‘Forget about eyes in the back of your head, kid,’ he’d say, tucking a shallot back into his folded pancake. ‘Grow some on the sides as well.’
He was a family man. He was well respected. He had collared a murderer by successfully proving that the seeds found on the accused’s trousers came from only one plant, at a certain time of year, which just happened to be minding its business and growing heartily not far from the body of the victim.
That prosecution had earned him kudos, and a reputation for being what kids today might call a nerd. And nerds were dangerous in a police force. They usually had smarts. And smarts were unpredictable.
Obe knew where the bodies were buried. Knew who was crooked and who was straight. Who was connected to whom. He understood the lingo. The little tests of character other officers threw at me, the newbie. He had the radar of a bat. Nothing, and I mean nothing, avoided his attention.
So I was schooled up when he allegedly killed himself. And I had a theory, too. Hubert Dunkle Senior would never take his own life. Hubert Dunkle Senior was murdered, in a police lavatory, in the heart of a major police complex, in a place reserved for the most private human business of police officers. Hubert Dunkle Senior was slain by another police officer.
I knew who the killer was, too. I was a damn detective, wasn’t I? It took me years of close listening, and a few lucky breaks when a piece of the puzzle here and another there fell into my lap. But in the end I knew who killed Obe and why. And just knowing that gave my daily life as a New South Wales police officer a certain degree of tension.
A lot, actually. A hell of a lot.
So I did what Obe trained me to do. I watched my back. I did everything by the book. I never breathed a word to anyone and I never took a misstep. If I did, I knew I’d join Obe on the dishonourable list of depressed officers who couldn’t cut it, who couldn’t make it, who took the coward’s way out.
I progressed through the ranks. I never had definitive proof of who murdered Obe. You rarely get that inside the police machine. For all its energies, its sole focus is towards the big, bad world outside. But sometimes your gut tells you something and you know it’s right. Good gut instinct maketh a good copper.
I kept an eye on my suspect throughout my career. I watched him rise, saw the pictures of him with the commissioner, and him as deputy. He was the model officer.
I went to his retirement party. Stood at the back of the room at Dick’s Hotel in Balmain and watched them shower him with praise. I slipped out before I had to shake his hand.
When he too died, an old man on a sweet pension, I wished him luck in hell.
And now I went to the locked entrance of the storage facility and let myself in. I took the huge lift to the first floor.
I found cage 143 and checked the padlock and bolt with my pocket torch. It was pristine. Unscathed.
Removing the padlock, I entered the cage.
I hadn’t been here in a year. I didn’t like storage cages. They were the unkempt corner of the cage renter’s mind; that little part of ourselves we try hard to ignore. It was dusty in there. A sheet was still draped over a rusting fan on a stand. Old garden tools were stacked in the corner. The book boxes were at the far end.
I stood and looked at the boxes. If my police diary for 1972 was missing from the small number I’d souvenired and stacked in one of those boxes, then someone had been in here and lifted it. If the diary was still there, then the one in my pocket was a fake. It certainly didn’t look like a fake.
But who in their right mind would counterfeit such a thing? And for what purpose?
I rubbed my hands together. ‘Okay, 1972,’ I said to myself. ‘Here we come.’
Then someone said ‘Oi’ behind me, and it echoed through Ali Baba’s, and as I turned the cold metal scoop of a shovel caught me flush in the face.
~ * ~
5
When I came to in the police holding cell, having been walloped with a garden spade and had my nose substantially rearranged, I had a hazy vision of a John Travolta-like figure circa Saturday Night Fever standing beyond the bars.
The apparition was tall, wearing flared trousers, and a nylon and largely unbuttoned duckbill-collared shirt revealing enough chest hair to make winter blankets for an entire village in Uzbekistan.
‘Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive,’ I said to the ghost.
I had a large white bandaged affixed to the centre of my face. I thought I could feel my nose hairs tickling my left ear.
‘You got bail,’ Travolta said, ‘but the boys in blue want a little word before you go.’
‘It must be the night fever,’ I garbled.
‘Coffee? We need to talk first.’
‘How deep is your love? Got any aspirin, by the way?’
My discotheque angel was no vision. He was Johnny K. Tapas, the Gold Coast’s pre-eminent celebrity lawyer. If you were suing plastic surgeons, seeking damages after scoffing a dodgy oyster in a glamorous Broadbeach restaurant, or defending yourself in a murder case that involved, for example, a yacht full of cocaine, a diamond-encrusted handgun, a transsexual cabaret performer called Lady Bump and a small and impossibly spoiled pet Shih Tzu named Moopie, then Johnny K. Tapas was your man.
‘Big night under the mirror ball?’ I asked him after I’d drained a mug of instant.
‘I suggest you avoid mirrors for a while,’ Tapas said.
‘What’s the charge? Breaking and entering my own storage facility?’
‘Impeding a murder investigation. Tampering with a crime scene.’
‘Bit low rent for you, Tapas. What’s in it for you?’
‘A former client has requested I take very good care of you.’
‘That so?’ I said. ‘Why would Ivan the Terrible, Russian computer fraudster and playboy, or Donger, dubiously moustachioed captain of the Bandoleros motorcycle gang, give a fig about me?’
‘Wrong clients.’
‘Cut the twaddle, Tapas. Who is it?’
‘Confidential. Condition of my services.’
‘That so?’
‘That’s so.’
‘You’re a terrible tease, Tapas.’
Later, in the interview room, with the fragrant Tapas by my side, the coppers apologised for turning me into a Picasso portrait with the spade to the face.
They explained that they knew I’d been in Junior’s apartment the night before and had followed me to the Ali Baba storage facility on suspicion of having removed an exhibit from the scene. I was then observed transporting the exhibit to a storage cage in the aforementioned facility, and the officer had attempted to prevent me secreting the aforementioned evidence. They said the aforementioned officer, noting my antecedents as a former police officer and, in more recent times, my involvement in well-publicised incidents that involved various levels of violence, took the necessary measures to ensure the aforementioned evidence was not secreted and that I was delivered into custody.