The Washington Club

by Peter Corris

  ‘What can I do for you, Cliff?’

  ‘You know I was working for Cy on Claudia Fleischman’s defence?’

  Frank nodded.

  ‘She didn’t do it, Frank.’

  ‘You sure that’s not your dick talking?’

  There were never any punches pulled between Frank and me. That’s how we both played it and oddly it worked. We both thought that pussyfooting causes more misunderstandings and resentments than directness. Frank would have learned things from Bolton when he knew I wanted to see him, and he wouldn’t hold back from drawing obvious conclusions.

  ‘Let me rephrase that,’ I said. ‘I believe she didn’t do it. I also believe that Cy s murder has something to do with the Fleischman case.’

  ‘Evidence?’

  ‘Scrappy.’ I sucked in a breath and gave him as good as he’d given me. ‘I know the police are under pressure to settle the Fleischman thing and that you’ve got a neat package with Van Kep and all. I say it’s bullshit.’

  ‘Okay. What d’you want?’

  ‘How’re Hilde and the boy?’

  Frank shook his head. ‘Cliff, that’s not worthy of you.’

  ‘Humour me. I’ve lost one of my best friends and, as you say, my dick’s involved.’

  He opened his hands. ‘Ask.’

  ‘I want to have a talk with Van Kep.’

  ‘Jesus, Cliff. I can’t do it. He’s a protected witness.’

  ‘He’s a lying turd. Claudia hired him to protect her from Fleischman. Someone turned him around and he killed Fleischman and lumbered her.’

  Frank shook his head. ‘You’re way off. Van Kep couldn’t kill anyone. They’ve done extensive psychological tests on him. The muscles and balls are all for show—he’s a physical coward, doesn’t know whether he’s AC or DC sexually and is as dumb as shit with just enough brains to act bright.’

  I could have told Frank about Haitch Henderson then, suggested him as the trigger-man, captured his interest. I didn’t. I wanted Henderson for myself, and something else, something unexpected, was building inside me. I was noting Frank’s shirt, white with a thin grey line in the weave; his tennis club tie and the double-breasted blazer on a hanger on a low clothes stand in the corner of the office. In the old days Frank used to drop his single-breasted Grace Bros suit coat over the back of his chair and feel in the pockets for pens and failed lottery tickets to scribble on. I was aware of the difference between a career and a living, between a marriage and what was probably going to be just another ‘relationship’, with all the trouble that can involve. I bubbled over.

  ‘Fuck you, Frank. You’ve got it soft. You can coast to a pension or a fucking payout that’ll keep you in Slazenger Topspins for life. I’m still out there trying to make shit fit.’

  Frank stared at me for what seemed like a long time; his long, lean face was set in hard lines with all the friendship gone out of it. I knew that desk jockeying wasn’t to his taste and that he’d taken the position because it was his due and because, with a wife and child, it didn’t make sense for him to be sitting in cars with shotguns or walking up to houses with shuttered windows. I’d scored a bull’s-eye and I was ashamed of it.

  ‘Frank, I’m sorry. I . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. There’s a lot in what you say and you don’t know the half of it. This fucking job’s mostly paper shuffling and what isn’t is just politics.’

  I eased up out of my chair. ‘I know. I shouldn’t have asked you.’

  ‘Sit down! Let me think. You made the appointment with Abigail, did you talk to anyone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sign the book downstairs?’

  ‘Come on, Frank. I wrote David Ritchie of Burnt Ridge, Kempsey.’

  Parker nodded. It was a favourite false name of mine. David Ritchie was the real name of the Aboriginal boxer, Dave Sands, who was killed in a truck accident in 1952. It was one of the regrets of my life that I was too young to have seen him fight. People whose judgment I respected said he was the best ever. Frank had seen him at Rushcutters Bay and was one of the praise-singers.

  ‘Okay,’ Frank said. ‘Abigail’s reliable, but I’m still putting my arse on the line here. If you fuck up . . . Hilde’s told me how women can turn your brains to shit.’

  ‘Don’t do it if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Fuck you. On the way out you’d better be the invisible man.’

  I nodded. He was still working himself up to do something dangerous and I gave him the time. Again, I felt guilty about putting him in the position, but an image of Claudia—frizzy hair and dark red parted lips—came into my mind and I held my ground.

  ‘D’you think the same guy did the hits on Fleischman and Sackville?’

  I wanted to say, Yes! Yes! But I couldn’t do that to him and he was leaning forward slightly in his chair, watching me intently. I rubbed my closely shaven jaw where the bristles were just starting to break through. The Claudia image had gone and I was left out there where the only signposts are the ones you write yourself.

  ‘I honestly don’t know, Frank. I haven’t got any details on how Fleischman got it yet. I read about it at the time but the details didn’t stick. If it was a handgun at close range, no way.’

  ‘Rifle. Two shots through the pump from about a hundred yards or so.’

  ‘It could be the same shooter.’

  Frank sighed, swung away, gazed out the window and swung back again. ‘Have you got your notebook handy?’ he said.

  13

  It didn’t surprise me that I saw no one I knew on the way out of the building. For one reason or another, many of the cops I used to know have left the force and the new breed seems more interested in computer spreadsheets and printouts than in clocking faces. There seemed to be more women on the premises than I remembered from my last visit and several Asian faces. Some of the better old hardheads like Grant Evans, who’d stretched the rules for me a few times when I first got into the PEA game, would have struggled to accommodate these developments and made the adjustment more or less. But Grant had gone down to a force nine coronary a few years back, and I didn’t like to think how close we were together in age.

  The needle on the parking meter swung into the expired zone just as I reached the Camry. I gave it the finger, deactivated the alarm, opened the door and the mobile phone buzzed.

  ‘Hardy,’ I said, crouching into the car.

  ‘Cliff, this is Claudia. I’ve been trying to get you on the other numbers, but . . .’

  There was an edge to her voice, not hysteria or panic but in that territory. I sat behind the wheel and tried to project reassurance. ‘Okay, Claudia. I’ve been running about. Where are you, at home?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Kirribilli, although nowhere feels like home anymore.’

  ‘I understand. I’m coming over there now. Is that what you want? Is there something wrong? Something I can deal with?’

  ‘Jesus, wait a minute till I get a cigarette.’

  I hung on, hoping the call wouldn’t drop out. I’ve got no faith in mobile phones. A parking attendant rounded the corner and began checking the meters. Ten or so before she got to me—nine, eight . . .

  Claudia was back on the line, sounding more calm but more angry. ‘Those bloody journalists. Christ, I hate them.’

  Seven, six . . .

  ‘What’s happened?’

  We had a power shut-down here for an hour this morning and it turned my answering machine off. A call came through just as I was waking up from the Mogadon. The phone kept ringing and I couldn’t understand why and I answered it.’

  Five, four . . .

  ‘Yes. Who was it?’

  ‘I forget her name. Some smarmy bitch. She sounded so pleased to have got through to me. She had a story just on that account I suppose. I was dopey. I could hardly understand what she was saying. I probably sounded drunk. Cliff, are you there?’

  Three, two . . .

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘She said . .
. Jesus, she talked about how the murder of my lawyer would mean a delay in the trial. I hadn’t even thought of that! I can’t remember what she said, I was still too fuzzy, but I could grasp the implication.’

  One . . .

  ‘Cliff, they’re going to say I did this too! To gain time . . .’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  The attendant glanced at me as I waved at her. She took it all in—the car, the mobile, the agitation—and took her revenge. She must have been Sydney’s fastest infringement notice writer; she had the ticket made out and under the wiper and was past me and moving on before I could say a word, not that there was anything I could say with the phone to my ear.

  ‘Cliff! Cliff! Are you listening to me?’

  ‘Yes, of course. That’s all crazy. You don’t have to worry about that.’

  ‘But I abused her when I got her drift. God only knows what she’ll write about me. And I will have to get another lawyer, won’t I? And he might not want you to . . . I just don’t know what to do.’

  ‘We can fix all that,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m on my way.’

  ‘No. No, don’t come here. I can’t stay in this place. You must have things to do. I’m going to go away for a few days. I need to think about everything.’ The sharp edge was back in her voice. Along with the huskiness it made her sound slightly frantic.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said urgently. ‘You can come to my place. We . . .’

  ‘Don’t be mad! I need to think about you among other things. Can’t you see that? You can’t run around doing what you have to do and baby-sit me as well. I’ve got to get myself together. I’ll call you, Cliff.’

  ‘Claudia, don’t . . .’

  She hung up. I swore, dialled the number and got the engaged signal. I looked in the rear-vision mirror and saw the parking attendant coming back. Can you be booked twice for the same offence? I didn’t know and didn’t want to find out. I slammed the phone down, started the car and drove off. I headed up towards Oxford Street and stopped outside a pub. I looked longingly at it. It was an old-style Sydney pub with one of the Resch’s pictures, showing a slender woman in a grey evening dress sharing a drink with a bronzed bloke in a dinner suit. These days, in that neck of the woods, the bloke was more likely to be in the dress and the woman in the suit. The thought amused me as I removed the parking ticket and dropped it on the passenger seat. I crossed the street and bought a take-away coffee.

  I phoned Pete Marinos and got him in person for once. I told him that Claudia Fleischman was about to take off somewhere and that I wanted his watchdog to stick with her all the way.

  ‘Can do, amigo.’ Pete likes to play the all-round wog.

  ‘This is serious, Pete. She’s supposed to report to the cops regularly. She could be running out on that. She could be in danger. Is this guy any good?’

  ‘He’s good. Where’s she going?’

  ‘I don’t fucking know!’

  ‘Take it easy, Cliff. I heard about Sackville. I get the picture. My man has to know if it’s interstate, overseas or what.’

  ‘Is it the same guy I found in the garden?’

  ‘Yeah. But . . .’

  ‘Interstate just possibly, not overseas. No passport. Mostly likely Sydney local or environs—you know, Blue Mountains, like that.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll give you his mobile number. You can stay in touch with him if it’s in range.’

  I wrote down the number and slowly drank my coffee, trying to remember how I handled all this stuff back before pagers and car phones and faxes. As far as I could recall, I put many miles on the odometer of the Falcon before last, got very sore feet and lost plenty of coins in vandalised phone boxes. I remember Cyn, my ex-wife, looking at the dusty car with its coat-hanger aerial and the overflowing ashtray and the box of twenty-cent pieces and shaking her head.

  ‘Why do you do it?’ she’d said.

  She was an architect, worked in a smart office in Edgecliff, drove a Fiat. People came to her, she didn’t have to go to them.

  I can’t remember my response. Anyway, it didn’t convince her and she was soon on her way out of the marriage and headed back to the North Shore whence she hailed. Nowadays, I’d been told, she had an advertising executive husband, a couple of kids and was a competitive sailor. I could imagine all that and wished her well. She’d have been surprised at the Camry and the mobile phone, but not at my sexual involvement with a client, the parking ticket or at my decision of what to do next. The responsibility for the break-up of the marriage was a fifty-fifty split.

  Haitch Henderson had a son named Noel. I’d found this out when I’d come up against Haitch the first time. Noel’s mother was a prostitute and Haitch wasn’t proud of the connection. But there’s a little good in everyone, even a low-life like Haitch, and he’d accepted the boy and provided for him after a fashion. The fact that Noel, as a teenager, had adopted pimping and drug selling as occupations wasn’t Haitch’s fault, unless you believe that criminality is passed on in the DNA. I’ve never been able to decide on the point.

  I knew that Noel did business in a block of flats in Earlwood. The flats were in a building mounted high up above the Cooks River, high enough to make it look, on a good day with a blue sky, like something other than the industrial sewer and stormwater drain it was. Noel owned at least three of the flats, rented a couple more, scattered through the block, and he kept whores in them, selling drugs in different flats listed under different names with different phone numbers, as the spirit moved him. The women were available on call or for home services and there wasn’t much they wouldn’t, or weren’t obliged, to do. The drugs were supposed to ensure their loyalty, but one of the women had kicked loose and told me about the operation. Although not proud of the strategy, I’d been planning to use Noel to get certain messages through to Haitch back when I had him in my sights, until other events overtook me. That was yesterday, this was today.

  I knew Noel by sight; he resembled his father in that he looked soft and mild. He wasn’t, but he hadn’t the direct hardcore toughness of Haitch. Noel’s style was more vicious and oblique. Courtesy of my informant, I’d learnt that Noel had an absolute obsession about the Citroen Goddess, never drove anything else, and kept several of them in a garage somewhere to recycle the parts.

  ‘His fuckin’ car’s the only fuckin’ thing he loves,’ she told me.

  I drove to Marrickville, crossed the river into Earlwood, and drove up to the big block of flats occupying the whole of a high bluff overlooking the river, the Marrickville golf course and the quiet park where not long back one notorious drug dealer had shot another to death.

  Resident parking was provided for in the form of steel-framed, perspex-roofed carports grouped at the east end of the building near a thick stand of wattle trees which had somehow survived the developer’s assault. There were twenty-four spaces, only seven or eight occupied—no Citroen.

  I drove off and parked a few streets away under some plane trees that hung low over the road. Then I thought about car thieves and joy-riders and moved to a spot between two other cars that caught a bit of the street light. I locked up tight and walked back to the flats. One of the carports looked as if it hadn’t been used that year or last. The oil stains were old and faded and grass had broken through the concrete in several spots. I took up a position near a tree beside this spot and had a view of most of the other slots and a clear sight of the arrival of any car calling this place home.

  I used the mobile to call Pete’s man.

  ‘The mobile telephone you have called is not answering. Please call again later.’

  That could mean the phone was out of range or had been switched off or was subject to some kind of interference. It told me nothing and didn’t make me any happier.

  Waiting more or less patiently is something I’ve learned to do but never enjoyed. I took out the Colt, leaned back against the tree trunk and prepared myself. I looked around, made sure I couldn’t be observed, and checked the Colt
over, making sure the safety catch was on. There’s probably as much villainy in Earlwood as anywhere else, but the usual atmosphere is quiet. The last thing I wanted to do there was fire a gun.

  Leaves fluttered down on me as I checked the gun and I reflected for the umpteenth time on how all the senses sharpen up for this kind of activity. I could feel the leaves hit, count them, and felt I could tell a difference in their weight. Nutty, but that’s the way it feels. Athletes talk about an adrenalin rush as if they actually experience it but I can’t say I ever have. With me it’s this honing-up of everything. It feels scary and good at the same time and there’s nothing else quite like it. It’s possible that I’m hooked on the feeling and will stay in this kind of work longer than I should. I don’t know.

  Traffic zipped along the road and over the bridge; kids kicked a football in drug-death park; I could hear the tyre noise and the thump of boot on pigskin clearly. There was no activity on the river. Old-timers recall swimming in it, catching fish fit to eat in it, kids playing on its sandy banks, but that’s all long past. I was seeing things near and far with unusual clarity and could even spot a couple of golfers indulging in their peculiar masochism in the distance.

  After fifty-three minutes of this I had something to watch. A tall, blonde woman wearing a miniskirt, high heels and a silk blouse, trotted across the concrete towards the brick pillars that marked the entrance to the area in front of the carports. She lit a cigarette and puffed on it as she adjusted her sunglasses, consulted something from her shoulder bag and tugged at her pantyhose. She checked her watch, readjusted the shades, looked back at the flats and waved and had trouble standing still. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other and, just as I’d done a while before, looked around to see if anyone was about. She couldn’t see me in the shadows. Satisfied, she blocked her left nostril with her little finger and sniffed hard. She repeated the action with her right nostril. Her head jerked back as she sniffed. A white Mercedes pulled up and she got smoothly into the front passenger seat—one of Noel’s girls for sure.