How Not To Commit Murder - comedy crime - humorous mystery (40 page)

‘It’s not a joke! He was beside me, he’s got a gun!’

A woman screamed again. Was it the same one? He looked around for Jug-ears then someone put him in a headlock. His trousers felt damp. Surely he hadn’t peed himself? He looked down at the pool of beer lapping at his feet. Wayne’s beer had splashed him on the way down.

The buzz of conversation heightened to fever pitch. Two pairs of uniformed legs appeared in front of him. His ‘headlocker’ released him and the security guards yanked his arms behind his back.

‘Did you get the guy with the gun?’ Reuben shouted at them.

‘Calm down, mate,’ one of the guards said.

‘What did he look like?’ the other said.

‘He was in an evening suit!’

‘Listen, wise guy...’

The guard wrenched his arms even harder.

‘He was bald, with sticking-out ears!’

‘All right, mate, we’re onto it,’ the first guard said. They exchanged ‘
we’ve got a crazy one here’
looks. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’

They marched him out of the room, the crowd moving aside to give them a wide berth.

‘Disgusting behaviour,’ rang out an older female voice. ‘And in this hotel!’

Reuben kept his eyes to the front. Kojak at the reception desk shook his head as if to say ‘I knew he’d be trouble’.

‘Have the police been called?’ Reuben asked the first guard who seemed slightly less brutish than the other.

‘They’re on their way.’

‘Thank God.’

CHAPTER 31

‘Wallet. Keys. Watch.’

The prison officer handed him the plastic bag. Reuben signed the forms to acknowledge he’d received them.

‘See you next time.’

‘There won’t be a next time,’ Reuben said.

The officer gave a sardonic grin. ‘Isn’t that what you said last time?’

How would you know, you prick, you weren’t even here last time.
The officer saw them come in and go out through the revolving door of so-called rehabilitation. They were all the same to him.

Outside the entrance Reuben kept walking and didn’t look back. It was a good five kilometres to the railway station, but it was a bright, clear-skied February day and he had until four-thirty to present himself, back at the parole office.

He thought about the last time he’d been released from prison, sitting beside Carlene in her car, his hand on her thigh, feeling as if he’d burst out of his skin with joy. The world was magic, the future exciting – he saw it in the trees and sky and buildings, heard it in voices and laughter and music, inhaled it with every breath of sweet, clean air and felt it in every pore of his skin.

Only seven months ago. Another lifetime. Now he was trying to find some equilibrium between self-pity and despair. He was homeless, wifeless and jobless with thirty dollars in his wallet. He didn’t know for sure about the ‘jobless,’ but not turning up to work for a month without explanation was usually sufficient reason to be fired. Every day, he’d told himself it was worth being arrested and charged with assault, and spending twenty-eight days in prison for beaching his parole, to have saved Lucy’s life. But for once, he couldn’t convince himself.

In the end it had all worked out pretty much to plan. As the two grim-faced cops escorted him handcuffed into the lift and out of the Grand Plaza Hotel into the crowd-filled night, he’d blurted out a garbled account of Operation Luce End.

‘Get over there right away, she could be there any minute! King George Square car park. Level 6 row E.’

The cops bundled him into the back seat of a waiting police car. ‘Good onya, mate! Happy New Year!’ someone yelled. The older cop got in beside him.

‘That’s a good story. Ten out of ten for originality.’

‘I’m not making it up!’ Reuben’s voice squeaked with desperation. ‘My wife took my phone, so I borrowed one then Jug-ears took it and had a gun at my back, so I had no alternative but to hit Wayne, so you guys would come and I could report it.’

The cop looked at him, the cynicism of too many years in the job etched on his face.

‘Look, charge me with assault, I don’t care. Just get someone out to that car park, or you’ll have a murder on your hands.’

‘We’ll be charging you with assault all right,’ the driver said. His mate took out a mobile phone. ‘Sir, it’s Sergeant Bolen here. Got a joker by the name of Reuben Littlejohn; we’re bringing him in for assault. He says there’s been a bomb planted in a car at King George Square car park. Belongs to his parole officer Lucy Prentice.’

He listened for a few moments. ‘Okay, sir, will do.’

He rang off and gave Reuben a hard stare. ‘If this is a hoax, you’ll be charged with more than assault.’

‘It’s real, all right.’

A thought occurred to Reuben. What if Frank or Bomber, for some reason, had decided at the last minute not to go through with it? And the bomb squad, especially mobilised for this task, found nothing? Hoax calls incurred thousands of dollars in fines, maybe a jail sentence. He broke out in a sweat.
Please, please, let Bomber have
planted the bomb
.
Just make sure the cops get there on time.

At the city police station, Reuben was processed and taken to a cell in the watchhouse. He’d been sitting on his bunk for a few minutes when a police officer unlocked his cell door. Sergeant Bolen and his offsider entered and stood in front of him.

‘Who are you in cahoots with, Littlejohn?’ Sergeant Bolen said.

‘I told you I’m not in cahoots with anybody. Frank blackmailed me into helping him, but there was no way I was really going to kill her. If I were, I would hardly have warned you about it. And I’m not answering any more questions until I see my solicitor.’

There was no point calling his solicitor at this time on New Year’s Eve, but hopefully he could persuade Andrew to spare him some time the next day.

‘You’re sure no one else knew about it apart from you and Frank Cornell, and Bomber?’

‘No comment.’

‘We received a call a few minutes ago,’ the other police officer said. ‘Warning us about a bomb planted in a car park.’

Thommo. He was the only other person who knew.

‘We were hoping you could shed some light on it,’ Sergeant Bolen said. ‘He wanted to remain anonymous. Said you would know all the details.’

They were watching him closely. He shook his head. ‘No comment.’

He didn’t want to implicate Thommo if he could help it – he’d wait for legal advice. He realised with a sick feeling that the police didn’t believe his assertion that Frank had blackmailed him – he could have had a grudge against Lucy as well and wanted her dead. It was only one criminal’s word against another. But why would he tell the police? Perhaps they thought he had a last minute attack of conscience, or that he’d had a falling out with Frank and Bomber and ratted on them to cover his own backside. If he was found guilty of conspiracy to murder, he could say goodbye to the next twenty years.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

‘Have they found the bomb?’ He couldn’t help asking even though he knew they wouldn’t tell him.

The other officer looked at him impassively. ‘Can’t tell you, mate.’

They left, the cell door clanging behind them. So Thommo who had reneged on his promise not to call the police had probably called from a pub somewhere in Sydney, pissed and not making much sense. But he’d done it to save Reuben’s life – and Lucy’s. Reuben felt a deep longing to be there with him – drinking, telling nonsensical jokes and exchanging bravado about women. He tossed and turned on his unyielding bunk, trying not to think about the possibility that the bomb squad hadn’t got to the car park before Lucy. But visions of exploding metal and flying body parts filled his mind. Amongst the stink of mildew and stale urine, and the yells and raucous laughter echoing from the other cells, the New Year crawled in.

Reuben’s solicitor, Andrew McLeod, turned up the next day. He’d acted for Reuben in his previous court case and his youthful appearance and guileless air fooled criminals and magistrates alike, until he stood up in court and opened his mouth. He looked a little less youthful and guileless at ten o’clock on New Year’s Day, presumably due to the excesses of the previous night.

With Andrew present, Reuben was formally charged with assault and gave his account of Operation Luce End to the detectives from the CIB. They tried in a dozen different ways to force him to admit he’d taken part in the operation voluntarily, and even suggested that he’d masterminded it. They were stonewalled each time by Andrew’s objections. But Reuben had one small victory – although the detectives refused to divulge if Bomber and Frank had been arrested, they did admit that Ms Prentice was perfectly well and in one piece. He was so light-headed with relief he almost floated off his plastic chair.

***

An engine roared up behind him then slowed down. ‘Want a lift, mate?’ a voice yelled above the chugging of the motor.

A bronzed, rough-hewn face grinned at him from the window of a battered ute, a tattooed arm resting on the window. Reuben hesitated, touched by the offer, but wasn’t in the mood for company.

‘Thanks but I’ll keep walking.’

‘No worries. Have a good life.’

He sped away in a cloud of dust. Have a good life? It wasn’t until Reuben boarded the train at Wacol that he realised they were kind words from a stranger, to a man trudging along a lonely road two kilometres away from a prison.

As factories, warehouses and drab shacks in weed-choked yards slid past him, his mind churned over the events of the past month. One of the few good outcomes was that although he hadn’t yet been sentenced for the assault charge, Andrew was confident he wouldn’t get another jail sentence. ‘Because this is your first offence of this nature, I’m tipping a large fine,’ he said cheerfully, ‘or if you get a hardline magistrate, a suspended sentence at the worst.’

There’d been one other positive result. Frank Cornell had been arrested – eventually. Two weeks after Reuben’s arrest, Andrew visited him in prison.

‘Thought you might like to know our friend has been charged with trafficking, quite a nice little haul of cocaine. The police went to his house to interview him about the car bomb, got hold of his mobile phone, or one of them, and found all the coded messages. A couple of prominent property developers involved as well.’ He shook his head. ‘Some people just don’t learn.’

‘Did they charge him with planning the bombing? Conspiracy to murder, or whatever it’s called?’

‘He denied all knowledge of course, and the police haven’t found any evidence to link him to it. Apart from your statement, of course, which in itself is not enough to charge him. By the time they got to the car park, the bomb was already planted and your mate Bomber, aka Stuart Rickman, had flown the coop. I suspect he’s sunning himself on a beach at Rio as we speak, up to his eyeballs in fancy drinks and bare breasts.’

So Bomber’s retirement plan had evolved as planned. If only one of his exotic floozies would get sick of him and poison his Tequila Sunrise. Or a renegade cop track him down and put a bullet through his head. Fat chance. That only happened in movies.

Jug-ears had escaped as well. The security guards did a token search of the premises but by then he had well and truly flown the coop. He’d probably slipped quietly out the emergency exit during the commotion of Reuben’s attack on Wayne. And he’d scored the Pastor’s phone. Reuben hoped he’d feel the full force of God’s wrath for such an uncharitable act.

‘So where’s Frank now?’ he asked.

‘In prison.’

Andrew grinned at Reuben’s expression. ‘Not here; in remand. He’s also breached his parole, so he won’t be granted bail. In fact, he won’t be going anywhere for a very long time, so you can sleep easy when you get out.’

And of course there was the fact that Lucy hadn’t been blown up. But in the process of saving her life, his life had gone to shit. A life for a life. Maybe he could have made it as a medieval knight after all.

He got off the train at Central Station, bought a hotdog and Coke and fronted up to Centrelink, where he filled out the necessary paperwork and received his release from prison payment. It was two o’clock. His parole appointment was the next priority then finding a place to stay. Carlene had given up the lease on their house and moved in with Nancy and Alec.

He got off the bus a few doors up from the parole office. Not wanting to pass Joe’s cafe, and risk Nina or Joe seeing him, he crossed the road, walked along the street for half a block then crossed the road again, approaching the building from the opposite direction.

Life went on around him as if he’d never been away, but somehow it was different. Then it struck him – the world wasn’t different, it was him. He wasn’t a part of it, he was in the audience watching himself play the starring role in a movie – one of those bleak modern movies that didn’t have much of a plot, where the main character stumbled from one disaster to another and when it ended, left you wanting to kill yourself. Or him.

He trudged up the stairs to the parole office. ‘Back again.’ He handed the receptionist his discharge papers.

She looked at him with an expression that said she had no idea he’d been away and it had nothing to do with her. He took a seat in the waiting room, occupied only by a girl with a buzz cut and three nose piercings. She jiggled her foot and scratched at the sores on her arms.

Reuben thought back to the last time he’d seen Lucy. Three weeks ago today, in fact. When the prison officer poked his head into Reuben’s cell and said, ‘You’ve got a visitor, Littlejohn, your parole officer,’ he almost fell off his bunk.

As the officer escorted him to the visiting room, a niggle of apprehension suppressed his initial flutter of anticipation. It wasn’t standard practice for parole officers to visit offenders in jail, so it obviously wasn’t a social visit. He hoped it wasn’t to reprimand him for breaching his parole, or worse, to tell him his parole had been cancelled and he would have to serve the remaining four years of it in prison. A deep chill numbed him and he was aware only of the brisk, rhythmic clip of the officer’s shoes on the concrete.