BECKER

by Gordon Reid

  ‘Angelina?’

  ‘Yeah, that bitch gave it to Maria and she gave it to me. I’m standin’ there lookin’ at it in me flamin’ hand and she’s tellin’ me we’re goin’ to be rich beyond our wildest dreams, when the door bursts open and in come these Federal cops. I’m caught red-handed, they reckoned. I didn’t know anythin’ about any fuckin’ coke. Ah, Jesus—’ He stamped a foot. The emergency vehicles were almost upon them. ‘You want to get rid of me, don’t you?’

  ‘You didn’t have to accept the coke.’

  ‘Eh? What’d you do if y’wife suddenly gave you a bag full of stuff. You wouldn’t know people were hiding out, watching. Ready to pounce as soon as y’touched it. It was a whole fuckin’ set up.’

  ‘You didn’t answer the question.’

  ‘What fuckin’ question?’

  ‘Why aren’t you in jail?’

  ‘Why am I? Why am I? No-one’s said anything to me at work. They know it was a set up. Fuckin’ Federal cops, never do anything useful for the community. Just set up traps and secretly record people havin’ private conversations and tyin’ ’em in with geezers you’ve only met once or twice for a drink. But who, it turns out, are wanted for grand larceny or drugs or terrorism and every other fuckin’ sensational scandal in the whole world. I’m fuckin’ sick of it. I’ve just about had it. I mean—’

  He didn’t seem to know what he meant. Barnes was at the end of his tether.

  The first vehicle, the patrol car, was slowing right down, the siren dying.

  ‘Anyway,’ Becker said, ‘you can explain all this to your colleagues.’

  ‘Explain what?’

  Becker ignored him, waiting for the first man to emerge, a sergeant.

  ‘Harry Becker,’ he said, shifting the Smith and Wesson to his left hand, ready to shake with the right if necessary. The sergeant did not bother.

  ‘Jackson,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘There’s a dead guy in my car.’

  ‘Is that a bullet hole?’

  ‘Yeah, same on the other side.’

  ‘What the hell?’

  The ambulance was pulling in now, backing up in front of Becker’s car. Jackson opened the door of the BMW, had a look. ‘Who did this?’

  ‘Ask him.’

  ‘Who? Constable Barnes? Why are you holding a pistol?’

  ‘I shot off three or four rounds,’ Becker said.

  ‘At another vehicle?’

  ‘Yeah, a big Toyota Land Cruiser. There may be a hole or two in the back.’

  ‘You get a number?’

  ‘I don’t think there was a number. No plate on the back, anyway.’

  ‘Max, get on the blower. A Land Cruiser, there may be a hole or two in the back. Search everywhere. No number plates. May have put ’em back on by now.’

  ‘A big white vehicle,’ Becker said again.

  ‘We got all that.’ He came back to Becker. ‘Is that a Smith and Wesson?’

  ‘I bought it on the market.’

  ‘Around here?’

  ‘In Sydney, years ago.’

  ‘Why did you buy an ex-police pistol?’

  ‘I’m an ex-police officer.’

  Jackson said, ‘Mmmm. Let’s see your licence?’

  Becker got it out. ‘He was going to have a go at me,’ he said.

  ‘Barnes? He was going to have a go at you?’

  ‘He came up to me with a hand on his piece.’

  Barnes cut in: ‘He was holdin’ a weapon.’

  ‘I’d just then shot at a vehicle.’

  Jackson said ‘Hmmm’ again. ‘You can put that thing away.’

  ‘Not till you’ve taken him away.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘Ask him,’ Becker said.

  ‘Something between you two?’

  ‘We’re cousins.’

  ‘A family feud?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Who was the old guy?’ Jackson asked Becker.

  ‘A witness to a killing in Canberra, last year.’

  ‘And someone shot him?’

  ‘Yeah, from the left side.’

  ‘Te bullet went through your window, too. How come you’re not hit?’

  ‘I leaned back, Buster leaned forward.’

  ‘Buster?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why would someone do that?’

  ‘They didn’t want him to go to court.’

  ‘Ah, Jesus.’

  Barnes had been standing, hand on weapon, fuming. And listening, as far as the pounding pulse in his ears would allow. Both happy to see someone standing up to that bastard, Harry Becker, and yet frightened something awful might happen. He’d had enough. He couldn’t take it any more from that fucking bastard, who had everything, a million dollars they reckon, given him by some Mafia boss’s wife in Canberra, who was gonna split and run with him. To live it up on the Riviera or some flash dump like that. But they got her, shot her in bed. So he’d heard, anyway.

  Now his fucking smart-arse cousin who wasn’t a real cousin at all, Harry fucking Becker, was standing there in front of him, telling a pack of fucking lies to that bastard of a boss, Jack Jackson, who’d never liked him, never given him a break, knocked him back every fucking time he’d applied for promotion. If he could have been made senior constable after all this time, ten fucking years, he would have been someone. Maybe with prospects of retiring as a sergeant one day. It had all gone wrong. Just because that bitch of a wife of his had told him that something was gonna happen. And he’d better be ready to verify that it had happened. Or else someone down in Melbourne would not be too pleased. Now, he was on a road to nowhere. Stuffed this time, really stuffed…

  All of this was going through his head at a million miles an hour.

  ‘Check the times,’ Becker was saying.

  ‘Why?’ Jackson asked.

  ‘Check what time you sent out the call to him.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘I think you’ll find he received a call on his personal phone before that.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘Someone to say the hit had been made. But he should go and see if the old man was dead, really dead. And another thing, who would drive along a highway without plates?

  Someone who had no need to worry about being picked up by a patrol car, eh?’

  Jackson looked bad. Looked as though he was going to bite off his bottom lip. His young offsider had finished his phoning. Now standing back behind Barnes, a hand on his sidearm. Just habit, or a creepy feeling that something bad might happen. Very suddenly.

  ‘Constable Barnes, what do you say?’

  Barnes was going deaf. He couldn’t hear properly. His neck had gone as stiff as steel, or as hard and cold as ice. Hard to say which.

  ‘Barnes? Did you receive a call about this incident before we called you?’

  ‘What?’ His heart was pounding. Something was going to break, he knew.

  ‘We can check, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘What?’

  Barnes began to fold up, cringing.

  ‘Constable? Do you know anything about this incident?’

  ‘Ah, shit,’ he said. ‘Ah, shit—’

  He began to cry out, cry for help. He couldn’t take it any fucking more.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  He hit the ground before they could catch him.

  Chapter 24

  Becker went home and told Robyn. There was no point in trying to hide it from her. It would be all over the TV news that night and all over the local paper next morning. She was pretty upset when he did. Shocked to hear what had been done to poor old Buster, who once upon a time had been
the respected young Mr Keaton at her little school in Wybilonga twenty-five years ago. Now he was dead. Why? What harm could a decent old man do to anyone? Not really old, not much more than fifty. For no reason other than he’d witnessed a murder in Canberra a year ago.

  Becker held her for a while, as she wept. She was like that. She took the misfortunes of others to heart. If only I could have done something to atone, she said. It’s not your fault, he’d said, patting her back. The kids were standing in the doorway.

  ‘What’s happened, Mum?’ Wendy said.

  ‘I caught another yabbie today,’ Terry said.

  They’d stood like that until all had dried out. Saying nothing for about a minute, which had helped.

  Then Robyn blew her nose and said: ‘She called today.’

  ‘Who called?’

  ‘Adeline.’

  ‘She’s still here?’

  ‘You put her in at the Pioneer, dear. And told her you’d do something for her.’

  ‘I told her to go back to Sydney. What did she want?’

  ‘She said she’d run out of money.’

  ‘Run out of money? I left a thousand dollars on her account at the motel.’

  ‘She said she’d had expenses.’

  ‘What expenses?’

  ‘She said they’d had to make a lot of phone calls to Sydney.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She had to tell all her friends what a wonderful man you had been. Also, she had to get her father out of jail.’

  ‘How is she going to do that?’

  ‘She’s hired a lawyer.’

  ‘She’s hired a lawyer? Who has she hired?’

  ‘Someone named Waterford. Apparently he’s famous.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Taking on impossible cases and winning.’

  ‘Is he any good?’

  ‘Apparently his family make crystal.’

  ‘She said his family makes crystal?’

  ‘That’s what she said, dear.’

  ‘So that impressed her? His family makes crystal? How does that make him a good lawyer?’

  ‘Harry, I don’t know. That’s the way she talks.’

  ‘She’s totally irrational.’

  ‘She’s such a sad woman,’ Robyn said.

  ‘She’s a conniving little bitch.’

  ‘Oh, she can’t be that bad.’

  ‘She was born that way. She has a small reptilian brain, the kind that has to snap at anything that moves.’

  ‘Oh, please don’t say that. I’ve never heard you say such a thing about any woman.’

  She was pouring him a whiskey. He was exhausted, could not take much more of this. She brought it to him with a coaster, placing it on the small table at his elbow. It was perfect blackwood, Tasmanian. Highly polished. She always polished everything at least once a week. It smelled wonderfully of polish, Sheraton.

  She’d picked up the table at a place down a back lane in Wagga, where you could always find some wonderful old stuff. If you knew where to look. Although she found it a bit difficult to get around. Hardly get behind the wheel of the Nissan, now being seven months gone. She tended to waddle a bit and to lean back for balance. But it was a joy, being pregnant again. And smilingly proud.

  Everyone saying she looked marvellous and asking who was her doctor. She had regular check-ups, and, against her better judgement, had had a scan. It was a girl. She did not, however, tell Becker. He probably wished for a boy, not having one of his own. And she not wanting to disappoint him at this stage.

  ‘So,’ she said, sitting beside him with her bitter lemon. She was off alcohol completely and had been since she’d first heard. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Do you mean to tell me she’s gone through a thousand dollars in a day?’

  ‘She said she’s been buying things at Grace Brothers.’

  ‘On tick?’

  ‘No, she said she’d come to an arrangement with the manager at the Pioneer. She assigned the whole one-thousand dollars to the motel, which promised to pay for her purchases up to a limit of seven-hundred dollars.’

  ‘What happens to the other three hundred?’

  ‘Apparently the motel keeps it as a service fee.’

  ‘Thirty per cent service fee? They are worse than the banks.’ He was fed up. He had an obligation, he knew. Not to Adeline, but his children. If they were his children, the two girls. Sometimes he doubted it. He sighed. ‘Oh, God, Rob, how can I get rid of her?

  At that moment, there was a knock on the front door, a ratatatat! knock. Quite determined, but not unfriendly.

  ‘Oh, hell, who is that?’

  ‘Shall I go, dear?’

  ‘No, I will.’ Wearily he went to the door, opened it. Chook marched in.

  ‘Thought I’d drop in,’ she said. ‘With some news.’

  ‘God, no, what now?’

  ‘Heard about old Buster, of course, and the collapse of your unlovely cousin. I was in the area doing some business. Thought I’d see how you’re holding up.’

  ‘What’s happened to Buster?’

  ‘At the morgue. The local cops are trying to trace any relatives.’

  ‘What happens if you can’t find any?’

  ‘We’ll take care of him. After all, he was our star witness.’

  ‘Poor Buster, he may be the only one at his own funeral.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ Robyn said.

  ‘You don’t have to go, Rob.’

  ‘I’d like to go,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll both go.’

  ‘We’ll all go,’ Chook said

  ‘Thank you, both of you.’

  ‘We don’t have any Jack Daniels,’ Becker said to Chook.

  ‘But we do have some Jameson,’ Robyn said. ‘Would that do instead?’

  ‘Ah, the smell of the peat.’

  Robyn began to heave herself up, but Chook had already pounced on the bottle on a sideboard and was helping herself to Jameson and water. Unusual for her—the water, that is. But she had a reason.

  ‘What happened to Barnes?’ Becker said.

  ‘In hospital, suspected heart attack.’

  Becker did not respond. He didn’t care about Barnes, although he felt he should. He was one of the family. It was an ill-fated family. Nothing ever went right. No matter what you did, it always came out wrong.

  ‘How are you both?’ Chook asked.

  ‘Depressed, my ex-wife is going through money at a fast rate. Of knots.’

  ‘Expecting too much, is she?’

  ‘Too much is beyond her comprehension. Now she wants me to help get her old man out of jail.’

  ‘Why is he in jail?’

  ‘Passing valueless cheques.’

  ‘How much would it cost?’

  ‘Fifty grand.’

  ‘Fifty grand? Are you going to pay up?’

  ‘Never, but I have to get rid of her somehow.’

  ‘What most attracts her?

  ‘The smell of money.’

  ‘The smell of money?’ Chook thought about it. ‘Did you tell me her last husband was a boxer?’

  ‘Yeah.

  ‘Boris Kalash?’

  ‘Yeah, it was.’

  ‘As I recall, Boris was knocked out just before the bell in the tenth?’

  ‘Yeah, he was.’

  ‘And he got nothing but ten-thousand?’

  ‘Quite right.’

  ‘And Rocky Rostrum got what?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘It might have been quite a bit, for the State title. Fifty grand, do you think?’

  ‘I’m not into boxing.’

  ‘I am, or was. I used to fight at Macka Doolan’s gym in Footscray—other girls, of course. We were lucky if we got f
ive-hundred for a fight, even though the girls got a bigger or at least a more enthusiastic crowd, screaming at us, “Kill her! Kill her! Kill her!”

  ‘Blood-thirsty bastards.’

  ‘It was the women. They wanted to see blood.’

  ‘God, what a world we live in.’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ said Chook.

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘You want to get rid of her. I think I know the trick.’

  ‘You’re not thinking of terminating her?

  ‘I wouldn’t do that to the mother of your children.’

  Robyn rose, smiling. ‘I think the pork is done. Will you stay for dinner, Stacey?’

  ‘Thank you, but no thank you. I have a date.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  Becker asked: ‘Anyone we know?’

  ‘Ah hah!

  ‘Not that pretty girl in the Hovell?’

  ‘Her mother’s asked me to dinner.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m telling her all about the Siege of Odessa. How we fought on for two months until the Germans beat us to a pulp. Then the Rumanians came in.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘Stood us up against a wall and shot us.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Oh, it could have been worse.’

  ‘How?’

  Chook did not reply, finishing her drink. ‘I must fly. Bye, Robbie!’

  ‘You must come to dinner soon, Stacey.’

  ‘I will.’

  Becker followed her to the door. ‘Why are you in this neighbourhood, mate?’

  ‘Chatting to my business associates next door’.

  ‘You mean Albert and his mangy son?’

  They walked out on to the verandah. It was a cool to cold night. But the moon was high and a cloudy cuckoo was trilling up the birdie scale of trills, enchantingly. Echoing in the stillness of the night. No bird answered. It went on and on, which showed that even birds longed for love, or if not love, then a little tender consideration.

  ‘I’ve got a deal going. They supply me with dope of the informational kind and I leave them to get on with supplying the stupefying kind.’

  ‘Is it working?’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘Isn’t that illegal? A cop turning a blind eye?’

  ‘Not if it’s approved up top.’

  ‘You mean in Canberra?’