Out of the Blue

by JR Carroll

  They locked Teddy in a holding cell that night and in the morning let him out on his own recognisance after he’d put in a call to the legal aid guy and got himself representation. The charges were assaulting police, assault occasioning bodily harm, threatening to kill, resisting arrest, drunk and disorderly, making an affray, offensive behaviour, this and that and a few more. They fingerprinted him and took his picture and then told him to get out. Teddy didn’t give a shit. He got home and pushed Elaine out of the way when she came to him, showered, put on clean clothes, cooked himself a good lunch of fried eggs and bacon, then got in the VK and steered it to the Quarry. That was the place to be, in the company of men, not women. In Teddy’s mind there was no shadow of a doubt that this had all been Elaine’s fault. If he hadn’t had to suck up to her he wouldn’t have gone to the fucking races in the first place and done his dough, then the rest wouldn’t have happened. Fucking women, you always got to treat them like children. With men you know where you stand. Men don’t change. Women, first it’s this, then that. They got no idea what the fuck they want. That guy in the bush doesn’t know how lucky he is to be rid of his.

  At the pub he ran into a couple of heads he hadn’t seen for a while, guys who generally had a lurk or two on the go, usually involving cheap tyres or crates of Scotch. Once they hijacked a truckload of cigarettes, attached the trailer to another prime mover, also stolen, took it to Adelaide and offloaded the lot there, truck included. Like Teddy they were both very familiar with the interior decor of H.M. Prison Pentridge.

  They got into some solid drinking for a few hours and eventually the two guys looked at each other, then one asked Teddy if he’d like to come in with them on something. They were looking for a third member of the team and Teddy had the skills needed. Teddy said, not hesitating for a moment, I’m your man.

  So next morning about eleven-thirty Teddy turned up at this warehouse in his blue overalls, commandeered a forklift, picked up a pallet of computers and transported it to the Goods Outward gate where his two mates were waiting with their truck, a borrowed Linfox flatbed. No one looked at them twice. Guy in the despatch office didn’t even look up from his newspaper. Teddy put the forklift back where he got it and strolled out the way he’d come, then crossed the street to his VK and drove home. How easy was that, he thought.

  NINE

  Wednesday lunchtime, and Dennis arrived ten minutes early at the Ballarat CIB so that Noeline Gallagher would not have to go into the place by herself if she happened to come before the appointed time. Understandably most people didn’t like going into police stations for any reason and although Noeline had been co-operative on the phone, it was in his interests to make the whole experience as painless as possible for her. A cool wind riffled his shirt. He paced around the footpath smoking a cigarette and glancing at individuals going in and out of the cop shop, automatically slotting them into categories. It wasn’t hard.

  Detectives in streetclothes who still managed to look just like detectives in streetclothes, ordinary citizens on routine business, then a legal aid solicitor with her client, a skinny kid with a perfectly shaved skull and a bunch of silver rings glittering on his nose—a burglar for sure. Most were young men—traffic offenders, piss-heads and punch-up artists, although one looked a couple of shades meaner than the rest, had huge hands and enough tattoos to suggest he’d done time for something a bit nastier than dragging off his mates down the main street or belting someone with a billiard cue in one of Ballarat’s many pubs. Something Slavic about the guy—flat nose, sweep of leonine hair, eyes dark in their sockets and too small for the rest of his head—immediately reminded him of Goran Pipic. Going by, the man scanned Dennis, who then watched him walk down the street in a shirt with the sleeves rolled right up to his shoulders and jeans that were too tight, effectively displaying all his considerable musclepower. From a corner thirty metres away, waiting at lights, the man actually looked over his shoulder, clocking Dennis again. That surprised him. It hadn’t just been a casual backward glance, either. Dennis stared at him. He felt an irrational desire to follow the man and wondered why. He watched him cross the street and merge with shoppers, lost him, then he reappeared at the kerb next to a vehicle and got in on the passenger side. The vehicle took off, U-turned through traffic with arrogance and sped south.

  At first Dennis thought he was dreaming, but no, there was nothing wrong with his eyes, even if other parts of him had lost their gloss. It was a Ford F350, cream in colour. Plenty of aerials, fucking forest of them. The body had been knocked around a bit, and in particular Dennis noticed that the off-side wing mirror was gone. It had a big one on the driver’s side. Something that felt like a winged insect fluttered in his balls. He watched the truck until it was out of sight, weaving between cars. It was Goran’s all right. The man himself at the wheel, probably. Who was the mate, though? Dennis would find out. He’d find out all about both of them.

  Distracted by this he had failed to notice the young woman standing next to him until she said, ‘Excuse me, are you Dennis Gatz?’

  ‘I am. Sorry. Noeline?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked into the face of a bright-eyed and attractive woman with bobbed hair and a fringe, twenty or a bit older—increasingly he found it harder to pin down ages that young—and gave her his friendliest smile. ‘Thanks for coming, Noeline. I really appreciate it. Hope it isn’t too much of a drag.’

  ‘No, no, that’s fine. I just don’t know what good I can do, that’s all. I hope I didn’t build your hopes up.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. Look, to be honest, this is probably a waste of your time. But it’s worth a shot, you never know. We just might get lucky. Since it was dark, you probably won’t be able to identify a face, I realise that, but you seem to have got a good overall impression. Even if you could provide some sort of lead, a list of possibles, that’s something to work on.’

  ‘Right. You sound like a policeman.’

  ‘Yeah, can’t help it, I’m afraid. I used to be. Unfortunately some things just don’t change.’ He looked towards the police station doors. ‘It has its advantages. This detective sergeant we’ll be seeing, Gilhooley, is a decent bloke, but I doubt he’d go out of his way for me if I hadn’t been a cop. He’s unusual, though—for most of them it cuts no ice at all. Quite the reverse in fact.’ He smiled, thinking of Frank Stannard.

  She smiled too, then cleared her throat and said, ‘I’m sorry about your wife.’

  He nodded once, then looked away. Just the mention of her did that to him. When distracted for short periods he could actually forget that Karen was no longer alive, and then when something or someone triggered a reminder of her, the effect was always to return him to a state of wordless disarray. The mind, he found, worked differently from the body—it could learn and accept facts no matter how unpleasant, but the body itself took time to adjust. He had been in a shop, seen something, a piece of pottery, picked it up and thought, Karen would like this, and then remembered. Forgetting that she was dead was not the same thing as forgetting Karen, a distinction now painfully clear to Dennis. It seemed to represent an unhappy new stage he’d entered. His system had recovered from its first shock and picked up the threads, business as usual, and in so doing fooled itself into believing that everything was back in place, that life had returned to normal. Now it would need time to catch up with the facts again.

  ‘Thanks, Noeline,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got a pretty good idea how you must feel. My brother was killed in a car last year.’ She added, ‘He was only seventeen.’

  So this explains her desire to help him, Dennis thought. And being trained to suspect the worst of people he naturally reasoned, Seventeen: so that makes him unlicensed, shitfaced, lead-footed, maybe even joyriding—all standard stuff for the growing boy in a bush town. There ought to be a special cemetery for these guys, one where they get buried with the remains of their cars.

  But Noeline saw through him and said, ‘He wasn’t d
runk. He wasn’t even driving. He hadn’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Noeline,’ he said, and left it to her to decide why. ‘What was your brother’s name?’

  ‘Danny. He’d have gone to university this year.’ Thinking of him, she grinned to herself. ‘He was one of these science freaks, you know? Always on the computer. Always working something out …’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘Well, let’s see if we can work something out too, Noeline,’ said Dennis. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Sure.’

  They went inside and Dennis asked for Tony Gilhooley. The young sergeant came out a couple of minutes later, swallowing the last of his lunch. When Dennis introduced Noeline he smiled courteously but did not shake hands, then took them to a sparse room containing a table and three chairs that looked just like a hundred other rooms in which Dennis himself had conducted interviews. Gilhooley invited them to sit down, then disappeared and returned shortly afterwards with an armful of very thick books that looked like photo albums.

  ‘You want to look at pictures—here’s the first lot.’ He dropped them on the table and said, ‘Give us a yell when you’re through with these and I’ll bring some more, okay?’

  Dennis said, ‘Thanks, Tony,’ and just for a moment caught a look in the detective’s eye that said, Why am I doing this? Why am I wasting time doing favours for a guy when there isn’t even a case under investigation? Then he went out and left them alone.

  At the end of an hour they were no closer to identifying the short, stocky, thick-haired man in his thirties or forties who had wandered briefly into the Welcome Stranger car park on the night of Goran Pipic’s birthday party. It didn’t surprise Dennis. Although Noeline had done her best and suggested that three or four might possibly have been him, thereby giving him names to follow up, he knew that there was no real reason to assume that this guy was local. And, in fact, if this was a vendetta aimed at Dennis himself, then the action was more likely to have originated in Melbourne, where he’d been throughout his career.

  Not necessarily, though. A lot of ex-cons change their names and head for the bush, looking for a fresh start where no one knows who they are or what terrible thing they’ve done. Murderers do that. They serve twelve, fourteen years for killing their wife or the guy next door or the kid that didn’t come back from the milk bar and decide that the simple life in a town like Ballarat or Bendigo or Wangaratta, out of the reach of their criminal connections, holds great appeal. That way they are able to put the past completely behind them—if a murderer can ever do that. But then, say, this hypothetical guy, possibly aggrieved, still protesting innocence, discovers by chance that the cop who put him inside isn’t a cop any more, but runs this pub just down the road …

  Dennis frequently wondered whether he had become clinically paranoid. A lot of his time was spent constructing scenarios like that. It was the sort of thing that could unravel a man, which of course would be the objective of the whole exercise. Frank had said he ought to be in Aradale, formerly the local nut-house but now a tourist attraction, and even though the words were spoken in heat he had probably meant them. It had been too specific a reference—Aradale—to be completely spontaneous. It suggested that somehow Frank had already formed that private opinion of Dennis without ever having seen him off the rails until that day. So had someone been in his ear, perhaps?

  He thanked Noeline once more, saw her to the door and explained that he needed to stick around for a few minutes. Gilhooley hung back, waiting. Noeline said, ‘I hope you find what you’re looking for, Dennis. Not that it can bring your wife back, but …’ She shrugged the last part of it off, then said, ‘at least then you’ll know. You’ll be able to get on with your life. Isn’t that what they say?’

  ‘They do. They do say that. I hope you’re right. Sometimes I wonder, though.’ He thought, That won’t be enough, Noeline. Not nearly enough.

  He gave Gilhooley the names of Noeline’s possibles, then the threatening letter, which the detective said he would test for prints. His first impression, he had to admit, was that it looked like the genuine article. The crude lettering, misspellings and above all the Melbourne postmark indicated that. It had been cut out of the Herald-Sun, from scores of notices, and sent to the Pyrenees Hotel. No ratbag hoaxer could put that together just from news reports—the information hadn’t been revealed. Dennis had few friends anyway, hardly any he’d kept in touch with. Practically no one from Melbourne knew his connection with Karen Parr. Like good crims, they’d kissed the past goodbye. No, this had to be someone who knew the whole thing, who’d kept tabs on him. And crims go into hotels. They recognise heads, especially those belonging to ex-cops. They pass it on down the line …

  He said all this to Gilhooley, who fixed Dennis with his clear grey eyes, listened impassively throughout, then said, ‘Know what I think? You should have stayed a cop. You’re not all that bad.’

  Dennis flashed a villainous grin. ‘Tony, if you’d known me then you wouldn’t say that. It was a case of get out or be pushed.’ He didn’t think it could hurt for Gilhooley to know that, if he didn’t already. You couldn’t tell.

  ‘Unconventional, huh?’

  ‘Unconventional, yeah. That’s putting a good gloss on it. The firm and I had what you might call a tempestuous marriage. It had to end one way or another. We were both quite relieved to see the back of each other, don’t worry.’

  Tony said he’d be in touch, then turned to go. Something nagged in the back of Dennis’s mind, however. He remembered quickly and said, ‘Tony, a man left here about an hour ago. Mid-twenties, musclebound, ugly. Tattoos. Possibly Yugoslav. Mean anything to you?’

  ‘Yugoslav? You must mean Stan. Stan Pipic. Why?’

  ‘Not sure. What’s he done?’

  ‘Stan? I believe it’s driving while unlicensed this time. But he’s done worse than that. He half-killed a guy once, took most of his face off with a shotgun while they were playing cards. I think he got four or five years for that.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘That I don’t know. I can find out.’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind. Shit, I wish I didn’t have to keep asking …’

  ‘No, that’s okay. I’m just an all-round regular guy, Dennis. Here to be of service.’ There was a little edge in that, not much but enough to make the point.

  ‘That’s true. I’ll buy you one hell of a Christmas drink, too. So tell me, what relation is he to Goran Pipic?’

  ‘Stan is Goran’s kid brother. You think Stan’s something? Goran leaves him in the shade, Dennis. Goran’s your actual hard man. He’s a killer. I mean a killer. And crazy too.’

  Dennis drove back to Avoca with a new strand to his investigations. How useful that had been, seeing Stan Pipic. More interesting was the fact that Stan gave every impression of recognising Dennis, but from where? Dennis was pretty sure the man had never been in his hotel—it was not a head he could fail to notice, or remember. So how did he tie in with Goran, apart from just being his brother, with Goran’s truck, with the short, thickset man in the VK? He felt in his blood that a picture was beginning to come up in its separate parts, like a photograph slowly being developed. He did not believe that these elements had been randomly scattered in his path. Stan, in particular, had been a gift.

  All his life Dennis had dealt in these matters, fragments that no one else had considered worthy of trying to connect, and many times his instincts had proved to be right. Persistence and then a willingness to take risks would usually pay off. Working from a safe distance got you so far, but finally you had to stand up and face the heat, hoping that it wouldn’t come in the form of a blowtorch. By then he would’ve got too far in to back off. Dennis had never been one to back off anyway. Gilhooley had said that Dennis was a good cop, and that was right—technically he had been. At the same time, however, he was a dangerous man to be around when the going got rough. Of course Gilhooley had no grasp of that. Nor could he detect in Dennis’s outwardly charming and solicitous
manner the barely-suppressed homicidal waywardness that drove him now.

  He felt more encouraged now than when he’d left home to meet Noeline. She hadn’t helped, not directly, not in a way she would ever realise. The main thing now was to keep Tony Gilhooley on side, to treat him with care and lots of respect. It would be a delicate matter of getting as much from him as possible while giving little in return.

  In the bar Brett was leaning on his elbow watching cricket on TV. There were only a couple of regulars present, retirees sitting on their usual stools sipping ponies. They could make those ponies last half an hour each—if Dennis depended on these guys to earn his living he’d be barefoot now. What he mostly got from them was talk, an endlessly recycled set of stories to which he or Brett would dutifully listen without contributing anything to the conversation, if it could be called that. This was the publican’s lot.

  ‘How’d it go?’ Brett said. He’d got up and started wiping the bar, quite pointlessly.

  Dennis poured himself a beer and said, ‘Well, it wasn’t an entirely wasted journey. One door shuts, another opens.’

  ‘Uh huh. Meaning?’

  Dennis drank half the glass in one swallow, then said, ‘I don’t hold out too much hope on the letter. If there were any useful latents on it I probably wiped them off myself. Noeline gave us a few names, but I think she might have been trying too hard to please. She was a good kid.’ He’d already told Brett about her. Being Dennis’s mainstay these days, he deserved to be kept informed—to a point. There’d come a time when Dennis would shut him out for his own good, go the last part alone. It couldn’t be any other way.