Bitter Wash Road Read online

  ‘Mum!’ shouted Hirsch, knowing it was futile.

  ‘What do you want?’ his mother was saying. ‘Why are you doing this to us?’

  ‘Mum,’ Hirsch said, and there was a click and the man in the back seat of the white car waved two devices at him, phone and digital recorder.

  Then the white car was streaking away. The patrol car pulled out, too, pausing for a moment alongside Hirsch. A woman in the passenger seat. She shot him with her finger and then passenger and driver were gone, being four-year-olds with the siren again.

  ~ * ~

  Twenty minutes later Hirsch said, ‘Have you been getting anonymous calls?’

  ‘We didn’t want to worry you.’

  The house sat at the end of a quiet side street and was indefensible. No alarms or window bars, flimsy locks, a bedridden old woman on one side, a weedy paddock on the other, a plant nursery behind them. Hirsch prowled from window to window and tugged at his parents’ blinds and curtains.

  ‘You’re making us nervous, Paul.’

  ‘When did the calls start?’

  ‘A few days ago,’ his mother said.

  She worked for the ambulance service, a narrow, rangy, nail-nibbling woman used to dealing with drunks, addicts, the scared and the deranged. Her love for Hirsch was absent-minded, as if she were not quite sure how she’d come to give birth to him. Never mean or cross or negligent, just practical and distracted. Closer to his sister.

  ‘Did you report it?’ he said.

  Hirsch’s father cocked his head tiredly, a man as raw-boned as his wife, still in his churchgoing pants and shirt. He was a carpenter and had the dents, scars and arthritis to prove it. He said, in his mild rumble, ‘As soon as we give them the name Hirschhausen, what do you think’s going to happen?’

  Hirsch said, ‘I think it’d be a good idea if both of you went away for a few days.’

  ‘Few days.’

  ‘Until the end of the week. Or sooner. As soon as I’ve finished giving evidence I’ll call you.’

  His mother came and gave him a hug. It was there and gone. ‘I don’t think that will be necessary, do you?’

  There was something about the main sitting room window. Hirsch crossed the room. ‘New glass. Fresh putty.’ He heard the accusing tone in his voice.

  ‘A brick,’ his father said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Friday night. We found it when we came back from seeing a film in town.’

  ‘Had it repaired yesterday morning,’ his mother said.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Were telling you now.’

  ‘No, you’re telling me because I noticed it now. And don’t say you didn’t want to worry me.’

  ‘Well, we didn’t.’

  ‘Just a rock?’

  ‘A rock would have been too subtle for us,’ Hirsch’s mother said. ‘There was a note wrapped around it, in case we missed the point.’

  ‘Let me guess: “Tell your son not to testify.’”

  ‘Along those lines,’ Hirsch’s father said.

  His mother said, “‘Tell your cunt of a son to do the decent thing and keep his trap shut.’”

  Hirsch had never heard his mother say the word and saw a glint in her eye. She had a good poker face, his mother, but under it he realised she was worried, and he remembered the fear in her voice. Her manner was unchanged, but she was holding herself too tightly.

  ‘Mum, please, talk sense into Dad. Go up north for a few days.’

  His parents owned a time-share apartment on the Gold Coast. School holidays were finishing so they might have the place to themselves.

  ‘Do you think your pals would hurt us?’ his father said.

  ‘If it would hurt me? Yes,’ Hirsch said, collapsing into an armchair, his body tired of the tension. Planted his feet firmly, held his arms out wide, a way of saying, Am I getting through to you?

  The legs of his jeans rode up and his father saw the Beretta on his ankle. The colour drained from his face.

  Embarrassed, Hirsch stood until the hems draped over his shoes again. ‘A precaution.’

  ‘Pretty serious precaution.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Hirsch said. ‘If I stay here for the week like we planned, I put you at risk. If I stay somewhere down in the city, I leave you here exposed. And if I do stay with you I won’t be around during the day. So I’m begging you, take a holiday for a few days. Call in sick. When it’s all over they’ll have no more reason to threaten you.’

  ‘But they could come after you.’

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  ‘Not if you get locked up, you won’t,’ Hirsch’s father said.

  Inviting—begging—Hirsch to say that wouldn’t happen because he wasn’t a dirty cop.

  Hirsch looked at his mother, she looked at her husband. ‘Karl,’ she said.

  ‘Eva.’

  ~ * ~

  They were gone by late afternoon, a late cancellation on a houseboat based at Renmark. Meanwhile Hirsch supposed he was still a target. He didn’t want to be killed in his childhood bed for his parents to find, so booked into a pay-by-the-hour motel on South Road and paid for four nights in advance.

  ‘Cash or card?’

  ‘Cash,’ Hirsch said.

  Then he had to turn around and hunt for a cash machine. He knew the transaction would trigger a record, but no one would know where the cash went after that. Unless there was a tracking device on his car. It did Hirsch’s head in, all that thinking, and he almost forgot he still had to drive back into the hills first thing in the morning to collect his parcel from the Balhannah post office.

  ~ * ~

  14

  THE PARCEL RETRIEVED, Hirsch reached police headquarters by nine-forty-five on Monday. Marking time in the main foyer, he spotted Marcus Quine. Quine wore the look of a man setting off on a raid, strolling in his languid, dangerous way towards a huddle of men waiting at the entrance to one of the out-of-bounds corridors that riddled the building. You didn’t mistake Quine for a teacher or a shopkeeper; he was a cop. Tall, proprietorial, unimpressed, full of unschooled intelligence. Not good looking—his features were too irregular—but the lopsided smile, when it appeared, was attractive. Hirsch sank down in his armchair, hoping he hadn’t been spotted.

  Quine stopped abruptly, seemed to sniff the air. He turned on his heel. And now he was cutting towards Hirsch, full of sharkish amusement. He halted. He grinned, no humour in it, his eyes like cracked marbles, his face all harsh planes and shadows. He said nothing. Hirsch gazed at him blankly, then started to pick his nose, really sticking his finger in. Quine moved off again, greeting the men in the corridor, a gifted backslapper.

  ~ * ~

  They grilled Hirsch in a room suited to savagery, a corporate blonde-wood and cream-walls kind of room, with a nondescript carpet and a side table holding a water jug and glasses. The scent of cleaning fluids and aftershave. Two glum senior officers sat at the head of the room, facing down Hirsch, who sat alone at a small central table, a briefcase containing his laptop and the cash and the iPhone at his feet. He’d requested and been denied a lawyer: not necessary, just a few formalities, okay? And sitting in, ranged along the side walls, were a handful of officers from the various squads whose activities Quine had compromised in some way: drugs, armed robbery, fraud...

  Rosie DeLisle was there, too, next to a woman who seemed to emit distaste and fury, as if she loathed Hirsch. Short-haired, solid, gruff, a scornful look on her face if he happened to catch her eye. He thought he knew all the Internals, but he didn’t know this woman. He shot Rosie a querying glance, Who’s your friend? Rosie gave a whisper of a shrug. Nothing for Hirsch to worry about.

  A prosecutor, maybe? Someone from a specialist squad with some dirt on him, real or imagined?

  Rosie’s boss, an inspector named Gaddis, asked the first question. He was thin and ferrety and perfect for the job, his long fingers tapping next to an AV
control box. ‘What was your first impression of Paradise Gardens?’

  Paradise Gardens was one of Adelaide’s bleak new outer suburbs: cheap housing, struggling young families, a volatile mix. High welfare dependency but few welfare services. No jobs and nothing for the kids to do, including catch a bus or a train anywhere. But Gaddis hadn’t meant the suburb, he meant the Paradise Gardens police station, which was also dysfunctional. Hirsch wondered which came first, the dysfunctional police station or the dysfunctional suburb.

  ‘I was new to detective duties, sir, and had no clear expectations.’

  Gaddis gave him a stop-stonewalling look. ‘In an early interview you said you felt “an atmosphere” soon after joining Senior Sergeant Quine’s CIB team at Paradise Gardens. What did you mean by that?’

  Hirsch thought he might as well give a straight answer. ‘Canteen and locker conversations would dry up whenever I showed my face,’ he said, ‘as if I wasn’t trusted. I wondered if they saw me as a spy.’

  Gaddis hid his sneer poorly. ‘Did this atmosphere improve over time?’

  ‘Eventually.’

  The other interrogator, a man who looked drawn and ill, said, ‘Please elaborate.’

  Conscious of sounding a little pathetic, Hirsch said, ‘At first the shunning was quite overt. I was rarely invited along on raids or to social events, for example, but left to man the CIB phones. That situation improved over time. After a while it was more like I was taken for granted. Like part of the furniture.’

  ‘You were a junior officer,’ Gaddis said, ‘and someone had to be on call at the station.’

  Nice try, Hirsch thought.

  The other man said, ‘These social events: dinner parties? Barbecues?’

  ‘Dinner parties, barbecues, strip clubs, four-hour lunches and nightclubs,’ Hirsch said.

  Someone laughed. Gaddis snarled, ‘By nightclub I take it you mean the Flamingo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A club owned by the brother of a Comancheros gang member,’ Gaddis said. ‘Wouldn’t you expect CIB interest in the place?’

  ‘The Paradise Gardens CIB was only interested in sex and money: the girls in the back room, the kickbacks and the Comancheros who bought the cocaine Quine had filched from the evidence locker.’

  ‘Senior Sergeant Quine,’ Gaddis said. He moved right along.

  ‘Presumably you did more than man the phones all the time. You performed some CIB duties?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I helped to investigate minor crimes. Burglaries, noise complaints.’

  ‘When investigating one such noise complaint, did you accept a bribe of five hundred dollars?’

  ‘No, that is a lie,’ Hirsch said. ‘We were short-handed and I was sent to look into an after-hours pub noise complaint. The publican offered me the five hundred to turn a blind eye. I took the money and immediately logged it in at the station, along with a written report. I then informed Quine, Senior Sergeant Quine. It’s in my report.’

  ‘We have been unable to find that report, Constable Hirschhausen.’

  ‘Is that a fact.’

  Gaddis said, ‘You might want to rethink your attitude. You’re not doing yourself any favours.’

  Hirsch ignored him. ‘In addition to handing me five hundred dollars, the publican took me into a back room where people were playing poker and roulette. I was invited to join in. I declined, saying I had another call to investigate. It’s all in my report.’

  ‘Which no one can find. When you reported to Senior Sergeant Quine, what did he say?’

  ‘He said, “Big Trev offered you a bribe? Doesn’t sound like him.” I then told Quine—’

  ‘Senior Sergeant Quine.’

  ‘I then told Quine that we should raid the pub’s gambling room. I also thought there might have been rooms set aside for prostitution. Quine said we needed to be better prepared, and suggested I see Big Trev again, wearing a wire.’

  ‘His name is Senior Sergeant Quine.’

  ‘It implies a respect he doesn’t deserve,’ Hirsch snapped.

  Gaddis breathed out. ‘Did you go to the pub again, wearing a wire?’

  ‘A week later. I was offered another five hundred. In fact, a weekly payment was suggested.’

  ‘You had this on tape?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You gave it to Senior Sergeant Quine?’

  ‘I did.’

  The other man coughed. Hirsch couldn’t read his grey face. ‘And?’

  ‘He called me in two days later and said the equipment must have been faulty, all he could hear was static. I offered to write it up from my notes. He said, “Yeah, why don’t you do that,” and so I did.’

  ‘More paperwork that seems not to exist,’ Gaddis said. ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Nothing. No follow-up.’

  Gaddis smiled at him and pressed a button on the AV controls. Scratchy sounds filled the air. ‘Static. Clearly your recording didn’t work, so why should there be a follow-up?’

  ‘It did work,’ Hirsch said. He removed his laptop from his briefcase. He cranked the volume up and pressed play. The room heard his voice, and another voice saying, ‘Five hundred now and a hundred and fifty a week, whaddaya reckon to that?’

  ‘Trevor Dean,’ Hirsch said. ‘Big Trev.’

  Gaddis swallowed. ‘Has that recording been authenticated?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Formally lodged?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why—’

  ‘Having determined that Quine was corrupt, I got into the habit of making two copies of everything,’ Hirsch said. ‘I have never deviated from that.’

  The grey-faced man glanced at Gaddis and back at Hirsch, so that Hirsch wondered if he had an ally here.

  ‘Moving right along. In your year at Paradise Gardens did you not see a great number of successful CIB actions?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Robberies investigated, witnesses questioned, raids mounted, arrests made?’

  ‘Yes,’ Hirsch said, and added, over Gaddis’s attempts to ask a new question, ‘But more often than not the team returned empty-handed from a so-called “sure thing” or carrying drugs and stolen goods that were never properly logged into the evidence safe.’

  Gaddis, tensely red, said, ‘More on that evidence safe later. What makes you so sure of these accusations, if you were manning the phones or whatever it was you were doing?’

  ‘I got curious. One day I saw Detective Constable Reid make a call on his mobile before one of these raids that amounted to nothing. The next day he left his phone in the charger while he went to the pub, so I checked his call log. He’d called another mobile phone. After work I went to the address they’d raided and started calling the number. I heard a phone ringing and found it in a rubbish bin. The idiot who’d dumped it hadn’t cleared any of his personal information: photos, texts, Google account, calls made, calls received. He’d been the target of the raid and Reid had tipped him off.’

  ‘Do we take your word for this?’

  After all, Reid was dead. Facing imprisonment, he’d shot himself. Not my concern, Hirsch thought, and he held his briefcase aloft. ‘If you like I can show you screen shots of Reid’s phone and the phone I found in the bin.’

  ‘Surely you gave this material to an Internal Investigations officer? Sergeant DeLisle, were you shown any of this material?’

  She was slightly behind Hirsch and he heard her cough and shift in her chair, and to save her he said loudly, ‘Things have a habit of getting lost.’

  This must have seemed like an escape route to Gaddis. With a smirk he said, ‘Lost by Sergeant DeLisle?’

  ‘No, not by her, by others under your command.’

  The man with the unhealthy skin said, ‘Getting back to these CIB raids. What happened when Senior Sergeant Quine’s team did recover drugs and valuables?’

  ‘Never properly lo
gged, sir. Partial descriptions, under-reported quantities, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Did you come to any conclusions regarding this?’

  ‘It’s my belief Quine and his mates would keep a portion of the drugs and the valuables and later sell them.’

  ‘To the Comancheros.’

  ‘The Comancheros preferred the drugs over the diamond earrings.’