Peter Temple - Dead Point

‘Happy birthday.’

‘Thank you.’

Her eyes were the colour of wet slate.

‘Restraint of trade. It stops him selling you the business and then starting a new one in opposition to you. He’s young enough to try that.’

‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘I know fuck-all about business.’

‘Do the looking at the books bit,’ I said, ‘then come and see me about the contract. I’m cheap.’

‘McCoy says living opposite your office is a risk.’

She’d been told the story.

‘McCoy likes to generalise. He’s had one unfortunate experience in the street. No-one forced him to throw his chainsaw into a passing vehicle.’

She paid and we walked back to Charlie’s in halfhearted rain. I went around to the driver’s side of the van with her. Her hair held drops of water. She brushed a hand over her scalp, dispelled the moisture. ‘Got any other libraries to put in, I’m your person,’ she said, getting into the cab. ‘I like your libraries.’

‘The person of choice. You will be that person.’

She looked down at me. ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘not to fuck about, I suppose you’re taken.’

So plain a question.

‘At this moment in time,’ I said, ‘no.’

‘I’m the same. Well, give me a ring. Business or social.’ She started the engine. ‘Here’s looking down at you, kid.’

I watched her take the top-heavy old van around the tight corner, stood for a while, thinking. Boz.

No. The world was already too much with me.

At the office, the answering machine was signalling me.

Jack, it’s Morris. Listen, I want a letter to Krysis. The neighbour says the bastard’s storing stuff in the garage again. Tell him he’s trespassing and we’ll kick his arse. Today, Jack, do it today. Cheers.

Morris, father of Stan the publican.

Jack, Morris again. I forgot to say the prick’s pushed the offer up another thirty grand. I told him not interested. He says he wants to talk to you. Tell him your instructions are he should piss off and stop wasting my time. Okay? Cheers.

Ditto. Someone wanted to buy his two adjoining properties in Brunswick, a more than generous offer as I understood it, but Morris couldn’t contemplate life without them.

Don’t let them tell you Robbie Colburne was just a casual barman.

A woman. Them? Who would they be? Xavier Doyle and company?

Jack, the Brunswick Street one, that lease finishes next month. Bastard rang the other day, wants to talk. Don’t want to know him, he’s out.

Morris, again. His Brunswick Street tenant was indeed deserving of the slipper, an habitual nonpayer.

I sat down and gave Robbie Colburne some thought. Queensland. He’d told The Green Hill he’d worked in Queensland. I rang a man in Sydney called D.J. Olivier. He said he’d ring me back. As far as my assets went, my credibility with D.J. ranked just behind my half of the boot factory. Then I opened my mail, threw most of the contents into the bin, took that into the back room and emptied it into a green garbage bag. After that, I made a cup of tea and sat at my table to read the latest issue of the Law Institute Journal. There were many things of interest in it, even some I understood, including recent findings of the legal profession tribunal regarding professional misconduct. Accounts of the venality of some of my colleagues left me greatly distressed. Distressed but not surprised.

I went to my window. Heavier rain now, steady plinks on the pools in the gutter. The lights were on in McCoy’s abode across the street, presumably to assist him in committing some disgusting act on canvas. Or elsewhere.

The phone rang.

‘Here’s a number,’ said D.J. Olivier. ‘It’s good for an hour or so.’

I drove around to the Prince, parked in the loading zone around the corner. Inside, I found no youthful pioneers of the cyberfrontier energising themselves with the fermented juice of radiated Russian potatoes. The nicotine-dark chamber held only a mildly alcoholic accountant called George Mersh, who played seven games for Fitzroy, and Wilbur Ong and Norm O’Neill, both strangers to the cyber and approaching a frontier from which noone returned.

They saw me, mouths opened like demanding chicks spotting the parent bird.

I heard the words unspoken, raised a hand. The mouths closed.

‘Not today,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to hear about it today.’

We would speak of the Saints’ inglorious performance but not while the memory was so fresh. Raw. I rapped on the counter and opened the flap.

Stan appeared.

‘The phone,’ I said.

‘Your professional uses his mobile,’ he said, and smirked.

‘It’s the new asbestos. Don’t you read the papers, Stan? Worse than stuffing bits of asbestos into your ear.’

His eyed opened wide, then a knowing look came over his face. ‘What do you take me for?’

‘An enigma wrapped in a mystery. Three beers. And have something yourself. Have, what is it, a Wally?’

He shook his head. ‘Jesus, Jack. Stolly. Really.’

I went into the pub’s office/archive. The telephone was under one of Stan’s jumpers, which I moved with a rolled-up newspaper. Cautiously. Then I cleaned the handset with a paper napkin I found marking a place in a paperback called Get a New e-Life: Cybertactics for Small Business, and dialled.

‘Done the immediate stuff,’ said D.J. Olivier. ‘Queensland, driver’s licence, issued 1992, renewed January 1996, and most recently six weeks ago. Otherwise, he’s not on the books.’

Robert Gregory Colburne had no tax file number and was not registered with Medicare.

‘MasterCard, six weeks old, limit ten grand, it’s 600-odd in credit.’

‘Address?’

‘Brissie. Red Hill. Also for electoral roll. No phone in the name now or ever. There’s just one possible lippy smudge on this collar.’

‘Yes?

‘The name got a passport in 1996. Departed Sydney, April ’96, but there’s no mention of a return arrival.’

‘How can that be?’

‘Well, sometimes they come back in a sailing boat, tramp steamer, fucking hang-glider, land in Broome, Top End, Tassie somewhere, there’s not always a record gets on file. Till they try to leave through Customs again, nothing shows.’

‘Anything else?’

‘No traces at the moment between April ’96 and the licence renewal and credit card issue six weeks ago. Oh and he enrolled at Sydney Uni in ’91. Seems to have dropped out in the first year. He’s not there in ’92.’

‘What school?’

‘Walkley. Up there somewhere to buggery over the mountains. You go through Bathurst. I think.’

I thanked D.J. and joined Wilbur and Norm. The subject of St Kilda could not be postponed. We had a fact-free exchange of views. The new development today was that both students of the game found some positive things to say about the Saints’ appalling performance. Most of them would have escaped less scholarly eyes. It had been that way with Fitzroy through the many dark seasons, the times without comfort or hope, all our enemies grown taller and swifter, their hands bigger and stickier, their boots crafted to kick impossible bananas and their foul blows, trips and gouges apparently invisible to umpires.

Cheered, I left before the IT crowd arrived. If they were ever coming back. As I turned the corner, the rain paused. The air was cold, deceptively clean-smelling. I could hear water running in the gutters, a flow of toxic liquid heading for the river and the bay.

On the way home, Linda Hillier was on the radio, where I’d left her, on 3KB.

Congratulations. You’re listening to Melbourne’s smartest station, and that says something about you.

Tonight we’re talking about drugs. Heroin users complained on radio this morning that they were treated like second-class citizens. Well, the man I’m about to talk to, the Reverend Allen O’Halloran, says that’s what they are. What’s your view? The number to call is, and bookmark it in what passes for your phone’s mind…