The Sunbaker, page 7
Jack glanced up – the red light still blinked away in silent warning.
The filing cabinets were all empty, their locks smashed open, no doubt the handiwork of the stormtroopers. He opened the cupboard doors and let out a sigh of relief. There it was at long last – the safe. A large one. Got you, thought Jack.
He pulled on the safe door, relieved to find it held firm, which meant the Harriers probably hadn’t yet managed to gain access. If they had, it’s unlikely they would have relocked it once they’d cleaned it out. The safe looked new and expensive, and Jack immediately had doubts about his ability to open it. He removed the picks from his pocket, made himself comfortable on the office chair, and set to work as the camera above his head continued to blink ominously. Ten minutes later his hands were sweaty and he didn’t have any sense he was getting close to opening the lock.
He stretched his back and shook out his arms. He wished Ricky was here. Although his friend had been a good teacher, Jack never had Ricky’s dexterity for opening the more challenging locks. And, to be fair, they had only ever broken into buildings for pranks; safes had never been in their syllabus.
Five minutes later, Jack’s hands were cramping so he gave up, frustrated. Instead, he turned his attention to the desk. Its full-width drawer held the usual office detritus: staple removers, coins, rubber bands, pads of Post-it notes, some unidentified sticky stuff stuck to the base, and on it went. Jack slid the drawer right out of its runners and felt around underneath the desktop. Right at the back, his fingers brushed across something metallic, held by tape. He peeled it off and removed a shiny key. He laughed. For all their bluster, this was an epic fail by the stormtroopers.
The key turned easily in the safe, releasing the mechanism with a pleasing metallic clunk.
The red light kept blinking.
Jack turned the handle and the door swung open. An oily smell immediately filled the small room. The safe contained a single large wooden box. It was unexpectedly heavy when he lifted it out and placed it on the desk. Jack savoured the anticipation and took some deep breaths – this was his Tutankhamun moment.
He opened the box slowly.
Inside was a gun. A big one. And that’s where Jack’s knowledge of handguns ran out. There were bullets too. Big ones. Jack had trouble tearing his eyes from the lethal-looking weapon, then remembered the blinking light. He quickly scanned the rest of the contents of the box: a stack of uninteresting correspondence from a bank, a passport, a Platinum Amex card, and a few small-denomination banknotes in foreign currencies.
There was nothing inside the box to indicate the man was criminally inclined, with the exception of the don’t-mess-with-me handgun. Jack examined the passport. Unless it was fake, Michael Brown really did seem to be Michael Brown.
He was about to replace everything in the safe, when he heard something. It was so faint he couldn’t be sure what it was, or whether it was anything at all; perhaps something scraping momentarily on something else. Muscles constricted in his chest and his throat. He switched off his head torch and stood absolutely still as he counted out five minutes, all the while forcing himself to breathe slowly. Silence. He allowed himself to relax, turned his torch back on at its dimmest setting, returned everything to the safe and locked it before taping the key back into its hiding place behind the desk drawer.
He listened again. Nothing. He extinguished his head torch, just in case, and let his eyes adjust to the darkness before feeling his way silently down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, Jack stopped to listen once more.
A booming voice broke the silence, a male voice. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
Chapter Fourteen
Jack jumped in fright, hairs stood erect on the back of his neck and arms, sphincters contracted involuntarily. He was still mulling the equally useless options of either running away down the next set of stairs in the dark or turning on his head torch and then running away down the stairs, when he was blinded by a powerful beam of light. He raised a hand to shield his eyes from the glare and could just make out the shape of a man sitting on a chair with his feet up on the dining table. The beam of light was lowered to the table. There was a bottle of wine and two glasses.
‘Jacko, mate, what took you so long up there? I’ve already finished half the bottle of wine and I have to tell you, it’s a seriously awesome drop.’
‘Ricky, Jesus, you scared the shit out of me.’ Jack’s heart was still thrashing in his chest as though trying to find its way out by the shortest possible route. ‘You’re supposed to be in Melbourne.’
‘And you were supposed to call me if anything interesting happened up here. Do you want some cheese?’ Ricky, with a gloved hand, pushed a plate across towards him; blue-vein and crackers. He poured Jack a glass of wine.
‘Define interesting,’ said Jack.
‘Seriously? There was a body on a sun lounge reading Dostoevsky in Russian and now you’re breaking into the victim’s house. And the victim is Michael Brown. In what universe is that not interesting?’
‘How did you know who it was? The cops haven’t released his name. And about Dostoevsky?’
‘Jacko, the word’s out. And I knew you’d be knee-deep in it, so I came straight up.’ He cut a chunk of cheese and ate it straight from the knife. ‘I guessed this would be the first place you’d break into. But I can’t believe you made such a mess of the front door.’
‘That was the cops. Just before the Harrier Squad arrived in force.’
‘Ahh, I was wondering how long it would take them to show up.’
Jack took a sip of wine; it wasn’t like any he’d tasted before. ‘Oh my God, what is that?’
‘Hill of Grace. There’s a case of them. We might have trouble carrying them all.’ Ricky reached for more cheese. ‘Did you find anything?’
‘Fuck-all. He seems to be pretty boring. Apart from having a Grim Reapers bikie jacket on the wall.’
‘One thing you can be absolutely sure of, Michael Brown was not boring.’
‘There was a safe upstairs, with a gun and nothing much else.’
‘That was the decoy safe,’ said Ricky. ‘The one he wanted burglars to find. You’re losing your touch, Jacko. You missed the paydirt.’ Ricky pointed his torch towards the lounge.
The sofa had been pushed back and the rug it sat on rolled away to reveal a safe concealed in the concrete floor. It was open.
Jack was seriously irritated he’d missed something that was now so obvious, and especially because Ricky had found it. ‘Was there anything in it?’
‘Ooooh, yeah. My retirement plan.’ Ricky pointed his torch to the island bench in the kitchen. Bundles of unused one-hundred-dollar notes were stacked high on the white marble.
‘Jesus,’ said Jack, wide-eyed. ‘He was either worried about the imminent collapse of the banking system or he was a bagman.’
‘He’d also stashed some notebooks in there, which could give us an idea who might have killed him. And I found this in the comms cabinet in the garage.’ He held up a tiny memory card. ‘It’s from the security system. There should be footage of who came and went over the last few days.’
‘Including us.’
‘That’ll be the first thing we delete.’
‘So, how do you know of Michael Brown?’
‘That’s a long story, which will have to wait because I’m not sure I want to tell you over a glass of wine, as awesome as it is, sitting in the dead man’s house, a house we’ve broken into.’ Ricky stood up and drained his glass. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Do you want a hand putting the cash back in the safe?’
‘Jacko, it’s proceeds of crime. The law says it has to be confiscated.’ He smiled. ‘I’m just a bit vague around the detail of who’s allowed to do the confiscating.’ He picked up a large black sports bag at his feet and began filling it with the cash and the notebooks.
Jack closed and locked the safe, replaced the rug and Ricky helped him return the sofa to its normal position. He picked up the wine glasses.
‘I’ll run them through the dishwasher to get rid of our DNA.’
‘Bring them,’ said Ricky as he went to the wine fridge and removed three bottles of Hill of Grace. ‘We’re going to need them.’
When they reached the ground floor, they extinguished their torches before leaving silently through the front door and ducking under the crime-scene tape. They ambled north along the beach then dropped onto the sand just beyond the reach of the gently lapping waves. Ricky retrieved the cheese and crackers and set them up on top of the sports bag. Jack uncapped a wine bottle and poured generously.
‘To Michael Brown, may God rest his soul,’ said Ricky, clinking their glasses.
It was a picnic to remember beneath a veil of millions of stars as they sipped wine that cost a thousand dollars. Wine that tasted all the better to Jack with his best friend sitting by his side.
Between mouthfuls of cheese, Jack asked, ‘So how do you know Michael Brown?’
‘I didn’t know him personally. He was mostly based in Sydney and so our turfs rarely overlapped.’
Although Ricky had largely chosen a different path, the rest of his family remained deeply enmeshed in the Melbourne underworld – at least those of them that were still alive. His father had been gunned down in front of Ricky outside their family home. And the following tit-for-tat executions with rival gangs had cost him two of his uncles and a cousin.
Ricky said, ‘Michael was the in-house counsel for the Grim Reapers.’
‘How do you know?’
‘My family has a contact in the Reapers – they sometimes do business together.’
Jack savoured another sip. ‘Do outlaw motorcycle gangs really have their own lawyers on retainer?’
‘Of course.’
‘If Michael Brown was associated with a criminal gang, any number of people might have wanted to kill him.’
‘I don’t think so. He wasn’t a threat to any of the other gangs, and he would have been pretty untouchable.’
Jack refilled their glasses. ‘Then why was he killed?’
Ricky lay on the sand and stared up at the stars. ‘There were questions being asked. Last year the Reapers sergeant-at-arms was convicted for drug offences.’
‘I remember. Eric the Enforcer – that story sold us a lot of papers. The Reapers were moving drugs around in hearses; coffins stuffed full of cocaine.’
‘That’s the one. It was genius. Who’s going to stop a funeral cortège and look inside the coffin, right? But the cops got onto them. Michael Brown represented Eric in court. The prosecution case was pretty flimsy until they produced phone recordings they should never have had. A few people quietly pointed at Michael.’
‘What, you mean he’s an illegal police informant, like Lawyer X in Victoria?’
‘It’s all just rumours. But some people, mostly in other gangs, had begun calling him Lawyer Y. Whether they were just trying to shit-stir the Reapers or were onto the truth, I don’t know.’
‘Could the Grim Reapers have killed their own man if they suspected he was an informant?’
‘Maybe,’ said Ricky.
‘It was hardly an execution-style killing with all that staging. How many bikies read Dostoevsky?’
Ricky sat back up and emptied the rest of the bottle into their glasses. ‘The Lawyer X scandal was such a public-relations disaster. I mean, seriously, what were the Victorian cops thinking using the criminal’s own lawyer as an informant? If the Harriers have been doing the same thing, they would have been shitting themselves about it all coming out. And what better way for them to bury the story than to kill the informer, stop him going to the press. Or going to the straight cops in exchange for a deal.’
‘You think the Harriers killed him to cover up their illegal operation?’
‘It’s one theory.’
‘So, I’d better be careful what I write in The Beacon?’
‘I think you’d better be careful in general if you’re poking around in their business. Very careful.’
Chapter Fifteen
Jack and Ricky had decided to sleep on the beach rather than walk back through town in the early hours and risk bumping into anyone who might remember seeing them or, worse, an over-inquisitive cop. They were woken by the rising sun as they lay with their heads resting uncomfortably on a sports bag stuffed full of cash. A brush turkey was staring at Jack from just beyond arm’s reach, seemingly trying to decide which was more edible – the contents of the black bag or the blue-vein cheese now covered in ants.
The first shift of surfers was already in action. Other early risers were striding or jogging along the beach far too energetically for that hour of the morning, at least according to Jack, who was feeling the after-effects of both the sleep deprivation and the wine. Mostly the wine. He slipped the straps of the bag over his shoulder and they set off from Wategos over the short headland walk to The Pass, then along the beach back to town, accompanied all the way by the sound of the waves, squawking wattlebirds, and Ricky grumbling about having to do some exercise.
Back in town, the aroma of coffee drew them like magnets into the bakery and they emerged soon after with coffee and a box packed with too many pastries. Jack’s new apartment was only a few steps away. It was owned by Ricky’s uncle, but he only used it occasionally as a bolt hole from the worst of the Melbourne weather or when he needed to check on his distribution network. Ricky, too, stayed there when in town. The uncle had agreed to let Jack use it for a few months until he found somewhere else to live. That was proving difficult as accommodation was hard to come by in Byron Bay. Besides, Jack was enjoying where he was and so had decided to stay until he was kicked out.
Soon after Jack moved in, Moira began sleeping rough in the entrance of the vacant shop next door. As usual at this hour, she was off having a breakfast and shower at Fletcher Street Cottage a few blocks away. Her belongings were all still in place and Ricky, careful not to be seen by passers-by, slid one of the bundles of hundred-dollar-notes into her sleeping bag.
The apartment door opened directly onto the street. Jack unlocked it and they climbed the internal stairs into the open-plan living area. It was full of what Jack’s mother would have called ‘clutter’, but what Ricky called ‘shit’. Oversized ornate furniture was packed into the small space, along with shelf after shelf of gold and brass ornaments collecting dust.
They went straight to the dining table and set to work devouring the coffee and cake.
As he chewed on an apricot danish, Ricky unzipped the bag to expose the cash. ‘Check those babies out.’
An effigy of Jesus mounted high on the wall behind Ricky seemed to stare disapprovingly at the banknotes.
‘How much do you think’s in there?’ asked Jack through a mouthful of chocolate éclair.
‘A hundred and twenty, less what I gave to Moira.’
‘Thousand?’ Jack peered into the bag.
It was surprising how little space the notes took up. But that didn’t make him feel any less nervous. When they’d finished eating, Jack removed Michael Brown’s notebooks from the bag then zipped it closed so the exposed money didn’t continue to taunt him.
He flicked through the first book – a handwritten ledger of financial transactions with row after row of incoming and outgoing payments. There were no names, at least no names that meant anything to Jack.
He asked, ‘Do you know of anybody by the name of Bad Boy? That name crops up a lot. Or Jockstrap?’
‘Nope.’
‘What about Mother Superior? She received ten grand three weeks ago.’
‘It’s a he,’ said Ricky. ‘Big hairy bastard, too.’
‘And he’s called Mother Superior?’
‘I wouldn’t recommend you call him that. And I only know of him. He’s been around forever.’
Jack flicked through more pages. ‘There’s a balance column. It says there should have been a hundred and fifty grand in the safe.’
‘Well, he’s shit at maths then. Lucky he was a lawyer and not an accountant.’
Jack opened the second notebook. There was just one name: ‘Mitzevich’. Which didn’t sound like a nickname or joke name. There were weekly incoming payments, but no outgoing.
‘Know anyone called Mitzevich?’ Jack asked Ricky.
‘No. Why?’
‘He’s been paying Michael Brown money. A lot of money.’
‘I’ll ask around.’ Ricky reached for a second apricot danish. ‘Any entries for Friday, when Michael went missing?’
Jack returned to the first book. ‘Nope.’
Ricky licked the sugar off his fingers, then opened his laptop. ‘Then let’s see if his security cameras caught anything.’ He inserted the memory card he’d taken from Michael Brown’s security system and started working his way backwards from the most recent file. Each was a short video recording triggered by motion. There were no videos at all for the previous few days. The most recent were from five days ago, Friday. One, from just after 6 a.m., showed the lawyer in running gear heading out the door. He started a timer on his watch, then ran out of view. He returned an hour later, breathing heavily. He stopped the timer on his watch then began warm-down stretches. He then disappeared inside. There were no other recordings that day.
Jack and Ricky looked at each other.
‘There’s no recording of him leaving again, even though his body was found thirty kilometres away,’ said Jack. ‘And the front door is the only way out – the house backs onto a cliff.’
