by Peter Corris
They finished the round and the companion came up to the bar and bought the next one. I drank slowly and when Peggy came up for her shout I had a ten-dollar note out and flapping in the breeze.
‘Peggy?’ I said.
‘Two Bacardis and coke, sport,’ she said to the barman, then she turned a magnificently bloodshot eye at me. ‘Yes? Do I know you?’
‘I was at Leon’s wake with Ann Winter.’
The drinks came and naturally that was what she was most interested in. She grabbed them with the excessive caution of someone who has a slight load on board. But she’d caught sight of the ten.
‘Nice girl, Ann.’
‘Yes. Would this buy a little information?’ I nudged the note. The barman was interested and trying to hover within earshot. I looked at him as if he had something in his nose and he backed off.
‘Depends.’ Her mate shouted, ‘Peg!’ from across the room and Peg ducked her head at her angrily. Peg’s hair was dyed red, she wore a lot of makeup and her body was strapped in tight. She looked as if she’d spent a little money on herself since I’d last seen her. ‘Depends,’ she repeated. ‘It might buy a little bit of some information.’
I took out another ten. ‘Get rid of your friend and we’ll have a chat.’
The friend didn’t like it much, but she put her Bacardi down fast and went out. I walked across to the table with my second scotch and a fresh Bacardi.
‘Cripple, are you?’
‘Just temporary,’ I said. ‘Hang gliding.’ I gave her the twenty dollars straight off and she offered me a menthol cigarette in return. I refused.
She sucked in the smoke. ‘Safer than hang gliding.’ She gave the sort of cackle that no person under sixty should be able to produce. Where the makeup had flaked off, her skin was a raddled ruin; her hair was thin and retreating like Glenda Jackson’s as Elizabeth I, and all the alcohol and tobacco on her breath couldn’t disguise the smell of poor teeth and lousy food. But through all that you could see she had once been beautiful, that her ruined features had once had a sort of perfection. And she still had guts.
‘Don’t look at me,’ she said sharply. ‘I look like garbage. What d’you want from me?’
She pulled hard on the cigarette and took a deep drink as if she wanted to hasten the decay.
‘Singer,’ I said. ‘John Singer and his wife. I understand you know a bit about them.’
‘Knew. Singer’s dead.’
‘Okay, knew.’
‘Any more money?’
‘It’s my turn to say “It depends”, Peggy. I’ll pay well for something interesting.’ I tapped her glass. ‘Bit flush, aren’t you?’
She sighed. ‘Good double and had both of ’em each way. Once in a bloody blue moon. Nearly all gone now. What’s your game?’
‘Private investigator. Did you read about that house in Clovelly?’
She was wearing a thin yellow cardigan draped over her shoulders. She pulled the sleeves across her chest and shivered.
‘I read about it.’
‘I helped close it down. That’s where I got the dicky knee.’
‘You must be all right, then. Shit, what a place! Were they really …’
I didn’t want to go down memory lane so I cut her off. ‘The Singers, Peggy. What do you know?’
‘I know a bit.’
‘How come?’ I hadn’t meant to let the implication slip in—that she was light years removed from the Singers socially and financially, but she was smart and she caught it.
‘I’m a mess, I know. Wasn’t always. But my girl Sandy was on with Singer for a year or more. Then he dumped her. She was just a kid, eighteen or so, and she took it bad.’
‘Singer’d be a bit long in the tooth for an eighteen-year-old, wouldn’t he?’ I said sceptically.
She finished her drink. ‘Didn’t look it, didn’t act it. Sandy had no complaints, not at first. What’re you drinking?’ She got up with one of my tens in her hand. That’s where it would go, dollar by dollar.
‘Scotch.’ My knee was hurting. When she came back with the drinks, she gave me a smile that still had a trace of the old power in it, but it would be a sloppy grimace soon.
‘Singer wasn’t so bad himself,’ she said as soon as she’d lit another cigarette. ‘Gave Sandy plenty of money, bought her a car. It was that bitch of a wife who was the real trouble.’
I sipped my drink and let her tell it.
‘I got this from Sandy, see? She said something happened to Singer. He lost his … don’t know what you’d call it. He couldn’t get it up. All that. Depression, isn’t that what they call it? Sandy reckoned the wife was behind it, driving him mad. Hard bitch.’
‘Do you know her?’
‘Yeah, I did. She’s older than me but I don’t suppose she looks it. Well, she knocked around a bit before she got on to Singer. I knew her then and for a few years after that.’ Her voice trailed off. They would have been the bad years, when things started to slide and people started to avoid her and every problem needed two or three drinks instead of one. She snapped back to the present. ‘I tell you she’s as hard as they come. Singer always liked the girls, see? And Marion used to sort them out. I saw her do it once at a party. Bloody near ripped this kid apart.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Like this.’ She made claws of her fingers and lifted them. The skin on her hands was yellow and cracked, her nails were bright red and some of the paint had got on the skin around them. She made a slashing movement and I got the idea. It was disconcerting stuff for a loyal and faithful employee to hear about the boss. If Mrs S had turned the violence against the philanderer that would explain why Singer wasn’t out boating and banging the birds any more. But it wouldn’t explain calling me in. I was aware again of how much I didn’t know about Singer; too much. That set me to thinking about people who would have known him.
‘McLeary,’ I muttered into my scotch.
‘What?’
‘Talking to myself. You’re the first person I’ve talked to who’s known anything much about Singer. I was thinking that Tom McLeary’d know a bit.’
‘I’ll say, but don’t mention him and Marion Singer in the same breath.’
‘Why?’
‘Jesus! She hates him. He used to supply Singer with girls and they had the casino deal. You know about that?’ She looked at me shrewdly as she finished her drink. Her brain was probably only half working, but there was enough of it ticking over for her to know how deep the water was. She wagged a finger at me. ‘You don’t know. Knew you didn’t.’
‘Tell me, then.’ I put twenty dollars on the table.
‘No. Fuck you, ask the bloody coppers.’
She was a bit scared and the booze was getting to her. The last one had probably been a double and it was hitting hard, the way it does when the liver’s shot. And she was probably due for her afternoon nap before starting on the evening session. It wasn’t parfit or gentil helping her to oblivion but it’s not a parfit, gentil world. I pushed the money towards her.
‘Tell me a bit more about McLeary and tell me where I can find Sandy.’
She looked at me with those eyes that had stared into countless drinks. She wanted to say no, to tell me to keep my grubby questions away from the spotless ears of her little girl. She was a mother and an alcoholic and the body chemistry won. Besides, the ears weren’t spotless any more.
‘Get us another drink.’ She held up her glass and I could feel her watching me as I limped away to get it. She could punish me just that much.
‘Won’t tell you much about Mac. In everything, gambling … Edgecliff, Maroubra … girls … papers.’
‘What do you mean, papers?’
‘Place is full of fuckin’ foreigners. Wogs, chinks. Papers, passports, you know.’
I nodded. ‘Sandy, and the name she goes by.’
‘More money,’ she said. More oblivion, more laughs, less pain.
I put another twenty on the table. She took the n
otes and her knuckles cracked as she closed her hand around them.
‘Modesto,’ she said.
I looked at her.
‘Her father … bigger shit than Singer, bigger shit than you, biggest shit in the world.’
‘Address?’
‘Flat two, eighty-one Robbins Road, Double Bay.’
It was a different address, but the name Modesto was the one Frank Parker had given me as the girlfriend whose movements had been checked.
‘What does she do?’ I said.
She shrugged.
‘Has she got a friend?’
‘Yeah, Yank. Funny name, Tod or somethin’. Piss off.’
20
‘FRANK, you’ve been holding out on me.’ I was using a telephone in the Royal Oaks.
‘Never.’
‘’Fraid so. You neglected to tell me about the casino deal.’
‘Uh,’ he said.
‘Sounds pretty important to me. Now, did I or did I not help you to clear up two murders?’
‘One. We never even opened a file on Leon.’
‘One, then, but a good one.’
‘Okay. It’s a little difficult …’ He broke off and his voice had nothing of the special, concise, on-top-of-it-all Frank Parker tone. I guessed the reason.
‘Your colleagues are in the room and you can’t just shoot the breeze about casinos. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘We’ll play it the way we played it before, only I’ll ask the questions. Now, there was some sort of deal about the casinos that involves the constabulary. Yes?’
‘That’s so.’
‘All I know is that they open and close. Let me guess; the deal takes in McLeary and Ward?’
‘That’s two out of three.’
‘Singer?’
‘Right.’
It gave the thing some shape and structure at last. The casinos were big money, very big, and big people were involved, political people. It was reasonable to suppose that Singer, Ward and McLeary had the go-ahead from the cops in some way. But what way? Deal, deal, deal, I thought. What do deals involve? Time.
‘Are you still there, Hardy?’
‘I’m here. The deal is for one operator to have an open go for a period of time.’
‘Exactly right.’
‘Whose turn is it now?’
‘Moot point.’
‘Who’s doing it now?’
‘Singer.’
‘How long is the agreed period?’
‘Two years.’
‘So Singer’s overdue to bow out?’
‘Right again. We’re talking about the wife.’
‘Thanks, Frank. You’re a real pal.’
‘Don’t get too smart, Hardy. It’s tricky country.’
‘Just where do you stand on it, Frank? I know you’ve got judges playing blackjack and shadow ministers putting their shirts on the red, but it’d help to know what your considered attitude is.’
He spoke slowly and it was obvious that he’d thought it over many times. ‘Pending legalisation,’ he said, ‘I’m for a little rationalisation.’
‘Am I to understand that there’s been trouble at handing-over time in the past?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘I think I can help you.’
‘This conversation never happened.’ Good old Frank. He’d extend his neck an inch or so but he wouldn’t stick it all the way out. He was right, of course; banks and insurance companies employ lots of ex-cops who’ve spoken out of turn.
‘We have an understanding,’ I said. ‘See you soon.’
Double Bay is hilly; very bad for a man with a crook leg, very good for property developers. It’s also good for hairdressers, couturiers and people who sell tiny pictures widely bordered by snowy white paper and enclosed in the slimmest of frames. A lot of media people living there kid themselves that they can walk to work in town. Usually they drive. The cars of Double Bay are a study in themselves. On a car-for-car basis, Japan and Germany won World War II and neutrality paid off big for Sweden.
Robbins Road goes up and down dramatically in a couple of hundred yards. The taxi dropped me at the end of the road and I discovered the first law of walking with a stiff knee—it’s a hell of a lot easier to walk uphill than down. Swinging the stiff leg up, you can sort of place it gently; coming down the grade you tend to thump it into place. The jar goes up the bone to the knee and the nerves do the rest. So you tend to go downhill crabwise—very slow and undignified.
Number eighty-one was a newish block, a modish five storeys with some nice shrubbery around it. There would be no change out of eight hundred bucks a month for a flat. I went up the path hoping to find flat two on the ground floor, but it was one flight up. I was sweating and gritting my teeth when I got there. Life’s a gamble, but I hoped like hell Sandy was at home. The door was a sophisticated job with an unpickable lock; kicking it in wasn’t on just then. As I pressed the buzzer, I wondered about Sandy: Singer had dropped her just over two years before when she had been eighteen. That made her twenty or so now. Twenty can be nursery-school callow or as hard as Ilse Koch.
The woman who answered the bell was Peggy cast back twenty years. She had thick, lustrous red hair, thin, arched eyebrows and a face that would have made John Singer feel years younger than he was. One of the eyebrows went up with practised slowness.
‘Mmm?’
‘I’ve just come from talking to your Mum in the Royal Oaks. I gave her fifty dollars and she gave me your address. I’ll make it up to a hundred for her or give it to you if you’ll give me half an hour of your time.’
She looked at me curiously through the eight-inch gap allowed by the security chain.
‘What would Peggy have worth fifty dollars?’
‘I’ll tell you if you’ll open the door.’
She was a careful lady; she looked me over from top to bottom. I was still wearing a heavy bandage around my ear and the top of my head. Peggy hadn’t commented on it, but I suppose she was used to people falling over and hurting themselves. That plus my hospital pallor might give me an air of fragility that would encourage Sandy to let me in. I leaned heavily on the stick for emphasis.
‘What’s the stick for?’
‘I hurt my leg. I barely got up the stairs and it pains me just standing here.’
‘You might attack me with it.’
I laughed. ‘You’d beat me. I can hardly move without it, but I’ll leave it out here if it worries you.’ I leaned the stick against the wall and got out my licence, letting her see some money sitting in there with it. ‘I’m a private detective. You can call Detective Frank Parker at College Street headquarters to check me if you want to. I don’t attack women.’
It was her turn to laugh. It was a good Sydney sound that suggested she’d had more good times than bad so far.
‘I suppose it’s all right.’ She unfastened the chain. ‘My boyfriend’s due in half an hour, anyway.’
‘Thanks.’ I limped into the hallway and steadied myself against the wall.
‘Get the stick, for God’s sake.’ It wasn’t a bad voice she had; very contemporary, using the rising inflection, but not on every group of words. I got the stick and went down the hall into the living-room. The apartment had big windows which were making the most of the afternoon light. The fittings were good but unremarkable, except for a very nice Persian carpet. There was a big TV set and a lot of silver-banded hi-fi equipment. No books. A gold steering wheel was mounted on a block of wood and the whole thing was about nine inches high, standing on top of the TV set. She saw me looking at it.
‘He’s a racing car driver, my boyfriend.’
I nodded and eased myself down into the chair with the most padding.
‘I didn’t catch your name.’
‘Cliff Hardy. I’m interested in John Singer. I can’t tell you why.’
‘That’d be right,’ she said. She got a Benson and Hedges Extra Mild out of its box and lit it with a gold lighter. ‘What do you
want for the fifty dollars?’
‘Tell me about how he went off you.’
It wasn’t polite and she didn’t like it, but I wasn’t going to get anywhere by being too polite with Sandy. The eyebrows and the way she smoked and moved told me that she was a long way from being a kindergarten teacher. She was a woman who’d been valued and who had accepted the going rate. She frowned and tapped ash off the Benson and Hedges.
‘Peggy told you that?’
‘Yes.’
‘How’s Peggy? I haven’t seen her for a while.’
I opened my hands. ‘She’s okay, I guess. Won a bit on the horses, she said. Drinking Bacardi.’
‘That’s her drink when she’s got money.’ She stood and leaned over to crush out her cigarette. She was medium tall with a good figure; her breasts under a black V-neck sweater fell forward heavily when she leaned down. Nothing heavy about the rest of her; she was trim-hipped and snappy as she turned towards a door. ‘Want a drink?’
‘No, thanks. Don’t stall me. Are you going to talk to me about Singer or not?’
She went out of the room and I heard drink-making noises. ‘How do I know she’ll get the money?’
‘I said I’d give it to you if you wanted it.’
She came back carrying what looked like a gin and tonic and sat down on a couch opposite me. She sipped the drink. ‘No, give it to her.’ There were a lot of things in the order—affection, disappointment and disgust as well. She worked on her drink and got another smoke going. Mother’s girl.
‘I liked John,’ she said softly. ‘He was good to me. I was in a bad way when I met him.’ She pointed a long, elegant finger at the Persian carpet. ‘Going down fast, you know? He fixed me up, we had a flat, went out a bit. Good times. He was very, very smart, the smartest man I ever met.’
‘How do you mean, smart?
‘Like, he figured everything out in advance. He’d say, we’ll do this and this and then this’ll happen. And it always did. We had a bit of trouble getting clear of Mac. Have you heard of him?’
I nodded.
‘Well, he had a sort of hold on me, but John outsmarted him.’
