‘The whole fucking thing’s legitimate, for fuck’s sake.’
‘Keep talking, mate. You make me laugh.’
‘It’s the property. All we do is manage the family property. That’s it.’
‘What was Tony junior doing here?’
‘Don’t you know? You don’t, do you? You’re out of the loop.’ Eddie grinned. ‘Tony senior’s got fucking Alzheimer’s. Word is he’s getting loonier every day. Tony junior runs the business now.’
Harrigan knew the business all too welclass="underline" extortion, enforcement, murder. The Ponticellis were the people to hire if you wanted anything like that done. They provided, with gusto. Once they’d been into anything-sex, drugs, any kind of contraband, corrupt property developments, shadier business deals, blackmail. Anything that could turn a dollar, which they had also done very successfully. Once, they’d probably had a higher turnover and owned more assets than some well-known companies. But the operations Harrigan had run had cut them down to size. He had gaoled their lieutenants, like Eddie, along with Tony senior’s brother, and seen others get shot in gang wars. After that, they had never recovered their territory. There was no such thing as a vacuum in the crime world. Other gangs, other nationalities, newer to the scene, had moved in.
Harrigan’s own involvement with the Ponticellis had teetered a little too close at times. There were one or two personal matters between him and Tony senior, which were another good reason for the old man to hate his guts, even more perhaps than for destroying his empire.
‘Tony junior doesn’t give a shit about you, mate,’ Harrigan said. ‘You’re not his man. You’re his dad’s. He’s doing you a favour, isn’t he?’
‘They need someone,’ Eddie muttered.
‘But it doesn’t have to be you. You’re a favour to his dad, aren’t you? Cause Tony junior any trouble and you can sleep in the street. You can give me some information. Is Tony senior thinking he might settle a few scores with me before he carks it?’
‘Why? Are you frightened?’
The old Eddie was coming out. Behind that soft expanse of stomach was the same hard man, the one who got a kick out of taking a knife to other people. He still had that look, the one that said he didn’t care if you died in front of him just so long as he had the pleasure of doing it. All that poison was still in his head.
‘If you think I’m frightened of you, mate, take me on and see who walks away at the end. It won’t be you. You didn’t answer my question.’
‘If he is, he hasn’t told me,’ Eddie said. ‘I haven’t heard anything.’
‘The white building near the railway line between Wiley Park and Lakemba. It’s a block of units. Tell me about it.’
‘Fairview Mansions,’ Eddie said.
‘I didn’t see any sign.’
‘It fell down. That’s not family property. It belongs to someone else.’
‘So what are you doing with it?’
‘Fucked if I know. It’s just on the books, isn’t it?’
‘Who owns it?’ Harrigan asked.
‘Fuck,’ Eddie muttered and turned to an ancient-looking computer. ‘Shillingworth Trust. I don’t know who they are. According to this fucking thing, that’s all we have of theirs.’
‘Give me the contact details,’ Harrigan said.
‘I don’t fucking have them. I was told: fucking rent it out, collect the rent, put it in a bank account. Any expenses I take them out of a float. I don’t see anyone! I don’t want to. Why should I?’
‘Renting out a building like that isn’t just fixing broken taps,’ Harrigan said. ‘Who do you contact when something happens the owners have to know about?’
‘I fucking don’t contact anyone. I’ve been told it goes back through the family.’
‘Do you know the name Craig Wells?’
‘No. Fucking never heard it before.’
‘Don’t cross me, mate,’ Harrigan said. ‘That would be a really stupid thing to do. Now, you and your woman friend out there, or whatever she is, didn’t see me here today. And if I want information from you, you give it to me. You keep your ear to the ground, you pick up what’s going on and you get back to me. Because I want to know if anyone’s coming after me or my family. And if I don’t hear, it won’t just be me that comes knocking.’
‘Jesus,’ Eddie said. ‘What the fuck do you want from me? You want me to end up dead? The family hates you. You know that. They just want to piss on your grave.’
‘That pleasure’s going to be mine, mate,’ Harrigan replied.
He got to his feet and walked out. He glanced at Gail at the desk but she was doing what she’d been told and not seeing him. Then he was gone, glad to get out of there.
Knowing that Tony Ponticelli senior had Alzheimer’s was a handy piece of information. It was hardly a surprise: Tony must have been in his late eighties. Harrigan wished he’d known before he’d talked to Eddie, but why should anyone have told him? He wasn’t Commander Harrigan any more. He no longer had intelligence reports across his desk, nor could he put people on the street when it suited him. Not for the first time, he saw the paradox in his situation. He had left the police to make his life his own; but the past kept following him while he had the handicap of only his own resources to rely on. One day he wanted to see the end of it.
He was about to start his car when his phone rang.
‘Boss,’ Trevor said, ‘some info for you. Craig Wells. Remember when the special homicide branch had a team dealing with the cold cases?’
‘Wells was one of them,’ Harrigan said. ‘I remember. One of the detectives from the original investigation came to see the team.’
‘That’s right. The records are in the archives. I’ve given Naomi a bell. She’s got a chair waiting for you whenever you want to go and have a look.’
‘I’ll do that now. Thanks.’
It was only a short drive to the police archives from where he was. Naomi, the archivist, was a substantially built middle-aged woman whom had he sweet-talked often enough when he’d been a serving police officer. She placed the square box of files in front of him with a disapproving look on her face.
‘I hope I don’t get into trouble doing this for you,’ she grumbled. ‘You’re lucky it’s still here. It’s listed to go to the State Archives in the next transfer.’
‘I’m grateful,’ he replied with a smile.
She went back to her desk. Perhaps she was lonely here in this isolated, climate-controlled shed that wasn’t much more than a staging post for records either doomed to the furnaces or awaiting perpetual incarceration in the Archives Office of New South Wales.
He opened the box and went through the records with the proficiency of a man who knows what he’s looking for. Memory came back as he searched. It had been a murder from the early ’80s, before the use of DNA testing. It had come to his cold-case team because one of the original detectives had been unable to shake off his doubts about it. On the face of it, it had been a straightforward murder-suicide. Craig Wells, then eighteen, had murdered his mother, Janice, in their rented Concord home and afterwards set fire to her car with the both of them in it, on the edge of the cliffs near Stanwell Park early one Sunday morning. The car had exploded and both bodies had been burnt past recognition. It seemed a hard way to commit suicide.
When, the next day, the police had gone to the Wellses’ home in Concord, it was all too clearly the scene of a murder. The living room was drenched in blood and there were bone pieces on the carpet, later identified as parts of a skull. A sheet had been torn from Janice’s unmade bed and presumably used to wrap and move her body to the car. The neighbours said they had seen Craig arriving home at about ten o’clock on the Saturday morning. He hadn’t been home for some days and no one knew where he’d been. No one had seen or heard anything of either Janice or Craig after that. The closest neighbour, an elderly man, said he had heard a car-he assumed Janice’s-leaving the house sometime between eight and nine that night.