The Big Drop Page 7

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘Our ears’re open, but there’s nothing yet. What’ve you got?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Cliff, leave it alone. It’s bound to be sticky. Do a few compo investigations, do a few arsons. Leave it alone.’

  I grunted non-committedly and hung up.

  In prison, men talk about escaping all the time. They talk about escapes that succeeded and those that didn’t. They pool the knowledge, share the wisdom—the result is that they all do the same things when they’re on the run and they mostly get caught. They talk endlessly about cars, which is one of the mistakes. Did you ever hear of anyone being apprehended in a taxi or a train? They steal cars and drive them in the dumb way they do everything else and they might as well be carrying a sandwich board—ESCAPEE AT LARGE.

  Kevin was hooked on Volvos; he claimed they were safe, but no car was safe with Kevin at the wheel. Time was when a Volvo in Glebe would have stood out like a camel on Bondi beach, but that’s all changed. Even so, it didn’t hurt to cruise a few of Kevin’s haunts—the gym off Derwent Street, the card room under the Greek restaurant in St John’s Road, the Forest Lodge video outlet where Kev and the girls sometimes made their own movies—just in case there was a Volvo around that didn’t belong. There wasn’t, but it filled in the time until I could go looking for Dave Follan at the Glebe Grenadier.

  The Grenadier is the sort of pub the Vicar warned you about—it smells of smoke and spilt beer and a good time. It used to serve counter lunches that would stop a wharfie but they cut them down when the weight-conscious professionals moved in. But there’s a bus stop outside, a TAB next door, no stairs to the pisser—nothing will ever drive the old-timers from the Grenadier.

  I ordered a beer and looked around for the pub’s social secretary—the man or woman who would know everyone who came and went and the colour of their socks. He was leaning his belly against the bar and watching the pool players. People slapped him on the shoulder as they passed and he greeted them by name without even looking at them. He was the man. I eased up to him with money in my hand ready to order.

  ‘Good pub,’ I said.

  ‘Usta be, too many bloody trendies now.’

  The clientele looked pretty solidly working class to me, but I respected his judgement.

  ‘Dave Follan’s a regular here, isn’t he? He’s no trendy, Dave.’

  ‘Need more of him.’ He finished his schooner and I gave the barman the signal as soon as his glass hit the bar. I finished too and ordered a middy. He lit a cigarette in the small space between drinks.

  ‘Ta.’ he sipped. ‘You a mate of Dave’s?’ He looked at me properly for the first time; his eyes were lost in the beer fat and his small mouth was overhung by a whispy ginger moustache. He wore no particular expression and it was impossible to guess at his thoughts.

  ‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t happen to know if he’s coming in tonight, would you?’

  He reached over the bar and poured the rest of the schooner into the slops tray. When he turned back to me he was holding the empty glass like a weapon. ‘I would happen to know. I’m Follan, and I don’t know you from Adam, mate. What the fuck d’you want?’

  After the Hardy foot, I thought, try the Hardy charm. I grinned at him. ‘Let me buy you a beer, I got off on the wrong foot then.’

  He wasn’t having any. ‘You certainly did. What’s your game?’

  ‘Cathy told me you gave her the nod about Kevin’s break.’

  ‘Cathy should keep her bloody trap shut, then.’

  ‘She’s worried about Kevin, just wants to know he’s okay.’

  Follan’s piggy eyes drifted along the bar to the right and left of us; it looked as if he could measure earshot to within an inch. He sucked froth from his empty glass and somehow I knew it was to oil a lie. ‘I dunno any more than what I told Cathy. I got the word from a bloke who was just out. Kevin told him to look me up. I gave it to Cathy word for word and that’s all I know.’

  ‘I could be lying about Cathy, I could be a cop.’

  He signalled for more beer. ‘Who gives a shit? I dunno where Kevin is.’

  ‘That’s a good safe story you’ve got.’

  ‘It’s true, too. Piss off.’

  I downed my drink and walked away; before I left the bar I turned and looked back. Follan was jiggling his change like a man about to make a phone call. I walked up the street and moved my car to a point where I could see the pub door, but was hidden behind three or four cars. I was hungry and the two quick middies felt like a gallon on my empty stomach. A taxi pulled up immediately outside the bar door and Follan took three steps across the pavement and got in. ‘If you drink, don’t drive’—an honest citizen observing the law? Not likely; I U-turned dangerously and followed the taxi.

  After fifteen years in the business of doing for people what they can’t do for themselves, I thought nothing a human being did could surprise me. Follan proved me wrong; I thought he’d head for some Ultimo or Chippendale boarding house, or another pub, but the taxi drove to the Bellevue Hotel. Follan got out and waddled into the foyer as if he belonged there. I couldn’t park and I didn’t fancy hanging around behind aspidistras in the lobby anyway. I drove home, had a sandwich and some wine and sat out behind the house looking at the big city glow and smelling the big city smells. They jangle some people; they soothe me.

  Dave Follan looked at me sullenly. I’d followed him from the Grenadier the next day to his flat in Avon Street, Glebe. I’d bailed him up as soon as he turned the key, pushed him in, and tried to impress him with my seriousness as much as with the .38. But I wasn’t sure it was working. He sat on an overstuffed, floral covered chair and looked belligerent. The flat was fussily decorated and arranged but the arrangements were fraying and breaking down as if the woman who’d set them up was no longer around. Fat Dave Follan looked incongruous amid the floral prints and china, but he didn’t seem to know it.

  ‘You won’t use that bloody thing,’ he growled. ‘I’m just sittin’ here wondering where to hit you.’

  ‘It could come to that,’ I said evenly. ‘After we spoke the other day you made a phone call and then you went to the Bellevue. I want to know why.’

  ‘You know what you can do.’

  I took off my jacket and put the gun in the pocket, dropped the jacket over a chair. ‘You’re fat and I’ve got ten years on you. You’ll get hurt and we’ll break things. You really want to do it this way?’

  ‘Yes.’ He came up out of the chair heavily but not too slow. He expected his bulk to help but it didn’t. He swung at me, I moved aside and he nearly lost balance.

  ‘You’ve had a few too many as well, Dave. Don’t push it.’

  He swore and drove a pretty good punch straight at me. I took it on the shoulder moving back. He was slow to recover and I put my bunched right hand in his face, fingers near the eyes and the heel on the nose and pushed hard. He grunted and went down.

  ‘This is silly,’ I said. ‘But if that’s the way you want it, okay. I’ll fix you up here, go to the Bellevue, find out what room you went to, give it a call and throw your name in. Be interesting to see what pops up.’

  That got to him. The beer courage and the bully drained out of him. He got up slowly and eased onto the couch; his flesh spread and settled as he let it take his weight. That left him with the weight on his mind.

  ‘Don’t do that. Jesus, don’t do that.’

  I picked my jacket off the chair and sat down. ‘Well, you can see where we are, Dave. You have to tell me why you’re so scared.’

  ‘I’m a dead man if I bloody do,’ he muttered.

  ‘It’s up to you, maybe I can keep you out of it. I could try. D’you have any choice?’

  He shook his head. ‘Wish the missus was here; I could do with a cuppa.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Dead. Month back.’

  ‘Get on with it, Dave.’

  His cigarettes had fallen on the floor and he
reached down for them; the effort brought the blood back to his face, and I watched him scramble and wheeze until he had one lit. ‘Big job on, of course. Interstate money.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘North. Kevin and the others are gonna do it. Cost money to get ‘em out.’

  ‘Why them?’

  ‘It’s a fuckin’ cowboy job, that’s why. You’d have to be bloody desperate to try it. They’ll have other guns on ’em while they re doin’ it. I picked that up by accident, wasn’t supposed to.’

  ‘Where and what?’

  He sucked on his cigarette and let the smoke out slowly. ‘I don’t know, that’s the truth.’

  He could have been lying, it was impossible to say; he was going to lie at some point, I was sure of that.

  ‘Why the message to Cathy?’

  ‘That was a blind; Kevin reckoned she’d get a car and get some dough together. The cops’d watch her and he could stay outa sight—keep clear of her.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  That was all I’d get from him, I knew. We were manoeuvring each other; he’d said enough to make it not worthwhile for me to blow him to his principals; but if the worst happened and he had to front them he could claim he hadn’t sung the whole song. They might leave him a toe.

  I pulled on my jacket and shoved the gun in under my arm. ‘I’ve got you by the balls, Dave. I can drop you in it with the cops or the other side. You know that?’

  He nodded. ‘Why would you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t need a reason. Last thing—give me the number at the Bellevue. That’s it, just three little words.’

  ‘Five oh six.’

  ‘I thank you. You’re on your own now, Dave. You’d better play it by ear.’

  If you’ve got the room number, fifty dollars will get you the name of any hotel resident in the city. Room 506 at the Bellevue was occupied by a Mr Carpenter of Southport. My informant, who arranged transport for the guests and did a stint on the desk, threw in for free a physical description and that Mr Carpenter would be leaving the hotel at 10 a.m. the following day. He was new at the job—he could have negotiated that into another twenty.

  The example of Dave Follan turned me off drinking for the night. I went to a film that tried to make me cry; it didn’t, but it could have. I walked up through Hyde Park to Darlinghurst to drink coffee worth walking that far for. The blocking of the streets has caused the girls to move to William Street where they seemed to be crowding each other a little. In Darlinghurst you do it in a terrace bedroom rather than the back seat of a car, but it’s the same thing. I thought about Cathy who made calls and went out to dinner more these days, but that’s the same too.

  Ten o’clock found me illegally parked and alert outside the Bellevue Hotel. Carpenter was easy to spot—a beefy, florid guy wearing a beige safari suit that might have cost five hundred bucks but still looked like a rag. He put two sizable suitcases into a new Falcon wagon and we were off. My ancient Falcon followed the new model like a discarded bull trying to keep up with the new leader of the herd.

  The drive wasn’t far and wasn’t scenic. The Falcon pulled up outside a blighted-looking terrace house in Enmore on the Newtown side. It was as un-neighbourly a house as you’ll see around there—on a corner, with an empty factory next door and the railway across the street. The house was a grimy, crumbling hulk, but it had one big advantage—you could get away from it in at least four different directions, and one route, by the tunnel under the railway, would take care of a pursuing car.

  One of the plusses for my car is that it can look abandoned. I sat in it, hunched down, about four houses and two rusty galvanised iron fences away and watched the house. Two kids who should have been at school wandered past and looked incuriously at me. A dog helped things along by pissing casually against the front wheel, rubbing himself briefly on the tyre and ambling off. After a while a car pulled up outside the house, two men alighted and went inside. Pretty soon they all came out: Carpenter, the two new arrivals and three other men, one of whom was Kevin Kearney.

  Kevin had grown a beard, lost weight and dyed his hair three shades darker, but his cocky walk, compensating for the fact that he was only five foot six, and the aggressive set of his shoulders was unmistakable. The party split up between the wagon and the car with Kevin riding separately from Carpenter. I had a moment’s worry, but it passed—the cars followed the same route.

  We drove in convoy to Five Dock. They pulled up within sight of the Great Western Highway intersection at a place where the canal goes under the road and there is a wide dividing strip and big grassy stretches on either side of the road. Houses are few and back where the priorities of highway and park have pushed them. I drove on and took a turn after the canal so that I could come back on the other side of the water and watch the group safely from pretty close quarters. The two parties coalesced, then split again. Carpenter and Kearney went towards the highway; Carpenter looked to be talking fast. The others broke into two pairs and moved around on opposite sides of the road. The two men who’d arrived later in Enmore went up a grassy bank to a high point above the road. A concrete bridge crossed another loop of the canal up there and they stood by it, looking down at the road and Kevin’s two mates who smoked, glanced up and down the road and looked anxious.

  Carpenter and Kearney joined them and Kevin did some nodding. Where they stood was a collection of yellow and black striped council gear—uprights, reflector lamps, long wooden bars—just the stuff for traffic diversion and road blocking. Carpenter turned and looked at the two by the bridge and Kevin’s eyes followed his.

  The two hill climbers came back down, the smokers stamped out their butts and everyone climbed aboard again for the ride back to Enmore. Carpenter’s car peeled off and headed towards the city but Kevin and his mates were delivered safely home just as the westbound 12.45 rattled past their front door.

  I was pushing my luck by trailing the other pair once they’d deposited the fugitives, but I risked it. They drove to Annandale and disappeared into a trucking yard. The sign on the fence said that interstate and international freight was handled there. The curious thing was that I had a sense of having picked up a tail myself on this run. I tested the feeling around an Annandale block or two, but I was either wrong or it dropped off. It was something else to think about on the way back to Glebe for a late lunch and a very late drink.

  Some of it wasn’t hard to understand. The job was a hi-jack with no honour among thieves. Kevin and the boys were going to be under surveillance; Carpenter was putting up the money. Three things were unknown: what the cargo was, why Follan had called it a ‘cowboy’ operation and why Kevin hadn’t been in touch with Cathy. She wasn’t green; she would probably have driven the prime mover for Kevin if he’d asked her. The biggest question of all was—what was I going to do about it?

  The first move was to get in touch with Kevin, and I didn’t fancy doing that by driving up to the door. I sent him a telegram—to the name Kevin Vincent at the address in Enmore. I asked him to phone me and to keep everything under his hat; Kevin’d like that—there was an old-fashioned streak in him. His call came at a bit after five.

  ‘Haven’t seen you for a bit, Cliff. Have you still got all your hair, boy?’

  ‘Yes, Kevin. And your phoney brogue’s as bad as ever. But I’ll play along—why do you ask?’

  ‘Because you’ve got a lot to keep under your own bloody hat and I wondered if there’d be the room, like?’

  ‘Knock it off, Kevin. You’re about to do something very silly.’

  ‘What would you know about it?’

  I thought about telling him but decided against it; Kevin was inclined to be irrational when he was angry. ‘It stands to reason. You’ve got a job lined up.’

  ‘How’d you get on to me?’

  ‘A whisper. Cathy asked me to look for you. She’s worried and she’s got good cause. She says she’ll wait for you to serve the five or six.’

>   The laugh that came across the line wasn’t the old feckless Kevin laugh. It was harsh and bitter, and had not a shred of amusement in it. A prison laugh, maybe.

  ‘Wait? Cathy? Her idea of waitin’s to only be taking on one at a time.’

  I didn’t say anything; I was more interested in listening.

  ‘Well, Cliff,’ he said. ‘You can tell her I’m in the pink . . . shut up!’ I heard a short laugh and a scuffling sound, then Kevin went on in a steady voice. ‘And I’ll be in touch soon. She’s not to worry.’

  ‘Oh yeah, great! She’ll eat that up, Kevin. That’ll fix everything.’

  ‘Soon means soon.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  Jesus, I thought, it’s tonight.

  ‘Now, Cliff, you just get yourself a bottle of something good and settle down for a quiet night with your books. You hear me, Cliff? Get nosey and you’re history. Got it?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He rang off, and I sat there holding the phone and thinking it had been one of the least productive conversations of my life. The three unknowns were still unknown and I still didn’t know what I was going to do. I phoned Cathy, couldn’t get her and chased her unsuccessfully through four telephone numbers, leaving urgent messages for her to call me.

  The temptation to do as Kevin suggested, hit the bottle, was immense but I fought it. I had one big Scotch and left it at that. I spoiled some eggs trying to make an omelette of them, ate the mess and felt bad. Towards the back of my brain a voice was telling me to call Frank Parker, but I kept getting a picture of Kevin with his beard and dyed hair and I couldn’t do it.

  When the call came I nearly hurdled a chair to snatch up the phone. It was Cathy; she told me to wait until she came over, which would be in about an hour. She sounded steady and she didn’t want to hear anything I had to say.

  It was after ten when she arrived—in a black velvet jacket and white silk pants. Her face was unnaturally pale and her eyes were over-dilated and bright. She had a bottle of Black Label Scotch with her and she invited me to pour her a big one before she draped herself on the couch in my living room. She lit a cigarette and stubbed it out straightaway, as if she didn’t want to obliterate the odour of sex that clung to her. She drank some Scotch and arched up her shoulders and wriggled.