Port Vila Blues

by Garry Disher

  She hadn’t realised how much she relied upon independent action in each arm. With her wrists manacled together around the metal frame of a camping cot, opening drawers and cupboard doors required great patience, strength and dexterity. And a sense of humour, for the cuffs chafed her badly and the cot knocked painfully against her shins. Once when a drawer fell out her hands fell with it before she could stop herself, which dropped the bottom edge of the frame with a solid smack across the toecap of her shoes. She jerked so fiercely on the cuffs in response that the nylon broke the skin and blood began to leak stickily over her fingers.

  ‘Eureka,’ she muttered, opening another drawer. A little tenon saw, the blade rusty, the handle held together with black electrical tape. Raising her right foot to support the weight of the cot while she worked with her hands, she flicked aside a file and a packet of nails, then propped the tenon saw blade upright, its teeth outermost, and nudged the drawer home until it clamped the blade in place. This gave her a twenty-centimetre cutting edge. She began to raise and lower her arms, running the nylon link along the saw teeth, the metal cot knocking the cupboard, her thighs. When the link finally snapped open, the bed dropped like a stone, falling from her supporting foot and onto the other again. The pain and regret and humiliation brought on blinding tears.

  She recovered, freed her wrists, gathered her things. Wyatt had left both guns, including the little revolver he’d found in her crotch holster. It was a .22 Colt Cobra weighing fifteen ounces, with a six-shot chamber and two-inch barrel. It had weighed slightly more before she’d filed down the hammer and front sight. She put it in her bag. She would have to lose the other gun now that it tied her to the shooting—or at least lose it until she knew who the dead man was and who had sent him and until she had her story right. Then she washed her hands and forearms, getting rid of any telltale powder residue that might be detected by a paraffin test.

  There was a heating-oil tank growing out of weeds at the rear of the building. Liz prised open the lid, dropped the gun, heard a dull slap as it landed in sludge at the bottom.

  One minute later she was out on the main road, flagging down a bus. In Belgrave she caught a train, express to the city. She should have gone in and reported to someone then. Instead, she went home and made herself a drink. She was in the mood for rebellion and proud lament. She clacked through her CDs, the Chieftains, Sinead O’Connor, the Dubliners, settling on Clannad. She’d have some explaining to do to Internal Investigations and her boss when this was over but, until she knew who she could trust, she wouldn’t be going by the book.

  Not for the first time, Liz wondered how much the job had changed her, how much she’d lost. Working undercover meant that she sometimes had to remind herself that she was a cop, after all. She rarely spent time at the police complex in Elizabeth Street, and then only entered by way of an underground corridor from a building around the corner. She tended to meet other coppers in pubs, parks or restaurants. The rest of the time she played a drug dealer, a fence, a street girl. It was a nervy double life and it took its toll on her. She was resented by some elements inside the force and only trusted outside it after painstaking groundwork. She encountered cops who didn’t like her because she was young, female, got results, had letters after her name, and she encountered crims who would want her dead if they knew what she did for a living. The ID in her shoe had saved her life twice in drug deals that had gone haywire; she’d flashed it, and hard men had put up their guns and backed off rather than kill a cop, but that didn’t mean there weren’t also hard men walking the streets who had too much to lose or wanted a payback or simply hated cops too much to care about an ID card.

  Liz could feel the scotch burning away the tension. At least by working burglary she had a margin of safety that hadn’t existed when she’d worked for the drug squad. Dealers, buyers, they feared ripoffs, not cops, and always went armed. They were jumpy people to deal with and the days were long. She’d often worked eighteen-hour days, from 4 P.M. to 4 A.M., setting up a deal and an arrest, then paperwork until 10 A.M.

  Not that the drug element didn’t exist behind the city’s burglaries. All crime flowed to and from drugs these days. The street scum burgled TV sets to buy drugs. White collar addicts committed fraud to feed their habits or pay their debts. The profits from armed robberies and stolen car and art rackets were used to buy into drug distribution networks. And the stakes were so high, the profits so great, the effects of the drugs themselves so destabilising, that crims now were more vicious, more unpredictable than they’d ever been.

  Liz Redding sipped her scotch and thought of Wyatt and Jardine. They represented an older, cleaner time and were rapidly going out of date. Jardine’s ill-health, Wyatt’s sharkish grin and urgency with her on the dusty mattress—she felt an ambiguous regard for each man, she felt closer to them than to her colleagues, her dirty double life. She didn’t want to see them caught or hurt. All she’d wanted was to trace the Tiffany, trace it back to the magnetic drill gang.

  She guessed she’d taken this latest assignment as far as it would go. Springett had arranged crash courses for her in fencing jewellery and assessing the weight and worth and provenance of precious stones and metals, and had told her to go around the pawnshops, certain pubs and clubs, seeing who was flash, who had money, cars, clothes, who the party animals were. All it had got her were a couple of small busts until finally a whisper that Frank Jardine, poor, sick sod, was the man to see.

  It occurred to Liz then that she might be making a bad mistake about Wyatt and Jardine. Never romanticise these bastards: she’d had that drummed into her at briefing sessions often enough. It was entirely possible that Wyatt had ripped off Jardine and Jardine had sent a killer after him. Or that Jardine had discovered who she was, sent a killer to get both of them and keep the Tiffany and the reward money for himself.

  She glanced at her watch. Three o’clock. Still a lot of the afternoon left.

  She took her own car this time. First, she called on Pardoe, her contact in the insurance company. He was pleased to get the Tiffany back. He smiled at her attentively across his desk, a pale, watery man with red lips and fingers he liked to steeple beneath his chin.

  ‘We’re very pleased. The question remains, is this gang getting its information from one of our employees? Have you been able to establish that one way or the other?’

  Liz didn’t return the smile. She felt jumpy and trusted no one. ‘Your people are clean. As far as anyone knows—in here and out in the street—I am a fence who can be trusted, so I’d have heard something by now. Besides, the Asahi Collection wasn’t insured by your firm.’

  Pardoe nodded gravely. ‘Fortunately. That little lot won’t be seen again. So, who? I’m not asking for police secrets, you understand. I’m merely curious.’

  Her expression neutral, Liz rose to leave. ‘We’re still working on that.’

  She left the building. According to the files, a crowd using an electromagnet and a drill had been active in Victoria way back in the seventies, hitting office safes, banks, jewellers and credit unions. Those men would be almost twenty years older now. Maybe they were back in action. Maybe they’d passed on their know-how to a younger crowd. Even so, they were getting their information from someone with inside knowledge of the alarm systems, holdings and security weaknesses of a range of places.

  Her second visit was to Jardine’s house in Coburg. The skinny, harrowed, bitter sister opened the door and told her that she was too late. A hard man had come calling at about the time Wyatt was gliding inside her. The sister had been visiting the house across the road, sitting in the front room drinking tea, and seen the man leave her house. The thing was, she hadn’t seen him go in, so she’d excused herself and hurried across.

  ‘I found my brother dead,’ she said. ‘Stroke. He had this look of fear on his face you wouldn’t believe. He was literally frightened to death, I don’t care what anyone thinks.’

  Liz was prepared to believe her. She asked for a
description of the man.

  ‘Sort of tall, neat, wore a suit, had this smile on his face.’

  ‘Not Wyatt,’ Liz muttered, half to herself.

  Jardine’s sister sniffed bitterly. ‘Ultimately Wyatt,’ she said, slamming the door.

  Next stop, headquarters.

  26

  Wyatt had gone looking for Frank Jardine first, on the premise that even a trusted friend, a child, or a nun in a habit could do him harm. If it had been Jardine who’d sent the hired gun to the cafe in the hills, Wyatt was prepared to kill him.

  But it hadn’t been Jardine. Instead, Wyatt found the grieving, angry sister, who talked about a visitor, about a stranger who’d literally frightened Jardine to death. All Wyatt could do now to find the man behind all this was backtrack the Tiffany, see what names he came up with. He grieved a little, felt a twinge of guilt, gave the twenty-five thousand dollars to Nettie, and flew to Sydney.

  He didn’t tackle Cassandra Wintergreen at her house, knowing how spooked she’d be there after the burglary. Using information supplied in Jardine’s original briefing notes, he staked out her electoral office, half a ground-floor shop, ‘Cassandra Wintergreen, Member for Broughton’ in a broad, thick-lettered arc across the window glass. Between it and the other ground-floor tenant, a Radio Shack outlet, was a foyer sealed from the street by sliding glass doors.

  He waited until late afternoon, went in, looked at the list of tenants: five floors of accountants, dentists, osteopaths and firms with names like Allied Exports Inc.

  He looked at his watch: 5:45 P.M. According to Jardine’s notes, the nightwatchman would be locking the sliding doors at six-thirty, and Wintergreen always worked late and would let herself out—small pieces of knowledge, but Wyatt and Jardine had built all of their jobs on an accumulation of small details. Wyatt crossed to the stairwell, climbed to the fourth level, found a men’s room and prepared to wait.

  After the groundwork there was always the waiting—for Wyatt a kind of self-hypnosis in which his senses registered only the essential: the foreseeable dangers, the wild cards, the variables, the job at hand. He knew how to let part of himself disengage while the other part remained wound tight and watchful. He knew how to sit, rest his limbs, and still keep a part of his mind sufficiently stimulated to stop himself from shutting down.

  Not that his tooth would have let him drift into sleep. He’d swallowed painkillers and had others in his pocket. According to the pharmacist at the airport, they wouldn’t make him feel drowsy, but, just in case, he’d also swallowed a five-grain, heart-shaped Benzedrine. Now he was on edge a little, but he figured that was better than the searing pain in the rotting stump of his tooth.

  At six forty-five Wyatt turned off the power to the ground floor, let himself in the rear passageway door to Cassandra Wintergreen’s suite, and went straight to the inner office. Wintergreen, fiddling with the light bulb on her desk lamp, looked up, startled, mouth opening to cry out.

  Wyatt clamped his hard, dry palm over her mouth. ‘I won’t hurt you, I want information,’ he said softly, staring fixedly at her until something in him convinced her to nod and go slack.

  He removed his hand.

  ‘About what?’ she asked.

  ‘The Tiffany butterfly stashed with your fifty thousand.’

  She jerked against him. She smelt musty, stale with old perfume. ‘You lousy bastard. Give it back. It was a gift, great sentimental value. And it might interest you to know that that money represents the hard work of my constituents, a downpayment for a shelter for—’

  There was only one way to reach a mind like hers. He slapped her left and right and told her that he didn’t have the time or the patience for this. ‘You are bent,’ he said slowly, his face close to hers. ‘The Tiffany was stolen from a Melbourne bank in February and there’s no way you can account for it legitimately. Your only choice is to tell me who gave it to you. If you don’t, I’ll hurt you and later tell the media where the kickback came from. Someone will listen.’

  He knew that much about how her world worked. He watched her, saw the rapid calculations behind her eyes, still caked with mascara, and finally learned about De Lisle’s apartment in Woollahra, his house on the northern New South Wales coast, his yacht, his work in Fiji and Vanuatu.

  27

  After leaving Nettie Jardine, Liz drove back to her flat in Parkville. 3LO had the Emerald shooting on their four o’clock update. She locked the car and took the Elizabeth Street tram to headquarters, staring out at Daimaru on one side, then the Vic Market on the other. It came down to one thing: who knew she was meeting Wyatt? Pardoe at the insurance company, but he didn’t know where or when—unless he’d had a tail on her for the past few days. And why do that if it meant he’d risk losing the Tiffany?

  Wyatt and Jardine, but it was clear that they’d had nothing to do with the shooter.

  Her skin began to creep. That left someone she worked with in the Armed Robbers. They were often asked to advise on security in banks and building societies.

  Superintendent Montgomery? Somehow she couldn’t see it. He’d moved to Burglary from Traffic and was dotty about his grandkids. It was with a great deal of reluctance that he sanctioned undercover work, its grey areas, the necessarily blind-eye approach. He would have been entirely happy for his officers to pull in a series of small fish, not hang out for the big ones.

  Her creeping flesh would not let her alone. How could she go to Montgomery with her suspicions? She’d shot a man dead and left the scene without reporting it or declaring who she was. Even soft Grandpa Montgomery wouldn’t save her from the toecutters once he knew that. She’d be stripped of all rank, suspended, maybe face charges. It wouldn’t help that the man she’d shot was probably a hired gun, a potential cop killer. She’d killed him and fled the scene, and that just wasn’t on.

  She mused about the risks involved in this job. There was always plenty to bring you down when you worked deep cover, submerged in a role for weeks at a time. Liz had known young male cops to confuse their roles, get hooked and start sleeping with the women who were always on the fringe of the drug scene, even fall in love with them.

  Alcohol. It always flowed freely when crims were putting a deal together.

  Money. Pocket a bit on the sly? Tell the Department’s paper pushers that your buy money got lost between the crime scene and the evidence safe, blew away in the wind, got unaccountably soaked in blood?

  And the danger itself, getting your kicks out of walking a knife edge day after day after night.

  And there were plenty of other risks beyond your control: cover blown by a corrupt colleague, cover blown by an incompetent colleague, cover blown by little old ladies who, recognising you, inquired after your mother and asked why you weren’t in uniform today.

  Liz stepped down from the tram and dodged blatting horns to cross the lanes of traffic and enter the police complex at the top end of the city. She made her way to Homicide, waited for Ellie Shaw to catch her eye, then mouthed: ‘Coffee?’

  Ellie was looking harassed. She glanced worriedly at her watch, the clock on the wall. The detectives around her were doing a lot of murmuring into telephones. They looked harassed, too.

  ‘It will have to be quick,’ Ellie said, joining her in the corridor. ‘We’ve got a real flap on this afternoon.’

  They took the elevator to the cafeteria. Liz paid for coffees and danish and for a vivid moment pictured Wyatt, his hawkish face and his dismay when his tooth fell out.

  ‘You do look a bit tense. What kind of flap?’

  Ellie leaned forward. ‘That shooting in the hills.’

  Well, this was falling into her lap. Liz said casually, ‘What about it?’

  Ellie leaned forward. ‘It was a cop.’

  Liz froze, believing her friend was saying that a cop had done the shooting. Her voice caught: ‘How do you know?’

  ‘We ran the guy’s prints. Lo and behold, he’s known to the police, only not as a crim, as a cop. Can you
believe it?’

  It wasn’t difficult for Liz to say wow and widen her eyes. ‘What was he doing there?’

  Ellie shrugged. ‘You tell me. I assumed he was working Burglary because your boss came in to our department to ask about him.’

  ‘Montgomery?’

  Ellie shook her head. ‘DI Springett. You’re on his team, aren’t you?’

  ‘Huh,’ Liz said.

  She hadn’t wanted his name to crawl into her mind. He was too close. Springett, a man she didn’t like but admired all the same, cold as a fish, utterly detached, a man who asked questions for a living and expected nothing back but lies and evasions. He hadn’t seemed to hold her youth, her sex or her education against her. Rather, he’d promoted her, put her in charge of the challenging cases.

  Like the magnetic drill gang, guiding and encouraging her every step of the way.

  Guiding, that was the key word. Guiding her so that she’d never find them, and if she did get too close he was in a position to head her off or give warning.

  Ten minutes later, Liz was watching Montgomery reddening behind his desk. ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘No, sir, I checked. Lillecrapp used to work with Springett on the Vice Squad and—’

  ‘You actually shot him dead and left the scene without reporting it?’

  ‘Boss, listen, there’s only one way Lillecrapp could have known about the meeting, and that’s if Springett told him and he tailed me.’

  But Montgomery was still overcome, holding his plump cheeks between plump, desk-work hands. ‘Christ Almighty. How the fuck do I explain this?’

  Liz paused, a little puzzled. ‘Explain it as it is, sir. A senior officer’s been feeding information to crims, sending a killer after a fellow officer.’

  Montgomery snarled, looking ugly now, no longer kindly: ‘Fuck that. I’m talking about the shooting. The press are going to have a field day when they hear how it happened. You say this Lillecrapp character was about to shoot you? I suppose we can say it looked as if he’d gone off the rails.’