I'm Dying Here Page 18

  “You better hope you haven’t killed him too,” Rebeiro said. Looking disgusted and irritated, he told my cop, “Go in there with her, Baxter. See the place is clear. Anyone gives you any trouble, shoot the bastard. You can carry on your patrol in Hudnik’s car, I’ll take this one.”

  “I’ve got to find my cat,” Animal was shouting. “Here, Sappho, Sappho.”

  Rebeiro jostled me toward the Fairlane in front and shoved me in the back seat. I bleated a little as the door slammed on my hip, but the tears were from the residual capsicum. Tough guys don’t cry.

  §

  I couldn’t get the seat belt buckled as the law demands with my hands jammed behind me, and I couldn’t sit back comfortably either. Rebeiro didn’t bother heeding the speed limit, and the high performance cop car wasn’t designed to smooth out the jolts of Sydney Road’s traffic corrugations. I bounced around for a while,

  trying not to bite my tongue as I harangued him. He threw an abrupt right and pulled up next to a hydrant with a jerk that flung me into the head rest in front. It smelled of some rank hair gel. What was it with the police force these days? Hair gel. Give me strength.

  Rebeiro came around to the side, got me out, released me with­out a word. He shoved the restrainer into his coat pocket.

  “Oh, that was quick. You’ve just worked out that I couldn’t possibly have killed this Lesser jerk, have you? Was it my honest face that convinced you? Or the superior odor of my hair gel, with its fragrant hint of capsicum?”

  “I know you didn’t do it,” Rebeiro told me. “Get in the front with me.”

  “Of course I didn’t fucking do it,” I said. “I’m a feng shui mas­ter. We spiritual advisors just don’t go around killing people. It’s terrible karma.” But my bluster was drying up, and my mouth with it. I had a headache, and that was bad enough, but deep in­side my guts I cramped with a surge of fear. He’d found out about the Vagilantes. He’d been talking to Vinnie and that slack-arsed biddy of his, Mrs. Maeve Murphy. Who knows what those old farts might have leaked? Annabelle—

  “I know you didn’t do it,” Rebeiro told me, starting the car and heading for the Freeway, “because we just arrested the bint who did.”

  “The...bint? Detective, is that any way for an officer of the law to speak about—”

  “Oh shut up, Purdue,” he said. “You’re giving me a pain. You know what bint. Your squeeze of the moment. The widow, Mrs. Sharon Lesser.”

  Unless he was lying, that let my daughter and the grrls off the hook. Urgently, I said, “We have to go to Williamstown.”

  “We are going to Williamstown.”

  I looked sideways at Rebeiro. “Why are we going to William­stown?”

  “Are you completely insane? Are you on drugs, Purdue?”

  “No, I know why I want to go to Williamstown. I just want to know why you want to—”

  He took both hands off the wheel and slammed them back down again. The car leaped. “Jesus Christ! Just shut up!”

  “Well, if you’re going to be like that.” I pulled my seat belt on as we dived down onto the tollway. “Listen, give me a lend of your mobile phone.”

  “You really are insane.” But after a moment he leaned back, fished it off his belt and handed it to me. “No international calls or I put you back in those cuffs.”

  “My pal,” I said, and made the ghastly face of a paranoid serial killer at him.

  §

  The first time I met Gabe Rebeiro, when he was still a uniformed cop on the way up—but amazingly not on the make—I was in­sane, or near enough. My wife Patty was only a few weeks from death. I saw her every day, trussed in tubes and machines that went ping, her face collapsing as if everything fluid and lifelike was being drawn away from its tissues and pissed into the waste bottles. I brought the baby every chance I could. She was a toddler then, running on her fat legs until she fell down and squalled.

  I had Annabelle in a yellow jumper suit and soft red shoes with buckles. On our way in we stepped quickly into a room before Patty’s, filched a bunch of bright sweet-smelling freesias from the unconscious bald old woman lying there, and carried it dripping to Patty’s room.

  “Come to Nana,” said Harriet Gardner in a brittle voice, and my daughter waddled over with an uncertain look at me across her shoulder. Harriet clutched her up, displayed her to Patty. My wife smiled like a death’s head. I could hardly see them both. I felt as though my throat and chest were ready to explode with grief. I groped for a vase, shoved the flowers in it, moved toward Patty.

  Gavin Gardner’s hand reached up and seized my shoulder. He was a head shorter than me, and had never spent time in a gym. His face was contorted, flushed red, lips white.

  “You hulking brute,” he said. “We don’t want you coming here anymore. Get out right now and leave the little girl with us.”

  I was agog. I shook my head, as you do when you’ve been clipped by a fist. I picked his hand off my upper arm and walked past him to Patty. Her eyes had closed again, and the machines clattered and hummed.

  “Didn’t you hear me? Just get the hell away from here. Haven’t you got any respect?”

  I turned on him, all my grief and rage cracking the cold chill of my heart.

  “Be quiet, Gavin,” I said. I was twenty-four years old, and he was thirty years my senior, but I had experienced unpleasant things he probably couldn’t imagine. Nothing so terrible as the slow murder of my wife by her own renegade cells and the poisons and rays used to fight them, but bad enough. Gavin Gardner did not frighten me. Somehow it did not occur to me, at the time, that I scared the hell out of Gavin.

  “Don’t you dare speak to him that way,” Harriet told me in a thin voice. Her grip must have tightened on Annabelle’s little hand, be­cause my daughter suddenly started crying, trying to pull away. Her grandmother tightened her grip. “You guttersnipe. You coward. You let our daughter waste away while you lolled about in some filthy American holiday home for criminals and drug creatures....” The words spat out of her mouth with no attempt at logic. It was bile and hatred and terror for her dying child. I could see that much but I had no charity in my heart. Not at that moment. Not with my baby and my sick wife in the room hearing her bitter rant.

  And I knew it was justified, which was killing me.

  I crossed the room in two steps, took Annabelle away from her and popped the little girl up on the narrow hospital bed beside her scarecrow mother.

  “I want you both out of this room right now,” I told them in a clear, ringing tone. “We want to be alone with Annie’s mother.”

  Harriet started to shriek. It was beyond words, a plaintive cry of woe and rebuke. Someone had to take the blame for her daughter’s fatal illness, and I was there. I was the long-haired layabout who had taken her away from them to begin with. Then I was the drug criminal caught like a fool dressed as a preposterously ugly woman, imprisoned in a distant land, abandoning a pregnant woman. Now I was a thug looming like some reprisal from a folktale. I was everything hateful that a bad son-in-law can be, and worse. It came out of her throat in a wail of terror and detestation.

  The baby picked up the terrible melody, and wound her piping screams into its racket.

  A blue-clad nurse rushed to the opening of the room, hesitated, belted off for reinforcements. I stood mute and stupid holding the wailing child. Patty’s eyes were appalled. Her monitor machines clattered and beeped their panic, and hers. Mute, with her cap­tive arms she tried to reach for Annabelle and hug the child to her wasted breasts. Two hefty female nurses and a large red-headed white-clad male nurse swarmed into the room. One of the women took Harriet in hand, tried to calm her. The other, a sturdy, sen­sible creature who might have been a midwife of several decades’ experience, plucked up Annabelle and held her to the comfort of her own large bosom. I turned away in despair from my wife’s bed and Gavin Gardner slapped me hard across the face. Then again, cutting the corner of my mouth with his bony knuckles.

  Harriet screamed mo
re loudly, struggling. The baby hollered. I roared in awful wrath and whacked my father-in-law the hell across the room.

  His backside hit a wheeled shiny tray of instruments that skit­tered away into the hall. He looked at me in disbelief and slid down on to the tiled floor.

  By that time I was fighting the large male nurse. He had a hy­podermic uncovered and came at me like a picador. I clocked him as well and started pushing people into the corridor. Everything would be all right if I could just sit here quietly with my daughter and my wife. All the screaming and panic would go away, and we’d be able to sit together and hold hands in the blessed silence.

  The police arrived at that stage. I glared at constable Rebeiro like an ape raging in a cage. He stared calmly back at me, took one step sideways, and slapped me into unconsciousness with a Victoria Police-issue nightstick.

  §

  I punched in Juliet’s number from memory. Some things stick, if they’re important enough. It rang for a while, presumably a tinny rendition of “Bird on the Wire” or “”Famous Blue Raincoat.” No doubt she was looking at the unfamiliar caller ID and wondering what the fuck.

  “Who are you trying to reach?” she said finally.

  “You, Jules. Listen, you’ve got to—”

  “Tom, whose phone is this?”

  “The property of the State. Detective-sergeant Gabriel Rebeiro, CIB, to be exact.”

  “Oh my God, have you gone and stolen the property of the Victoria Police force now?”

  “Yeah, he arrested me—”

  “You’ll just have to sit this one out in the cell, bozo, I’ve got to get home to my computer.”

  “Shut up for a moment and listen to me, Juliet. Rebeiro arrested me years ago when I beat up my first father-in-law.”

  “I thought the beak let you off on that one. I’m not at all sure I would have done, it showed a want of feeling.”

  “He’s driving me to Williamstown.” I heard a growl. Rebeiro was not impressed by my putting it that way. “He’s a very helpful chap, is Gabe Rebeiro. This phone, it’s a loaner from him.”

  The detective reached across and tried to drag it away from my ear. “It’s bloody well nothing of the sort,” he told me.

  “All right, calm down, you’ll get it back. Jules, I take it you’re not sitting around in Scientology’s Brunswick test center.” I sniggered. “Did you ever go clear?”

  “Good grief, Purdue, you and I must be the only people under the age of forty who still listen to Lenny Cohen.”

  “Only just under forty, in my case.”

  “I’m in a Silver Top cab coming off the Westgate even as we speak. I think I know what this is all about, Tom, but I need my computer. I’ve been talking to Ruby.”

  “Ah. So much for my big news. You know Sharon Lesser’s been arrested?”

  “I saw them grab her as I was running for a cab. I never liked that bitch.”

  My heart leaped. “Are you going to the foundry or straight home?”

  “Willie. It’s quicker from here, and there are more solid citizens around to hear my screams. If it comes to that.”

  “It might. Culpepper is hot on your trail.”

  “My tail?”

  “That too. And who can blame him?”

  “Not a chance, Purdue, we’ve already been through that. Ten years of absolute purity committed to our Blessed Mother, that was the promise I made and the sacred vow I mean to keep.”

  I wanted to bury my face in my hands and snivel, but it wouldn’t have been manly and Rebeiro would have laughed at me. I said, “Hide the Esky, sweetheart.”

  “Well, duh. I’ll put it in the ute and park it near the beach. No chance anyone will find it. Do you know yet why they’re all so eager to find Nile Fever’s tongue?”

  “Some sick reason. Identification, I guess, like when they cut off some stoolie’s fingertips then deliver them to his gang as a warn­ing. Maybe that’s what happened to poor stupid Muttonhead with his nose. Christ. What a world.”

  “To who? Whom?”

  The police radio said, “Whachinga hiss murmle con passerango blurt, carnine.”

  I glanced enquiringly at Rebeiro to see if he wanted his cell phone back. He’d already lifted a dinky little wireless headset off the rim of the steering wheel and fitted it in a slick motion over one ear, straightening the button mike near his blue-bristled chin. “In pursuit, entering King’s. ETA Williamstown, seven minutes.” I couldn’t hear whatever garble HQ communications sent back to him. Obviously the headset overrode the crappy car speaker system. Rebeiro listened, slithering past a milk delivery behemoth and gunning the engine. I thought seven minutes was a bit hopeful, but maybe he could do it. He’d need to, bloody Culpepper had a decent lead on us.

  “Look, can you give me Grime Grrl’s home number?”

  “Do you have any idea what time it is?” I heard Juliet yawn at the very thought.

  “It’s Cookie I want to speak with, and she’s just been lying around for the last couple of days. Anyway, those hacker grrls keep American hours, don’t they? So they can talk to their cracker web pals in real time?”

  “A good point, Sherlock.” She fiddled with her own phone, read me out a number. I did what I could to commit it to memory, muttering a mnemonic that brought a strange look from my police driver. “I’m just pulling up into John Street now,” she said, “and there’s nobody near the house that I can see. Oh, one last thing, just to reassure you. Annabelle is on her way to Balwyn in a cab. She has the cat.”

  “She called you?”

  “Don’t be absurd. She called Grime, who told me.”

  “Ah, so it’s ‘Grime’ now, is it?”

  “Thanks, driver. Keep the change. Wait here for a moment un­til I’m at the front door, would you? Thanks.” A door slammed. “Okay, that’s it from me. Give me your number.”

  I asked Rebeiro, who reluctantly gave it.

  “Take care, honey,” I said. “These are bad people.”

  “Luckily I’m not a camel or a child molester,” she said.

  “Even so.”

  She was gone, and I looked out the window. We were leaving the Westgate Bridge. Rain was falling harder, driven by the wind. I was glad I’d left the Cobra with its roof up. The Fairlane shook as we rushed past a large vehicle that was doing a pretty fair rate of knots itself. I glanced at it. Mack truck, burning bright. I lurched, peered through the rain. Was that my insane brother-in-law at the wheel, face illuminated by the dashboard lights?

  Convulsively, I jabbed at the teeny keys on the phone, but of course no familiar name flared in blue letters when I poked in MAUR. I tried to recall his number. But that wouldn’t help, be­cause I’d broken his loaner phone. Or had he switched that num­ber to his current phone? One thing was certain—Mauricio the scam artiste would never be without a phone. I punched in the old number. The machine told me the number I was trying to reach was out of range. Right, in small pieces on the flag stones. I tried to recall the mnemonic for the number for Cookie that Juliet had just given me. First four numerals, that was all I could retrieve. Shit.

  “Am I ever going to get that back, you jerk-off?”

  “One moment, detective,” I told him soothingly. “I’m realigning its feng shui.”

  “Don’t you ever stop with the bullshit, Purdue?”

  “I gave it up with my P.I. license, Rebeiro,” I said. Offended, I slid the phone into my pocket. Rebeiro grabbed at it, and the wheel spun and the Fairlane with it. “Something you should remember well.”

  He’d been called to give testimony at my hearing. Obviously old jailbirds don’t get licensed to carry guns and private detective cre­dentials, but who was to know that Recherché Doubting Thomas Purdue, convicted felon in the former British colonies now known as the United States, was also honest Tom Purdue, antipodean widower and father? The Australian Federal Police computers, that’s who, but back in 1998 they weren’t too crash-hot, the Fed’s computers. They were primitive. I wasn’t sure they’d
even heard of the Internet, the men and women in blue who keep our nation safe from the likes of me. But they were good enough to trip me up, match my prints, snatch back my P.I. license and threaten me with some more hard time. Rebeiro got me sprung, is my guess. The lawyer I used that time wasn’t nearly as sharp as Sir Rupert Muldoon, Q.C., but then he only charged a tenth as much.

  “That’s the one,” Rebeiro told the little solid-state nugget before his lips. “Keep an eye on it. We’re coming up on Ferguson and Nelson. Wait for us at Cole and Nelson in case he takes fright and does a runner. No bloody sirens and flashers this time, either, Johnson.”

  The phone buzzed in my pocket. I snatched it out, had it against my ear before Rebeiro could claim it back.

  “A big white car pulled into the driveway,” Juliet told me. Her tone suggested that her blood was racing. “The limo, I take it.”

  “You inside or out?”

  “Down the street behind a large pot plant.”

  “You got the ute parked elsewhere?”

  “Do I look like an incompetent halfwit, you offensive fellow?”

  “I love you too, Jules.” I hesitated. “I really do, you know.” Another silence. Rebeiro shot me a glance, rolling his eyes. I ignored him, rolling down the window. Red lights ahead gleaming through the rain. We went through them without the siren.

  “I know,” she said.

  “For Christ’s sake stay out of this. I don’t want you hurt.”

  “Listen, Cookie called. We have to—”

  “No time,” I said. “we’re here.” I snapped the phone shut and put it back in my pocket. Rebeiro went past the house with his lights off. The Fairlane was not obviously a cop car, unless you knew cop cars and had time to look at it. I was pretty sure Culpep­per and his goon driver had more urgent matters on their mind, like a spot of breaking and entering. I wondered briefly why a distinguished practitioner of the facilitating and import-export industries and notable member of the haughty Melbourne Club would take such risks. Get his own lily-whites dirty. For the thrill, I decided. To show himself he was still a mensch.

  And why not? It was my own motive, really.