Hard Yards

by J. R. Carroll

  … Carter Isaiah Khormitch III was born in Colorado Springs, about sixty miles south of Denver, Colorado, in 1940. Since his father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all military men, young Carter’s future, as well as his Christian name, was mapped out for him. It was written. An able though not outstanding student, he duly left school at 17 and joined the air force, intending to be a fighter pilot. This represented a break from tradition, and was the cause of ructions within the Khormitch clan, as his antecedents had been army men through and through. His father was fond of saying he could ‘shit khaki and camouflage in diapers’ …

  Khormitch served two tours in Vietnam – earning a shitload of decorations – and a stint with the Joint Chiefs in Washington, before the Irangate scandal destroyed his faith in the entire system:

  … By this time his son, Carter IV, had enlisted in the Marines, thus carrying on the family tradition. But Carter Senior had turned his back on his beloved air force: he threw out his uniforms, returned his decorations and, with his wife, Francine, devoted more and more of his time to fundamentalist religion. It seemed inevitable that he would soon find it necessary to establish his own church, which duly came to pass …

  On the next page there was a colour shot of the man-God himself, ex-Colonel Carter Khormitch III. It must have been quite a recent photograph – certainly post-air force – because although his sandy hair was thin and wispy on top, like scattered cornstalks, it was non-regulation thick at the back, with unruly curls cascading over his shoulders. Khormitch gazed at the camera as if staring it down through narrowed blue-grey eyes that were indeed ‘flinty’ and unyielding. He reminded Barrett of the actor Robert Duvall: lean, creased, carved as if from rock, cheek and jaw bones sharp-edged; hard resolve written all over him. Not a man to make idle threats.

  Barrett put the folder aside, struggled to his feet and poured himself a generous shot of 18 Year Old Chivas Regal. He was finding it hard to concentrate. It was too late in the day – following a night of drama and little sleep – to be reading such off-the-wall material as this. It was all too alien. America seemed to contain so much craziness: crazy TV evangelists, crazy sacrificial cults, paranoid anti-government ‘survivalists’, UFO nutters, Klansmen, Louis Farrakhan’s Million Men, shopping mall and school shooters, dangerous extremists and fanatical fringe groups of all types. It seemed ridiculous that something happening over there could create problems on the other side of the world. Of course they existed in Australia, too, these whackos, but in lesser numbers. A far-out crew in a flyspeck Queensland town had attracted attention recently. He sipped the Chivas, then lit a cigarette, exhaling long and slow. Mad fucking men. The place was full of them, and they all had their reasons. Diaz, the Mustang fraggers, doomsday-sect head cases and – somewhere in the woodwork – a contract trigger man trying to get a champion runner in his crosshairs.

  10

  On the Monday morning, early, Barrett felt he ought to ring Andrea, mainly to see if she was all right. He still couldn’t believe someone wanted to put a bomb under his car. Why? He hit her number on the speed dialler, noting the time on his wristwatch as he waited for her to answer.

  ‘Hello?’ the sleepy voice said.

  ‘It’s me, Andrea.’

  ‘Who? … Oh.’

  ‘Everything okay there?’

  ‘Well … until somebody woke me up it was.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I have to get up anyway. Christ, what time is it?’

  ‘Half seven.’

  ‘Shit. Thanks for the wake-up call, Barrett. Goodbye.’

  ‘Wait a minute, Andrea. Just hold on, can you?’

  ‘Barrett. I meant what I said. Don’t. Bother. Me. Again.’

  ‘Bother you?’

  ‘That’s right. If you persist I’ll have to get the police onto you.’

  ‘Christ, Andrea …’

  ‘I will not be harassed or stalked, not for one minute. If you make contact with me again I’ll instruct my lawyers to get an intervention order against you. Can I make it any plainer than that?’

  ‘No, that’s plain enough. I just don’t understand why you’ve turned against me so much.’

  ‘Barrett, if you don’t get it, I can’t explain. Our situations are different, that’s all. They don’t go together.’

  He felt like saying: That’s not the impression I got when you screamed underneath me to fuck you unconscious. Or when you begged me to get the bottle of lubricant and fuck you in the behind. Our situations seemed pretty well matched then. Instead he said, ‘It wasn’t my impression. I thought we had a good thing going.’

  A moment’s hesitation, then: ‘Whatever you thought, it’s over, Barrett. Accept it. Get on with your own life.’

  ‘You don’t give me much choice.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Andrea, I didn’t put the fucking bomb there. I stopped them, remember? I nearly got a busted leg out of it.’

  ‘I told you, I don’t care who put it there. I have no wish to die violently because of something you’re involved in. Has that got through yet? Now I must go.’

  Click went the phone, and then he was listening to the soft burr of a dial tone. His heart gave a bump. Nothing was more dispiriting than being on the receiving end of a disconnected phone. It felt exactly as if he had been sliced in half.

  No change of mind there, he thought. And there never would be. Barrett was now on the same level as poor, despised Ivan Fearnor in her eyes. He felt as if he’d been stabbed, then been blamed for getting in the way of the knife. At the moment it was all still a bit unreal, but when the finality of it hit home he knew he’d have a problem or two getting over her. The unfortunate fact was that he did love Andrea, fuck it. No use moping: he was simply going to have to get her out of his head.

  He made a cappuccino in one of Lance’s numerous coffee machines, then sat down at the window to watch the nude follies. Three buildings up, in the same street, there was an apartment one level below his which was occupied by a young professional couple who were evidently of comfortable means. Every morning the woman would throw open the bedroom curtains and stand facing the world in the buff, her well-shaped tits and dark triangle of not-so-secret hair on show for anyone out there to appraise. Then the man would get up, his swinging dick perfectly visible as he loped about the room and performed his ritual of calisthenics. Occasionally there’d be a little horseplay, and once or twice he had seen the man become aroused as he put his hands on her and she’d pretended to fend him off. Their routine was that he would shower first while she did ten minutes on the exercise bike in the living room. He would then dress while she showered, after which she took her time deciding what to wear. Then they would sit down to breakfast. At eight sharp they went to work. In the evenings it was much the same in reverse, and with all the lights on. After dinner they would lie on the bed and watch TV while sipping flutes of champagne. Always, the theme was nakedness or semi-nakedness being brazenly – proudly – flaunted, although they stopped short of having sex on stage. Whenever they reached that point she always jumped up and drew the curtains with a dramatic flourish, pausing for a second beforehand to throw a glance in Barrett’s direction – ciao for now.

  Viewing this daily peep show Barrett had felt a little off, but not enough to make him stop watching. It was compulsive viewing, in fact, much better than anything on TV, and the clear impression he had was that the couple wanted an audience. It was a game; it turned them on. It turned them all on. He was sure they could see him through his window, but if so they were unfazed. In any case, snooping was his job. Now, watching their antics with his bad leg resting on a stool, he felt like James Stewart in the Hitchcock movie, Rear Window, but instead of a telephoto camera lens he had binoculars.

  In a while his mind turned to more pressing matters. He caught a taxi to the office, then telephoned the Dee Why police to find out what was happening about his car. The usual runaround ensued: no-one knew where it was, the officer he asked for wasn’t in,
and so on. Try again later. Then he switched on the computer and, accessing one of Lance’s databases, ran a check on vehicle registration number CALLME 3. 1990 Ford Mustang, red. A rental – not surprisingly – owned by a firm in Hornsby called Specialty Car Services. There were seven Mustangs registered to them, all red and all consecutively numbered.

  Now he had to decide whether to phone or visit the premises. It was sometimes hard getting information over the phone, but without wheels he was behind the eight ball. He pressed the numbers: a man answered, saying, Good morning, Specialty Car Services. Barry Groves speaking. How can I help you? Barrett responded by putting on his cop-sounding voice, giving a fictitious name and running a spiel about being a Fraud Squad detective investigating a stolen credit card scam. It was a risky tactic, but it often did the trick. As soon as he heard the words ‘credit card scam’, Groves forgot the name Barrett had given him. Was he a victim of the scam? We don’t know yet, Barrett said; we do have information, however, that this person might have recently hired a Mustang, registration CALLME 3, from your company. Possibly last Friday or Saturday. Can you check that for us? He could hear the man already getting to work on the computer, tapping keys. Here we are, he said. CALLME 3 was taken out on Friday morning, returned 4 p.m. yesterday. What name did he give? Barrett said, pen poised. Groves said, customer’s name was Kenneth M. Dowd. How did Mr Dowd pay? Barrett said, scribbling on his pad. MasterCard, Groves said. Could you give us the number, Mr Groves? So we can check it against our list of stolen cards. Groves obliged. And do you have an address for him? Address? Sure. Here we go … 33 Bethune Close, Ryde. Thank you, Mr Groves. We may need to come and talk to you at some stage, depending. Fine, Detective, I’ll be here. Hope you catch the bugger.

  Barrett thanked him again and rang off. If only they were all as cooperative as Barry Groves. It did help being able to do a decent cop impersonation. But if Groves decided to run a check on the call, Barrett could be in deep strife. Advanced telephone systems were making it tougher for private snoops these days: many businesses already had the capacity to display a caller’s number, if not his face. He tore off the page and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he got on with one of the on-going cases in which Lance’s firm was involved.

  This had to do with a nation-wide ice-cream franchise called Cones-R-Us. Headquartered in Brisbane, the company correctly believed it was being fleeced in a major way by some of its franchisees. Gold Shield Detective Agency had been given the account in an effort to get to the bottom of the illicit biz, with discreet digging being the name of the game. Naturally, Cones-R-Us did not want negative publicity relating to its operations, and nor did they wish to be seen as soft targets. Hence no cops.

  With several folders of documents under his arm Barrett hailed a cab in the street, got in the back seat and instructed the driver to head for Parramatta District Court, in the far west. This was the third day of a fraud matter in which Barrett was the principal prosecution witness. He had no problem with it, having spent a lot of time in court during his cop years. Mainly it was tedious – a lot of sitting around, waiting – but sometimes a sharp defence barrister could unravel you if you were not on your toes and alert to his wiles. This was another Cones-R-Us scam, and one that Barrett himself had exposed.

  Barrett had long ago ceased being amazed at the stupidity of the criminal classes, of whatever stripe. Most simply could not resist bragging, even to complete strangers, about their nefarious activities. Once, posing as a friend of another Cones-R-Us franchisee, he had ‘accidentally’ met a suspected scam artist in a hotel for a few friendly drinks. He had barely shaken the ice-cream man’s hand when the fool began mouthing off to Barrett’s friend about how he had rorted the parent company out of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, tax free, in the financial year just past. He did this by opening on public holidays – which was fine, perfectly legal – but without including this small detail in his monthly report to the Brisbane office. He was therefore able to pocket a hundred per cent of the take instead of the usual fifty. He was so clever, and so pleased with himself. When his books were examined, it was found he had siphoned three hundred thousand dollars over two years, ever since he’d got into the place. He was thrown out of business, hit with criminal charges and sent down. Then the Tax Office had cut him to pieces. By this time his team of lawyers had sucked up all his funds, so he was unable to pay his back taxes and the very heavy fine imposed. Accordingly his house and chattels were sold from under him. To finish him off, his wife and kids split, on top of which he had to do a year and a half in Long Bay. A year and a half in the slammer did not exactly zip by.

  It was stuffy in the taxi, but worse than that there was a foul stench coming from somewhere, as if a long-deceased animal had been left under the seat. Barrett wound down the window, and straightaway a passing gravel truck gave him the full benefit of its diesel exhaust. Traffic along here was appalling, even worse than usual, and there was a long way to go. There were road gangs, flashing arrows, closed lanes, an accident somewhere ahead, a cop car and an ambulance trying hopelessly to get through the creeping glacier of vehicles – and this was the fucking M4 motorway! By Christ it was tough earning a quid sometimes.

  ‘Mate,’ he said to the driver, ‘can you turn on the air-conditioner?’

  ‘Sorry. Airconditioner’s rooted,’ the driver said.

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘No, mate. Been rooted for weeks.’

  ‘Well … why don’t you get it fixed?’

  ‘Not up to me, mate. Not my fucking car. It’s the company’s responsibility.’

  ‘Call that customer service? Christ, man. What’s that fucking rotten stink, anyway? You got a decomposed cadaver in the boot?’

  The driver looked at Barrett in the rear-view mirror. ‘Buddy, do us a big favour and shove a pipe in it. Or you can get out and walk. I’m just the fucking driver, right? Don’t take your crap out on me.’

  Barrett wound up the window. It was a toss-up what was worse: the filthy stench or the grit, dust and vehicle pollution that swirled around in the cabin, stinging his eyes and making his throat feel as if he’d swallowed oven cleaner. ‘Don’t expect a fucking tip,’ he said.

  ‘I wouldn’t take your lousy fucking tip,’ the driver said. Then, half to himself: ‘Arsehole.’

  Barrett could have reached over and throttled the man, but then he would have been stuck here forever.

  Three-quarters of an hour later he was in downtown Parramatta. It was warmer here than in town. When he had asked the driver for a receipt, the man had given him a look that went beyond mere hatred and into homicide territory. Barrett had offered him a pen and said, ‘Come on, mate, I haven’t got all fucking day,’ and the driver nearly spat at him. But he got the receipt, followed by a muttered stream of abuse as the taxi took off into the traffic without waiting or indicating, making a girl in a little Honda slam on the brakes and scream at him. Road rage was a highly contagious condition – this could go on all day, passed on from one driver to the next, until eventually someone in the chain got stomped. Barrett straightened his tie and entered the courtroom building.

  The man in the dock was one Charlie Tucci. Fifteen months earlier he had put his franchise on the market, and Barrett, posing as a prospective buyer, had paid him a visit. Tucci was a genial man in his late thirties with a large, balding pate that gleamed like a bowling ball. Barrett had introduced himself – having phoned earlier for an appointment – then the two men had gone to the rear of the shop. Here there was a small office containing a computer and a heap of paperwork lying all over the place. Quite evidently Charlie Tucci was not well organised, even if he was making money hand over fist.

  Following an initial chat, Tucci had showed Barrett around, and Barrett could not help noticing there was a large quantity of ice-cream in the refrigerated storeroom. When he’d remarked on this, Tucci happily explained that he was running a second business on the side by supplying ice-cream to caterers, for weddings,
private parties and other large functions run by sporting clubs, or by the rich and famous. Ice-cream was big in the Italian community. He was raking in an absolute fortune, and the reason he was selling the franchise was that the catering had expanded to the point where it was taking up most of his time. He needed to rationalise his operations.

  Number one, as a Cones-R-Us franchisee he was out of order operating a parallel business using their product; number two, he’d kept all the proceeds from this second business, robbing the parent company of a million-and-a-half dollars. Number three, he was cheating the tax man big time. What he didn’t know, as he was merrily confessing all this detail to Barrett, was that Barrett had a loaded mini-cassette recorder strapped to his waist, under his shirt, and was taping every word of it. Charlie Tucci had condemned himself out of his own garrulous mouth, and now he was having his day in court. It was not a happy experience for him.

  The thing was, Tucci had two brothers, which Barrett had not known at the outset. The younger one, Ernesto, was supposedly involved in a heavy criminal gang. Barrett had heard that he preferred to be addressed as ‘Hollywood Jack’ or ‘The Man’. Like most people around the traps, he’d heard and read about this character who fancied himself as Jack Nicholson in the Mafia movie, Prizzi’s Honor, but he had not initially connected him to Charlie – Tucci was a reasonably common Italian name in Sydney. In the private eye business, you heard all kinds of stories about all kinds of people. Ernesto ‘Hollywood Jack’ Tucci had a fearsome reputation which, it seemed, was partly of his own invention. He had been known to hire thugs to beat up his opponents, and the story went that he once planted listening devices in the cars and homes of his friends, including his brother-in-law, to find out if they really respected him or merely pretended to in his presence. He was the ultimate egomaniac fantasist, even more so than Anthony Diaz. If those two ever fell out and went head to head, serious sparks would fly. They were both bad-tempered sons of bitches and would tear each other to shreds – a spectacle worth the price of a front-row ticket.