Peter Corris: Wet Graves

I got up and put on my jacket. Then I saw the jury duty notice and bent over to fill in the form attached. I ran my eye down the fine print and discovered that licensed inquiry agents were ineligible to serve on juries. I crumpled the letter and scored a direct hit on the wastepaper basket.

The letter from Detective Sergeant Griffin had invited me to contact his office for more information about my court appearance, but I had something of Ms Madden’s caution about writers of official letters. “Bypass A Bureaucrat Today” is my motto. There ought to be a T-shirt.

I set out to walk to the new police fortress in Goulburn Street, partly for the exercise and partly because I like to see how my law and order tax dollar is being spent. I went down William Street and cut up Yurong to Oxford. It was July but warm and dry after a few weeks of cold and wet, and the lightly dressed and briskly moving people seemed to be relishing the change. These days I feel like closing my eyes when I walk through the city. You can’t rely on a building you visited on Friday afternoon still being there on Monday morning, and most of the new stuff going up looks as if it has been designed by architects who stalled at cubism.

As I turned out of Oxford Street I almost collided with a man who was so wide he almost took up half of the footpath. If the woman standing behind him had been at his side they would have had to erect a detour sign.

“Say, buddy. Can you direct us to your Sydney Harbour Bridge?”

I pointed and tried to use language they would understand. “Walk north,” I said. “It’s a mile or so.”

His mouth dropped open and the fat on his cheeks sagged towards his neck. “Walk? Did you hear that, honey? We have to walk.”

The woman, wearing a white sweatshirt and black trousers, looked like a two-tone bowling ball. “Isn’t there a bus or a streetcar?”

I shook my head. “Better to walk. The buses are full of muggers.” I nodded, stepped onto the road to get around them and headed towards the police building. I regretted being a smartarse before I got there and turned around to make amends, but they were getting into a cab, him in front, her in the back. I made a mental note to be nice to the next tourist I met.

From a distance, the Sydney Police Centre looks all right-a combination of grey shapes, more or less inoffensive. Up close the slim pillars and the boxy structures behind them look like a house of cards propped up by king-size cigarettes. The architects have inserted grass and bricks everywhere grass and bricks can go, and haven’t stinted on polished marble and automatic doors. I went into the lobby, which looks like a cross between a bank, heavy on the bulletproof glass, and a five-star hotel, heavy on the pile carpet and rounded edges. The place bristles with pamphlets emphasising community policing, and the lighting is soft to suggest that harmony and under-standing begin here. The only thing to suggest that crime is being fought here too is that the cops in the glass and aluminium bunkers wear their caps.

I presented my credentials to a series of interceptors who made phone calls and ran metal detectors over me. A young constable escorted me silently up two flights of stairs and along a corridor to Frank Parker’s office. We stood outside the door and I looked at the cop.

“Am I allowed to knock or do you have to do it?”

“You can knock, sir.”

“Thank you.”

I knocked and I heard Frank say, “Yes.”

“What now?”

The constable opened the door. “Mr Hardy to see you, sir.”

“Thanks, son. Come in, Cliff.”

My escort had snapped back into a position resembling attention. I said, “At ease,” and went into the room. The door was closed quietly behind me.

“Take a seat, Cliff,” Frank said. “What’s the matter with you? Why are you looking like that?”

“I’ve been a prick to people twice in the last twenty minutes,” I said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I sat in one of the two well-padded chairs and looked around the room. Frank’s office in the old College Street police building had looked some-thing like a World War I trench and smelled like a snooker hall. This was all beige carpet, off-white walls and tinted glass. The old fixed squads in the police force- homicide, vice, fraud and so on-had been broken up in favour of units that drew on personnel as required and pursued cases as directed by policy-makers who weren’t always policemen. Unlike the old top cops, who had diplomas from rugby league clubs and testimonials from priests and master masons, these guys had LLBs and criminology degrees and used terms like “targeting” and “social worth”. Frank’s job was to liaise between the thinkers and the doers, so he got carpet and tinted glass. He liked the new honesty but missed the old sweat and dirt.

“Can’t afford a conscience in your game, Cliff,” Frank said. “Maybe you can do a few good deeds and get even. Meantime, I hate to push you out of the confessional, but…” He gestured at his thick stratifications of paperwork.

“I thought we might go out for a beer.”

“No chance. I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes.”

Frank looked greyer of hair and skin than he used to, but maybe it was the tinted glass. Then again, we hadn’t played tennis in months, or sat in a beer garden, so I suspected lack of sun was the cause. His nose was dipping towards his papers. Not the time to encourage him to take more exercise. I put my two requests to him, and he had the phone off the hook before I finished talking. He read while he listened, grunted and made notes through the two calls. He put the phone down and looked at his watch. I can take a hint; I stood and moved towards the door.

“Hold on, Cliff. Let me think. Yeah, I reckon I can do it. What about a beer around about six tonight?”

“I thought you didn’t have time to drink beer. I got the feeling that if you did drink beer, you wouldn’t have time for a piss afterwards.”

“Don’t joke. This could be serious. You’ve been mentioned in evidence given in the Lenko trial.”

“What?”

“That’s what Griffin tells me.”

Beni Lenko was an alleged hitman accused of shooting and killing the husband of Didi S teller. Didi was a society woman with much more money than sense who’d ordered the hit on her hubby and then taken a kilo of sleeping pills. Beni complained about being short-changed on his fee and had talked his way into a murder charge. I’d read about the case in the papers but, to the best of my know-ledge, I’d never met Didi, Beni or the late husband, whatever his name had been. I stood on Frank’s beige carpet with my mouth hanging open. “That’s crazy,” I said.

“I’ll try to find out more about it and fill you in at six. Meantime, you’d better get on to Cy Sackville.”

“I will. Thanks, Frank. I don’t under-stand this.” An indifferent day had got worse, much worse, but I wasn’t going to drop my bundle. Not Hardy. “What about the Madden matter?”

“You can collect a copy of the file and a few other bits and pieces from Room Ten, second floor.” Parker scribbled on a sheet of notepaper, came out from behind his desk and handed it to me. He straightened his tie and worked his shoulders inside his well-tailored suit jacket. “Give them this. Sorry, Cliff, I really have to go. Six tonight at the Brighton?”

“Sure. Have a good meeting.” I went out of the room and was picked up by another fresh-faced constable at the end of the corridor and escorted to Level 2, Room 10. I handed in the chit Frank had given me and was directed to wait downstairs. The waiting room didn’t contain any magazines or ashtrays-they don’t really want anyone to wait there for very long. Like the man and woman already there I sat on a hard chair and stared at nothing. I didn’t know about them, but I had plenty to think about. I’d read about the Lenko trial and heard radio reports but the details weren’t clear in my mind. Had there been a mistrial or was an appeal pending? I couldn’t remember.