Peter Temple - Black Tide

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Dead for a VCR. When?’

She softened a little, pulled a face. ‘Early April. Third or the fourth,’ she said. ‘We’ve been done over twice in a year. I came in and found the one. Pathetic creature, really. Hanging out for a hit. It’s totally out of hand.’

‘Makes you want to move to the country,’ I said. ‘Country of Lapland. I don’t even know what Mr Jellicoe did for a living.’

‘Something to do with travel,’ she said. ‘In the city.’

I drove back to Fitzroy. All the way, at the lights, men in cars and utes and panel vans picked their noses, admired the findings. The greasy-grey day, in its terminal stage, had a ruddy tinge, whole western sky the colour of a feverish child’s cheek.

Sitting in the clotted traffic provided lots of time to think about Gary. Gary and his sophisticated switched-off security system, Gary being followed by a man, Gary vanishing, the man Gary regularly met at his liquor store being murdered.

Stuck at a light, I rang Wootton. ‘That earlier inquiry,’ I said, ‘I need more.’

‘On a fee-for-service basis, I presume.’

‘At the discount rate extended to people who have performed services far, far beyond the call of duty. Yes.’

Wootton sniffed. ‘What exactly do you need?’

‘The party’s source of income.’

Wootton laughed, a flat, false laugh. ‘That’s quite impossible, I’m afraid. Not a service on offer.’

‘Just a thought,’ I said. ‘Having a drink after?’

‘Very likely.’

I parked at the stable and took a tram into the city, only half a dozen people on board. Going the other way, the trams were crammed with the tired and oppressed on their way home.

I got off at the first stop in Collins Street and walked back up the slope to Spring Street. The street had its winter evening feel: light the colour of a ripe peach falling across the pavement from the windows of expensive shops, falling on hurrying people, people in dark clothes, overcoats, scarves, a dark red the colour of drying blood the colour for women’s lips this year, background noise of hooting, of clanking trams, and, in the air, the pungent, urgent smell of exhaust fumes. Near the corner, a tall woman, dark-haired, long and intelligent face, severe grey suit, bumped into me, just a touch, a meeting of bodies. But she was wearing Linda’s perfume. It overwhelmed me, caught in my nose, my throat, my heart.

Around the corner, in Spring Street, people were disappearing from sight into the underground as if being sucked into quicksand. I looked across at the State Parliament. On the steps, a television crew with lights was filming a fair-haired woman interviewing a man in a dark suit.

Wootton was on his window seat in the Windsor Hotel’s street bar, whisky glass on counter, newspaper in hand. At the long bar, the youngish, smartish patrons, not a pierced protuberance or a shaven head to be seen, were braying and whinnying at one another.

I bought a beer and joined him. ‘Cheers,’ I said.

Wootton looked up from the newspaper, took off his horn-rimmed glasses, folded them, put them behind the triangle of red handkerchief in the top pocket of his dark-grey pinstriped suit.

‘In the courts this afternoon,’ he said.

‘Sorry to hear that. Bail obviously wasn’t a problem.’

He ignored my flippancy.

‘The Crown dropped all charges against Brendan. Free man. As we speak, a free man motoring to his place in the country near Maryborough. There is a just God.’

‘A just God,’ I said, ‘would ensure that as we speak Brendan O’Grady was being crushed by a fully loaded car transporter. As for his country place, it used to belong to a bloke called Cicchini. Bren had him knocked so that he could harvest about four tonnes of weed the guy had ready for market. Plus he wanted to comfort the wife. And the daughter. Possibly the dog.’

I drank some beer.

Wootton coughed. ‘Sends you his best regards,’ he said. ‘Moving on. You’re in luck. Tax Office audited that fellow of yours last year.’

‘Why?’

‘Travel claims, most likely. Probably just picked him up in a computer sweep. Big claims. World traveller.’

‘On business?’

Wootton nodded. ‘Allowed them, too. Makes a fair living, I can tell you.’

‘Source?’

‘Variety of sources. Printout’s in the bag.’ He pointed down at his brown buckle-up suburban bank manager’s leather briefcase.

‘Occupation?’

‘Security consultant. A line of work I often wish I’d pursued. Studying the security needs of large corporations, designing security strategies, advising on equipment…’

‘Selling information to the opposition, taking kickbacks. You’d be a natural.’

Wootton sighed, drank. ‘Dear me, your discount on this information just shrank to nothing. And the surcharge for gratuitous offensiveness has just cut in. Are you buying the chips? Salt and vinegar, please.’

I bought the chips, then transferred the printout in Wootton’s briefcase to a white plastic shopping bag supplied by his formidable woman friend behind the bar. We had another drink and parted. Wootton strolled off to his parking garage. I rattled home on a tram-me, a blind man with a guide dog, four tired-looking Vietnamese women travelling together, and a large, florid drunk who talked and sang to his reflection in the window.

Plastic bag in hand, I hiked along the narrow streets to my stable.

No Linda on the answering machine. Only Andrew Greer, Brendan O’Grady’s new lawyer. He didn’t identify himself:

Nice little hand of statements there. Pair is good but threes? Other side folded, gave up the game. Bren wants to have your babies. I’m out getting drunk with whores tonight but give me a call tomorrow.

I put on water to boil for pasta, stuck frozen sauce in the microwave to defrost, lit a fire on the ashes of at least ten old fires.

The chairs in my parlour seem empty and bare.

That was a compelling message to leave. Guaranteed to strike a chord in Linda. E. A. Presley’s silliest number. Never heard together.

I ate my meal without relish and settled down with the history of duelling. In the course of learning about how painful the consequences of giving offence once could be, I fell asleep, missing the appearance of the thirty-something spunk and the man who kissed her ear. Waking to a dry mouth and audible eyeballs, I made tea and watched an ABC documentary on Ulster. There was clearly something rubefacient in the water or the air of Ireland. More evidence for this came in the person of the presenter of the current affairs program that followed, a man of Irish descent possessing a distinctly russet hue. I went outside to fetch another log and when I got back the host was jousting with a bald man displaying the sad and silken demeanour of an undertaker.

I didn’t care about current affairs. I switched off. I wanted to ring Linda, hear her laugh, hear her suggest that loving me and missing me were not out of the question. I wanted to go to sleep in the sound knowledge that impressions to the contrary were paranoid. But the sensible part of my intellect, now only marginally more than vestigial, said No.

I went to bed to confront The Mountain from Afar: Men and their fathers. Before I could approach the mountain, however, I had to make the bed, turn down, tuck and tauten the twisted sheets.

It seemed so pointless.

It was so pointless.

I was in Meaker’s eating a sandwich of grilled ham with lettuce, tomato and gherkins and reading the Sportsman when the floor moved and I lost a lot of my light.

Kelvin McCoy, reformed smack freak, unreformed drunk, gifted poseur in the plastic arts, former client, lowered his bulk into the chair across the table. McCoy had taken over the lease on the sweatshop across the road from my office and was using it as a studio/residence. If people didn’t believe he had any talent as an artist, they generally kept it to themselves: McCoy was built like a street-cleaning machine. He had a shaven head, stoved-in nose, small eyes the colour of candlewax, and he kept himself formidably dirty. About fifteen huge canvases a year came out of his studio under such titles as Patriarchy’s Dialectic and Rituals of Hegemony. A man who taught something called cultural studies at Melbourne University provided the names. Inexplicably, rich people rushed to buy McCoy’s dark and sinister messes of paint and hair and toenail clippings and unidentifiable but worrying substances. His gallery shark allowed him a small portion of the proceeds, which he made speed to redistribute.