by Peter Corris
‘Why?’
‘Don’t talk.’ He lifted the gun a fraction. ‘Just go.’
I was in no condition for side-stepping, ducking or for grabbing shotguns through wire screens. I went.
I was swearing, and my head was hurting as I drove back towards Glebe; if I’d had a dog I would have kicked it. I was driving fast down Cummins Street towards the turn up to Victoria Road, and when I touched the brake there was nothing there. My stomach dropped out as I pumped uselessly and started to flail through the gears and grab the handbrake, which has never had much grip. I fought the steering and felt the wheels lift as I wrestled the Falcon left at the bottom of the hill. The road was clear, the tyres screamed and I got round. I ran the car into the gutter, closed my eyes and shook; the tin fence at the bottom of the hill had been rushing towards me and what you mostly meet on the right around the corner are trucks—heavy ones. I felt as if I was walking on stilts when I got out to examine the car: there was no brake fluid in the cylinder. It’s not a good way to kill someone; what if the victim thumps the brake a few times in the first hundred yards? But it is a good way to scare a man, like pushing a wall over on him. The more I thought about it the angrier I got.
I flagged down a cab and went back to Vincent Street. There was a lane running down behind the Frenchman’s place, and I went down that and climbed over his decaying fence. The yard was a tangle of pumpkin vines, weeds and many, many strata of animal, vegetable and mineral rubbish. I crept past a rusting shed and almost whistled when I saw the back of the house: there were about twenty broken window panes on the glassed-in verandah, some smashed completely, others starred and cracked around neat holes.
I got my gun out and sneaked up to the side of the verandah; the Frenchman was sitting in a patch of sun at a small table with a flagon of red wine and a racing guide on it. A breeze through the bullet holes was stirring the paper and he moved his glass to hold it down. I couldn’t see the shotgun. I wrenched the door open and went in; the Frenchman barely moved before I had the .38 in his ear.
‘Sit down, Frenchy,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll have a glass with you. Where’s the popgun?’
He jerked his head at the door leading into the house and I went through into the kitchen, if you call a stove and sink a kitchen. The shotgun was leaning against a wall and I broke it open and took out the shell. I rinsed a dirty glass in rusty water. Back on the verandah the Frenchman was marking the guide with a pencil stub. He ignored me. I poured out some of the red and took a drink; it was old, not good old, stale old. It tasted as if it had been filtered through used tea leaves. I poured my glass into his.
‘Who did the shooting?’ I said.
He shrugged and made a mark with the pencil.
‘Don’t come over all Gallic on me, Pierre. I’ve had a wall drop on me, a shotgun pointed at me and my brakes taken out, and it all has to do with you.’
He looked up; his eyes were gummy and hair from his nostrils had tangled up with a moustache as wild as his backyard. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. The shotgun? I protect myself, that’s all.’ He put some of the red down his throat as if he liked it.
‘Protection? From me?’
He shrugged again. ‘He shoots my house all to hell and tells me don’t talk to you. So I don’t. Now you have the gun, so I must talk to you.’
I put the gun away and sat on a bench under the window, then I realised what a good target that made me and I moved across the room.
‘Who told you not to talk to me?’
‘On the telephone, how do I know? Bullets everywhere, then the phone. Don’t talk to Hardy. Hardy is tall and skinny with bandages. So.’ He opened his hands expressively, they shook and he put them back on the table.
He was scared but he drank some more wine and got less scared. I offered him fifty bucks and cab fare to Central Station and he accepted. He said he could go to Gosford for a few days, and I said that sounded like a good idea. After I’d given him the money he got out a bottle of wine with a respectable label on it and we drank that. He gave me names of people who’d profit if Pat’s dogs lost. The names didn’t mean anything to me. I asked him if these men would dope dogs, and he smiled and said something in French. It might have been ‘Do bears live in the forest?’ but French was never my strong point at Maroubra High.
I spent the early part of the afternoon getting my car towed to a garage and persuading a reluctant mechanic to give it priority. Then I went home and rested; the red wine buzzed in my head as a background to the throbbing pain, but after a sleep and a shower I felt better. I collected the car and drove to Rozelle to confer with Pat and pick up Terry, who was visiting there. Pat’s street is narrow and jam-packed with houses, but the blocks are deep, and Pat keeps his dogs out the back. He once showed me the kennels and the mattresses they sunbathe on and the walking machine they use when it’s too hot or wet for the roads; it was like a country club except that the members were thin and fit. I didn’t like them much and they didn’t like me; without their muzzles I liked them even less.
Terry was out the front chatting to the neighbours when I pulled up. They’d known her since she started knocking a ball against the factory wall opposite, and even though they saw her on television now their attitude to her hadn’t changed nor hers to them—it was that sort of street. Terry and I went inside to talk to Pat, who was drinking tea in the kitchen.
Pat is a widower of five years’ standing but his house-keeping is as good as the Frenchman’s was bad. Terry made coffee in the well-ordered kitchen; Pat tried to talk about my injuries but I wouldn’t let him.
‘The Frenchy gave me these names,’ I said. ‘What d’you reckon?’ I read him the names and he chewed them over one by one. He sipped tea and smoked a rolled cigarette: Pat is small, brown and nuggety; his wife was six inches taller than him and gave her build and looks to Terry. Pat must have contributed warmth and charm because he has plenty of both. He was loyal to the game he was in too; he ruled out all the men I named as non-starters in the doping stakes. Two he knew personally, one was decrepit he said, and another was too stupid.
‘It’s none of them, mate,’ Pat said. ‘Could be some new bloke the Frenchy doesn’t know about.’
‘Yeah, I’ll have to check that angle. Takes time though; this’ll be costing you, Pat.’
‘Worth it.’ He puffed smoke at me and I coughed. ‘Sorry, forgot you were a clean-lunger, like Terry. Good on you.’ He drew luxuriously on the cigarette.
Terry and I went to a pub down near the wharf in Balmain. You can eat outside there, and hear yourself talk above the acoustic bush band. They have a couple of very heavy people to deal with the drunks and the food is good. Terry seems to eat mainly lettuce, and drink hardly at all; I was manfully doing my share of both food and drink when she told me that two of Pat’s owners had pulled their dogs out.
‘Hear about the doping, did they?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘I thought that was a close-kept secret.’
‘So did I, so did Dad. What does it mean, d’you think?’
I ate and drank and thought for a while. ‘Sounds as if the doper spread the word.’
‘That wouldn’t make sense.’ She took a tiny sip of wine, as if even half a glass would ruin her backhand.
‘It might, if the idea is just to put Pat out of business, not to actually fix races. Does that open up a line of thought?’
‘No.’
‘Well, try this; it could be revenge.’
She almost choked. ‘On Dad? Come on.’ Then she saw that I was serious. ‘Revenge,’ she said slowly. ‘We go in a bit for that on the circuit, but it’s not common in real life, is it?’
That’s another thing I like about Terry, although she’s serious about her tennis she doesn’t think it’s ‘real life’; she won’t go on the gin when it’s over. ‘No, it’s not common,’ I said. ‘In fact it’s rare. “Maintain your rage” and all that, people can’t do it mostly. But it does happen; we’d
better ask Pat about his enemies.’
‘I’m sure he hasn’t any.’
‘Everyone has.’ She didn’t like that too much; she doesn’t like my suspicious nature or the work I do, really. It’s a problem, and we spent the rest of the dinner talking about other things and getting over the bad spot.
Back in Rozelle Pat was still up, working on his books. We went through the tea and coffee ritual again and I asked Pat if he’d made any enemies in the game.
‘Few,’ he said. I glanced up at Terry.
‘Any that’d want to put you out of business?’
He blew smoke and deliberated. ‘Only one I reckon. Bloke was a vet and I gave evidence against him for doping. He didn’t like it, and said he’d get me.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about him?’
‘Couldn’t be him, mate. He’s in gaol; he went to Queensland, got mixed up in something, and I heard he got ten years.’
‘When was this?’
‘Oh, four, five years ago.’
‘He could be out, Pat,’ I said.
Terry and I went back to her flat at Rushcutters Bay, near the White City courts, and she acknowledged that I could be on to something. We left it there and went to bed; it hurt a bit, what with the bruises and all, but it didn’t hurt enough to stop us. The ex-vet’s name was Leslie Victor Mahony, and it took me two phone calls and half an hour to find out that he’d been released from gaol in Brisbane three months back having served four and a half years of a ten-year sentence for embezzlement and fraud. I spent the next two days confirming that Mahony had come to Sydney and failing to locate him. There was a definite feeling that Doc Mahony was in town, but no one knew where, or they weren’t saying.
At the end of the second day I was dispirited. Terry was playing an exhibition match but I didn’t feel like going, and I didn’t feel like reporting my lack of progress to her afterwards. The case was turning into a fair bitch and, weakling that I am, I got drunk. I started on beer when I got home, went on to wine with my meal and on to whisky after that. I woke up with a mouth like a kangaroo pouch. I stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, telling myself how not smoking reduced hangovers. All that did was make me wish I had a cigarette.
I was drinking coffee, and thinking speculatively about eggs, when the phone rang.
The voice said: ‘I hear you’re looking for Doc Mahony.’
I said: ‘That’s right, who’s this?’
The voice said: ‘Nobody. How well do you know Heathcote?’
‘I know it.’
‘You get there, and pick up a road that runs along the railway, going south. Where the bitumen stops you go right on an unmade road for two miles. You take a left fork, go down a dip and there’s a shack on your right. Mahony’s there.’
‘You a friend of his?’
‘I wouldn’t piss on him. If you want him, he’s there.’
He hung up and I tried to remember whether I’d heard the voice before. I thought I had but I’ve heard a hell of a lot of voices. I didn’t like it at all; it looked to me as if a .22 had been used on the Frenchman’s windows and a .22 bullet can kill you. An anonymous phone call, a shack in the bush—it sounded like a trap. It sounds crazy and probably had something to do with the brain cells I’d burnt out the night before, but I just couldn’t get too frightened about a vet. I checked over the .38 carefully, took some extra ammunition and went to Heathcote.
I’ve heard people talk fondly about Heathcote as an unspoiled place of their childhood; it’s hard to imagine it like that now. The sprawl on the western side of the highway is the standard, sterile, red brick horror-land where the garage dominates the outside of the house and the TV set the inside. Over the highway and the railway line though, the area has retained some dusty charm—if you like faded weatherboard houses with old wooden fences and roofs rusting quietly away. Up to a point I followed the directions I’d been given, but I’m not that green; I had a map of the tracks leading into the national park behind and beyond and I marked where the shack would be and circled up around behind it. I stopped at a point which I calculated would be about half a mile from the shack; it was a still, quiet day with the birds subdued in the sun. I closed the car door softly and started down the rough track towards a patch of forest behind the track. Things jumped and wriggled in the grass beside the track and I resolved to be very, very careful so that they wouldn’t be jumping and wriggling over me.
The shack, as I looked at it through the trees, was exactly that—an ancient, weatherboard affair that had lost its pretensions to paint long ago. Grass grew in the guttering and sprouted out through the lower boards. I squatted behind a tree for ten minutes soaking up the atmosphere—no sign of a car, no wisps of smoke in the air, no coughing. I did a complete circle of the place at about seventy-five yards’ distance, the way they’d taught me in Malaya. Still nothing. There are two theories about approaching a possibly defended place like this: one says you should keep circling and come in closer each time; the other has it that this causes too much movement and you should come in straight. The first way was out because there was a clear patch about fifty yards deep in front of the shack and I’m a straight-line man myself, anyway.
I made it down to the back door without any trouble. The building was a tiny one-pitch, three rooms at most. The noise I could hear inside was snoring. I gave it a few minutes, but it was real snoring, complete with irregular rhythm and grunts. I eased the door open and went in; floorboards creaked and the door grated, but Doc Mahony wasn’t worried—he was lying on a bed in his underwear with a big, dreamy smile on his face—maybe he was dreaming of when he was young and slim and sober, which he wasn’t any more. There was an empty bottle of Bundaberg rum on the floor and one half full on a chair beside the bed.
It was a dump comparable to the Frenchman’s and the rural setting didn’t help it any; you could hardly see through the dusty windows and the kikuyu poked up through the floor. I couldn’t find the .22, which worried me, and I was also worried by the empty tins and the food and water bowls in the back room—I hadn’t seen any sign of a dog. I filled the empty rum bottle with water and went back to the bedchamber. The Doc tried to ignore the first few drops but then I got some good ones down his nose and into his mouth and he spluttered and coughed and woke up.
His face was pale, grimy with dirt and whiskers, and lumpy like his body. He had a few thin strands of hair plastered to his head with sweat, and a few teeth, but much of the beauty of the human face and form was lacking. He opened his eyes and his voice was surprisingly pleasant-sounding.
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m a friend of Pat Kenneally, Doc. You remember Pat?’
He remembered all right, alarm leapt into his pale, bleary eyes and he made a movement with his hand. He changed the movement into a grab for the rum but I wasn’t fooled. I pushed the bottle out of reach and felt under the bed, and came up with a shoebox. I took my gun out and pointed it at Doc’s meaty nose.
‘Lie back. Get some rest.’
Inside the box was a notebook with Pat’s address and phone number written on the first page. The next few pages were taken up with the names and descriptions of greyhounds. Some dog owners were listed with telephone numbers and addresses. Also in the box was an array of pills and powders, a couple of hypodermics and some bottles of fluid with rubber membrane tops.
‘Nasty,’ I said. ‘Poor little doggies.’
He didn’t say anything, but reached for the bottle again. There were still a couple of inches of water in the bottle and I poured enough rum into it to darken it up a bit. I handed it to him.
‘You’ll ruin your health taking it straight. Now, let’s hear about the bricks and the car and the bullets through the Frenchman’s house.’
He took a long swig of the diluted rum, swilled it around in his mouth and spat it against the wall. He followed this display of his manners with a racking cough and a long, gurgling swallow from the bottle.
‘I don’t
know what you’re talking about,’ he gasped, and then took another swallow.
I tapped the notebook. ‘What’s this—research for a book?’
‘I wanted to get Kenneally,’ he said in the voice that was all he had left of his profession and self-respect, ‘but I don’t know anything about that other stuff—bricks and bullets.’
‘It’s God’s own truth, Hardy.’ The voice came from behind me; it was the voice on the phone and now I didn’t even need to turn around to know who it was. I felt something hard jab the nape of my neck. ‘Put the gun on the bed, Hardy. Do it slow.’
I did it very slowly, and then I turned. Johnny Dragovic had scarcely changed at all in the past six years since I’d seen him in court when my evidence had helped to get him eight years for armed robbery. Johnny was a tough kid from Melbourne who’d decided to take Sydney on; he knocked over a couple of bottle shops, and moved up to TAB agencies, with some success. The Board hired me and some other private men and I got lucky, heard some whispers, and we were waiting for Johnny at the right time and place. Blows were struck, and Johnny turned out to be not quite as tough as he thought. But he was tough enough, and the automatic pistol in his hand made him even tougher. I said, ‘Dragovic,’ stupidly.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Glad you remember.’
My guts were turning over and I concentrated on getting my balance right and watching him carefully, in case he gave me a chance. I didn’t think he would.
‘What’s it all about then?’ I said.
‘It’s about eight years, five at Grafton.’ The way he said it spoke volumes: he wasn’t there to thank me for rehabilitating him.
‘Put it behind you,’ I said. ‘You’re not old.’
The gun didn’t move. ‘You bastard. I’ve kept going by thinking what I could do to you.’
‘Thinking like that’ll get you back there.’
‘Shut up! I was nineteen when I got to Grafton, what do you reckon that was like?’
‘Scary,’ I said. I thought that if I kept him talking something might happen, he might even talk himself out of whatever he had in mind.
