Next stop, headquarters.
Twenty-six
Wyatt had gone looking for Frank Jardine first, on the premise that even a trusted friend, a child, or a nun in a habit could do him harm. If it had been Jardine who’d sent the hired gun to the cafй in the hills, Wyatt was prepared to kill him.
But it hadn’t been Jardine. Instead, Wyatt found the grieving, angry sister, who talked about a visitor, about a stranger who’d literally frightened Jardine to death. All Wyatt could do now to find the man behind all this was backtrack the Tiffany, see what names he came up with. He grieved a little, felt a twinge of guilt, gave the twenty-five thousand dollars to Nettie, and flew to Sydney.
He didn’t tackle Cassandra Wintergreen at her house, knowing how spooked she’d be there after the burglary. Using information supplied in Jardine’s original briefing notes, he staked out her electoral office, half a groundfloor shop, ‘Cassandra Wintergreen, Member for Broughton’ in a broad, thick-lettered arc across the window glass. Between it and the other ground-floor tenant, a Radio Shack outlet, was a foyer sealed from the street by sliding glass doors.
He waited until late afternoon, went in, looked at the list of tenants: five floors of accountants, dentists, osteopaths and firms with names like Allied Exports Inc.
He looked at his watch: 5.45 p.m. According to Jardine’s notes, the nightwatchman would be locking the sliding doors at six-thirty, and Wintergreen always worked late and would let herself out-small pieces of knowledge, but Wyatt and Jardine had built all of their jobs on an accumulation of small details. Wyatt crossed to the stairwell, climbed to the fourth level, found a men’s room and prepared to wait.
After the groundwork there was always the waiting- for Wyatt a kind of self-hypnosis in which his senses registered only the essentiaclass="underline" the foreseeable dangers, the wild cards, the variables, the job at hand. He knew how to let part of himself disengage while the other part remained wound tight and watchful. He knew how to sit, rest his limbs, and still keep a part of his mind sufficiently stimulated to stop himself from shutting down.
Not that his tooth would have let him drift into sleep. He’d swallowed painkillers and had others in his pocket. According to the pharmacist at the airport, they wouldn’t make him feel drowsy, but, just in case, he’d also swallowed a five-grain, heart-shaped Benzedrine. Now he was on edge a little, but he figured that was better than the searing pain in the rotting stump of his tooth.
At six-forty-five Wyatt turned off the power to the ground floor, let himself in the rear passageway door to Cassandra Wintergreen’s suite, and went straight to the inner office. Wintergreen, fiddling with the light bulb on her desk lamp, looked up, startled, mouth opening to cry out.
Wyatt clamped his hard, dry palm over her mouth. ‘I won’t hurt you, I want information,’ he said softly, staring fixedly at her until something in him convinced her to nod and go slack.
He removed his hand.
‘About what?’ she asked.
‘The Tiffany butterfly stashed with your fifty thousand.’
She jerked against him. She smelt musty, stale with old perfume. ‘You lousy bastard. Give it back. It was a gift, great sentimental value. And it might interest you to know that that money represents the hard work of my constituents, a downpayment for a shelter for-’
There was only one way to reach a mind like hers. He slapped her left and right and told her that he didn’t have the time or the patience for this. ‘You are bent,’ he said slowly, his face close to hers. “The Tiffany was stolen from a Melbourne bank in February and there’s no way you can account for it legitimately. Your only choice is to tell me who gave it to you. If you don’t, I’ll hurt you and later tell the media where the kickback came from. Someone will listen.’
He knew that much about how her world worked. He watched her, saw the rapid calculations behind her eyes, still caked with mascara, and finally learned about De Lisle’s apartment in Woollahra, his house on the northern New South Wales coast, his yacht, his work in Fiji and Vanuatu.
Twenty-seven
After leaving Nettie Jardine, Liz drove back to her flat in Parkville. 3LO had the Emerald shooting on their four o’clock update. She locked the car and took the Elizabeth Street tram to headquarters, staring out at Daimaru on one side, then the Vic Market on the other. It came down to one thing: who knew she was meeting Wyatt? Pardoe at the insurance company, but he didn’t know where or when-unless he’d had a tail on her for the past few days. And why do that if it meant he’d risk losing the Tiffany?
Wyatt and Jardine, but it was clear that they’d had nothing to do with the shooter.
Her skin began to creep. That left someone she worked with in the Armed Robbers. They were often asked to advise on security in banks and building societies.
Superintendent Montgomery? Somehow she couldn’t see it. He’d moved to Burglary from Traffic and was dotty about his grandkids. It was with a great deal of reluctance that he sanctioned undercover work, its grey areas, the necessarily blind-eye approach. He would have been entirely happy for his officers to pull in a series of small fish, not hang out for the big ones.
Her creeping flesh would not let her alone. How could she go to Montgomery with her suspicions? She’d shot a man dead and left the scene without reporting it or declaring who she was. Even soft Grandpa Montgomery wouldn’t save her from the toecutters once he knew that. She’d be stripped of all rank, suspended, maybe face charges. It wouldn’t help that the man she’d shot was probably a hired gun, a potential cop killer. She’d killed him and fled the scene, and that just wasn’t on.
She mused about the risks involved in this job. There was always plenty to bring you down when you worked deep cover, submerged in a role for weeks at a time. Liz had known young male cops to confuse their roles, get hooked and start sleeping with the women who were always on the fringe of the drug scene, even fall in love with them.
Alcohol. It always flowed freely when crims were putting a deal together.
Money. Pocket a bit on the sly? Tell the Department’s paper pushers that your buy money got lost between the crime scene and the evidence safe, blew away in the wind, got unaccountably soaked in blood?
And the danger itself, getting your kicks out of walking a knife edge day after day after night.
And there were plenty of other risks beyond your controclass="underline" cover blown by a corrupt colleague, cover blown by an incompetent colleague, cover blown by little old ladies who, recognising you, inquired after your mother and asked why you weren’t in uniform today.
Liz stepped down from the tram and dodged blatting horns to cross the lanes of traffic and enter the police complex at the top end of the city. She made her way to Homicide, waited for Ellie Shaw to catch her eye, then mouthed: ‘Coffee?’
Ellie was looking harassed. She glanced worriedly at her watch, the clock on the wall. The detectives around her were doing a lot of murmuring into telephones. They looked harassed, too.
‘It will have to be quick,’ Ellie said, joining her in the corridor. ‘We’ve got a real flap on this afternoon.’
They took the elevator to the cafeteria. Liz paid for coffees and danish and for a vivid moment pictured Wyatt, his hawkish face and his dismay when his tooth fell out.
‘You do look a bit tense. What kind of flap?’
Ellie leaned forward. ‘That shooting in the hills.’
Well, this was falling into her lap. Liz said casually, ‘What about it?’
Ellie leaned forward. ‘It was a cop.’
Liz froze, believing her friend was saying that a cop had done the shooting. Her voice caught: ‘How do you know?’
‘We ran the guy’s prints. Lo and behold, he’s known to the police, only not as a crim, as a cop. Can you believe it?’
It wasn’t difficult for Liz to say wow and widen her eyes. ‘What was he doing there?’