Old Scores

by Whish-Wilson, David;

  The car phone trilled as Swann stopped at some traffic lights in Claremont, watching drunken girls with tanned skin in short skirts and tank tops and boys in jeans and collared shirts spill down Bayview Terrace. He lifted the receiver; heard the screams. A man screaming – Heenan, hysterical, not physical pain. There was no traffic behind him and when the lights turned green Swann stayed at the lights, listened to Heenan sobbing now, waited for it to subside.

  *

  The door to Heenan’s twentieth-floor apartment was open. Heenan was slumped on the edge of his bed, dazed and mute but the tears still pumping, his pink Lacoste shirt soaked, nipples and fat rolls visible across his chest. On the bed, facedown and head turned awkwardly, silver wig askew, was a naked woman. Swann pushed Heenan aside with his knee, put a finger to the woman’s neck, took it away, put it back to check.

  ‘You fool. She’s still alive.’

  Heenan, tangled in Swann’s feet, and near catatonic with shock and exhaustion, sucked in a deep wheezy breath, kept sucking it in, a balloon expanding, scrambling to his knees. Swann kept his finger at the woman’s neck, pulse weak but regular, deep in the overdose. Swann could see why Heenan thought she was dead; she was barely breathing, taking a breath every ten seconds or so, barely a breath at all.

  ‘Call the ambos, now.’

  ‘No, Frank. C’mon …’

  Swann grabbed Heenan by the hair and threw his head back, caught the bedside table, sent a lamp spilling. The woman began gurgling, her lungs imploding, heart ready to burst, drown her in blood. He hefted her over, began CPR, filling her lungs. Heard Heenan stagger away, make the call, run the tap, throw water on his face while Swann kept putting air in her lungs, dizzy with air himself, could feel himself start to hyperventilate, too much oxygen. Kept going, lights in his eyes, felt himself spinning. A hand on his shoulder. An ambo, and he fell aside, slumped on the floor beside the bed. Took a shallow breath and held it, felt his lungs tremble, exhaled and repeated the process. Could stand now. Went to Heenan in the kitchen, hands on the benchtop, staring down into the marble.

  When Heenan spoke, his voice was a whisper. ‘She wasn’t like that, Frank. Not when we got here. I was drunk, couldn’t even do it, passed out. When I awoke, she was there, so still. I thought …’

  ‘She one of Dot Coulter’s girls?’

  Heenan looked up. ‘How’d you know that?’

  ‘I recognised one of Dot’s girls on the riverboat.’

  Heenan nodded. ‘Conlan only uses Dot. We were at a party near here. Started as an office party, in Maitland Conlan’s boardroom. Ended up more a … Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Was the premier there? You see something you weren’t supposed to?’

  Heenan thought about it, wobbled at his knees, still drunk. ‘No. I’ve seen the others like that before. Flagrante delicto, so to speak. It’s why I … partake too. So they know I’m no different, not likely to –’

  ‘Then what? What do you remember? That girl, I checked her purse. No fits, no gear. Someone came up here, gave her a hotshot.’

  Heenan shook his head, furrowed his brow. The tears started; the panting breath. Then stillness, eyes widening. ‘Not something I saw, Frank. Something I said.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I said to Larry Conlan. I told him … what you told me. About the Exetar tender looking shaky. He doesn’t know, of course, that I asked you to –’

  ‘You mentioned my name?’

  ‘Yes, Frank, I’m sorry. I was angry. Sick of him treating me like … so I ragged him back. Just a little.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense. The power he has over the premier. He could just get you fired.’

  Heenan slumped. ‘That’s what he said. That’s when I said …’

  ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘What you told me. About organised crime. The bikies, and the Exetar tender. I wasn’t specific.’

  ‘Specific enough. The Burswood project’s worth near a hundred million. You don’t think that’s worth Conlan killing for?’

  ‘I was drunk, Frank.’

  The ambos entered the kitchen, a young man and an older woman, faces that had seen it all. The woman looked at Heenan, her voice cold. ‘She’s stable. Refusing to come with us, to Royal Perth, against my advice. Must’ve had a big tolerance already.’

  Swann thanked her, Heenan looked away.

  ‘I hope you paid her well,’ she said to Heenan, who still wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  ‘Where did she inject herself?’ Swann asked.

  A strange question, but the ambo didn’t blink. ‘Looks like straight in the neck. Veins are collapsed on her arms, probably everywhere else too.’

  Swann followed them to the door, locked it. Took Heenan aside. ‘How much cash do you have? She’s not going back to work. Not after what she’s seen.’

  ‘Not much. Not … that much.’

  Swann nodded, as Heenan thought it. The cash in the premier’s office.

  ‘And I’d get your locks changed.’

  Swann entered the bedroom, the woman trying to buckle her high-heels, unsteady. The ambos would have given her an upper, to get her heart going, but her eyes were unfocused, her satin dress unzipped and her wig still askew. Swann knelt beside her, buckled her shoes, zipped her dress, straightened her wig, stood her up and passed her bag. Looked into her eyes.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she slurred. ‘Dot recruited me from St Kilda. I’m not hangin’ round here. And since you’re not askin’, I’ll tell you. There were two of ’em. Didn’t see their faces, but I saw their boots. Bike boots. Leather.’

  Swann took her arm. Heenan was waiting in the kitchen, shirt tucked, wearing a peaked cap pulled low, car keys in hand.

  *

  The lights in the kitchen were on. Swann walked down the side of the house, peered through the window, and there were Marion and Blake Tracker, seated at the formica table drinking tea and playing cards. He could hear the turntable spinning Charlie Pride, one of his father-in-law’s records, at a guess chosen by Blake. The back door was unlocked. He shed the revolver and pistol, took off his shoulder-holster and rolled the lot in his jacket, placed it on an upper shelf in the laundry. Blake was already at the kettle, but Swann shook his head, reached for the good stuff – Matusalem dark rum – on top of the fridge. He took it down and rolled a glass off another shelf and kissed Marion on the ear, looked at her hand. They were playing twenty-one. Blake took up his hand again and waggled his eyebrows, made Marion laugh. Each of them exhausted, unable to sleep, no words necessary. Swann poured himself three fingers and corked the bottle, drank off half the glass and slumped in his seat, nearly slid away. He offered his cigarettes around the table, lit up and exhaled and closed his eyes.

  He felt Marion’s fingers reach for his own and took her hand, kept his eyes closed, sipped the rum. He had sat at this table decades ago and held hands with Marion while her father, George Monroe, told stories about the job, for Swann’s benefit.

  A strange relationship at first – the hardened detective and Swann, the tough kid and occasional criminal, in love with a policeman’s daughter. Marion told him that her father had seen something in Swann, but it wasn’t until later, just Swann and her father at the table, drinking longnecks and smoking, that he learned the truth. His future father-in-law telling him straight that Marion was stronger than Swann, and so he saw a match. But what Marion’s father saw in Swann wasn’t good; the worst aspects of his own personality, barely checked. Swann trying to be respectful, knew he had a lot to learn, didn’t understand what the middle-aged man meant, sitting there in a white singlet, scars and tattoos on his arms, handsome face all hard angles – eyes that saw through the darkness.

  Unspoken between them, the morning paper’s front-page photograph of Detective Sergeant George Monroe with a cracked shotgun over his suited shoulder, the gun he’d used to kill a cop-killer. The corpse out of picture – a young man Swann’s age who’d boasted that he was going to kill a cop, had done it there in Bentley on the
driveway of his mother’s yard, had run to the hills and holed himself up in a logger’s shack, calling down hell. Marion’s father like most of his detective peers, a WWII veteran, took no pleasure in killing but his eyes were cauterised by the lives he had taken of men who wanted to kill him.

  Marion’s father was drinking for his own reasons, but filling up Swann’s glass and leading him into falling-down drunkenness, an old Scottish tradition to test his psychological and emotional core. They drank for twelve hours straight, Swann afloat on a sliding floor, but moored to the dark eyes and the other man’s fierce sobriety that would never leave him no matter how much he drank. In between stories the older man counselled Swann that a family would steady him, put the fighting and stealing and fucking into a different reference point, acting as a rein on his worst impulses. Told Swann that either way he wasn’t destined to live a normal life, and that taking on the discipline of responsibility was a survival technique that would guarantee him a longer life, and spare the community the collateral damage. He counselled Swann to never mention this to Marion, who would be making her own sacrifices in turn. Her wildness was a reflection of Swann’s own, and their bond of love was exactly that, a binding that contained a spiritedness that would sustain them together but destroy them apart. Swann took the older man’s words on a promise, but later knew them to be true; Swann never happier or safer than in her arms at night, in the cool darkness on the edge of sleep.

  Swann felt the squeeze of Marion’s fingers, sensing his drift towards sleep, pulling him back. He opened his eyes, saw that Blake was smiling mischievously as he fanned another hand, pushing a matchstick into the centre of the table. The sun was coming up; a magpie warbled in the driveway, a train trundled towards the port. Swann stood and felt his legs buckle, replaced the bottle and wandered towards his bed.

  43.

  The river was calm as a lake in its blue depths and amber shallows, pelicans seated on the stanchions of Canning Bridge as Swann passed the Raffles, the Abe Saffron–owned pub where coppers were always welcome. He’d just hung up the phone, Carter assuring him that today Gerry Tracker would be presented before a judge and released, all charges dropped, as a sign of good faith. The overturning of the conviction against his son would require some good faith on Swann’s part. Some physical evidence – say a photograph of the Mercedes. Swann had laughed at Carter. Overturn the conviction, or the location of the Mercedes and its contents would be given to the media; the Grednics’ disappearance still played well with the better investigative journalists. Carter laughed back at Swann. Did the Abo boy really want murder added to the charge of stealing and assault? Swann raising the stakes – the papers in the trunk made for interesting reading. Carter swore and told Swann to call back in an hour.

  On the radio: no sightings of Des Foley, the Good Morning Bandit, meaning that Foley was good to run. A snippet on the state’s acquisition of power infrastructure in the South-West, questions raised by the shadow finance minister about the fact that it was only recently sold to a private bidder, Sam Mostel, and that the buying price appeared double the original selling price. The premier unavailable for comment, touring the government’s latest private-sector investment; a swathe of land in the Ord, a joint development project with Barry Conlan’s Exetar, the land supposedly diamond-rich. Another car stolen by the Porsche Boy, another aborted car chase. Clifford and Welsh, hours from death. The prime minister’s request for clemency denied. And next, the latest number one single from Australian Crawl, ‘Reckless’.

  Swann left the radio on, the measured drumbeats of the song accompanying the bass thuds of the laden trucks rolling over the Narrows Bridge; the South Perth foreshore occupied by kids kicking footballs, joggers and rollerbladers on the path closest to the shore.

  The carpark was empty of junkies, which was unusual. Terry Accardi was due in fifteen minutes, and Swann parked in the corner near the paperbarks, where two crows and a seagull tussled over a bloody sheet of butcher’s paper. The car phone rang, and Swann lifted the receiver and crooked it into his neck, expecting Accardi. But it was Hogan, terse, agitated.

  ‘Swann, whatever you’re doing, stop doing. I warned you yesterday –’

  Across the river, a small puff of dust from one of the middle floors of the Central Police Station, followed by the sound – a blunt, ugly thump, followed by more dust-cloud – a horizontal black and brown spear over the Causeway, then an eerie silence, the crows and the children and the joggers and rollerbladers pausing to look, shielding their eyes from the sun.

  Hogan had cut the line. On the foreshore, normal life resumed; the sounds of children squealing with delight, bickering and slamming cricket bats on trees, crows cawing, parents scolding, the trucks drumming over the Narrows.

  The cloud of dust to the east was gone. Only seconds had passed. Long, hollow seconds, but time enough for Swann to understand.

  Terry Accardi’s office. Blown out onto the Causeway traffic.

  *

  News vans and reporters on foot. Car alarms railing at the wide blue sky. An ambulance edging through the crowd of rubbernecks on the footpaths of Adelaide Terrace; Swann parked between the looming police building and the snarled traffic at the Causeway roundabout.

  Heenan had called and wanted to know. The premier was flying back from the Kimberley in a Conlan private jet. Swann was asked to stick around and pump the journos; even better, get the good oil from an ex-colleague. But there were no ex-colleagues on the street who would speak to Swann. The building had been evacuated. A hundred detectives and a couple of hundred uniformed clerical staff and senior brass huddled in the carpark under the blazing sun, a barrier of black-clad TRG troops with pump-action shotguns at present-arms.

  Swann scanned the milling crowd, looking for a familiar face, waves of heat prickling over his skin, heart thudding, light-headed with adrenalin. He lit a cigarette and left the car, caught snatches of conversation, dream language, floating in the air. It was the Aborigines, their militant Brewery protest gone mental; it was the mafia, drugs, always about drugs. Or Des Foley, taking a crack at the old enemy, bank robber turned cop-killer. Then a crackle of loudspeaker, the warping of feedback, a gruff voice warning spectators to stand away, let the ambulance through. A press conference in the carpark about to commence, the station superintendent in full uniform, flanked by TRG; their black helmets a backdrop of uniform menace.

  Swann pushed his way through the crowd, journos three deep as the super began to speak, squinting into the sun. Tragic news. One of our own. A young and promising Homicide detective. Would appear to be a letter bomb. No motives as yet. No leads. The entire force at the disposal of the Homicide squad. No holds barred. Full weight of the law. The Super’s words drowned by the journalists’ questions, a jostling choir chanting what can you tell us about …

  There was nothing for Swann at the scene. He returned to the Statesman, sat behind the wheel, put his head in his hands. Accardi was working the case of the murdered enviro, who’d been looking at Exetar. A Conlan company, and Conlan-funded, but it was Hogan who’d warned Swann off Exetar, Hogan who’d called him the moment the letter bomb blew, must have known about their meeting. Wouldn’t hesitate to kill another copper if he stood in the way. Swann next, of that he could be certain. And despite this, despite the blood in his face, his fists clenched, the dark congestion in his chest – with his eyes closed, Swann saw the perfect logic of all his years leading to this moment: driven out of the blackness of his feelings towards an image of crystalline definition; the moment when he would look into Hogan’s eyes and release his fury.

  44.

  Swann saw the HG Kingswood three cars back, confirmation that Hogan’s men were tailing him again as he climbed out of St Georges Terrace, past Parliament House, up towards the treeline banking Kings Park. The car phone was off the hook – he was sick of Heenan’s importuning. Swann turned the Statesman into the park, speeding along the row of lemon gums, tourists taking happy-snaps of the city at their feet, jo
ggers in fluoro headbands and kids on BMXs riding the trail beside the road. Past the cenotaph obelisk, through the roundabout and the giant fallen karri, a hard right away from the botanical gardens, running into the forest. A glance in the rear-view: the HG keeping pace, crowded with suited bodies, passenger hands on the dash as Swann gunned it, the Statesman lifting in eagerness, the HG stuggling to keep up, giving Swann time to slow as he approached the artillery memorial. He reached into his rolled jacket and drew out the two loaded guns, laying them on the seat until he glided the Statesman off the tarmac and onto the woodchip track that led into the bush. The car chewed up the track but made it to the first rise, Swann jacking the handbrake so that the car lunged forward, skidding over the top. Swann hit the ground running, could hear the HG whining up the track behind, building speed towards the ridge, saw the looks on the faces as the Statesman blocked their way, driver slamming the brakes and shanking the wheel; the Kingswood fishtailing into a jarrah, smashing into the driver’s door. Swann aimed the .22 pistol throw-down in his left hand, kept the .38 revolver for whatever happened next, watched the rear passenger door crack open and saw the pistol in the hand of a young detective and fired his own: two shots from point blank into both legs, followed by a kick, the .38 covering the front of the car, the .22 now aiming straight at Hogan’s face.

  Hogan’s eyes – genuine fear there, hand on the man beside, pushing the service revolver away. Hands raised in surrender, pushing at the boys in front to do the same. Swann waved Hogan out of the car, saw that he was wearing a bulletproof vest beneath his suit jacket. Not standard issue – bought it with his own coin. Why?

  Hogan stood beside his shot colleague, who was now on his hands and knees retching into the grey dirt. ‘There was no need for that, Frank.’

  Swann took a short step with the leading leg, a feint with the right – Hogan walking into Swann’s sweeping left fist, pistol butt catching his temple. Dropped to his knees, hands reaching out for Swann in punch-drunk vertigo, grabbing his colleague instead, sliding round onto his back. Swann stood over him, .38 still covering the men in the car, pointed the pistol at Hogan’s head. A terrible gravity drawing on Swann’s wrist, a burning line between bullet and forehead. The gunshot surprised Swann as much as Hogan, a little jerk of the wrist the only thing that saved him, cordite spray on Hogan’s cheeks, deafened. He felt it in his ankles, knees, hips – the buckle and sway of violence at close range, only his gun-hand steady, and that just training. Now Hogan came alive, eyes flinching, seared by muzzle-flame and powder-blast. Hands reaching up for the barrel, trying to speak but only puffs of sound, Swann kneeling closer; bringing the pistol to Hogan’s neck, beneath the chin.