Chaffee’s probably going to die back there and all we got was a short bloke called Artie.’
Cam was tapping his fingertips. ‘Only hit him twice, can’t die of that. Short Artie’s good too.’
‘How’s that?’
‘How many short Arties can there be? Short Arties with a Saint.’
Peter Temple
Dead Point (Jack Irish Thriller 3)
The answering machine was speaking to a caller as I opened the door of my office. I took the two steps and picked up the phone.
‘Ignore those words. Jack Irish.’
‘Jack, Gus.’
Augustine, Charlie Taub’s granddaughter. Alarm, a stab.
‘Charlie?’
‘What?’
‘He’s alright?’
She read my anxiety, laughed her sexy laugh. My shoulders and my chest untightened.
‘Never better. He said to tell you he’s staying another week. He’s playing bowls every day, he’s playing in a tournament next week. He said, and I quote, “Tell Jack, hot’s good for one thing.”’
I sighed.
‘Means something, does it, the message?’
‘Yes. Exactly as I feared. Will you marry me? Take me to Canberra with you?’
Charlie’s granddaughter was a fighter for the oppressed workers and, said the gossip, being courted for a safe federal Labor seat. That or in due course Australia’s highest union office.
‘I’m not going to Canberra,’ she said. ‘You’ve been reading that idiot in the Age. Anyway, I don’t think harem life would suit you.’
‘The zenana. We’d sit around, the boys, playing cards, crocheting, waiting for you to come home and pick one of us.’
‘I may need to give this Canberra business more thought,’ she said. ‘Stay close to the phone.’
It was just after noon. Much of the day ahead, much already accomplished: a trip down the bright golden Hume, the witnessing of a man having his nose broken, his collarbone fractured, tonnes of rock dropped on his prized car, followed by a coating of paving sand, enough sand to provide the base for a nice barbecue area.
Moving on. I settled down at my aged Mac and attended to the affairs of my bustling legal practice, to wit, a letter to Stan’s father’s tenant, Andreas Krysis, asking him to desist from storing things in Morris’s garage, which was not part of his lease.
Hunger struck. I went around the corner and bought a salad pita, came back and ate while reading the sports section of the Age. The daily bulletin on all football clubs said that, notwithstanding the team’s atrocious performance against West Coast, the St Kilda club president was standing firm behind the coach. ‘He has our full confidence. We have always said that we are with him for the long haul.’
In football-speak, these sentiments translated as: Full confidence — most committee members want to sack the bastard. The long haul — until the next game. Saturday at Docklands Stadium was Waterloo for the coach.
I rang Drew. He was in court. I rang my sister.
‘So,’ Rosa said, ‘to what?’
‘To what what?’
‘Do I owe this honour?’
‘I’ve been away a bit. I went to see Claire.’
‘I know that. I talk to her every second day. You may recall that I’m her aunt.’
It was hard for me to grasp that people saw themselves as aunts or uncles. I had neither, had never felt a vacuum in my life.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘you’ve been back for over a week.’ An edge to her voice, not anger, not the usual exasperation. Worse. Knowingness.
‘Lunch,’ I said. ‘It’s been a while. Your choice of venue after the cruel things you said about mine last time.’
‘Lunch.’ She managed to roll the word around in her mouth, endow it with sinister meaning.
‘What about The Green Hill?’ I said. ‘Very fashionable, I’m told. They know me there at the highest levels, the boss shouted me a tankard of Leprechaun ale the other day, Leprechaun, some name like that, very ethnic.’
Silence.
‘Andrew Greer stood me up,’ she said finally.
The masticating on lunch now meant something.
A moment of calculation.
‘Drew? What, a legal matter?’
‘No. A lunch.’
‘I didn’t know you knew Drew. In a lunching sense.’
Sparring. A spar.
‘I don’t. I thought I was going to have the opportunity.’
‘To do what?’
‘Get to know him in a lunching sense.’
‘Well, he’s a busy man, things come up, that’s the law.’
‘Lawyers don’t work on Saturdays.’
‘The lawyers you know. Lawyers in name only. Accountants in drag. Tax avoidance, mergers and acquisitions. Drew is a criminal lawyer. They never stop, never sleep. Never eat, some of them.’
She knew. She could not know, but she knew. Some psychic vibration had reached her, bounced off a star, found her.
‘I don’t know what this is about,’ I said. ‘What time are we on? What time is it on your side of the river?’
Silence.
‘Well, I rang you, so whose prerogative is it to end the conversation? Tricky point of etiquette, not so?’
‘Sometimes I hate you,’ she said and put the phone down.
On the other hand, she could know if Drew had told her.
I sat back in my captain’s chair and my shoulders sagged.
Why had I been so stupid as to speak my mind to Drew? What did it matter if he became entangled with Rosa? What was one more clear-felled forest, one more toxic waste dump, one more nuclear test site in my immediate vicinity?
I sat in this mood of despond for a while and then, for want of something to do, I dialled Telstra inquiries. Since the privatised utility wanted to encourage people to use this free service, it took six minutes to get the number of Baine’s Newsagency in Walkley.
‘Baine’s,’ said Terry Baine.
‘Terry, Jack Irish, I talked to you-’
‘Mate, telepathy, mate, on the verge of ringin ya,’ he said. ‘Got the name of that girl, Sim come in this mornin.’
‘How’d the barra go?’
‘Yeah, well, big as great whites ya believe the bastard. Sandra Tollman, that’s the name.’ He spelled it. ‘Sim says she married a Forestry bloke. Says he heard that. Christ knows where he’d hear that.’
I said my thanks.
‘Got your number, mate. You’re on the record. Comin down for the vroom-vroom next year, look you up.’
Adult life was all desire and expectation. Until it was too late. I went home to change for Mrs Purbrick’s library-warming.
Peter Temple
Dead Point (Jack Irish Thriller 3)
David, Mrs Purbrick’s personal assistant, opened the huge black front door. His smile seemed genuine.
‘Jack,’ he said, extending his beringed right hand, the hand with the green stones, ‘we’re delighted you could come.’ He dropped his voice. ‘I must say I found the muscle you brought with you last time rather
