The Big Ask (27 page)

I liked the idea of the whatnot. ‘I'll ring you Monday.'

‘Make it Tuesday. I don't want you to think I'm easy.'

As distinct from hard. That would be my part. If I passed the audition. I felt my credentials firming, so I hung up and reviewed my immediate priorities.

Where does a man go who has just passed up an offer of a safe seat in parliament? On the balance of probabilities, all things considered, I figured that my best bet was Safeway in Carlton. Free undercover parking with every purchase over five dollars. The amount of food Red was going through, I'd spend that much, easy. And the way the rain was pissing down, undercover parking was an inducement too good to refuse.

I was turning the Honda into Brunswick Street, wipers slapping, the condensation on the inside of the windscreen thinning in the warm-air blast of the demister, when suddenly the word ‘Foodbank' materialised. It was stencilled onto the tailgate of the Bedford truck in front of me.

As we inched along, the traffic thicker than a National Party voter, I recalled that Foodbank was a charity that collected perishable foodstuffs for distribution to worthy causes. I remembered, too, where I had learned that fact.

In an instant I was transported back to the wholesale fruit and vegetable market, to the interior of Donny's Kenworth. Okay, so my zucchini wasn't tangled in the knicker elastic between Heather Maitland's alabaster thighs. But I could clearly recall the occluded view through the smeared mist of the rear window. I could see the Foodbank truck parked beside us. Like a film projected onto my windscreen, a scene unfolded before me.

Head down, I was sprinting through the rain towards Donny's truck. As I rounded the tailgate of the Foodbank Bedford, I slammed head-on into Frank Farrell. The impact of our collision knocked his mobile to the ground.

Then Farrell was scooping up his phone, casting an appreciative eye over the spanner in my hand and continuing on his way. A few moments later, I glimpsed him again as he ambled into the market, jeans tight around his backside, hands thrust into his jacket. His grey leather jacket with its cinched waist and narrow slit pockets. Pockets suitable for a pair of sunglasses, but far too small to contain a bulky mobile phone.

So where was it? One moment it was in his hand, the next it was gone. No more than fifteen seconds had elapsed since our collision. At some point during that time, he must have ditched it. But why toss away a thousand dollars worth of communications equipment? And where?

When the Foodbank truck took a left at the lights, I stayed behind it.

The traffic was crawling. My mind was racing.

Spider Webb described the murder weapon as a blunt object, of which there were plenty ‘readily to hand'. And if you happen to be holding one, what could be more readily to hand than a mobile phone?

When I'd called Farrell at the Haulers, ten days after Darren's death, I was given a number for his mobile. The
new
number. If he had a new number, surely that meant he had a new phone. So what happened to the old one? Was it possible that Farrell had tossed it into the load on a parked truck? Might Foodbank have driven away from the market that morning with more on board than just a consignment of on-the-turn vegetables?

We turned into Victoria Parade, four lanes wide. The traffic thinned and the Bedford picked up speed. I stayed with it, tracking it past the edge of the central business district. I hunched over the steering wheel, my eyes glued to the words on the tailgate in front of me. A desperate hope had begun to take root in my mind.

The only eyewitness to Darren Stuhl's killing was dead. But if Farrell's phone could be found, and if it could be shown to be the murder weapon, then the police would be forced to reconsider the case. Once that happened, Farrell's whole fabric of deceit would begin to unravel. It was even conceivable that Bob Stuhl's role in Donny's alleged suicide might come to light.

Whoa, I told myself. You're drawing a very long bow here, Murray. As an object to clutch, the idea didn't even amount to a soggy straw.

By the time we reached the workshops and warehouses of North Melbourne, reality had begun to shine its cold light on my fantasies. For all I knew, the Foodbank truck was bound for Perth or Darwin or Dar-es-Salaam. Even if I followed it to the ends of the earth, what were my chances of finding Farrell's mobile phone when I got there?

I broke off the chase, dropped back and flipped on my indicator, angling for a break in the traffic. At that moment, the Bedford turned down a side street and vanished into a warehouse between a radiator replacement joint and an airfreight dispatch centre. The sign above the entrance read ‘Foodbank Central Depot'.

Doubling back, I pulled into the kerb in front of the building. Through the slap of the windscreen wipers, I watched a station wagon emerge, slow to check for oncoming traffic, then drive away. The driver was a man in a Salvation Army uniform. He was a big bloke, one of gentle Jesus's burlier devotees. He probably believed in miracles. I didn't, but I got out of the Honda anyway.

Foodbank was a drive-through operation, a mediumsized warehouse with a roller door at each end. Down the centre ran a row of metal racks containing trays of bread and baked goods. Styrofoam cases of fruit and vegetables were stacked against the walls. A coolroom opened to one side, curtained with heavy strips of clear plastic. A woman in a tracksuit was helping herself to the fruit, loading her choices into a transit van with the words ‘Street Kids Mission' on the door. Three men in dustcoats were carrying crates of fruit juice from the back of the truck into the coolroom, working efficiently but with no great sense of urgency.

They had about them the fate-buffeted air of individuals who might once have been on the receiving end of the charity they now helped to dispense, who lifted and toted but harboured no illusions about the redemptive value of physical labour. I thought I recognised one of them from the market parking lot, a scrawny old lag, one of the first arrivals at the scene of Darren's pulping.

If Farrell had tossed his phone into the Foodbank truck, then it was possible that this man had found it. It was also possible that the police had already covered this territory as part of their general inquiries. Since I was there, I decided to find out.

The man paused in his work as I approached, leaned against the Bedford's mudguard and pulled out a tobacco pouch. ‘Help you?' he said, a cigarette paper stuck to his bottom lip.

I opted for the direct approach. ‘You were at the wholesale market the morning that bloke got killed, weren't you?'

He tilted his head to one side, fingers working at the makings. ‘You a reporter? Bit slow off the mark, aren't you, mate?'

I took the opening. ‘I'm doing a bit of follow up. Progress of the investigation, that sort of thing. Tracking down some of the people who spoke with the cops.'

He parked a thin rollie in the corner of his mouth. ‘Who says I talked to the police?'

I tapped the side of my nose. ‘Can't disclose my sources, mate.'

‘Well you'd better get more reliable ones,' he said, an aggressive edge creeping into his voice. ‘I didn't say nothing to the cops. And that's because I didn't see nothing. End of story.'

The shutters were coming down fast. I shrugged helplessly. ‘Looks like I've had a wasted trip, then.'

‘Looks like it.'

Time for a different approach. I nodded apologetically and made as if to leave, then turned back. ‘While I'm here, I might as well make a contribution.' I took out my wallet and offered him a twenty dollar bill.

He picked a shred of tobacco off his bottom lip and shot a glance over his shoulder. ‘Can't give you a receipt, mate. We're not set up for cash donations.'

‘Don't worry about the paperwork.' I folded the bill and slipped it into the breast pocket of his dustcoat. ‘I'm on expenses.'

He lit his cigarette and inhaled hard, waiting.

‘You didn't happen to find anything unusual in your load that morning, did you?' I said.

He sucked his cancer stick and meditated upon the matter. ‘Found a python once, in a load of bananas. And a rusty hand grenade in a bag of spuds.' He rubbed his stubbled chin. ‘Can't say I found anything that morning.'

That was it, then. I had my answer. ‘Thanks anyway, mate,' I shrugged and started to go, for real this time.

‘But then I didn't do the unloading that morning,' he added, almost as an afterthought. ‘We had a couple of young blokes at the time, some sort of youth training program. Anything turned up worth keeping, they'd've kept it. Anything else would've got chucked in the lost and found.' He twitched his cigarette towards a large cardboard carton at the end of the vegetable bins.

I nodded thanks, went over to the box and fished among the accumulated odds and sods. These consisted of a dirty check apron with the strings missing, an ancient football jumper with the sleeves torn off and a baseball cap that appeared to have been fed through a hay-baling machine. Some heavier items had settled on the bottom. I tipped the box over and dumped its contents onto the concrete floor. Out tumbled a lidless lunchbox, a fractured thermos flask, a John Deere tractor badge and a black mobile phone.

My mouth went dry and my pulse went through the roof. I squeezed my eyes closed and counted to ten. When I opened them the phone was still there.

Before it melted into thin air, I crouched down on my haunches and prodded it with a pen. Its casing was intact, the display panel cracked and the antenna bent. When and where this happened was impossible to tell. It seemed reasonable to assume that it was kaput when it arrived at Foodbank or it would have been snaffled by the youthful trainees.

There was no doubt in my mind that this was Frank Farrell's phone. And that it had been used to deck the despicable Darren. Problem was, would anyone else believe it?

To my dismay, no convenient clumps of reddish hair adhered to the casing. No clots of blood were visible in the crevices of the keypad. But Donny had talked about a bloody big gash and Farrell had disposed of the object in haste, so there must have been at least some prospect that evidence remained of its lethal use. I was no expert, but I'd watched enough police shows on television to know that every contact leaves its traces.

If my discovery was to lead anywhere, I would have to find those traces. Only after that would there be any chance that the police would take me seriously. And since I had no forensic facilities at my disposal, my only hope was to trust to luck and try to wing it.

Taking care not to touch it, I bundled my find into plastic wrapping from a package of date-expired Danish pastries and carried it briskly out of the building. My dustcoated informant made a conspicuous show of not noticing me leave. Our conversation, I understood, had never taken place.

Once back in the car, I resumed my trip to the supermarket. As well as toothpaste, tinned tuna and enough cereal to feed a team of draught horses, I purchased a pair of tight-fitting rubber dishwashing gloves. At the office-supplies store on Elgin Street I bought a magnifying glass.

Back home, I restocked the refrigerator and the pantry, moved my reading light to the kitchen table, snapped on the rubbers and set to work.

Gingerly tweezering the phone between thumb and forefinger, I examined it closely with the magnifying glass. No fingerprints were visible. But a fine seam, I discovered, ran along the plastic moulding above the earpiece. This was the most likely point of impact if the phone had been used to strike a blow. Running the tip of a safety pin along the crack, I extracted a minute quantity of dark-brown crud.

Which told me exactly nothing.

I transferred the gunk to the rim of a saucer and turned my attention to the keypad. There were twelve number keys, eight function keys, * and #. From the gaps around these I extracted more tiny samples of muck. What I needed was an electron spectrographic crudometer.

Or the nearest equivalent. I went into Red's room and dusted off the microscope that had been languishing on top of his wardrobe since a week after his tenth birthday. It wasn't the most sophisticated piece of scientific equipment in the world, yet it was more than just a toy. I set it up on the kitchen table and adjusted the mirror until the lens revealed a luminous white circle. Then I sorted through the glass slides and eliminated those labelled Angora Rabbit Hair, Butterfly Scale and Fowl Feather.

Science had never been my strongest suit at school but I'd studied biology until my final year. If any of the stuff I was dredging from the nooks and crannies of the phone were blood, I'd need a sample with which to compare it. I pricked the tip of my middle finger with the safety pin and smeared a drop of blood on a clean slide. I laid another on top and took a squiz. What I saw looked pink and bubbly, like the froth on a strawberry milkshake.

Laying aside the control slide, I proceeded to scrutinise the various bits of detritus I'd dredged from the phone's clefts and crevices, first mixing them to a slurry with a droplet of water. I got the Mekong Delta, mosquito diarrhoea and the hide pattern of a Friesian cow. Nothing remotely resembled my specimen of blood.

This was getting me nowhere. I turned the phone over and tried the other side. Releasing the latch button, I removed the battery. A layer of soft residue caked the seam. I smeared some of it on a slide and squinted through the lens. What I saw was caramel rather than strawberry but its bubbly cellular structure was almost identical to my selfsourced sample.

If that's not blood, I thought, I'm Louis Pasteur.

The more I squinted through the eyepiece, the more convinced I became that I had uncovered an item of evidence capable of nailing Frank Farrell for Darren Stuhl's homicide. And thus of putting paid to the canard of Donny Maitland's suicide. Possibly even triggering an investigation that might even reveal Bob Stuhl's role in Donny's death.

Unless, on the other hand, it wasn't Darren's blood. Or Farrell's phone. These were matters that could only be determined by the police. Proper scientific scrutiny might also find fragments of Farrell's fingerprints and further bits and pieces Darren's biology. His hypochondrial DNA or whatever it was called.