The Dying Trade ch-1

by Peter Corris

  “Are you Mr Lawrence?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m Hardy, who’s Lawrence?”

  She smiled to show she understood but withheld approval. “He telephoned, he’s been referred to Dr Pincus. Have you been referred?”

  “No, I don’t want to see the doctor, at least, not yet. I want some information.” She picked up a pencil and tapped it against her big, strong white teeth. “About what?” she said.

  “I want to know whether a Miss Susan Gutteridge has contacted Dr Pincus and whether she gave her address.” There’d been no number listed for her in the directory.

  “I can’t possibly tell you that.”

  “Then she has contacted him?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You as good as did. Look, I referred her to Dr Pincus. She was having trouble with her diabetes, I knew he was good, the best.”

  She unbent a little. “I still can’t help you, Mr Hardy,” she said, “I can’t give out information about patients.”

  I took out my wallet and showed her my card. I found Bryn’s cheque with his name stencilled on it to establish my connection with the family. She was inclined to help but a tough professionalism held her back. I noticed a copy of The News tucked into a basket beside her chair.

  “Look, Miss…?”

  “Steiner, Mrs.”

  “Mrs Steiner, this is a serious business, it’s connected with things that happened last night. The story’s in your paper. I’m mentioned. Take a look.”

  She pulled out the paper and ran her eyes over the story. She looked up at me with huge dark eyes that seemed to invite you in for a swim.

  “I haven’t time to explain,” I said. “Miss Gutteridge was at that place last night, I saw her. I advised her to see the best diabetes man in Sydney and now I need to see her again. I don’t know where she lives.”

  She gave a convinced nod. “I believe you Mr Hardy.” She flicked over the pages of an appointment book. Pincus looked to be booked solid until the end of the century. “Miss Gutteridge has an appointment for tomorrow,” she said, “she gave her address as 276 Cypress Drive, Vaucluse. She called from a private phone so I assume she was at home.”

  I thanked her and took back my licence folder. I gave her a smile and a half-bow as I left, but she was too busy re-reading the story in the paper to notice.

  I went back to the car and drove out to Vaucluse again. Life went on out there as it always would, the traffic flowed smoothly as traffic does in places where no one has to get anywhere at a particular time. Cypress Drive was a notch down from Bryn’s lofty eminence, but it was still nothing to be ashamed of. The house was on a rise and the grass, shrubs and trees had never lacked fertiliser. A concrete driveway led up to the house like a stairway to paradise. There was no way the Falcon could have coped with the grade, so I parked it outside the wrought iron gates and took my exercise for the day — keeping my promise to myself to do more walking.

  I was short of breath and sweating when I reached the top of the drive. The house had too many arches and white-painted, sculptured pillars and railings. It looked like a wedding cake by a baker who’d let his passion for decoration run away with him. I sat on a set of marble steps to catch my breath and then went up two more flights of marble to the door. The bell was the eye of a tightly curled, plaster moulded snake. I shuddered and pushed it waiting to hear the William Tell Overture inside. In fact a few clear, plain notes sounded inside. It was loud and audible even through a house of twenty squares, but it got no response. I tried again with the same result. I pushed at the door but it didn’t give an inch. I went down the steps and around the house on the right side; pebble-strewn garden beds bordered the house from front to back and the windows were at least fifteen feet from the ground all around. There was a slight look of neglect about the lawn edges and shrubs as if they were feeling embarrassed to be caught in such a state.

  The back door of the house was reached by a railed set of concrete steps that lead to a tiled patio, but the garage took my attention first. It would hold four cars but there were signs of frequent occupation — tyre marks and oil stains — in only two of the bays. A third bay had a very slight tyre mark and a small grease spot. Above the garage was a long, low structure which looked like quarters for the staff.

  I went up the steps to the flat and pushed the door open. I stepped straight into a neat kitchen and announced my presence by rapping on the wall. There was no answer. I went through to the next room which was pleasantly furnished with a good timber table, a serviceable divan and some built-in cupboards. A man was lying on his back on the divan, snoring quietly. There was a two-thirds empty brandy bottle and a sticky glass on the floor beside the couch. The sleeping man was short and spare, beak-nosed like a jockey, with thin, sandy hair and bad teeth. His mouth was open and he smelled like the Rose and Crown on a Saturday night. There was a rinsed glass on the kitchen sink indicating that someone had helped him on his way to oblivion.

  I went out fast and took the steps to the back of the house three at a time. The back door was locked, it looked solid but wasn’t, it sprung open at my third kick. The house was an exercise in total comfort, total push button luxury, total soullessness. It was intended to be clean and tidy at all times but it wasn’t now; the bed in one of the large bedrooms was a tangled mess, the mattress was slewed off the base and there were clothes, books and make-up strewn about. A sleeve ripped out of a satin nightgown lay on the floor in a passageway and objects had been knocked and spilled from tables through the house. Susan Gutteridge had given whoever had carried her off quite a fight, but it appeared to have been a fight with rules because I didn’t see any blood.

  I went back into the bedroom and began a search of Susan’s belongings. One thing was clear — whoever had taken her wasn’t interested in her papers or possible hiding places. Nothing was disturbed in the dressing table drawers, there were no edges lifted, no seams ripped, no books disembowelled. It wasn’t money either. Susan’s purse was on a sideboard in the living room; it had all her personal tickets in it as well as four hundred dollars in cash. It also had what I was looking for — an address book. There were four addresses for Bryn listed along with telephone numbers — one in the city, Vaucluse, one near Cooma in the snow country and one at Cooper Beach on the Central Coast. I slipped the book into my pocket and wandered across to a window. There was a harbour view of course. The early rain had cleared and the day had turned into the sort of Sydney special that persuades Melburnians to give up their football and settle. I saw in a series of mind-made movie stills images of Bryn Gutteridge sitting on his sun deck potting at sea birds with his air pistol. His skin was saddlebag brown and he was a heliophile if ever I’ve seen one. He’d be at Cooper Beach. The scene around me screamed for a telephone call to the police, but I’d had enough of desks and blotters and forms in triplicate for a while. The guy in the flat should wake up in a few hours and would probably call the cops. That left me with a fairly clear conscience and about as much of a start as I needed.

  I was congratulating myself on having thought this out when a slight sound made me turn. I couldn’t tell at first whether it was a man or a woman. There were flared purple slacks and a flowered shirt, shoes with metal buckles and a stiff brimmed black hat on top of a head as pale and fair as a lily in a snow field. I decided that it all belonged to a man, and that the man was holding a gun. He was almost albino, slightly pink around the eyes and he spoke with a high voice, lisping a bit.

  “Hold your hands out like this.” He fluttered a hand at full arm stretch. “If I do, can we be friends?” I said. He didn’t move a muscle in his face and the gun was steady on my navel.

  “Just do it!”

  I did it.

  “Now turn around.”

  “Oh, don’t take advantage of me.”

  He’d heard it all before and it didn’t touch him. I felt as if I was digging my grave with my teeth. I knew I should stop riding him, but the words seemed to come out wro
ng.

  “I might have what you want,” I said.

  Still no reaction.

  “Just turn, I’ll let you know when to stop.”

  I had nothing to lose. He looked as if he’d enjoy killing me and his only problem would be where to put the bullet for maximum enjoyment. I reached into my pocket. He did none of the things an amateur would do. He didn’t clutch at the trigger or move back; he knew he had me cold and maybe he just wanted to see what sort of gun he was up against. I flicked the address book out of my pocket and threw it at him with a jerky movement as I dived for his legs. The book missed him by a mile. He sidestepped a fraction and swept the side of his gun down onto my perfect target of a skull. The blow hit the same spot as before and the blood must have flowed like Texas oil. I blacked out for a second and when I came to I couldn’t breathe and my heart seemed to be missing three beats for every one it caught. I heard the paleface say, “Shit, he’s dead.” I thought for a minute that I was but that was quickly replaced by fear. If he thought I was dead that was fine with me, even an animal like him wouldn’t want to kill me twice. Through half-shut eyes I saw him pick up the address book and go off towards the back of the house. I tried to pull myself up but my arms and shoulders couldn’t take the strain. I went down hard and blacked out again.

  17

  I was out for about ten minutes. I was rubbery legged like an unfit businessman pushed through a three mile run when I came to. I had flickering vision and the hemispheres of my brain seemed to be competing for the space. I propped myself up against the nearest wall, wiped blood out of my eyes and debated whether to look for whisky or die. I opted for the whisky and found some in a small room got up like a cocktail lounge. I had a choice of nearly full bottles of four different brands and decided on Teachers. I took a long, breath-cutting swig of it. The liquor fused my double-sided headache into one which was slightly less painful overall. My hair was matted with blood and an external clean-up seemed to be the next thing indicated after the internal treatment. I staggered off to find a bathroom, dimly aware of what sort of figure I’d cut before a policeman, a judge and twelve citizens good and true.

  I lapped water up into my face and eyes and waited for the snowstorm vision and morse code heartbeats to stop. I lowered myself gently down onto the edge of the bath, soaked a face towel in water, and mopped carefully at my scalp. After a few painful minutes of this and a close look in the mirror I decided that the experience hadn’t aged me much more than ten years and that I was up to doing some thinking. It didn’t take much — the albino was Bryn’s offsider, the torturer; Bryn had sent him back for something, probably the address book. He was going to catch Bryn up somewhere or maybe Bryn was waiting for him. It didn’t matter because he thought I was dead. I closed my eyes and brought the writing on the page of Susan’s notebook back and up into focus. I got it — 24 Seaspray Drive. I dried my face and ten minutes later I was in my car heading for Cooper Beach.

  I stopped in North Sydney for petrol and water for the car and tobacco for me. I pelted through the north shore suburbs up to where the Pacific Highway joins the Newcastle tollway. The old road holds close to the hills. Driving it you call in at a couple of pleasant little towns. It’s nice but slow and Bryn wouldn’t have taken it. The tollway rips through the country defiantly, it sits on huge concrete pylons over valleys and it passes through thirty-metre-high rock cuttings that look as if they’ve been carved by the hand of God. You get a different picture of the country from this route. The Hawkesbury looks a mile wide, and little beach towns look like pretty fishing villages instead of the take-away horrors they are.

  The car coughed a little on the hills and I felt a bit unsteady on the bends, but I used some more of Susan’s whisky which I’d brought with me and that helped. It took three hours from the Harbour Bridge to the rickety wooden affair that crossed Cooper Creek. Seaspray Drive was on the beachfront at the northern end of the town. Bryn’s house was a modest two-storey timber and brick hideaway that probably had solar heating and an indoor pool. The Fiat I’d seen before and a Land Rover were parked in die driveway, the gates were shut and there was no air of imminent departure. I drove past quickly. It was after three o’clock and I felt light-headed from the beating, the whisky and the lack of food. I went into one of the town’s two pubs and persuaded die stringy, faded barman to get me a toasted sandwich although the food went off at 3.00. I got a beer from him first, breaking my promise of the morning, and he went grumbling off to the kitchen.

  He came back with two great steaming chunks of toasted bread, meat and tomato that had been prepared by an artist. He accepted my offer of a beer.

  “Wife made’ em,” he said, pointing to the food.

  “They’re great.” I couldn’t see why he was so woebegone. The beer seemed to lift his spirits a bit though, and I thought he might be good for a few questions.

  “Do you know a Mr Gutteridge, Seaspray Drive?”

  He took a deep pull on the middy. “Yeah, rich bloke.”

  “That’s him, see much of him?”

  “Not much. Now ‘n’ then. Doesn’t come in here but, sends for some grog occasionally. Why’d’y wanna know?”

  “I’ve got some business with him, just want to get him sized up a bit. What do you make of him?”

  “Well, I don’t know him properly like, just talked to him on the phone a coupla times and seen him up the house when I’ve been delivering the grog. He’s a homo.”

  I nodded. He finished the beer and I fished out the money for two more. He pulled them, looking closely at what he was doing. He put mine in front of me and lifted his own.

  “Thanks, cheers. Well, we get plenty of them up here, their business I suppose. Gutteridge himself seems all right to me, but there’s some funny jokers up there with him sometimes.”

  I finished the second sandwich, terrible for the waistline and for getting shot on, but good for morale.

  “Have you ever seen a very pale man up there, white hair, just about albino?”

  “Yeah, he’s the one I had in mind. Something off about him.”

  “Like what?”

  “I dunno. Partly just the weird bloody look of him, but I seen him shoot a seagull once, pointblank with a. 22. Bloody cruel. I reckon he’s not the full quid.”

  I left the pub with the brisk step of a man on business although I was very unsure of my next move. The beer had fuzzed me up a bit so I decided to take a walk along the beach to clear my head. I took off my sandals, rolled up my pants and walked along in the shallows for a mile or so until the rocks running down in sharp spines to the beach turned me back. The beach was clean and white with a light scattering of driftwood on the squeaky, powdery sand above the tideline. Like everyone who lives in the city and draws their bread and butter and stimulation from it, I indulged in some dreams of a seaside hideaway where I could cut down on my drinking and be free of pollution, mortgages and everything else. But mortgage was the native tongue in the hills above this beach and on the walk back I consoled myself with the thought that many of the residents of Cooper Beach were deeper in debt than I was.

  It was five o’clock. I sat on the sea wall while a little of the daytime warmth seeped out of the air, but not much. I put on my sandals, glanced over towards the pub and saw a man in white denims and a pale blue shirt going into the bottle shop. His hair was silver white and among the expensive sun tans and liquor complexions on the street he stood out like a bishop in a brothel. The Land Rover I’d seen in Bryn’s driveway was parked across the street from the hotel. Getting the grog in was a good sign, it meant they didn’t intend going anywhere in a great hurry. You don’t send your minions down to the inn for Campari if your next move is a dash to the airport and a plane to Paris. My car was parked under trees around the corner from the Land Rover and it was unlikely that Pinkey would see it. I was congratulating myself on this when he came out of the pub. The barman I’d been talking to was with him, carrying a carton and nattering away. Pinkey was nodding
his head and looking up and down the street like a circling hawk watching for chickens. He pointed across to the Land Rover and went back into the pub, maybe for a drink, maybe to phone, no way to tell. In any case it seemed like London to a brick that my presence in Cooper Beach was soon going to be known about in all the wrong quarters. I’d been careless and slow and the thought came to me, not for the first time, that I might be getting too old for this line of work.

  I ran across the street and came up on the Land Rover from the other side. I got in the driver’s door and climbed over into the back. There was the usual mess of tools, rope and groundsheets that every four wheel drive freak collects, and I huddled down in a corner behind the passenger seat and pulled a light tarpaulin over me. The door opened, glass clinked and cardboard scraped on vinyl. The door closed. I wished like hell that I had a gun and that made me think of Bryn and his guns and the possibility that he might keep one right here. I risked a quick peep out of the window. No sign of the albino. I rummaged about quickly and found lengths of pipe, two fishing rods, a pump and a. 22 rifle. The rifle was in a waxed paper sheath and there was a box of bullets taped to the side of the sheath. I pulled out the magazine, put six shells into it and worked one up into the breech; I put the safety catch on and laid the gun down on the floor parallel with the seat. I pulled the tarp up again and waited. Sweat rolled off me and I wanted to scratch in ten places, the tarp was damp with sea water and I felt as if I was slowly pickling like a joint of meat.

  He moved like a cat, as I’d seen before. He was in the driver’s seat and starting the motor in one smooth motion and hadn’t made any noise outside that I could detect. His driving was also smooth and efficient and we’d made a few turns and were heading for home before I’d had time to plan the next move fully. The car wouldn’t be visible at the gates I decided, and it wouldn’t be audible, what with the Pacific crashing in a hundred yards away and the breeze roaring through the Norfolk Island pines. I had to hope that the gates were closed. They were. He pulled up a car’s length from them and as he set the handbrake I came up and poked the end of the rifle barrel into the nape of his neck.