The Toe Tag Quintet
Matthew Condon
"The adventures of a former Sydney detective from 21 Division who, in his prime, collared some of the most murderous criminals in Australian history yet, on retiring to the Gold Coast in Queensland, along with half of the criminal milieu he once pursued, is shot, king-hit, tortured, and thrown from buildings in his relentless pursuit of justice. With his trademark wit, warmth and humour, Matthew Condon takes us on a crazy ride - in boats, Kombis, Peugeots and window-washing platforms - through art galleries, libraries, swampy islands and caravan parks to illustrate that we are never too old for adventures." -- Publisher description.
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The Toe Tag
Quintet:
Five Novellas of Murder and Mayhem
Matthew Condon
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ONE
MURDER MOST
ABSTRACT
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1
‘I loved that shirt, Reginald.’
I was gazing out of the window, beyond the tangle of clear tubes, at the flowerless jacaranda tree outside.
‘And which shirt might that have been?’ asked Reginald, not very enthusiastically — not in an interested way, but as if to say if it pacified me to send out some noise with his exhalation, he’d send out some noise.
Reginald was my nurse, and there was an aura about Reginald that said his job of dressing bullet wounds and other sundry abrasions that came into his care was a temporary step to grander things. It was so complete about Reginald, this aura, that I sensed his entire life was a stepping stone to some nirvana. If Reginald’s flat life had a scent, it would be the human breath contained in a week-old balloon. Somebody else’s breath, at that.
‘The Hawaiian,’ I said, to the tree.
I shouldn’t be here. In a hospital bed. With a bullet in my thigh. And a hole punched clean through my side. It had taken the surgeons hours just to pick out the fibres of my new retirement shirt from the wound. All those threads that used to be pretty coconut trees and hibiscus and a little grass hut. I loved that shirt.
Why shouldn’t I be here? I’m happy-go-lucky. I’m that guy who stands by the piano near the end of a party and belts out ‘My Way’, pate on my breath and a fragment of maraschino cherry caught in my front teeth. At Christmas I like to pop those festive crackers and slip on a little paper hat. And I’ll wear the hat all day — or at least until it tears and ends up in the kitchen tidy all stained with oily fingerprints from the chicken and turkey legs. I have an apron I wear when I barbecue, which shows the torso of a woman in bra and briefs and fishnet stockings. Ha, ha. I could be a grandfather, for crying out loud.
That’s why I shouldn’t be here. Thirty-seven years in the New South Wales police force, a number of those commanding the meanest, toughest, bloodiest precinct in Sydney, and I never took a bullet. Someone once cracked my head with a hammer. I’ve been glassed in a pub. Put in a chokehold. Pinned in a totalled patrol car. Kicked in the guts, accidentally, by a police horse. Had a glass of expensive wine thrown in my face by a woman con artist with expensive taste in wines. And felt the muzzle of a .38 pressed against my temple. But that was all a long time ago.
Yet I retire to Queensland and I get shot — not once, but twice. You can understand why I’m not happy.
If you’d said to me two weeks ago that instead of taking out my new silver dinghy, Pig Pen, on the Broadwater at the Gold Coast and throwing in a lazy line, or sitting on the balcony of the Main Beach Surf Club with a cold one at hand and watching the setting sun stain the whitewashed waves a fluorescent pink, I’d be banged up in this little white room, I may have laughed.
Get me laughing now and the bags, tubes and wires that hang off me will gurgle and sway, and make their own music, and become a tune that will forever haunt me, much like ‘A Horse with No Name’, or ‘Knights in White Satin’.
I can hardly move. All day I look at a little square of sky and a tree they tell me was heavy with purple flowers just a couple of months ago. Purple as a fresh bruise. Maybe it’s the morphine, but I feel connected, somehow, to that tree.
Reginald tells me I’m lucky to have a room at all and that I should be grateful. Look out the window to the carriageway at the front of the hospital, he says. Bumper to bumper with ambulances, and in the back of them people that can’t get a swish hospital bed like me. (Reginald says ‘swish’ a lot. I have not heard the word ‘swish’ since I was a boy visiting my feisty old Irish grandmother in her flat in Five Dock. Fancy English crockery, for example, was very ‘swish’.)
‘Did you just say “swish”?’ I ask him, but he ignores me.
He says my picture has been in the newspapers and I look a lot older in real life. Thank you, Reginald. I want to tell him, facetiously, that I don’t like the view and that now I’m a celebrity I should be afforded something more splendid. But in the orbit of old balloon breath I too have become flat and tired. Dullness can be infectious.
‘Is it grape season, Reginald?’ I ask him.
It is another thing — as an observant former detective — I know about Reginald. He carries the ever-so-slight wince on one side of his face of the mercilessly teased. It is a flinch in advance of the insult.
So I ask him inane questions about grapes and watch the wrinkles deepen around his left eye.
On occasion I feel like giving him one of my famous verbal blasts. But I don’t. I’m not in a position to savage the man who removes my bedpan.
‘Don’t listen to me,’ I say diplomatically. It is a saying I have always used a lot. It means, you must listen to me very attentively. The officers under me knew that. So did not-an-inconsiderable few of the junkies, carjackers, dope dealers, hustlers and street grubs I used to come up against. I used to talk with my fists, as they say. Or used to say. Who uses fists now, in the bang-bang age?
I feel sorry for modern coppers, facing multi-million-dollar lawsuits for bruising with handcuffs the delicate wrists of their prissy offenders, or twelve months of counselling and possibly suspended pay if they don’t refer to the drunken, writhing deadbeats they have apprehended as sir or madam. Don’t get me started.
What exactly does Reginald think when he’s polishing my silver kidney-shaped ablution bowl?
‘Don’t listen to me, Reginald,’ I say, meaning, this time, go away.
Over time I suspect my nurse has developed a little touché strategy of his own.
I will say, ‘Is there a furnace in the hospital basement, Reginald, for getting rid of unwanted human bits?’
And he will reply, ‘You can see forever from the helicopter pad on the roof. On a clear day, all the way to Moreton Bay.’
But Moreton Bay is the last place on earth I want to see, let alone entertain at length in my weary, gnarled, nicked and scarred fifty-nine-year-old melon. I would be happy never to see again the glittering diamante surface of the bay. The islands. The islets.
Me and Moreton Bay? It’s a complicated relationship.
At night I want to close my eyes, just to remove myself from Reginald and his increasingly prolific bons mots. He has moved on to ward grotesqueries, just to pee me off. Guess what I saw on the seventh floor? I’ve had it up to the gills with his florid descriptions of wounded, hacked, sliced, bruised, distended, fried and vanished human body parts. At his ceaseless monologue of the things that can happen, out there in the big world, to the human body.
‘It’s tough as nuts, the body,’ says Nurse Reginald, ‘but at the same time, well, it’s as weak as water. It’s truly amazing how we get through the day, how we survive, don’t you think?’
I get the sense I’m being used as a human whetstone to sharpen this clown’s social skills.
He reminds me of an
article I read about the dreaded fire ant, now surrounding much of Brisbane like a terribly patient Roman army. They grab on to the skin with their pincers, and then sting not once but in a neat, complete circle, pivoting from the central axis of where they’ve taken hold of your flesh. The perfection of nature. Reginald has made me come out in a rash.
But if I did close my eyes against his presence, I’d be back in the bay at night, fighting for breath, and I’d be on that island, staring down the muzzle flash of that gun, and I’d be entangled in a mystery about an artist I’d never even heard of before I came up north to enjoy my twilight years.
Before I passed — by chance — an old acquaintance from the underworld of Sydney’s Kings Cross and I was innocently enjoying the sun and minding my own business down at Main Beach.
So I couldn’t close my eyes. I was stuck with Reginald.
‘Could I possibly have more water?’ I ask.
And he begrudgingly pours it.
‘We’re on level four, you know,’ he says.
I’m confused. I have heard Reginald trying to discuss cryptic crosswords with the constable stationed on guard outside my hospital room. ‘I thought this was the fifth floor,’ I say.
‘No, ninny.’ First ‘swish’, and now ‘ninny’. I begin to contemplate that Nurse Reginald is in fact the reincarnation of my grandmother. ‘Level-four water restrictions.’
Is he serious? Queensland is paradise on earth, isn’t it? Bountiful. An embarrassment of riches.
‘Just make it half a glass, then,’ I say.
He doesn’t find this funny. ‘Level four is not funny.’ He grumpily leaves the room. He’s done this walk-out before, when I quizzed him on what it meant to say that Brisbane is ‘the new black’. I’ve seen these advertisement signs everywhere. What is the new black? What was the old black? He turned his nose up at me, swivelled on his heels and left. For what it’s worth, I’ve seen more black in Brisbane in the last fortnight than at any point in my life.
I shouldn’t be here. There I was, minding my own business on the coast. Enjoying a brief stay in the Main Beach Caravan Park while my wife finalised the sale of our house in Sydney and I hunted for our luxury retirement villa in Paradise.
There I was one fine morning, strolling down Tedder Avenue just after seven to pick up the daily newspaper, when I passed him and caught his eye. Dapper Daniel the Antiques Man, a.k.a. the Boltcutter, a.k.a. the scumbag who, on a cold night a long time ago in the dunes of Wanda Beach, put a pistol to my young, naive, fresh-out-of-the-police-academy head, and threatened to blow me and my brains into infinity.
The very same Boltcutter, padding past me like any other retired southern gent in his leather loafers, yachting shorts and fruity Hawaiian shirt. Just like mine.
Our eyes met for a millisecond. And the hair on my neck bristled.
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2
I first met my wife Peg on a TAA flight from Sydney to Brisbane in 1971. Peg was a hostess, as they used to call them, before the word was deemed politically incorrect. Now they’re flight attendants. This doesn’t make sense to me. Waiters aren’t ‘food attendants’. Now that I think of it, is ‘politically incorrect’ a logical or correct term? I have my doubts.
I’m getting off the track. I’ll blame the morphine. (Reginald takes no offence in being called the traditionally female-gendered word ‘nurse’. He does not find it politically incorrect at all. One day, he says, he would love to be called ‘matron’. I’m growing suspicious of Reginald.)
Anyway, that flight in 1971 proved to be some sort of trip. It was my first to the Sunshine State. And en route, I met my wife. Not bad.
I had heard a lot about Queensland, even as a young officer wet behind the ears. And not all of it was good.
I had been seconded, early on, to 21 Division, the notorious vice squad, having spent some uneventful early months at Rose Bay police station in Sydney. I’d had my share of the odd harbour body or two, petty burglars, car crashes, noise complaints and the occasional domestic dispute. You have a domestic dispute in some of those streets jam-packed with blocks of flats and, let me tell you, half the suburb can hear it.
Prior to my graduation from the academy I had toyed with studying the human mind. I was intrigued by psychoanalysis. Peg says it was a ‘cry for help’ — that I was trying to understand myself a little better. Smart woman, Peg.
So I dipped into it by correspondence, and when my superiors heard about this I was suddenly the egghead of my police year. They called me, however briefly, ‘the Professor’. (That nickname was replaced, permanently, not long after with ‘Dusty’, after dustbin, and my propensity to attract dust, flies, and other unspeakable societal detritus. The Boltcutter, however, was one piece of muck I thought I had wiped from my shoes many years before. Such is life.) It didn’t take much to be academically head and shoulders above the crowd in the New South Wales police service in the late sixties.
Anyway, my cursory look into Freud somehow fast-tracked my career, and I was thrown head-first into 21 Division. We were a mobile unit, charged with sniffing out illegal gambling dens and other lowlife hellholes of disreputable behaviour. There were things I saw that I had never previously contemplated could be performed by human beings. I’ll spare you the tasty details. Suffice to say, it made my tenure at lovely Rose Bay look like Nurse Reginald’s elusive nirvana.
I had been chosen, I later heard, by the commissioner himself — Norman ‘the Foreman’ Allan — who had an almost obsessive desire to see educated officers in his ranks. Apparently a few months of dipping into Freud’s Wolf Man theories and his bizarre sexual hypotheses qualified me as a learned gent in Norm’s eyes.
I’d only been in 21 Division a month when I was called into the office — the relatively new Bourbon & Beefsteak Bar — and told I was to be part of a ‘very special mission’ to Queensland. All hush-hush. The press grubs were not to know.
‘You heard of a sheila called Wendy “Legs” Lockett from Atherton?’ my superior asked, scanning the room.
‘I’ve never even heard of Atherton.’
‘All right, smart chops. She’s a prostitute. Was a prostitute. Was causing all sorts of problems for us in Brisbane. Statutory declarations. Corruption. Fingering blokes left, right and centre.’
‘You want me to talk to her?’
‘You could try. But she’s dead.’
‘Oh.’
‘The good old-fashioned drug overdose, just before a little court appearance where her testimony could have proved ... er ... rather difficult for one of our boys in Brisbane. I want you to go up there, keep your ears open, find out what the talk is on her. Rumours. Theories. That sort of stuff Even you could manage that, couldn’t you, Dusty?’
Funny how life works. I was flying up to Queensland to spy on a dead prostitute and I met my future wife, who spilled coffee on my nice white 21 Division shirt and skinny tie. I was smooth in those days. I told her, as I disembarked, that I needed her home address so I could send her the cleaning bill. Not original in the modern history of courting, but it worked — she gave me her phone number.
‘Don’t ring too early,’ she said. ‘My husband likes to sleep in.’
I stood, embarrassed and confused at the door to the plane. Then she winked. ‘It’s my mother, actually. She enjoys a good lie-in. Goodbye.’
As I walked across the boiling Brisbane tarmac I looked back at the plane and couldn’t see her. I had never experienced such humidity. Just walking through it was like trying to swim in your clothes.
I checked into my room at Lennon’s — no expense spared for the 21 Division — and took a quick walk around town, just to familiarise myself. I was looking forward to riding on a tram but was told they’d stopped running two years before. I went up into the clocktower of the City Hall to further orientate myself. Nice. I liked Brisbane, and its brown snake of a river. In a city with a river like that, you’re going to get a lot of deception, crooks and conmen. And corrupt police. These were thou
ghts left over from my meagre days as a student of psychology and its multitudinous and infuriating subtexts.
I didn’t learn too much about poor Legs. She’d been murdered for certain. The local cops were keeping things pretty close to their chests. But they were just a little too jumpy and tight-lipped for the supposed overdose of a known madam. It was the way they didn’t care about her run-of-the-mill death that made me think they cared very much about it.
I had a sandwich at the Cubana Café with a young local officer I befriended.
‘You’re pretty famous up here, you know, you boys of the 21 Division,’ he said.
‘Is that so?’
‘Got a bit of a reputation, you have. We got some tough guys up here too, but they don’t go and give themselves a name, like the 21 Division.’
‘Fair enough.’
The Toe Tag Quintet Page 1