Sydney Noir

by John Dale

  Six months earlier a neighbor had collared me on the staircase. He lived in the apartment below mine. Heavyset, careless shaver, always wore a crumpled sports coat and Hush Puppies. He wore a wedding ring but lived on his own, did his laundry on Saturday nights, and rarely bothered to pick up his mail. We’d nodded to each other a few times but never had a conversation. I knew his name—Fowler—from the intercom list beside the front door.

  I was pretty certain I had seen him at Haklander’s barbecue but Fowler would have been too drunk to remember. I had assumed he was another of Haklander’s drivers. Haklander liked to have more drivers than taxis for them to drive; it kept everyone hungry. It turned out that Fowler was a detective at Manly. It was possible he moonlighted as a cab driver. Plenty of cops did.

  He stopped me on the stairs and said, “Quite a social life you’ve got going up there.”

  I didn’t reply.

  Fowler leaned forward until his face was a few inches from mine. “I know you’re dealing.”

  “Not me,” I said.

  “Don’t fuck with me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Fowler stood aside courteously to let another tenant pass us on the staircase and waited while she let herself into her apartment. When she’d bolted the door behind her, Fowler asked, “Do I look stupid?”

  I’ve never been good with rhetorical questions. What was the right answer? That he was stupid and didn’t look it or that he wasn’t stupid and did? “What do you want?” I asked.

  Fowler reached into his coat and took out a packet of cigarettes with a picture of a gangrenous foot and the words, Smoking causes peripheral vascular disease. He shook a cigarette out of the packet and offered one to me. I told him I didn’t smoke.

  Fowler followed me upstairs. I kept my stash under a loose floorboard in the second bedroom. There was a small chest of drawers over it. As Fowler helped himself to the stash—and eleven hundred dollars in cash that I was going to use to pay the rent—he said, “You should be more careful.”

  I wasn’t sure which of us was more pathetic—Fowler for shaking me down or me for letting him do it. The bastard walked away looking smug but he missed out on another five hundred I kept hidden behind the microwave.

  * * *

  An hour after my conversation with Haklander, I heard a fist banging on the front door. It was Fowler. This time he hadn’t brought his manners with him. I had to let him in before he broke the door. He pushed past me and went straight to the spare bedroom. I stood in the doorway while he shoved the chest of drawers away and pulled out the loose floorboard. He lay on the floor groping between the bearers. “Where is it?” he demanded.

  “Where’s what?”

  Fowler got to his feet and said, “I could arrest you now.”

  “On what charge?”

  He didn’t answer. I knew what he was after, but who had told him about it? It had to be Haklander. Fowler let me stew for a while. Then he said, “The Colombian. I know he left something behind.”

  “Did he?”

  Fowler walked toward me. “You’re out of your depth, son. Tell me where it is.”

  I hesitated. I had allowed him to rip me off once but I wasn’t planning to let it happen again. “It’s somewhere safe,” I said. “Not here.”

  Fowler stood so close that I could smell the lunch on his breath. “Don’t play games with me, son.”

  “Fifty,” I said.

  His mouth fell open. “What?”

  “Fifty thousand. The stuff’s worth two hundred. All I want is fifty.”

  For a while Fowler stood there wheezing like an old Labrador. Then he started laughing. On his way out he said, “You’ve got some balls.”

  * * *

  My mobile was ringing. I looked at my watch. It was just after ten in the morning. I had drunk too much gin. The sun was blazing through the broken blinds. I rolled over and picked up the phone. It was Haklander. He said we had to talk about something, the oil gauge or the broken door handle on the taxi. He sounded flustered. I said, “I’m not driving today. Can’t it wait?”

  Haklander said he needed to come and discuss it in person. There was a pause and then he asked me for my address.

  “My address?”

  “Yeah,” said Haklander. “Where do you live?”

  I sat up. Haklander already knew where I lived, although he had never been inside the apartment. It sounded like a warning. I had the feeling that somebody was with him and telling him what to say. Ramirez? Or the people Ramirez was working for? I wondered how long Haklander had been dealing with the Colombians. Was it cocaine that had paid for that mansion in Bellevue Hill?

  Suddenly the phone went dead. Haklander’s visitors must have realized what he was up to. I doubted it would take them long to get what they needed. I threw on some clothes, grabbed the cocaine from the speaker cabinet, and stuffed some spare clothes in a holdall along with whatever cash I had in the apartment. Then I put the radio on and left. I was watching from the laundromat on Macleay Street when a silver Subaru WRX pulled up outside my apartment block. I saw two men get out, a dark-skinned Latino in jeans and a white T-shirt and a younger man in a leather jacket. Fifteen minutes later only the Latino came out.

  There was a public phone in the laundromat, although the sound of the machines made it hard to hear. I rang triple zero and told the operator I wanted to report a break-in.

  * * *

  I agreed to meet Fowler at nine p.m. at a self-storage depot on the industrial side of Chatswood. I thought Chatswood was all apartments and Chinese restaurants; I didn’t know there was an industrial side. According to Fowler he’d been renting a storage unit there since his divorce. He said it was cheaper than an extra bedroom. The kids were grown up and none of them wanted to stay with him anyway. He hadn’t spoken to his eldest since she was sixteen.

  I arrived twenty minutes early but Fowler’s ten-year-old Magna station wagon was already in the car park. He had promised to come alone but I could see someone sitting beside him. I drove around the car park and back onto the street, parked a couple of blocks away, and walked back.

  The roll-a-door to Fowler’s lockup was half open. I had to bend down to get under it. As I straightened up Fowler said, “This is Mr. O’Connor. He’s offered to come along. For security.”

  O’Connor was sitting on a fishing chair in the corner. He was smartly dressed in chinos, polo shirt, and a blazer, but he had a boxer’s busted nose. He was smoking a cigarette.

  “It was supposed to be just you and me,” I said.

  Fowler said, “Fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money. We don’t want anything bad to happen.”

  “Is he a cop?”

  Before Fowler could answer, O’Connor said, “We’re golfing buddies.”

  Fowler shifted awkwardly in his Hush Puppies, eyes downcast, like a man who knew he’d made a bad call.

  I figured that Haklander and Fowler had ripped off the Colombians. Fowler must have arranged for the uniformed police to be outside the Park Regis Apartments. He and Haklander would have known that at the first sign of trouble the delivery would be aborted. They had to take a chance on what Ramirez would do next, but it was a fair bet he would leave the cocaine in the taxi. Fowler had ripped me off once and thought I’d let him do it again. Paying me off would not have been part of the plan yet it still left them a nice profit. So where did O’Connor come in?

  The lockup was full of old tools, rusting tins of paint, boxes of bathroom tiles for a renovation job that Fowler had never gotten around to. There was a men’s bicycle hanging from a hook on the wall but it was hard to picture Fowler ever having ridden it.

  While O’Connor explored the pockets of the fishing chair Fowler said, “Give us the gear, son.” It was more like a plea than an order.

  “Who’s got the money?” I asked.

  “You’ll get the money,” said Fowler. “Just hand over the fucking gear.”

  I remembered him warning me
that I was out of my depth, but if anyone was in over his head, it was Fowler. I watched O’Connor playing with an iridescent fishing lure he had found in one of the chair pockets.

  Fowler pointed to my backpack and said, “Open it.”

  O’Connor dropped his cigarette and extinguished the butt delicately with the toe of his shoe. Then he put the fishing lure back in the chair pocket and stood up. “Let’s get this over with,” he said.

  His hand went into his blazer. When it came out there was a gun in it. He took a silencer out of his pocket. I thought he was going to shoot me. Fowler must have thought the same thing; he told O’Connor to put the gun away. O’Connor fired once. The bullet went through the pocket of Fowler’s blazer and left a crimson stain. Fowler was dead before he hit the concrete.

  O’Connor frisked the body for a weapon, but Fowler had come unarmed. Corrupt but trusting: a fatal combination. O’Connor asked me politely for the cocaine, then sat back in the fishing chair. I handed it over. He made a small hole in the shrink-wrapping and took some of the powder on his index finger and rubbed it on his gums. Then he took my car keys and gave me Fowler’s. “There’s a gym bag on the backseat,” he said. “Bring it here.”

  I could have tried to make a dash for it but I didn’t trust O’Connor not to shoot me in the back.

  The gym bag contained a hundred meters of nylon rope, a box cutter, and a car battery. O’Connor had come prepared. He told me to lash the car battery to Fowler’s corpse. “Make the knots good and tight. We don’t want him coming back.”

  It was after eleven when O’Connor told me to go and fetch the car. We bundled Fowler into the back of his station wagon and drove through silent North Shore streets to the Tunks Park boat ramp. Tinnies and a handful of larger boats were chained to a row of metal stands near the top of the ramp. O’Connor chose a dinghy with two paddles stored inside the hull. The padlock wasn’t even locked.

  The wind had come up. Yacht masts jangled as we paddled past the point into Middle Harbour. As the Spit Bridge loomed out of the darkness, O’Connor put down his paddle and said, “This’ll do.”

  We heaved Fowler over the side. There was a splash when the body hit the surface, followed by a stream of silver bubbles while it sank to the bottom.

  I watched O’Connor light a cigarette. His complexion looked darker in the moonlight, his features more Mediterranean. He didn’t look like an O’Connor. Who was he working for—the Colombians? Haklander? Or was he just another opportunist out for himself?

  In the distance a fishing boat was chugging slowly out to sea. Getting out of Sydney seemed like a good idea. I tried not to think about the money. Fifty thousand dollars was an awful lot of money not to think about. I’d had sleepless nights thinking about a lot less. I left O’Connor standing on the boat ramp. He made a gun out of two fingers and fired.

  For some reason I hoped Haklander had talked the Colombians out of shooting him. As for Fowler, I didn’t believe his body would stay hidden. He’d be on the move before long, dragged up and set adrift by a carelessly thrown anchor. Where would he end up—Balmoral Beach? Rushcutters Bay? Or bobbing among the pylons at Manly Wharf?

  The harbor always gives up its secrets in the end.

  SLOW BURN

  by Gabrielle Lord

  Clovelly

  The great thing about retirement is that it gives you time to do the things you enjoy, like fishing off the rocks at the point near Clovelly Beach. Which is what I’m doing right now, standing on the point, line baited for bream, watching the sea roll in and the big green swells lift the seaweed around the rock shelves where the dusky flatheads like to lurk. It’s a relaxing way to spend a morning. Gives me time to think too. Time to think about vengeance. The Lord is reported as saying, “Vengeance is mine,” but in this, as in all things, it’s my belief that the Lord sometimes needs a helping hand.

  It is a perfect blue and white Clovelly day as the small breakers fall away from the rocks in sheer white waterfalls and my companion jerks his gear back after a bump on his line, hoping to jag a flattie. “Got one!” he yells.

  I remember catching a big old duskie some years back who had four rusted hooks along his jaw. Out of respect, I cut him free, removed the hooks, and sent him on his way with good luck wishes, one old survivor to another. Now, I studied my companion as he played his catch along—giving the fish some slack, then hauling back on the line, bringing him in closer each time. It could be a big duskie, I thought. Or a skate.

  They say it’s dangerous to go rock fishing alone, so I almost always have a companion. My usual fishing buddy, also a retired cop—we worked together in homicide years ago—is currently traveling the east coast in a fancy caravan with his missus, and over the last couple of months I’ve been fishing with this new fellow, and not just for bream or flathead. He thinks this came about because of the casual camaraderie that sometimes develops between the normally solitary men who fish off the rocks. We’ve never got round to introducing ourselves and just call each other mate on the rare occasions we need to speak. He knows nothing about me but I know a hell of a lot about him.

  He has no idea that for nearly two decades, I’ve been planning to destroy him. His name is Ronald Leslie Twigg and there he stands, a few meters away from me with his canvas hat and his gear baited for flathead, playing his catch, looking south, not taking much notice of me. I’ve been keeping tabs on him since I was a senior sergeant in traffic, and he was a young thug, the baby in a family of thugs, part of the 15 percent of the population who harass the rest of us, one way or another.

  Now Twigg is a weathered fifty-two, with a permanent scowl on his face and carrying too much weight. But I don’t want him to cark on me, dying of a stroke or a coronary. I want Ronald Leslie Twigg to live for many years to come. Many years.

  I’ve been waiting and watching for the right opportunity. Just biding my time for the possibility that all the ducks might one day line up. It’s a big ask, and I’d almost resigned myself to the fact that it might never happen. One duck has been in place for some years, in the person of my clever young daughter Kerryanne, who works in the New South Wales Police Force in forensic services. So imagine my elation when out of the blue, a second duck settled into position. Some months back, Twigg left the inner-city boarding house he’d been living in and came to live in Clovelly, several streets away from our place, renting a shed in the backyard of a house whose owner is currently overseas. When that happened, I dared to be hopeful that there was now a real chance that our long-discussed plan, sometimes seeming like a fantasy that we’d been telling ourselves for all these years, might actually materialize. It was as if Fate had delivered him into my hands.

  Some evenings, I walk past the vacant house with its blinds pulled down as the interior lights come on automatically at six thirty p.m. and I head around the block to the back lane, and peer over the fence, noting the dim light in the shed inhabited by Twigg, hearing only the sound of a TV and the occasional clink of bottles as he drinks alone. Outside the shed in a sagging box, I’ve sometimes spotted a cat, tucked up in the dodgy shelter, with a bowl of curdled milk nearby.

  I’ve followed this man now for nineteen years. Unlike his older brothers, he was acquitted of a particularly brutal crime, in which a young man was almost beaten to death and then had his throat cut. This young man had been on his way home after having dinner with his family to celebrate successfully completing the first four years of a pharmacy degree, when the three thugs jumped him, threw him to the ground, dragged him into an alley, and went to work—took his wallet and phone and continued bashing him until they were interrupted by some people who heard the commotion. But it was too late for the victim, who died of massive blood loss and a heart attack in the ambulance.

  I try not to be too obsessed, but it’s hard. All we need, I’d say to myself, is a violent crime in the area. But realistically, how likely was that? That’s the really hard part in a place like Clovelly: quiet, gentrified, with constant renovations
and rebuilding going on; artists and journalists moving in over the last couple of decades and almost no serious crime to speak of. We just don’t have violent crimes in Clovelly, with its family-friendly beach and village atmosphere, open football field and coastal walks. Until—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Claire and I bought our cottage in Clovelly over thirty years ago from her parents when you could pick up a nice little place for a hundred and fifty thousand—a fortune to us then; you’d probably have to pay twice that as a deposit for anything in the vicinity these days. We liked the safe little beach with its breakwater where our kids could play and swim without fearing any dangers from rips or sharks. We also liked the ocean swimming pool—washed out and topped up by the tides every day—where Claire swims her laps most mornings. A couple of other retired cops live in the area and we sometimes get together to revisit our times on the job, sitting around on the concrete terraces and steps near the pool, swapping war stories, reminiscing about the crims we helped lock up. And, less frequently, of the flatheads and crims who got away. It’s a sad fact that a lot of crims do get away with crime. Our statistics might suggest otherwise, but then, as the saying goes, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Many crimes are never reported and policing is mostly bluff—just enough to keep a civil society behaving itself. Also, nearly 85 percent of crime is committed by around 10 percent of the population. The other 90 percent police ourselves.

  Clovelly is a coastal suburb of Sydney and used to be called Little Coogee years ago because Coogee Beach is just around the corner to the south. It was also known as Poverty Point because back then it was mostly inhabited by battlers, Italian and Greek migrants trying to settle into Sydney after the war. In those days, the buildings were fishing shacks or humble semi-detached cottages. The surf life-saving club is over 110 years old and all our kids started their beach lives as Clovelly Nippers, racing in the sand, practicing with the old-fashioned line-and-reel surf life-saving equipment, learning how to bring a person in distress to shore. I think of those days a lot. Life was simpler and the job wasn’t so complex.