The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  ‘Eyesight. I’m worse than my father ever was. But I stayed sharp, made some contacts, went to police reunions, befriended the children of serving officers. I was, to a degree, embedded enough to pick up the scent and run with it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come to me? I had theories of my own.’

  ‘My father trusted you,’ Junior said. ‘But that didn’t mean I had to.’

  ‘You’re a chip off the old man’s block.’

  ‘I spent years checking you out. And the others. I established the identity of every single human being who was in that building the hour before and after my father’s death. In that group was my father’s killer. I drew up a wall-sized diagram. I had every name, every credential and function of each person in the building. Then I methodically worked that group from the outside in. Checked every background. Every link to my father. I collated more than a hundred thousand pages of files. Many thousands of photographs and documents. I worked my way towards that singular cubicle in which my father had lost his life. If I eliminated everybody by the time I metaphorically got downstairs and into that washroom between a quarter to seven and seven that evening, I’d have just a couple of suspects left, and one of them would have to be the killer. You, of course, were in that select group.’

  ‘Because I found his body.’

  ‘Correct. And as it turned out, it took me until four weeks ago on the Gold Coast — four decades after I’d started — to find my father’s killer.’

  ‘Your son, the detective. He helped you from the inside?’

  ‘Just for the last few years. It’s the only reason he joined the police. And he will resign when our job is done.’

  ‘The single-minded Dunkles.’

  ‘That’s us.’

  ‘I always figured it was Deputy Commissioner Meekin.’

  ‘Sorry. You were wrong.’

  ‘You say your job is done?

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘Then why bring me in? Why the staged murder scene at the exact location of Susan Haag’s death? Who was trying to kill us in Toowong cemetery?’

  ‘I’m not sure you’re ready for what I’ve found.’

  ‘Junior, after all this, nothing will surprise me.’

  ‘My father had a great affection for you. He was grooming you as his successor. But in his fastidiousness he came across something that cost him his life. In honour of his memory, and your friendship, I couldn’t let the same thing happen to you. I brought you in to save your life.’

  ‘What? That was forty years ago — a generation.’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘There is something you don’t understand.’

  ‘Now is as good a time as any, Junior.’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  He left the room and returned with a large shopping bag. From it he retrieved a huge old ledger with a green frayed cover and marbled paper ends. He lowered it onto the coffee table in front of the couch, then quietly resumed his position in front of the sliding doors. He watched the great wheel turn and turn.

  I looked at him for a long time. Then I opened the cover.

  Written in archaic lettering, the floral flourishes clearly rendered with a black fountain pen, was the title.

  The Good Murder Guide.

  ~ * ~

  9

  Of course I’d heard of the book — The Good Murder Guide — even when I was a fresher in the police academy. It was mythical. It was what a few wags called The Dead Scrolls. Forget the sea.

  It was, as rumour had it, an old text that originated in Sydney in the twenties in the bad old days of razor gangs and street slayings, when prostitution got organised and police graft equally so. The book, as legend had it, was started by a few hard-head detectives who wanted to keep track of those early corrupt monies, and who was connected to whom, and who was protecting which lady of the night, and who had guns, who didn’t, who owed favours, who collected on bad debts. It was a fledgling blueprint of the Sydney underworld.

  As the book grew, though, it organically developed a parallel, and infinitely more dangerous, narrative. While it maintained a primitive spreadsheet on the bad crooks, it also yielded a map of the bad cops.

  The men who knew of, featured in or helped to create and maintain The Good Murder Guide were, I was to learn from Junior, a very tight group of police officers. The mere existence of the ledger was either a life-insurance policy or a potential death sentence for these men. The ledger, then, gave birth to the first real embedded cabal of corrupt officers in the New South Wales force.

  And the myth grew. The word amongst the criminal elite was that the guide was a secret dossier on all their activities, their monetary transactions, the assaults and murders they’d committed and got off by chance or through bribing police.

  When the cops raised their protection fees, the hikes could hardly be protested. Behind everything and everyone was the guide.

  Junior explained all this to me in the hotel room with a view of the Wheel of Brisbane. It was obvious, I know, but in the hours it took for Junior to lay out forty years of his brilliant detective work on the death of his father, I’d glance at that wheel and couldn’t help but think that it was, indeed, a metaphor for life, and Junior’s investigations, and the many thousands of rotations that he had patiently endured as he moved closer and closer to his father’s killer.

  ‘So as the years went by,’ I asked him, ‘what happened to the guide?’

  ‘It kept going. It has never stopped.’

  ‘But what happened to that original group of policemen? The first authors of the guide? How many were there? Six, seven?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘What happened when they left the force? Or died?’

  Junior paused and looked away. Did he have tears in his big round eyes?

  ‘Fathers have sons,’ he said quietly.

  At that moment, his own son emerged from a bedroom in boxer shorts and a singlet. He wore a holster and he checked the balcony.

  ‘We change hotels at five this afternoon,’ he reminded his father, then went back to the bedroom.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ I said, rubbing my eyes. ‘Those old coppers from the twenties kept this book going until they eventually retired, and in turn they had sons who joined the force and took over custodianship of the guide.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘A family affair. ‘

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘The guide has never seen the light of day outside those families.’

  ‘The sons of two of those original custodians, as you put it, decided to start a new life in Queensland in the early fifties. As expected, they joined the force up here. Thus began a new facet of the guide. They started a guide, then, just for Queensland. Two sets, in Brisbane and Sydney.’

  ‘If I didn’t know your father, I’d say you were making this up,’ I said.

  ‘Another son of one of the originals, upon retirement in Sydney in the late seventies, moved up here for the weather. He left behind a boy in the Sydney force who contributed to maintaining the guide, and now has a grandson in the Queensland force. He too could be considered one of the generational co-authors.’

  ‘Three generations of corruption.’

  ‘And murder,’ said Junior.

  The guide sat fat and heavy in front of me. I had noticed on the spine a large IV.

  ‘Volume four?’ I asked Junior.

  He nodded.

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  He didn’t answer.

  I played at the frayed edges of the heavy cover. I hadn’t opened it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Even touching it gave me a bad feeling. The litany of instructions Obe had given me in the noodle house in Chinatown all those years ago came back to me. All the whispers I’d trained myself not to hear. The things I deliberately chose not to see. This book was a trove of everything I had avoided. I had never been party to The Good Murder Guide, and it was p
robably why I was still alive.

  ‘Is Susan Haag in one of the volumes?’

  Junior nodded.

  ‘They killed her, back in seventy-one?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘She was threatening to go to the press,’ said Junior. ‘By accident she’d laid eyes on the guide in one of the coppers’ flats. She was shifted up here for her own protection, so she thought. But the book, you see, had long tentacles. And suddenly she was dead of an overdose.’

  ‘You faked your death there, at the same address on the Gold Coast, as a message. To the whole guide fraternity.’

  ‘Call it a dark gesture of humour. A bloody warning. That after ninety years of fun and games, the jig was up.’

  ‘Only your old man would use a word like “jig”.’

  ‘I am my father’s son,’ he said.

  It took me a long time to ask my next question. I sat back and stared at the book. I had grown uncomfortable just being in the same room with it.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Am I in it?’

  Junior looked at me straight in the eyes and after a moment’s hesitation he nodded.

  ‘A recent entry?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Marked for death?’

  Junior said nothing. He had answered the question.

  ‘So you brought me in,’ I said quietly, ‘to protect me.’

  ‘I needed to bring you in, firstly, to verify something about the day Dad died. I couldn’t risk a call or a visit. I could have undone a lifetime of work. This was the grand finale I’d played over in my mind, one way or the other, since the day we buried my father. That’s why I planted the phone number in your diary. I thought it’d be simple. You reclaim your old diary. The men investigating my murder see you as a nuisance and move you on. You’d find the phone number and we’d meet. But they were more suspicious and paranoid than I thought. It’s infinitely worse, here in Queensland, than in New South Wales. The paranoia. Clearly someone did a little reading, back in volume three of the guide that covered 1969, and they discovered who you were, and how close you were to the epicentre of my father’s murder.’

  ‘What did you need to verify with me?’

  ‘Your partner. In the downstairs bureau, with my father.’

  ‘Greaves.’

  ‘Greaves,’ Junior said. Now his eyes were the coldest and darkest I’d seen them.

  Greaves. The blockheaded journeyman I sat next to in that dreary office. A barely competent detective. Drinker. Smoker. Philanderer. I couldn’t wait to see the back of him and the stink of his Craven As. Greaves. He was gone a month or so after Obe’s death. Disappeared into the great police maw. I only saw him one more time. At the farewell function for Deputy Commissioner Meekin, who I was convinced had killed Obe.

  ‘You asked him to secure the washroom straight after my father was shot,’ Junior said firmly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You heard the shot, and you ran straight for the toilet doors which were precisely 7.7 metres from your desk in the office just across the hall.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did you run into Greaves before you found my father’s body?’

  The room spun around. My head felt like exploding. I grabbed it with both hands.

  And when the tear-gas cartridge smashed through the sliding glass doors of the room and disgorged its pitiful load, and the room door exploded in shards of cheap timber, it couldn’t have better reflected my inner turmoil.

  ~ * ~

  10

  They were only after one thing, of course, and they took it.

  After a SWAT team the size of the Bolivian army raided our hotel room, and I slipped off the couch in shock and — would you believe it? — smashed my other temple against the corner of the coffee table, and when the tear gas had disappeared, The Good Murder Guide, volume four, had predictably vanished.

  They played tough guys with me and Junior and his son, zip-locked our wrists, made a show of checking through every cupboard and drawer of the hotel room, then apologised. There had been a terrible mistake, they said. They’d had a tip-off about some drug dealers. Sorry for the inconvenience. Then they were gone. And so was the book.

  Junior’s son bandaged my freshly damaged temple. Now I had taped bandages on both temples, and the flattened bugle. I looked like an old koala.

  ‘We’d better go now,’ Junior’s son said.

  ‘I’d like a lie down,’ I said. I was tired of all this cops-and-robbers stuff. And I was dreading explaining to Peg my new cranial decorations.

  ‘Their first objective was to secure the guide,’ he said. ‘Who knows what they have planned for phase two.’

  ‘There’s a phase two?’ I said. There were tears in my voice.

  ‘Best to be prepared and assume that there is.’

  ‘I agree,’ Junior said.

  The goddam Dunkles and their unceasing meticulous nature.

  ‘I need a Scotch,’ I said.

  Within the hour we were in another hotel room, over by the old Botanic Gardens. I would have gone home, but there was one part of the story I needed to know. This whole adventure had been like a forty-year-long movie. How could I walk out before the ending?

  ‘Here,’ Junior said, handing me a Johnny Walker on ice.

  ‘Bless you, my son,’ I said.

  ‘You want to know about Greaves.’

  ‘You read my mind.’

  He, too, poured himself a drink. It looked odd in his hand. He was not a drinker, and people who didn’t drink held their booze in a different way to those of us who did. Delicately. Cautiously. Like a sweaty stick of gelignite that just might detonate. He took a small sip.

  ‘Six months before my father was killed, he was having a drink at the London Hotel in Balmain with a small-time petty thief,’ Junior said. ‘Like any decent detective he maintained his contacts on the ground, as you know. ‘

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Willie Hamm.’

  ‘The Hammer. I remember him.’

  ‘Anyway, Hamm had a few too many schooners and the next thing you know he’s gabbling on about a burglary he’d done a few weeks before in nearby Rozelle. Said he’d lifted a bunch of stuff, including an old book full of dates and names and mugshots and money columns.’

  ‘The guide?’

  ‘He’d unwittingly broken into the home of Inspector Norman Greaves, father of young detective Don Greaves, your desk buddy at headquarters.’

  ‘A troubling example of poor judgement. Sounds like Hamm. ‘

  ‘Word got out that Big Daddy Greaves’ place had been hit, and it finally reached Hamm, and he quietly and anonymously returned the goods. A week after his booze-up in the London Hotel with my father, Hammer was dead.’

  ‘That was six months before Obe’s murder, you say?’ I reached back into my memory, beyond my two swollen temples. ‘That’s about when Don Greaves came to work for us.’

  It was getting dark outside. I could see, beyond the window, a little clutch of yachts moored alongside the long, dark avenue of Hoop pines in the gardens. Bats stitched across the sky.

  ‘That’s when my father started investigating the existence of the guide. The Greaveses, of course, were one of the five families that had controlled it since the twenties.’

  ‘I didn’t have a clue what was going on, did I?’

  ‘You were young,’ Junior said. ‘And my father was only just starting to fit the pieces of the puzzle together when he was shot dead that day.’

  ‘Greaves,’ I said, shaking my head.

  ‘You have to remember, the guide, by the late sixties, was now quite substantive, and the men it implicated in crime and corruption were now in the highest ranks of the force.’

  ‘But why did they keep on with it?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t they just abandon it, destroy it, get on with life without it?’

  Junior took another sip of Scotch, and revealed a modest smile.

  ‘Simple,’ he said. ‘Good, old-fash
ioned power. The mere existence of the book, and its long and deep pedigree, gave those five families incredible cache. More importantly, it generated fear. And that fear grew with each generation. To this day, its exposure could bring down police forces in two states.’

  ‘So you found Greaves.’

  ‘He was the last man standing in the wake of four decades of research,’ Junior said. ‘It was Greaves. He killed my father to protect his own father, to maintain the security of the guide. You had never considered your desk buddy as a suspect because to you he was a nothing — an incompetent, a man who, to you, barely existed.’