Dead Point

28

I drove home in drizzle, tail-lights turning the puddles to blood, listening to Linda on the radio taking calls on Victorians’ gambling habits. The daylight was gone before I found my mooring beneath the trees.

Upstairs, I put on the kitchen radio to hear a man say:… accept that the state’s now on a gambling revenue drip and raise the tax till the bastards scream.

Linda: You’re saying gambling’s a fact of life, so get the most public benefit out of it?

Caller: Exactly. And this Cannon Ridge casino, the Cundall casino, slug it. Playground for the rich, double the bloody gambling tax.

Linda: Thank you, Nathan of Glen Iris. Now there’s a challenging point of view, even if the logic may be slightly fuzzy. What’s your view, Leanne of Frankston?

Leanne: Linda. I’m a compulsive gambler, I’ve had treatment…

Enough. She would ring or she wouldn’t. It was probably better if she didn’t. We could meet from time to time as friends. Old friends. We’d made a good start at that.

Had she rubbed her left leg against my right? Not a rub, but a linger. A touch and then a linger.

How old did you have to be before this kind of rubbish stopped?

I got a fire going, bugger cleaning the grate. Everything was dirty in my life, why worry about a pile of soft, clean ashes?

Now, a drink. I looked in the cupboard. Campari and soda, Linda’s end-of-day drink, the bottles not touched since Linda. I poured a stiff one, settled on the couch to think. The phone rang.

‘No doubt,’ said Drew, ‘I find you poring over your footy memorabilia, sniffing old Fitzroy socks, marvelling at the size of your antecedents’ jockstraps, lovingly preserved.’

‘Large in their day but dwarfed by those to come,’ I said. ‘I gather you’ve found a form of happiness with some unfortunate.’

Tell me that it is not Rosa, please.

He sighed. ‘To find joy and to share it, that is life’s purpose. You probably have no idea who said that.’

‘No. Let me have a stab. You.’

‘Spot on. Anyway, you can’t dwarf a jockstrap.’

‘The courts will decide what you can and cannot do with a jockstrap. Who?’

‘A corporate lawyer. International experience. Top-tier firm, I might add. With a personal trainer.’

I gave silent thanks. ‘Trains her to do what? Find 48 billable hours in the day? Render the simple incomprehensible? Conspire with the other side to shake their clients down?’

I could imagine the pained Drew look.

‘Slander your fellow servants of the law if you will,’ he said. ‘This delightful creature has been slumbering, awaiting the kiss of an awakener.’

‘Slumbering? Form?’

‘Unraced.’

‘Age?’

‘I’m not filling in an application here.’

‘I’ll put it to you again.’

‘The thirties. Thirty-five, six. Thereabouts, I suppose.’

‘That’s quite a slumber. How did this happen?’

‘Her secretary was in a bit of strife. Vanessa came along to give the poor woman moral support. You’ll have noticed the effect a commanding physical presence, razor-sharp intellect, and professional brilliance can have on women.’

‘I have. How’d you get Vanessa to notice you?’

‘I can feel waves of jealousy passing through this instrument.’

‘I hope you’re talking about the phone. You got the secretary off?’

Drew sighed. ‘Actually, no. Could’ve been worse though.’

‘Moving away from your erotic fantasies,’ I said, ‘as a man of affairs, does the name Alan Bergh mean anything?’

‘It does.’

‘Tell me.’

‘An employers’ secret agent, Mr Bergh. Years ago, when the unions could still get up a decent strike. Before a Labor government broke the Builders’ Labourers.’

‘Does everyone except me know that?’

‘Unusually, no. Bergh planted thugs in marches, demos, the blokes at the back who lob the first unopened can of VB at the cops, that sort of thing.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Appeared for one of his thugs. You were on sabbatical then.’

He was saying that this was in the time, the long time, when I was drunk, half-drunk, getting drunk again, after my wife Isabel’s murder.

‘The client told you?’

‘We were pleading guilty, mate, as befits people shown on television poking what looks like an electric cattle prod up a police horse’s bum. A former racehorse. With not unpredictable consequences.’

‘Took off at great speed?’

‘No. Reared and endangered lives, jockey fell off.’

‘Surprising. Given a touch of the jigger, your race-horse generally shows a bit of toe, leaves the field behind. That’s the idea of jigging them. So the client told you about Bergh?’

‘Not him. Another bloke came in. An extremely dubious character. I got the impression that he’d hired my client and was a bit worried about what I’d do in court. I didn’t want to discuss the matter with him, so he said, listen, just don’t do anything that’ll piss off Alan Bergh.’

‘And?’

‘Over a cheering glass with the labour aristocracy down at the John Curtin, I asked about Bergh. The word was that he did jobs for employers. The nasty work. Not still in business, is he?’

‘He’s in some business. Haven’t worked out what it is yet.’

I was still trying to work it out in the last moments before sleep. I tried to find a thread in everything I knew about Robbie/Marco. Hopeless. It wasn’t a fabric, it was a heap. And now there was a sophisticated attempt to blackmail a judge of the Supreme Court sitting in a drug importation case.

Marco was murdered. He was being watched, and then he was murdered. The supplier of the surveillance clips knew that and wanted me to know that. Milan Filipovic hadn’t thought it likely that Marco had stuck a too-potent needle in his arm.

‘Needle’s a big fucken surprise to me,’ he’d said.

But Detective Sergeant Warren Bowman said the dead man had needle tracks.

Alan Bergh and the woman in the car belonging to a Sydney high-flier. How did they fit into Marco’s life and death?

Sleep claimed me, troubled sleep, full of strange places, peopled with strangers.