Sucked In (23 page)

‘Merv wasn't going to look a gift like that in the mouth. He showed the bankbooks to Charlie and Barry. Quietly, in confidence, and out of deep concern for their reputations.'

‘Mexican stand-off.'

Bishop nodded again. ‘That's what the meeting at the Shack was supposed to be about. Cutting a deal that accommodated all parties. They'd get the dossier, we'd get the bankbooks. Merv would sign off on the amalgamation, Gilpin would get some fuck-off money. But once Merv had the bankbooks in his hand, he didn't need Gilpin anymore. When Charlie picked him up at his office on the Friday night, he'd sent Gilpin off on some fool's errand. The two of them left without him. But Sid must have realised that Merv was cutting him out of the loop and barrelled after them in a blue streak. If the cops hadn't picked him up for driving over the limit, the whole thing would've played out very differently.'

I knew that wasn't the real reason Gilpin had been left behind. Charlie obviously wasn't going to stick around and put himself in the position of having to explain why Merv was prostrate on the shagpile with his dick hanging out and a hole in the back of his head.

‘If Merv had the bankbooks,' I said. ‘How did Gilpin get them back?'

‘He pinched them.'

Jesus, if this got any more complex, I'd need a degree in nuclear physics to follow it. And if it got any longer, I'd catch pneumonia. I shivered and shook myself, hinting that we should move inside. Bishop continued, oblivious. Fucking fresh-air nut.

‘Barry took the books off Merv when he was non-compos and tossed them in his briefcase. They were just sitting there in plain view when Gilpin made his dash into the Shack to use the phone. He was only inside a few seconds, but it was long enough to take a quick shufti and grab them. We discovered what he'd done almost immediately, of course. But there was a lot going on by then, and bigger matters at stake.'

‘You didn't try to get them back later?' I said.

‘That would only have complicated matters. Gilpin cleaned out the accounts and made himself scarce. We wrote off the money and let sleeping dogs lie.'

It started to drizzle. I flicked my cigarette butt in the general direction of the casino and we hurried inside. Staff were stacking the seating and dismantling the dais. We headed into a quiet corner, our voices hushed.

‘The sleeping dog kept the passbooks,' I said. ‘He's picked up that the police suspect things are a bit iffy in the manner of Merv's death. He's threatening to send the books their way, just to stir things up. Unless, of course, somebody makes him a better offer.'

‘He's crazy,' said Bishop. ‘Their threat value is twenty years past its use-by date.'

‘He's crazy all right,' I said. ‘Certifiable. But you and Barry illegally disposed of a body and perjured yourselves at an inquest. Not a good look for men in your current positions. And your story's already springing leaks, otherwise I wouldn't be here.'

Bishop stroked his fungus and gave it some thought. ‘Does Quinlan know about this?'

‘He will as soon as I tell him,' I said.

‘Don't use the phone,' said Bishop. ‘Barry was very clear on that point.'

‘He's a very wise man,' I said. ‘By the way, did the police show you a picture of a watch?'

‘Yes,' he nodded. ‘What's that all about?'

‘Buggered if I know,' I said.

For want of a better idea, I decided to put in an appearance at my place of work.

As I was walking into the vestibule, Alan Metcalfe emerged from the direction of the Legislative Assembly at the pointy end of a flying wedge of frontbenchers. Daryl Keels of the Right, Ken Crouch of the Left, deputy Peter Thorsen and a small phalanx of spear-carriers.

Metcalfe gave me a curt, magisterial nod as they swept past. Without breaking stride, Thorsen reached into his jacket and handed me an envelope.

‘Good timing, Murray,' he said, tipping me a jovial there-you-go wink. ‘That letter you wanted, re the constituent matter.'

‘Good on you, Peter,' I said, pocketing his treasonous pledge as we each continued on our way.

It was one of those moments that makes politics a sport worth playing.

After an hour or so of dutiful paperwork at my desk in the Henhouse, I adjourned to the carpark and thence to the Safeway in Smith Street, Collingwood, which lay exactly twixt House and home.

Out of respect for the street's heritage status, the Victorian-era façade of the supermarket building had been retained. Its windows empty, it stood attached to the front of the strip-lit modern grocery emporium like the plywood set from a Western movie. I drove up the ramp to the rooftop carpark, then walked though the cluster of buskers and ferals sheltering in the entranceway.

One of them stepped into my path, cold-sores on her lips and track marks on the backs of her bony hands. ‘'Scuse me, mate,' she started up. ‘You couldn't help me could you, 'cause I've lost me train ticket to Frankston and…'

‘Forget Frankston,' I poured my loose change into her palm, all three dollars of it. ‘Get yourself a hit.'

The supermarket was busy with home-bound shoppers and desperate singles cruising for a pick-up. Toilet paper, breakfast cereal, tea-bags. I browsed the condoms.

Lanie still hadn't called. Don't get your boxers in a knot, I told myself. It's only Monday. Give it time.

The classic plain ones, I decided. Ribbed might look a bit kinky.

In the meat section, I phoned Red to check on his whereabouts and discuss ongoing menu issues. He was home hitting the books. Did I have any thoughts on the consequences of the French Revolution?

‘Too early to tell,' I said. ‘How does spaghetti bolognese sound?'

He made a slurping noise. I took it for a yes, loaded up on mince and joined the line at the register. All the check-out chicks were Vietnamese students and all the bag-boys were Ethiopian. While I waited in line, I tried to imagine the results if they ever had children together. Long distance runners with doctorates in chemical engineering? Very tall restaurant owners?

‘Proice check on gwuckermoley?' bellowed the Oriental pearl at the register, unequivocally true-blue.

I humped the groceries to the car, shuffled home through the drizzly rush-hour and conscripted Red into the unpacking. ‘Mothballs?' he said, emptying the cleaners and chemicals bag.

‘No thanks. They give me heartburn. Let's stick with the spag bog.'

Spaghetti bolognese was the bedrock of Red's culinary repertoire. He browned some mince, added a jumbo jar of tomato puree and phoned a friend while he stirred. I took the mothballs into my den of antiquity and hauled my archive boxes down off the top shelf.

I'd got there just in time. As I levered the lid off the first cardboard carton, a startled silverfish slithered back into the haphazard pile of documents that filled the box. I reached in and removed the contents. A fine powder of insect-droppings had accumulated in the crevices at the bottom. Not a whiff remained of the naphthalene flakes I'd scattered there only three or four years earlier.

Dropping a handful of mothballs into the box, I began replacing the pages, scanning them as I went. This was the archaeological record of my life and times, the hieroglyphs of a vanished civilisation, intelligible only to the expert eye. Why I'd saved this stuff in the first place, and why I continued to store it, was a mystery to baffle the Sphinx. Here were my initials, scratched with a stick in the sands of time. Or, in the instance to hand, scribbled in biro on the menu of the 1972 Young Labor Conference dinner.

In total, the evidence of my passage filled two and three-quarter pop-up Ikea storage boxes. A Politics 201 essay on Checks and Balances in the Australian Constitution. A diatribe addressed to the editor of
Rabelais
, the student newspaper at La Trobe University. The notification letter of my acceptance as a graduate trainee in the Commonwealth public service.

The papers were stored in no particular order. Cataloguing them could wait, something to occupy my sunset years at the Old Apparatchiks Home. Only occasionally did I pause between mothballs to peruse a memory. A staff photo from the Labour Resource Centre, Wendy beside me, her belly big with the imminent Red. A well-received position paper I'd written in 1980 on the untapped potential of co-operative credit agencies. All the vanished dreams of social democracy were mouldering in my boxes, snacks for the weevils. Sic transit Jack Mundey.

Half-way through the second box I found what I was looking for. The cheap newsprint had faded to a parchment yellow and the creases were permanent, but the silverfish hadn't yet done their worst. The eight issues of the
Federated
Union of Municipal Employees News
that I had edited, probably the only copies still in existence. I knelt on the floor and carefully turned the pages.

Charlie's photograph appeared at the top of his monthly reports as Victorian State Secretary. The same photo every time, a simple passport-sized head-shot. He was somewhere in his early forties at the time, slightly younger than I was now. His face had aged over the years, but it hadn't really changed.

There was a magnifying glass among the oddments in my top drawer. I switched on the desk lamp and took a closer look. The eyes, crescents of old ink in a genial teddy-bear visage, contradicted nothing I thought I knew about the man.

Something about the story of that morning at Lake Nillahcootie was nagging at me. Something didn't quite gel. I could accept the fact that Charlie had hauled Merv Cutlett's limp form into his car and driven him, semicomatose, to the Shack. His judgment was clouded by his concern for Margot and he had obviously misread the seriousness of Merv's injury. The disposal of the body, too, had its desperate logic.

But Charlie jumping into the water? It was an unnecessary embellishment. The man-overboard story didn't need it. Not only that, it smacked of self-aggrandisement. Not Charlie's style. Something else had happened out there in the boat, I was sure of it. A piece of the jigsaw was missing.

I leafed through the pages, scanning the other photographs. Most were of Merv Cutlett. Merv the Great Leader and Merv at Work, stern-faced defender of the working class behind his redoubt of logs-of-claim and keys-of-access. I found Charlie again, one of the figures in the background of Merv Shares a Laugh.
Annual Picnic December 1977
, read the caption.

The crowd basking in the great one's presence included Sid Gilpin. He was wearing a wide-collared short-sleeved sports shirt, the top buttons open to better display the medallion around his neck. His left arm was draped around one of the skylarking crew. On his left wrist was a chunky metal band.

My heart skipped a beat. Could it be a watch, I wondered? A Seiko Sports Chronometer, as seen in the Polaroids that Detective Constable Robbie Stromboli had shown me at my electorate office? I put my nose to the lens and squinted at the blurry monochromatic image. Sid's jewellery was a name bracelet. I couldn't read the engraving, but I knew what it said.
Wanker
.

‘Grub's up!'

Red banged a spoon on a saucepan lid. The dinner gong had sounded.

We tucked into our pasta with gusto, washing it down with orange cordial. Beer and wine were only for shelf-stacking nights. Not that Red's day hadn't been busy. Monday was his heaviest timetable and there'd been post-school toil over a hot assignment, due within the week. Unusually, Theatre Studies was giving him the pip.

‘Motherfucking Courage,' he complained through a forkful of saucy tagliatelle. ‘Brecht.'

His school had a reputation for liberality, giving it a roomy niche among the progressive element in Melbourne's middle class. To offset parental qualms about elitism, its curriculum offered Marxist agitprop along with interschool rowing and the international baccalaureate. But Red found Bertolt far too preachy, especially when he was expected to turn in a six-hundred-word essay on the cigar-chomping old Stalinist's dramaturgical critique of bourgeois ethics.

‘Give me Lorca any day,' he said, mopping his plate with a crust.

‘They didn't have any,' I said. ‘You'll have to settle for Yoplait.'

‘Not Jean-Louis Yoplait, founder of the Comédie Française?'

‘Apricot Yoplait, his temptingly luscious mistress.'

After we'd eaten, Red returned to his homework. I took a half bottle of sav blanc into my den and hit the phone. First I called Margot and made reassuring noises. She sounded washed out, but she didn't put up a fight.

Next I rang Mike Kyriakis. Both his home and mobile numbers were engaged. I had a few sips and tried again. And again.

He was working the phones too. So far, so good.

I put everything but the
FUME News
back in the archive boxes, added the last of the moths' knackers and stowed them away again. Then I reclined on the couch, wine in hand, and contemplated the situation.

The proper, responsible course of action was obvious. Wait until the remains were officially identified. If the police continued to regard the death as a possible homicide, try to persuade Margot and the others to appraise them of the true circumstances.

It would be the best thing for all concerned. Given the passage of time, the police might well decide not to pursue the matter further. Even if they did, they'd probably have a hard time convincing the Director of Public Prosecutions they could make the charges stick. The physical evidence was questionable and sworn admissions were unlikely to be forthcoming. In the meantime, I should butt out and stop making promises I had no idea how to keep.

But I wasn't going to do that, was I? Not while mad, bad Sid still had those fucking bankbooks.

The phone rang. It was Helen Wright.

‘We've just sent out a press release for Mike Kyriakis, alerting the media to his intention to run for Coolaroo,' she said. ‘And you remember that kid there on Sunday, the young tyro sitting on the floor? Well, he spent the whole day tooling around the electorate with the membership lists. Seems there's a lot more party members on the books than on the ground. Unless some of them are living six to a room, the Right has been padding the books. Heavily. We're running up a hit list for the returning officer. If the central panel wasn't stitched up so tight, we'd actually have a real chance.'