by Peter Corris
I knocked on the door of flat 6 and heard the sound echo about emptily inside. After a second try a woman put her head outside the door opposite.
“She ain’t in,” she said.
The voice jarred with everything around and I turned around to take a good look at its owner. She was fortyish, fat and a good advertisement for cosmetics—black circled eyes, rouged cheeks and fire engine red lips. She’d had a few drinks but not enough for her to forget that she had to hold herself together. She had some help from corsets and a bra that pushed her breasts up out of the tight floral dress towards her loose chin. She wore gold, high heeled sandals. I looked closely for a cigarette holder but she didn’t seem to have one just then.
“If you’re looking for the darkie she ain’t there.” Her voice was city slummy with a touch of country slowness.
“Do you happen to know when she’ll be back Mrs . . .?”
“Williams, Gladys Williams. Who’re you? Is she in trouble?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“Well, you know them. She comes an’ goes, all hours like. Must be doin’ something shady.”
“I see. Do you mind if I ask what you do Mrs Williams?”
“Nothin’, not any more.”
I raised an eyebrow and she gave a lopsided grin. “Nah, not that either, not for years. Married now.”
I nodded. “Husband’s a bookie,” she went on, “in Lithgow. That’s where we live. He comes to the bloody city meetings once a week, bloody dumps me here.”
“Why don’t you go with him?”
She shook her head, the frizzy red tendrils danced about like the Gorgon’s snakes. “Sick of ’em, rather stay here. Might go out tonight. Hey, why’re you askin’ all these questions, wanna drink?”
I’d only asked three that I was aware of, but she was ready to open up like a sardine can and her qualifications as an observer of her neighbours were impeccable. I produced a card from the insurance days.
“A drink would be very nice,” I said, moving towards her so she couldn’t renege on the offer. “I’m an insurance investigator. Miss Pali isn’t in trouble exactly, but any information you could give me might help to clear things up a little.”
She wanted it to be trouble. “Fiddlin’ a claim is she?” We moved through the door straight into the living room. It was over-furnished and over-cleaned, the blinds were drawn to enhance the television viewing—the real day closed off to allow the fantasy one fuller rein.
“I’d rather not say Mrs Williams. It’s rather unsavoury in some ways.”
That was better. She nodded conspiratorially and went off into the kitchen. She made noises out there and came back with two hefty gin-and-tonics. She handed me one, sat down in a quilted armchair and waved me into another. She tucked her legs up under her and took a long pull at her drink.
“I understand,” she said throatily. “How can I help youse?”
I sipped the drink. It was something to take in slowly over half an hour with a novel.
“What can you tell me about Miss Pali? I understand she drives a red Volkswagen, is that right?”
“Yeah, like I said she comes in at all hours of the day and night. Makes a bloody awful noise that thing.”
“What does she do for a living?” She wasn’t stupid, she gave me a suspicious look. “Don’t you know?” I cleared my throat and took another sip trying to look guarded. “Well, we’re not sure, that is . . .”
“Umm, well I dunno. Seems to have plenty of money to judge by her clothes, not my taste of course but they aren’t cheap—slack suits and that. Could be some sorta secretary, ’cept not in an office. She’s home a lot an’ types for hours. A couple of blokes come and bring . . .” she made a vague gesture with her hand. “Files,” I suggested, “papers?”
“Yeah, somethin’ like that. Folders and that.”
“I see. How many men?”
“Couple.”
“Can you describe them?”
“One’s a big bloke, bigger ’n you and younger. Other one’s dark, not a boong, more dagoey looking, sharp dresser.”
“All business is it?”
She looked sly, “No way, young man stays the night sometimes.”
I took out a notebook and pretended to write in it. “You keep your eyes open, Mrs Williams.”
“Bugger all else to do here. I stay down sometimes see, go to a show and go up to Lithgow at the weekend. Got a coupla relations in Sydney.”
I wrote some more gibberish. “Can you describe them more closely, her visitors?”
“Nah, never looked that close. Both wear good clothes, better ’n Bert’s.”
“Bert?”
“Me husband. Bert wears old fashioned clothes, he reckons bettors don’t like trendy bookies. I reckon they don’t like bookies full stop, but you can’t tell Bert a thing.”
The gin was getting to her and she was wandering into the dreary deserts of her own life. I only wanted the spin-off from that—the fruits of her boozy, envious snooping.
“I see. What else can you tell me? Does she have other visitors?”
“Yeah, course she does, other darkies mostly, but they piss off when the white blokes arrive.”
It was time to wind it up. “When did you last see her, Mrs Williams?”
“Yestiddy mornin’, didn’t come home last night don’t think. No sign of her this mornin’.”
“Is that usual?”
“No, always comes home sometime, he comes there, see. I dunno, suppose it’s all right, black and white and that. She’s a funny sort of blackie anyway, not an Abo’, comes from some funny place, New . . . somethin’, saw the stamp.”
The gin had hit her, she was coming apart and I pressed in for just this last scrap.
“New Guinea?” I prompted.
“No, I heard of New Guinea, Bert was there in the war. Never heard of this place, New . . .”
“Hebrides?”
“No, don’t think so.”
“Caledonia?”
“Yeah, that’s it, New Caledonia. Where’s that?”
I told her, thanked her for the drink and eased my way out. She slumped down in her chair muttering about a cruise.
Strictly speaking, it was a little too late for me to be making another call. I’d meant to give the Pali flat a quick once-over and be on my way, not get stuck drinking gin with a lady whose best days were behind her. Still, I’d learned a bit and this encouraged me to stick to my schedule and tackle Haines next. The traffic would hold him away from home for at least an hour after office hours, if he observed them. If he didn’t, then one time was about as good as another for what I had to do. It was a short drive but my shirt was sticking to my back and my throat was oily with the humidity and the almost neat gin when I turned into Haines’ street. It was a migrant and black neighbourhood which surprised me a little from what I’d heard of Haines, but perhaps he liked slumming. His flat was in a big Victorian town house, free standing with massive bay windows on both levels. Someone enterprising had made the building over into flats about thirty years ago and it was now in a fair way to return a thousand dollars a month. There was a small overgrown garden in front of the house and a narrow strip of bricked walkway down each side. At the back the yard had been whittled away to nothing to allow four cars to cuddle up against each other under a flat roofed carport. There were no cars at home.
I took this in from a slow cruise around the block formed by the street onto which the house fronted, two side streets and a lane at the back. I parked across the street and a hundred yards down, took the Smith & Wesson from its clip, dropped the keys under the driver’s seat and walked up towards the house. My car blended in nicely with the other bombs parked around it. Two black kids were thumping a tennis ball against a brick wall. I gave them a grin and th
ey waited sceptically for me to pass. The iron gate was off its hinges and leaning against the fence just inside the garden. I went in and took the left hand path to the back of the house. It turned out to be the correct side; a set of concrete steps ran up to a landing and an art nouveau door with slanted wooden strips across it and a swan etched into the ripple glass. I coaxed the door open with a pick lock and slid inside leaving the door slightly ajar.
It was what the advertisements call a studio apartment—one big room with a kitchenette and a small bathroom off to one side. A three-quarter bed was tucked into the bay-window recess, and a couch and a couple of heavy armchairs were lined up against one wall with a big oak wardrobe facing them across the room. A low coffee table and a few cushions filled in some of the space and an old wooden filing cabinet stood in a corner away from the light. The rug left a border of polished wood around the room; it had been good and expensive fifty years ago and still had much of its charm.
In the kitchenette were the usual bachelor things and there was no one dead in the bathroom. There were no papers in the filing cabinet, just socks, underwear and folded shirts, all high quality. The drawers of the wardrobe held tie pins, cuff links, a couple of cigarette lighters and some dusty stationery. I flicked through the suits hanging in the long cupboards, four of them with custom labels, nothing in the pockets. Nothing either in the bathrobe, trench coat, duffel jacket or two sports coats. The shoes were in the bottom of one of the cupboards, formally aligned like waiters at a wedding breakfast. There were no bathing suits, no tennis sneakers, no camera, no records or cassettes. There was a small transistor radio, but no television and there wasn’t a book in the place.
I found the personal papers in a drawer in the base of the bed—on the side turned to the wall. They occupied one large manila envelope and it took me about two seconds to spread them out on the coffee table. They didn’t amount to much: five photographs and five pieces of paper. Unless he carried them around strapped to his thigh, this guy had made a point of not accumulating the usual pieces of plastic and paper that signpost our lives from the cradle to the grave. That in itself was interesting.
If they haven’t been kept with any special care, a collection of photographs is fairly easy to arrange from the earliest to the latest and so it was with this batch. The earliest picture, yellowed and a bit creased, was of a building I’d never seen before to my knowledge—a nasty red brick Victorian affair with a wall around it and the look of a women’s prison. Next oldest was a muzzy snapshot of a woman in the fashions of twenty years before. A young woman with flared skirts and plenty of lipstick—she looked vaguely familiar but it might just have been the clothes; my sister had looked much the same at the time. Number three, according to my layout, was a careful shot, taken with a good camera, of a landscaped garden—a beautiful job with rockeries and tiled paths and garden beds spreading out over what could have been an acre or more. The fourth picture was a booth print, passport size, of Ross Haines taken about five years ago. He had a dark bushy beard and was slimmer than he now looked; he was wearing a department store shirt and tie and a suit which, to judge from the cut of the shoulders and the lapels, had come off a fairly cheap hook. Haines wasn’t smiling or scowling or pulling any kind of face, just presenting his puss neutrally to the camera. The most recent of the photos could have been taken yesterday—it showed Ailsa Bercer Gutteridge, nee Sleeman. She wore light coloured slacks and a denim smock and her eyes were slightly crinkled up against smoke from a cigarette which she was holding rather stiffly in front of her. She looked a bit surprised, a bit off guard, but she wasn’t doing anything she shouldn’t unless you disapprove of smoking.
The documents, all but one, dated themselves. There was an extract of birth to the effect that Ross Haines had been born on 8 May 1953 in Adelaide, South Australia. It was only an extract so no parents’ names appeared. There were two references from employers dated October 1970 and November 1971, both letterheads were of plant nurseries and garden suppliers and landscapers in Adelaide. They established the solid credentials and serviceable talents of Ross Haines in this line of work. The other dated document was a diploma from a Sydney business college. It detailed the creditable performances of Haines at typing, shorthand and commercial principles and practice. A map of the Pacific Ocean completed the personal papers of Ross Haines. It folded four times, down to the size of a ladies’ handkerchief. I opened it out. There were no marks, no circles, no pin-pricks; at that scale most of the islands were dots or straggly shapes like ink-blots in a vast and trackless sea.
I couldn’t make much of this very selective preservation of the past. I studied the photographs of the building and the women closely so as to recognise the originals if I ever saw them and then put the whole lot back in the envelope and the drawer just as I’d found them.
This piece of illegality had taken longer than I’d expected, over half an hour, and I felt an itch at the back of my neck that told me it was high time to go. I went out onto the landing and pulled the door shut behind me. I froze as I heard a car engine being cut under the car port twenty feet away. A door slammed and leather-soled shoes started hitting the bricks. I risked a look down and saw a short, heavy-set man with a head as bald as an egg move briskly down the path and turn into the doorway of the front flat on the ground floor. I let out a stale, sour breath and went down the steps and out through the spaces in the car port. Flat 1’s space was taken up by a red MG sports model with wire wheels and kerb feelers. I sneered at it and walked through the lane and up the street to where the Falcon stood with its rust patches and bald tyres gleaming in the late afternoon light.
I had just enough time to try a long shot which would round off the day’s work. I drove against the flow of traffic, which was thick and moving as slow as a senile snail, across to the University. I arrived when the day students were pulling out and just before the evening sloggers took up all the space. I got a parking place near the east gates and strolled across the lawn to the main library. I had once done a little research into architecture when I was investigating an insurance fraud on a fire in a Victorian hotel and I remembered where the architecture section was in the library. I looked along the rows until I found Chiswick’s two volumes on The Public Buildings of South Australia. The book had been very expensive when it was published thirty years before and the quality of its photographs was excellent. It was meticulously indexed and it only took a few minutes to find out that the building of which Haines had kept a picture wasn’t a prison. Another few minutes showed that it wasn’t a school. Perhaps it was a combination of the two though: I found it on page 215 of the second volume, the picture was taken from a slightly different angle but it was undoubtedly the same forbidding edifice—St Christopher’s Boys Orphanage. The short history of the building wasn’t interesting but I read it through just the same. I put the books back and left the library.
CHAPTER 12
The part-timers, looking tired already, were getting out of their cars as I got into mine. I decided to make for a pub and have a few drinks before calling Ailsa. I’d been hired to help a woman I found I cordially disliked and had ended up working for one about whom I had quite different feelings. It was a big changeabout in a short space of time and I wondered what effect it was having on my judgment. I wonder better over a glass of something, so I put off the effort until I had the conditions right. After a scotch in a place near the dog track, I picked the right money out of my change and put it into the red phone at the corner of the bar. The wall was scarred with a hundred telephone numbers and the names and numbers of innumerable horses and dogs. The directory was a tattered ruin. I read the record of losing favourites and one-leg doubles as I waited for Ailsa to answer her phone. It rang and rang hopelessly and I hung up, checked the number and rang again. The result was the same and the repeated buzz on the line chilled and sobered me like a bucket of ice water in the face.
I ran to the Falcon and unpa
rked it regardless of duco and chrome. I ripped my way through the late afternoon traffic towards Mosman.
There were no cops about and I set records through the winding roads towards the Bridge. I hit the Harbour Bridge approach and pushed the Falcon to the limit cursing it for its sluggishness and refusal to steer straight.
I ran into Ailsa’s drive too fast and nearly spun the car around full circle in bringing it to a stop in front of the house. I unshipped my gun and went up the steps at a gallop. I hammered on the door and wrenched at the handle but it was locked so I kicked in the glass pane next to it. The thick glass shattered and splintered where my foot hit it and the rest of the pane came crashing down like a guillotine. I went in through the jagged hole and raced through the house, poking the gun into each room and calling Ailsa’s name. I found her in the bedroom. She was naked and her clothes had been torn in strips to truss her up and tie her to the frame of the bed. She was breathing harshly through puffed, split lips and her body was criss-crossed with long, heavily bleeding scratches. There were round, white-flaked burn marks on her forearms and the room smelled of singed hair and skin. I grabbed the bedroom phone and called for an ambulance, then I untied the strips of fabric and lifted her up onto the bed. I tucked a pillow under her head, her pulse was strong but she was rigid and sweating and there were now lines in her face that looked like they would stay there forever.
