‘You asked him to secure the washroom straight after my father was shot,’ Junior said firmly.
‘Yes.’
‘You heard the shot, and you ran straight for the toilet doors which were precisely 7.7 metres from your desk in the office just across the hall.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where did you run into Greaves before you found my father’s body?’
The room spun around. My head felt like exploding. I grabbed it with both hands.
And when the tear-gas cartridge smashed through the sliding glass doors of the room and disgorged its pitiful load, and the room door exploded in shards of cheap timber, it couldn’t have better reflected my inner turmoil.
~ * ~
10
They were only after one thing, of course, and they took it.
After a SWAT team the size of the Bolivian army raided our hotel room, and I slipped off the couch in shock and — would you believe it? — smashed my other temple against the corner of the coffee table, and when the tear gas had disappeared, The Good Murder Guide, volume four, had predictably vanished.
They played tough guys with me and Junior and his son, zip-locked our wrists, made a show of checking through every cupboard and drawer of the hotel room, then apologised. There had been a terrible mistake, they said. They’d had a tip-off about some drug dealers. Sorry for the inconvenience. Then they were gone. And so was the book.
Junior’s son bandaged my freshly damaged temple. Now I had taped bandages on both temples, and the flattened bugle. I looked like an old koala.
‘We’d better go now,’ Junior’s son said.
‘I’d like a lie down,’ I said. I was tired of all this cops-and-robbers stuff. And I was dreading explaining to Peg my new cranial decorations.
‘Their first objective was to secure the guide,’ he said. ‘Who knows what they have planned for phase two.’
‘There’s a phase two?’ I said. There were tears in my voice.
‘Best to be prepared and assume that there is.’
‘I agree,’ Junior said.
The goddam Dunkles and their unceasing meticulous nature.
‘I need a Scotch,’ I said.
Within the hour we were in another hotel room, over by the old Botanic Gardens. I would have gone home, but there was one part of the story I needed to know. This whole adventure had been like a forty-year-long movie. How could I walk out before the ending?
‘Here,’ Junior said, handing me a Johnny Walker on ice.
‘Bless you, my son,’ I said.
‘You want to know about Greaves.’
‘You read my mind.’
He, too, poured himself a drink. It looked odd in his hand. He was not a drinker, and people who didn’t drink held their booze in a different way to those of us who did. Delicately. Cautiously. Like a sweaty stick of gelignite that just might detonate. He took a small sip.
‘Six months before my father was killed, he was having a drink at the London Hotel in Balmain with a small-time petty thief,’ Junior said. ‘Like any decent detective he maintained his contacts on the ground, as you know. ‘
‘Who was it?’
‘Willie Hamm.’
‘The Hammer. I remember him.’
‘Anyway, Hamm had a few too many schooners and the next thing you know he’s gabbling on about a burglary he’d done a few weeks before in nearby Rozelle. Said he’d lifted a bunch of stuff, including an old book full of dates and names and mugshots and money columns.’
‘The guide?’
‘He’d unwittingly broken into the home of Inspector Norman Greaves, father of young detective Don Greaves, your desk buddy at headquarters.’
‘A troubling example of poor judgement. Sounds like Hamm. ‘
‘Word got out that Big Daddy Greaves’ place had been hit, and it finally reached Hamm, and he quietly and anonymously returned the goods. A week after his booze-up in the London Hotel with my father, Hammer was dead.’
‘That was six months before Obe’s murder, you say?’ I reached back into my memory, beyond my two swollen temples. ‘That’s about when Don Greaves came to work for us.’
It was getting dark outside. I could see, beyond the window, a little clutch of yachts moored alongside the long, dark avenue of Hoop pines in the gardens. Bats stitched across the sky.
‘That’s when my father started investigating the existence of the guide. The Greaveses, of course, were one of the five families that had controlled it since the twenties.’
‘I didn’t have a clue what was going on, did I?’
‘You were young,’ Junior said. ‘And my father was only just starting to fit the pieces of the puzzle together when he was shot dead that day.’
‘Greaves,’ I said, shaking my head.
‘You have to remember, the guide, by the late sixties, was now quite substantive, and the men it implicated in crime and corruption were now in the highest ranks of the force.’
‘But why did they keep on with it?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t they just abandon it, destroy it, get on with life without it?’
Junior took another sip of Scotch, and revealed a modest smile.
‘Simple,’ he said. ‘Good, old-fashioned power. The mere existence of the book, and its long and deep pedigree, gave those five families incredible cache. More importantly, it generated fear. And that fear grew with each generation. To this day, its exposure could bring down police forces in two states.’
‘So you found Greaves.’
‘He was the last man standing in the wake of four decades of research,’ Junior said. ‘It was Greaves. He killed my father to protect his own father, to maintain the security of the guide. You had never considered your desk buddy as a suspect because to you he was a nothing — an incompetent, a man who, to you, barely existed.’
I lowered my head. I knew he was right.
‘I found him in a private room in a nursing home at the back of Coolangatta,’ Junior went on. ‘He had become what you already knew as a young man — a man who barely existed.’
‘He’s not that old, is he?’ I asked.
‘Emphysema,’ he said.
‘The Craven As,’ I said, nodding at the floor.
‘He was sitting in a chair by the bed,’ Junior went on. ‘He was rigged up to breathing apparatus. There was a book on the floor beside him.’
‘Volume four of the guide.’
‘Greaves’ own son had brought it in the day before. We took surveillance pictures. Why? Maybe to let a dying old man reminisce, to lose himself in better days. I sat opposite him in that room and waited for him to wake up. I studied that face and foul open mouth for maybe twenty minutes. This useless waste of space had taken my daddy from me. I could have killed him with my bare hands.’