DRAGAN
1
‘I swear to God I’m getting too old for this shit,’ I said to Lanza.
‘They’ll need a frontend loader to dump all them ashes in the goddamned pool of reflections,’ he said.
‘You should have more respect for the dead,’ I said. ‘Yeah, Dragan, like the dead got respect for me.’
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I think that they’re gonna have a symbolic sprinkling.’ ‘You want another coffee?’ Lanza asked me.
‘Naah. I gotta go see the old man of the shooter kid. Did you know that they changed their name to Davidson from Davidovich?’
‘No kidding? Sounds Serbian.’ ‘It is,’ I said.
‘Mafia?’ Lanza trigged. ‘Oh yeah, the worst kind.’
‘Mafia kid, eh. Be careful, Dragan.’
‘Yeah, I know. I’m just gonna have a nice polite jawbone with the guy. Ask if he knows where the kid got the gun. I reckon that he’d still be doing it tough cause the kid was his only son.’
‘Like he’ll tell ya.’
‘Yeah, I know. Anyway, I’m outa here. Might catch you later.’
My work is about as twisted as the people I get to investigate. I’ve been on this case for eighteen months now. It was all hush hush, an internal investigation into one of our own. It came all the way from the top and I was ordered to proceed with total discretion and secrecy. I was ordered to only report to the Chief. Nobody else in the force even knew that I was on the case.
About eighteen months ago, two victims gave evidence directly to the Chief, personally and in secret, incriminating Sergeant Allan Baxtre. They claimed that they suffered extreme sexual abuse from Baxtre when they were young children. They were both boys and one of them was only seven when the offences occurred. When the Chief told me the details it turned my stomach.
The Chief’s idea was to run surveillance on Baxtre after hours and gather evidence and try to save the two victims the trauma of a trial. The Chief figured that they’d been through enough as it was, so he put me on the case.
I’d been tracking Baxtre and working up a pretty good dossier on the bastard. He was a huge man, one of the biggest on the force. And if that didn’t scare you enough, he had one of those faces that just screamed violence at you. And he perfected that look in his eyes, that really frightening, intimidating look that says that just under this thin veneer of human skin is an animal ready to unleash a huge storm of violence upon you. It was a brave or stupid person that looked him directly in the eye.
It didn’t take me long to figure out why he was so big. He was a gym junkie. I found out that he was a serious abuser of anabolic steroids, as well as a dealer. I already had him for that offence, but I wanted to nail him for the paedophilia. I was quite surprised when I found out that he was a raving queen because he kept that completely hidden from his colleagues at work. He acted completely straight, really manly.
His gym boyfriends had a nickname for him. They called him Anabolic Al. The thought of this gorilla ravaging himself on tiny little boys made my flesh crawl. Although I do not as a rule allow myself to get any personal feelings in a case, I’ve got to admit that I had developed quite a raging hate for this rat-bastard. I hated him so much that I was even contemplating putting a slug through his head myself. But as it turned out, the kid saved me the trouble.
So now, all of a sudden, I was off the Baxtre case and on the Davidson case. My immediate task was to try to find out where the kid got the gun, as if I didn’t know.
Most of your regular Mafiosos, like the Italians and Russkies, prefer to pack heat that they can reasonably-well conceal when they carry it around. Not so the Serbs. When you cross one of them, they like to put a hole in you that the sun can shine through. And it don’t make no difference anyway because your body will never see the light of day, cause that’s the other one of the Serbs’ traits, the bodies are never found, unless they want them to be found. Their preferred method of making a body disappear is to have it eaten by some type of ravenous beast. I remember once, a couple of years ago, when one morning they found a foot, a head and a bunch of bones in the lion enclosure of Taronga Zoo. That person went missing the day before. We all knew that it was a signature Serb- Mafia hit except the bastard they took out didn’t deserve to live. Everybody was after him. The Serbian boys just saved us a lot of trouble in the end. In general, when it comes to the Serbian Mafia, they never take out anyone that didn’t deserve getting taken out in the first place. The other thing about the Serbs is that they keep very low key. They don’t peacock around the place and make a huge amount of noise. You don’t even know they’re around. They do their crooked business very very discretely. But if you cross one of them, you are dead. And the favourite instrument of death for a Serb Mafioso is a .44 Magnum, just like the one the kid, that blew Baxtre’s brains out all over fucking Oxford Street, had.
So, I already knew where the kid got the gun, but I also knew that I was never gonna be able to prove it because, like your typical Mafia piece, it was completely untraceable. So this was going to be more like a social visit with no disrespect to a grieving father. You don’t get to be in this game for thirty years by being disrespectful to the wrong people at the wrong time.
2
I walked into his tiny jewellery shop around mid-morning. The little bell on top of the door clinked as I came in. The inside of the shop looked really old fashioned, like back from the fifties. There was a glass counter with some antique-looking jewellery. The place looked more like a pawnshop. It wasn’t hard to figure out that this business couldn’t support a family of mice, much less people. He came out of the back and smiled at me. He looked placid and was very polite.
‘Hello. How can I help you?’ he said.
‘Good morning, Mr. Davidson. I’m Detective Dragan from Darlinghurst Police. Sorry to barge in on you like …’
‘No no no, it’s OK. I’ve been expecting someone, detective …’ ‘Just Dragan is OK.’
‘I’ve been expecting you, Dragan.’
‘I figured you might have been. Er, sincere condolences Mr. Davidson …’ ‘Please, call me Vincent.’
‘Really sorry about your loss, er, Vincent, and could you please pass on the whole station’s condolences to your wife as well. It can’t be easy.’
I couldn’t have been any more respectful to Vito Corleone himself. His kid killed one of our officers and I was wishing him condolences. I did genuinely feel sorry for him, though, because I had my suspicions about what was at the heart of the shooting. I was still a long way from telling the kid’s father though. There was no way of knowing how he would react.
‘No, it isn’t easy,’ he replied with genuine sadness. ‘And thank you, I will pass on your message, although I am sure that there is another reason for your visit.’
‘Yeah, sorry,’ I said.
‘Why don’t we step into my workshop, Dragan,’ he suggested, ‘and I’ll make us a couple of coffees.’ He just sounded really sad.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Dragan, that is an unusual name,’ he said. ‘Belgian parents,’ I explained.
‘Black and one?’ he asked.
‘Yes, perfect, Vincent, thank you.’
We sat down on a couple of old chairs. His workshop was obviously where he spent most of his time.
‘I suppose that you know why I’m here,’ I said as politely as I could. ‘I think so,’ he said.
‘Er, Vincent, if you could shed any light on how your son got his hands on a .44 Magnum?’
His face slumped into total despair when I mentioned the gun. You didn’t have to be Einstein to work out that the gun was his and that he was having huge regrets about it.
‘I wish I could help you,’ he said heavy-hearted. ‘So do I,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry that I can’t be of more assistance. Would you like to search my shop? It’s OK, just be careful not to break anything if you don’t mind.’
‘That won’t be necessary, Vincent.’
‘It is impossible to describe how much I loved my son,’ he said. ‘My wife is devastated.’
I started to get the feeling like I wanted to leave.
‘You know, Dragan, if you like you are welcome to come over to the house for dinner tonight and meet Nadia, my wife. I’m afraid that it won’t be very much fun, but she is cooking sarma tonight. Her sarma is so good that you’ll even want to eat your fingers afterwards.’
I couldn’t believe that he was asking me to dinner despite how he was feeling. He continued,
‘You may, if you wish, search the house while you are there. My wife will probably ask if you can be careful about it and not break anything.’
‘I don’t want to search your house, Vincent. I don’t know if I should come so soon after …’ He cut me off mid-sentence.
‘Any time after six will be OK. We will look forward to seeing you.’
As I walked out of his shop, I couldn’t believe how I genuinely got a liking to the guy.
It was ten past six when I rang the doorbell. Vincent opened the door and welcomed me into their comfortable but modest house. The house was saturated with the sweet aroma of cooking.
‘Come into the kitchen,’ he said, ‘I’ll make you a spritzer.’
I followed him through the neatly-decorated house. My heart sank as I spotted photos of their son everywhere. Nadia greeted me warmly. She was dressed all in black and looked pale and gaunt. Her eyes were all vacant and red from crying. She was trying as hard as possible to be a good hostess. I noticed that she was a very beautiful, slim, dark-haired woman, aged perhaps around forty was my guess, but it was difficult to tell because of her mourning. They sat me down at the kitchen table. She spooned some sauce from the sarma and asked me to taste it.
‘Is it salty enough?’ she asked.
I tasted it. ‘It’s perfect,’ I said. From the moment I walked in through the door they treated me like an old friend.
They tried to smile, but couldn’t. Vincent poured some red wine into a tall glass, through a spout out of an actual wooden barrel, and topped it up with genuine mineral water imported from Serbia, and handed it to me.
I decided to sit at the table and say as little as possible. This couple had just lost their only child and they were devastated. I wasn’t even sure anymore why I was even there. I had definitely decided to completely forget about the gun. Technically, the case was already solved. The murderer of Sergeant Baxtre was lying in a freezer at St. Vincent’s Hospital with a finger missing and four bullet holes in him. But something else was giving me an almighty itch that just wasn’t going to go away until it got scratched. Who the hell was Phoebe? Who the hell was this mystery woman, or girl, that nobody remembered seeing? But he saw her. I have watched all the footage, everything, all the stuff that nobody is ever going to see, and the kid, Jerome, definitely saw a woman across the other side of the street, and he screamed Phoeeebeee at the top of his voice just before he got plugged full of holes.
Now, just to set you straight, the reason the footage will never surface into the light of day is this. Everyone on the inside has pretty much Einsteined that the slugs inside the twenty corpses lying in the street, after all the shooting stopped, came out of cop pistols. Other than Jerome, the cops were the only other people there packing heat. When viewing the video, it became pretty clear that the boys-in-blue did most of their firing from the hip, John Wayne style. That sort of gunplay can get mighty addictive and it’s hard to stop once you’ve started. Unfortunately, you eventually run out of bullets and that’s when the fun stops. One hundred and twenty rounds were fired and only five hit their target. The rest killed twenty other people, including two cops, and left twenty- three more bleeding all over fucking Oxford Street. Nobody knows who shot who, and the force intends to keep it that way. The footage is going to disappear. Basically, the force looks after its own first and everybody else can go and get fucked. Nobody knows what I have just let you in on. Inside the force only the Chief knows, and a few of us more senior officers. There’s lots of new ways we do things, but there are some things that still get done the old-fashioned way. I don’t think that that will ever change.
After dinner, we sat around the table. The conversation was very downbeat. Nadia cried a lot and kept wiping her eyes. Vincent poured me a slivovitz. Really gingerly, I asked,
‘Do you mind if we talk about Jerome? We don’t have to if it is too difficult.’
They looked at each other. Vincent put his arm around his wife and consoled her.
Then he looked at me and nodded. And Nadia said, ‘No, we don’t mind. It’s OK.’
‘We’re just trying to establish a reason for his actions,’ I said.
‘We understand,’ said Vincent. ‘We would like to know what happened as well.’ So, I asked the first question.
‘Did Jerome have a girlfriend?’
Nadia immediately responded, ‘Yes. He just met a lovely girl. He saw her, I think, three times before … you know …’
‘That’s OK, that’s OK,’ I said. ‘And he told you about her?’
‘Oh yes,’ Nadia said. ‘We were very close with Jerry. We told each other everything.’ She started crying again. Vincent consoled her. I felt a bit like a real bastard, but I was a copper and sometimes I had to do this kind of shit.
‘Did he tell you her name?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Nadia said. ‘Her name was Phoebe. She was fifteen and she was very beautiful, Jerry told me.’
‘Bingo!’ I thought. ‘Did he tell you where she lived?’ ‘No, he never mentioned that.’
‘Did he have any other close friends?’
‘Jerry was a very quiet boy,’ Nadia began, ‘except for lately when he ran into some trouble at school. He was provoked and he reacted. Anybody would have reacted. He liked his university friends. We live so close to the university and he liked to go there. There were two girls that he was very good friends with, a Suzy and a Samantha, he told me. We never met them and I don’t know where they live, but they sounded nice and they sounded like they were very good friends to Jerry.’
She began to cry again. Vincent looked at me so I backed off and shut up for a while. He cuddled his wife then topped up my glass with slivovitz. It was like drinking nitro methane. I could feel the burn all the way down to my arsehole.
After about ten minutes, Nadia calmed down and asked me to go on, so I did. ‘Er, this Phoebe,’ I said, ‘you said he saw her three times.’
‘Yes,’ said Nadia. ‘The last time was the Thursday before … you know. I think they met and spent the day together in the city. It was after his appointment with Dr. Donneville. The times before that were the Friday the week before and the Thursday, which was the day they met, er, after another appointment with Dr. Donneville.’
‘And they spent both days in the city, you think?’
‘Well, yes, that’s what Jerry said. He wore his crazy red cap and he told me that that was how he noticed Phoebe, because she was wearing the same cap. He seemed so happy after he met her, Dragan.’
‘Thank you so much, Nadia, and Vincent, you have really helped, I think. We now know where he was with the mysterious Phoebe, and when. This Dr. Donneville, who is he?’
‘He was Jerry’s psychiatrist,’ Vincent said with a mangled scowl on his face. ‘Jerry was seeing him because of the trouble at school.’
‘I see,’ I said. Then Vincent asked me,
‘Do you have any idea why our son shot that man?’
I could have told them my suspicions but I thought that these people have suffered enough. I was pretty sure that young Jerome must have been one of Baxtre’s victims and that the kid decided to take the law into his own hands. But I could never be 100 percent sure. And how do you tell the parents that their little boy got savagely raped by a total animal, sometime in his early youth, and that he was so scared of the fucking prick that he kept it a secret. I don’t know how you tell a mum and dad that, especially just after their kid died. And anyway, what good would it do in the end? Baxtre was dead now, and so was the kid, and it was all over.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I have no idea as of yet.’ Then the mother asked me gravely,
‘When will I be able to bury my son?’
I answered her like the cold-hearted, sonofabitch bastard that I was, ‘When the coroner is finished with his enquiry, I’m afraid.’
‘How long will that be?’ the father asked.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ I said hating my own guts. I decided that I had enough of this shit. I couldn’t take any more so I got up to leave. I shook their hands and thanked them. Finally, I said,
‘Again, I am truly sorry for your loss. And thank you very much for dinner. It was delicious.’
They both looked at the floor for a few moments, with their arms around each other, then Nadia began to cry again. Vincent said,
‘I’ll see you out, Dragan.’
3
The next day, I took a trip out to the University. I thought that I’d try to track down Suzy and Samantha. As it turned out, my first shot at using a somewhat less than subtle technique worked like a charm. I went to the biggest cafeteria for lunch and I got the guy behind the counter to page Suzie and Samantha, friends of Jerome, over the P.A. Two minutes later, we were all sitting together at one of the big tables. The girls, although clearly very attractive, looked wasted and pale from obvious extended bouts of crying. As soon as I mentioned Jerome, they broke down again. I could see that the university cafeteria wasn’t going to be a good place to ask these girls the questions I wanted to ask, so I asked if there was some other place where we could do this and they said that I could come over to their place that night and ask them my questions there. They also said that they could cook me dinner if I liked, and I said that that wasn’t necessary, but they said that they were going to knock something up anyway, so I said,
‘OK, why not.’
They lived in a typically cluttered-up, messy student flat. You could cut the grief with a knife. I saw heaps of CDs and a player and I imagined the parties that went on in this place, but the atmosphere that night was seriously glum. They offered me a beer and I took it. I sat at the tiny table and watched them fuss at the stove all miserable. I didn’t say much. They made spag-bol and we all had some in a bowl with pickles. Nobody talked while we ate.
After dinner, and after they washed up and gave me another beer, we all sat down on a ratty old lounge and started to talk. They brought over a box of Kleenex. I asked,
‘What was Jerome like?’
‘He was the sweetest boy we knew,’ Suzie said, sniffling.
‘He was always so quiet and sweet,’ Samantha said blowing her nose into a tissue. ‘Did he mention a Phoebe?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Suzy said a bit more upbeat. ‘He talked about her a lot the last time we saw him.’
‘What did he say?’ I asked. ‘Did he describe her?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Samantha, ‘in quite a great deal of detail.’ ‘He certainly was smitten with her,’ said Suzie.
‘Oh yes, she certainly rang his bell,’ said Samantha. ‘She must have been gorgeous,’ said Suzy.
I broke in with another question. ‘How did he describe her?’
The girls looked at each other and Suzy said,
‘Well, she was young, fifteen I think Jerome said, and tall …’ ‘And thin …’ Samantha added.
‘With long straight hair.’
‘And she wore red sneakers and blue jeans.’ ‘And a purple-velvet shirt, open over a T-shirt.’
‘And don’t forget the cap, the red Holden Caulfield cap.’
‘The what cap?’ I said.
‘The Holden Caulfield cap, like in Catcher in the Rye.’
‘In what?’ I said. I was showing my ignorance. I’ve just never been a reader. Magazines were more my style. The girls looked at each other and then at me. They were a lot more polite than they needed to be. Suzie explained,
‘Catcher in the Rye is one of the most famous and widely read novels in the whole history of the world. Holden Caulfield is the protagonist. He wears a red hunting cap everywhere, you know, one of those ones with the earflaps and all. Jerome owned one. He bought it after he read my copy of Catcher.’
‘Oh yeah,’ I said, ‘he wore it when he shot Baxtre.’
Both girls gasped in shock and dove for the Kleenex box. After they blew their noses and settled down a bit, Samantha continued,
‘Well, the way he met Phoebe was that he saw her in Hyde Park, by the fountain, wearing the same red Holden’s cap.’
‘He was wearing his cap at the time,’ Suzy explained.
‘So, what you are saying is that they were both connected by this book and that they both recognised it in each other because of the caps?’
‘That is exactly what happened,’ said Suzy. ‘That’s what got Jerome to walk up to her and say hello.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘And you say that she was fifteen?’ ‘Yes, that’s what Jerome said.’
‘Well she must have gone to a school,’ I said. ‘Did he mention what school she went to?’
‘No,’ said Suzy.
‘But he did tell us that she had the day off because the police were investigating some teachers for touching-up some of the younger school girls. I think that the school was closed for two days, the Thursday when he met her and the day after when Jerome took the day off to be with her,’ said Samantha.
‘He told us everything,’ said Suzie sobbing into a handful of tissues. ‘God I loved him.’
‘Me too,’ said Samantha crying.
‘He was such a quiet boy. He hardly said anything.’
‘We were completely shocked when we heard that he shot someone.’
‘It was completely out of character for him.’
‘Yeah, because he was the nicest boy we ever knew.’
The girls both completely broke down into a crying fit. I finished my beer and thanked them for their help. They were a total mess by the time I left.
4
I was really getting places. I now knew Phoebe’s age, what she wore and what attracted Jerome to her. The biggest news was that I knew that her school had recently been investigated for some kind of sexual abuse of the young students by the goddamned teachers. I figured that it should be a snap to find out that information. So next morning I cruised into the station figuring that I was going to have this Phoebe mystery nailed in a matter of minutes.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. My rhapsody turned into one mongrel black dog, mixed with a solid dose of intrigue. I checked the records and there had been no investigations into any kind of sexual abuse, in any schools in the whole fucking Sydney basin, on the aforementioned Thursday and Friday. Somebody was spinning a huge yarn. It might have been Suzy and Samantha, but I doubted that, or it might have been Jerome, very likely, or it might have been Phoebe. I was beginning to smell a very pungent rat. The idea that Phoebe might have been fabricating the sexual abuse story was becoming more and more unlikely by the second because it was increasingly looking like old gorgeous, tall, thin, perfect Phoebe didn’t even exist. It was all pointing towards the fact that young, .44-Magnum Jerry, with the school problem and the psychiatrist, had no fucking girlfriend at all, except the one he conjured up in his head. Phoebe was starting to look like one of those imaginary girlfriends that guys who have no girlfriends have. I felt sorry for the kid and I really felt sorry for his parents. I started trying to figure out how I was going to break the news to his mother and father, and the two university girls.
5
My theory that young Jerome was completely crackers was only reinforced with the passage of time. As the days passed, witnesses started coming into the station. All of them remembered one thing mainly, Jerome’s red cap. Everyone said how stupid it looked on him. I organised their testimony in chronological order, based on time. First it was the people that saw him on the first Thursday, the day he was supposed to have met the mythical Phoebe.
First cab off the rank was a short, fat, Greek café proprietor, Yiannis Papas, who ran a café in Macquarie Street. He said that Jerome stopped twice at his café for breakfast. The first time was on that first Thursday just after he finished with his shrink and just before he was supposed to have met Phoebe. The second time was one week later. On that second Thursday he said that he called out to him as he walked past, heading towards Hyde Park, about ten in the morning. He said that he invited him to come in and have some breakfast, but the kid said that he couldn’t and that he might be back later. Old Yiannis said that the kid was back within half an hour and that he chose to sit outside in the rain under an umbrella. He remembered that the kid had two coffees and a toasted sandwich for breakfast. When I asked Yiannis if there was anyone else with him, he told me that he was on his own. He said, ‘The kid was really quiet. He mainly kept to himself.’
The next person of significance was a waitress who worked at The Fountain Café in King’s Cross. I knew the establishment well, and as well I was reasonably well acquainted with that particular waitress. I knew that there’d be no bullshit in her evidence. She remembered clearly seeing the red cap on Friday morning a week before the shooting. She remembered how she made a comment about it. When I asked her if anyone was with Jerome, she said that he was alone and that he was a particularly quiet and reserved sort of boy.
The next witness was a young salesman from the Ferrari dealership in William Street. He remembered the red cap on that Friday as well, and he also swore that the kid was on his own.
Next there was a jolly fat old waiter, from The Caminetto Restaurant in The Rocks, named Vincenzo Gattellari. He said that Jerome came into his restaurant for lunch on the Friday. He said that he was wearing his rollerblades and red cap. That was why he remembered him. He said that the kid sat quietly outside in the corner and ate his pizza and had his Coke. When asked if there was anyone with him, Vincenzo said that the kid was alone. He said that Gino, another waiter at the restaurant, could corroborate his story, but I said that that would not be necessary.
The next witness was a lady that worked in an umbrella shop down in Centrepoint arcade. She remembered the red cap as Jerome dropped in. She said that he chose and bought a blue golf umbrella. She said that he was a very polite and quiet young man. She also said that there was no one else with him.
Similar evidence came from a waitress from the Botanic Gardens Restaurant.
So, there it was. Case closed. Young Jerry was completely off his tree and I doubt that anything that old Donneville, the shrink, might have prescribed could have helped much. After the whole Phoebe mystery was solved, I reduced the chances of Jerome having been one of Baxtre’s victims down to fifty fifty. Jerome might have been walking on old terra firma but his head was in cloud cuckoo land with the fairies. I decided to give it a couple of days, just to give myself time to choose my words carefully, before I told Vincent and Nadia, and Suzy and Samantha, that Phoebe wasn’t real. Then once I did that, I figured my desk was clear and I might get to take a couple of weeks off up the Gold Coast. How wrong could a guy be?
6
As it turned out, I remained in a serious state of procrastination. I just couldn’t summon up the motivation to go and see Vincent and tell him that his kid was a psycho. One time I got as far as the front door of his shop and piked it thinking that I preferred not to get fed to a bunch of pigs one limb at a time.
Then this crazy show came on TV, this special about Jerome Davidson and what motivated him to kill. I knew nothing about it. Usually the force gets wind of programs about cases that we’ve recently been