Zero at the bone, p.5
Zero at the Bone, page 5
A bell trilled and immediately conversations resumed, cigarettes were lit and beers emptied. Jennifer Henderson’s dark eyes caught him watching her. None of the men looked squarely at Swann as he moved past them, although they’d taken him in, used to assessing risk at a glance. Swann had sensed their radar on him during the minute’s silence, even though their eyes were closed. Most of them were old enough to be WWII veterans, the few younger men would be Korea or Vietnam vets. Couple of father and son teams.
Jennifer Henderson looked him square in the face, comfortable in the all-male environment. Hint of a challenge in her eyes, payback for his secret observation. That cute gap between her front teeth when she smiled. Glossy white teeth, like pearl shell.
‘You’re late.’
Jennifer nodded to the barman, a tattooed older man wearing Buddy Holly specs who placed a glass of what looked like breakfast juice on the towel.
‘Salty Dog. With a crown of salt. By the book.’ He lingered, wanting to see Swann drink. ‘They’ll have to pay me more, Jen, now I do cocktails.’
Swann took a sip. Vodka and grapefruit juice, tart in the gills, much like the look on the barman’s face, waiting for his verdict.
Someone down the bar shouted, ‘Make us a Sloe Screw, Mick, willya? Nah, a Harvey Wallbanger. Nah, make it a Sloe Screw Against the Wall.’
‘Like it,’ Swann answered, the moment calling for diplomacy. ‘More than a tequila sunrise.’
The barman slung a tea towel over his shoulder. ‘My work is done.’
Jennifer waited until the barman was out of earshot. ‘Good at the white lie, Swann?’
‘More a backhanded compliment, I thought. Either way, years of experience.’
‘Your profession?’
Swann took another sip of the Salty Dog, felt it bite again in the gills. ‘First thing we’re told as police rookies. Everyone lies; all the time. Job’s not so much a matter of finding the lie, but catching liars out with the truth.’
Jennifer laughed, rested a hand on his forearm. She shrugged off her jacket, leant across to place it on the bar. Swann could smell her, fresh and cool like the wind through a forest. He watched her straighten the cuffs on her silk shirt, pat herself down, withdraw into secret thoughts. It was the change in her eyes that made him notice this – vivid blue to bruised in a moment – as though her watchfulness was difficult to maintain.
The blue of day; the blue of night.
‘Your wife sounded friendly. Marion? What does she do?’
‘Community nurse. Part of a new program. Tends to the aged in their homes, visits working girls in the brothels, kids too sick to get to clinics, deros in the dunes. Sometimes ships at the docks, when their last port of call was Asia, and penicillin is required.’
‘Must be useful for you, in your profession, a wife who tends to the community.’
‘You mean information? Sure. She knows what goes on, more than most.’
‘And your face. They’ve faded, but there are scars. Your nose has been broken . . . Like my father, you were a boxer.’
He let her continue the game. She knew all this, he could tell. She wasn’t just killing time, either. She was watching him closely, as he had watched her. But what about him could she tell by observing? Swann was at an age when he no longer needed to pretend. He looked down at her and hid nothing, scanning the creamy skin and freckles, her face tilted upwards.
Like everyone with a cop background, Swann appeared confident, even calm. He was lucky enough to have a face that people liked.
But she was looking deeper than that.
He also had a bad temper, and was practised in violence. Prone to bouts of melancholy and disgust. Proud and reckless, a combination that had brought him trouble.
But for all that he was a father of three daughters, and since his last fiasco with a lover, which had ripped his family apart, a loyal husband.
‘Teenage kids?’ he said in answer to her question. ‘Has its moments. You and Max never . . .?’
She shook her head, withdrew behind her quiet reply. ‘Max never wanted them. Went and had the job done on himself in his thirties, before we met.’
‘And you?’
‘I never wanted them either. Nor dogs. That’s why Max took them with him.’ She paused, bit her lip. Swann caught the cocked head of the barman, indicating to her a new arrival.
‘Ah, here he is. Swann, I thought I’d come down here and make the introduction for you. I don’t have Garth’s number. Garth doesn’t have a number.’
Swann turned to look. Found the tall, lanky man with stringy white hair and wary eyes looking at him.
The man made his way through the handshakes and slaps on the shoulder to stand beside them. He stared long into Jennifer’s eyes. Turned his head mechanically and gave Swann the same look, neutral and sustained. He had hoops of sweat under his armpits, long wiry arms and large hands, calluses on the knuckles.
‘What are you doing here, Jen?’ he asked her while still reading Swann.
‘I came to introduce you. I heard you were in town. Swann here is going to be asking questions, and I figured if I wasn’t here, you wouldn’t —’
‘You figured right. I don’t know him.’
His voice was hoarse. Flat. He barely moved his lips when he spoke. Dry, cracked lips.
‘Garth, this is Swann. Frank Swann. He’s helping me look into Max’s business associates. Thought you might help too.’
‘How?’
No curiosity in his voice. Just the monotone. The minimum it took to communicate.
‘Garth served with Max in Vietnam. In the SAS, before he got wounded. Garth is . . . was Max’s closest friend. He’s been drilling out at the Rosa Gold stake.’
Jennifer tried to conceal it, but it was there in her eyes. Her wonderment, confusion, disappointment at this fact. That a man like Max Henderson, who’d done so well in life, had chosen as his confidant a wreck like Garth Oats.
‘Max is dead, Jen.’
Nothing added. Just the mechanical switch of his gaze from Swann to Jennifer, whose eyes flooded with tears. She finished her drink, took her cigarette from the ashtray, tapped. ‘I’ll leave you two alone.’
She didn’t look at Swann, but placed a comforting hand on Oats’ chest, who stepped back, watching her exit through the silenced drinkers to the door.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, to nobody in particular. He fixed his gaze back on Swann, stretched out a hand. ‘Garth Oats.’
The handshake was hard and clammy. When Oats released his grip, Swann had to resist the urge to wipe his hand on his trousers. The barman was hovering with a can of Export cracked and ready. He reached across the wood and placed the beer in Oats’ hand, closed his fingers around it. Patted him on the forearm, went away.
Swann had finally witnessed grief in Jennifer Henderson, and all the confusion you’d expect from a suicide’s wife, but as he watched her husband’s best friend sip on his beer, his eyes dull and his face burned beyond caring, he felt as though he was in the presence of a ghost.
It was an hour past sunset and North Cottesloe Beach was deserted. The moon was rising over the roofline of the Ocean Beach Hotel. The water was colder than he’d expected, and Swann breathed heavily as he stepped into the wash. The sea breeze had dropped and the swell emerged glassy and sheer out of the darkness. There wasn’t much traffic on Eric Street, and between the waves Swann could hear the clink of pool balls in the back bar, the odd shout and laugh coming across the water. He swam through the sets that broke over the reef on either side of him, rifling along the hard skeins of beach behind. His breathing had settled, and his skin tingled with the cold, diving down into the darkness and watching the glow on his fingertips as he kicked to the deeper banks of even colder water, the faint suck of swell over his back and shoulders, then closing his eyes and letting go, the air in his lungs drawing him up.
He trod water and ran his hands through his hair, cleared his nose and watched a container ship enter the Fremantle port, drawn into the greater light. Swann saw how far he was from the shadows of the beach. He felt a twinge of fear, but as he’d been doing all day, he ignored it, turned to stare across the black ocean, tipping to sunlit Africa.
His conversation with Oats haunted him. The man wasn’t the damaged simpleton he’d first appeared. Perhaps it was the presence of Jennifer Henderson that had unnerved him. Perhaps he was awkward around women. Oats lived in his car, a battered HQ panel van with heavy-duty treads, flanks red with dust.
Swann knew the type. Men who struggled with human company, who lived in the bush by themselves and had the worried and hungry look of the wild dog. There were plenty like him.
Oats had met Max Henderson during a battle in Vietnam. Garth was one of six SAS troopers whose covert surveillance of a Viet Minh company had been surprised by a platoon coming from behind, at the very moment the SAS captain was calling in an artillery strike.
The Viet Minh were stealing Australian mines set in the southern zone and resetting them on the roads nearer to Nui Dat, and had killed plenty of Australians this way. The SAS men tasked with tracking the company were hopelessly outnumbered once the shooting began. They’d started their retreat instantly, running and firing, trying to get out of the vulnerable middle ground, leaving their packs and carrying only the radio and their weapons, taking a position and firing behind, retreating to a new position and repeating the rearguard action, soon low on ammunition.
They were cactus, as Oats described it, the SAS captain calling in their position near a clearing, the sound of the battle and the heavy rain obscuring any radio response, then settling in to fight and die, knowing they’d been outflanked, knowing there was nothing left to lose by throwing an extraction flare into the clearing, the red smoke soon beaten down by the rain, until they heard the chopper circling overhead, coming down improbably large and steady into the clearing, already taking fire, the captain dying before Oats’ eyes from a head wound, Oats taking a bullet to his shoulder, then another to his wrist, then another in his thigh. He made it to the clearing, the bird yawing above him, bullets zinging off its undercarriage. Oats climbed aboard despite his shattered wrist, beyond pain now, reaching down to draw up his companions with adrenalin-shaking arms, the last soldier firing from his position on the chopper’s broad feet, his entrails spilling out of his shirt like strings of sausage, firing and shouting maniacally as they rose into the clouds, the soldier dying in Oats’ arms but smiling madly, not knowing that he was dead.
Once the noise of the battle was gone, there was only the deafness, the ringing silence, soundtrack to the war. Then later, one by one, the words of the pilot, unnaturally calm, deep and assured, calling in their position, not a trace of anything but the matter at hand, the reporting to base that he’d been on a routine journey between Vung Tau and Nui Dat to pick up some officers, but had diverted to extract an SAS squad, to prepare the ambulance and hospital, ten minutes ETA, the nasal Australian voice the most beautiful thing Oats had ever heard, the chopper’s deck awash in blood and rain and viscera, the windscreen shot out and rain pouring over the pilot too, Max Henderson calmly checking his instruments, the chopper responding to him like a graceless extension of his long angular body, banking towards the coast now, the pretty lights there in the dusk of Vung Tau, the pilot calling in their position again . . . a man’s voice but an angel’s voice, Oats had thought to himself, as he began to lose consciousness . . .
9
Swann pulled the EK to the kerb outside his home. He climbed out, still in his wet shorts, shirtless and barefoot, left the damp towel on the back seat and carried his trousers, shirt and shoes, socks stuffed inside, onto the front verandah. Inside, he could hear music he didn’t recognise on the record player, loud and insistent, which meant that Louise was home. He could smell devilled chops in the kitchen, and once inside the humid smell of shampoo and soap and steam, the sound of Marion’s humming behind the sliding door.
He entered the steam and drew back the shower curtain. Marion looked at him intently and he kissed her, to let her know.
She placed a hot, dripping hand on his shoulder. Swann kissed her again, wiped suds off her cheek, ran a hand down her leg, which was slapped away.
‘Dad, is that you?’
He stepped out of the bathroom as Louise emerged from the kitchen, a chop in one hand and a tissue in the other, eating on the run as usual. She was dressed in a leather miniskirt and black stockings and monkey boots, a baggy white sleeveless T-shirt. Her lipstick was crimson and her eyeliner black. Her short hair was spiked up.
‘Dadadadadada . . .’
‘For a bloke who holds a song, Dad, your Addams Family could do with some work. Sounds like Skippy.’
Swann leant down to her ear, the only place he could land a kiss without disturbing her make-up.
She poked him hard in the belly. ‘Nother hard day at the office, I see. Well, you’d better hurry up. We leave in fifteen. It’s your turn, don’t forget. Mum did it last time.’
Swann stood back and rubbed his belly, looked wounded. ‘Missed something, have I?’
‘It’s dinner you’ve missed,’ Marion said from down the corridor. ‘Unless you pick it up a bit. Shower’s yours.’
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘What are we talking about?’
Louise moved towards him and he pretended to flinch, put up his hands. She hugged him anyway. ‘C’mon, Dad. You’re on the till. We need you. Mum’s got to study. Sarah’s out with the boy, and Blonny’s too young. None of my mates can count beyond ten, you know that. Didn’t matter for our first few gigs, but tonight we’re the main event.’
‘All right, I’m ready.’
Swann pretended to sweep sand off his shoulders, scratched his belly again. Looked down at his bare chest and flat stomach. Knobbly knees. Long tanned legs, hairy shins.
Louise grimaced, shook her head. ‘Get in the shower, then into some jeans. The Wranglers you’ve worn to death. An old T-shirt’ll do, might be some beer spilt . . .’
She passed him the spicy chop, bone wrapped, and disappeared out the back.
Swann had better get moving. He could see in her eyes that she was nervous about the gig. Louise was his fearless eldest daughter, and he began to feel nervous too.
There wasn’t room for Swann in the kombi that collected Louise; full of amps, guitars and boxes of leads. Swann told Louise he’d meet her at the Shents, but on the way he decided to visit Donovan Andrews, one of his old fizzes, before Andrews left to work the night shift.
The early darkness was warm and grey, and the weather was finally turning. Swann crossed the Fremantle Traffic Bridge and looked beyond the giant gantry cranes at the port to see the next front coming over the ocean. Rottnest Island was hidden behind a veil of ripped white water that hadn’t reached the groynes. It was storm season up the coast and a tropical cyclone was due to cross near the Pilbara during the morning, gusting to 250 k’s and bringing rain to the goldfields and wheat belt. Swann’s EK could do with a wash – dust from the heavy industry down in Kwinana had covered the bonnet with a fine grit, and the windscreen was only clear where he’d worked the wipers.
He turned down Wellington Street and away from the coast. Parked the EK beneath the first of the towers and made sure it was locked. The last time he’d visited Andrews his unlocked car had been raided, his dash radio wrenched out and his parking change nicked. Kids, no doubt. The little smart-arses had popped the bonnet and lifted his battery too.
Donovan Andrews lived on the fifteenth floor of Tower 1, as it was called, to differentiate it from Tower 2, which was identical in every way. Swann wasn’t scared of heights but the walk from the lift and stairs around the edge of the building to Andrews’ flat always made him nervous. The railing separating him from a hundred-metre fall barely came up to his waist. The cold front hit the coast just as he exited the graffiti-marked lifts, wind swirling over him and creaking in the drainpipes and rusted fittings that clung to the salmon-brick walls. He had seen Andrews’ BSA Gold Flash in the car park, sheathed in a canvas hood, so he knew Andrews was somewhere in the complex.
Andrews was Swann’s favourite fizz. He worked as a kitchen hand at the European Club, making sandwiches for the upmarket clientele of Little Italy’s best illegal casino. On the nights he wasn’t there, he did shifts as a glassie at the Zanzibar. He spent his days sleeping and smoking pot and rooting the young mothers that inhabited Tower 1, while their husbands were in jail or at work.
Ben Hogan was a regular at the Zanzibar. As a Fraud Squad copper, he worked regular office hours. Swann had checked with Terry Accardi, his contact in the CIB, and learned that Hogan hadn’t taken any leave, which meant that wherever he was hiding Sydneysider Barry Cassidy during the day, the chances were pretty good that he wouldn’t bother with concealment at night. In the long tradition of the ‘swim-through’, where coppers visited one another interstate, the locals supplied all the entertainment – the girls, the grog, the gaming. Hogan would want to show off his influence to Cassidy, whether Cassidy’s business in Perth was official or not.
Swann knocked extra loud on the cheap plywood door, which shivered in its aluminium frame. It was raining now, and the concrete walkway that separated him from the long fall was slippery wet, and as always with the first squalls of the season, the rain smelt of limestone dust and gum leaves. He scuffed his shoes on the sisal mat and knocked again, shoulders turned against the wind.
Andrews opened the door naked except for a towel. He had a semi hard-on that he tried to conceal by buckling forward at the waist. ‘Jesus, detective, I was expecting someone else.’
‘I hope so, Don. You going to ask me in?’
The one-bedroom flat smelt of burnt toast. There was a bong on a coffee table by an old couch that had clearly done its time on a verge. Bare walls, grey carpet worn in a track from bedroom to kitchenette to couch. The rain beat horizontally against the sliding door that gave onto a small balcony. As Andrews went through to the bedroom, Swann flicked on the lounge fluoro, which buzzed, came on, the light marbled by a layer of dead bugs in the fitting.
