by Alan Carter
‘What next?’
‘I cleaned him up. Gave him a drink of water. Asked him where he wanted to go.’
‘And?’
‘He started going nuts. Babbling in Chinese. Started hitting me.’
‘Why?’
‘Ask him. Psycho he was. Mental.’
‘Was it because his scam had been busted and he needed your help to get out?’
‘What scam was that then?’ Stevenson cocked an eyebrow.
‘Skimming off his workmates. His brother-in-law.’
‘Naughty, naughty, but sorry, no, I didn’t know he was doing that.’
‘Why did you get Guan Yu to put his hand up for it?’
‘Who?’
‘Guan Yu, the brother-in-law, the one with the sick kid. He told you he had a fight with Chen that night. Was he your insurance policy if things started going pear-shaped?’
‘Pear-shaped?’
‘The body washes up and the town is crawling with cops, even if they are interested in something else. It all just goes a bit ... pearshaped?’ ‘Look, this is all news to me, do you want to hear my story or what?’
Cato caught Stevenson’s drift; it was his word against Guan’s that there was an ‘arrangement’. He tried a different angle. ‘What about Travis Grant?’
‘What about him?’
‘Didn’t he ever ask you what happened to your gangmaster Hai Chen?’
Stevenson looked at a poster on the wall. ‘Travis isn’t your inquisitive type. Minds his own business. It’s served him well so far.’
Cato knew now where this was going. Keith Stevenson had used the last few hours to work out his story. Or maybe he had been waiting for this day all along. An argument, a violent struggle, Chen had grabbed at the .22, it had gone off accidentally. Stevenson had a body on his hands. With his criminal history it wouldn’t look good. He had to dispose of it, that’s all he would own up to. Not murder, just manslaughter at most and the illegal disposal of the body. It would be almost impossible to prove anything else. With a good lawyer he would be looking at five to seven years with a third off for good behaviour.
Cato sighed. ‘So how did you get rid of him?’
‘Took him out in the boat, Starvation Bay. Went out a few miles. Cut him up on the deck with the Huskie, chucked him over the side, hosed the deck down.’ Stevenson opened his arms, mildly regretful but really all in a day’s work.
‘Chen’s clothes, wallet, phone?’ asked Mark McGowan, pen poised.
‘Same, everything over the side and into the drink.’
Cato went through the story with him again, dotting i’s and crossing t’s, checking for inconsistencies. It still looked the same. Around 11.00 that night Chen must have woken dazed and bleeding from his encounter with Guan Yu. His workmates were by now asleep and drunk, believing Chen to be dead, and in no fit state to worry about it until the morning. Chen wanted to meet Stevenson and, after stumbling across darkened paddocks until he was in mobile range, called him to arrange it. Why? Maybe Hai Chen believed that he was finished here, his scams rumbled. Again, why? Nothing so far suggested Guan Yu knew he was getting ripped off any more than the basic fifty bucks a week. The argument they had earlier that night was about Guan’s inability to pay his weekly dues, nothing more.
At the airport another argument ensued, this time with Stevenson, and Chen was shot. Cato sat back and folded his arms behind his head.
‘Tell me about the argument again, just so we’ve got it straight.’
‘He was nuts. Babbling in Chinese. Started getting aggro.’
‘What about?’
‘Fuck knows.’
Cato leaned forward again, resting his arms on the table, interlocking his fingers. ‘C’mon Keith, you told me you, quote, “did the Chink”. You must have had a reason. Babbling in Chinese and getting aggro aren’t reasons; you could have laid him out with one punch, a man with your experience.’
Stevenson mirrored Cato’s arms-on-the-table pose. ‘When I said I did the Chink you were threatening my son’s life. I think it’s known as duress. However I am here of my own free will volunteering to help clear this matter up.’
‘Please go on.’
‘He made a grab for the gun. It went off, hit him in the head, end of story. That’s what I meant by “did the Chink”. I was responsible.’
That was all he was giving. The forensics were inconclusive as to the details of the struggle and, like Keith, were never going to tell Cato the real reason for it. The story was coming to an end with plenty of i’s and t’s left undotted and uncrossed and Cato couldn’t do anything about it. Maybe Stevenson and Chen were splitting the rip-off proceeds fifty-fifty and Chen was threatening to tell all unless he got what he wanted. Maybe Stevenson or maybe someone else shot Hai Chen. Jai was the only other candidate; he’d certainly shown he could handle a gun. Keith Stevenson then took the body in his ute, picked up the boat from home and went out to sea. And now he was probably taking the rap for his son. He was turning out to be a better dad than Cato had ever shown himself to be.
‘Okay, thanks Mr Stevenson, that should be enough to be going on with.’
Mark McGowan formally charged Stevenson with various counts including assault on a police officer, obstruction of justice, and manslaughter. Stevenson sat back in his seat and yawned.
Cato stood to leave. ‘Okay Mark, let’s bring Jai in, and his mum as a responsible adult of course, and check his version of that night he went out shooting with his dad.’
Keith Stevenson smiled and kept his thoughts to himself.
Jim Buckley’s coffin rolled through the dark red velvet curtains to the strains of ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’. DI Mick Hutchens had never figured Jim for a Procol Harum fan; then again he’d never figured him for anything except maybe a dickhead. At least he had the grim satisfaction of assuring Buckley’s grieving sons that their father’s killer was in custody. Justin Woodward’s appearance before an Albany magistrate the previous day had been headlines on the evening news. Mick Hutchens was flavour of the minute – even the Commissioner had deigned to zap him a congratulatory email. He sensed rehabilitation and reward in the offing. He wanted out of Bogan Town, he wanted Fremantle Detectives. He wanted luscious Lara Sumich but she was as coy as ever. He wanted to bring Cato Kwong back in from the cold; Kwong was too smart and too tenacious for bullshit like Stock Squad, but he had fucked up yet again. Missing the plane and missing Jim Buckley’s funeral. Did he have some kind of self-destruct button he pressed whenever he got too near to the big league?
The mourners were filing out. Cigarette packets and lighters already in hands. Mobiles were being switched back on, messages beeping. Among the crowd he could see Jim Buckley’s sister-in-law, Stuart Miller’s wife; she’d been pointed out to him before the service began. Poor bugger, she looked dreadful. She’d lost her sister and brother-in-law in fairly quick succession and now had a husband blinded and burnt beyond recognition in the hospital. She was staring at the screen of her mobile phone like she had just seen a ghost.
Hutchens went over, fumbling in his head for some words of condolence. ‘Mrs Miller, I’m Detective Inspector Mick Hutchens, I...’
Her face had turned white and there was a look of fury in her eyes. ‘Fucking animal,’ she hissed.
‘What? I...’
‘Look at this.’ She passed him the mobile. It was a text message.
Sorry about ur husband. Feel like have known him years.
Lovely man. DA
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s from Stuart’s phone.’
‘What?’
‘DA. Davey Arthurs has my husband’s phone.’
Hutchens tried desperately to catch up. ‘Davey who?’
Jenny Miller snatched the phone back out of his hand, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘The man in the caravan, you fucking idiot.’
Kerry Stevenson seemed bored. An early morning armed siege, a wounded cop, blood on her kitchen floor, a son seconds
away from being shot and a husband looking at several years in jail. Not a flicker. Cato wondered if there was something missing up top. She had a glossy women’s gossip magazine on the table in front of her, a collection of Hollywood yummy mummies on the cover. Next to her in a hooded top and board shorts sat eleven year old Jai with a half-sucked Chup-a-Chup sticking out of his mouth. Back on Cato’s side of the table, Mark McGowan looked like he could think of a thousand places he’d rather be.
Kerry declined a lawyer. ‘What the fuck we need one of them for?’
Cato couldn’t think of a reply. He took them back to the night of Hai Chen’s death. He focused his questions on Jai, he figured he’d get a bit more sense out of him.
‘What time did you go out shooting with your dad?’
‘Eight-thirtyish.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yeah, the second Simpsons wasn’t finished and I wasn’t going before that, no way.’
Midweek, school days, bedtimes: obviously a loose concept in the Stevenson household.
‘Right. So where did you go?’
‘Usual place, out John Forrest Road near Phillips River. Always heaps out there to shoot.’ Jai paused. ‘Oh yeah, how is the cop? Steve, is that him?’
Cool as a cucumber. Inquiring about the man he’d shot in the back this morning, as if asking after somebody with flu. Great joke.
Cato didn’t give him the satisfaction. ‘Fine. Thanks for asking. Get anything that night?’
Jai Stevenson looked at Cato like he was a moron. Of course he got something. ‘Five rabbits, a fox, and an emu, kept that for Millie.’
‘Millie?’
‘The cat, she loves it.’
‘She doesn’t have to fucken clean it, skin it, and chop it up does she?’ muttered Kerry. ‘Stinks the place out.’
‘So do you with your cigarettes.’ Jai’s eyes darkened.
‘Watch your lip.’ Kerry Stevenson pointed a nicotine-stained index finger at her son’s face.
Jai dabbed at his scar, an involuntary reflex; he was doubly furious when he realised what she’d made him do. Kerry smirked, she’d hit home.
Cato tapped his pen on the table as if in deep thought and also to remind everybody where they were and why. ‘What time did you finish?’
Jai shrugged theatrically. ‘Dunno, late.’
‘Did you come straight home?’
He looked Cato straight in the eye and said, ‘Yes.’
They’d been prepared for this since day one.
‘You sure?’
‘Yeah, dead sure.’ A spark of amusement flickered in the boy’s dark eyes.
In for a penny, thought Cato. ‘I think this is what happened. Your dad got a phone call some time after 11.00. He drove over to the airport. You were with him. You met the Chinese man there. Mr Chen. Right so far?’
Jai looked up at the window, feigned bored.
‘There was an argument. It got violent. You had the gun and you decided to help your dad out. You shot the Chinaman didn’t you?’
‘No.’
The dark eyes held just a hint of bravely held-back tears, the voice soft and so genuine. A performance like that in court would win hands-down on the day. Cato had what he wanted, he had the truth, but he knew he’d never be able to prove it. This doe-eyed eleven year old had shot two men in the last couple of weeks, one of them had died. He was getting a taste for it and he was going to get away with it. Cato shuddered at the thought of what this kid might be capable of in the future.
Kerry Stevenson fidgeted with her cigarette packet. ‘You done now?’
35
Friday, October 17th. Midafternoon.
There should have been celebratory drinks or something, a ritual to wind everything up. The case of Flipper the headless torso was solved. It was Keith Stevenson and/or little Jai, with the gun, at the airport. But nobody was in the mood. Senior Constable Steve Dempster had been airlifted to a hospital in Perth with a bullet in his back. His colleague, Corey Withers, was lining up the first of many counselling sessions having soiled himself on the Stevenson staircase. Everybody knew the chances of Jai Stevenson facing any real consequences were remote. Cato surveyed the scenery as it sped past him on the road from Ravensthorpe back to Hopetoun. Some days it was vivid, lush and grand, a timeless tableau bigger than all of us and reassuringly so. Today it looked grey, bleak, and mean.
Black clouds billowed and boiled in the western sky. The wind had whipped up and thick drops of rain spattered the windscreen. It wasn’t just the shooting of Dempster and general disillusionment with the likely outcome that had dampened the idea of a celebration. In truth, nobody really cared about Flipper in the first place, nobody except Cato Kwong. Flipper had become Hai Chen who turned out to be a greedy little mongrel ripping off his colleagues and countrymen. Hai Chen, an itinerant Chinaman brought in to fill a labour shortage, an outsider and an interloper. Not very welcome and only barely tolerated.
Cato fitted that bill too. A wandering Chinaman called in to fill Mick Hutchens’ labour shortage. An outsider and an interloper, not welcome and only barely tolerated. Certainly Desk Sergeant Bernie Tilbrook had made no secret of his contempt. Mark McGowan for a while had shown some grudging respect for the tenacious oddity that was Cato Kwong. Case closed, McGowan’s mind was clearly back on returning to Albany and the next job. Released from his bondage, he seemed to have shaken Cato Kwong out of his system like a dog coming in from the rain.
Cato needed to snap out of this. Cresting the rise that brought him down into Hopetoun, he switched the wipers to full bore to cope with the deluge pounding the windscreen. Through the gloom he could see at the end of the road the foaming steel grey Southern Ocean battering the groyne, walls of spray rearing over the spot where Jim Buckley had been found. Today it looked like the bleakest and loneliest place to die. Cato glanced over at the empty passenger seat where Buckley should have been. Jim’s funeral would be over by now. Cato Kwong, obsessive as ever, had not been there to send him off, to show some respect for a colleague: so much for feeling responsible for the man’s death.
The recruitment poster said Step Forward ... but just when we need you, you Walk Away.
Greg Fisher and Tess Maguire had him pegged. He pulled up on the gravel of the motel car park and turned off the engine. He sat staring through the windscreen, trying not to think about anything much.
The crime-scene tape was gone. Jim Buckley’s room must have been released by Goldflam that morning; one of the forensic loose ends he was finally able to tie up before heading back to Albany. The door was open and a cleaning trolley was parked outside. The last time Cato had stood so near this threshold, Lara Sumich had been coming out. Why was that? Something about hearing a noise and wanting to check the room was secure. At the time he’d taken it at face value, he was off the case and had no cause to give it second thought. Now Mick Hutchens had raised doubts about Lara. Whether or not his doubts or concerns had the purest of motives was another matter. Was it just that he wanted to get inside her knickers or did he know something more about Lara that he was holding back? Knowing Hutchens, you’d have to say it was about fifty-fifty.
Cato popped his head around the door, nobody there. There was a bustle of movement behind him.
‘I was just about to start cleaning that room.’
It was Pam, she had a determined set to her fleshy jawline; this was a room left unused for too long while good business went elsewhere. She was over the drug syndicate thing now that most of the police had decamped. She’d probably moved on to new rumours.
Cato smiled a greeting, adding in a wistful sad look for effect. ‘Sergeant Buckley was my colleague, my partner. I just wanted to take a last quick look. Old times’ sake.’
Pam looked at him like he was a bit mad. ‘It’s just a room. The other blokes will have taken everything out by now.’ She looked at his doleful face a moment too long and relented. ‘A couple of minutes, okay?’
Cato scanned the room not sure what he was
looking for. It was a mirror image of his own, functional, easy-clean mauve carpet and a queen bed, unmade, with a heavy synthetic multi-coloured floral covering. The kind that have the big fold-over envelopes for the pillows and always feel too heavy and too hot, even in winter, before sliding off in the middle of the night and leaving you shivering. There was nothing in the drawers of the bedside cabinets except the Bible and phone directory. The wardrobe sported only empty wire hangers, spare bedding and pillows. There was nothing here to advance the case. On his way out he glanced over at the waste bin and peered inside; an old West Australian newspaper stood to limp attention. Forensics had obviously not deemed it to be of interest. Cato picked it out; he flicked through the pages to the middle section where he knew he’d find the crosswords. Jim Buckley had filled in most of the quickie but the cryptic was untouched. Cato folded the paper and pocketed it. He had just looted a dead man’s crossword – how low can you go.
Pam the Cleaner returned with a firm smile of dismissal, Cato reciprocated. He knew he really should head over to Tess Maguire’s place and pick up the Buckley file and disks but after an early morning armed siege and a resolution to the Chen case he was, to put it mildly, stuffed. He nudged open the door to his own room, chucked his phone and keys on the bedside table and fell on to the bed. He kicked off his shoes, reached for the crossword and a pen and flicked on the reading light. Diana’s debut is a no-show. Easy. ‘Disappearance’. Positive result of a snap decision. Doddle. ‘Photograph’. He was asleep halfway through reading the next clue.
Cato woke up and reached out for the flashing phone vibrating on his bedside table.
‘It’s me. Hutchens. What happened to you?’
‘What?’
‘The funeral, where were you?’
Cato finally shook himself into the moment. He looked at his watch in the gloom: 3.30. He could see daylight through the crack in the curtains – 3.30 in the afternoon.
‘So?’ Hutchens was waiting for an answer.
‘Sorry. I got ... sidetracked.’
