Pay Dirt

FOURTEEN

Letterman watched as Pedersen came out of his house and got into a Range Rover. The Range Rover looked new. He started the Fairmont, ready to follow Pedersen. He was reminded of the job a security firm had offered him when he was dismissed from the force. They wanted his detective skills, they said. They’d pull strings and get him licensed as a private investigator, and he’d start on $700 a week. The money was okay, but the work wasn’t. Letterman knew about private investigators. They went into the game thinking they were Spensers or Cliff Hardys but soon went sour from boredom. Being a PI meant living in a car and working half a dozen cases at once-tailing wives and husbands, checking credit and employment records, drinking thermos coffee while workers’ compensation claimants ran around on tennis courts, maybe getting out of the car sometimes to guard an exhibition of furs in David Jones. Stuff that for a joke.

The Range Rover’s rear lights came on, the right one brighter and whiter than the left. Letterman had been tailing Pedersen for two days now. On the first day, when Pedersen stopped at a TAB to place a bet, he’d broken the brake light lens with a stone. He hadn’t known then if Pedersen would go out at night or not, but if he did, the broken light would make him easier to tail.

Pedersen pulled away from the kerb. Letterman waited half a minute then pulled out after him. On Nicholson Street, where the traffic was heavier, he settled in two car lengths behind the Range Rover, keeping the bright tail-light in view.

So far today had been a repeat of yesterday. Pedersen had slept until lunch-time, spent the afternoon going to TABs, a pub and a brothel, taken Red Rooster chicken home for dinner, and gone out again at eight o’clock. Last night Pedersen had driven to King Street in the city. Letterman had watched him park the Range Rover illegally, put on a black leather jacket ten years out of date, and try to get into one of the clubs. He’d been refused admission there and at another club a few doors along. Letterman saw him gesture angrily at the bouncers in each place. All the bouncers that Letterman had ever known were ex-crims with records for violence, so Pedersen had been lucky not to have his head kicked in. Not that Letterman blamed the bouncers. Pedersen didn’t look right. He had a prison pallor, a jumpy manner, bad taste in clothes. And he looked almost middle-aged, too old for the King Street clubs.

Tonight was different. Tonight Pedersen drove to a pub in Fitzroy. It had a blackboard on the footpath advertising mud wrestling. That sounds about right, Letterman thought, watching Pedersen park illegally again and go in.

Letterman didn’t follow straight away. He switched off the engine and turned the radio to a talk show on Radio National. With any luck he’d hear that some poofter had jabbed the New South Wales Police Commissioner with a syringe.

Later Letterman turned on the interior light and scribbled in his notebook. He had a complete record of all Pedersen’s movements over the past two days, and they added up to one thing, in his view- Pedersen was still living off the proceeds of the job he’d pulled with Wyatt six weeks ago, the job that had wrecked the Outfit’s Melbourne operations.

He also had telephoto shots of Pedersen going in and out of pubs, TABs and a brothel called Fanny Adams. He’d used up a whole roll of film and had it developed at a one-hour place, the sort of place that has a high turnover and no curiosity. Some of the photos would go to the Outfit. They demanded before and after shots of all contract hits. But the photos were also groundwork. Letterman liked to make a study of his targets before he hit them. He intended to hit Pedersen at home-he hadn’t decided how, yet-but if something went wrong and he couldn’t manage it, he’d go through the photos again and familiarise himself with Pedersen’s other haunts. He hoped it wouldn’t come to a hit in the open. The Outfit stipulated that in getting rid of loose ends like Pedersen he should attract as little attention as possible.

He turned off the interior light again, locked the Fairmont and crossed the road. He loosened his tie and untucked an edge of his shirt front before he entered the pub. He spotted Pedersen immediately, without appearing to look at him. The mud wrestling had just finished and the air carried a pungent layer of sexual hate and bitterness beneath the smoke, noise and splashed beer. Pedersen himself looked jittery and frustrated. Rather than front up to the bar, Letterman grabbed an abandoned glass with an inch of beer in it and slumped like a regular at a corner table. He didn’t look directly at Pedersen. He didn’t look directly at anything other than the floor. He kept Pedersen in his peripheral range. The Pedersens of this world, Letterman thought, can smell cop, even ex-cop, the instant they make eye contact.

Letterman stayed there for an hour. He ordered a glass of beer from a passing topless waitress at one point and endured another mud-wrestling match. A live band played between shows. Someone seemed to be selling speed and Buddha sticks.

Then Pedersen got ready to go. It looked like being an extended departure- he was clapping the shoulders of other drinkers who’d been ignoring him all evening-so Letterman left first. He crossed the road, got into his car, and settled a hat on his head. It probably wasn’t necessary, but he didn’t want Pedersen puzzling about where he’d seen the bald man in the Fairmont before.

As Letterman watched, Pedersen crossed the road unsteadily, U-turned in front of a tram, and sped north with a faint tyre squeal. Letterman waited for the traffic to ease, then followed him. Pedersen cut through to Nicholson Street and went north along it. He’d been drinking heavily and it showed in his driving. Just my luck, Letterman thought, if he gets pulled over for drunken driving. He lost Pedersen at Brunswick Road when Pedersen ran a red light, but it didn’t matter, Pedersen was going home.

Letterman got to Pedersen’s house in Brunswick in time to see the Range Rover’s rear lights go off. He pocketed a Polaroid camera, got out and ran silently across the road and behind the Range Rover. It was a narrow street, dark, and Pedersen didn’t hear him coming. When Pedersen let himself into his house, Letterman pushed in behind him. He pushed the door closed, hearing the lock click home, and took out his knife.

Pedersen spun around, then flattened his back to the wall in shock. His breath was beery. Letterman raised the knife and touched the blade tip under Pedersen’s jaw, watching with interest the gulping motions in Pedersen’s throat. He said softly, ‘Maxie.’

Max Pedersen gulped again. ‘Who are you?’

‘You don’t want to know that, Max,’ Letterman said. He used Pedersen’s first name deliberately. It gave him an extra advantage over Pedersen, who didn’t even have a last name to call him.

For the next two minutes Letterman said nothing. Instead, he put his head on one side and then the other, turning the blade tip under Pedersen’s jaw. The hall light flashed on the steel.

The silence began to work. It always did. ‘What do you want?’ Pedersen asked. ‘Just tell me and I’ll do it. You want money? I got some in my wallet.’

Still Letterman said nothing. He would let the silence do its job, then fire the hard questions so they hit like punches.

He shouted the first one. ‘Where is he?’

Pedersen winced. ‘Who?’

Letterman said nothing. He waited, then asked softly, ‘Where is he?’

‘Who? I don’t know who you mean.’

Almost a caressing whisper this time: ‘Where is he?’

‘Who?’ Pedersen pleaded. ‘Only I live here. Who do you want?’

Letterman stood back at arm’s length and nicked Pedersen’s neck with the blade. When he spoke it was bleak and fast: ‘Wyatt.’

Pedersen’s hand went up and came away with blood on it. He looked at it and then at Letterman, as if the world was spinning too fast for him. ‘Wyatt?’

Ideally Letterman would have another man helping with the questioning, one to hurt the subject where it wouldn’t show, the other to offer a way out of the fear and pain. ‘Where is he?’ he repeated.

‘Wyatt doesn’t live here,’ Pedersen replied. ‘This is my place.’

Letterman was gentle and smiling again, but the knife was beginning to make a Crosshatch of nicks on Pedersen’s neck. ‘I know that. I want to know where he is.’

‘I haven’t seen him for weeks,’ whined Pedersen.

This was clearly the truth. Letterman had known it all along really, but still, he greeted it with total disbelief, another move that usually got results. ‘Bullshit! You’re working with him again.’

‘No, promise, no,’ Pedersen protested. He was close to tears. ‘I swear I haven’t seen him. He got in strife and cleared out and no one’s seen him.’

‘Let’s say I believe you. I don’t, but for argument’s sake, let’s say I do. If he cleared off, where would he go? Has he got some bird stashed away somewhere? Does he like to poke little boys in Manila? Maybe he’s got an old mum over in Perth or something?’

Pedersen began to get his courage back. This maniac didn’t want him, had nothing against him. ‘I hardly know the bloke. He keeps to himself. One or two big jobs a year, then he drops out of sight again.’

Letterman smiled again and let the light flash on the blade. ‘You work with him.’

‘Only the once.’

‘You were with him on his last job.’

Pedersen nodded reluctantly. ‘Yes.’

‘You stepped on some toes with that one,’ Letterman said.

Letterman always used a thin blade. Thin blades slide in easily, avoiding needless hacking and cutting. He always held the knife flat and horizontal, and used a single, direct thrust. When he went in from the front he aimed for the carotid artery. A tough sheath of muscles protects it, and that’s why the thrust has to be strong. He finished with a wriggle to sever the artery, removed the blade, and watched Pedersen slide, twitching, to the floor. It was quick and clean, one of the many things that separated Letterman from the amateurs.

He photographed the body, let himself out and drove back across the city to his motel in St Kilda. On the way he thought about the nature of luck in his profession. Although his leads had amounted to nothing, he believed that it was important that he’d followed them. It could mean good luck would come his way. He might hear something about Wyatt when he least expected it.

That was why he wasn’t surprised to find a ‘While You Were Out’ message under his door. It told him to expect a phone call. The caller would ring every hour until midnight, and again the next day, starting at seven in the morning. Letterman looked at his watch just as the phone rang. Eleven pm. The voice on the other end said he knew where Wyatt was.