Aftershock

by Peter Corris

  ‘Boxing,’ I said, ‘mostly.’

  ‘That’d be right. What have you been doing, apart from being bashed?’

  ‘Talking to Horrie Jacobs and looking through Oscar Bach’s things.’

  ‘Find anything interesting?’

  I’d recovered my balance and had the half-truth ready. ‘His old house’s being renovated as of yesterday after years of neglect. Seems a bit coincidental. Did you find anything interesting?’

  She touched my arm and shrugged her shoulder bag into place. The gun on her hip jumped a few inches. ‘Come and have something to eat and we can talk about it.’

  She took me to a semi-outdoors restaurant, part of the re-vamped waterfront. We sat under a pergola covered with a vine that grew out of a tub. It was that sort of a place—almost natural. She ordered a light beer and calamari and I opted for the same drink and whitebait. We made small talk over the beer while we waited for the food. I reflected that this semi-profession had changed: once, you had to be an ex-cop or something equally heavy and be ready to put in the boot, now, there’s a TAFE course leading to qualification for a PEA licence and we lunch al fresco with gun-toting female cops.

  She speared up some calamari, ate it and nodded. ‘It can have the texture of a bicycle tube, ever found that?’

  ‘Yes.’ I crunched the bones and skin of some whitebait, chewed briefly and swallowed the lot. ‘This is great.’

  ‘Good, since it’s all on you. The police force is feeling the pinch.’

  I groaned at the joke and suddenly we were on better terms. She told me that Oscar Bach fell very definitely into the category of ‘nothing known’. No convictions, no fines, no violations, no infringements, no complaints.

  I said, ‘Isn’t that a bit unusual?’

  She ate some of the side salad that had come without being ordered. It seemed to be fresh and crisp, but was it free? ‘Yes, but not unique. In theory, all citizens should have a clean bill of health.’

  ‘You’d be out of a job if they did.’

  ‘So would you.’

  ‘True. I have to tell you that I got the same result when I looked through his stuff. Too good to be true. No, worse than that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Not true at all.’

  ‘You’re being fanciful now. You’re trying to promote something. That’s the trouble with people in your business, always looking for angles.’

  The tasty whitebait turned to ashes in my mouth. Suddenly I was angry. Where did she get off? Going from office to courthouse, attending the odd disaster … ‘That’s your old man talking,’ I said. ‘How many private detectives have you dealt with, Senior? In your smooth ride towards the top?’

  ‘What d’you mean by that?’

  I started eating again and the food tasted better. I crunched the skin and bones, took a forkful of the salad and a solid swig of the light. I wished it was Newcastle Brown.

  ‘You think I made this rank because of my father,’ she snapped. ‘I’m a better bloody police…’

  It was getting out of hand. Her voice had risen and people were starting to look at us. I resisted the impulse to complete her sentence with ‘person’, and poured her some more beer. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘we shouldn’t be fighting.’

  ‘Why are we, then?’

  I looked at her over the plates and glasses and bowls. The light bouncing off the water made her eyes look even bluer than before.

  You’re not interested in blue eyes, I said to myself, you like dark eyes. Think of Anne Bancroft. But I liked what I was seeing much more than I wanted to. I tried to think of Helen Broadway. I needed help.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

  I shook my head and a laser of pain shot through my skull. I blessed it. Something to blame. I touched one of the cuts and winced. ‘My head hurts. Crowbar.’

  ‘Jesus. You should be in hospital or something.’

  ‘I’ll be all right. Not as young as I was. You don’t bounce back from these things as quickly. We seem to have rubbed each other up the wrong way. I apologise. I need your help.’ The words were not coming from the part of my brain that was thinking and feeling things.

  She ate a little more calamari, drank some beer and lit a cigarette. ‘D’you mind?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘blow some over here.’ Not much of a line but better than telling her to put it out. Maybe someone else would do that. It was a pretty clean-looking place and I didn’t see any ashtrays.

  ‘Let’s get back on the point,’ she said. ‘Nothing known on Mr Bach. An autopsy was done, of course. If we find someone squashed flat with a refrigerator lying on top of him we still have to determine the cause of death.’

  I nodded. Maybe tough talking was her way out of emotional confusion, the way excessive formality was mine.

  ‘There is something slightly unusual about the autopsy, but I wouldn’t get excited about it if I was you.’

  ‘What was unusual?’

  ‘It was done here at the forensic unit of the Central Hospital, like most of them …’

  ‘Most? Not all?’

  ‘No. The workload must’ve got too heavy or something, because a couple of the bodies were shipped to Sydney. Mr Bach’s autopsy was done here but the doctor who did it died of a heart attack himself a few weeks later. This was the only autopsy he did and, compared with the others, I’d have to say his report is perfunctory.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  She opened her shoulder bag and took out some papers. She’d balanced the cigarette on the edge of a plate and it had burned away, forgotten. I resisted the impulse to reach over and stub it out before it burnt down to the filter. ‘I couldn’t photocopy reams of the stuff or someone might have asked me what I was doing. But here’s a sample—a page of the Bach report and one of the others. And I still don’t know why I’m doing this.’

  ‘Your cigarette’s going to smell of plastic soon,’ I said. ‘Can I see the papers, please?’

  She dealt with the cigarette and I took the papers and it would have been hard to say whether she’d intended to surrender them or not. The waitress arrived just then asking if we wanted coffee. We both did. Another agreement, another diversion. I scanned the papers quickly. Dr … (signature scrawled in haste, indecipherable) had some talent as a writer. His notes on the injuries to his subject and their clinical consequences leading to death had a dramatic and convincing ring. Not so with the work of Dr Keifer McCausland, who wrote his name in a bold, round hand. It was all ‘apparents’ and ‘evidents’ and ‘obviouslys’. Dr McCausland concluded that Oscar Bach had died from ‘contusion and trauma’ resulting from ‘falling objects’.

  The coffee arrived and we both took it black without sugar. I handed the papers back. ‘I see your point,’ I said, ‘it looks a bit sloppy, but you couldn’t promote anything on that basis.’

  ‘Don’t start,’ she said. ‘All you can take away from this is that you’d have had more confidence if Dr Thingummy had done the job. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘That’s not much.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who bashed you?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure. Why’re you interested?’

  ‘You think I’m interested in you?’

  ‘Again, I don’t know. No reason to think so. Maybe you’re tired of being in personnel and liaison or whatever. Maybe you want to do some policing.’

  ‘You’re right there. I do. Is there anything in this, really?’

  ‘I’m sick of being asked the same thing. Another minute and you’ll have me saying it’s a clear case of suicide, just for the variation. I simply don’t know, and I have to admit I’m a bit thrown. I’m not accustomed to dealing with policewomen.’

  ‘What’s the difference? You’re lying to me just as you’d lie to a man.’

  I sipped some of the thin, bitter coffee. ‘That’s not true. I mean, it’s been known, but …’

  ‘This is getting tricky,’ she said. ‘I assume
you’ve got a few things to follow up?’

  ‘One, at least.’

  ‘Why don’t you do that and get in touch with me again? I might have something more to add myself.’

  That suited me. Her tone was neutral, not unfriendly. I fished out my Mastercard and waved it at the waitress. ‘You wouldn’t like to tell me what that something more might be?’

  She smiled. ‘I don’t think so. Thank you for the lunch.’

  10

  In the old days if you booked into a motel, took off in the afternoon and didn’t come back by midday, the manager would open up the room and start inventorying your belongings. Not anymore. At the Hillside they held a signed credit card slip and they could play it any way they chose. The manager gave me a casual wave as I drove in and went back to supervising the cleaning of the pool. Good move.

  I lay on the bed with my brain in neutral and only my digestion working. My head ached and I thought about taking some painkillers but fell asleep before I could translate the thought into action. It was late afternoon before I woke up and I tried to tell myself that an interview with the client, an investigation of the subject’s possessions and a consultation with an officer of the law constituted a day’s work and entitled me to an evening with Lonesome Dove and the TV. I failed to convince myself. I showered, cleaned up the cuts on my face, changed my shirt and headed for Lambton.

  Lambton is to Newcastle what Erskineville is to Sydney. Close in, old established, traditionally working class and by-passed by the trendies. I drove through the look-alike streets until I located Yorkshire Road which must have been named by someone stabbing a map of England with a pin. There were no moors, no pubs, no pits—nothing here for Freddy Trueman. Mark Roper’s place was a double-fronted fibro bungalow—iron roof, chimney at the side, garage at the rear—pretty much like the one next to it and the one next to that. As I got out of the car I was aware of two unrelated thoughts in my head: I’d never gone calling on a pest exterminator before, and I wondered what Glenys Withers was doing just then.

  I stepped over the low gate and walked up the cracked cement path towards the front of the house. Weeds sprouted through the cracks. The porch was just a scrap of wood and fibro tacked onto the front of the place—post-war austerity. I went up the brick steps and the porch boards sagged under my weight. They also creaked loudly enough to make it unnecessary to knock on the door. I did, anyway, and it was opened by a tall, thin man with shoulder-length dark hair. He looked to be in his early twenties, wore a blue overall and smelled of beer and tobacco. He was visibly shaking which wouldn’t have concerned me overmuch except that he was holding a rifle and pointing it at my navel.

  ‘Are … are you Cliff Hardy?’

  I had to consider this question. Maybe he’d shoot if I said I was and I knew a rifle bullet would travel faster over one and half metres than me.

  I said, ‘Are you Mark Roper?’

  His nod seemed to accentuate his general shakiness. He didn’t lower the weapon. He wasn’t a bad-looking young man except for the close set of his eyes. I raised my hands in a parody of the ‘hands up’ movement. I thought he might follow my hands with the muzzle of the rifle. Worth a try, but he didn’t do it. I took a step forward, putting me squarely within the doorframe. Sergeant O’Malley, my old army unarmed combat instructor would have been ashamed of me.

  ‘Stop,’ he said.

  But he also moved back and O’Malley had taught me what to do when that happens. A backward moving person is halfway beaten. I twisted, came further forward, flattened myself against the wall and brought both hands down in hard-edged chops on the flexed bones and tendons of his forearms just above the wrists. He screamed with pain and dropped the rifle. I was ready for the movement and almost caught it cleanly. Bit of a fumble, but I got it on the half-volley and had the muzzle up under his chin before he could get any feeling back into his hands.

  I pressed up into the tight skin of his jaw. ‘Let’s continue this discussion inside, Mr Roper,’ I said. Anyone else around?’

  He shook his head; the stretched skin scraped on the rifle muzzle and hurt him. Pain registered in his eyes and I believed him. He backed away down the passage and I eased off with the rifle. It was .22 semi-automatic with the safety off. Fourteen shot magazine at a guess. Could do an awful lot of damage at close range. Roper knew it and as his chin came down and he looked into the business end of the barrel he shook so hard I thought his knees would buckle. I flipped the rifle up onto my shoulder.

  ‘I’m not going to shoot you,’ I said. ‘Let’s talk. Back here to the kitchen?’

  He nodded and we moved down the passage, where damp had affected the pale green paint job, into the kind of chrome, laminex and lino kitchen I had had my first few thousand meals in. Except that my mum had kept the kitchen floor as clean as an operating table and this one was sticky with spilt food and drink. Roper slumped down into a chrome and plastic chair and I put the rifle in the corner by the sink and took up a position where I could stop him if he bolted for the door. But the confrontation had drained him and he didn’t look as if he had any bolting in him. Making a cup of coffee might be his limit.

  ‘Suppose you tell me what’s the big idea,’ I said. ‘Do you usually meet people at the door with a rifle?’

  He shook his head and reached into the pocket of his overall. He took out a packet of Marlboros and a lighter and got one lit. He drew the smoke in deeply and the shaking began to diminish. I passed him a saucer from the sink and he flicked ash into it. It had been a deep first draw.

  ‘I know who you are,’ he said. ‘You’re a detective from Sydney. Horrie Jacobs hired you because he thinks I killed Mr Bach.’

  I did a quick mental resumé of the things that had happened so far. I couldn’t place Mark Roper anywhere in the chain of information. With nowhere else to look for him, I asked myself if he could have been one of the kids in the Commodore at the level crossing and concluded that he wasn’t. Too old. Wrong colouring. Puzzlement. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘You’re getting way ahead of me. You’re right about who I am and who I’m working for. But where did you get this other idea?’

  ‘I worked for Mr Bach. Now I’ve got his business. I’m the logical suspect, right?’

  ‘Let me tell you something. There’s no such thing as a logical suspect except in domestic killings. The logical suspect is the person who slept with the victim. Nine times out of ten that turns out to be the one who did it.’

  He was most of the way through his Marlboro, listening hard. His skin was pale to the point of unhealthiness and he looked as if he had difficulty in maintaining an acceptable standard of grooming and hygiene. He made it, just, and I wondered about his domestic arrangements. The house bore all the traces of the parental home, gone to seed. Was Mark a loner, a middle-aged bachelor twenty years early, misfit and psychotic killer? Somehow, I couldn’t see it.

  He lit another cigarette and his voice was a thin, strained whisper. ‘Are you saying I’m a homosexual? I’m not. I’ve got a girlfriend.’

  I struggled to follow his logic, then I got it. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t implying anything like that. I don’t know anything about you, Mr Roper. And I don’t know enough about Oscar Bach.’

  He snorted through the smoke. ‘He wasn’t a homo either, believe me, he wasn’t.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  He opened his mouth as if he was going to speak more than two sentences. Then he half shut it. ‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled. ‘Nothing.’

  I was getting impatient with him. This man knew something I didn’t and was being paid to find out. That cuts across kindness and compassion. ‘Look, son,’ I said, ‘I don’t give a shit how many girlfriends or boyfriends you’ve got. I want to know everything I can find out about Oscar Bach. You know something and you’re going to tell me what.’

  He glanced at the rifle. He was considerably closer to it than me but he made the right decision and looked away again. ‘I can’t,’ he muttered
.

  ‘You don’t have a choice. You pointed a rifle at me a while ago. I took it off you without doing you any harm but it doesn’t have to stay that way.’

  ‘You’d beat me up?’

  I touched the wounds on my face. ‘It’s like this. I’ve come in for some rough treatment around here already. You can see that. My pride’s been hurt and when that happens I’m likely to get impatient and take it out on someone else.’

  He squashed out his cigarette and the face he turned up to me was twisted with misery. ‘I’m not brave, you see. That’s the trouble. They’ll kill me if they find out.’

  He’d at least given me a line of attack. ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘Gina’s brothers.’

  ‘Who’s Gina?’

  ‘Gina Costi, she’s my girlfriend—sort of.’

  I’d had ‘sort of girlfriends myself, they’re the worst kind. This young man had a bad case of the fear and confusions. I judged it was safe to take my eye half off him and I ran water into the kettle and set it on the stove. There was a jar of instant coffee on the sink and several dirty mugs. I rinsed two mugs, made the coffee and told him to get the milk. He obeyed automatically, like a compliant child. There was almost nothing else in the refrigerator apart from beer cans and a carton of milk. There was probably a packet of cereal somewhere, some bread and a jar of peanut butter. That’d take care of breakfast and lunch. It was odds on there’d be fast food containers in the rubbish bin. Dinner. He spooned sugar into his coffee and sipped it before lighting another cigarette.