by Peter Corris
Deal Me Out
( Cliff Hardy - 9 )
Peter Corris
Peter Corris
Deal Me Out
1
When Terry Reeves of Bargain Renta Car rang me, I bought at first that he was up to his old trick-trying to Hog off an exmember of his fleet on me. Over the years he’d offered me Commodores, Peugeots, even an ‘84 Falcon, but I’d remained true to my Falcon which had been born about a decade earlier.
‘Terry,’ I said, ‘you’re wasting your time, I’m going to be buried in that car.’
‘You probably will be, Cliff. But this is a business call.’
‘You mean you’re going to give me money, not take money off me?’
‘I mean I want you to earn the money by investigating something. That’s what you do, isn’t it-investigate?’
‘Yeah. Lately I’ve done more money minding and debugging than investigating, but I can still remember how it’s done.’
‘De-bugging?’
‘Yeah, it’s all the go. People want you to de-bug everything, cars, dunnies, the lot. I did a course in it.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Means I talked to a bloke in a pub about it. He puts bugs in and he told me how to take them out. He learned it from another bloke in another pub. What’s the job?’
‘You’ve got me edgy, Cliff. Better not talk on the phone.’
‘Bullshit. Nine times out of ten the only bugs I find’ve got legs and feelers. What…?’
‘Just the same I’d rather do it face to face. Come over to the office. And park that wreck a block away at least. I don’t want anyone thinking it’s one of mine.’
I let him have the last word, which is always good business practice and I couldn’t think of a snappy comeback anyway. I worked with Terry as an insurance investigator after I got out of the army and decided I wasn’t cut out for the law. We’d been competitive, had disagreements about fires and things gone missing, but got along well. He went into the car rental business about the same time I set up as a private investigator, about fifteen years ago. He’d probably made a hundred times as much money as me and he’d acquired a nice wife and a couple of attractive kids. I’d lost my not so nice wife who’d gone off to have her attractive kids with someone else. I occasionally rented a car from Terry when a job called for it: we’d stayed in touch.
I drove over to his office in Surry Hills on one of those Sydney spring days that remind you of somewhere else warm with car fumes where you’ve had a good time, like Rome. Terry runs his show right off one of the parking and servicing stations. It had been a no-frills operation that had lately acquired considerable polish, but it was still not unknown for Terry to do a day behind the desk or in the workshop.
I pulled the Falcon into a prominent place beside one of the highly-glossed, bright orange, fuel-injected vehicles, and told the woman in the orange skirt and white blouse who came over to protest that Terry was expecting me. She eyed the car, which is a bit faded and wrinkled, like me.
‘I bet he wasn’t expecting you to park that here,’ she said.
‘You’re wrong, he insisted on it’
She sniffed at that and stepped aside. I walked past a line of cars to the glass-walled outer office. It had a big registration desk, some VDTs, pot plants and posters of places you might drive to with Bargain. A waist-high partition is the only barrier Terry puts between himself and his staff; I considered vaulting it, decided against, and pushed open the half door.
Terry had a telephone in his hand and was scribbling on a pad on his desk. He nodded at me, flipped the receiver up to his ear and caught it with his shoulder like a night club performer playing with the mike, then he waved me into a chair with his free hand. I sat down and looked at him; it was an odd experience, regarding an old friend in a new light, as a client. Clients need special looking at, for rust spots and other defects. Terry was a well-built six footer with blond hair going thin on top. He’d played professional football and been a pro runner in his younger days, and he still had a lot more muscle on him than flab. He was one of the few teetotallers I knew who wasn’t a dried-out alcoholic.
Terry had always looked ten years younger than his true age, but now it seemed that a few years had jumped in and wrestled him down. His face was thinner than I remembered it and there were strain lines around his eyes and mouth. He said a few quiet, firm words into the phone and hung up. He gave me a welcoming grin, but the expression flicked off his face quickly as if the muscles couldn’t hold it.
‘Hello, Cliff. You don’t look any more brain-damaged than when I last saw you. Have you been taking it easy?’
‘Mmm, could be. I seem to be getting more sleep. How’s the family?’
‘Okay. Let’s get to it. I’ve lost five cars in the last month.’
‘Lost?’
‘Lost-gone, vanished.’
‘You’d be insured, wouldn’t you?’
‘Of course. But you know the deal: they’ll be getting shirty if I report them all, and the premiums next quarter’ll kill me. They already take an arm and a leg.’
‘How many claims have you made?’
He ran a finger around inside his shirt collar where there seemed to be more room than a good fit required. He was a neat dresser, Terry, who wore white shirts and plain ties. This shirt was a little grubby at the neck and the tie had been knotted too far down. Terry Reeves looking like a country cousin; that was something new.
‘One claim,’ he said. ‘That puts me in an irregular position. I should have claimed for two more, signalled them at least. But word gets around.’ He made a dive-bombing motion with his big, freckled hand. ‘People get nervous and business goes down. The margins in this game are tight, believe me.’
Another orange-skirted young woman walked into the office and plonked two polystyrene cups of coffee on the desk. Terry’s tired face gave a quick, painful smile.
‘Thanks, Dot.’ He pushed a cup towards me and rummaged in a drawer of the desk. He pulled out some tin foil wrapped pills, released two and washed them down with a swill of coffee. If it’d been me with that load of worry on I’d have had the bottle out lacing up the coffee, but that wasn’t Terry. But then, pills weren’t Terry either. I took a sip of the coffee and was surprised that it was good espresso.
‘I seem to remember that you wanted my mother’s maiden name and references from three clergymen before you let me take out one of your cars.’ I drank some more coffee and tried to remember the procedure. ‘Driver’s licence, plastic… what else?’
‘All that, but it didn’t do us any good in these cases, or at least in the couple I checked on-all faked. I don’t have the time to follow up on all these and I’m rusty. I wouldn’t know how to go about it now probably.’
‘It hasn’t changed much,’ I said, ‘footslogging, eyestrain…’
‘Eyestrain I know about. Look, Cliff, I’m a desk walloper.’ He snorted derisively and opened a drawer. ‘I made you up a list. I’m good at making up lists.’
He brought out a manila folder, extracted two sheets of paper and pushed them across to me. The first sheet contained five blocks of type, each recording a name, address, licence number, credit card details and information on the car hired: vehicle make and model, mileage recorded, period of hiring etc. There were three Holdens, a Fiat and a Ford Laser. The second sheet carried photostat copies of one personal and one company cheque and three credit card debit slips.
Terry finished his coffee, crumpled the cup and dropped it into his wastepaper bin. ‘I checked on the first two- Majors and Stanford, both Holdens. Phoney as a three dollar note-bodgie addresses, crook licences, no money in the bloody accounts. That’s about twenty thousand bucks worth of car gone west.’
&nbs
p; I grinned at him. ‘West?’
‘It’s no bloody joke, Cliff. A few more and I’m in real trouble.’
I finished my coffee and took a shot at the bin over the desk. Bullseye. ‘What do the cops say?’
‘What do they ever say? Yes, sir, very sorry, sir, give us the numbers, sir, and we’ll keep an eye out. The last time a cop solved a crime in this town was about the time a doctor cured a patient.’
‘Can’t be that long.’ Terry didn’t smile, and it looked like time to drop the levity. He’d never been a boastful man but the self-deprecatory crack about making lists had struck me as a fragility that he probably couldn’t afford in this kind of business. In any case, the lurk was a new one on me and interesting in that respect. And it seemed to hold out the prospect of travel; I’d been stuck in Sydney too long. It was time to get business-like.
‘A hundred and twenty-five a day and expenses, Terry,’ I said. ‘I’ll waive the retainer because you’re a friend.’
‘No you won’t!’ He reached for a fat cheque book and wrote rapidly; I could see the seven hundred and fifty dollars from where I sat. I took the cheque and looked at Terry rather than it. There seemed to be something almost furtive about him, and that was the last word you’d normally apply to Terry Reeves. I gave him one of my hard-guy looks.
‘Something else you want to say, mate?’
He sighed. ‘Shit, you might as well know. We installed cameras behind the desk a year ago. Didn’t want to, but the insurance boys insisted on it. We’ve got pictures of the clients. Snoopy stuff. We destroy the bloody things when the cars come back.’
I snapped my fingers rudely. ‘Gimme.’
The manila folder came out again and Terry shoved it across the desk. The photographs were in colour and blown up to postcard size. The camera looked to have been mounted fairly high behind the desk; the pictures showed the customers full face, but in two instances the lens had caught faces in half profile. They weren’t good pictures; the light in the office wasn’t conducive to photography and the fixed camera made no allowances for subject size-the tops of the heads of two tallish men were lopped off and of a short man and a small woman there was not much more than head and shoulders. I shuffled the pictures until I had three of each, then I leaned forward to study them more closely.
‘You see it?’ Terry said.
‘Just a minute… Yeah, I think so.’
‘Disguises, pretty good ones. Anyone ever tell you that you look like John Cassavetes, the actor?’
‘Yeah, but she had designs on my manly body.’
Terry snorted. ‘I’m told this sort of thing is pretty easy to do if you know how.’ He pinched in his fleshy nose. ‘You can fill in this bit and take in that. A make-up expert could turn you into a Cassavetes look-alike. The hair helps.’ He reached over and stabbed at one of the photos. ‘Wigs, make-up, contacts, their mothers wouldn’t know them.’
I nodded, and took one shot of each person. ‘Means there’s a well-planned operation here. Expensive too.’
‘Good returns,’ Terry said. ‘You get an as-new car for the cost of the rental deposit, and I try to keep costs down. You get plates, service book…’
I made a stack of the photos and Terry passed me an envelope. I put the pictures in it and tapped the edge against his desk.
‘I know this sounds like a psychiatrist, but have you got any ideas?’
‘No, none.’
‘What about the competition? Anyone you’ve put under pressure getting back at you?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s a cut-throat game, but it’s still an expanding market. I haven’t driven anyone to the wall that I know of. Some of the others might be having the same problem.’
‘You haven’t checked?’
‘No way; that’d be letting on what I’ve lost. That might give rise to talk. A lot of this is expense account stuff; everyone wants a solid firm to do business with. Nothing shonky.’
I examined the typed list. ‘Are they all fleet cars-I mean, all that attractive shade of orange?’
‘Ochre.’ He looked embarrassed when he said it. ‘That’s what it’s called, ochre. No, that’s going out. People don’t want to advertise that they’ve got a hire car. It’s on the list. The Holdens are… orange. The Laser and the others are different colours. They’ve got a small logo on them, that’s all.’
I grunted. ‘They don’t have to say where they’re going, do they?’
‘No, just stipulate a period. They’re supposed to say if they’re going interstate; affects the insurance. None of this lot did. Probably means they went to Perth.’
‘You never know, they could be in Surry Hills. Well, I’ll follow you up on the checking and try the photos out on a few people. There’s a few other possibilities too.’
‘Like what?’
‘Don’t be so negative, Terry. Like the make-up angle; can’t be a hell of a lot of people around who can do that stuff.’
‘I’m worried.’
‘I said: ‘Don’t worry’ and immediately thought of something to worry him. ‘Those cars weren’t all signed out by the same person, were they?’
‘No. Jesus, Cliff, I trust all these people.’
He did, too, and it was a good reason to work for him. I stood up and the phone rang. He said ‘Yes’ into it, and then groaned. ‘Which one?’ The voice on the line sounded agitated. I sat down again. Terry listened and aged in front of my eyes. ‘Okay, okay, calm down. I’m doing something about it right now. Just send in the paperwork as soon as you can, and the pictures. Take your time.’
He put the receiver down gently. He was looking straight through me, and I swivelled my head to look at the wall behind me. There was a big poster of Ayers Rock, looking red and mysterious. I wanted to say that the cars wouldn’t be parked behind the rock but I didn’t. Terry was undergoing some sort of crisis.
‘Another one, fuck it! I’m getting angry.’
‘Good. What kind of car?’
‘Bloody Audi, only one I’ve got. There’s a special booking for it, too, Shit, that’ll cost me money.’
We sat without talking. I studied the typed list and Terry shuffled some papers. After a few minutes the orange skirt swished in. The woman put papers and photographs on the desk, clicked her tongue sympathetically and went out. Terry spread the exhibits.
‘Bruce Worthington’, he said. ‘Company Director, Mastercard, New South Wales licence, blah, blah, usual thing. Out for five days and three days late. See the name? Worthington. What were those others? Majors was one, Sergeant, and the woman was Faith somebody. Jesus!’
‘Let’s have a look at him.’
I spread the photographs, which were only passport size, peered at them and tried to keep my jaw attached.
The face was lean with deep grooves running down beside the nose to the mouth. The hair was short, not long and wild, and the bushranger beard had been trimmed to a fine line along the jaw… but it was still the face of Bill Mountain, a fairly close enemy of mine over the past ten years.
2
Terry undid his loose collar and slipped his tie down; he rumpled his thin hair and looked more like a football player than a businessman, but a player in a losing team. I scribbled the details from ‘Worthington’s’ registration form on the back of the typed sheet, selected two of the clearest photographs and slipped them into the envelope. I looked through the other set of photos again and pulled out another two. Terry looked through me as if a graph of his business had suddenly appeared over the Ayers Rock poster.
‘Going to be hard to cover that Audi,’ he muttered. ‘Wonder if he’d settle for a Merc?’
‘Probably.’ I stood up and passed the photos of the defaulters back across the desk; they had a blank look as if they knew they were only wearing their faces for a day.
‘What’re you going to do, Cliff?’
I tapped ‘Worthington’ on the nose. ‘Start with the freshest. I’ll be in touch, mate. Try not to worry. You can probably take a lot of it o
ff your tax.’ I grinned at him. ‘You can take me off your tax, too.’
‘Yeah.’ He summoned up a quick smile. ‘When you give me a receipt.’
I let him give me my exit line, and went back into the outer office. His phone rang as I went, and I hoped it wasn’t another bolter. A fat man was checking out a car at the desk; I couldn’t see the camera, but I could imagine the pictures-very unflattering angle for chins, especially when you’ve got three of them.
I removed my eyesore from the parking bay, and tried to assemble the random information I had on Bill Mountain as I drove to my office at the Cross. Mountain was a writer, of short stories mostly, with a couple of novels. As he told it, the fees he’d got for the stories hadn’t paid for the paper and typewriter ribbons; the novels had been raved about in Meanjin and remaindered within months. His agent had got even more desperate than Bill and wangled him a crash course in film writing. Mountain took to it like a sailor to sex, and he landed a job writing TV soap operas.
He’d told me this as he worked his way through a bottle of Suntory whisky, his chosen drink. Those grooves in his face seemed to get deeper with every sip, and the rutted lines around his eyes criss-crossed like ski tracks.
‘It’s a treadmill, Hardy, a bloody treadmill.’
‘Is that the kind of dialogue you have to write?’ I’d asked. He threw a punch then which I ducked and he fell over. After that it was all apologies and more drinks until the next time. I didn’t like Mountain, but we had mutual acquaintances, and I seemed always to be running into him here and there, especially a few years ago when my drinking was nearly in his league. Since then I’d moderated it a bit, and our paths crossed less often, but I heard about him. I heard how he called me an ASIO man, a ‘disinformation agent’ and other unflattering things. I heard how he hit women in public, and drank all the money he hated earning so fast that he had to go on earning it.
The trouble was that he could be interesting on the subject of writing, and I had a lot of time for some people who seemed to like him. The last time we’d met had been a few months back, in a pub as usual. He’d been sitting with my reporter friend, Harry Tickener, slurping down the Suntory and twitching hairs from his woolly beard into the corner of his mouth, catching them in his teeth and plucking them out with a twitch of his head. It was an unpleasant thing to watch.
