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Chapter 3

A hot Sunday in late January, I walked up to Crown Street and had a late lunch of bacon and eggs at the Italians’ while I read the paper. Elvis Presley was in Germany earning $82.50 a month in the US army. Over in Cuba a ‘beat-generation leader’ called Fidel Castro was stirring things up. Meanwhile, the Russians had discovered a youth drug called Substance H-3. There was a picture of a bloke doing a handstand on a table, one hand. I swallowed an Aspro, paid up and left.

A bloke was waiting for me outside the cafe, leaning against a car, his arms folded. He had short, bristly hair, a round face, protruding lower jaw. I knew the face. Detective Sergeant Fred Slaney. He pointed at me.

‘You, come here,’ he said.

He opened the passenger door of the car. ‘Get in.’ I did. He walked around, got in, started the car and drove up William Street.

‘Where are we going?’ I said.

He didn’t answer. He drove into the city, off Pitt Street into a laneway called Central Street.

‘Are you taking me to the CIB?’

‘When I want you to talk I’ll let you know, maggot.’

He drove through an archway into a courtyard. He parked the car, got out, said, ‘Come on,’ and we went into the old building next to Central police station.

We went upstairs to a small room, bare but for a table and two chairs. Slaney went off and came back in less than a minute, carrying a folder.

He sat down, indicated for me to sit in the other chair, opened the folder and flipped through some papers. Then he leant back and looked at me.

‘September 1957. Someone knocks over the J. Farren Price vault. Forty thousand quid’s worth of jewellery. Six weeks later Chief Superintendent Ray Waters disappears. His car is found at Mascot airport. Items from the Price robbery subsequently turn up in Los Angeles. Why do you think that was, Glasheen?’

I said nothing.

‘Well? What do you think happened? Don’t be shy.’

‘I believe there were rumours to the effect that Waters had bundied with the gear, that he was somehow mixed up in the robbery.’

He said, ‘I worked with Waters on a number of cases.’

I nodded.

‘And I know he didn’t organise the Price robbery.’

I nodded again.

Slaney closed the folder, sat back. ‘But I also know he had an interest in it. He was in line for a half-share of the fenced value.’ He paused. ‘Ten thousand pounds, so he reckoned.’

‘A lot of money.’

‘And I was expecting half of his share. That’s how we used to work, sharing the take.’

‘That’s very touching.’

He leaned forward. His fist shot out, caught the side of my jaw, knocked me right off the chair.

‘I’ll let you know when I want your smart-arsery. Get up.’

I did. He continued like nothing had happened.

‘So, I was expecting a half-share of Waters’ ten grand.’

‘You must have been upset when he disappeared.’

‘I was more than surprised, you might say. So I personally looked into the matter of Ray’s disappearance, on my own time.’ He smiled at me. ‘Among Ray’s notes I found an address in Pittwater. And naturally I—’

There was a tap at the door. A voice called out, ‘Mr Slaney?’

He got up and left. Ten minutes later he returned with another bloke, a grubby little feller. Slaney left us together in the room, said he’d be back shortly.

The little bloke hardly looked at me. He walked around the room, blew his nose into a dirty hanky.

‘It’s not fuckin’ fair. I fuckin’ told him what happened, I told him the truth. I didn’t give him up. He doesn’t give a man a chance, that bastard.’

‘Who, Slaney?’

‘Yeah, fuckin’ Mr Slaney. You got a ciggy?’

I gave him one. He lit it and looked at me for the first time. ‘Thanks, mate. What are you here for?’

‘I don’t know.’

He nodded like he didn’t believe me, then went back to pacing the room, muttering to himself.

After twenty minutes, Slaney came back with another copper.

‘All right, come on, you two. You get to know each other, did you?’ I looked at Slaney and he laughed. ‘I mean, you’d’ve been wasting your time if you did.’ He walked over to the grubby bloke and punched him hard in the stomach. He fell to the floor. Slaney kicked him.

‘Get up, you scum.’

The little bloke slowly got to his feet. ‘It’s not fair, Mr Slaney, I never—’

Slaney head-butted him and then gave him another kicking.

It went on like that for five minutes or so, then Slaney said, ‘All right. We’d better get going now.’

The little bloke was lying on the floor, bleeding. Slaney said to me, ‘Give the little cunt a hand up.’

I helped him to his feet. The four of us went out to the courtyard. Slaney said, ‘You come in the car with me, Glasheen.’

We got in his car and he drove off. The sun had gone down and there was a gritty wind blowing. The bible bashers were in Park Street singing songs to a crowd of idlers. We drove into Clarence Street and over the Harbour Bridge. Sunday evening, it was quiet on the roads.

We took the first exit off the Bridge, left into Lavender Street and along to Blues Point Road. Slaney said nothing the whole time. But he was breathing noisily through his nose and his eyes were wide. Alcohol on his breath.

The police radio was on: there had been an accident at Broadway, a disturbance in a boarding-house at Redfern, a break-in at a gift shop in Mosman.

Slaney drove down to the end of Blues Point Road and pulled up outside a big building site, right down on the harbourfront.

‘Get out,’ he said.

The building site was surrounded by a white-painted ply fence. Slaney walked over to the entrance, a gate with a big chain across it. He pulled out a bundle of keys and tried them each until one opened the padlock. He pushed the gate open a couple of feet.

The other cop pulled up in his car then, with the shivery little bloke on board. They followed us in. There was a gatehouse, but no one there. The site was a huge hole in the ground, blasted out of the Sydney sandstone to a depth of maybe a hundred feet. There were a few lights about the place, but it was pretty dark.

Slaney and the other cop had a quick whispered conversation, then Slaney pulled the gate closed behind us.

‘All right, come on, you two.’

We walked down a steep, rough roadway which spiralled around the edge of the excavation, all the way to the bottom of the pit. There was earthmoving equipment down there and the ground had been roughly smoothed out, ready for construction to proceed. Steel reinforcing was in place over half the ground.

At the bottom of the roadway I stopped and said, ‘Are we going to talk business, Slaney?’

He punched me in the face. ‘Mister Slaney, maggot. So you think you might be able to say something of interest to me, do you?’

‘The way this seems to be developing indicates to me, you know, that maybe you’re considering acting on what you think the situation is, when maybe you’re not in possession of all the facts, and I was—’

‘Shut your mouth.’

Slaney turned to the little bloke, who was whimpering now, and pushed him in the chest a couple of times, away from the roadway. Slaney turned his head away, spat on the ground, then pinched his nostrils closed. ‘Phew, this little prick has shat himself.’ He put his hand into his coat, brought out a gun and shot the bloke in the head. He seemed to crumple in on himself. He twitched once and then was still, bent over in a position that no living body could ever have achieved. Slaney fired twice more into the body, which gave a little shake as each bullet went in. Blood trickled out from under the body, black and oily in the dim light.

‘Okay, Terry, you better put a couple in him too.’

The other copper was looking none too spry now, but he took out his gun and fired twice. Slaney pulled a half-bottle of scotch out of his back pocket and took a swig, handed it to the other copper. ‘All right, Terry, let’s see what you’re like with a bulldozer. The keys are supposed to be in it.’

When the cop had gone, Slaney looked around, rubbed his chin and said, ‘I did this in the wrong place. All right, Glasheen, it’s time to see how fit you are. Pick up that piece of shit there—’ he walked over to a pit, grave-size, which had been cut into the sandstone—‘and drop him into this hole. I’d be careful though, that feller’s leaking from everywhere.’ He laughed, a short, ugly sound.

I took the body by the feet, dragged it over to the edge of the pit, stopped.

‘Go on, drop him in.’

The body fell to the bottom, about four feet down.

‘Life is short and full of woe,’ said Slaney. He laughed again, turned around. ‘What’s holding Terry up?’

Right then the front-end loader started. The cop drove it towards us. Ten yards away he put the blade down and pushed a load of rubble into the pit, reversed up and did it again until the top was level. Then he drove over the spot a couple of times with the blade down to smooth it out and square it all off. He stopped the vehicle, got out and had a spew. But Slaney was in good spirits now.

‘The concrete pour is on first thing tomorrow. Fifty tons of concrete should shut the little fucker up. All right, Terry, you did well. You can shoot through.’ He turned to me, put his hand heavily on my shoulder. ‘Now, young Bill, you said something about doing business.’

Slaney drove us back to East Sydney. On the way he finished his account of his investigation into Ray Waters’ disappearance.

‘So I found this address among Waters’ things. It was a place up at Pittwater. I went there, took the ferry across the bay. No one home. The ferry driver recognised a photo of Ray Waters, remembered taking him across. But he couldn’t remember taking him back to Church Point.

‘I found out that you’re the owner of the place, and before that old Laurie O’Brien was. I knew who he was, but I’d never heard of you.’ He smiled at me. ‘But I know a bit more about you now.

‘So I had a bit of a walk around up there at your place, thought about it all. I saw the boat down there in the shed, looked at the water, the open sea just a few miles away. And then I pretty well knew what had happened: you and O’Brien killed him and dumped him in the briny. Now, I admit, it seemed unlikely, a bodgie petty crim and a broken-down old bookie taking on Ray Waters. But I was certain that was what happened.’

‘What if I didn’t kill him? What if I just happened to have been there? Hypothetically.’

‘Doesn’t matter a flying fuck. You were there and you failed to prevent it. That fact alone makes you as guilty as the perpetrator. And then, you benefited from it—maybe a judge would give you twenty years instead of life. You want to put it to the test?’

‘No, not really.’

He pulled up in William Street, turned off the engine.

‘Don’t get me wrong. As far as I’m concerned, your relationship with Ray Waters is your business. He was nothing special to me, and knowing Ray, he probably asked for it. Spoilsport old cunt that he was.’ Then he turned to me and leaned right over until he was inches from my face.

‘But you see, Glasheen, I never got my money. That’s what gives me the shits. I was counting on it.’

‘So what do you want from me?’

‘Ten thousand pounds. Obviously.’

I stared at him. ‘You can’t mean it. I’ve got less than a thousand.’

‘I do mean it.’

‘It would take me years to make that much. And what’s stopping you from killing me anyway, even if I do pay you?’

‘Absolutely nothing.’ He brought his gun out, put it to the side of my head. ‘It’s up to you. If you think I’m asking too much, we’ll drive back to the building site, take care of it all right now. That way, you won’t have to bother yourself with raising the money, or with anything else. The alternative, have a go at getting the money. If I was you, I’d have a go.’ He put the gun away. ‘That way you have a chance at least. What have you got to lose?’

I thought hard. ‘I need time.’

‘I understand that. Since this is a kind of settling of accounts, an appropriate deadline would be the end of the financial year. I’ll give you until the first of July. See it as a kind of race against the clock. Now, I’ll let you choose how you do this. You can either give me fortnightly instalments, or a lump sum at the end.’

‘I’ll go for the lump sum. How do I get in touch with you?’

‘You don’t, I’ll keep in touch with you. You live in a flat up the back there, work down at the Haymarket, drive a grey Holden. Yeah, I know your movements pretty well, Glasheen. I’ll keep in touch, don’t worry about that. Off you go now.’

I stayed indoors with the blinds drawn for the next three days. I’d never crossed Slaney’s path before but I’d heard the stories. About how he was a loner in the force but had a hand in nearly everything bent that was going: abortionists, pros, bludgers, thieves, standover men, bookies—a whole army of crook operators made regular payments to him just to stay in business. Then there was his other job, the New South Wales Police Force’s unofficial assassin.

I slept badly or not at all. My appetite vanished. I tried to read, couldn’t concentrate; turned on the television, couldn’t sit still. I had a nearly constant headache and a cold feeling in my guts.

Towards the end of the week, my nerves started to settle down. It was pay up or die, and the longer I spent shivering in my burrow, the nearer the deadline would get. I opened Uncle Dick’s book of wisdom. The preachment said, Put fear aside and go forward.

I turned my mind to the matter of the ten thousand pounds. A huge amount of money. You could buy a row of terrace houses for that much, or three new American cars.

First off, I’d have to call in all my debts. If I did the rounds I could probably collect half of what I was owed, or maybe more. And there was the Jack Davey loan. That might add up to one and a half or two grand. But I knew my only chance for the really big money lay in high-risk, high-return endeavour—lawbreaking.

The fact was, however, I was sadly underqualified for day-to-day criminal work. The rorts I’d done in the past had been other people’s jobs that I’d tagged along on, or else spur-of-the-moment things I’d stumbled into. I had no real idea about the routine business of crime. For the life of me I wouldn’t have known how to open a safe, pick a lock, or shimmy up a drain pipe.

I got on the phone to Teddy Rallis, slippery man about town, dealer in stolen property, and prime mover of the J. Farren Price deal. I told him I was on the loose and interested to hear of any business on the go, and that I wasn’t averse to trying my hand at the semi-skilled, meat and potatoes aspects of the trade. He said he’d keep in touch.

Then I got out and pressed the flesh, visiting those places known to be frequented by the lawless element. I started at the Bognor, moved on to Monty’s at Pyrmont. I mingled, got into shouts, dropped hints here and there. I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with offers, so I moved on to the Ancient Briton at Glebe. I asked the bloke behind the bar if he’d heard of any, you know, ‘jobs’ going anywhere. He kept a straight face, said he understood they were looking for an offsider on the brewery truck.

I went to the Victoria at Annandale where I spotted Ronnie Cosgrove. Just after the war, when Ron had been a Newtown publican, I’d run sly grog for him. Nowadays he was the acknowledged expert at hoisting cigarette trucks. So lucrative was the ciggy truck business, three or four such jobs could get me square with Slaney. I renewed my acquaintance with Ronnie and let him know I was available. He nodded, said he’d be happy to have me on board but he had nothing on right now. I read in the paper next day that a Rothmans truck had gone off that very evening.

But I didn’t panic yet, I had five months. Christ, anything could happen in that time.