Line of Sight

by David Whish-Wilson

  Swann shook his head. ‘Two thousand registered Anschutz rifles in Australia. They’ve located two hundred-odd so far. Not exactly a rush job.’

  ‘Interviews?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘So Jacky’s still the only suspect? What a joke.’

  Jacky White had been Ruby Devine’s lover. The 21-year-old was interviewed after the murder and cleared, according to Terry, then she immediately disappeared. A cue for Casey and his detectives to fix upon her as the prime suspect. The rumour was she’d been murdered herself, buried in the Gnangara pine forest.

  The calling in of the Anschutzes was nothing more than a ploy; the .22 used to kill Ruby had almost certainly been unregistered and since destroyed. Police interviews had focused on witnesses who’d seen Ruby’s Dodge from the safe distance of the freeway. The dead woman’s financial dealings, her threats to name names, had gone unexplored.

  Swann had given up expecting to hear anything interesting out of the CIB. Whoever had killed Ruby knew they were safe. It was written all over the crime scene. She had been shot in cold blood and her body left on display as a message to others. Others who knew what she knew.

  Finding out what Ruby Devine had known was what Swann and Reggie were all about.

  Reggie took a Craven A from Swann’s packet. His teeth were hurting again – Swann could tell by the way he sipped his whiskey but didn’t swallow, letting it soak into his gums. And there was something else bothering him.

  ‘What is it, Reggie?’

  A grimace in reply. Reggie inhaled deeply, looked up at the ceiling. ‘Bad news, I’m afraid. It could be more misinformation coming out of the CIB, but it seems Helen’s going to appear at the commission. Like I said —’

  Swann raised a hand. ‘It’s all right. I expected it.’

  That was a lie and both of them knew it. Swann had hoped against hope that Helen would be kept out of the commission, but that was naïve considering their tactics so far. Despite the anxiety spreading through him – he could feel every pulse in his neck, wrists, temples – he eyed Reggie evenly and tried to laugh it off. ‘So I had an affair with the woman. She wants to tell the world about it, that’s her business.’

  His thing with Helen hadn’t been much, and it hadn’t been for long, but because it was connected to Louise’s disappearance it weighed on him worse than guilt. The last time he’d seen his daughter was the night she caught him leaving Helen’s house. She’d been waiting outside, for what he couldn’t tell. When he came out Louise was so angry she wouldn’t talk to him. The next day she was gone. He assumed she’d run away to punish him and he’d ended it with Helen the same day.

  He had never lied about the affair, so his enemies had little to gain by publicising it. Unless of course Helen had been got at, was going to lie herself. He could tell by Reggie’s silence that this was what he’d heard.

  Swann put his glass down and stood up. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s get this done.’

  In an empty driveway on Rawson Street in Subiaco, sheltered by hedges of jasmine and grevillea, Swann and Reggie sat in the warm dark with the windows of the EK down, smoking and waiting for the CIB. The engine ticked as it cooled.

  Two weeks before, Reggie had been contacted by a schoolteacher who lived across the road from a brothel belonging to Pat Chesson, one of three green-lit madams in the city, and Ruby’s main competitor. She had since taken over all of Ruby’s brothels and refused to speak to Swann, claiming she was too afraid. But she didn’t appear afraid whenever he approached her. Instead she had the look of the cat that got the cream.

  Reggie had dropped in to interview the teacher. She told him she’d often seen detectives calling into the brothel at night, and yes, she could remember their faces. She thought it suspicious due to the length of time they stayed inside, and because they always seemed to be inebriated when they left. When she complained to Pat Chesson about the noise, two detectives appeared only minutes later and threatened her with arrest for being drunk and disorderly, even though it was the detectives who were clearly drunk.

  Reggie phoned Swann to tell him this, and Swann, taking the call in his hotel room, had written down the details, added the woman to their list of potential witnesses.

  A few days later Reggie called again to say the teacher was frightened and angry that he’d betrayed her to the CIB. She’d had a visit from two detectives who knew exactly what she’d said to Reggie. They told her to keep her mouth shut.

  Reggie went back to her and got a positive ID on Casey and Detective Sergeant Webb, the consorter in charge of Vice. It was pretty clear what had happened. That was when Swann got his phone checked.

  A few nights ago they’d put it to the test. Reggie called Swann and told him he’d bumped into a friend who claimed to have seen Louise in a flat in Nedlands, not far from the university. The two of them parked in bushland opposite the address and waited for three hours, but nobody came.

  That the call wasn’t responded to meant one of two things – either Swann’s phone wasn’t bugged or Casey knew the sighting couldn’t have been legitimate.

  Tonight they would find out for sure.

  Reggie rolled up his shirt sleeve and scratched at a sunspot on his forearm. ‘Who the hell put a blowfish in your swimming pool?’ he asked.

  ‘Same bastards who tipped the garbage bins into it, sank the HMAS barbeque. Casey’s clowns. Don’t know where they got the blowie from, though.’

  ‘I’ll say it again, you’re always welcome to bunk at my flat.’

  ‘Understanding types, your neighbours, are they?’

  ‘My neighbours could do with the excitement,’ he chuckled. ‘And while we’re on the subject of pools, Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards were taking a piss off their penthouse balcony into the hotel swimming pool, last time the Windies were on tour. Clive leans over to Viv and says, “Jesus, mon, the water’s cold.” Viv says, “Yeh, mon, and deep too!” ’

  ‘Here we go.’ The urgency in Swann’s voice wiped the smile off Reggie’s face. They sat deeper into the bench seat. An unmarked white HQ Belmont, the generic plainclothes sedan, cruised past with the siren off but dash beacon flashing. Swann looked at his wristwatch. Eighteen minutes since he’d taken the call from Reggie in his hotel room. It was fifteen minutes from Central to where they were parked, with sirens on.

  Seconds later, another vehicle of the same model appeared. Swann was able to make out the driver talking on a dash-mounted handset. Then another, and another, all of them silent and converging at the same corner. Reggie grabbed the binoculars and the two of them climbed out of the station wagon and stood behind the hedge.

  Four, then five unmarked cars at the crossroads, blocking each of the access roads. The detectives remained in their cars, headlights illuminating the gnarled peppermint trees and verge, all of them waiting for something. Someone.

  Swann saw the tan Statesman just before he heard its low growl, cruising down the side street in low gear.

  ‘There he is.’

  Reggie passed the binoculars and Swann focused on the Statesman, whose driver’s door was opening. Detective Inspector Donald Casey set his feet on the asphalt. Wedged into one of his boots was a pistol.

  ‘He’s got a throwdown in his boot,’ he told Reggie.

  Casey climbed out holding a cracked shotgun and stood in the park lights of the nearest HQ.

  ‘Looks like they’re planning an execution. I can see Hogan there by the Statesman. Sherving. Chaney. Webb. All armed.’

  Casey stood a good head taller than the others, shirt untucked beneath his jacket. He was listening to Detective Sergeant Sherving, who was looking grimly at the shotgun in Casey’s large hands.

  ‘I make that Dominic having a ciggie over there by Webb,’ Swann said. ‘And Kader – that’s his curly hair. The ones in the car look like Gannon, Hocking and Donnelly.’

  Detective Sergeant Hogan was head of the Fraud Squad, too senior to be out on a call like this, as were all the others. The fact that ten
high-ranking detectives had turned up within minutes to put the fear into a pair of imaginary witnesses told Swann that whoever pulled the trigger on Ruby Devine hadn’t acted alone.

  ‘Gannon’s gone to knock on a door. Wait … Christ, should see his face. Like a puckered arse. He’s going back to Casey now.’

  Ten CIB detectives, while not one had bothered to attend the call about his daughter – this told Swann that Casey knew where she was. What made him feel sick was that if Casey was so sure Louise couldn’t have been in the Nedlands flat, then almost certainly she was dead.

  ‘He’s got the news. Get down.’

  The last thing Swann saw before he ducked was Casey’s disgust at registering that there was no 87 Rawson Street.

  Partridge finished his breathing set with a long, weak exhalation, closed his mouth and opened his eyes. His head felt light and his pulse was faint but at least the pain behind his eyes and the tightness in his chest had gone.

  This was just as well; he had a lot of work to do. He climbed off the bed, tightening the belt on his dressing-gown, and sat again at the table, before the neat piles of papers, photographs and reports. He took up the photo of Ruby Devine made famous by the newspapers – Ruby in the same cinnamon-coloured satin gown she’d worn the night of her death. Only here she was happy, smiling for the camera, holding out her dress to exhibit its flow and sheen.

  The rest of the photos had been taken after her death. A picture of the seventh fairway, where her body had been found in her Dodge Phoenix, not a kilometre from where she lived. Ruby slumped across the driver’s seat, her right hand fallen to her side, her left hand placed modestly on her lap, and her heavy breasts thrust forward in her low-cut gown. A close-up showed blood seeping from her right ear, down along her jawline and across her chin; her eyes were in shadow and her mouth was closed. She looked peaceful in death.

  Next came pictures taken at the mortuary. Her head had been imperfectly shaved, with patches of longer hair remaining on her pale neck. Each of the four bullet holes was visible in the lower back half of her head, marked with thick black texta: 1, 2, 3, 4. Partridge had seen photographs of such ‘bowling ball’ executions before, and recognised the powder burns around the bullet holes. One in particular betrayed the intimacy of the firearm; the woman’s skin was overlaid with the square imprint of the sawn-off stock, forced into her neck before the bullet was fired.

  He opened the accompanying coroner’s report and noted the stated occupation of Mrs Devine was ‘housewife’. He noted the fatty deposits discovered in her right aorta, the substantial amount of blood found in her stomach, the diamond in an upper right tooth, the fact that her skull was found to be ‘exceptionally thick’ – fifteen millimetres, compared with a normal skull, which was less than ten millimetres. He let his eyes drift across descriptions of the implants found in her breasts – written up as ‘plastic bags’ – the analysis done of her dress, then pages and pages of statements by witnesses who’d driven past the vehicle during the night. There were recurring mentions of a Bogart film televised earlier in the evening, the red brake lights of the Dodge, the reverse lights, the car moving backwards and forwards on the fairway, two people talking in the front seat.

  He read the statement of Devine’s lover, Jacky White, who had been asked by Ruby to leave the house after their poolside barbeque dinner on account of a ‘big business meeting’ taking place that evening. Ruby had told Jacky that the man coming to see her would solve all her problems, but he didn’t want to be seen by anyone, not even Jacky; he wanted to remain a ‘silent business partner’.

  The reason for the late-night business meeting, according to Ruby Devine’s lawyer, was the large bill she had received from the taxation department. She was in the process of appealing it but didn’t hold any real hope of success. The sticking point was the 73 000 dollars in a trust fund that Ruby claimed wasn’t hers. She refused to disclose who the money belonged to, or to whom she had made regular payments over the years. To reveal the names would mean certain death, she claimed, an explanation which the taxation department would not accept as mitigating circumstances.

  Partridge finished his reading. Unable to dispel the grisly images, he picked up the tourist brochures on the bedside table. He had no measure yet of this city, the most isolated in the world, according to one brochure, 3000 kilometres from the next, far across the Nullarbor. This place of mysterious light, in particular the light off the river, which in the early evening had reminded him of a line from a poem – ‘reality is a sacred apparition’. But the captivating quality of the light wasn’t what had given Perth its status as the City of Lights, he read – it was so named because in 1962 the astronaut John Glenn, in orbit around Earth, had noticed that the people of Perth kept their lights on as he passed overhead, later describing how the bright cluster there amid the great darkness had given him courage, had cured his loneliness, and wasn’t it perfect that the inhabitants of the world’s most isolated city and the lonely astronaut had comforted one another?

  Even through the double-glazed windows of his fifteenth-floor room, Partridge could hear the round-the-clock construction going on – the result of the latest mining boom. When he’d looked out his window this morning he was greeted by the sight of gouged foundation pits and high-rise concrete shells, and cranes like masts across the horizon. It was a vision of great ugliness compared to the photographs lining the walls of the room, sepia shots of Perth when it was all sandstone colonial and weatherboard shanty.

  He couldn’t begrudge the city its eagerness, however, nor the people their excitement. Although it did amuse him to read that when the French sailed up the Swan River in 1801 it was summer, the place dry and infertile, and they had rejected it as a potential colony, whereas the English, out of pure good fortune, explored the river in winter and found fresh water and other ‘pleasant aspects’.

  There but for the grace of God, Partridge mused. And yet here I am, a century and a half later, like some latter-day Ovid cast upon the fringes of Empire, lulling myself to sleep with parochial legends of settlement and starvation, failure and pestilence, and wars against the blacks, in a place where as recently as my father’s day every second person was a convict.

  How much more benign his homeland across the desert appeared to him now. And at last – wasn’t that the first tug of darkness calling him down into his body? And wasn’t this perhaps how the astronaut had felt, floating across the dark vacuum of night, his eyes on the lights below until he too had lost all feeling in his body, except for a vague sensation of weight, and of sinking, and then of falling …

  Nobody trusts a cop who drinks alone. Swann lifted his Emu Bitter and took a long draught, meeting eyes with the sideshow clowns across the room. Everybody knew who he was and what he was about; nobody wanted to see him there, nobody wanted any trouble.

  The bar was a weatherboard annex tacked onto a derelict hardware store off Roe Street, not far from his hotel, not far from Central. It was illegal but had existed at least as long as Swann had been a cop, and was known as the beer with no pub. It was tolerated because it gave cops off the nightshift somewhere to drink, and the hookers and taxi drivers and queer crowd from the clubs on James Street somewhere to come down.

  The place was full of smoke and tinny laughter, but also a rising panic. The night was sliding away. They were rolling towards the sun. Swann could see in the punters’ eyes the recognition of an unwelcome day. The bar had all the atmosphere of a school canteen. Bare concrete floor, hosed out at dawn. Scavenged tables and chairs. Stained and sunken plaster ceiling. Leaking bin by the door. The smell of piss from the outhouse by the back fence.

  The barman’s possie was a milk crate by a bathtub full of beer and ice. He looked at Swann with the cold malevolence of a poisoner. There was a good reason for that – Swann had put him away thirteen years ago. They were roughly the same vintage, but the other man’s face looked like it had been poached in spirits and left in the sun.

  He’d be gratef
ul for this job, Swann knew. He could drink all night and sleep on the floor during the day. He could bitch with Pat Chesson’s hookers and wash under the tap out back. He could gather dirt and feed back to whichever Liquor and Gaming D was letting him run the place.

  Swann lit a cigarette to hide his disgust at being here, again. Reggie was home snoring, no doubt, on the couch. Swann had tried everything to get to sleep but even his last resort of a hot bath had failed to work.

  It was the same every night. Unable to knock himself out for those hours between two and dawn, he’d inevitably end up here or one of the other illegal clubs on the block. Because if he failed to get to sleep, the horror of what might have happened to Louise would hit him like a punch to the heart. He would see her naked and strangled and buried in the dirt, or bound with gaffer tape and weighed down with rocks, rotting in some scum-covered swamp in the outer suburbs. Even worse, he’d see what she’d gone through before she died. What had been done to her, the fear and despair she would have felt, her last words, calling out his name, but Swann not there, never there, her eyes wide and his chest tight and fists clenched.

  Then he would know that sleep was impossible and he would get up and drink. By day, too, the images of his daughter never left him and he was driven out in search of her, telling himself there was still hope, that he would find Louise, slouched against the wall in a makeshift bar, there amongst the barely living.

  He glanced around at the other drinkers. What made it worse was that this was the life his stepfather had lived, had envisaged for him too. Swann thought of the times he was called to some back-alley Fremantle sinkhole where Brian was passed out, having been gone for days – days that Swann counted as blessings. His mother would send him out to find her husband, to guide him home or go through his pockets for his pay packet, what was left of it.

  The idea that Brian’s prediction for him was coming true deepened Swann’s self-disgust, made him want to flip the table and break things, just like he’d done as a kid, wild and violent and resentful, devoid of better feelings.