Dead Point

38

He was standing with his back against the counter, a depleted beer in his right hand: a big man in a dark rumpled suit watching two stringy young men playing pool.

‘Where’d you get the tan?’ I said.

‘Holidays, mate. Private-school boys wouldn’t understand. Life’s all play to you.’

‘I’m close to played out.’ I found my beer behind him and had a deep drink. Cooper’s. ‘What taskforce did you draw?’

‘Street dealers. War on street dealers. Finished our task, mate, it’s a fucken indoor activity.’

‘That’s when you form a taskforce to drive them onto the streets again.’

‘Exactly. We’re like the tides. Move shit in and out.’ He drank half his glass, burped, a full-blooded burp. ‘I reckon they should give McDonald’s the franchise to sell drugs. Quality control, clean premises, collect fucking GST. Plus the junkies get a burger with every hit, keep em healthy. McSmack.’

‘Leaving you and your colleagues free to drive around at high speeds and shoot people.’

‘Yeah. That and the relationship counselling, role modelling.’ He eyed me. ‘Down in the weights. Dying or a new girlfriend?’

‘Exercise, strict diet.’

‘Dying then. On the subject, this query of yours. Mick Olsen. Why are you always fucking around with dangerous things?’

One of the pool players wore a bandanna, the other a cap backwards. Bandanna man was going for an impossibly acute angle. We watched. It wasn’t impossible after all.

‘Fuuuck,’ said his opponent.

‘The person’s a cop,’ I said. ‘Cops are only supposed to be dangerous to wrongdoers.’

Barry turned his head, had no trouble finding the barmaid’s eyes where she stood talking to a fat man in a Bombers beanie and scarf. She tossed her head. The light from the west window spangled off the rings and stones in her nose and ears and eyebrows.

‘Mick’s a cop in history,’ Barry said. ‘Resigned a while ago. Now a man of leisure. But dangerous still. You don’t even want to know his name.’

‘Why?’

‘Drug squad. Policing where the shit interfaces with the fans, if you get my meaning.’

‘Just the melody.’

‘Here ya go.’ The multi-pierced one put two new beers on the counter. I paid.

‘I say again, dangerous is the word,’ said Barry. He was intent on the pool players. Bandanna man was sighting down the length of the table, trying to pot one of three balls in a cluster.

‘This bloke’s fucken ambitious,’ said Barry.

Bandanna picked the nominee out of the group, thudded it into the corner pocket.

‘Shit,’ said Barry, impassive, appreciative. ‘Man with the golden stick.’

‘This Olsen,’ I said. Mick Olsen had picked up messages from Alan Bergh left with the lovely Kirstin Deane at her minimally stocked boutique.

‘The Commissioner’s enema. Just the name’s a suppository. And there’s blokes in the squad want him dead, they say.’ He drank. ‘Anyhow, Mick’s highly deadly, shouldn’t speak ill of him.’

‘The name Alan Bergh mean anything?’

Barry looked at me briefly, probed a tooth with his tongue, shook his head, went back to watching the pool.

‘Bergh made calls to Olsen’s girlfriend. To be passed on, I gather.’

‘Jack, Mick’s in the drug business. Get lots of messages. It’s a message business.’

‘What’s made him history?’

‘Done the Feds like a dinner. Unbelievable fuck-up.’

‘Coke jackets?’ The case before Mr Justice Loder.

He looked at me, a full look, shook his head in a sad way. ‘Jack, I don’t know. You had a profession. I looked up to you.’

‘Did you really?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Tell me about Olsen,’ I said.

Barry drank some beer.

I drank some. I was starting to like the taste. I put my glass down, pushed it away. Just a few centimetres away. The symbolic distance between the me who would once have knocked back this beer and then woken up somewhere strange with a full beard, and the me now.

‘A bloke called Ross set it up,’ said Barry. ‘Conned the Feds he’s got Mr Big on the line, the man’s placed a trial order. A controlled delivery scam. Very stylish, made the Canberra boys look like absolute cunts.’

Bandanna’s opponent played a two-cushion shot that sank a ball.

‘Jeez, luck,’ said Barry. ‘These two cunts were supposed to lead to a Mr Big, like you get to the big-time by being such an arsehead that the delivery boys can take the Feds to you.’

‘Where’s Olsen come in?’

Barry put a hand into his jacket and, without taking out the packet, found a cigarette. He lit it with a plastic lighter, coughed, calmed his throat with a long drink of beer. ‘The talk is that Olsen’s the brains. He’s a smart fella. Nearly finished law at Monash.’

‘That’s not a sign of smartness,’ I said. ‘He got what out of this business?’

‘Well,’ Barry said, looking around the room, ‘it appears the Feds helped the boys bring in more stuff than the two Ks they find on them, so the extra’s what Mick got out. Between the airport and the handover, that vanished.’

‘How do they know that?’

Barry shrugged. ‘Apparently they heard from the supply end. After. Over here, these Fed dickheads just took it on trust what the boys were carrying. Couldn’t have a look in Perth, open their cases. It was on the pricks, in these jackets, world’s heaviest fucken ski jackets, must’ve hung down to their knees.’

‘Where’d Olsen’s excess go?’

‘On-sold quick-smart you’d imagine. Same night. But that’d be a contract.’

He finished his beer, wiped his lips with a thumb. ‘Got to go, sweep some of Mick’s stuff off the fucken streets.’

‘There’s a small thing,’ I said.

‘Oh yeah.’

‘I need to find out who identified a body.’

‘Fuck, Jack, you’re a nuisance.’

‘Your day will come.’

‘I doubt that very fucken much. Shoulda been a crook. Chose the wrong end of the fucken stick. What body’s this?’

I told him, watched him leave. The pool players watched him too. They knew a cop when they saw one. Then they looked at me. I looked back. They found other things to look at.