The casino, p.14
The Casino, page 14
‘Where did you grow up?’ Beth asks him.
‘Brunswick.’
‘You got brothers, sisters?’
‘A sister.’
A lie by omission.
His sister is long, long dead.
They’re all dead.
Ewan gets in first before she can ask another. ‘Why did you leave the Coast?’
‘Kid stuff. I was young and dumb.’
‘Where did you end up?’
‘In the hills, across the border. I tell you what, if you think this place is strange, you should see the people who live in the hills. There’s a whole other world down there. I’m lucky I found my way back out to reality.’
‘I can’t see you as a hippie.’
‘Can’t you?’ Beth theatrically swirls her hair. ‘I was quite good at it.’
They drag on their smokes in unison, bringing a pause.
‘Ewan?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Are you going to find Ben?’
She’s close now.
Her eyes.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Good.’
‘Why is that good?’
She kisses him. Her lips are very soft.
Ewan backs up. ‘That’s probably not a …’ He wants to stop, but can’t. He lets it happen again. Frustrated, aroused, confused, he touches her face and says, ‘Why is it good?’
Beth pulls away, fixing her hair. ‘Because it was an honest answer. I should go inside.’
He absolutely does not want her to leave, but she walks up the lawn. At the house, she turns. ‘Ewan?’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t fall in love with me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t want you to.’
PART SIX
GLITTER STRIP STICKY FINGERS: GOLD COAST SHOPLIFTING SOARS WITH TASKFORCE ON PAUSE
BY ANGELA OWENS
THE GOLD COAST BULLETIN, 24 JANUARY 1986
THE TEMPORARY SUSPENSION of Strike Force Caesar has coincided with what local retailers are calling a ‘shoplifter’s paradise’ along the Coast, with the previous week’s losses hitting record levels. Store owners are reporting an increase in brazen and coordinated theft since the specialised police unit, headed by Sergeant Brian Siegler, was reassigned to other duties.
‘They’re walking out with everything except the fixtures,’ said Barry Morrison, manager of the Myer department store in Broadbeach. Morrison estimates his store has lost upwards of $4000 in stock alone this month, with cosmetics, undergarments and electrical goods proving the most popular items.
The Southport Chamber of Commerce, which previously praised Strike Force Caesar’s efforts, has renewed calls for the unit’s immediate reinstatement. Police resources remain severely restricted since the Nobby Beach bombing. There are hopes that yesterday’s announcement of a $50,000 reward for information relating to the bombing (see cover story) will bring new information to light.
CHAPTER 41
LANA COLLAPSES FOR FOUR hours, sleeping as if under piled concrete. She wakes sharply at dawn. By five-thirty, she’s in the kitchen in her underpants watching the kettle boil.
A key turns in the front door.
Charlie comes through, fresh from a shower at the casino change rooms. ‘Morning,’ he says, sliding in behind. ‘You’re up early.’
‘Got a breakfast meeting.’
‘Any news?’ He slides his hand under her shirt.
‘Get out of it. I have to get ready.’
‘I’m already ready.’
The jug clicks over.
Lana feigns annoyance, checks her watch. ‘I guess I can grab a coffee later.’
•
Lana’s breakfast date is Sally Andrews, her banking informant. Yesterday, on the phone, Sally wasn’t too keen on looking up information on Trina Chalmers—‘A lot of the working girls bank with us. They’re good customers. They don’t shit-talk my staff, unlike you dickheads.’
Lana talked her round. ‘A woman is dead, Sally, and it’s tied in to the bombing. I don’t want to wait on a warrant.’
Over coffee, Sally runs down what she discovered. Trina Chalmers has a savings account at the bank. There have been no transactions since a week before Trina’s hand turned up on the beach. The balance is surprising: she died with thirty-two thousand dollars to her name. ‘That’s just the start of it,’ Sally says. ‘Trina had a joint account with another fifteen K in it.’
‘Who with?’
Sally turns a page of her notes. ‘Someone called Nadine White.’
‘Good find. Nadine is on my radar, but I didn’t know her surname.’
Sally has already compiled other searches. ‘They had lots of cash coming in, but all personal deposits. Nadine recently closed out her personal account.’
There’s a date on that.
It’s two days after Trina Chalmers’ final withdrawal.
Is Nadine the killer?
‘Sally, oh my god, you’ve just—’
‘Hold your horses, I’m not done yet.’
‘What?’
‘Nadine White’s postal address is in Nobby Beach. Eighty-one Cyprus Street.’
The beach where the hand was found.
Lana can’t write it down fast enough. ‘I have to go.’ She fusses with her notebook, checks that she has her bag. As she gets up, Sally clears her throat.
‘Lana?’
‘Jesus, I’ve gotta …’
‘Lana?’
She stops. ‘Yes?’
‘The cheque, dear.’ Sally slides the bill for breakfast across the table.
•
Miami Vince is waiting for her on the footpath outside Nadine White’s Nobby Beach address. It’s a detached whiteboard dwelling, split into two apartments, an upstairs and downstairs space.
Lana jogs across the bitumen from her car. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Hang on,’ says Vince. ‘Where did this info come from?’
‘Informant.’
‘Logged?’
‘Would you log your informants in my office?’
Vince looks a little bleary-eyed, but he’s in better shape than yesterday. He’s freshly ironed, has his hair slicked back.
‘Do you want to call it in?’ Lana asks.
Vince unfastens the clasp on his holster. ‘No. Let’s take a look first.’
Nadine White’s apartment is the downstairs one.
Lana knocks.
No answer.
She knocks again and the front door of the apartment above opens. ‘Fuckin’ cut that out. It’s not even eight o’clock.’ It’s a man’s voice, immediately followed by a wheezing coughing fit.
Lana and Vince back out from under the awning.
‘Morning, sir,’ says Lana. ‘We’re police detectives with Gold Coast CIB. We’re looking for Nadine White. She live down here?’
‘Last I checked,’ says the man from behind the screen door.
Vince shields his eyes from the sun. ‘Can you step out for us, sir?’
The man comes to the verandah railing, casually leans over. He’s a big fella with thick stubble on his face, hairy pot belly protruding from under a terry-towelling dressing-gown. ‘What’s she done now?’
‘We just need to talk with her,’ says Lana. ‘You a friend of hers?’
‘Me? No. I just rent the place to her.’
‘When was the last time you saw her?’
‘Been a couple of days.’ He can barely keep his eyes open in the glare. ‘Fucking hell,’ he says, touching his face with both hands. ‘Can you hold on a sec?’
The man re-enters the flat, his feet clomping on the timber flooring so hard the whole house shakes. They hear the sound of coughing and vomiting.
‘We’ve all been there,’ says Lana.
A minute later, the guy reappears. ‘Bloody hell. Sorry.’ He has a mug in one hand and a set of keys in the other. As he comes down the front stairs, he says, ‘I wouldn’t normally let you in—Nadine wouldn’t like that—but I found the place wide open two weeks back, open for all the world to see. Didn’t think nothing of it ’cos I know what she does for a crust. Bit of a wild girl, ya know. She kinda comes and goes.’
He opens the door.
Lana isn’t two steps across the threshold before she sees it.
A spatter of black blood on the ratty carpet.
CHAPTER 42
VINCE LOOKS AT THE blood, then scans the rest of the flat. Nadine White’s place is a wreck. Untidy to the point of unsanitary, even excluding the recent carnage. Nothing has a place: no storage, no sorting. Clothes heaped on the dining room table, magazines and books on the floor alongside encampments of pizza boxes and plastic bags of rotting Chinese takeout. A mountain of mail and shoeboxes on the coffee table, blocking the TV. Flies buzzing.
Unfortunately, this is a state of mind Vince is well acquainted with. He takes his notebook out and jots down the time.
‘Crikey, it doesn’t smell too good,’ says the landlord. ‘What is it?’
‘Stay outside, please,’ Lana tells him.
They follow the blood round the couch to a small kitchen. There’s more spatter across the peeling linoleum and the sink. A first-aid kit is open on the bench, also covered in dried material.
Lana squats down and studies one particular splotch before moving on without comment. They check the bathroom and find more disarray, but it’s not as bad. ‘She’s bleeding,’ says Lana. ‘But the kitchen sink is closer.’
‘Or it happened there.’
The bedroom looks ransacked, but with no signs of physical violence. Whatever happened didn’t happen in here. There’s a phone on the bedside table. On the floor beside it, an open Yellow Pages phone directory. Both the phone and the book have blood smears on them. Lana kneels down carefully to look at the directory without disturbing it.
Vince shifts his eyes to the wardrobe. All the luggage is there. No noticeable gaps in the clothes on the hangers. ‘Who’s she calling?’
‘Doctors. All across the border. Down in Tanglewood.’ Lana gets up, cracks her knuckles. ‘What do you think?’
‘Hard to say. Someone hurt her.’
‘Maybe she copped it trying to cut Trina’s hand off?’
‘Could be,’ says Vince.
But she survived. Kept moving, found a way out.
Lana mentions bank withdrawals and traveller’s cheques.
‘We better call this in,’ Vince says.
•
The Scientific Section arrive an hour after the rest of the Gold Coast CIB Strike Force. There’s plenty of sour stares for Vince, but hardly a word proffered. The Strike Force leads are two men from Brisbane North. They ask questions about how Vince and Lana came to be at Nadine’s apartment, and Lana feeds them a line of unfiltered bullshit, carefully covering her informant. ‘We found mail from this Nadine White lady in among Trina Chalmers’ personal items at her place of work.’ She has a piece of mail pinched from the letterbox for show-and-tell.
The woman is good on her feet.
Vince backs her up.
The local inspector, Ron Bingham, comes through but he doesn’t do much. Gets a run-down, puts his nose in, leaves without a word to Lana or Vince.
As the morning progresses, there are few surprises.
The scientists bag and tag.
Detectives photograph and file.
Vince and Lana drive the landlord back to the station house for a statement. On the way, he grumbles about the whole thing and how he should never have rented to Nadine in the first place. Too bloody wild. Too bloody loud. In the middle of it, Lana asks him who owns the house he manages.
The man falls silent.
‘Come on,’ she says, watching him in the rear-view mirror.
‘Don’t know.’
‘We can find out,’ she tells him. ‘It wouldn’t be Colleen Vinton, would it? Don’t want to save us the hassle, do you?’
Nothing.
Vince turns in the passenger seat and looks at him.
The man shrugs.
It’s as good as yes.
•
Vince leaves Lana at the station, not wanting to step foot inside. He hops a cab back to the Saturn, then up to his room and into the ensuite.
He snorts a line of last night’s gear. It’s good fucking stuff.
With that in him, he finally feels the morning settle.
This is breaking.
I can weather the storm until it finishes.
He closes the balcony doors and winds up the AC.
Feeling amped, he gets to work.
Vince spends half an hour running Nadine White’s name all over town. He calls in favours on both sides of the border. He leans on old Sydney friends, as Nadine was obviously headed in that direction, by way of a doctor’s office across the border. Getting nowhere fast, Vince grabs his notes on Trina Chalmers and places each page on the carpet so he can see as much of it as possible.
How does it fit?
Did Nadine kill her girlfriend and leave town?
Is that Trina’s blood on the carpet?
By Vince’s measure, Nadine is not physically strong enough for it. Almost anyone can lop a hand off, but she’s too small to drag Herb Fleming’s torso down onto the sand. She doesn’t figure for the perpetrator of both crimes. No, it’s more likely that Nadine just got caught up in it.
Like the rest of us.
Back to the ensuite.
A little top-up.
Then a quick call to Lana at the station. ‘Can you bring over the Trina Chalmers file? I want to have a look at the actual paperwork. By the way, did you find out anything new last night?’
‘Fuck all,’ she says. ‘I just got a call from the scene. The boys found half a key of cocaine in Nadine’s flat.’
‘Do you understand any of this?’
‘Not really. Hopefully the Science Section will find something else we can use.’ She tells him she’ll be over with the file the moment she can get away.
Vince has little option but to wait.
He unlocks his jaw.
Try to slow up. Hold steady.
He needs to come back to the plan. He’s not here on the Coast to solve the murder—that’s everyone else’s job. Vince is here to investigate police corruption associated with Herb Fleming.
Get back on track.
Go lean.
Scope down.
The drug in his bloodstream rages, and he mixes a light scotch and soda to smooth himself out. Takes it to the bedroom where Vince clenches and unclenches his fist while staring at himself in the mirror.
Think, think, think, think, th—
The private investigator.
The guy with the girl at Herb Fleming’s house. Vince caught him snooping around. He never called like he promised.
Where is he in all this? Maybe he knows Nadine White or Trina Chalmers?
Maybe …
Vince checks his notes and calls Brisbane to run the name Ewan Hayes up the flagpole. After being passed around a few times, a woman in Financial Crimes gives Vince an outside number—some guy called Doug who knows all about private work.
Vince calls him. For a steep price, placed on a tab Vince has never heard of, Doug says he’ll look the name up.
‘It’s Ewan Hayes,’ Vince says.
Doug laughs.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Where are you?’
‘On the Gold Coast. Why?’
‘What’s this about?’
‘Official police business.’ Vince can hear the cocaine-tinged aggro in his voice and forces himself to breathe. ‘I’m looking into the bombing.’
‘Well, Ewan’s in your neighbourhood, but he didn’t blow up any cops. Let me give you his number. If he asks, we never spoke, okay?’
‘I can live with that.’
The man on the line reads out the digits.
Vince punches the air, hangs up, rolls his neck.
He tries Ewan’s number.
A woman answers.
CHAPTER 43
EWAN STANDS UNDER THE eternal daylight of the Saturn gaming floor, idly watching the roulette ball whirl around the wheel’s edge. Grace and Ewan have split the work up for the day. Grace has the car. She’s out early on the Strip, putting her journalism degree to good use doing background research on every name they have. It’s quite a list now.
The target is Ben Cameron, their client’s lover. Everyone around Ben is missing or dead. But Ben is also strangely absent from the story. He’s the missing centre. They’ve been through all the previous investigation reports and all that is known about his disappearance is that he came to the casino to gamble, until he was kicked out for bad behaviour.
In terms of background research, it feels light. Ben’s lawful wife won’t answer her phone—or to be precise, she’ll answer, but the moment Ewan speaks, the line goes dead. The rest is so …
Boring.
A rich guy who acted like one and disappeared.
Handsome enough. In good shape.
But what else?
There’s something Ewan isn’t seeing.
The crowd around the roulette table cheer as a retiree rakes in chips. People pack in close around the winner, drawn to the lucky energy. Ewan keeps his distance. He’s there and not there.
•
An hour later, at 9.35 am, Ewan catches the housekeeping manager taking her morning break in a second-floor bar. It’s a breakfast of champions for her: a bloody mary and a cigarette. Ewan plants himself on the stool beside her. ‘We meet again.’
The manager is not thrilled. ‘Piss off. I’m married.’ She keeps her eyes on a nearby screen. The Sullivans is playing silently.
Ewan motions at the half-empty cocktail. ‘You want another?’
‘I want some peace and quiet.’
Ewan slides her a fifty-dollar gaming chip. ‘I found this on the floor.’
The woman eyes it off, slips it in her pocket. ‘Who are you again?’
‘Just some guy.’ Ewan comes closer, lowering his voice. ‘Any chance you found that employee record for Trina Chalmers?’
The woman remains tight-lipped. A slight shake of the head.
‘Don’t suppose I can have that chip back?’
The manager unpeels herself from her perch. She glances at the bar staff further down, then gives the room a quick scan. ‘I should be able to get it,’ she says.
