Guy Fawkes Night, page 9
part #3 of Mitchell Mystery Series
A louvered window let light in from the rear of the property. The concrete floor was stained by pools of oil and where paint tins had fallen. Offcuts of roofing battens, weatherboards and building beams lay stacked beneath one of the side benches. Then sheets of galvanised iron. Bottles of engine oil. Lawn mower petrol. Siphons. Hoses. Sprinklers and metal taps. A toilet bowl. Cistern. A wooden box tossed full of gaskets, nuts, bolts, clamps. Roofing guttering cut at odd angles. Then gardening tools: spade, rake, several shovels, pitchfork, three crowbars of differing length, a mattock, mining pickaxes.
‘He’s definitely been working in here,’ Sheridan said.
‘Whatever that work was. It’s just like any old garage …’ Cole said, trying to make sense of it. ‘… except it’s more. More of everything.’
‘And the total opposite of inside his house, where’s there’s virtually nothing,’ she said.
And then he noticed the other thing. ‘His car. I didn’t even think about his car. Stupid of me.’ He slapped his forehead light-heartedly. ‘His car’s obviously not here, so where is it?’
‘I’ll phone for a licence plate number when we’re back at the station and try to locate it.’
‘See this though. When the car was parked in the garage it’d be just about impossible to move in here. You might be able to get out of the car, at a squeeze, but that’d be about it. That’s why he’s got his mower up on that bench I’ll bet.’
‘It’s a small garage, sure.’
‘But I don’t think that’s the point. Why would a person who obviously doesn’t like having anything more than the bare minimum inside his house have such a God-awful mess in his garage? It doesn’t add up. Unless the whole point of all this rubbish is to hide what he doesn’t want us to see? If you’re looking for something valuable you’d ransack a house for it. You wouldn’t look in here for it. That’s the thing. There’s just too much stuff here.’
‘Or he likes having his house neat and tidy but who cares about a garage?’
‘Do you feel like getting your hands dirty?’
She grinned, ‘I’m game if you are.’
Then Harley stuck his head around the door. ‘Goodness,’ he said of what he saw.
Cole said, ‘I’m taking a punt that if Dragic had anything to hide we might find it here.’
‘Then let’s start searching,’ the detective said.
Sheridan took one side bench, Cole the back bench, and Harley the remaining one. And something caught Cole’s eye immediately. Where he’d seen no newspapers in the house here suddenly in a corner was a large cardboard box that seemed to be stuffed full of them. Why keep old newspapers?
‘And,’ said Cole, lifting the box to where he could get at it. ‘Hey, presto!’ He pulled out a thick handful of newspapers, a big cockroach scuttling away over the side of the box. Cole peered into it, and then reached down into it. Out came a hessian bag folded over several times to protect what was inside. Inside was a hard cardboard case, reinforced at its corners with leather, and with a snap down catch.
He set the case down on the ground and found it unlocked. When he lifted the case’s lid they all stood back.
‘Well, no wonder he wanted to hide these,’ Cole said, lifting out a stack of magazines, perhaps thirty in total. He quickly rifled through them, checking the covers and occasionally flicking them open to see the inside content. ‘Not your run of the mill dirty books, are they? It’s pretty violent stuff. You don’t need to look if you don’t want to,’ he told Sheridan.
‘You don’t need to be protective,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen just as bad — and worse — in Melbourne. And that was just on other cops’ desks.’
Cole had no answer to that.
‘This may only be the beginning,’ Harley said. ‘We should have a thorough look through everything else as well.’
Cole thought he looked more embarrassed about the magazines discovery than Sheridan did. Cole himself felt very uneasy about what they had found.
‘I wonder if these were for personal use or whether he was selling them?’ Cole speculated.
‘They look brand new,’ Sheridan said, opening wide the pages of one magazine to Harley’s disquiet. ‘But if they appeared before a magistrate you’d think someone could expect some time in the cooler.’
They began searching other boxes and the nooks and crannies of the garage. One box produced yards of steel chain and heavy padlocks, knuckle dusters, a gleaming metal cosh and a pair of leather boxing gloves.
‘You wouldn’t want to get whacked by this,’ Cole said of the cosh, which had a fair weight to it.
Examining the underside of one bench they found a sliding drawer and all bent down to look at it. Sheridan drew it out and made space for it on the bench. In the drawer were pencils and biros and a school exercise book with a pink cover. The pages inside were ruled into three columns and contained only numbers.
‘Let’s see if we can make sense of this,’ Cole said, the other two looking on. He opened the exercise book at the first page. ‘This first column starts with 1064. Looking across the page, the next column has a 1, and then across again is 5-10-0.’
He flicked forward a few pages and then back again.
‘The first column,’ Sheridan noted. ‘It goes from 1064 for a couple of rows and then becomes 1164 and it bit further on again 1264. I’d bet they’re dates, October 1964, November 1964 and so on.’
‘I’d second you on that,’ Cole agreed.
Harley said, ‘I don’t know what the second column signifies but I would hazard a guess that the last column is pounds, shillings and pence. Look ahead to 266 and see if he’s changed to decimal currency.’
Cole turned the pages. ‘You’re right. He has. See? But he only begins in March 1966, not February. But why all the secrecy here, this hidden drawer? Why wouldn’t he keep this inside the house if it’s his banking or way of keeping track of what he’s spent?’
‘Look at these blue ticks against the last column, too,’ Sheridan pointed out. ‘They’re there against most of the money entries, but not all.’
‘Paid or not paid?’ Cole ventured.
‘Probably,’ Sheridan and Harley said at the same time.
‘Good to see we’re all of a one,’ Cole grinned. ‘So dates and amounts, but what do the numbers in the second column stand for?’
‘Maybe each number is a person and beside it a payment or sum received from them?’ Sheridan guessed. ‘But why use numbers then and why not write down the name of the person or business?’
‘And there doesn’t appear to be any logical sequencing to the numbers in the second column,’ Harley said. ‘Some are single digit numbers while others have two. The numbers also seem to leap about from page to page.’
Cole said, ‘But they must have meant something to Dragic, we know that much. And that what he’d been doing was likely suspect. But is any of this connected to his death and or the housing estate, that’s what I want to know. Let’s see where his dates finish up,’ Cole said, flicking to about half way through the exercise book. ‘Here’s the last entry.’
And then he stood stock still.
‘What is it?’ Harley asked.
‘The final date,’ Cole began, barely believing it. ‘It could be last Saturday, the night of the cabaret. But only the date has been filled in. There’s nothing in the other two columns.’
Chapter 13
All hands were put to the wheel in an effort to make sense of Dragic’s finances but they discovered very little. Cole and Harley interviewed Councillors Bowmeester, Pappas and Rafferty who all sung from the same songbook: their first declaration was that they had done nothing wrong, their second was a repeat of the first, and more of the same followed. What was clear was that the councillors had bought blocks from the developer Anton Dragic in good faith according to their own testimony, and then on-sold the blocks to builders or put them up for sale in real estate agent’s windows in Mitchell and elsewhere. All three men professed to be financially solvent despite the loans they had taken out and claimed no ill-feeling had existed between them and Dragic or indeed anyone else.
‘How could that be? They buy all those blocks and then can’t sell most of them? Are they expecting a sudden rush before Christmas?’ an exasperated Cole asked after they’d finished with Rafferty.
He sensed the councillors had been ready and waiting for them.
Harley smoothed his cheek with a hand. ‘I imagine it would depend on how much the land was bought for in the first place, and then how much they have borrowed and at what rate.’
‘So Dragic buys the entire parcel from council, carves it up and then with his investors lays down the nuts and bolts for the estate. Presumably he’s sold the land to them at a higher price than he bought it for, even allowing for the streets and so on. Who then would be carrying the biggest risk? Dragic or his buyers?’
‘If the good councillors and the other gentlemen paid Mr Dragic outright then his buyers would be carrying the greatest burden, you would think.’
‘That’s what I reckon too. The third parties here, the builders, would stay pretty conservative with their buying. They wouldn’t want to get themselves into too much debt.’
‘And the vacant lots are proof of that. I hope your own situation there isn’t at risk?’ he asked concernedly.
‘No. We’re okay there, thanks. And I’ve got my wife and an honest builder to thank for that. But going back to your point about our council friends paying Dragic outright. What if they didn’t? What if they just borrowed the money from the bank but agreed to pay him back over time, say as they sold each block, or at set periods? Wouldn’t that turn up the heat on them and maybe give one or more of them cause to get rid of Dragic when the blocks weren’t selling?’
‘The contracts should explain the particulars of the loans. Assuming there were loans and then contracts.’
‘Yes, assuming that. But I wouldn’t necessarily take Henderson’s word for it. The transactions might have been done on a nod and a wink. But I’ll have to speak with Grimes and see if I can pry a skerrick of truth out of him. By the way, I doubt there’s any connection between the land deals and the amounts in Dragic’s exercise book.’
‘No, those sums were too small. Large enough, some of them, but still too small to be for sales of land.’
‘Still, that book must have some significance.’
‘Yes, it must. Collectively however, those hundreds of small sums still add up to a very significant amount. We shouldn’t forget that.’
Jones and Sheridan had meanwhile spoken to the football club hierarchy, while Sheridan and Constable Whittaker also kept working their way through the cabaret’s guest list. Some thought they saw Dragic at the cabaret but most maintained they hadn’t. Some thought he was in costume, others were adamant he wasn’t. For a man that everyone seemed to know by sight Dragic had remained remarkably invisible.
Back at the station, Sheridan sat down with Cole.
‘Everyone’s been very helpful about Dragic’s car but no one knows where it is,’ she said quizzically. ‘Ben and I must have driven along every street in town.’
‘If someone’s stolen it I doubt we’ll see it anywhere here. It could be in Melbourne or way out in the sticks somewhere.’
‘Unless it’s hidden in a garage. I had more luck with looking into Dragic’s banking though.’
‘Oh?’
‘His only bank — in Mitchell at any rate — is with the State Bank. He opened an account in the 1950s and has been with them ever since. So he’s loyal to his bank. I could only see his statements for the last couple of years but there was something curious about them. The only transactions were for large amounts, which could have been his sales or investments in the estate.’
‘What’s curious about that?’
‘Just that when you have a bank account you generally use it regularly, money going in or out once a week or at least a fortnight. There were no small sums in his statements, not one, and sometimes his account wasn’t touched for a month.’
‘Maybe he didn’t trust the bank that much. Maybe he took a lot out at once and kept in under his mattress, taking it out from there as he needed it. He wouldn’t be the first to do that. We saw how frugally he lived at home. Perhaps he approached his banking the same way.’
‘That could be. But it still seems strange to me.’
‘Or maybe the amounts in that exercise book had something to do with that.’
‘If it was up to me, that’s what I’d be looking at,’ she said. ‘The other thing was, Dragic was the only person to put money into his account. No one else deposited into it.’
‘What was the balance when he died?’
‘A little under two thousand dollars, so it wasn’t Aladdin’s Cave.’
Sheridan had a real spring in her step today, Cole thought. She’d had her hair done yesterday — nothing wrong with that — and looked as happy as he’d seen her. In her time at Mitchell she prosecuted every job, big or small, with the same endeavour and enthusiasm. She went out of her way to compliment others on their work, Whittaker in particular, and everyone liked her for her amiable nature and for being such a good sport — the way she made fun of herself and others.
‘We’ll keep looking then,’ Cole said, smiling.
‘And you haven’t forgotten I’m going to that party tomorrow?’
‘You don’t seem to have.’
‘No,’ she grinned. ‘I’m keen to find out what else there is to know about Dragic. If those rumours and stories are true. If he was doing what he was supposed to at parties I’m bound to find out.’
‘I’ve no doubt about that,’ Cole bantered. ‘But enjoy yourself too hey? You don’t have to take your work home with you.’
‘Don’t worry, boss. It won’t be all work,’ she said with a wink as she got up to leave. ‘I hope you have a good weekend too.’
‘As soon as I get out of here I will. And just one more thing before you go. Next time you’re near the State Bank ask the bank manager to give you a copy of all of Dragic’s records. I think they’ll come in handy.’
She saluted. ‘At your service, boss.’
Cole watched her leave. Melbourne’s loss, our gain, he thought.
But there was still plenty to do before his week was done. He closed the file on his desk with a sigh and headed down the street to see Albert Grimes.
The solicitor also appeared to be in some sort of reverie in anticipation of the weekend. He was leaning back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head as he stared at the skylight above. Cole startled him by materialising in his doorway.
‘I hope you’re not too busy to see me,’ Cole said. ‘It looks like you aren’t.’
Grimes pulled himself up straighter, annoyed he’d been caught out as Cole sat himself down. ‘A brief respite only. I’ve enough work here for decades,’ he said, indicating the mess of folders on his desk.
Still in his customary crumpled black suit, Grimes seemed to be quietly expanding in it year after year, like a gently inflating balloon. The suit had gone shiny with the strain at his elbows and cuffs. There was fraying at the collar.
‘You should do a bit of decorating, spruce this place up. It’s like the dead are still here,’ Cole told him with reference to the building’s earlier use as a mortuary.
‘Except that it wouldn’t bring me any extra income, quite the opposite. No one likes seeing a legal man living extravagantly. They’ll think I’m charging too much. What can I do for you?’
He put on his horn-rimmed spectacles and peered across the desk at Cole who said, ‘I’m looking into the financial dealings of one Anton Dragic. Do you know him?’
Grimes licked his lips in a vaguely reptilian manner. ‘He of the Early Settlers Estate?’
‘That’s the one. I know a number of councillors had bought into that project and that you prepared contracts for them.’
‘And they said this?’
‘Of you, yes. Unless there’s another solicitor in Mitchell going around by the name of Albert Grimes.’
‘There’s no need to be facetious, senior sergeant.’ Grimes began his usual stalling, studying his knuckles and moving a folder here by an inch, another by two inches. ‘You know I’m a man of the law and that I do everything by the book.’
‘Only sometimes, Albert, as we both know. Bill Henderson. The land he bought from Dragic. Under what terms did he purchase it?’
‘That is a confidential matter between my client and myself. I’m afraid I can’t disclose that information.’
Cole leant forward in his chair. ‘Albert, Anton Dragic died in very suspicious circumstances and what’s in your files might help us understand who is responsible. If you want to hinder a police investigation then go ahead and do it, but if you do I promise I’ll charge you with obstruction of justice and I’ll make sure the locals know about it in such a way that won’t look good for you and which might not be that good for business.’
Grimes laced his fingers together and then unlaced them. ‘Very well. Mr Henderson. I’ll have to consult my file.’
He paused, waiting, as if hoping the file might sneak away before he could get to it.
‘Please do,’ Cole told him, nodding toward his filing cabinets.
