store membership, a photo of a toddler. All seemed present and correct. Cato passed everything to Tess for bagging.

  It was close to six now. The town was beginning to wake up to a blue sky with a few wispy trailing white clouds and the fresh smell that a good downpour brought. Even though it was a Saturday, shift workers would still be heading out to the mine either under their own steam or on the bus that picked them up outside the general store. Some of the fishermen were also early starters plus there were the early-morning joggers and walkers. Tess had parked her wagon across the entry road to the groyne, effectively blocking any traffic from coming near but pedestrians were still able to get through. Already some curious ghouls were making their way over. Tess nodded to Greg Fisher who snapped out of his daze and into action, spreading his arms wide in shepherding fashion. Dr Terhorst was telling Cato what he already knew but at least it was now official.

  ‘Do you know who would do such a thing?’

  ‘If I did I wouldn’t be standing here, Doctor.’

  ‘Quite so, do you think it’s connected to your other inquiry?’

  Cato shrugged. ‘I doubt it, we weren’t getting anywhere.’