Hard Light- Infamous

by Warren Hately

  “Cigarettes?”

  “Hold your horses, Mr Flanagan.”

  The detective laughed and took a seat on the opposite side of the plastic table, reversing the chair like a true television heart-throb before crossing hairy arms over the back.

  “You lured me here under false pretences, Detective Constable.”

  “Mr Flanagan. Michael. Give me a break.”

  “It’s just Flanagan.”

  “OK. Why haven’t you been returning my calls?”

  “Look, Pringdegar, if you haven’t listened to what Teneille Tennyson was telling you, I’m not going to waste my time. Carlo Franco or his associates – his employees – have kidnapped my friend’s kid sister. I’ve been lying in a hospital bed while God knows what’s happened to her.”

  Pringdegar produced a notepad, though he made no move to write anything down.

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “I understand the doctors at Fremantle Hospital are of the opinion you shouldn’t even be walking around, let alone charging about attacking local sporting identities, Mr Flanagan.”

  “Flanagan, I told you.”

  “Flanagan,” the cop slowly said. “Are you going to trust us to investigate this or are you going to get yourself killed?”

  “I’m sorry, detective, but I don’t see you doing shit.”

  “Carlo Franco is, quite frankly, a very difficult area for the WA Police Force, Mr Flanagan,” the detective replied. “You know he’s already under investigation by two separate squads. I’ve passed on this information to both units, and if there was something we could do, some evidence this girl had been abducted, we would’ve moved on it by now.”

  “Do you have a full database of all the properties Franco controls, and do you have men watching each of them?”

  “Mr Franco’s financial affairs are a pretty complex matter.”

  “Allyson kept a diary, detective,” Flanagan slowly told him. “She kept a comprehensive account of all the places Franco and his associates took her or let her near during the past year.”

  Pringdegar adjusted his tight jeans, though it maybe wasn’t fair to say he looked visibly excited at the news.

  “That’s why you believe they kidnapped Miss Jacobsen?”

  “They don’t know about the diary,” Flanagan replied. “Allyson contacted journalists trying to sell the story of her affair with Brett Hopkins. They approached Hopkins, and Allyson disappeared pretty much the next day. You know Brett Hopkin,s and Carlo Franco are like two fucking peas in a pod.”

  “They’re two very different individuals, Mr Flanagan. True, we know they are close. However, one’s a championship footballer and a sponsor child of numerous major WA businesses. The other one’s a criminal. We need only the slightest shred of solid evidence to lock him away forever.”

  “That’s not how I understand it,” Flanagan replied. “You’ve had your chance once before, right? The way Brett Hopkins can command a police presence whenever he wants has me thinking your esteemed WA Police Force can’t be trusted to handle this matter.”

  Pringdegar’s mobile rang. He pulled his cigarettes from the pocket of his shirt and threw them onto the table before digging into his jeans for the phone, an R&B number crooning in polyphonic tones.

  “You can say what you want about the department, Mr Flanagan,” the cop said, frowning as he squinted at the number ringing on his display. “If you make even one crack about me being crooked, then I really will find some way for you to disappear in the system.”

  He held the phone to his ear as he responded to Flanagan’s gesture for a lighter.

  “Madd Pringdegar.”

  His eyes slowly moved to Flanagan, imperceptibly nodding his head. Flanagan exhaled smoke and laid the purple lighter on the table top. He was aware of the cop studying him. After a second more, Pringdegar sighed and held out the phone.

  “It’s for you.”

  *

  THE VOICE ON the line sounded as smoky as if it came from Flanagan’s own throat.

  “Michael Flanagan. Frank Doyle.”

  Flanagan breathed a shaky sigh of relief, eyes closing with tiredness.

  “Inspector. How are you?”

  “Better than you, from what I hear,” Doyle replied.

  “So you heard.”

  “Flanagan, I hear fucken everything, for which you should be well and duly grateful. Is that Sikh cunt still there?”

  Flanagan’s eyes barely flicked up. “Yeah.”

  “Right,” Doyle said in what for him passed as a thoughtful tone of voice. “You and I are gonna have to have a little talk about what the hell’s going on with this footballer and you, and what exactly you think you’re doing with this new line of work of yours. Say nothing now. The less Matt-moot Whatever-his-fucking-name-is knows the better.

  “You’re gonna be released without charge if you can keep your mouth shut from this moment forward. We’ve had a word with Hopkins and brought him in for questioning over this girl. He’ll drop charges if we put some kind of pressure on you to keep away from the media. That includes keeping the fuck away from him. I want you to walk out of there once they release you and just go home.”

  “Franco –”

  “Say nothing,” the senior cop hissed. “We happen to be the police, Michael. Do you think you can keep that in that football-shaped fucken head of yours?”

  “I don’t have a football-shaped head, Inspector.”

  “You must have, for all these people to keep on kicking it. Now hand the phone back to the Sikh.”

  Flanagan did as told, Pringdegar taking the phone like it was a dead rat. After a stifled exchange, Pringdegar switched off the mobile and sat looking across at him with a look caught halfway between bewilderment and disgust.

  “I thought Sikhs had long hair and shit,” Flanagan said.

  “Yeah,” Pringdegar replied distantly. “New country, new rules, I guess.”

  *

  THEY WERE IN the corridor again. Pringdegar led Flanagan by the shoulder still, now living a pretence of Flanagan as his prisoner. At a desk in front of a coded security door, a seated cop in uniform plonked down a plastic zip-lock bag containing Flanagan’s effects. There was a row of gravel-faced police watching him, the service counter behind them, any members of the public masked by a concrete wall and the blue door with its card reader.

  “I want that diary, Mr Flanagan,” Mahmoud said lightly.

  Flanagan turned around, tucking Allyson’s photos and his cigarettes into his jeans.

  “I’m going home,” he replied. “That’s what I’ve been told to do.”

  “How about actually helping us in our inquiries, Mr Flanagan?”

  “Pringdegar, you don’t listen, do you?”

  Flanagan opened his mouth to say something more when the security door clicked inward and a huge uniformed cop with a greying moustache walked in, for a moment the splitting likeness of his uncle, Ted Lysaght. No sooner than Flanagan conceived of his mistake, standing in the wrong station to begin with, he noticed the other senior police leading Brett Hopkins through looking bruised and unhappy in a hooded surf top. Hopkins held his hands like he was cuffed, Flanagan disappointed to see it wasn’t the case.

  “Christ,” Pringdegar snarled.

  “Hopkins,” Flanagan called, gesturing with his chin. “Where is she?”

  “You can talk to my lawyer, just like these cunts,” Hopkins spat back.

  One of the aforementioned police gave the footballer a rough shove in the back, propelling him on and giving Flanagan just the faintest spike of hope that not everyone would overlook Hopkins’s behaviour because of his fame.

  A moment later it was just him and Pringdegar again. The detective forced another business card into Flanagan’s hand.

  “You know he’s not going to talk to us,” the detective said softly.

  “No, probably not.”

  “Work with us. Give us the diary.”

  Flanagan stared back at the policeman a moment longe
r, his face a mask.

  “I can go now?”

  Pringdegar exploded a sigh.

  “Yes,” and he stormed over to the blue door and ran the card on his belt across the scanner.

  Flanagan stepped through into the Hollingsworth Street exit, Nuala’s house only a five-minute walk away.

  *

  HE FOUND HIS sister cross-legged on her living room floor with newspaper spread out, a small canvas board and a set of watercolours on one knee. If there was anything left to pack, Flanagan couldn’t see it. The front door was open, admitting the night, the orange street lighting diffused through the streaky trees and warped by the narrow windows.

  “You look like you’re ready to go,” he said as he came in.

  Nuala feigned more surprise than she felt at his appearance, struggling for the right words.

  “Michael, where have you been? I can’t go until I know you’re going to be alright.”

  “Nee, what are you going to do about it if I’m not? I turn thirty next month. Big boy and all that.”

  Flanagan was almost proud of the way she kept her mouth shut and resisted the easy retort he’d offered. He sat down beside her on the lukewarm carpet and eased out the kind of sigh he felt like he’d been carrying for months.

  “I’ll miss this place,” she said. “It’s relaxing.”

  “Hard to believe, idiots from The Pines pissing on your gates and doing turds in your garden,” he said.

  “A stone’s throw to the world’s best coffee, the latest cinema, great sushi,” Nuala said and shrugged.

  “Berlin’s got all that, surely,” Flanagan said.

  “You’ve never been?”

  “Never been to Europe,” he confirmed. “So much for all that high school French.”

  “You’d hate Berlin. I love it, but it’s much more orderly than here. And greener, too, than you’d expect.”

  “I hope you’ll be happy,” Flanagan found himself saying, lamely.

  “Well. . . .”

  He could tell she was on the verge of waxing lyrical about her lover, and again, she spared them both. Nuala’s mouth closed with an audible clack.

  “I can’t even offer you a cup of tea, I’m sorry.”

  “How about a cigarette?”

  Nuala chuckled and nodded slowly, like a geisha.

  “For old times’ sake.”

  Creaky as he stood, Flanagan offered his sister a hand, staring down at the watercolour of a person’s face, possibly his own, floating under water.

  “I take it that means you’ve finished with the diary.”

  “I translated all the nasty bits. Come on.”

  Like they were children again, she led him through to the back by the hand and he consented, also like the boy he’d once been, one who only wanted to follow his older sister everywhere, strangely contented.

  *

  WHILE NUALA SKETCHED him, Flanagan went through the translated notes with a pen and paper of his own, slowly drawing up a list of key locations and their addresses, skimming back over the original pink diary and asking for the occasional clarification each time the German seemed to imply a number or a quantity or a word he thought he half-recognised.

  In setting out to prove they were smooth operators, Franco and his mates had done the reverse. Allyson had led them around by their cocks until there wasn’t much she didn’t know about Carlo’s empire of methamphetamine labs, chop shops, and fencing houses stretched across the coastal suburbs. From the numbers alone, Flanagan guessed Carlo kept half of Perth’s burglars employed giving them a secure way to dispose of stolen goods no pawnbroker was ever going to touch. That he probably paid them off in cheaply-made drugs only made his own deal sweeter. It was sheer machismo that had rendered his own enterprise so transparent, though he wasn’t alone in that. Allyson listed several other men, probably lieutenants in the Franco business, who left her sitting in the car while they checked in on a licence plate swap or grabbed a few grams of speed ahead of a big night out. And Allyson wrote it all down in her own style of code.

  “I don’t know what she thought she was doing,” Nuala said in the silence that had descended while Flanagan sifted through the pages.

  “I guess there are all sorts of ways to be smart,” Flanagan replied. “Allyson showed that. Franco has a certain feral intelligence. He’s put together a cohesive operation. He’s a rich man and he’s made others rich. That brings loyalty.”

  “And this girl?”

  “She’s smart in her own way.” Flanagan swallowed as he checked his own grammar, so easy to slip into talking about her like she’d gone already. The pain didn’t help. It made him feel lethargic yet frustrated at the same time, sitting on Nuala’s carpet playing accountant while his friend’s sister possibly languished in some kind of hell.

  “It doesn’t seem so smart to me.”

  “Smart but naïve, maybe,” he said. “She’s good at school. Bright, a real achiever. She only knows the world through TV, through this obsession with gossip, Instagram, whispers from her girlfriends, maybe half of it lies. God knows the world seems obsessed with teenage girls, it’s no wonder she feels so powerful.”

  “It’s men who’re obsessed with teenage girls.”

  A harsh rebuttal died in his throat. He knew his own duplicity.

  “It’s an illusion of power,” Nuala continued. “You see girls on TV, on billboards, in the gossip columns. They are highly visible, but that’s not the same as powerful.”

  “I’m not sure,” Flanagan replied.

  “Trust me, Michael. Who owns these media? Who makes money from girls in bikinis, in surfwear, in gossip pages? Not the women, that’s for sure.”

  “It’s not all men.”

  “Oh, Michael, I’m not trying to say it’s all men. God knows, these girls are giving them licence to own them, their bodies, and there’s plenty of women higher up the chain, even bitter, ageing hags like me.”

  “Well, you’re not,” he said, and managed a laugh. “And you’re no hag. You’re my sister. Don’t talk that way.”

  He smiled to try and inject some lightness into the night and mostly failed, thanks more than anything else to the cold knowledge of what he had to do next.

  TWENTY-SIX

  MIKE SELF PULLED into the Norfolk Street kerb and dipped his lights a moment – all the signal needed for Flanagan to give Nuala a kiss on the cheek and be out the door seconds later.

  “I’m leaving next week, Mick,” his sister yelled.

  Flanagan turned at the door of Mike’s taxi.

  “I’ll see you before then. Promise.”

  “Just don’t get yourself killed.”

  He gave her the cocky grin he hoped would frustrate and put her at ease all in the one turn. Then he ducked his head, slipping into the front of the white Falcon.

  “Mike, thanks for coming,” he said.

  The cabbie gave a broad grin, enormous black moustache moving like a wild thing. Mike changed the stick on the automatic and they cruised away from the curb.

  “Nice looking girl.”

  “My sister,” Flanagan said.

  “Ah, OK. Mitts off, then.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the half of it,” Flanagan said tiredly and turned his frown into a grin. “Single bloke, are you?”

  “Yeah,” Mike replied in a glum voice.

  Flanagan thought he’d had something witty to say, only to realise almost any joke he could make would be impossibly cruel. Instead, they lapsed into three seconds of uneasy silence – time enough to do a lap of the roundabout at the bottom of the street, the brick shithouse of the Italian Club in the foreground, Fishing Boat Harbour at the back. Then they eased back up Norfolk Street to the lights at the end.

  “You said something about Cottesloe.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got to pick up my car.”

  “What are you driving?” the cabbie asked.

  “It’s not mine. A little Honda. I have a Fairmont, an old one. Shit itself.”

 
; “Unsurprising,” Mike quipped. “Are you sure you need this car? I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.”

  “You’re on shift, aren’t you?”

  Mike boggled his eyes. “Yeah, I’m working, aren’t I? Driving a customer to his destination?”

  “I’m not sure I could pay you what your time’s worth in this one, Mike. Besides, you really don’t want to get mixed up in this shit. A lift’s fine.”

  “It’s this girl, huh? The little looker.”

  “Allyson. Yeah.”

  “I read the paper, mate. Are you for real about this?”

  “What did you think when you read the paper?” Flanagan asked.

  “Well, having met the girl, I guess I . . . You know I came to see you in hospital, right?”

  “That’s great, Mike. I appreciate it.”

  Flanagan wound down the window, a warm breeze blowing. It was midnight. They ran silently through the back streets of the east end of Fremantle, skirting the Oval, the gentrified Fremantle Prison, Queens’ Square that was just an intersection, really, and then down to the port and the train line and the Old Traffic Bridge and into North Fremantle.

  “You thought she’d probably run away.”

  “Yeah. She’s flighty, mate.”

  “No one knew about the diary she kept,” Flanagan said. “It lists everything: every stupid nightclub where Carlo Franco’s men are dealing, every dodgy mechanic, every place Franco goes to gamble, to fuck Vietnamese hookers, to watch dogs fight, men fight, girls fight.”

  He sighed, knowing it was only the tip of the iceberg.

  “When you see it in that light, you’d understand . . . these men would kill her to keep it all shut up inside her stupid little head.”

  He realised how angry he sounded and wondered at the depths of his own remorse. He’d gone a long way to help out a friend, to atone for a bit of rough stuff with Darryl Jacobsen. Allyson was a little minx. He still didn’t think she’d got her claws into him, but maybe he was wrong. One night in bed, sincere enough at the time – maybe that was how it started for all of them. The worst of it was that he wanted to be angrier than he was. Instead, he contemplated all manner of stupidity, not the least of it being to ignore Frank Doyle’s inarguably sound advice.