Chopper Unchopped (162 page)

“They go to church, or the whores do, the same day they kill. Fidel has been using ’em for years. Only trouble is, they are so good a lot of ’em turn freelance and don’t go back,” said Tony.

As they got the body downstairs Ortiz asked, “So do ya think Carlotta and Jose are part of this Che Guevara lot?”

“Yeah,” said Tony. “The ice pick, the head job, then church this morning and Jose has vanished. A freelance would be alone, but true Cuban Army would stick together. Yeah, them two Cubans is Che Guevara Divisionala. I’ll bet my life on it.”

“Why Bob Ford?” asked Ortiz.

“Who knows?” said Tony, shrugging. “Who goddam knows in this crazy game?”

THE Nossa Senhora de Gloria do Outeiro church in central Rio de Janeiro, otherwise known as the Gloria Church, is the most beautiful church in the city. Built in the old Brazilian Baroque style, it overlooks Guanabara Bay. But George Pratt wasn’t thinking about architecture as he sat on one of the ornate carved pews holding Carlotta’s hand. A thought had occurred to him.

“Carlotta, I thought the carnival was a pre-Easter celebration, but this has been going not just four days before but all throughout Easter?” he said.

“I don’t know, sir,” said Carlotta. “Brazilians all Portugese. Crazy peasants. Too much cocaine, too much rum and wine, too much whisky, too much pussy. I don’t know. All they do is kill each other and rape each other. The carnival lasts ten days sometimes. It starts before Easter but it stops when everyone go to sleep. When the cocaine slow down,” she giggled.

There was silence. “Mr George,” said Carlotta quietly. “You no go back to El Rancho.”

“Why not?” said Pratt.

Carlotta looked at him. “I like you, Mr George. You good man. Mr Bob bad man. He kill Mr Sam.”

“How do you know that?” said Pratt, shocked.

“Carlotta know a lot of things,” she said. “Mr Bob work CIA long ago, but he work for Coco Joeliene now.”

Pratt didn’t have to ask if she knew what she was talking about. He’d heard enough.

“You Australian Intelligence,” said Carlotta softly. She was smiling, as if saying the words “Australian Intelligence” was comical.

“Yes,” said Pratt.

“Mr Sam too?” asked Carlotta.

“Yes,” nodded Pratt.

“You take photos of Coco Joeliene on yacht.”

“How did you know that?” asked Pratt.

“You sit on beach in front of a thousand people and take photos. Everyone in Rio know that.”

Pratt felt like a congenital idiot. This housemaid was a lot more than she pretended to be.

“You no go back to El Rancho. Coco Joeliene know you there. She kill you.”

“What do you know about Coco Joeliene?” asked Pratt. He couldn’t help being curious.

“Oh,” said Carlotta airily. “Coco Joeliene very bad. She rob Fidel millions in drug deal in Havana. General from Panama come collect cocaine. No cocaine, no money, no Joeliene. Fidel very angry.”

“How much for?” asked Pratt.

“One ton cocaine,” said Carlotta.

Pratt sat back. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was taking the girl’s advice and going straight to the airport. This was no place for a humble public servant attached to the piss poor sub branch of HM Intelligence service in Australia. If Coco Joeliene could rip Fidel Castro for a ton in cocaine and live to tell the tale, who the hell was some half-baked Aussie intelligence outfit to think they could send unarmed men out to snap photos of her? Who bloody well cared about Elliot Royce anyhow. Cancel his travel allowance, make him pay full freight at the canteen or sack the bastard. If he is a problem why spy on the bugger?

All Pratt wanted was a desk in Canberra so he could push some papers around without any life and death dramas. All of a sudden he just wanted a cup of Milo and a Teddy Bear biscuit.

“Who are you, Carlotta?” he whispered. But as she was about to speak, Jose Zores walked up and touched her on the shoulder.

“I go now, Mr George,” she said gently. And with that she kissed Pratt full on the lips and held the kiss there. This time when she pulled away she had a tear in her eye.

“Via Con Dios Caballero,” she murmured. And with that the mysterious Latin princess got up and walked out of his life. Or what was left of it. Pratt knew he didn’t have long to make a move if he was going to make it.

HE sat there for a while and thought. His gear was at the El Rancho. Forget it. He had his credit card and diplomatic passport. Forget Elliot Royce, forget Coco Joeliene. But how could he ever forget Sam McCord? What was it Bob Ford had sung in that silly song.

“Sam crossed the majestic mountains to the valleys far below, he talked to his team of huskies as he mushed on through the snow, with the Northern lights a runnin’ wild in the land of the midnight sun, yes Sam McCord was a mighty man in the year of nineteen one.”

Yes, thought George Pratt. Sam McCord was indeed a mighty, mighty man, the big drunken larrikin.

“If I’m gonna die, let it be in a whore house,” were the words McCord had once used in jest. That’s right, thought Pratt. But he would have wanted to be the victim of lewd, lascivious and licentious conduct, with death taking him at the very crescendo of human pleasure, which wasn’t the way it happened.

He would have liked to die on the job with the prettiest girl in the joint, not be hurled from the roof of a Rio whore house with his busted brains spilling all over the street below.

A non-conformist to the last, even his death was a total pig’s breakfast. He was a big, infectious jovial bastard. Why had the cardigans in the Canberra golf club placed them with scant notice or forewarning into this totally unprotected hell hole? Here they were rubbing shoulders and matching wits with drug-dealing communist dictators, cocaine cartels, renegade generals, Haitian killers, secret police, the lot. And all for what? To trap some dodgy little Foreign Affairs officer getting his pockets filled and his knob polished by a Jamaican whore who married a rusty knight and a Collingwood ratbag who collects the names of horses. Was it worth poor Sam’s life. No, it was not.

These thoughts filled Pratt’s mind as he stood up and began to walk out. As he reached the stairs of the church leading to the street he saw a young man standing on the sidewalk below him. He thought he recognised the face. Shit, it was that kid Ronnie Reeves. Why, thought Pratt, he’s not much more than a big teenage kid to look at.

Too late, he saw the handgun in the kid’s hand and the smile on the kid’s face and heard the kid yell out “Adios amigo” as he brought the handgun up and pulled the trigger. Pratt felt the white hot slug hit him in the neck, then he heard a second shot, then a third, but he didn’t feel the two slugs hit him in the chest.

He fell to the ground, right in front of the Gloria Church. What a nice place to die, he thought. The face of Sam McCord floated into his mind, then Carlotta. The sun was in his eyes. All he could see was a white yellow ball of light. He felt warm in the sun, then cold. It was as if some strange narcosis had taken over. Was that church bells? Yes, of course, he was lying in front of a church. “Adios amigo” was a strange thing for Reeves say.

“And Adios bloody amigo to you, too, you bastard, you’ll get yours,” he thought with a smile. “You’ll get yours.” Then, as if saying goodbye to himself, George Pratt died, still whispering the words “Adios amigo.”

“REMEMBER the Steeler’s Wheel scene in the movie
Reservoir Dogs?
” asked Westlock.

Doc Holliday scratched his head. “Steeler’s Wheel?” he said. He had a puzzled expression on his dial, like a boy who has been asked a particularly tricky sum.

“Yeah, you know,” said Westlock. “Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right, Here I am stuck in the middle with you.”

“Oh yeah,” said Doc Holliday, relaxing a bit. He was off the hook. “That’s when Mr Blonde cuts the ear off the copper then gets shot by Mr Orange.” He may have been tone deaf but he wasn’t colour blind.

“Yeah, that’s it,” said Westlock. “Tell me, did ya notice anything odd in that?”

Holliday looked puzzled again. Looked as if he was going to get a headache the way the conversation was going.

“The blood,” said Westlock patiently, as if he were a quiz king letting lesser minds in on the answer. “There was hardly any blood.”

“Yes!” said Holliday quickly. “A cut-off ear would piss buckets of blood.”

“Correct,” said Westlock wearily. “That Tarantino bloke might be a top movie man, but it’s clear he knows shit about ears.”

“Ya not wrong,” said Doc Holliday, warming to the topic now he had a handle on it. “He just took a guess, I shouldn’t wonder. After all, cutting off ears isn’t a big part of the American criminal scene, culturally speaking. Ha ha.”

“That copper wasn’t all that pleased when the lug came off,” said Westlock with a laugh. “Michael Madsen played a good role though.”

“Who was he?” asked Holliday.

“Mr Blonde” said Westlock. “Victor Vega.

Doc Holliday again looked muddled.

“Victor Vega? Didn’t John Travolta play that role?”

“Nah,” said Westlock. “Travolta played Vincent Vega in Tarantino’s other movie,
Pulp Fiction
. Madsen played Victor Vega in
Reservoir Dogs!
”

“Jesus, Graeme” said Doc, “you sure do know your movies.”

Detective Chief Superintendent Graeme Westlock and his best friend and most trusted old caballero Detective Sergeant John “Doc” Holliday, father of the famous Bill, were sitting in the lounge room of Holliday’s sister’s home in Hanover Street, Carlton. Holliday was sporting a nasty black eye and a busted nose and cheek bone, the result of a 156 gram Kookaburra Commander cricket ball hitting him full in the face at 90 miles per hour at the Police versus Firemen’s cricket game.

“Did you know,” said Doc Holliday, “that Mr R.J. Mitchell invented the Supermarine Spitfire aeroplane.”

“No, I didn’t, as a matter of fact,” said Westlock.

“Yes, well,” continued Holliday, not wanting to lose the advantage in the obscure knowledge caper, “and I’ve also got another titbit of trivia for you.”

“Oh,” said Westlock as he poured himself another large Hankey Bannister scotch whisky.

“Did you know,” continued Doc Holliday in his best schoolteacher voice, “that the motto of the RAF and the RAAF was the Latin
Per Ardua Ad Astra
, which means by slow and toilsome ways to the stars.”

“That’s amazing,” said Westlock, genuinely impressed with his friend’s deep knowledge of obscure trivia.

Holliday nodded smugly, “yes, it is, isn’t it. I just thought I’d share that with you, Graeme.”

In their more private moments, alone and half drunk, Westlock and Holliday, the two most feared legends in the Victorian Police Force, could be as quaint and as precious as a couple of old maiden aunts at a Sunday School picnic. They often had soup together in the police canteen. Both men seemed to have in them an endless supply of obscure facts and figures, detail and trivia. Jerry Lee Lewis was singing
Mexicali Rose
on the radio in the background as Westlock launched forth again.

“Did you know that Aspanu Pisciotta killed Salvatore Juiliano, the famed Sicilian bandit – and Pisciotta was Juiliano’s own cousin?”

“Yes,” said Holliday, “and Hector Adonis killed Pisciotta.”

Westlock frowned. “Game, set and match,” he said.

Holliday gave a sly grin.

“Well then,” said Westlock. “Did you know that the two most powerful handguns in the world are not the .357 magnum and the .44 calibre magnum, but the two most powerful pieces of small arms ordinance in the world are in fact the Israeli-made automatic .50 calibre action express, and the American made .308 silhouette revolver?”

“You’re wrong,” said Holliday.

Westlock snapped, “No, I am not Doc.”

But Holliday insisted. “Sorry, Graeme the most powerful handgun ever made was the Stonewall Jackson .52 calibre pistol.”

“Oh yes,” continued Holliday, “I know Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson invented a .47 calibre in 1859 and the Colt Walker .50 calibre was good, but nothing was ever built to compare with the .52 calibre. General Stonewall Jackson wanted a handgun that would cut down a running horse at a hundred paces, which was a tall order. It was built by a gunsmith named Coleman Springfield in 1862. The only one ever made.”

Westlock was again genuinely impressed and the two men fell into silence as the Jerry Lee Lewis song finished. Next, the Icelandic singer Bjork came on the radio with her song,
It’s oh so quiet
.

“She reminds me of them old classic singers from the 1950s,” said Westlock.

“Yeah,” said Holliday, “she’s all lungs.”

“And full of the joys of spring with a few drinks under her belt as well by all reports,” said Westlock.

Doc Holliday smiled. “Did you know that Trivalve won the Melbourne Cup in 1927?”

“Yes,” said Westlock, “and paid 6 to 1, too.”

Holliday again fell silent.

“Who was the Prime Minister in 1927?” asked Westlock.

“Stanley Bruce,” said Holliday with a grin.

“Correct,” said Westlock.

The two men never tired of this nonsense form of trivial conversation. Then Holliday got up and turned the dial on the radio to get another station. Some opera singer, probably Pavarotti, came on singing.
O Sole Mio
or some such.

“Get that wog shit off the radio,” growled Westlock, and Doc Holliday tuned it on to another station. Foster and Allen came on singing
Maggie
.

“Ahh, yes,” said Westlock, “that’s more like it.”

The house on Hanover Street was old, small, red brick, and single fronted, with two bedrooms and not much else. It wasn’t all that far from 50 Barkly Street, Carlton, where Squizzy Taylor met his match on Thursday October 26, 1927.

Taylor’s widow Ida had come to live with Molly Holliday and her 17 cats in Hanover Street shortly after the shooting. In fact, the Holliday family had shown Ida Taylor great kindness after the death of “The Turk”, which was another nickname for Taylor.

It was a strange and secret friendship between the Hollidays, mostly a police family, and the Taylors, who mostly weren’t. Although, of course, police and gangsters are two classes of people who tend to have a lot to do with each other, understand each other, and sometimes get a bit blurry about whose side they’re on.

When Taylor came out of the Bookmakers Club in Lonsdale Street late on the Thursday afternoon in question, the story goes, he’d been drinking with Harold Holliday, Henry Stokes, Harry Slater and Johnny Reeves. He left the Bookmakers Club with Harry Slater and Johnny Reeves and got into a cab and headed for Carlton.

The cab turned into Exhibition Street and continued north along Rathdowne Street to the corner of Palmerston Street, then stopped at the Clare Castle Hotel. Taylor and Reeves got out and went inside and had a brief word with Albert Pepper and Ern McGovern. Reeves and Taylor returned and the cab continued on to the pub in Newry Street and there had a brief word with Stanley Oxbow and Ralph Cartlidge, then on to the Morning Star Hotel for a chat to Big Dick Loughnan, Taylor’s bail bondsman. He collected a .32 calibre revolver from Ray Peddy, head of the Francis Street Gang.

The magpies that nestled in the trees in Turner Street and Lulie Street, for some reason seemed to flap their way across town and sit on the roof of the Morning Star Hotel, and the pigeon pie served as a counter meal in the pub was quite often not pigeon at all.

There were two more pub calls in Drummond Street, then Taylor posted a letter to Blinky Baxter, chief crime reporter for the Melbourne ‘Age’ newspaper. It contained a short poem which read:

“Ashes to Ashes mate, and dust to dust,

If Westlock don’t get me, Kelly must.”

It was signed “Joseph Leslie Theodore Taylor, gentleman at large.”

Then the cab load of scallywags headed for Barkly Street. The cab parked on the corner of Faraday and Canning Street. While Squizzy and his two caballeros walked slowly down Barkly Street toward number 50, Snowy Cutmore was in bed wearing his favourite striped pyjamas. Snowy was living in the area under his alias of John Harris.

His mum was in the front room knitting. Her name was Bridget Cutmore and she had a .32 calibre revolver in her apron pocket, which was a lot handier than a hatpin when the chips were down.

Johnny Reeves had a Melior blue black hammerless automatic handgun in his kick. Harry Slater had a .25 calibre automatic in his. To cut a long story short – in reality, few shoot ’em ups take more than moments, anyway – Taylor started to fire on entering the house, but got two slugs in the right side of his chest … from the weapon fired by Cutmore’s mother, not Cutmore himself, as legend would have it.

Johnny Reeves fired his weapon into Snowy Cutmore and Harry Slater returned fire and hit Bridget Cutmore in the shoulder. Cutmore and Taylor both blazed away at each other with .32 calibre hand guns, neither man hitting his target. About fifteen shots fired in all, and eleven empty pistol shells were scattered about, yet police found no guns at the scene of the crime. Cutmore got a slug in the left side of his chest and died. He was unlucky at that, considering how many had missed him.

The whole shoot-out was a screaming example that as gunmen Taylor or Cutmore made good thieves. The secret that it was Cutmore’s mother who really put the fatal slugs into Squizzy, and that it was Johnny Reeves who shot Cutmore, was well guarded in order to protect the memory and legend of the king of the Melbourne underworld. But, as Holliday and Westlock often told each other and others in pubs, it was well-known in police circles, if not polite circles, that Snowy Cutmore’s mother shot Squizzy Taylor.

An even better reason for the deaths of Cutmore and Taylor being blamed on each other was the convenient one that it protected the living from the hangman’s rope, which still got a regular work-out in the 1920s. Bridget Cutmore, Johnny Reeves and Harry Slater all went to their graves swearing black and blue that it was Cutmore who killed Taylor and Taylor who killed Cutmore. But Val Slater, blind drunk at the Palace Dance Hall in St Kilda who let the cat out of the bag one night in 1932.

Val was in a wild fist fight with Ida Taylor when she yelled “Squizzy was a bloody pansy. Johnny Reeves shot Cutmore. Your two-bob dwarf husband couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a shovel full of wheat.”

Three off-duty homicide policemen claimed to have overheard this slanging match and witnessed the fist fight. The likelihood of three detectives telling the truth is doubtful, as any reasonable person might suspect. But the fact is that two hundred dance goers at the hall overheard and witnessed it, and there isn’t any doubt about that …

Anyway, while Westlock and Holiday enjoyed the quiet of a lazy Sunday afternoon in Hanover Street, Carlton, a few other people were sitting around, relaxing and talking in the same neighbourhood. Rex Slater, Robin Stokes and Ray Peddy sat in the lounge room of Slater’s home in Napoleon Street, Collingwood, which is only a few punt kicks away from Carlton.

The three men were all members of the Peddy brothers’ Francis Street crew, a Collingwood gang whose history went back to the 1880s, not long after the Kelly gang was wiped out. The Peddy gang had been famous before the Reeves clan had ever been heard of in Collingwood. The legend started in 1880, the year Ned Kelly was hanged, and continued on until 1926, then vanished.

In the street battles during the 1920s with the Bouverie Street mob and the Woolpacks gang from Carlton, the Fitzroy Checkers gang and the South Melbourne Flying Angels, the Peddy family ruled the waves – and waived the rules – on a sea of blood. But it was the war with the Chinese Fan Tan gangs and the Chinese See Yap Society that saw the downfall of the Peddy boys.

The leadership of the See Yap Society, three shifty Chinese named Lee Tock, Cheong Ah Toy and Lee Gum Quong, paid Squizzy Taylor and Johnny Reeves two thousand pounds in cash to settle with the Peddys. Ma Peddy was axed to death in the Dardanelles Drinking Club and her three sons were gunned down outside the Little Menzies Drinking Club. Taylor and Reeves seized control of the brothels run by the Peddy sisters in Gertrude Street, Marion Street and Little Napier Street, Fitzroy.

The See Yap Society was so pleased with the result that Taylor was invited to take a half share in their opium den in Little Bourke Street. The Peddy sisters, all five of them rather keen on the saveloy, were sold to the Chinese and were to later give birth to a small army of half-caste Chinese children, all fathered by the gang leader Cheong Ah Toy, or so he thought, anyway. One half-caste Peddy kid looked much the same as another. They tended to have black hair, dark eyes and to be handy with a meat cleaver, but that’s another story.

Henry Lawson wrote some of his best work when visiting Melbourne to write for the ‘Truth’ newspaper because he smoked himself out of his mind in the brothel and opium den in Little Bourke Street. Les Norton, boss of the ‘Truth’, sacked Lawson after finding him in the opium den in the arms of a teenage Chinese boy, or so they say. The bisexual conduct of the drunken, drug-ridden poet shadowed him afterwards, although Norton, himself a chronic drunkard and liar, was not believed until allegations of a similar homosexual adventure of Henry’s surfaced at Darlinghurst Jail after one of Lawson’s many stays there.

But if it was true about being a bum bandit, the old bugger liked it both ways, because it was Lawson, they reckoned, who fathered the bastard son of the prostitute Mae Peddy. Which is why two large portrait photographs of Henry Lawson and his bastard son, Henry Peddy, were hanging above the mantlepiece of Ray Peddy’s home in Francis Street, Collingwood.