Wet Graves

by Peter Corris

  The question surprised me, not because it was tricky in any way but because Frank was playing the copper rather than the friend. It was my turn to drink beer.

  “Cliff?”

  “I’m thinking. I’m wondering whether you really reckon I’d help to set up a hit, or whether you’re puzzling over who’d be trying to frame me.”

  Frank rubbed his chin and the hard, day-old bristles rasped like Scotchbrite. “I’m sorry. All the crap I’m processing these days leaves me wondering if there’s an honest man left in the world.”

  “Apart from yourself.”

  Frank took another drink and stared up over my shoulder at the TV set, which showed film of some uniformed men using batons and fire hoses on young people wearing jeans and T-shirts. The street where this was happening looked hot and dusty; it could have been anywhere. “You know how they send the apprentice jockey for the left-handed whip, that sort of thing?”

  I nodded.

  “When I made it to plain clothes they put me in Vice. First job was go around the brothels picking up the take. Do it right and get a good mark. Don’t do it right and your papers get marked ‘not suitable for plain clothes’ and you can look forward to ten years in Woop Woop. Of course, once you’ve done it the sergeant’s got something on you, just as the senior sergeant’s got something on him and so on up.”

  “Nice. How did you handle that?”

  “I found out what the senior had on the sergeant and used it against him to avoid the job. My papers got marked ‘not suited to this squad’ and I went over to Homicide.”

  “They didn’t get you to kill anyone?”

  Frank grinned. “I was lucky I wasn’t sent to armed holdup.”

  “This is fun, Frank,” I said, “shooting the breeze. D’you want to talk about Hilde and my namesake next?” Hilde Stoner was a former tenant of mine who’d married Parker a few years back; they had a son named after me.

  “No. Let’s get back to it. The witness hasn’t got a name. She’s in a witness protection program.”

  I looked at a clutch of men drinking at the bar—rebels who’d ignored the step back order. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “All I can tell you now is that the witness is a woman. She made a very brief appearance in court during Lenko’s first trial. I’m told she wore a wig and dark glasses—her own mother wouldn’t have known her. Since then she’s gone into witness protection, as I say.”

  “Why?”

  “You haven’t been keeping up, Cliff. A witness didn’t show up and couple of jurors were suborned, or attempts were made to suborn them. Threats, you know. So, mistrial, and Lenko goes up again in a couple of weeks.”

  “Who didn’t show?”

  “Rhino Jackson.”

  “Shit. Are you telling me you can’t find out who this witness is?”

  “No. I can find out, given time. But I’d be putting my job on the line if I told you. And I’m sure Sackville’d advise you not to see her. There’s probably been an injunction issued to that effect anyway.”

  “Great. So I can’t even know who’s trying to put me out of business. Christ, Frank, this could lead to a conspiracy charge or something, couldn’t it?”

  “I said I’d help you. I …”

  I took a drink of the light beer, wishing it was whisky. “No. I’m not going to ask you to risk your job for me. You’ve got responsibilities. I haven’t. I’ll handle it somehow. You’re right, I should’ve called Sackville the minute I got the letter. He must be able to throw a few punches for me.”

  “That’s right. If he runs into trouble tell him to call me. I’ll do everything I can.”

  I thanked him and we drank the rest of our beer. We did get around to talking a little about Hilde and the kid. I agreed to go out to Harbord and see them, and Frank agreed to play tennis soon. We both had our fingers crossed behind our backs. Frank told a few halfway funny stories about the politicians he came into contact with in his new job, and I told him about the client who’d hired me to guard his dog. It was a valuable dog.

  The noise in the bar was mounting as the booze took effect. An argument was developing along from us—the voices were getting louder and every second word was “fuck”. The cigarette fug builds up more slowly now that people have come to believe that smoking kills you, but it still builds. My eyes started to water and Frank looked at his watch. He stood, took out his paper, rolled it and tapped it against his open palm like a cop with a baton. His grin was pretty low-voltage. “You never answered my question, Cliff.”

  “What was that?”

  “When did you last see Rhino Jackson?”

  I was carrying my big manila envelope with the police documents and pamphlets inside. I held my paper shield up against his paper weapon. “Hell, Frank,” I said. “You know I charge twenty thousand to set up a hit. And it’s not easy—who can protect that sort of money from the tax man these days?”

  I didn’t want to go home. The house is empty apart from the cat, and I don’t even have Harry Soames next door to gripe about and with. I’m in number 57; Soames sold out in 59 to a developer and the owners of 61 and 63 did the same. The word in the street is that a townhouse project is on the way, but the word doesn’t explain why I haven’t even been made an offer. I’d refuse it like I’d refuse the Order of Australia—but I wouldn’t object to the offer. The cat would probably prefer to live in a townhouse.

  I drove to St Peter’s Lane and parked in a place where my resident’s sticker allowed me to stay as long as I liked. It had taken several visits to the South Sydney Council office, one to the Department of Motor Transport, two statutory declarations and ten bucks to get the sticker so I made as much use of it as I could. The area is changing, gentrifying fast. Primo Tomasetti’s tattooing parlour has gone, along with the slab of concrete he used to rent me as a parking space. Blocked-off streets are making the place like a maze. I sometimes get the feeling that you can only find your way around in a BMW.

  A wind had sprung up and the mild day had turned into a cold evening. The cold made me hungry. I bought a pizza in William Street and headed for my office—a smoke-free zone with weird but gentle neighbours like the painless depilator and the new iridologist—they wouldn’t budge for developers without a fight. There was also the bottle of red in the filing cabinet to add to the allure. The threatened renovation of my building never happened—saved by the stock market crash. The lane has pretty much avoided gentrification; it still features more plastic garbage bags than native plants, and the occasional paint jobs the buildings get aren’t modish. It’s the church that saves us; if the God business goes any further downhill we could be in big trouble.

  One change we’ve had to endure is the installation of a lock on the street-level door. I keep my key to it wedged in a crevice of the church’s sandstone wall on the other side of the lane. I keep a spare key to the office door under the lino on the stairs—a bit like in Dial M for Murder. You won’t catch me locked out of building, office and drinks cabinet on a cold Tuesday night.

  I got the key out of the wall and had to juggle the pizza and my manila envelope of volunteered information to use it. I ended by wedging the envelope between my knees, balancing the pizza box on my head and working the stiff key one-handed.

  He came out of the shadows where there is a recess between my building and the next, and he was quiet and fast. I just caught a glimpse of him and swayed away a little from the thing in his hand that was swishing through the air. It struck hard but the pizza saved me; it took a lot of weight out of the blow, although I felt it down to my toes and the shutters almost came up. I yelled and sagged back against the door. I felt a hand grabbing at me as if the assault was sexual but I realised he was reaching for the envelope between my legs. I hunched over and attempted to butt him somewhere, anywhere. I connected and felt the wind rush out of him. It hurt me too, forcing me to shut my eyes and gasp. I tried to yell again, but my windpipe felt twisted and no sound came out.

&
nbsp; I was going down, a perfect target for a boot, when a shout came from above and across the lane.

  “Hey! What’s going on there?”

  The voice was coming from the church. Could it be the Almighty? I tried another yell but managed only a choked growl. Shout and growl were enough for my attacker. He stopped groping at me and ran off down the lane, stumbling a bit but with a lot more get up and go in him than I had in me.

  4

  In Darlinghurst, if a shout saves you from injury and violation, you don’t complain if you never see who did the shouting. I sat with my bum on the cold cement, my back against the door, and peered up at the high wall opposite. But there was no further movement or sound from that quarter. The envelope had slid to between my knees and was ripped where the attacker had got a grip on it, but that was all. My head was aching, ringing. I guessed the blurry white thing lying in the lane, upside down with a large dent in it, was my pizza box.

  When I was sure I had vision and movement, I levered myself upright and looked around for my key. I couldn’t see it on the ground. I picked up the pizza, squinted in the gloom and found the key in the lock. I opened the door and broke my fail-safe rule by putting the key in my pocket. The rule doesn’t apply when you’re semi-concussed and carrying a broken pizza. Then I went slowly up the stairs, pausing at each level, until I reached my own floor. I slid along the wall like a drunk needing the support until I reached my door. No need to dig for a key or, even worse, go back to the stairs for the one under the lino. The door was standing open.

  I turned on the light, went inside and put my burdens on the desk. I knew I’d left papers on the desk; my mother’s attempts to make me tidy hadn’t ever taken, and where she’d failed how could the army hope to succeed? But I hadn’t left the desk as messy as this. I certainly hadn’t ripped my copy of the Commercial Agents and Private Enquiry Agents Act 1963 into pieces and scattered them around the room. I gave the door a push and heard it slap against the frame and fail to lock. The lock had been opened with a pick and had jammed in the latch position. That much detection was all I was up to for the moment. I went down the hall to the bathroom, ran water, washed my face and got a thick wad of wet handtowel paper to press against the bump on my head.

  I sat in the client’s chair with my eyes closed for a while until the throbbing eased and other parts of my body made their needs known. I was hungry and thirsty. For no good reason I remembered something my ex-wife Cyn had said when I came home with a pizza one night. “Garbage in, garbage out,” she’d said. That was all she knew; if I’d been carrying a tabouli salad my brains might be lying in the lane. The filing cabinet had been opened—it didn’t take Raffles to do that—but the wine was still there. I pulled the cork out of the bottle and drank some of the rough red down in gulps. Aggressive stuff, confidence-building. I slid the pizza out of the crashed box and wolfed it—cold squashed anchovies and all. A few more gulps of wine and I felt ready to plug in the jug and make coffee. Cyn had despised instant coffee too, but even she couldn’t deny that it was quick. Two cups of it, black, with three red Codrals, and I was pain-free, almost floating, ready to think about what the hell was happening to me.

  The office had been roughly but thoroughly searched—filing cabinet, desk drawers, under the carpet, behind the electric jug, coffee and sugar. For what? I did a quick paw through myself and couldn’t find anything missing, although I had a feeling that something was. The notes on my oldest case, the one involving the striptease dancer and her runaway son, and my latest, the disappearance of Brian Madden, were where they should have been. I prowled around the room trying to locate the gap. When things are too familiar, it’s easy to overlook something missing—memory and imagination supply the lack. I drank some more wine and gnawed on a pizza crust. What? What? Eventually it hit me: a framed photograph almost three decades old I had put in the office rather than the house because Cyn had hated it, wasn’t lying face down on top of the filing cabinet the way it had for years. A clean space, six centimetres by ten, stood out on the dusty surface like a cricket pitch on a bowling green.

  I sat down behind the desk and thought about the picture. I’d looked at it a thousand times with mixed emotions, and every detail of it was clear in my mind. ‘Maroubra Police Boys’ Club boxing championships’ had been scratched across the bottom by the photographer. The picture showed the finalists in the divisions from heavyweight to flyweight—sixteen of us. I was there alongside Clem Carter, who’d knocked me out in the third round to win the welterweight title. Also in the picture were several policemen who’d trained and encouraged us and also acted as timekeepers and referees. I’d long forgotten most of their names but I remembered one of the referees. He’d tried to give me a fast count when I went down in the semifinal, and I’d had to scramble up early to beat it. You might think that a man who can’t even referee a kids’ boxing match honestly has a serious problem and in this case you’d be right. His name was Stewart ‘Rhino’ Jackson.

  It didn’t make a lot of sense, but it did make some. One thing was certain—it was time to get professional help on my semi-professional problem. I poured a sipping-size measure of wine and called Cy Sackville. In an unguarded moment, Sackville had once told me that he liked to watch LA Law on TV on Tuesday nights, so I knew where to find him. I dialled his number and tried to imagine him sitting in a leather armchair in his Point Piper flat with the remote control in one hand and the Law Review Digest in the other, ready to do a bit of reading during the commercials.

  “Sackville. Please leave your message after the tone.”

  “I know you’re there, Cy. Put in a tape and press the record button. It’s your old friend and client, Cliff Hardy, in need of a talk.”

  There was a pause, then the tone was cut off and Sackville’s voice came on the line. “Jesus Christ! Hang on.”

  I grinned as I sipped the wine.

  “Okay,” Sackville said.

  “How’re Mickey and Grace? Are they married yet?”

  “What d’you want, Cliff?”

  “Hah, hah, can’t say you’re busy, can you?”

  “I could hang up.”

  “Don’t, Cy. I need help.” I told him about the summons and Parker’s sketchy information. I didn’t tell him about the missing photograph or my sore head or the squashed pizza. Sackville’s appetite for the law is insatiable. The best way to get his attention is to present him with some legal snafu he hasn’t struck before. I get to do that reasonably often, and I could tell by his silence as I spoke that I’d hooked him with this one.

  “Interesting,” he said. “I’ve never been to one of these hearings.”

  “What hearings?”

  “This petty sessions sitting you’re going to. It’s more in the nature of a hearing than a trial. Statements, right of reply, modified rules of evidence.”

  “I don’t want to go to any hearing. I want you to get me out of it. It’s bullshit. I wouldn’t know Beni Lenko from Alan Bond.”

  “How about this Jackson?”

  “I know him, sure. But there’s no connection to the Steller-Lenko thing.”

  “How do you know? Have you looked into it?”

  “Cy …”

  “They must have something, Cliff. I know they’re trying to tighten up on all you pistol-packing types—private eyes, security guards and so on. Too many guns and payrolls going missing. But your nose is clean with the police, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So there’s someone behind it. I wouldn’t press Parker on the name of the witness. These witness protection programs are the flavour of the month since Fitzgerald. A breach by Parker could seriously damage his career if it got known.”

  “I told him not to do anything to risk his job. But I can’t just sit and wait for this shit to flop on me. As my lawyer they’d have to put you in the picture, wouldn’t they?”

  “Up to a point.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They needn’t identify the witness
specifically, but I would get a context—full transcript of statement, supporting evidence and so on.”

  “Great. I can be put out of business by a faceless woman.”

  “Let me think,” Sackville said.

  “If you’re sneaking a quick look at the box, Cy, I’ll come around and piss in your pool.”

  “No, no. This is interesting. Don’t worry, Cliff, I’m taking it seriously. What I’ll do first off is get you a delay. I can probably get a fortnight, maybe more.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “You’re a detective, aren’t you? You’d better ask around and find out who wants you retired. Are you vulnerable in any other way? What are you working on now?”

  “A missing person case.”

  “Sounds safe enough. Good, even. A little acceptable privatisation of law and order. Keep your books in shape, account for your expenses. Write up your notes every day.”

  “My name card fell off the door.”

  “Get a proper plate made. Screw it to the door. You need to look solid.”

  Just hearing him say it made me feel all the more fragile. He got the date of the hearing and had me spell the name at the foot of the fateful letter: G-r-i-f-f-i-n. He told me he’d get back to me when he had some news. I think he expected another crack about LA Law, but I disappointed him. My head was buzzing again and the torn paper, turned-back carpet and battered pizza box were depressing me. I added the documents I’d collected to the Madden file, put the police pamphlets on top of the filing cabinet and gathered up my meagre belongings. I freed the door lock, turned out the light and left the office. I went down the stairs quietly and carefully, but no one was lurking in the shadows. So if my guardian angel was hovering around he had nothing to do for the present. I stuck the key back in the wall, drove home and went to bed.

  In the morning, after eight hours’ sleep, with only a slight headache and the cat for company, things seemed a lot clearer. I had a one-thousand-dollar fee to earn and a licence to protect. “Keep busy, that’s the secret,” is what my Irish gypsy grandmother used to say. She made it to eighty-plus and keeled over while building a drystone wail. It was good advice, applicable to me at forty-plus, although the only physical labour I did these days was carrying out the garbage tin. As I told the cat, it was very simple. “Work on the Madden case in the daytime and the Lenko matter at night. Keep busy.”