Peter Corris - Aftershock

I stepped over the low gate and walked up the cracked cement path towards the front of the house. Weeds sprouted through the cracks. The porch was just a scrap of wood and fibro tacked onto the front of the place-post-war austerity. I went up the brick steps and the porch boards sagged under my weight. They also creaked loudly enough to make it unnecessary to knock on the door. I did, anyway, and it was opened by a tall, thin man with shoulder-length dark hair. He looked to be in his early twenties, wore a blue overall and smelled of beer and tobacco. He was visibly shaking which wouldn’t have concerned me overmuch except that he was holding a rifle and pointing it at my navel.

‘Are… are you Cliff Hardy?’

I had to consider this question. Maybe he’d shoot if I said I was and I knew a rifle bullet would travel faster over one and half metres than me.

I said, ‘Are you Mark Roper?’

His nod seemed to accentuate his general shakiness. He didn’t lower the weapon. He wasn’t a bad-looking young man except for the close set of his eyes. I raised my hands in a parody of the ‘hands up’ movement. I thought he might follow my hands with the muzzle of the rifle. Worth a try, but he didn’t do it. I took a step forward, putting me squarely within the doorframe. Sergeant O’Malley, my old army unarmed combat instructor would have been ashamed of me.

‘Stop,’ he said.

But he also moved back and O’Malley had taught me what to do when that happens. A backward moving person is halfway beaten. I twisted, came further forward, flattened myself against the wall and brought both hands down in hard-edged chops on the flexed bones and tendons of his forearms just above the wrists. He screamed with pain and dropped the rifle. I was ready for the movement and almost caught it cleanly. Bit of a fumble, but I got it on the half-volley and had the muzzle up under his chin before he could get any feeling back into his hands.

I pressed up into the tight skin of his jaw. ‘Let’s continue this discussion inside, Mr Roper,’ I said. ‘Anyone else around?’

He shook his head; the stretched skin scraped on the rifle muzzle and hurt him. Pain registered in his eyes and I believed him. He backed away down the passage and I eased off with the rifle. It was. 22 semi-automatic with the safety off. Fourteen shot magazine at a guess. Could do an awful lot of damage at close range. Roper knew it and as his chin came down and he looked into the business end of the barrel he shook so hard I thought his knees would buckle. I flipped the rifle up onto my shoulder.

‘I’m not going to shoot you,’ I said. ‘Let’s talk. Back here to the kitchen?’

He nodded and we moved down the passage, where damp had affected the pale green paint job, into the kind of chrome, laminex and lino kitchen I had had my first few thousand meals in. Except that my mum had kept the kitchen floor as clean as an operating table and this one was sticky with spilt food and drink. Roper slumped down into a chrome and plastic chair and I put the rifle in the corner by the sink and took up a position where I could stop him if he bolted for the door. But the confrontation had drained him and he didn’t look as if he had any bolting in him. Making a cup of coffee might be his limit.

‘Suppose you tell me what’s the big idea,’ I said. ‘Do you usually meet people at the door with a rifle?’

He shook his head and reached into the pocket of his overall. He took out a packet of Marlboros and a lighter and got one lit. He drew the smoke in deeply and the shaking began to diminish. I passed him a saucer from the sink and he flicked ash into it. It had been a deep first draw.

‘I know who you are,’ he said. ‘You’re a detective from Sydney. Horrie Jacobs hired you because he thinks I killed Mr Bach.’

I did a quick mental resume of the things that had happened so far. I couldn’t place Mark Roper anywhere in the chain of information. With nowhere else to look for him, I asked myself if he could have been one of the kids in the Commodore at the level crossing and concluded that he wasn’t. Too old. Wrong colouring. Puzzlement. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘You’re getting way ahead of me. You’re right about who I am and who I’m working for. But where did you get this other idea?’

‘I worked for Mr Bach. Now I’ve got his business. I’m the logical suspect, right?’

‘Let me tell you something. There’s no such thing as a logical suspect except in domestic killings. The logical suspect is the person who slept with the victim. Nine times out of ten that turns out to be the one who did it.’

He was most of the way through his Marlboro, listening hard. His skin was pale to the point of unhealthiness and he looked as if he had difficulty in maintaining an acceptable standard of grooming and hygiene. He made it, just, and I wondered about his domestic arrangements. The house bore all the traces of the parental home, gone to seed. Was Mark a loner, a middle-aged bachelor twenty years early, misfit and psychotic killer? Somehow, I couldn’t see it.

He lit another cigarette and his voice was a thin, strained whisper. ‘Are you saying I’m a homosexual? I’m not. I’ve got a girlfriend.’

I struggled to follow his logic, then I got it. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t implying anything like that. I don’t know anything about you, Mr Roper. And I don’t know enough about Oscar Bach.’

He snorted through the smoke. ‘He wasn’t a homo either, believe me, he wasn’t.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

He opened his mouth as if he was going to speak more than two sentences. Then he half shut it. ‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled. ‘Nothing.’

I was getting impatient with him. This man knew something I didn’t and was being paid to find out. That cuts across kindness and compassion. ‘Look, son,’ I said, ‘I don’t give a shit how many girlfriends or boyfriends you’ve got. I want to know everything I can find out about Oscar Bach. You know something and you’re going to tell me what.’

He glanced at the rifle. He was considerably closer to it than me but he made the right decision and looked away again. ‘I can’t,’ he muttered.

‘You don’t have a choice. You pointed a rifle at me a while ago. I took it off you without doing you any harm but it doesn’t have to stay that way’

‘You’d beat me up?’

I touched the wounds on my face. ‘It’s like this. I’ve come in for some rough treatment around here already. You can see that. My pride’s been hurt and when that happens I’m likely to get impatient and take it out on someone else.’

He squashed out his cigarette and the face he turned up to me was twisted with misery. ‘I’m not brave, you see. That’s the trouble. They’ll kill me if they find out.’

He’d at least given me a line of attack. ‘Who’s they?’

‘Gina’s brothers.’

‘Who’s Gina?’

‘Gina Costi, she’s my girlfriend-sort of.’

I’d had ‘sort of girlfriends myself, they’re the worst kind. This young’ man had a bad case of the fear and confusions. I judged it was safe to take my eye half off him and I ran water into the kettle and set it on the stove. There was a jar of instant coffee on the sink and several dirty mugs. I rinsed two mugs, made the coffee and told him to get the milk. He obeyed automatically, like a compliant child. There was almost nothing else in the refrigerator apart from beer cans and a carton of milk. There was probably a packet of cereal somewhere, some bread and a jar of peanut butter. That’d take care of breakfast and lunch. It was odds on there’d be fast food containers in the rubbish bin. Dinner. He spooned sugar into his coffee and sipped it before lighting another cigarette.