Too Easy

by J. M. Green

  ‘Will?’

  ‘William Blyton. A Guns and Gangs detective. Quiet, thorough. A good cop.’

  I moved on. ‘Ricky Peck was a nasty piece of work.’

  ‘You don’t get to be president of a motorcycle gang by being kind.’

  ‘True. Who is Gorman? He gets a mention on the recording.’

  ‘Lennox “The Ox” Gorman, a high-ranking Flower, the sergeant-at-arms.’

  ‘And what does that position involve?’

  ‘Head-kicker who kicks actual heads, a problem solver, cat herder.’

  I pondered that for a second. ‘He’s in charge, now that Ricky Peck is dead?’

  ‘He’s been quiet in the last few months. When his girlfriend got out of prison, they said they wanted to go straight.’

  ‘What, they had their publicist put out a press release?’

  ‘The media followed them around the day she got out. She’s famous for being in a Bangkok hellhole before she got a transfer deal and they brought her back here. Don’t you remember that? It was all over the news.’

  ‘Wait. Yes, I have a vague memory of that now you mention it, but I didn’t remember the boyfriend being a bikie.’

  ‘He made a speech about leaving the Corpse Flowers,’ Phuong was saying. ‘But no one believes he’s going straight. If you come across him, walk away.’

  ‘How would I know if I came across him?’

  ‘He’s lost a finger. He’s been shot, stabbed.’

  ‘I’ll check the fingers of every bloke I meet. No worries.’

  A bus lumbered around the corner behind me. I turned on the engine in case I had to move, but it went by, flat out like it was trying to out-run the wind. Another bus took the corner. ‘I have to go.’ I ended the call.

  I checked my rear-view mirror. My back window filled with light. The horn blasted. In a panic, I hit the accelerator and the car lurched, side-swiping the utility pole.

  I fanged down a side street and lost my bearings. I wanted Barkly Street, but I kept taking wrong turns down one-way streets. In the end, I pulled over to use the GPS on my phone, trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong. If only I could do the same with my life.

  Getting home and driving into the garage felt like an unlikely triumph against the odds. I inspected the damage. The paint was scraped from front to back along one side, every panel. What surprised me was that I didn’t care. The car belonged to Ben, my recidivist brother. He was the family scapegoat, mainly harmless, monumentally stupid — had been stopped on the street late at night. He was tried and convicted of going equipped to steal, a crime so nebulous that it was hard to believe it was still on the statute books. It was basically a catch-all for ‘being dodgy’. They found gloves and a screwdriver and charged him with going equipped to steal. But according to him, he was only going for a walk. Late at night. In a wealthy suburb, far from his home. He was currently growing heirloom tomatoes in a minimum-security facility in central Victoria, awaiting sentencing. His lawyers thought he’d get about a year, but his long list of priors, and a harsh judge, could spell as much as two years. Last I spoke to him, he was radiant with joy. So much for punishment; they were letting him roast fennel and make his own labna.

  I went upstairs, took out my laptop, and googled ‘Corpse Flowers’ and ‘Gorman’ and found an article on Gorman and his girlfriend. No more criminality for these two, they said. They were both going straight. There was a picture of them, outside the humble flat they lived in, above a smash-repair place in Sunshine. I studied the background. I’d driven past that mechanic’s garage. I opened an online map, entered Anderson Road, Sunshine into the search bar, switched to street view, and zoomed in on the sign.

  Talbots Body Works.

  The woman in the picture with Gorman was thin, with medium-length brown hair. She was beautiful, in a wild kind of way, with her broad smile. A big happy-to-be-out-of-jail cheesy grin that offered a clear view of her broken front tooth. Caption: Ox Gorman with Philomena Enright. Or, as I had come to know her, Josie. Alma’s so-called youth worker.

  So. Josie, partner of a Corpse Flower, was a phony youth worker. Mortimer, a Corpse Flower, was a drug dealer to Footscray’s youth. According to Senior Constable Raewyn Ross, Ricky Peck had been behaving weirdly with street kids.

  It was tempting to begin pacing up and down, to ease the revulsion this bikie business had stirred up. Instead, I changed into my pyjamas and brushed with brutal vigour. My teeth were innocent in all this, and I eased off, spitting paste into the sink.

  Institutions were set up to protect vulnerable children, those without parents — or at least competent ones. And those institutions were often inadequate, under-resourced, or did actual harm. A criminal gang could easily sweep into that responsibility vacuum, ready to recruit, or use, or abuse. What exactly did the Corpse Flowers want with homeless children?

  Before I retired for the evening, there was one important bit of business to take care of. I needed a better ring tone. Something sad, and beautiful, and most of all, aggrieved. Something that conveyed my deep feeling of being tragically misunderstood. It took an hour or so, but I finally found it: Karen Carpenter’s original version of ‘Superstar’.

  I got into bed and went over my to-do list. Number one: the Mazda needed repair. And as it happened, Ox Gorman appeared to be residing in a flat above a smash-repair place. The tired old muscle in the centre of my chest began to step up the beat.

  20

  ALARMS, WHAT a horrible blight on human progress they were. On the other hand, I was up, and acting like a boss in the kitchen. My scrambled eggs were totally fit for human consumption. I finished breakfast and a routine ablution, and dressed for both heat (a short-sleeved frock) and cold (a sensible cardigan). Then I was off, driving to work for the first time in my life.

  I went via Buffy’s on Union Road. I had a fierce loyalty to Buffy’s. There were newer establishments I could go to, with better coffee. But my preferred coffee shop was run by Lucas, a pop nerd and cosplay outsider, and a man as committed to all things post-apocalyptic as me. We understood each other. We disagreed on some things, mermen mainly, but we were in complete agreement that the long-running Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s lack of an Emmy was an injustice.

  The transaction went like a Swiss watch. I double parked, ran in, threw coins at Lucas, who promptly handed me my double-shot flat white in a takeaway cup, and I was off, absorbing caffeine on the go.

  I arrived at work early. In fact, I was first, which was a first. I turned the alarm off, and the lights on. Then I looked up the number for the Victoria Police headquarters, and dialled the number.

  ‘Detective Blyton, please.’

  Blyton and Copeland worked together. And this Guns and Gangs detective might be more forthcoming on Corpse Flowers information than Copeland. Plus there was the added advantage that, depending what Blyton told me, I could gauge whether the story Copeland had given me was legit. But that would have to wait.

  ‘Who’s calling?’

  ‘Stella Hardy.’

  ‘He’s not in. Can someone else help you?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I replied, and hung up.

  Brendan Ogg-Simons announced his arrival by rattling the doors in a huff.

  ‘Push,’ I shouted from my cubicle. He ceased his ridiculous pulling.

  ‘Forget how the door works? You’ve only worked here for ten years, you bloody great nuff-nuff,’ I called out helpfully.

  He expressed his thanks by going directly to his office and slamming the door. I waited for my fellow WORMS slaves to show, hoping to spend morning tea doing The Age quiz. But alas, as the morning wore on, the office remained almost empty. I knew that folk took advantage of the Melbourne Cup holiday on Tuesday by taking the Monday off and having a long weekend. It appeared my colleagues thought that such a wonderful idea was only improved by taking the previous Friday as wel
l.

  Good luck to them. I’d have done the same if I had someone to escape with.

  The morning passed in a blur of emails, dull reports, and returning calls to the caller’s voicemail. Some things were worthy of my attention. Like the Victorian Coroner’s report shared among the migrant services sector on a house fire in which three refugees had died. The living conditions at the house had been appalling. At the time, twelve adults crowded its three bedrooms, and multiple computers and appliances piggy-backed on power boards. The owners had apparently been of the impression that only three people occupied the house.

  I wrote a memo for Brendan about the need to review conditions at our clients’ accommodations, suggesting we follow up on tenancy agreements, make requests for landlords to do house inspections, properly maintain smoke detectors, and assess the level of electrical safety compliance. I banged on for a bit about the need to educate migrants on fire safety. Then I raised the issue of overcrowding and the need for a solution that didn’t involve vulnerable families simply being evicted.

  With a creditable amount of actual work under my belt, I opened a browser and searched for Philomena Enright: images of a woman, jacket over her head, in handcuffs as she was bundled into a police van; exterior of a Thai jail.

  I trawled on and hit a long feature article on Australians in foreign jails. Philomena Josephine Enright, AKA Josie, was included. The journalist had nicked her high-school portrait. She looked innocent, and daggy, with high side ponytails, sticking-out ears, and freckles.

  In August 2005, after a tip-off from an unknown informer, Philomena was arrested in a hotel in Bangkok with five other people.

  I looked up from the screen, resting my eyes for a moment. There often seemed to be a tip-off in these cases. I could only imagine the long hours sitting in a hellish prison, brooding on that colossal act of betrayal.

  She had been caught with forty-five grams of heroin in her handbag. Of the others convicted with her in Thailand, three were Australians, one of whom had AIDS and later died in jail, and two were Vietnamese nationals. A fourth member of the syndicate, Jeff Vanderhoek, was arrested in Melbourne. He subsequently pleaded guilty and served eighteen months. He was, he said, a ‘drone’ in the gang, with limited knowledge of the deal that had gone wrong.

  The judges sentenced Josie to death, that was commuted to life, then to twenty years in Lard Yao, a women’s prison within Klong Prem Central Prison.

  Thailand allowed transfers of prisoners between the two countries. I found some video of an interview with the journalist Bunny Slipper on ABC TV from 2008 — Josie pleading for the Australian government to facilitate a transfer.

  ‘If I was released back to Australia,’ a desperate young Josie said to the camera. ‘I’d give back to the country that has given me so much. I’ve got so much to give back. I’ll go into rehab, get my life on track.’ She smiled then, showing her broken tooth.

  The transfer was approved and she was sent to Fairview women’s prison in Rockdale, thirty kilometres west of Melbourne. While there, Ms Enright had taken a course in community service and hoped to become a youth worker.

  I opened the office copy of the Yellow Pages, and, using skills not required since the dark ages just to prove to myself I still had it, I found Talbots Body Works. I rang the number and arranged to have the Mazda inspected for a repair in the afternoon.

  I was thinking of taking a tea break when I had an urge to call the police. I rang Flemington Police station and asked for Raewyn Ross.

  After a brutal hold-message, Rae got on the line. ‘Hardy, s’up?’

  ‘Can an ex-prisoner do volunteer work with street kids, is there some kind of special clearance for that?’

  ‘I doubt it. Sometimes the born-again types go rogue, do their own thing on the streets, soup and the word of Jesus. Then they get in over their heads, scumbags roll them. Then they call us to fix it up for them.’

  ‘What can you tell me about Ox Gorman?’

  ‘The bikie? I’m hanging up now. That’s what I know.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Around noon, Shanninder showed up. She checked in with Boss, saying she’d been giving some youth workers a two-hour training session on dealing with family violence.

  ‘Thank Eris you’re here,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Some goddess — a bad one, evidently. Anyway, it’s lunch time. Boss is locked in his office, and I’m dying of hunger.’

  We walked to a place on Racecourse Road that made a tofu bánh mì with extra chilli and a strong cà phê sữa đá. We took our vittles to a nearby park to sit in the shade of Flemington’s mature elms.

  ‘So I was in Macca’s last night, late, about three in the morning, and I came across this quasi-youth worker.’

  ‘Is she with an agency?’

  ‘I doubt it. I think she’s a lone saviour type. One of those passionate volunteers who feed the homeless and preach Jesus. She’s done time, reckons she’s trying to keep at-risk young people from making the same mistakes.’

  ‘Sounds suss.’

  ‘Her name’s Josie, nice dresser, broken tooth.’

  Shanninder frowned. ‘I’ll ask around,’ she said, making a note in her diary.

  I sipped my ice coffee. ‘She was with a kid called Alma. She referred to her as a “client”. It’s a pretty unusual name — can you ask if they know her, too?’

  She wrote the name down. ‘You think this Alma is at risk?’

  ‘I don’t know. I met them at the same Macca’s where the boy got hit by the truck.’

  ‘I heard about that. So sad.’

  ‘His name was Cory. His mother was a client of mine a few years ago. Maybe you could —’

  Shanninder shook her head. ‘Stella, the poor boy has died. What good can it do to get information on him now?’

  ‘It can’t hurt, can it? Maybe he had contact with the bogus youth worker.’

  ‘Oh, you’re such a stickybeak. Okay, I’ll look into him, too.’ She scrunched up her lunch wrap. ‘I’m heading back.’

  We walked back to work. ‘Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. Pukus is making some announcement today. Boss wants you to go with him to Parliament.’

  I groaned. ‘Hey, can you cover for me? I’m gonna quickly dash out and take my car to the panel beater, and I might be a bit late getting back.’

  Shanninder sighed. ‘How long will you be?’

  ‘Not long. If Boss asks, I’m with a client.’

  ‘I’m not lying for you.’

  ‘Damn your decency, woman!’

  Shanninder laughed. ‘Decency has nothing to do with it. I’m covering my arse.’

  ‘I doubt he’ll ask you. He hasn’t said a word to me all morning.’ The blinds were still drawn on Boss’s office when we got back. I logged off, sneaked out, and jumped in the Mazda.

  21

  TALBOTS BODY Works was an old-school mechanic’s business. Wedged between a long-closed shoe factory with windows smashed, and a thriving cleaning-supply shop, the place was a quarter acre of concrete with a single covered bowser and a large mechanics workshop. An external flight of stairs led to the flat above. The enterprise was fenced off on three sides by a series of posts slung with a white chain.

  A legion of grubby youths in combination overalls were swearing and wheeling car parts around on low trolleys. To the right, a small office was sectioned off. FM-radio pop, and the place reeked of the macho catnip of testosterone, motor oil, and unwashed bodies.

  I sat idling in the Mazda, taking a sneaky gander at Gorman’s place above the workshop. The exterior of the flat had a cosy feel, coloured leadlight in the casement windows, and to one side a rooftop patio. Fringed by a rusted railing, the terrace was decorated with large palms in concrete pots. A set of retro cane chairs was arranged under a fifties-style beach umbrella; the occupants kept serious fa
ith with the period. There was even a Hills Hoist up there, some smalls waving in the breeze — the ex-con favoured wonder bras and frilly French knickers.

  I went into the workshop area, crowded with cars in various stages of repair. None of the young men took any notice of me. Then a senior-looking mechanic came waltzing around the corner, sporting a rockabilly hairdo and carrying a fish-and-chip white-paper bundle. He’d made a hole in the paper and was throwing chips in his mouth with his filthy fingers as he approached.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Bit of a run in with a pole.’ I pointed to the damaged panels.

  ‘That right?’ He had a look. ‘Yeah. Come off second best, didn’t you? Won’t be ready till Wednesday at the earliest.’

  Damn the Cup Day long weekend. ‘How much?’

  ‘Depends.’

  I gave him a look.

  ‘Not more than … five hundred.’

  I held out the keys.

  ‘Got everything out of it?’

  I held up my handbag. There was a packet of mints in the glovebox, but these lads were not going to bother with those.

  ‘Come in the office, and I’ll do the paperwork.’ He wiped his hands on his overalls.

  I followed him to a dingy little room lined with shelves, umpteen boxes of screws and nuts piled up everywhere, and a girlie calendar on the wall from 1968. He dropped his lunch on the work bench and picked up a stubby pencil. ‘Name?’

  I gave him my particulars, and he printed each word laboriously in a random combination of caps and lower case.

  ‘Been here a while?’ I asked.

  He dropped the pencil and opened the chip wrappings. ‘Me old man’s.’ He put some chips in his mouth and nodded at the wall. Stuck there among the business cards was a black-and-white photo of a man with rockabilly hair leaning on a hot-rod.

  ‘Place belongs to you now?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And the flat upstairs? You live there?’