‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Forever.’
‘How come?’
‘You know Jessie, Russell’s wife?’
‘I knew her, yes.’
‘I’m her stepbrother. Her mother married my father, poor bitch. Jessie said I could stay here after I had my breakdown. I was in the war. Vietnam. Got shell-shocked. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I fought in Malaya,’ I said. ‘Different kind of war, but I’ve got some idea. Bert told me Jessie’s brother had died.’
‘That was her real brother.’
‘Does Bert know you’re his brother-in-law, sort of?’
He laughed, a surprisingly rich sound out of that ruined mouth. ‘No. She didn’t tell him anything about our fucked-up family or much about Gerry, I suspect.’
‘Gerry?’
‘Are you offering me that money?’
‘For information, yes.’
‘We’ll swap, then. You look like an insurance man or a lawyer who’s gone a few rounds. My guess is something’s been found?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah. What? Where?’
‘You haven’t given me anything, Stan.’
‘All right. Try this. Young Tom Russell’s not Bert’s son. Did you know that?’
‘No, and it’s not worth twenty dollars.’
‘How about this then? Tom’s been asking me for years about something hidden here someplace. What’s that worth?’
I gave him the money. He folded the note carefully and tucked it into the pocket of his pyjamas. Once he started talking it was hard to stop him. He paused once, remembering that he was being paid, and I gladly forked over another twenty. He told me that Jessie Russell had been married to a man named Gerry Slim, known as Slim Gerry, who was a tall, pale skinny man. He was Tom’s real father. The boy was about six or seven, Stan calculated, when Gerry Slim was shot dead in his white Mercedes. Slim was a drug dealer and conman who’d formed a close association with some high-ranking American army officers who were stealing everything they could lay their hands on in Vietnam. Something went wrong and Slim paid the top price.
‘Would Bert know anything about this?’
‘Not a thing. She met Bert about a year later and grabbed him. Jessie wouldn’t have said a word. Too much to be ashamed of.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Jesus, I’m really emptying out the family skeletons. I wish I had a drink.’
I gave him another twenty. ‘You can buy something that won’t rot your guts.’
He gave the rich laugh again and put the money in the pocket along with the other notes. ‘Rotted away long ago. Christ, I’m glad to let it all out at last. The money’s a bonus.’
He told me that he had a sister named Vi who went to bed with Gerry Slim two days after they met at Slim’s wedding to Jessie. I produced the photograph and showed it to him in the way I had to Clarrie and Merv. He cleared his throat and spat over my shoulder. I was distracted and he snatched the photo from my hand.
‘No need to cover it up. I’ve seen it all before. Handled it, too. Told you we were a fucked-up family, didn’t I? Jessie was the only decent one among us. Just doesn’t make sense that she should go before me.’
I took the photo back. ‘This is Vi?’
‘That’s her. She was a great root, anyone’ll tell you. Except Jessie. Vi had a go at her, but Jessie wouldn’t be in it.’
There wasn’t a lot more to it. As I brushed away the flies, he told me that Jessie had agonised over her half-sister’s affair with Slim, but she was in love with him, bore his child and couldn’t break away. When Slim was killed she distanced herself from Vi and swore Stan to secrecy about it all in return for letting him live in the shack. About five years back, Tom had been up at the house with a couple of his mates getting drunk. For fun they had supplied Stan with all he could drink and he and Tom had had a drunken conversation in which a lot of what Stan was now telling me had come out. Tom had revealed that his father had told him before he was killed that there was something hidden at Dugong Beach, but he hadn’t said what or where.
‘Tom kept at me about it but I mostly said I knew bugger-all, which was true. I might have hinted around a bit sometimes, because he was free with the grog when I did. He searched the place inch by inch over the years, but he never found anything. Got a bit excited a few weeks ago and came up late one night. Bottle of Johnny Walker that time, but I didn’t know anything.’
‘Excited how?’
‘I don’t know. As if something had happened. He’s got bad blood in him, that boy.’
‘What happened to Vi?’
‘Drug overdose not long after Slim Gerry got shot. She had some money. Had a flat in Vaucluse, flash car, the works. She bought some heroin that was way better than the stuff she was used to and… pfft! Out she went. That’s one thing about the grog, it’s hard to kill yourself with it in one session. ‘Course, a couple of million sessions, that’s a different thing.’
I left him with his sixty dollars and flies and made way through the scrub to the house. My shirt was sticking to my back and I was looking forward to one of Bert’s beers. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself for having sorted the whole thing out quickly and at very little expense. There’d be a few legal tangles to work through, but I thought I also stood a good chance of the twenty-five thousand. I noticed that my car was in the sun so I skirted around the house and put it under a tree. Bert’s 4WD where it had been but there was another car in the yard-a yellow Monaro with a black racing stripe. I’d seen the car before, parked outside the liquor store in Glebe.
I went into the house through the shaded porch and was about to call out to Bert when something told me not to. I stopped, listened and sniffed the air. Previously, the house had smelled of disinfectant and I hadn’t noticed any flies. Now there was another smell, urine, and flies were buzzing strongly. I rushed through to the kitchen and found Bert on the floor. The back door stood open. His trousers were stained and soiled and the flies were swarming. He lay on his back with his eyes closed and his mouth open. The room was disarranged, with a chair turned over and plates and saucepans and a frying pan that had been neatly stacked on the sink lying on the floor. I knelt down and felt for Bert’s pulse but it was a waste of time. He was well and truly dead and had been for a while. The open mouth was twisted in a grimace; some kind of froth had dried on his chin and there was a bruise on the right side of his face.
I stood up and looked out the back window. Tom Russell was squatting in the vegetable patch. I watched as he lifted a couple of the gold bars out of the strongbox and put them in a backpack. He tested the weight, added another bar and lifted the bag. I waited until he’d straightened up before I went through the door, jumped down the steps and moved quickly across to block his path.
‘You can put that down, right now.’
‘Get fucked. It’s mine.’
‘Your father’s in there dead and you’re out here robbing him, you little shit.’
‘He’s not my father.’
‘He’s been like a father to you. Better than you deserve. Put the bag down.’
I was only a few metres away and very angry. He looked scared. Suddenly, he swung the bag up and heaved it at me. It would have done some damage if it’d hit but I sidestepped and it sailed over my shoulder. Tom grabbed a shovel and made a wild swipe at me, missing by centimetres. I lost balance and fell. He came at me bellowing and wielding the shovel like a battleaxe. I rolled out of the way and it dug into the earth. He reached for it but he was watching me at the same time and he fumbled long enough for me to get to my feet. He got hold of the handle but he had to change his grip to do anything useful with it and I hit him with a short right to the ribs. He let go of the shovel and flailed, gasping for air. I hit him again in the pit of the stomach and he collapsed, spewing beer and whatever fast food junk he’d eaten out over the grass.