‘I don’t care if you are or you aren’t,’ she said. ‘Why should I talk to you?’
Freeman glanced around at the sunbakers, then leaned forward and spoke in a low, gravelly voice.
‘Because if you don’t, Paulie’s going to be in shit up to his neck. He’ll be out on the street looking for a new job. Unless you want that to happen, you’ll listen. If you care, that is.’
There were few hooks more effective than this one. She did care, more than she remembered caring for anyone else. However much she read her heart, there was no way around it. She and Harrigan were too entangled. He mattered to her too much. She felt the same sharp fear she had felt last night, that something could happen to wreck his life.
‘Talk to him yourself.’
‘You think he wants to talk to me? You think he wants to sit in the same room as me and listen to what I’ve got to say?’
She understood Harrigan well enough to know this would make him sick in mind and body. If Harrigan was back on the job, Grace decided she could be as well, at least for as long as it took to find out what Freeman had to say. He could be any other slimebag she might have to deal with in her usual line of work. The field work she had done for the organisation she worked for, Orion, had brought her into contact with people just as bad as Freeman. Like him, they all had information you needed even if they were dangerous.
‘How did you know I’d be down here?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t. But after I watched the news on TV this morning, I thought maybe I’ll go down to Bondi on the off chance. You’re usually around this stretch of the beach somewhere sometime.’ Freeman squinted in the sun. ‘Did you know I used to see you here pretty often before I went into hospital? Don’t worry, I wasn’t watching you. I’ve lived around here all my life. I’ve come down here whenever I could this last year. Just to be here. I’m dying, you see. I’m supposed to be in a hospice but I came home a few days ago. I’m not going to die in a place like that. I’m going to die in the house I was born in. Now look at this. Not the front page. Open it to where it’s folded.’
He handed her a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald. A small photograph was pinned to the inside page. The angle showed it had been taken with a secret camera. A group of men were sitting around a table in a house somewhere. Grace recognised Marvin Tooth’s son, Baby Tooth; the Ice Cream Man himself; Stuart Morrissey; and the man she had seen on the net that morning, Jerome Beck. The table was covered with the remains of a meal. The used plates and empty wine glasses had been pushed out of the way and what looked like a marketable quantity of tablets had been placed in the centre. Ecstasy, she assumed. There was a time and date stamp in the right-hand bottom corner from about five months ago.
‘That’s our syndicate, mine and Mike’s,’ Freeman said quietly. ‘You know, peddling the usual shit. Ice, E, a bit of coke, all that. Baby Tooth was our man on the job. Stewie used to clean the money for us. Him and Nattie Edwards. The man with the glasses is some arsehole Stewie brought along called Jerome Beck. Maybe you know the name, maybe you don’t. But I bet you’ve seen him before. A man who looks an awful lot like him just had his picture splashed all over the net, dead as a dodo.’
‘Why aren’t you in the picture?’ Grace asked.
‘I was too busy taking it. You can keep that. I’ve got the disk in my bag here. There’s a lot more where that came from, let me tell you.’
Grace refolded the paper and dropped it in her beach bag.
‘What’s this got to do with me or Harrigan?’
‘It’s the icing on the cake, mate. I’ve got tapes of all our meetings tucked away back home. He didn’t know it but Baby Tooth was our fish. We had him by the balls. So when Marvin got to be commissioner, we’d have him by the balls too. With what I’ve got, Paulie can hang Baby Tooth out to dry and take old Fang with him as a bonus. That’s an offer you don’t get every fucking day.’
‘That’s a bribe,’ she said. ‘You want Harrigan to do your dirty work for you. You don’t want to do it yourself.’
‘I’d look at it this way if I were you. If Fang gets to be commissioner, Paulie’s going to be fucked for good and all. He knows that. Now it’s going to work the other way around. You can make a choice which way you want it to go.’ He spoke lower. ‘And it’s not just Baby Tooth on those tapes, mate. Paulie’s there as well. You’ve heard about Eddie Lee? Well, Mike talks about him on my tapes. Him and Paulie and everything that happened that night Eddie got shot. You want that to go public? Up to you. But if it does, Paulie’s fucked.’
‘Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?’
‘This is about Mike, Gracie. Who worked him over like that and why. Because I’ve got good information that’ll help you find that out.’ Freeman looked out to sea like someone waiting for the angel of death. ‘Paulie found Mike’s body yesterday in that house up at Pittwater. I’m glad. He’ll get a decent burial now. You might hate him but he was my mate. That’s why.’
‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.
‘First off, come back to my place.’
‘I’m not doing that.’
‘Fucking Christ, mate, I’m not going to hurt you. There’s nothing there waiting for you but a bunch of tapes. I want to talk about things I can’t talk about here.’
‘No.’
‘Look.’ He leaned forward again, talking as softly as possible. ‘I’ve got a gun, okay? A.38. You can have it to protect yourself. I know you can shoot. It’s in my bag right here. I’ll give it to you.’
‘Not on Bondi beach!’
‘No, take the bag. It’s got the disk in it. Take it all.’ He shoved it into her hands. ‘There’s no one left but me, Gracie. I’m going to tell you what I’ve got to say and die. That’s it.’
‘I’ll ring Harrigan.’
‘What do you think he’s going to say? Yeah, just hop in the car with Jerry, I don’t mind. If you don’t come back with me, I’m sending everything I’ve got to the papers. If I do, Paulie’s gone.’
‘Why aren’t you doing that anyway? Why should you care what happens to Harrigan?’
Freeman looked down at the sand almost as if he was embarrassed.
‘Because Paulie will get the fuckers who killed Mike. I wouldn’t trust any other copper but he knows what he’s doing. He’ll want to know who they are if only so he can piss on Mike’s grave about it. He’ll keep going till he finds out, he’ll have to. If you don’t know that, you don’t know him.’
This was too true for an argument. At another time, Grace might have laughed that even Freeman respected Harrigan as much as this. She looked in the cheap bag he had pushed into her hands. Just as he’d said, she saw the dull glint of gun metal.
‘I’m ringing Harrigan anyway.’
The phone rang through to his voicemail as it so often did when he was working. ‘It’s Grace,’ she said uselessly. ‘Call me as soon as you can.’
‘There’s nothing at my house, Gracie,’ Freeman said, when she shut her phone. ‘Just the tapes. Do this. It’ll help us both. Then I can die easy.’
Freeman’s face, a stark mask, matched his words. She didn’t believe he was lying. If he did have tapes back at his house, she couldn’t let them end up in the media’s hands. There was something else at work too. Taking risks when she was under pressure was an old habit of Grace’s. If life and death were only a breath apart, there were times when all she wanted to do was walk the tightrope between them. When the emotional impress got too much-the way it almost always did when Harrigan was involved-the adrenaline, the sheer risk, relieved the tension. The way it was now. Doing something so perilous as trusting Freeman was like a drug. As dangerous as it was, it eased away a worse anxiety.
‘Did you drive here?’ she asked.
‘No, I got a cab. They took my licence away. Said I’d be fucking lethal if I was out there driving.’