‘People love to see me on television,’ said Birkerts.
‘So do we all. Say nothing. Check the whole street for security vision, that’s the priority. Along with all mobiles in the vicinity, starting, oh, 6pm Saturday.’
‘My exact thoughts,’ said Birkerts.
‘What took you so long then?’ said Villani. ‘Are we assuming the killers took these boys from the house to the shed to work on them?’
‘I am,’ said Birkerts. ‘The back door’s been smashed in.’
Villani crossed the concrete apron, inspected the back door. The latch was lying on the floor, all four screws forced out, that was one heavy, practised blow. He smelled disinfectant before he entered the kitchen, clinically clean.
The smelling he learned not on the detective course but from Singleton, who walked around murder scenes sniffing like someone with a lingering cold.
‘Stay with you, smells,’ Singo said. ‘All your life.’
Villani did not know of any occasion when sniffing had detected something that would not have been found by other means. But the more he sniffed, the more doglike he became, the more aware of the smells of the world.
The day would come, sniffing would pay off.
Empty pizza boxes stacked beside a bin, plastic plates in a drying rack, empty sink, two scourers. He crossed the room. A dim passage with a bare parquet floor led to the front door, two doors to the left, three to the right.
He looked into the first left-hand room. A bedroom, single bed. Prim like the kitchen, bed unmade, two pairs of runners lined up under it, clothes folded on a chair, a comb stuck in a clean hairbrush, like a porcupine with a fin.
The room opposite, a bathroom, towels hanging from rails. Clean as the kitchen, it smelled of chlorine bleach.
Next, another bedroom, king-sized bed, not made, cheap Chinese cotton clothes peeled from a body, dropped to the floor, layers of clothes. He sniffed cigarettes, dope, alcohol breath, sweaty runners.
Something else. Perfume, cheap. He sniffed above the bed. A woman had slept in it recently. Or a perfumed man.
The next room on the right. Duplicate of the previous one but dirtier and with two drug pipes. Different perfume here, also cheap.
The room on the left, a sitting room. Oversized chairs of cheap leather, foam escaping through splits, glass coffee table three metres square, cracked from corner to corner, a landing strip for burger wrappers, empty beer cans, cans of Cougar, HotRod, Stiff, HighLand. A chrome hubcap served as an ashtray, it held perhaps forty or fifty stubs, others missed the ashtray, burned out on the table, left cylinders of ash, dark nicotine stains. A fifty-inch flatscreen stood on a stand, the sound muted, a man and a woman with thick make-up, sprayed hair were talking to the camera: a breakfast show. The male frowned at the end of sentences, his eyebrows sloped, a dog face, sometimes happy, sometimes puzzled, sometimes sad. The pretty woman was excited in an awkward way, she knew she was meat, they had told her to be herself, she had no idea of what she was herself except pretty, so that did not help.
Someone had slept on a sofa against the wall, an unzipped sleeping bag on it, a grimy pillow, on the floor a full ashtray, a half-empty cigarette pack, a plastic lighter.
Beside the fireplace, newspapers were neatly stacked on a small table beside an obese and lumpy chair. Villani looked.
The Age.
Saturday’s paper. In this house, who read the broadsheet of record, the druggies or the tidy man, the cleaner and disinfector?
They had always kept the Age for Bob Villani at the milkbar in Selborne. When he was driving all week, they accumulated. On Sunday mornings, Bob arranged them in order and father and son read them at a sitting, Bob passing each paper on as he finished it.
Villani went back down the passage, through the antiseptic kitchen, into the day. Moxley was coming from the shed wearing a green surgical mask, pushing it onto his forehead.
‘Three Caucasian males, bullet wounds only on the one nearest the entrance, shot in the head, the two hanging have multiple wounds, including bullet wounds,’ he said. ‘No identification. Except.’
He handed Villani a card.
VOLIM TE IVAN, written in slanting capitals.
‘What’s this,’ said Villani.
‘Engraved on an earring on the nearest hanging male,’ said Moxley. ‘The two are both late thirties, I’d say. Give or take a few years.’
They watched him go back into the building.
‘I like him more with the mask on,’ said Villani. ‘More kissable.’
He showed the card. The crew stepped close.
‘I love you Ivan,’ said Tomasic. He was an only child, his parents dumped him when he was seven, he was fostered, shopped around, spoke four languages. ‘That’s what it says.’
‘In what?’
‘Croatian. Slovak.’
Villani felt the little tingle, looked at Birkerts. ‘Get in there and tell Moxley I’d like details of tatts.’
‘That’s going to be helpful?’
Birkerts had been Singo’s star pupil, picked in spite of having a degree, in spite of getting up the nose of every superior he’d ever had.
Villani had an acid surge, beer, nicotine, vinegary tomato sauce. ‘You reckon not, detective?’ he said. ‘Should I have asked you first?’
‘Sorry, boss.’ A small head bow, Birkerts went.
Villani and the crew stood in the warming day, the air alive with electronic squawk and grate and twitter, waited for his return, watched him step around the blood, come back.
‘Both got a little shield with a sword across it,’ said Birkerts. ‘Like a chessboard.’
He patted his left upper arm. ‘Here.’
‘Matko Ribaric’s boys,’ said Villani. ‘Who says there’s no God?’
He walked to the building. They would have turned the third man onto his back by now, he could take pictures.
IN THE CAR, at the lights at Belgrave Road, the phone rang.
Kiely’s fat vowels. ‘Gather I’m the last to hear about Oakleigh,’ he said. ‘Makes me unhappy.’
‘What’s your unhappiness got to do with me?’ said Villani.
‘Just a comment. So I’m playing catch-up, what’s the prelim scenario?’
Villani wanted to close his eyes for a long time, but the lights changed.
‘Could be drugs,’ Villani said. ‘That’s a possibility.’
‘Really?’ said Kiely, smart little inflection. ‘I thought it might be something like, ah, farm produce.’
Kiely had a degree in criminology and an MBA, done parttime. He was head of Homicide in Auckland when he got the nod, they thought New Zealand was clean and green. Kiely was certainly green.
‘We’ve had farm produce, mate,’ said Villani. ‘Many dead. The Mafia war. But you wouldn’t know.’
The silence sang.
‘Anyway,’ said Villani, ‘Tomasic’s sent through three names, we’ll get the paper on these boys soonest. The house is going to take all morning. That’s the priority.’
‘Shouldn’t this be a Crucible matter?’
‘Unnatural deaths. Homicide. Not the case in Auckland?’
‘Just contributing to our ongoing professional conversation.’
‘Whatever the fuck that is. Forget Crucible.’
Hunger.
Villani detoured to South Melbourne, parked in a disabled space, he felt disabled. They knew him at the greasy, run by Greek outlaws, he customised the hamburger with the lot, subtracted the cheese, he couldn’t hack plastic cheese, the bacon with the pink stains of meat in the white fat. Four orders ahead of him, he went down the street, bought a paper, came back and watched the two-station assembly line at work.
Jim, the fat cook, changed the station on the radio and Paul Keogh came on in full voice:
…these killings, nothing official yet. We throw millions of dollars, that’s millions, throw them at a so-called high-tech, super-sophisticated taskforce, dedicated to stamping out organised crime and what’s to show for the Crucible spending? A few idiots jailed. That’s it. And now this thing’s happened in Oakleigh, which is…