by Peter Corris
‘There’s an old house up there,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure who actually owns it. It’s half falling down. Bill took me there to stay once. It’s a great spot-clean air, you know?’
She’d created enough fug in the car to prompt a rude remark, but I resisted the temptation. I just said I’d heard about clean air.
‘You get up in the morning and really feel alive. Feel like going for a long walk, not like in the city.’
‘Can you find the house in the dark?’
She looked back at the tangle of glass, metal and electrical wire on the back seat and smiled. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. The place is in the town, not half way up a mountain. There’s street lights. Mind you, there’s no light in the house except kerosene lamps.’ She paused, maybe to enjoy a memory. ‘D’you think he’ll be there?’
I blinked a few times to get rid of a momentary blindness caused by some passing high-beam headlights. ‘What do I know? I’m the guy who said Mai wouldn’t be in the pub tonight, remember?’
‘You did a good job there though.’
It was the first bit of praise I’d earned from her. ‘Thanks. We’ve got a few worries with this.’
She lit a new cigarette. ‘You tell me yours.’
‘First, why did Mountain mention Blackheath to Mai? It seems indiscreet.’
She blew smoke at the windscreen. ‘And?’
‘The opposition. What’ve they made of it? I haven’t been up here for years. What’s Blackheath like now-biggish?’
‘No, smallish, especially now-not many holiday people around.’
‘That’s what I was afraid of. If the car lifters went up there to flush him out the odds are that they’d be able to do it. He’s a pretty distinctive bloke, even without the big beard. What’d he be, six foot two?’
‘Three,’ she said. ‘He’s six foot three.’ She fell silent after that. I thought what an incongruous pair they’d make, but of course, that could’ve been half the fun.
We went through Katoomba somewhere around midnight. The moon was nearly full in a clear sky that seemed to have twice as many stars in it as it does over the city. I stopped on the outskirts of the town to stretch my legs and empty my bladder. I shivered as I stood there in my cotton shirt and unlined jacket. Steam lifted pleasingly from the stream of urine. Like most city people, I like the country in small doses. The light breeze carried tree smells that evoked boyhood memories of holidays in big guest houses with stiff, cold sheets and mountainous plates of toast. I doubt if they serve that much toast these days.
From the road, Blackheath first appeared out of the blackness as a spread of lights to the right. Erica directed me around a few turns of the wide, quiet streets and down to a big corner block where an overgrown garden spilled out over broken fences on two sides. The house was set well back from the street behind high, wild hedges and shrubs that had grown to the size of trees.
I parked further down the street, and we came back quietly on foot. My boots had rubber soles and Erica wore cloth-topped espadrilles with rope soles. She also had a padded jacket, so she probably wasn’t shivering as I was. We were noiseless on the footpath as we walked around two sides of the block. There were no lights showing in the house. I put my mouth close to Erica’s ear and whispered: ‘Where would he put a car?’
She pointed into the backyard. There was a dark hole looming beside an outhouse, which showed grey with strips of peeling paint in the moonlight. I stepped over a rusty gate, took a few shuffles through the knee-high grass and probed the black hole with a torch beam. As I switched on the torch a dog howled and I froze. It was some distance off, but the hair stood up on the back of my neck just the same. The light showed that the grass had been flattened by a vehicle and by some comings and goings on foot, but the hole, between the outhouse and what I now saw was a thick, sprawling blackberry patch, was deep and empty.
I went back to the gate and shook my head at Erica’s upturned, enquiring face. Following Hardy’s first law of entering strange houses at night, we went around to the front gate. It creaked open, and then we were pushing through undergrowth and straggles of privet up to the front porch. The smell from the house was so strong that it was a wonder it wasn’t catchable from the street. The scents of the trees and bushes must have concealed it.
Erica’s grip on my arm almost cut off the circulation. I eased her hand away, turned the knob and opened the door. The stench was like a combination of rotting meat and of a science lab in which something had gone very wrong. I’d smelled it before, in Malaya when the bodies had lain in the sun in jungle clearings and the smell of putrefaction had soaked the still hot air. This wasn’t quite as bad, but it was bad enough.
The torch beam showed a long front room with a fireplace in which a fire had been thoroughly set. The furniture was standard for such places, a mixture of styles and periods, mostly sagging, all looking comfortable.
‘Bedrooms.’ Erica pointed to the doors off to the right and left. I looked in at the right but the double bed was undisturbed; the other room was empty, and though the smell had penetrated, neither room was its source.
‘Where can I find one of those lanterns?’ I realised that I was whispering, and I repeated the question too loudly. There was no need to whisper, no-one was living there with that smell. She opened another door and went down a short corridor to a kitchen that ran across the width of the house. The smell was very strong. Erica used the torch to locate a kerosene lantern on a shelf. She held it out to me and shrugged.
‘I don’t know how they work.’
‘Give us your lighter.’
I lifted the glass, poked at the wick and got the thing lit. The light slowly penetrated the darkness and showed the outlines of the room-sink, table, bench, newspaper-lined shelves, old dresser crammed with enough cracked crockery to serve an orphanage. I inclined my head at the door at the end of the room, and Erica spoke in the same sort of whisper I’d used.
‘Toilet, bathroom, storage room-there’s a series of…’ She made a sloping motion with her hands.
‘Lean-tos?’
She nodded, and I opened the door and lifted the lantern above shoulder height. The kerosene smell helped a little but the stench got stronger in the bathroom and we found him in the storage room. The floor was a mess of paint tins, drop cloths, plumbing fittings and discarded machinery. He was propped up against the far wall and I heard the flies for the first time just as I spotted him. They buzzed as I kicked my way across the floor, rose in an angry cloud and settled. Erica stood stock still in the doorway; then I heard her blunder away in the dark and the sound of her retching and vomiting.
From the arrangement of the floor clutter, I decided that the body had been dragged across the floor and carefully wedged up between a wall and a heavy cupboard. Even by the dim lantern light I could see the dark smears and dried puddles of blood that marked the trail. As I got closer, there was a scurrying on the floor and a couple of rats raced for the darkness of the far corner. I came as close to the figure as I could stomach and raised the lantern. The dead man would have been unrecognisable as to features and not only because one side of the face and skull was collapsed. The rats had done a lot of work. Fingerprints were unlikely but I wasn’t going to have to bother about such things or his dental history. In life he’d been of medium height and stocky build. He wasn’t William Mountain.
I gave Erica the good news, if that’s what you could call it, and helped her to clean up the mess she’d made in the bathroom. Then I prowled around the house trying to find out what had happened. It wasn’t too hard. The man had been killed in a lean-to laundry by several blows to the head with several implements, including a bottle. Then he’d been dragged to the storage room. There was a blood-caked hammer that the flies had visited and lost interest in, along with an implement for manipulating the controls of a combustion stove and the bottle. The bottle had contained Suntory whisky.
‘Who is he?’ Erica fiddled with a cigarette but didn’t light it.<
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‘Don’t know. My guess is he’s from the car-stealing firm.’
‘Bill killed him?’
‘Looks that way. I’m going to go around and put things back and then we’d better get out of here.’
‘Leave me the torch. I don’t want to sit around in the bloody dark.’ She was getting her nerve back-not that she’d done too badly anyway.
I toured the house looking for signs of Mountain’s presence. There weren’t many: the beds were made, the dishes had been washed, the kerosene fridge was empty and turned off. I found no road maps, no newspaper clippings or note books with indentations I could shade in and read. All I found was the whisky bottle and a book with Mountain’s name in it. I took the book, put the lantern back on the shelf and we found our way out by torchlight.
Erica lit her cigarette as soon as we got through the gate.
‘What now?’
‘Off-as fast as we can.’
I plucked the cigarette from her fingers and took a drag, my first for years. I had to do something to get the taste of death and decay out of my mouth. The cigarette tasted like old dog blanket.
‘We don’t report it?’
I returned the cigarette. ‘How would you like to explain what you were doing in there?’
7
We didn’t talk much on the drive back to Sydney. Erica smoked a bit and yawned a lot. At Katoomba I asked her if it was Suntory whisky she had in the bag. She shook her head, turned around and rummaged and came up with a flask of Bundaberg rum. We both had a good pull on it, me telling myself it would help keep me alert for the drive. In fact I was alert enough, but discouraged.
Car Stealers Inc. would undoubtedly go looking for their boy before long, if they weren’t at it already. When they found him, Mountain would be in even deeper trouble. If he was the one who’d done the killing, his legal position looked very dodgy. The first few blows could have been in self-defence but the damage had gone way beyond that. By rights it was a police matter, but there were snags in that for me. Bring in the cops and the reporters come in the door behind them. Terry Reeves didn’t need his troubles served up to everyone at breakfast along with a dash of bloody murder.
Apart from that, I felt that I owed something to Erica by this stage. She’d shown guts and persistence in her search for Bill Mountain, as well as some compassion for Mai. I liked her well enough to worry about what might go on behind that fringe now that the Blackheath tip hadn’t paid off.
We were off the freeway and back into the cocoon of the inner west when she spoke up.
‘Won’t you get into trouble if you don’t report it to the police. I mean your licence and everything?’
‘Maybe. But I can handle a little pressure of that sort, or my lawyer can. You have to make your own judgements in this business. One standover man more or less won’t disturb my sleep.’
‘Are you sure that’s what he was?’
‘Pretty sure.’
‘Will you help me? Can I hire you to find Bill?’
‘You can’t hire me, I’m already hired. But he’s still the freshest trail in this mess.’
‘What will you do?’
I gripped the wheel and felt the tiredness grip me. I yawned impolitely. ‘I’m too tired to think now. Maybe I can go back to Mai and squeeze some more out of him. Maybe he has a way of contacting his principals and the information I’ve got now could give me some leverage. I don’t know.’
She huddled against the door and blew her nose violently. ‘I wish he hadn’t killed that man,’ she sniffed. ‘Why would he?’
I didn’t have any answer to that, certainly not at 2.45 am. Death has a draining effect on a normal person and we were both so normal and drained that we went into my house and dumped our bags on the floor without even discussing what we were doing. I showed Erica the plumbing and the spare room, which Hilde had painted and transformed in other ways from the bare cell it once was.
‘Nice room,’ she said.
‘Sleep tight.’
I took a pull on the rum and went to bed with the comforting warmth of the spirit in my mouth and throat.
Before dawn I woke up from a dream in which a man with a bashed-in head was following me round and round an overgrown garden. In the dream I was yelling, and I yelled for real when I stepped over a rusty gate, fell and woke up. Sweat was breaking out on my face as I sat up and instinctively looked to see if I’d woken Helen, but there was no Helen. I was half glad, half sorry for that. I lay back and waited for the sweat to dry; then I went deep under and slept without dreaming or turning over until 9 am.
The kitchen was filled with grey cigarette smoke when I got down there. Judging by the smoke and the butts, Erica had been up for a few hours. She didn’t look tired as she lifted the coffee pot. I nodded and sat down wondering why I wasn’t looking and feeling as good as her.
She re-charged the pot. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘I was wondering if Chinese people got red-rimmed eyes from lack of sleep.’
She laughed. ‘I got some sleep. I feel all right. D’you want milk? There doesn’t seem to be any.’
‘Black is fine. The cat drinks all the milk around here. Seen the cat?’
‘Yeah, it looked in and left.’
‘No milk, see? Goes next door.’
We waited while the pot did its job. She poured two cups of coffee and took hers across to the sink. She leaned back against the sink and used it for a big ashtray. The morning was cool, and she was wearing a sloppy joe Hilde had left behind. It was about three sizes too big and the message ‘Dentists are people too’ was down around her waist. She saw me looking and tugged at the sweater.
‘Does this belong to your woman?’
‘No. To my ex-lodger.’
‘No woman?’
‘Not at the moment. She comes and goes.’
‘Does that suit you?’
‘Yep.’
‘Why?’
‘Two lives are more interesting than one.’
‘Sounds like Bill’s philosophy. You’re a bit like him, you know. Why didn’t you two get on well?’
‘He’s more of an extrovert than me; you probably noticed.’
She smiled. ‘Can we go over it all a bit? I’m sorry, I just don’t know what to do.’
‘Suits me.’ I spilled some bread out of its wrapper and inspected it for mould. ‘A talk’d be good. I need to know a hell of a lot more about him. Toast?’
We sat and drank coffee and ate toast and she talked about Mountain at length. A picture formed of a wilful, selfish man, but one capable of great emotional generosity. Erica claimed that he had taught her a lot without ever patronising her or making her feel inadequate. She thought he’d make a good teacher.
‘It sounds like a gift all right, but what he wants to be is a great writer, not a teacher. How about that?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s what he wants, that’s true. He wants it so badly.’
‘Does he want it too much to do it?’
‘How do you tell? I never even write a letter. I don’t know what it’s like to write anything. Do you?’
I shook my head.
‘He reads about writers all the time. Literary biography is probably his favourite reading. He says he does it to find out how a writer should behave. When he’s drunk enough
‘Yes?’
‘He curses television, says real writers don’t have anything to do with television.’
‘Certainly didn’t bother Shakespeare.’
‘Don’t joke; you said you wanted to know about him. Well, this was his obsession. Look.’ She pulled the book I’d brought from Blackheath, and completely forgotten about, out from under the morning newspaper. ‘Why did you take this?’
‘I don’t know. Let’s have a look at it.’
The book was a thick paperback biography of Jack Kerouac. The pages were turned down at irregular intervals indicating that Mountain had read it in dribs and drabs and possibly more than once.
I looked at his big sprawling signature-a firm hand that he’d tried to disguise when he wrote ‘Bruce Worthington’. The date was printed boldly in figures half an inch high.
‘I hope he wasn’t trying to learn how Kerouac lived. He drank himself to death.’
She nodded. ‘Bill wanted to stop. He tried to a few times, but he couldn’t.’ She pushed back her fringe and gave me an unimpeded straight look. ‘Are you going to try Mai again today, Cliff? Can I come?’
I liked the ‘Cliff’, but I was trying to think of a way to say no, when the book came open at a page that had been turned down at the corner more than once and the binding had been strained by being bent back flat. A couple of paragraphs on the page were heavily underlined in fresh-looking ink. While Erica waited, I read the paragraphs: they described the period, late in Kerouac’s life, when he went to live with his sister and tried, unsuccessfully, to stop drinking. My mind flicked back to what Erica had said about Mountain’s alcohol problem.
‘You said he wanted to give up the grog?’
‘Yes, but he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to write without it. And you know how it is, all his social contacts were drinkers, they met in pubs… he’d have to give up almost everything he did to stop drinking. It was just too hard.’
‘Does he have any relatives?’
She thought about it, which meant lighting another cigarette. ‘A sister, but they’re not close.’
‘Doesn’t matter. Did he ever talk about her?’
‘Mm, not. much. She lives in Melbourne and she’s pretty straight. Bill called her something strange, something old-fashioned. A wowser.’
‘Wowser is old-fashioned?’
