Crooked (5 page)

Gus stood there, uncertain what to think, or how to react. Tanner's words by no means sat comfortably with him, and there came on him a gradual feeling that something wasn't right. He rubbed his eyes under their glasses. Then again, he'd been up all night and was feeling very tired.

He turned on his heel and walked down the hall, reaching the door to the squad room as Wally Driscoll, from the Scientific Investigation Bureau, came hurrying through. Driscoll was dressed in a grubby white lab-coat, with horn-rimmed bifocals of a supernatural size, bloating the green eyes underneath.

Gus stopped him with both hands. ‘Wally? You lifted the prints off those guns from the Latin Quarter?'

‘Haven't you heard?'

‘Heard what?'

Wally took Gus by the arm and dragged him a few paces. ‘There aren't any.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘There aren't any prints.'

‘You're kidding me, right?'

‘Nope,' said Wally. ‘I'm right on the level.'

‘Does Tanner know this?'

Wally moved a little further into the corner. Fearing they could be overheard, even there, he said in a voice barely audible, ‘I'm saying those guns have been wiped.'

One month after Johnny shut down his Kings Cross establishment, Glory was sitting in his new betting club on the main street of Liverpool, together with Johnny and their new friend Mick Moylan, who was thumbing through the ledgers as they counted the night's takings. Above her, the starting prices were chalked up on a blackboard under a sign with a painted kangaroo, saying, ‘Hop in – You're Welcome' and in smaller letters underneath, ‘Gentlemen Please Oblige by Not Carrying Form Guides and Papers when Leaving the Premises'.

The operation was small but thriving, with four telephone lines and an eager stream of punters trickling in from the pub. They took bets on the dogs, the trots and the ponies, then spread a bit of green baize after the last race on Fridays, and played three shoes of baccarat until when in the morning.

‘The thing is,' said Moylan. ‘Once we get this joint off the ground we'll move onto another one, big but not flashy, with glass chandeliers and dancing girls in black egret feathers and a giant roulette wheel –' he held out his arms – ‘maybe thirteen foot across.'

Johnny interrupted. ‘Just where are you going to lay hold of a thirteen-foot roulette wheel?'

‘Monte Carlo,' said Moylan, though last week he'd told Glory he had a timber trader lined up in the back streets of Bangkok.

Moylan was a large, almost elephantine man in his
mid-fifties, with a blanket of dyed hair rising in unequal mounds on either side of a straight part. He had an enormous cyst on the side of his mouth, and eyes that were glassy and perennially bloodshot. Johnny had run into him at South Sydney Juniors some weeks before. Moylan had just arrived in Sydney from London, and somebody had told him that Johnny was an experienced club manager looking for a break.

‘I dunno,' said Johnny. ‘I reckon you'd be better off with craps.'

‘Craps?'

‘Yeah. Once was, I ran a craps game with the prettiest pair of dices you ever seen, fetched in a packet,' Johnny laughed.

There was a creak on the stairwell. Johnny's old mate, Chooks Brouggy, stuck his head through the door.

Chooks was a short bloke of unfortunate physique, with a miserably skinny neck, and hair the colour and straightness of straw sticking out around the edges of an old pork pie hat. His shirt was half-tucked into a pair of blue dungarees with the buttons undone, so his chicken-ribs were showing.

Johnny looked up from the notes he was bundling. ‘Jeez, Chooks. Didn't I tell you not to take your eyes off the door?'

Chooks shuffled his toes. ‘Yeah, but it's Tommy Bogle.'

Johnny started up from the table. ‘I hope you got rid of him. Quick smart.'

‘I thought you ought to see him.'

‘Well, do me a favour and quit thinking. I need one of Reilly's boys poking around here like a hole in the head.'

‘He's one of Dick Reilly's boys?' said Moylan, looking up from his ledger.

‘Shit, yeah,' said Johnny, growing angry at the memory. ‘That bloke Reilly reckons he owns this town, like it was Pittsburgh or something. But I've got news for him. Out here in Liverpool he don't own a thing.' He turned back to Chooks. ‘Go down there and tell Tommy from me to get stuffed.'

‘Hang on a tick.' Moylan turned towards Chooks. ‘Maybe the bloke's got a reason. What did he say?'

Chooks glanced at Johnny, as if waiting for Johnny's permission to answer. Glory watched on, acutely aware that they owed Moylan a whole lot, but knowing Moylan had a habit of spiking Johnny into a prickly belligerence.

‘Well, first up,' said Chooks, once Johnny had given him the go ahead. ‘I reckon he isn't working for Reilly anymore.'

‘Why?'

‘I dunno. Just do. I reckon you seen him and you'll catch what I'm saying.'

‘I guess you better send the bugger up then,' said Johnny.

Chooks went out, and Johnny not so casually pulled a gun out of his trousers and put it down on the table. He waited a minute, then picked up the gun and moved to the top of the staircase, gun-arm dangling loose, pointing down into the dark. ‘Hurry up, Tommy. I'm a busy man.'

There was a subdued commotion on the staircase, and then Tommy blundered out of the gloom. His face was battered and bruised as if from a recent beating, and the light from the naked bulb brought out his injuries in a startling way. His cheeks quivered. He gnawed on his thumb.

‘Aw, hell …' Johnny was disconcerted. ‘Reilly do that?'

Tommy hesitated, but after a while his mouth began to work and the words tumbled out.

‘Mate, Reilly's gone and knocked him.'

‘Who?'

‘O'Connor.'

‘He hasn't,' said Johnny.

‘I tell you he's done it, and I reckon I'm next. He thinks I'm the one who topped off to the coppers the night that the Kellett Club got raided. Mate –' Tommy pleaded, and held out a crumpled paper. ‘I tell you the bloke's got no loyalty. He hasn't got the right.'

Johnny took hold of the newspaper, and Glory peered at it over his shoulder.

Police Commissioner Norman Allan slammed down the newspaper and yelled at Reg Tanner as he came down the room. ‘This is not the sort of thing I want to read over the marmalade pot. This is the sort of thing I ought to be told.'

Allan had been called from his sickbed at an unusual hour. His striped flannel pyjamas peeked at odd points from the collar and cuffs of his uniform, and his protruding potbelly blossomed like cauliflower through a half-buttoned coat. Tanner took this in as he came to a halt in front of the desk, and put on a wonderfully contrived look of angelic contrition. ‘I was going to mention it to you, Norman. Honest. Only with you being sick and all –'

‘There's nothing to stop you from picking up the telephone. You dial it and it rings. Ever heard of that?'

Tanner slackly raised his arms from his sides, palms uppermost, in a gesture of hapless apology. ‘This O'Connor character. See, he was a bit of a loser. I reckon most likely he upped and shot himself.'

‘Shot himself?'

‘I dunno how it happened –'

‘Too right you don't.'

‘Yeah.'

‘You better give me a good reason why I shouldn't yank you off this,' said Allan, starting in on a tirade that went on for several minutes. Then he sank back down against the edge of his desk,
and his eyes began to wander, anxious and allergic. ‘Hell. Just tell me what happened.'

Tanner threw himself down into the nearest chair like he'd just been invited. ‘I guess it must've been a little after three. I'm down at the Latin Quarter with my eyes on McPherson and that lot, when the club starts to close and people are blowing out the door and blocking my sight. Then I hear a shout, “Look out, he's got a gun,” so I jump to my feet and draw my revolver. I'm pushing my way across the room, hurling furniture and so forth, and then I see this bloke lying under the table. McPherson says, “Ducky O'Connor, Mr Tanner. The cunt tried to knock me.” So I say, “Sit down, you lot, and put your hands on the table.” Then I turn to Pigeye and say, “Lock the doors, Pigeye” and I bend down and see that O'Connor's still breathing, so I say, “Ring for an ambulance and get the others here.”'

‘And then?' said Allan, pacing the room between the desk and the window.

‘Well, about twelve inches to the right I see a small automatic pistol, a Colt .25, so I pick up the gun and put it down on a napkin. Then I see a much larger weapon, a Dreyse .32, which I put on the table alongside the Colt. Then the others arrive, so I bag up the guns and sign them over to Scientific Investigations for dusting.'

‘Who wiped the guns?'

‘I reckon I dunno.'

Allan came to a halt at the edge of his desk. For a moment he didn't speak. Then he said, ‘I don't like this, Tanner. I reckon it smells.'

Tanner eyed him soberly. ‘The last thing any of us needs is accusations of hankery-pankery flying around, what with them Labor blokes clamouring up and down Macquarie Street and the press banging on.'

Allan walked round the side of his desk and sat down in his chair. He took off his glasses, cleaned the lenses, and put them back on. ‘Can't you get me a witness?'

‘We spoke to them already.'

‘Well, speak to them again,' said Allan. ‘Then report back to me personally, understand?'

‘Sure,' said Tanner and, when it seemed Allan wasn't going to say anything more, picked up his hat and got ready to leave.

Allan glanced after him. ‘How's young Finlay coming along?'

‘Fine,' said Tanner. ‘Why?'

‘Knew his father once. Nice bloke, but soft for a copper. Got into a muddle. Sent him out the back o' Bourke. Three weeks later, and he topped himself. Know that?'

‘No,' said Tanner, turning around with his hand on the doorknob. ‘I reckon I didn't.'

Allan sank a little deeper into his chair and reflected. His crook leg hurt him. He'd done the thing in by falling down the station steps one morning, landing splat on his back and mangling the cartilage. The damn thing had folded underneath him again shortly thereafter, boarding a plane out at Kingsford Smith Airport. That put him hip-down in plaster. Then there was the bit of asparagus on the floor at that politician's kid's bar mitzvah that cost him seven months and a kneecap …

Scrambling to his feet, Allan strode angrily to a window that gave out on a glum courtyard filled with bits of broken brick and uncollected garbage. A thick fug of pollution drifted about the lintels of the building. He was head of the police force and in charge of everything, but down at the Criminal Investigation Branch he was in charge of nothing – there, only Tanner was in charge. Allan sent out orders. They were constantly countermanded. He requested information and got nothing back. The battle was denting his ego and sapping his strength. Pitiful as it was, he was compelled to go on or watch everything he cherished go up in a puff of black smoke.

Allan knew there were plenty of coppers who had unusual arrangements with the criminal class and that money was involved all along the line in such transactions. Previously, he'd always been willing to turn an honest blind eye so long as nobody got hurt … and because politicians were involved. But he deeply resented the idea that Tanner should have the upper hand. And this feeling worked inexorably on him, grinding away at the mellow of his mood, until it began to assume the shape of a plan.

Tanner walked through the rear entrance to CIB. Up ahead, the corridor was blocked off with pressmen surging out the swing doors into the stairwell, clambering over each other to get close. On the first-storey landing, an enterprising photographer stood on a three-stack of soapboxes emblazoned ‘LustreGlo', another dangled down from the top-storey landing, with his left foot hitched round the banister, looking like a brown-suited orangutan in bottle-glass spectacles. Tanner eyed them narrowly, threw a few elbows and barged his way through. Gradually the whole gang of them creamed back from his passage, falling away. And then the doors of the squad room banged shut behind him.

There was a lectern on the platform but Tanner didn't use it. He hoisted his foot onto a straight-backed wooden chair – tie yanked down, shirt collar unbuttoned, twin patches of sweat darkening his armpits – and leaned into the room. He didn't need to grab anybody's attention. ‘Lads,' he said, and everybody jerked themselves upright, craning towards him.

‘I guess you already know what that ruck in the corridor's all about: Raymond ‘Ducky' O'Connor. In light of recent adverse publicity the big boss has asked us to put the lid on this quick, and gather up enough evidence to substantiate a charge. Now, we know that O'Connor arrived at the Latin Quarter just before
closing, we've got witnesses that put him through the door a little after three. More than likely, he went there looking for Lennie McPherson with the intention of shooting him. However, two guns – a Colt and a Dreyse – were found at the scene of the shooting, and neither of these guns have owners. We were hoping for fingerprints. Unfortunately, we didn't get any.'

‘What's new?' said Gus.

‘Not much,' answered Pigeye.

‘That's right, detective,' said Tanner, ‘not much at all. The coroner has confirmed the Dreyse as the probable weapon, and because the Colt wasn't fired, I reckon we can safely work with that assumption. Bullets and cartridges have been retrieved from the scene of the shooting, but the complete ballistics might take a couple of days. We do have leads. Officers spoke to forty eyewitnesses at the scene of the shooting and the big boss wants all of them re-interviewed –'

There were groans, a collective stirring.

‘Don't give me that.' Tanner straightened up. ‘It's not me who's saying, “I don't trust you.” Just this once it's got to be everything by the book. In any case, it's more than possible that there's somebody out there who saw something but is holding back, through shock or fright, or maybe just something they don't consider important. So, are there questions?'

There weren't any.

‘Good,' said Tanner, and the crowd busted up.

Gus sprang off the desk and wedged himself into the back of the queue of detectives snaking towards Pigeye, who was handing out assignments.

Tanner put a hand on Gus's shoulder.

‘Sir,' said Gus, wheeling round.

Tanner pulled a set of car keys out of his pocket. ‘O'Connor was carrying these. I want you to find the car they belong to. Take Agostini with you. Grid-search everything between Hyde Park and the Harbour.'

‘Right-o,' said Gus. He signed off on the keys and left, banging through the swing doors with the rest of the squad.

Tanner waited for the last muffled ring of a footfall before he switched off the lights. He returned to his desk, cocked himself back in his swivel chair, ankle on knee. He didn't need to think about Allan. He already knew what to do. He stared blankly at the wide strip of blue sky and, etched against it, the rectangular black edge of the city.