Truth (19 page)

He gave directions. In time, they crossed the railway line, found the street, the number, parked opposite. The house was behind a two-metre-high corrugated-iron fence, just its tiled roof visible. They walked over. A padlock and chain on the double driveway gates. Villani looked through a gap. He could see little.

They shouted, banged on the gate.

‘We need a warrant here,’ said Villani. ‘Going by the book.’

‘What book is that?’ said Dove.

Villani made the call. They sat in the car. He offered Dove a cigarette. A time passed, his view was north-east, the sky was dull yellow-brown, a huge diatomic bloom caused by dust and smoke. From the hills, the city would be wobbling in its own heat.

He rang Bob. It rang out. Again.

‘Villani,’ said Bob.

‘Me. What’s happening?’

‘Nothing. Come up to Flannery’s last night before the wind shifted. Still in the north-west. We should be all right.’

‘And Flannery?’

‘Some burnt mutton. Now shot and that’s fucking expensive. He had the CFA on him to move them yesterday, won’t listen. Man’s gaga.’

‘What do they say about you?’

‘Mate, the dickheads know me. Keep their mouths shut.’

Coughing, throat clearing. ‘Listen, the doctor’s wife rang. Last night.’

Karin. Mark’s wife number two. Number one was Janice, a nurse from Cobram, pregnant when they married just after he started specialising, she lost the child early. They broke up inside a year.

Mark went up the medical scale, Karin, a researcher, something to do with blood, her father also knew blood, he was one of Mark’s teachers, Mr David Delisle, all-purpose surgeon, cut anything needed the scalpel. Villani met him at the civil ceremony in Kew, a brick mansion, wrought-iron gates. Mrs Delisle gave him the eye, handsome in a Botoxed stringy gymrat way. The knife man was poreless, silky hair, like a greyhound somehow but without the nerviness.

Right from the handshake, Bob Villani and David seemed to have some joke going. Perhaps they recognised each other as born killers. Karin got on with Bob too, a pony-club girl, besotted with horses, couldn’t keep her hands off them. Before the pregnancy, she drove up to the farm on her days off, stayed over. It occurred to Villani that she was in love with her father and she put that on Bob. The men had the same stillness, the appraising stare. They gave the impression that, if circumstances required, they could do an appendectomy in the dark with a reasonably sharp Joseph Rodgers Bunny Clip and Castrator. Working purely by feel.

‘What’s she say?’ said Villani.

‘Well, makes out it’s about the fires. Then it’s tears, Mark’s gone off her, out late all the time, no-show for the kid’s birthday party. And so on.’

‘Tragic,’ said Villani. He wasn’t going to tell Bob about Lizzie.

‘Talk to him,’ said Bob. ‘Have a word with the doctor.’

‘Be reasonable,’ said Villani. ‘You can’t talk to blokes about that stuff.’

‘Not a bloke, he’s your brother. He’ll listen to you.’

‘What, the boss manner?’

‘Something like that. Kick his arse.’

‘The boy may be in need of emotional support,’ said Villani.

‘Yeah. Kick his arse.’

‘Know a Danny Loneregan? From Vietnam?’

He thought he could hear birds.

‘Who wants to know?’

‘His son. He’s a cop. Asked me to ask.’

‘What’s he want to know?’

‘Just about him. Didn’t know him.’

‘Tell him his dad was a good bloke. Had guts. Used to show anyone who’d look his boy’s picture.’

‘Do that then.’

Cough. ‘Talk to Mark, okay?’

It was forty minutes before the van came down the street. Two men in overalls got out. Villani crossed the street.

‘The gate, Gus,’ he said. ‘Then possibly the front door.’

‘This a legal entry?’

‘I’m an officer of the law, yes,’ said Villani.

The offsider cut the chain with boltcutters, a hard snick. Dove pushed a wing open and they entered.

The house was small, an ugly yellow brick-veneer in the centre of its block. It was partly obscured by gum trees, weedy splitting things, the result of some misguided arboreal instinct. To the left, the high unbroken wall of a sheet-metal fabricator shadowed the driveway. On the other side, beyond the high fence, a brick building of no obvious purpose showed dirty windows.

They went down the concrete drive, walked by a window covered by a metal roll-down security blind. Villani climbed a step to a brick verandah. Two new padlocks secured the steel front door. Attempts had been made to jemmy it.

‘Got replacements?’ said Villani.

‘Pope Catholic?’ said the offsider. They were civilians, had no respect.

The pair wheeled in a buggy with a gas bottle and cut the locks in minutes. ‘Bunnings shit,’ said Gus. He went to the van and came back with three new locks and a length of chain. ‘Bloody waste of quality,’ he said.

They left.

‘Little sniff before we go in,’ said Villani.

He pointed Dove to the left, stepped off the verandah and went to the right, past the other shuttered window. There had once been a flowerbed along the house, a strip of dirt marked out by bricks on the diagonal. Now it grew only plastic bags, cigarette packets, beer bottles, mixed-drink cans, chicken bones, unidentifiable bits of cloth, a pair of nylon underpants, a denim skirt, one cup of a bra, the fabric peeled back to reveal a grey cone of foam rubber.

The alley between the house and the fence held more of the same, plus pale condoms and turds coated with baize-green moss. Two windows had been sealed with unmatching bricks.

The small back yard had all these things and much more. The bodies of three pillaged cars, crowpicked, bled rust into the concrete. Their unwanted innards lay in oil stains.

‘Recycling,’ Dove said. ‘That’s nice. Power’s on, the water meter’s ticking.’

The back door was steel, blank, internal bolts. Serious attempts to open it had failed. The windows were high and small, broken but negotiable only by cats.

They went back. Villani opened the steel front door. There was another door behind it, of delaminating plywood. He opened that, went in first, that was his prerogative and his duty.

He stood in a passage: dead air and the gas given off by cheap carpets and the foam beneath them. Something sweet and sour, too, like the sweat in old intimate garments.

The light didn’t work.

Dim sitting room. Dove wound up the metal blind. It groaned, it had been a while. Sixties furniture, glass coffee table, a kidney shape.

‘Coke,’ said Dove, pointing.

Villani looked, saw the smears, walked around sniffing, went down the passage and into the bathroom. Nothing on the rails, nothing in the cabinet above the basin.

‘Do that room,’ he said to Dove. ‘Don’t touch.’

The first bedroom had a bare single bed. He opened a wardrobe
by tugging on the bottom of the door. Empty.

In the kitchen, the small fridge was running, freezer iced up. Empty.

Who paid the power bills?

‘Boss.’ Dove.

Villani went to the back bedroom, stood in the door.

‘Nothing here,’ said Dove, eyes on the carpet next to the stripped bed. ‘But there’s this.’

Villani crossed. On the cheap dark carpet, a darker stain, large.

‘Another one here,’ said Dove.

‘Well,’ said Villani. ‘We should ask the question. Get them. Prints, DNA, the lot. House search. Under the floor, roof, everything.’

He left Dove to wait, drove out of the street.

HIS PHONE rang as he was parking in a small shopping centre carpark, directly across from the arcade that ended in his brother’s consulting rooms. It was Kiely.

‘There’s no Metallic match with the weapons in Kidd’s car, the Ring Road one. That’s one hundred per cent sure.’

‘Bugger,’ said Villani.

‘And the vehicle. Genuine plates. It’s registered to a man not seen for nearly ten years and was sixty-eight then.’

‘Bugger again.’

A big man with long greased hair in a ponytail came out of the arcade and stood at the kerb. He took sunnies out of his denim jacket, big wraparound glasses, put them on, looked around, lit a cigarette.

Villani knew him. His name was Kenny Hanlon, they brought him in for questioning over a man called Gaudio, a minor drug figure. Gaudio’s biggest impact on society was to block a storm-water pipe in Melton. Someone, possibly Kenny Hanlon, had bound his hands and feet with no. 8 fence wire and stuck an apple in his mouth. Then a heavy vehicle had driven over his head, several times.

He watched Hanlon cross to a black Holden muscle car parked tight against struggling hedges in the far corner, get into the
passenger seat, vanish behind the dark window.

Villani waited for the Holden to leave. Waited.

Mark came out of the arcade, white shirt, open-necked, he stood where Hanlon had stood, looked around, turned left. Villani lost sight of him, then he came through the ragged hedge in front of the Holden, went to Hanlon’s window, blocked Villani’s view.

The urge was to look away, start the car, drive off. Get on with the business of the day. But he looked and his throat was tight and his mouth was dry. The dark window came down. Mark Villani leaned his forearms on the sill, head almost in the car.

In less than a minute, Mark straightened, tapped the roof of the Holden, went back the way he had come. The machine woke, the driver made it growl, it backed, went forward, backed again until a wheel mounted the kerb. Then it escaped its lodging, came past Villani, slowly, eight-speaker sound system threatening to break windows, dent cars, blow the infirm and their shopping carts back into the supermarket. It had three short backsloping coil aerials on the roof.

Villani went to his brother’s surgery. An old man, two women and a toddler, a girl, were waiting, sitting on white plastic chairs. ‘His brother would like to speak to Dr Villani,’ he said to the receptionist, a thin woman with dyed black hair and pencilled eyebrows.

She picked up the phone. ‘Your brother’s here, doctor. Okay. Right.’ She smiled at Villani. ‘Doctor will see you next.’

Villani sat as far away from the others as possible, hands in his lap. He closed his eyes, tried to think of nothing, failed. He opened his eyes. The child was looking at him. She took off towards him, plodding and uncertain steps.

‘Dadda,’ she said. ‘Dadda.’

‘Shayna, leave the man alone,’ said a young woman in a man’s leather jacket. She had a tattoo around her neck below the Adam’s apple, a strand of blue barbed wire. The child ignored her, eyes fixed on Villani, took another step, held out her dimpled arms.

Villani looked away. How had the budding neurosurgeon ended
up in this sad dump?

‘Dadda,’ the child said.

The old man made a popping sound like a failing two-stroke ignition. It might have been a laugh. He pointed at Villani. ‘Nailed yer, mate,’ he said. ‘Nailed yer.’

‘Shut yer fucken mouth,’ said the woman. ‘Stupid old cunt.’

‘Fuck you too,’ said the man. ‘Seed you got two more in the car. Three fucken dads no doubt.’

‘Mr Stewart, kindly be quiet or wait outside,’ said the receptionist. ‘And you’ll wait all day.’

The child took another step towards Villani. ‘Dadda,’ she said.

The woman came out of her chair, wrenched the child away by the arm, sat down holding her tight. The child began to whimper and tears rolled down her fat cheeks. Her eyes never left Villani.

The door opened and a pimpled teenage boy came out, perhaps sixteen, olive-skinned, Elvis hair. He looked straight ahead, walked. Mark Villani stuck his head out. ‘Steve,’ he said.

The consulting room had a temporary look, a chipboard desk, a cheap computer, an examination table covered with a sheet, not sparkling white. The calendar was for 2009.

They sat.

‘Been meaning to call you,’ said Mark. He had grown his hair, grown a little goatee, a ring in an earlobe.

‘Saw you outside,’ said Villani. ‘At the black Holden.’

Mark lifted his chin, blinked twice, looked down at the desk pad, wrote something. ‘Patient left his prescription behind.’

‘I could see you knew him.’

‘Of course, I know him. He’s a patient.’

‘Could have sent the receptionist.’

Mark looked up. ‘You here to tell me how to run my practice?’

‘He’s not a model citizen, your patient. Know that?’

Mark shook his head. ‘Steve,’ he said, ‘I actually don’t ask sick people to present character references. Feeling crook is enough.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘I also don’t discuss my patients with other people. That’s a
principle among doctors. Not heard of it? I suppose you’re in the pub telling the drunks about who murdered who?’

Villani waited, looking at his brother. Mark looked back, tapped a finger.

‘Nice of you to drop by,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got patients waiting. I’ll call you, find a time.’

‘Hellhounds,’ said Villani. ‘You’re associating with Hellhounds.’

Mark raised his upper lip. ‘Steve, don’t come the cop with me. The bloke’s a patient, he rides a Harley, I’ve got a Harley, we talk Harleys.’

‘Go round the clubhouse, do you?’

Mark picked up his ballpoint, clicked it, kept clicking it. ‘As I understand it, it’s just pool tables and beer fridges and a workshop.’

‘Are you fucking naïve or what?’

‘Listen, don’t tell me who I can talk to. Got fuckall to do with you, okay?’

‘No, it’s not okay,’ said Villani. ‘You’ve got something to do with me. I think that.’

‘Can we have this conversation some other time? I’m busy, I don’t have…’

Villani said, ‘So the golden boy’s now giving the wife and kids the arse, got a little beard, little earring and he’s associating with murdering bikie scum?’

Mark placed the ballpoint on the blotter, looked at his hands, opened and closed his fists. He had big hands, wiry hair on the backs. ‘Anybody punched you recently?’ he said.

‘Don’t give me tough, sonny,’ said Villani. ‘I’ll put you on your arse. I’m your brother. I’m telling you what you don’t want to hear.’

‘How’s your happy family?’ said Mark. ‘You still fucking everything in a skirt? You think Laurie doesn’t know? I’ve had enough sanctimonious crap from you.’