The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

‘Just keep out of trouble.’

  Good woman, Peg. The belly was a worry, though. I had spent much of my early career immersed in the underbelly of life. Now I was all belly and no under.

  I gathered my thoughts in that dark street. I could see the faint outline of Ali Baba’s cheesy grin on the unilluminated sign outside the storage facility. He too had a spherical belly. I didn’t understand why a storage facility, meant to keep your chattels safe in this dangerous world, would name itself after a legendary thief. Never mind. Nothing made much sense to me in the twenty-first century.

  I took the old diary from my pocket. I could feel its dry cover and spine in my dry old hands.

  Someone, be it Junior or his assassin, had shown tremendous interest in this prehistoric volume. It mentioned Obe’s death, but just in passing. Nothing dramatic.

  What was it that had driven someone to break into cage 143 at Ali Baba’s, rifle through some battered book cartons, remove the volume, study it, and place it at the scene of a murder?

  It took me back, the diary — just holding it in the cabin of the car late at night. It returned me to my fake walnut desk at Sydney police headquarters, a magic carpet I thought would deliver me all the way to the rank of commissioner. Then Obe died, and everything changed.

  I continued to turn up at that tatty desk. But from that day onward, I felt untethered, vulnerable.

  I never shared my theory about Obe’s death with anybody. I was young. Wet behind the ears. I still didn’t know who to trust — besides Obe — in the great labyrinthine machine that is any police force. While I was watching all of them, they were watching me. Was this young detective one of us? Would he have our back? Would he keep his mouth shut when he had to? Avert his eyes when necessary?

  On some nights Obe and I used to catch a quick meal in a noodle house down in Chinatown. It was there, over green tea and duck pancakes, that he took me under his wing and gave me a few survival tips.

  ‘Forget about eyes in the back of your head, kid,’ he’d say, tucking a shallot back into his folded pancake. ‘Grow some on the sides as well.’

  He was a family man. He was well respected. He had collared a murderer by successfully proving that the seeds found on the accused’s trousers came from only one plant, at a certain time of year, which just happened to be minding its business and growing heartily not far from the body of the victim.

  That prosecution had earned him kudos, and a reputation for being what kids today might call a nerd. And nerds were dangerous in a police force. They usually had smarts. And smarts were unpredictable.

  Obe knew where the bodies were buried. Knew who was crooked and who was straight. Who was connected to whom. He understood the lingo. The little tests of character other officers threw at me, the newbie. He had the radar of a bat. Nothing, and I mean nothing, avoided his attention.

  So I was schooled up when he allegedly killed himself. And I had a theory, too. Hubert Dunkle Senior would never take his own life. Hubert Dunkle Senior was murdered, in a police lavatory, in the heart of a major police complex, in a place reserved for the most private human business of police officers. Hubert Dunkle Senior was slain by another police officer.

  I knew who the killer was, too. I was a damn detective, wasn’t I? It took me years of close listening, and a few lucky breaks when a piece of the puzzle here and another there fell into my lap. But in the end I knew who killed Obe and why. And just knowing that gave my daily life as a New South Wales police officer a certain degree of tension.

  A lot, actually. A hell of a lot.

  So I did what Obe trained me to do. I watched my back. I did everything by the book. I never breathed a word to anyone and I never took a misstep. If I did, I knew I’d join Obe on the dishonourable list of depressed officers who couldn’t cut it, who couldn’t make it, who took the coward’s way out.

  I progressed through the ranks. I never had definitive proof of who murdered Obe. You rarely get that inside the police machine. For all its energies, its sole focus is towards the big, bad world outside. But sometimes your gut tells you something and you know it’s right. Good gut instinct maketh a good copper.

  I kept an eye on my suspect throughout my career. I watched him rise, saw the pictures of him with the commissioner, and him as deputy. He was the model officer.

  I went to his retirement party. Stood at the back of the room at Dick’s Hotel in Balmain and watched them shower him with praise. I slipped out before I had to shake his hand.

  When he too died, an old man on a sweet pension, I wished him luck in hell.

  And now I went to the locked entrance of the storage facility and let myself in. I took the huge lift to the first floor.

  I found cage 143 and checked the padlock and bolt with my pocket torch. It was pristine. Unscathed.

  Removing the padlock, I entered the cage.

  I hadn’t been here in a year. I didn’t like storage cages. They were the unkempt corner of the cage renter’s mind; that little part of ourselves we try hard to ignore. It was dusty in there. A sheet was still draped over a rusting fan on a stand. Old garden tools were stacked in the corner. The book boxes were at the far end.

  I stood and looked at the boxes. If my police diary for 1972 was missing from the small number I’d souvenired and stacked in one of those boxes, then someone had been in here and lifted it. If the diary was still there, then the one in my pocket was a fake. It certainly didn’t look like a fake.

  But who in their right mind would counterfeit such a thing? And for what purpose?

  I rubbed my hands together. ‘Okay, 1972,’ I said to myself. ‘Here we come.’

  Then someone said ‘Oi’ behind me, and it echoed through Ali Baba’s, and as I turned the cold metal scoop of a shovel caught me flush in the face.

  ~ * ~

  5

  When I came to in the police holding cell, having been walloped with a garden spade and had my nose substantially rearranged, I had a hazy vision of a John Travolta-like figure circa Saturday Night Fever standing beyond the bars.

  The apparition was tall, wearing flared trousers, and a nylon and largely unbuttoned duckbill-collared shirt revealing enough chest hair to make winter blankets for an entire village in Uzbekistan.

  ‘Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive,’ I said to the ghost.

  I had a large white bandaged affixed to the centre of my face. I thought I could feel my nose hairs tickling my left ear.

  ‘You got bail,’ Travolta said, ‘but the boys in blue want a little word before you go.’

  ‘It must be the night fever,’ I garbled.

  ‘Coffee? We need to talk first.’

  ‘How deep is your love? Got any aspirin, by the way?’

  My discotheque angel was no vision. He was Johnny K. Tapas, the Gold Coast’s pre-eminent celebrity lawyer. If you were suing plastic surgeons, seeking damages after scoffing a dodgy oyster in a glamorous Broadbeach restaurant, or defending yourself in a murder case that involved, for example, a yacht full of cocaine, a diamond-encrusted handgun, a transsexual cabaret performer called Lady Bump and a small and impossibly spoiled pet Shih Tzu named Moopie, then Johnny K. Tapas was your man.

  ‘Big night under the mirror ball?’ I asked him after I’d drained a mug of instant.

  ‘I suggest you avoid mirrors for a while,’ Tapas said.

  ‘What’s the charge? Breaking and entering my own storage facility?’

  ‘Impeding a murder investigation. Tampering with a crime scene.’

  ‘Bit low rent for you, Tapas. What’s in it for you?’

  ‘A former client has requested I take very good care of you.’

  ‘That so?’ I said. ‘Why would Ivan the Terrible, Russian computer fraudster and playboy, or Donger, dubiously moustachioed captain of the Bandoleros motorcycle gang, give a fig about me?’

  ‘Wrong clients.’

  ‘Cut the twaddle, Tapas. Who is it?’

  ‘Confidential. Condition of my services.’

  ‘Tha
t so?’

  ‘That’s so.’

  ‘You’re a terrible tease, Tapas.’

  Later, in the interview room, with the fragrant Tapas by my side, the coppers apologised for turning me into a Picasso portrait with the spade to the face.

  They explained that they knew I’d been in Junior’s apartment the night before and had followed me to the Ali Baba storage facility on suspicion of having removed an exhibit from the scene. I was then observed transporting the exhibit to a storage cage in the aforementioned facility, and the officer had attempted to prevent me secreting the aforementioned evidence. They said the aforementioned officer, noting my antecedents as a former police officer and, in more recent times, my involvement in well-publicised incidents that involved various levels of violence, took the necessary measures to ensure the aforementioned evidence was not secreted and that I was delivered into custody.

  ‘Why don’t you take your aforementioned allegations and shove them up your oft-mentioned aft region,’ I said.

  ‘My client is still suffering from his injuries and I request that comment not be used against him in any future proceedings,’ Tapas interjected.

  They said I would be released on bail and that a court order to be lodged later in the morning would prevent me from coming within a 100-metre radius of the murder scene and communicating with any officers involved in the aforementioned murder investigation.

  ‘Oi,’ I said. ‘Whatever.’

  Tapas merely checked his manicured fingernails. ‘Wait outside,’ he said to me.

  Later, in his air-conditioned, imported black Maybach, the cabin gaggingly rich with Tapas’s sticky, icky, sweet aftershave, he asked me why I had such an intense interest in the death of Hubert Dunkle Junior.

  ‘Long story, Tapas. It would require an attention span to digest it.’ I was staring at the little mirror ball dangling from his rear-vision mirror.

  ‘Try me.’ We had stopped at a set of red lights.

  ‘I can hear your meter running, Tapas, and I’m not buying. It’s history.’

  ‘Then you won’t need this,’ he said. He reached into the back seat and retrieved a large brown envelope. He dropped it in my lap.

  It was a full photocopy of my 1972 diary. From when I’d gone nigh-nigh courtesy of a garden spade to slipping into the whoofy Maybach, someone had copied the old diary, bundled it up and slipped it into the hands of the coast’s most fashion-challenged legal mind.

  ‘You cheeky dog, Tapas, how did you get it?’

  ‘Johnny K. Tapas got history, too, my friend,’ he said. ‘Old friends. Old favours.’

  Old Spice more like it, I wanted to say.

  ‘I owe you,’ I said, holding the diary copy.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  At home, Peg ignored me. Which was good, because it gave me a chance to properly examine my old handiwork.

  I had arrived at the supposition that the discovery of my diary at the murder scene was no accident. It had been planted there to lure me. But why had I been reeled in? And by whom?

  I repaired to my study, sadly neglected since my Russian-assassin fiasco last year, and flicked on my trusty and reliable super-bright desk lamp. I made myself comfy, brought out my jumbo-sized magnifying glass, and started on page 1, 1 January 1972.

  I had an almost out-of-body experience going through those old entries. It was a flickering slideshow of my past, and long forgotten scenes and people’s faces and snatches of conversation whirled about me in that quiet room that afternoon.

  Trust me, I am not a melancholy man. But it’s a strange thing, to meet your younger self once again. He is the stranger that lives within you, and if you don’t like him, there’s very little you can do about it.

  I remained open-minded about the young stranger of me.

  Around the month of March in the diary, I noticed something peculiar. Between two sentences in an innocuous entry — something about a break and enter — was the world’s smallest number. It was tiny. The footprint of an ant. Written in pencil. But it was definitely a number. The number seven.

  A week later in the diary I found another, a three. By the time I got to 21 July — the date of Obe’s death — I had discovered nine different numbers.

  I wrote them in sequence. I had a hunch. I went back to the entries between January and April. Sure enough, my miniature calligrapher had secreted a zero in a note on an informant I was cultivating.

  I sat back and stared at the numerical sequence. It didn’t take Einstein to work it out.

  It was a telephone number. In Brisbane.

  I got on the phone, and after three rings someone picked up at the other end.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ a male voice said. ‘About time.’

  ~ * ~

  6

  I was due to meet my mystery diary calligrapher at Samuel Griffith’s grave on the top of the hill that presided over Brisbane’s Toowong Cemetery.

  Just what I needed. An informant with a dramatic sense of occasion.

  This guy had thus far entangled me in a murder investigation by breaking into my storage cage at Nerang, pillaged my private papers, indirectly given me a broken nose, left a microscopic phone number secreted within my old police diary and now wanted to rendezvous at the grave of a Queensland pillar of justice.

  The last thing I needed, with a shattered proboscis, was a meeting with some dipstick who’d seen too many Humphrey Bogart movies.

  Still, with Peg not speaking to me and the Dunkle murder gnawing away at my aching brain, I headed to Brisbane in my old Kombi. And yes, I still have her, despite my near-fatal run-in with the villains from the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe a couple of years back, and a few minor mechanical niggles such as snapped accelerator cables, oil leaks, failed brakes and — oh yes — the motor blowing up and requiring a total recondition. But what’s new in the world of the Kombinationskraftwagen?

  Before my little assignation in the land of the dead, however, I needed to pay a visit to Queensland’s state archives, south of the CBD.

  I had been thinking about a woman, you see. A lot. I had been thinking about the young, blonde Susan Haag who had taken her own life in a small bedroom in the Ace Royale apartments on the Gold Coast in 1971. Why, nearly four decades later, had Junior died in a modern apartment in the air space above the old Ace Royale? Was there a connection?

  I had been vaguely familiar with the Haag case as a young detective. I’d been close to the late Obe Dunkle, who’d also apparently suicided. And I’d last met Junior at his daddy’s graveside. There were dots here, and I needed to join them.

  It was time to call in some favours. This time, I tapped my son on the shoulder. In between his incessant tweeting he had actually found the time to establish a relationship with a lovely girl, who I’ll simply call X.

  X was an attractive, bookish young lady who had seen something in my boy and, I’ll be honest, performed the impossible. She’d got him into reading books.

  To see my son with a book is like going big-game hunting in East Africa and stumbling across a hippopotamus who’s making martinis with a silver shaker at sunset. And that is an exercise in only slight improbability.

  So X had earned my unswerving admiration. She had expressed to me an interest in criminal cases, and in particular the monolithic Fitzgerald Inquiry, which had been the best show in Brisbane town for two years in the late eighties.

  There was one minor problem. Whenever we met, she looked at me with that ever-so-slight, yet unmistakable revulsion that a young girlfriend or boyfriend registers when looking at the parents of partners, and thinking, my God, is that what I’m getting into in forty years’ time?

  This is completely understandable, and I empathised with dear X. I often looked at myself in the same way.

  Nevertheless, on this morning I arrived at the slightly shed-like state archives and met her for a coffee, and she slipped me copies of some vital documents concerning the life and death of the late Susan Haag. All had non-publication court
orders on them, prohibiting their public perusal for between sixty-five and one hundred years.

  I couldn’t wait that long to get to the bottom of my suspicions about Senior and Junior.

  I had about five hours before my appointment at Samuel Griffiths’ grave, so I immediately drove to New Farm Park with my cache from X, parked, picked up a takeaway coffee from the snack wagon near the kids’ swings, returned to the van, pulled back the Kombi’s sliding door and in a cool breeze off the river settled into some serious reading.

  ‘Talk to me, Susan,’ I said, opening the X files, blowing the steam off my latte.

  I immediately wondered if X, possible future daughter-in-law, had browsed any of the material. She probably had, little bookish minx. And she was probably surprised at what she read.