‘Oh yeah.’ For once, Jack Susko was not the guy in the room with everything all the way up to his earlobes. But the old feeling washed over him for a second.
‘Well,’ said Beaumont. ‘I still got the gun.’
‘What are you doing here, then? Why don’t you go round and point the thing at him?’
‘Don’t worry. It’s my next stop.’
A truck drove by in the laneway, whooshing loudly past the back door. Beaumont jumped. He sounded about as convincing as a five-year-old. Jack wondered how much of a grip the guy had on what was going on. ‘So Ziggy,’ he said. ‘Why?’ He could sense Beaumont wanted to tell. And better a story than bullets flying around Susko Books.
Beaumont rubbed his face, sat down on some boxes. Leaned forward, elbows on knees, gun in hand, but hanging it casually between his legs now. ‘The short answer? Because Brandt killed my father. Not with his own hands, of course, the fuck. He simply crushed him from a distance. Like a fucking ant.’
‘How?’
‘My father had a big chunk of land up in the Hawkesbury, near a place called Brooklyn. All by the water, acres and acres of prime real estate. It is now, anyway. He lived there in a little fibro shack, just a weekender, nothing. He moved there to —’ Beaumont stopped, as though trying to decide something. ‘To get off the booze. He was sick. The shack, it had been in the family for years, since my great-grandfather’s time, just sitting there. My father was alone, my mother was dead. I was overseas. Brandt got him to sign it all away for … for, Jesus, I don’t know, a bottle of fucking sherry. By the time I got back, he was living at a homeless shelter in Surry Hills. Talking to himself in the fucking TV room. Not long after, he was dead.’
Thelonious Monk was still playing and his piano spilt in lightly from the shop. ‘Sweet and Lovely’. Everything this story was not. Jack wondered how long Beaumont had nurtured his hatred of Brandt and what it had eaten up inside him. Reality was probably the first thing to go.
‘Why now?’ said Jack. ‘You could have tried a hundred times before.’
Beaumont’s mouth was a straight line, lips bloodless. Claudia all over his face like a bleached Super 8 home movie, flicking away over the sharp angles and dark crevices. ‘Opportunity. Kippax and the investigation and the money and … I could see it, you know? Do the guy, get Kippax to wear it, and then me, I’m gone.’ He looked hard at Jack. ‘And because of you,’ he said. ‘Because of you, Susko.’
‘I didn’t do anything.’
‘He stuck you in there. Right between us.’
‘Yeah, that’s right. Brandt did that, not me.’
‘He couldn’t have done it with anybody else. He knew she still loved you.’
Jack felt a little stab in his side, which may or may not have been a splinter of guilt.
‘No,’ said Beaumont. ‘It was you. Because that was when I knew that Brandt knew about me. How much time do you think I had before I got buried under one of his construction sites?’
‘Barangaroo, huh?’
‘Yeah, fucking Barangaroo. It’s what this whole thing is about anyway. Kippax and Brandt, wanting each other out of the picture. Jesus, you know how much that motherfucker is worth? Prime chunk of harbour foreshore, it’s the eye fillet, man. Nobody’s even sure who fucking owns it, the council, the government, they’re all slugging it out …’ Beaumont was getting a little colour back. ‘And then these two big shots trying to hammer each other out of the way. I thought with all the smoke, you know, I could get at Brandt and … and …’
He looked up at Jack, grinning, his face twisted and unhinged. ‘You can see it too, can’t you, Jack? Great fucking plan, huh?’ His grin stretched wider, a sick joke smile splitting his face. ‘Except now it’s different. I see me in the reinforced concrete and Ziggy naming the spot Beaumont Point!’
‘Not with Claudia in the picture,’ said Jack. Clear now. That was why Brandt wanted him to get in there. No blood, because it was his daughter: rather an old flame stoking disharmony. Jack the fool sent in to flush Beaumont out. All the moves mapped. Christ. The man would have given Bobby Fischer a run for his money. Maybe Jack ought to have taken the Mosman Bay apartment: something to at least live in after he did his three to five for getting involved in this mess. Like Beaumont, he appeared to have worked hard to end up with nothing.
‘I told her, you know,’ said Beaumont. ‘I told her everything. She understood. She said it was okay. That she still loved me. She said I hadn’t done anything wrong.’ He shook his lowered head, heavy with remorse. ‘Until now.’
‘You didn’t kill him,’ said Jack, just laying out the bare fact.
‘And what good does that do me?’
‘There’s no blood on your hands.’
He looked at them, as though to reassure himself. No blood, but a gun. His shoulders slumped. ‘It doesn’t matter anymore.’
‘What about Claudia?’
‘I can’t …’
‘She wants to see you. She asked me to find you for her.’
‘What?’ Beaumont’s head jerked up, his face a worn yellow map of anxiety.
‘Don’t let Brandt win.’ As Jack said it, the words surprised him, like it was somebody else talking.
‘I can’t … I …’ He shook his head. ‘You’ve got to get me out of here! Hide me someplace, I just need a little time.’ His eyes darted around the storeroom, as if there was a spot right there. ‘It’s over, everything’s over. Help me, Susko.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Jack was losing patience with Beaumont’s blues. He had enough for a trumpet solo of his own. Everybody seemed to want his help, but only as far as he could take their place in the stocks. ‘Just give me the Luger and I’ll go drop everybody that wants to kill you, and then you can live happily ever after.’
‘No, I didn’t mean —’
‘Aren’t you the guy with a goddamn assault charge pointing at me, as well as that gun?’ Jack had never wanted in on this story and yet Brandt had slipped it around him like a slow tide. And now Beaumont was here asking him to stay in it and get really wet, because, after all, it was Jack’s fault anyway. ‘What the fuck do you think I’m going to do?’
Beaumont stood up. Something cold and desperate on his face now, his skin breaking out all blotchy over the neck. His gun hand came up slowly. ‘You’ll do anything I tell you to fucking do.’
The voice was steel but Jack saw the doubt in his eyes, like people peering out through a curtain in a window. How to play it? But before he could decide, there was an almighty crash right behind Beaumont.
‘I can hear you in there, Susko!’
Beaumont swung around and took a step back towards Jack, the gun now directed at the door. ‘Jesus! What the —’
Another crash. The door shook and timber cracked as though a truck had rammed it. A third boom, then a fourth, and Jack was pretty sure that somebody was taking to the door with an axe.
24
He was wrong — it was a sledgehammer. Now it came through the door with a crash. Whoever was wielding it swore and heaved and tried to pull it back out of the splintered hole. It appeared momentarily stuck. Beaumont had not moved since turning around and continued to stare, mesmerised by what was going on. Jack had taken a step back, but he too was transfixed and watched, on the border of disbelief. It was like the goddamn Shining.
A loud grunt outside. The dark metal head of the sledgehammer was finally torn from the door, finger-length splinters flying. Whoever had the handle end was not a weedy teenager or a hairdresser or a graduate systems analyst.
Beaumont’s gun was pointed at the door. Jack waited for the next pounding, not breathing: then it came. Boom! A length of timber doorjamb came flying off and struck Duncan Beaumont in the head. Almost in the same instant, the gun in his hand fired, though he probably did not know about it. Jack looked at him,
lying unbuckled on the concrete floor, like a pair of pants with nobody in them. Out.
Jesus.
There were red welts across his forehead and nose and cheeks, a couple of cuts and some blood creeping slowly out of one nostril. Jack looked up at the door and saw the bullet hole, about waist height, clean and small, nothing like the violence of the sledgehammer one above it. Unbelievably, the lock had held. He remembered buying it at Bunnings Warehouse, $12.95 on special.
The wind whistled through the newly installed ventilation. No other noises from outside, just some traffic, but it sounded distant in the choppy weather hammering the city. Jack went over to Beaumont and took the Luger out of his hand. Then he crept to the rear door and put an eye to the bigger hole.
Nothing that he could see. He worked the angles, stretching to look down, left then right. Nobody. Ear against the battered timber. Nothing. He knew he was going to have to open the door but really did not want to. He stepped back at arm’s length and unlocked it: the snick sounded more hollow than usual. It took some effort to push the door back, but it opened, creaking loudly. Jack brought the gun up, ready. Edged his head out into Market Row.
Big Mick was lying on his back. The sledgehammer was beside him. And they were both dead.
The bullet had gone into his chest and was probably somewhere over on the wall opposite. A pool of dark blood was leaking out of his back, but the wind and rain took it down a nearby drain as fast as it flowed out of the man. Jack had an out-of-body experience and suddenly found himself floating above the laneway, looking down, wondering what the hell he was going to do. He was pretty interested. He waited but watched himself do nothing.
A long, angry car horn somewhere on York Street snapped him out of it. Shit. He had to fucking move. He looked up and down Market Row, saw cars and a few umbrella-carrying pedestrians crossing either end of it, but nobody had turned to see. Just another winter’s day in the Emerald City. He shoved the Luger inside his pocket, reached down for Mick’s ankles and started to drag the body into the storeroom. Christ, the guy was a unit. It was awkward work and Jack was fighting the dead man hard. The rain got heavier and he grunted and pulled and eventually got him two-thirds in the door. He dropped the legs, grabbed the old newspaper that was on the floor behind him and jammed it under Mick’s lifeless arm. Then with the arm he dragged the body half around and got the bullet-bloodied back sort of on the newspaper and his head inside the door. Stepped over the body and peered into the lane again. Someone turning in, a white delivery van. Jack pulled the door back, heard the van stream by through the wet and away. When he looked out again it was down the other end, waiting to turn onto Druitt Street. Just taking a short cut. Jack picked up the sledgehammer and hurried back inside. The lock clicked and he wiped the rain off his face with a sleeve.
The wind blew in through the hole in the door, all down his neck, a cold breath. Jack shivered.
The phone started ringing like a prison’s breakout siren. Jack tensed and rushed out of the storeroom to answer it. Fumbled the receiver to his ear.
‘Hello?’
‘Mr Susko. Buenos dias.’
It was Chester Sinclair. For Christ’s sake. Jack said nothing. Thoughts were tumbling through his mind like clothes in a dryer and none of them had anything to do with the sloppy book-dealer on the other end of the line.
‘Hey, are you there?’
‘Sinclair, I’m busy.’
‘What kind of talk is that?’
‘Way I remember it, we weren’t talking at all.’
‘I believe sufficient time has passed.’
‘What are you on about?’
‘Jack. I forgive you.’
‘I’ve really got to go.’
‘Hang on! You don’t want to make some cash on those westerns you purchased at the auction?’
‘Excuse me?’ It was starting to get surreal.
‘The auction, remember? You bought some books?’ Sinclair gave a gravelly snort of disdain. ‘Well, lucky you, because I know somebody who wants them.’
‘Fine,’ said Jack. ‘Five hundred per box. Now, I’ve got to —’
‘Five hundred bucks a box? What the hell is that? Are you fucking concussed?’
Jack wanted to say, Look, there’s a dead guy in my goddamn storeroom, but talking to Sinclair he could almost believe it was just a bad dream. ‘It’s five hundred bucks per box,’ he repeated, slightly calmer. ‘You want them delivered?’
‘Well, obviously I’ve caught you on a particularly shitty morning.’
‘Usually happens when you call.’
‘Look, smart-arse, I’ve got a guy who collects all those old crappy westerns. If you wanna try and sell them out over ten years at fifty cents a pop, you know, you go for it, Jack. However …’ Sinclair cleared his throat. ‘If we could come to some sort of arrangement, well then … I could offload them in bulk for you at a far prettier rate.’
‘And what did you have in mind?’
‘Twenty-two a box.’
‘Twenty-two? Jesus, Sinclair.’
‘That’s a fair price. And I’ll take care of transportation, et cetera. Can’t be fairer than that.’
Jack glanced back at the storeroom, thought he heard a groan. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Bye, Chester.’ And put the phone down. As if his day had not already gone to shit.
He hesitated before stepping into the storeroom again: regardless of the temperature in Susko Books, he felt a wave of hot, oppressive air sweep over him in a rush. Christ, he was going to have to do something about this. Now. He reached out for the wall and tried to forget about Chester and westerns and twenty-two fucking dollars a box, tried to bring his attention into focus, here, where life and death waited for him to make the next move.
Okay, first thing: Jack was not calling the cops. Fuck that. Because the cops would not get him out of it, only put him in there deeper, in with Brandt and Kippax and murder. They would finish the job completely, the one begun by Ziggy, the one that Jack had never intended on being a part of. Close the lid on it. They would secure the evidence and take the dead body in his storeroom and photograph it and type it up and file it away in their files of forever after — Jack inside the story for good, not where he wanted to be. The whole book sealed with blood.
So what he was going to do was give the body right back to Brandt and Kippax, to all of them. Send it back to where it had come from. Fix his door and lock it and never let them through again, ever. Even if they came with a sledgehammer.
Another knock, this time at the front door. A customer? The thought brought with it a small, strange wave of relief. Maybe if he just opened up the shop and ignored the storeroom, everything would go away.
He walked back out into the shop. Saw Claudia Brandt at the door. Felt his relief sizzle and disappear, like a drop of water on a hot frying pan.
25
‘Not open yet?’
She was wearing a light-grey tweed skirt and matching cinched jacket, a silky ruffle-front top and a dark-brown belt around her slim waist, everything working to highlight her willowy parts. Laced-up suede Louis heels and a maroon leather clutch under her arm. Hair out and lush and lustrous. Jack shut the door and left the Closed sign on it and wondered what he was going to say. Took a little while, so it was Beaumont moaning from the storeroom who got in first.
Claudia frowned and turned towards the sound. ‘Who was that?’
Jack sighed, then thought what the hell. ‘Wait a tick. I’ll just go get him.’
‘Who?’ She watched him walk past, confusion in her eyes. ‘Is it Duncan?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, defeated by the longing in her voice and the lie in Beaumont’s line about her still being in love with him. ‘But wait here.’
‘No!’
She ran past him, crashing her shoulder to Jack’s side, and
into the storeroom. A couple of seconds later he heard her scream and hoped nobody else had.
Duncan Beaumont was slowly coming to.
‘Oh my god!’
‘He’ll live, relax.’ Jack peeked out through the back door: as hoped, the rain had washed away what blood had seeped out of Mick and onto the asphalt of Market Row. Would calling it a blessing amount to blasphemy?
‘What … what happened?’
‘When you play with guns, somebody’s bound to get hurt.’
She looked down at the body on the floor. ‘Is he dead?’
‘Yep.’ Jack went over to Beaumont, grabbing him under the arms and pulling him up into a sitting position. He leaned him back against the boxes. The guy groaned as though having a bad dream, still not quite with them yet. Jack put a cigarette in his mouth, watched Claudia with her eyes locked on her fiancé. He said: ‘Your boy did it.’ It was harsh, holding back the fact that it was an accident; but there, he was doing it.
‘He works for Kippax, doesn’t he?’ she said, looking at Mick, her calm a little disconcerting.
‘You know him?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve seen him a couple of times. Never talked. Roberto told me that he was Kippax’s right-hand man.’ Then she whispered: ‘Fuck.’ Knelt down beside her fiancé.
Jack frowned. ‘You spoke to Florez?’
‘You said no. Who else was going to help me?’
‘Florez?’ Jack did not mean to say the name again but it came out of his mouth like a divot.
‘He rang me.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘Just that he wanted to speak to Duncan. Try and help clear up the mess he’s in with Allan Kippax.’
‘And you believed him?’
She paused. ‘I don’t know what to believe.’
Jack did not like the girl’s each-way-bet tone. ‘Florez wants to give lover boy to Kippax so that he can hurt him. Badly. That what you want?’
‘I … I don’t know …’
‘Christ.’ Claudia was thinking about which direction to move, but none of them were heading for Jack. ‘Beaumont used you,’ he said. ‘And Florez is doing the same thing.’
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