Line of Sight

by David Whish-Wilson

  He had a contact in Sydney who’d helped in similar cases demanding discretion and tact, and Partridge had called him to ask for a counterpart in Perth. But all the Perth PIs this man knew were ex-detectives. Better that Partridge remain anonymous, and for the Sydney PI to make the inquiries himself.

  At the agreed hour the phone rang. Partridge knew the PI wasn’t one for small talk, and so he merely said, ‘Go ahead.’

  The PI had a voice all gravel and glass. He would probably never find out who’d actually pulled the trigger on Ruby Devine, he said. But it was the lead-up to the murder that was interesting. There was the matter of the seventy-odd thousand dollars in a Hong Kong trust fund that Ruby was responsible for as an alleged investor in property, although when pressed by the taxation department she had refused to state where the money had come from. Money laundering for others, in other words. Faced with a large tax bill for the money in the fund, Ruby had become anxious about the possibility of losing not only her savings, but also the marks of her status – her large home in a well-to-do suburb, her swimming pool with her initials inscribed in golden letters on the bottom. She had sought the help of politician friends, and friends in the media, but to no avail. Then, two days before she was due to have another interview with the taxation department, she told Jacky White she had a ‘big business meeting’ that would solve all her problems, and as a result had asked Jacky to leave the house.

  All of this was on the public record, according to the PI, as was the fact that Ruby Devine had contacted her regular babysitting agency that afternoon but was unable to secure a sitter at late notice. Put together, the fact that she had asked her lover to leave the house while also trying to secure a babysitter for her daughter told the PI that Ruby was expecting to be collected from her home, by someone who didn’t want to be seen. Someone who must have been dropped off at Ruby’s and then later picked up at the golf course, given that she’d been murdered in her own car.

  Also on the public record was the statement of the next-door neighbour, who had seen a girl at Ruby Devine’s front door just as she was leaving. Since her daughter claimed to have been upstairs watching television, that meant there must have been a babysitter that night. According to the PI’s source at the local newspaper, Ruby had occasionally used her working girls to babysit when she was unable to hire an agency sitter. And yet the statements of Ruby Devine’s prostitutes, taken down by Detective Inspector Donald Casey, were all identical, to the word; all denied ever having babysat for Mrs Devine, which suggested that either some of them were lying or their statements had been coerced or dictated.

  Given that the girl was seen at the door close to the time of Mrs Devine’s departure, it was possible she alone witnessed who visited that night, the presumably male person who lured Ruby to the golf course where she was murdered soon after.

  When the man stopped talking, Partridge thanked him and said, ‘Keep looking. But I want you to concentrate in the following area …’ He explained what he wanted and hung up. He could stay upright no longer.

  He set his alarm for six, although he doubted he’d need it. He lay back, closed his eyes and began his regimen of deep breathing, sifting through the memories of his afternoon, distracting himself by taking flight in the story of the murdered woman, a jigsaw of fact and detail that he must reassemble, organise, perhaps even understand.

  Swann had slept little and woken early. He got up, bathed his knuckles in iced water before heading down to Fremantle prison. But now, as he approached the front gates, he felt the usual trepidation. He had been to the jail countless times over the years but it never got any easier. The limestone walls glowed in the morning heat as the guard over the watchtower paced his rat-run, .22 rifle in a sling. Swann pressed the buzzer on the gate and waved his ID to the guards in the booth. His insides were clenched and his palms were sweaty – guilty or innocent, inside jail all were the same.

  The convict-built prison looked down over the port city as a reminder of the hard truths of crime and punishment. Wherever you went in Fremantle the jail was always there, its stone walls looming on the hillside. It was right beside Fremantle Oval, and watching the footy as a child Swann would imagine the men inside and wonder if they heard the shouts of the crowd and what they must think. On a clear night he could see the guards pace the rat-runs with their rifles and their backs to the town. The prison’s inhabitants were mute and invisible, but their silence and invisibility had the power to enter Swann’s dreams at night, when he saw men breaking rocks in the sun and going over the walls, just like in the stories his stepfather told him. Brian had spent a year in the prison as a young man, for stealing a car, and he was at his most eloquent when cursing the screws and railing against the walls that had once kept him inside and still kept his mates there. Brian always said it was a short walk from freedom to the iron gates, and Swann should never forget that.

  The first time Swann entered the prison he was nineteen years old. He’d always expected to be inside one day, but never imagined it would be in a police uniform. His uniform was still new, his boots polished to a high shine. The day was hot and the sun pounded the walls; the light coming off the limestone bit his skin and filled his eyes with red marbles. He felt the strange dread that was also a kind of excitement.

  Behind the big black gates the prison opened up into a large yard with flowerbeds and white rope skirting chalk paths. The cell blocks were low and flat like bricks laid out to bake. He had come to see the driver of a hold-up at a local savings branch who’d crashed and broken both legs while his mates escaped into the Coolbellup bushland. The driver was just a kid and had been put in with the perverts. Swann was there to offer him soft time in another division, if he was smart and gave up his accomplices.

  What he remembered from that first visit wasn’t the frightened kid or how easily he opened up, but the moment of stepping into the exercise yard of the block where he was being held. The yard was empty, but as soon as he entered he felt a crackling that stopped him, made the hairs on his neck stand up.

  The guard with Swann laughed. ‘You feel it, eh? This is New Div, where we keep the sex offenders. That’s where your CIB mates asked us to keep your man. He’s in with the knuckle-dragging boong who runs the place. He hasn’t stopped shaking since he got here. Come on.’

  Swann could barely move his feet. All his instincts told him to turn and run. It was only thirty metres across the yard but it was the longest walk of his life.

  Ray Hergenhan was in Fourth Division, along with the other long-termers. The block rang with the sound of guards’ boots on meshed-steel walkways and concrete floors. Naked globes hung on thin cords from the ceiling over the rapidly emptying hall. Prisoners in green tracksuits moved towards their twelve-by-eight-foot cells. The prison was so overcrowded that they were locked up in pairs for sixteen hours a day.

  The stench of shit buckets and male sweat and rotten feet and cheap tobacco hung in the air. Baking hot in summer, freezing in winter, the prison was brutal – even the gallows remained in commission as a defiant gesture towards the civilisation evolving elsewhere in the country. Inside the walls nothing had changed in more than a hundred and twenty-five years of unbroken use.

  Yet some men called the prison home, and Hergenhan was one of them. Swann knew him well from the days he worked standover for loan sharks and bookies. His specialty, however, was armed robbery, and as a result he’d spent a deal of his short life inside. At six-foot seven, with greasy blond hair and a skinful of bad tattoos, he was easily identified. He was a smart-arse too, disliked by his peers, and it was never long before someone gave him up for a carton of cigarettes or a private cell or a few more weeks of freedom. The skinny from Swann’s friend in the prison administration was that Hergenhan was back working standover for some of the older crims in the better cells.

  Despite his youth, Hergenhan was old-school and would never talk unless his survival was at stake. When Mitchell Davey had broken and told Swann that Hergenhan knew someth
ing about Ruby’s murder, Swann racked his brain for an angle, and now, thanks to Donovan Andrews, he had one. Michelle had been Hergenhan’s girl.

  For a carton of beer at the main gate, Hergenhan’s cellmate had been moved elsewhere for an hour. Swann wanted it publicly known that Hergenhan was talking to a cop, but he didn’t want the details of their conversation getting out.

  The cell door was open. Hergenhan was sitting on the bottom bunk, writing in a journal that he closed and put under his pillow when he saw he had a visitor. He reached for his tobacco as Swann sat on the stool opposite. The shit bucket by the door was empty but the room stank of farts and unwashed feet. Hergenhan’s fists were freshly scabbed and his eyes were bloodshot. White scum had dried in the corners of his mouth and his greasy hair was peppered with dandruff.

  Swann offered him a Craven A. Hergenhan took two and put one behind his ear. He tucked his packet of White Ox into the waistband of his shorts.

  ‘Well, this is a fucken honour. Swann the dead man. Still walkin’ and talkin’ but dead dead dead. And look at your knuckles, boy. You been layin’ down the law, eh? Snap!’ He held out his own scabbed hands.

  ‘There’s something I thought you’d want to know,’ Swann began.

  ‘Dead dead dead.’ Hergenhan’s smile revealed a set of yellow teeth. ‘You know there’s a contract out on you, detective? You’re lucky I’m banged up. Very tempted I’d be otherwise, number of times you’ve put me away, you bastard. Still, I shouldn’t be gloating. Coupla days left and you wanna spend it in my little patch of paradise. It’s a bloody honour.’

  Swann felt the power return to his bruised hands. Hergenhan was a bloke he could take it out on and nobody would care. His fingers began to shake and he could feel the blood in his face. It would be nothing to reach across and snuff him, smash his head against the floor, push thumbs into his eyeballs, crush his throat.

  But he needed to be calm for this to work.

  ‘In a coupla days I’ll be able to tell the world that jus’ before he died Swann came to pay his old mate Raymond some final respect.’

  Swann waited, holding the shin of his crossed leg with one hand, smoking with the other, looking out the door.

  ‘How I love ya, how I love ya! My dead ol’ Swanny!’

  ‘Your girlfriend Michelle is dead.’

  The shutters came down fast, but not fast enough. In that brief moment, Swann saw right into the place where Hergenhan had watched as his elder brother beat their father to death; into the borstal where he’d been gone through, had gone through other boys. Right into the place where the people Hergenhan had tortured until they gave him what he wanted waited for him, and would wait as long as he drew breath.

  ‘Just last night,’ Swann added.

  Hergenhan tried to hide the panic in his eyes. ‘Doesn’t surprise me. She was a slut.’

  ‘I suppose she was.’

  Hergenhan busied himself lighting his other cigarette. ‘I told her it was dangerous work. How’d she go?’

  ‘Overdose. I was there.’

  ‘Nah. Nup,’ he said warily. ‘Must be some mistake. Shelly was no user. I told her I’d kill her if —’

  ‘You weren’t there. How would you know what she was or wasn’t? You’ve been locked up for five months.’

  ‘Yep, yep,’ Hergenhan agreed. ‘And ten years to go, with hard fucken labour. But nah. She visits here regular. No way. I’d know.’

  Swann flicked his butt into the shit bucket. He smoothed his hands along his trousers and waited. ‘Visited here,’ he corrected. ‘She won’t be coming again.’

  ‘No fucken way,’ Hergenhan repeated, and farted absentmindedly.

  ‘You’re probably right. They’re saying it was an OD but I was there, I saw it. It looked all wrong.’

  ‘Whaddya mean?’

  He described how Michelle had been found, right down to her hair being whipped by the breeze. Hergenhan was tense in every muscle. Swann could almost hear the whirring and clicking as Hergenhan projected the names and faces of those who might want Michelle dead.

  ‘Your old mate Mitchell Davey just dogged you to me, Ray. Told me you know something about Ruby Devine’s murder. That you’ve been saying things. Boasting about it. That true?’

  Hergenhan tried to remember how to smile but his face didn’t work. Swann decided to back off a little. He didn’t want him doing something stupid.

  ‘Is it possible someone murdered Michelle to get at you? Because you’ve been talking out of school?’

  ‘That Mitch’s blood on your knuckles, Swann? Thought you were better than that.’

  ‘Just answer the question.’

  ‘Sure, it’s possible.’

  ‘Then perhaps I can help.’

  Hergenhan shook his head. ‘That’s very kind of you, dead man. But no thanks.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘Oh yeah, lemme see now, you help me if I help you. But then you get knocked off and where am I then, dead man? Eh?’

  Swann shrugged. The bloke had a point, but his own point had been made. Whatever Hergenhan knew, and whatever he might decide to tell Swann, it wouldn’t be done in the here and now. It would take time for Michelle’s death to get past the smart mouth and the hard eyes and settle deeper. But late at night, in the dark and quiet, alone with his fears, his self-loathing, then maybe.

  ‘I don’t know what it’s like out there, detective, but in here every man and his bumboy knows that when the royal commission is done, you’re done as well. There’s even a book going on how long you’ll last. So what the fuck?’

  ‘You talk on the record and I’ll get you looked after. I’ll get you a new life – new city, new state. New country if you want.’

  ‘Bullshit. I talk and I’m as dead as you. You think your mates won’t be able to find me? Gimme a break. Those boys know I’ll never talk.’

  ‘You’ve already been talking, Ray. Never could help yourself. And now Michelle’s dead.’

  ‘That’s bullshit too. I haven’t said anything. You reckon you can come in here, shake ol’ Raymond down an’ see what falls out of his pockets?’

  ‘Michelle came to me.’

  Hergenhan sneered. ‘Then she deserved what she got.’

  ‘Sure you didn’t put her up to it, Ray? You’ve got me here, haven’t you?’

  He got no reply to that. ‘Just like in the old days, Ray. We helped each other a lot, no?’

  ‘Keep yer fucken voice down,’ he growled. ‘Less you wanna get me killed. That was out there.’

  ‘We can come to the same arrangement.’

  ‘Bullshit. I know every black hole and blind spot in this prison. I still got choices. I’m safer in here than you are out there.’

  Swann grinned. ‘That isn’t true, Ray. You tell me or don’t tell me, you’re still talking to me. I’m here. They’re all going to be interested in that, your so-called mates, inside and out.’

  Swann stood and tossed his packet of cigarettes to Hergenhan, who let them fall to the floor.

  ‘Dead man, I want for nothing in here.’

  Swann strode out onto the iron walkway. The other cells were locked down but he could feel the eyes staring at him as he headed to the door.

  From the public phone at his hotel he checked in with Reggie and then called Terry. He asked him to pull a file on Solomon Sands, should one exist. Jacky’s description of him matched the tax agent Donovan Andrews had seen in Mancuso’s restaurant, and the filing room at Central was a place that even Terry, a uniformed plod, could access. It might have been where all the confidential records of arrests and investigations and unsolved cases were kept, but even when Swann was a rookie the lore was that it was kept unlocked so that the purple circle could come down whenever they chose and disappear the files of mates, and others – put the blame on uniformed if it came to that.

  After hanging up he went to shower and change his clothes, which stank of Hergenhan’s cell. Before the bathroom mirror he buttoned his shirt, fix
ed his necktie. The interview with Hergenhan hadn’t been a complete waste of time, even if the rumours of him being the killer were most likely crap.

  It didn’t make sense that the people behind the hit would use someone like Hergenhan, and would only mean there’d have to be two murders, the second to silence the first killer. Hergenhan was tough but he was no pro, and could be broken with fists and boots in a matter of hours and made to squeal.

  But there was another reason why an outside hit was unlikely. The purple circle were lords of the town; they had dirt on judges and politicians and did whatever they wanted. Some of them had brains and some were just bash artists, but they all had one thing in common – they shot their own meat and framed their own pictures. One man to pull the trigger while another kept guard, the others in the circle of knowledge bonded to silence.

  Swann slipped on his jacket, put a foot up on the sink and buffed his shoes. The pain in his hands was returning and he’d just decided to pour himself a shot when the phone rang. He checked his watch – ten o’clock – and went to answer it. At first he thought it was a woman on the line, but the sobs and the slurred voice belonged to Cooper, drunk and maudlin and raving.

  ‘Swann, that you, mate? Mate?’

  ‘What’s up, Cooper?’

  ‘I think I did something, mate. You’re my mate, aren’t you Swann? Jesus. What am I saying? You fucken hate me.’

  ‘What are you on about? I can hardly —’

  ‘It was Ruby. It was me.’

  ‘You’re pissed. Put the receiver next to your mouth.’

  ‘I did a terrible thing. It was me. She told me, she told me. She was so angry. She was gonna get some people back if they didn’t put money in the hat.’

  Swann felt adrenalin flood his body. ‘Shut up right now. I’ll come —’

  ‘I was playing the tables at Il Travatore. I’m in deep there, too deep. I mentioned what Ruby had said to Nicky Mancuso and his mates. I was drunk, Swann, I didn’t mean to —’