The Silent Inheritance (30 page)

Watched her slip two hearing aids into her ears when they were back on the ground, then he quizzed her on how much she heard with them.

‘Big noise. Not much.’

He lifted their matching backpacks down, shuffled behind them to the exit, then walked at their side to the taxi rank where he queued behind them.

‘Where are you staying?’ he asked.

‘At a hotel in the middle of the city tonight,’ the girl said. ‘We get on our tour bus in the morning. How long are you staying?’

‘I’ll be flying home while you’re touring,’ he said. ‘How would your mum feel about sharing a taxi?’

‘She likes saving money,’ the girl said. ‘Mum. He wants to share our taxi.’

Mum wanted to pay her share of the fare when he unloaded their backpacks outside the hotel. He told her his boss was picking up the tab.

‘Find Danni soon,’ the girl said.

He had no reply to that, then with a wave of their hands they were gone, and he didn’t know their names.

He knew that Mum was a senior payroll/accounts officer at Crows. He knew they lived in a granny flat behind an elderly tyrant’s house, that they’d left her home alone for ten days and were worried about her already. He knew they were going to buy a car after their holiday, if Mum got her licence. He knew there was no father on the scene, that he was buried in Perth, that they were going to visit his grave before they flew home. He knew, too, that had he been less set in his ways, he would have asked their names, got their phone numbers. That’s what people did these days, met on planes, in bars, online.

For much of his life, Ross had been making snap judgements about those he met in odd places. He liked or disliked, trusted or distrusted on sight. He liked that girl. He liked her Mum’s worried eyes.

He didn’t like the desk clerk when he fronted up at the reception desk to check in and was told his room wouldn’t be ready for occupancy until one o’clock. He was, however, welcome to leave his luggage.

Ross’s laptop was in his sports bag, and, having no intention of being separated from it, he walked out to the pavement where he lit a smoke and wondered if his seatmates were having the same difficulty at their hotel. It was only a block or two from his, so he walked back, telling himself he’d ask their names if he found them wandering the morning streets.

A small world, he thought. What was the likelihood of flying across the country to speak to the ex-wife of an ex-con who was probably driving up at the mines and keeping his nose clean, then being seated by default, or the fault of two out-of-control brats, beside a kid who’d gone to school with Danni?

He knew where she’d gone to school. He’d been there. He knew where she’d lived. Been there too. His seatmate’s granny flat would have been in that general area.

*

He had a busy day. It was after five before he checked into his room, and the first thing he saw in it was the
No smoking
sign and the fine smokers would incur should they light up in that hallowed space. He tossed his bag on a bed, made certain his door was locked then walked around the corner where he bought Chinese for dinner.

Space and time are good teachers. He found a card game on his phone and flattened his battery playing it and when he checked in so he could charge it, he couldn’t find his charger. No more card games – and his borrowed bed was as hard as the hobs of hell.

He turned on the television and flicked around until he found a movie – and was asleep before it ended.

A ratbag morning show woke him – and probably his neighbour, and when he failed to find the remote to turn it off, he dressed and got out, checked out, which took as long as it had to check in – and no, he had not attacked their minibar. Maybe they sent someone up to check, which could have been why it took so long to check him out.

Annoyed by the dictates of those at the top of the tree, he lit up a metre from the hotel door and hoped his smoke infiltrated their sterile space.

His flight home left at ten, and with hours to kill, he went sightseeing, or mind travelling through yesterday.

He hadn’t found Clarence Daniel Jones but had eaten a ham and pickle sandwich with Jones’s ex-wife, who ran a childcare centre for five grandkids. Their conversation was interrupted half a dozen times while she broke up fights, but between the fights he’d learnt that Clarry had worked at Bridgestone Tyres after
they’d
let him out the last time, but that
they
must have given him back his truck licence because the last time she’d heard from him he’d been driving up at the mines.

She’d said she had no way of contacting him. She said again that he was never a bad husband, just unreliable. He still sent her money when he thought about it and he never forgot the kids’ birthdays, or hers. She still loved him, she said. ‘Just couldn’t live with him.’

She gave him the names of Clarry’s six brothers, told him all about fat Freddy’s hyphen.

‘He added it when he got his scholarship into university. He thought he was too good to be a common Jones. I only met him two or three times but he always came across as a smart-arsed little runt. His mother thought he was Jesus Christ himself.’

She’d given Ross the addresses of two of her brothers-in-law. ‘We send Christmas cards,’ she said.

He’d spoken to his Perth colleagues. If Clarence Daniel Jones was driving up at the mines, they’d find him. They’d had no luck to date in tracking down the ‘Ron’ who’d called Crime Stoppers about Indiana Jones.

Ross was standing with a group waiting to cross at a traffic light, a smoke in hand and a woman looking at him as if he were a terrorist carrying a load of explosives. He butted out in his peppermint tin and considered what he might do on these streets if he had a week of space and time.

And he saw them, the girls from the plane, waving at him from the far side of the street. He smiled and waved back, didn’t cross over when the lights changed. Waited for them to cross to him.

‘Are you tailing me?’ he greeted them.

‘We didn’t pay for breakfast at the hotel,’ the girl said. ‘Mum thinks she can remember a McDonald’s near where we catch our tour bus.’

‘Would Mum mind if I joined you? I don’t mind a bacon and egg McMuffin.’

‘It will save us wearing ourselves out trying to keep you in sight,’ the girl said, and he laughed, halfway in love with that middle-aged twelve year old.

C
larence Daniel Jones was still missing. Bill Jones hadn’t seen Clarry since their father’s funeral but kept in touch with John, who’d lost his wife six months ago. Joe he’d last heard from a few months after their father’s death. Bert was overseas somewhere, Gordon was a widower with a buggered back, and then there was Freddy. You only needed to look in a newspaper to find Freddy.

Ross had run his hoon theory by Johnson. It took a better imagination than his to visualise Frederick Adam-Jones and his son digging a grave and burying that girl then returning a week later to dig her up – and maybe a better imagination than Ross’s. He put it aside, pushed it aside but it ate at him, so he gave in and paid Freddy one of his social calls.

He owned a nice-looking house but a common doorbell. The woman who opened the door wasn’t common. She was taller than her husband and looked as if she kept in shape, dark hair, shoulder-length and tied back at the nape of her neck.

Ross introduced himself, flashed his ID, and told her he’d appreciate a word or two with her husband.

‘Freddy,’ she called.

He came, in his shirtsleeves.

‘We’re attempting to contact your brother, Clarence,’ Ross said for openers.

‘I’m unable to help you,’ Freddy replied. He didn’t invite his caller inside.

‘When were you last in contact with your brother?’

‘Why?’

‘We believe he may have information …’ Ross gave his spiel. Freddy, disinterested, wanted him to go, but in no hurry, Ross turned the conversation to the carjacking. ‘I hear you’ve had no luck yet identifying the carjackers?’

‘The night was dark. They were dark.’

‘You saw the tats on the big bloke with the knife.’

‘As I was being tossed into the boot, Sergeant. There is a light – was a light – in the boot of the Commodore.’

He was good – and he looked bored, so Ross stopped boring him and walked back to his car, thinking that should there come a day when he decided to murder Melvin Sloan for cutting down that avocado tree, fat Freddy would be the bloke he’d want defending him.

*

The elusive Ron was still missing, but the Perth cops found an ex-crim who’d served time with Indiana, not at Fremantle, but in Perth, back in ’99.

‘He was doing time for manslaughter, and a dead ringer for Indiana Jones. There was this big old blonde bird who used to come in once a week, a volunteer supposed to be learning us good English but who spent more time saving our souls and eyeing off Indiana. She called him Indie. I never heard anyone call him by another name. Don’t know what his real name was.’

Clarence Daniel Jones hadn’t served time for manslaughter. It was another piece of a puzzle where none of the pieces fitted.

Ross’s trip to Perth had achieved little but much. He’d become proficient at the card games on his mobile and had some inkling of why every kid over three spent half of their life staring at a screen.

He’d heard his own laughter at McDonald’s, and had damn near looked around to see who it was that was laughing. He’d heard Sarah’s laugh. It hadn’t sounded deaf. Her daughter would have made a cat laugh that morning.

They’d exchanged names over egg and bacon McMuffins and he’d felt himself shedding years with his skin cells. Could have sat with them all day, talking about everything and nothing, with a deaf woman and her daughter, but they’d had a bus to catch and he’d had a date with a plane.

He’d walked them down to their tour bus, where they were met by a guide and a dozen elderly citizens.

‘Enjoy your trip,’ he’d said.

‘We’re going to enjoy every second,’ Marni said.

He hoped they had, but feared they’d spent their week tripping over walking sticks – and he wouldn’t have minded spending that week with them, tripping over those walking sticks.

Loved their eyes, big, wide, chocolate-brown, honest, innocent eyes, and if he hadn’t flattened his mobile battery playing cards, he might have asked for their phone number.

Back here in his own world, he’d regrown those lost years fast, had stopped laughing and told himself when he thought about those girls that he was eight years away from fifty and that cops died young, and that he should have been making a new will, not googling the streets adjacent to the Burwood Heights high school and searching backyards for a granny flat.

C
heryl had replaced the Commodore with a grass-green Honda hard pushed to hold four, the perfect little city runabout, she’d claimed until yesterday, until her Vermont mate’s seven-seater four-wheel drive was run over by a tram.

The ‘girls’ had been planning a trip to Canberra in it, a long weekend of hilarity, and now they’d have to split up and travel there in two cars. That had been the plan, until Cheryl hired a replacement seven-seater she was not accustomed to driving.

‘Take it slow,’ Freddy warned. ‘Don’t take your eye off the roads.’

‘Don’t worry about me. You worry about Rolly. Don’t take your eyes off him this weekend,’ she’d warned.

Blame teenage hormones, mixed with grog, weed and maybe worse, but that kid had gone to the dogs. Freddy watchdogged him. Cheryl phoned him. He hadn’t got away on Saturday. He’d made a break for freedom on Sunday afternoon but Freddy cut him off at the pass, and with his mother on the phone for back-up, he’d got him back to the house where he’d deadlocked the doors and put the keys in his pocket.

Cheryl had enrolled him at the local high school, bought him the right uniform, and when school went back on the Monday, Freddy drove there, pleased with his son’s appearance and his pleasant manner. He liked the Ferrari.

‘Good luck,’ Freddy said when he’d dropped him off at the school gate.

‘You too,’ Rolland said. Then that shit of a kid took off running in his new school uniform, and Freddy had to go. He had a client depending on him.

He phoned Cheryl. She phoned back during the lunch recess. She’d spoken to Rolly. He’d been nervous about fronting up at a new school and was currently out at Steve’s place, at Vermont.

‘He said he’ll see you at dinnertime,’ Cheryl said. ‘Take him out somewhere nice, Freddy.’

Freddy ate a frozen dinner, lasagne, alone – or with his phone. Cheryl wasn’t answering, and nor was Steve’s mother, with whom he’d left three messages.

Eight o’clock before she called back. ‘Steve said that they’re meeting a couple of girls at Forest Hill then going to a movie,’ Steve’s mother said – and if she believed her son, she was a bigger fool than he’d previously believed her to be. It was all he had to go on though, and at eight thirty, Freddy left the Ferrari at risk in the top-level car park at Forest Hill. The theatres were on the top level.

He had a look around there. No sign of Rolland or his ratbag mate. He looked at the list of films playing. There were a couple that a bunch of sixteen-year-old kids might consider cool. He walked out and glanced at Vegas, and his heart started its palpitating dance. Every time he thought about that night it started dancing.

They had his DNA in their data bank. He’d sweated that night, he’d cried, puked, worn the skin off his hands in gouging a hole deep enough, long enough to bury that girl – and it hadn’t been deep enough. He only had to see a woman wearing yellow and his pulse lost its rhythm. And it hadn’t been his fault. He’d had a few drinks, but not enough to affect his driving. He hadn’t been speeding. She’d run out of nowhere, had run into him, and now his DNA was with that of his deadbeat brother in the national data bank’s computers – and he needed a drink so he bought one.

Vegas had balcony tables which offered a view of who went in and who came out of the theatres. Freddy chose a seat that also allowed him to look down on the escalators where he’d see Rolland and his rat pack, either coming or going.