The Dying Trade

by Peter Corris

  “Get fucked,” he snarled.

  I tut-tutted him and walked over to Evans.

  “Back exit, Cliff,” he said, “it’d never have done for Malaya.”

  “True,” I said. “What car did they take?”

  “Fiat, sports model.”

  “That’d be right,” I said wearily.

  “How’s that?”

  “Never mind, Grant. What’s the drill now? Headquarters, statements and such?” He nodded. “OK,” I said, “see you there.”

  I trudged over to the Falcon, climbed in and turned the key. The engine leapt into life as if it had thrived on the action.

  CHAPTER 15

  I was at police HQ for over four hours. It would have been longer and tougher if Grant Evans hadn’t been on side. I made statements about my earlier call on Brave. Evans allowed me to leave the Gutteridges with a very low profile in the whole thing. The Costello affair was what he was interested in and what Tickener’s readers were interested in as well. They were both happy for me and my involvements to take a back seat. I told Grant that I might have something soon on the Giles killing and he said that would be nice in an uninterested way. I read on a message sheet on his desk that “attempts to contact Senior Detective Charles Jackson and Dr William Clyde had been unsuccessful”. Bulletins were out on them. In a break from the recording and questioning, I got on a phone and called Bryn Gutteridge’s number. There was no answer. The same ten cents bought me a call to St Bede’s hospital and the information that Miss Sleeman had responded well to transfusions and a saline drip and was sleeping peacefully. When I gave my name the desk attendant said that the police were anxious to contact me in connection with Miss Gutteridge’s injuries. I told her where I was calling from and she seemed satisfied. I hadn’t heard anything about it at headquarters and I didn’t want to if I wasn’t going to be there until mid-day.

  Brave, Bruno and the thug who’d been picked up in the grounds were securely booked. The third man had sung like a bird and there was a bulletin out on his mate, a long-time hood with an impressive record and a history of association with Rory Costello. Nobody put pressure on me to identify the two men who’d escaped in the Fiat and I kept quiet about it. Evans prepared a statement for the press and went into a huddle with Tickener and Jones about their respective rights to the glamour and gore of the evening. They sorted it out and the pressmen, looking pretty pleased with themselves, came over to shake my hand before leaving.

  “Lucky I followed you, Hardy,” said Tickener. “Instinct, eh?”

  We shook. “I guess so,” I said. He hadn’t handled himself too badly and he’d be well clear of the sports page and Joe Barrett’s errands now. Also, he now owed me something and it’s handy in my game to have a pressman in your debt. Colin Jones looked like he needed some sleep, but if he was going to get his pictures into the morning editions he probably wouldn’t get it. He let go my hand and slapped one of his cameras.

  “Miles to go before I sleep,” he said.

  “You’re the only educated cameraman in the west, Colin.”

  “Yeah, it gets in the way. Thanks for letting me in, Cliff, it made a change.” They wandered off to put the final touches on the thrills in store for their readers over the yoghurt and crispies.

  I’d exhausted my packet of Drum and drunk all the autovend coffee I could stand. It was 2 a.m. and I felt like I needed a new skin, a new throat and quite a few other accessories. I had an Irish thirst and the image of the wine in my refrigerator beckoned me like the damasked arm of the lady in the lake. Evans started slipping papers into folders and his telephone had finally stopped ringing hot. I was sitting across from his self-satisfied look. He reached into a drawer of the scarred and battered pine desk and fished out two cigars in cellophane wrappers. He offered me one.

  “Keeping ’em since Jenny was born. Thought it might be a son. This is the next best thing, have one?”

  I shook my head. “Wouldn’t have a cold beer would you?”

  He smiled, lit his cigar and leaned back blowing a thin stream of the rich, creamy smoke at the ceiling. “Piss artist,” he said indulgently. “Case closed, Cliff?”

  “Yours or mine?”

  “Mine is like a fish’s arsehole. I mean yours.”

  “I don’t know yet.” I was lying, I suspected it was just beginning and that there were many little corners of it still unexplored and a great highway of truth still to put through the lives of the people concerned.

  “Well, anything I can do, just let me know.” He looked at his watch and I took the point. We shook hands and I trudged down the corridor and took yet another chance on the lift. We made a nice couple as we wheezed down to ground level and I closed its wire grille gently; with care and kind treatment we might both just last out the decade.

  I picked up my car which was looking sheepish and barely roadworthy among the powder blues in the police parking lot, and drove home through the back streets and quietest roads. I tried to think of Ailsa battling with her pain in hospital, and Susan Gutteridge coming out of a long slide, and Bryn cruising and cruel like a harbour shark, but all the pictures blurred and the people receded far off into the distance. A truck backfired when I was within fifty yards of home, and as I sidled the Falcon into the yard my ears were ringing with the noise and I could smell the smoke and feel the shotgun heavy and deadly in my hands. I went into the house, drank a long glass of wine and made coffee, but I went to sleep in a chair while waiting for the cup I’d poured to cool. I swilled it down cold and went to bed.

  Tickener made a good job of it. His headline was lurid but his story was sharp and clear. Evans got a splash verbally and photographically and there were lots of adjectives scattered through the writing like “fearless” and “masterly”. I got a few mentions and anyone reading between the lines would come away with the knowledge that I had killed Costello, but who reads between the lines any more? The name Gutteridge didn’t figure in the. story and it seemed that a combination of brilliant investigatory journalism and enterprising police work had delivered the goods. That suited me. The last thing I wanted was pictures of myself in the papers and my name a household word—it might feel good, but it would play hell with business if kids came up to ask you for your autograph while you were staking out a love nest.

  I read most of this sitting on the lavatory while a warm, soft Sydney rain darkened the courtyard bricks. Back in the kitchen I made coffee and welsh rarebit. Ordinarily, I’d have been at least semi-relaxed. I was on a case, on expenses and earning them and hadn’t had any bones broken in the past twenty-four hours. But this one was different, my client was special and she was in hospital and I was partly to blame. The villain was in custody as they say, but villains were coming out of the woodwork and the past was sending out tentacles which were winding around the necks of people living and dying in the present. It’s a dying trade I’m in.

  I called the hospital and was told that I could visit Miss Sleeman at 10 a.m., seeing that I was the one who’d admitted her. I took a long, hot then cold shower, which made me feel virtuous. I capitalised on this by taking the flagon and a glass out onto the bricks along with my electric razor and my razor sharp mind. I sipped the wine and ran the tiny, whirring blades over my face. The sun climbed up over the top of the biscuit factory and beamed heat down into the courtyard. The bricks started to steam and sweat began to roll off my chest down into the thin layers of fat around my waist. I resolved again to walk more and to cut out beer and that was as far as my thinking took me. I towelled off the sweat, dressed in cotton slacks, shirt and sandals and played inch by inch with the Falcon out onto the street. There was a sweet, malty biscuit smell in the air as I drove past the front of my house. Soames had just put on his first record of the day. Pretty soon he’d take a peek over the fence, shake his head at the empty flagon and roll his apres-muesli joint.

 
I don’t like hospitals. My mother and father and Uncle Ted died in them. They all smell and look the same, all polished glass and lino and reek of disinfectant. Ailsa was on the fourth floor in a ward past the maternity unit. It was crammed full of rosy cheeked mothers smothering babies, black, white and brindle, against their chests. It made me feel my childlessness like a burden and I wondered if Ailsa felt the same way. Perhaps she didn’t need to. She hadn’t mentioned any children, but then I had only got a pretty episodic biography of her, perhaps she had twins being finished in Switzerland. Dangerous thoughts for someone for whom marriage was a busted flush and kids were something not to shoot when out on business. I had wanted kids but Cyn hadn’t unless I was going to be home at six o’clock every night and I couldn’t give her that guarantee. I was in an intensely self-critical mood when I arrived at Ailsa’s ward. A roly-poly matron who hadn’t heard how dragon-like she should be showed me to the door and told me I could have an hour. I went in.

  Ailsa was sitting up in bed wearing a white cheesecloth nightgown. She had no make-up on and had lost a lot of colour in her face, her eyes were shadowed and huge so that she looked pale and fragile like a French mime. The bronze hair was newly washed and a bit curly and she had a scrubbed clean look as if she was about to be delivered somewhere. Her face and lips were still puffy and bruised, but when she looked up from her book she managed to work her features into a smile.

  “Hardy,” she said, “the great protector.”

  I moved up, took the book away and grabbed her hands. She winced with pain and I swore and let her go. She reached out slowly and stiffly and put her hand on my forearm, it rested there light and feathery like a silk stocking across a chair.

  “You’re hopeless,” she said, “no fruit, no magazines. How’ll we fill in the time?”

  I gave her a leer and she smiled before shaking her head. “Not for weeks,” she said. “But when I can you’ll be the first man I call.”

  I was relieved. We’d seemed to be plunging into something very heavy and I wasn’t sure I could handle it yet, or ever. Her version of the way we stood, even though it was determined by her injuries, accorded with my feelings and relaxed me. I patted her hand and we sat there quietly for a minute or two feeling something like trust and understanding flow between us. I eased back the loose sleeves of her nightdress and saw that her forearms were bandaged. I told her again that I was sorry I hadn’t been there.

  “Don’t be silly, Cliff,” she said, “how could you have known what was going to happen. The whole thing has got out of control. I don’t understand it properly, do you?”

  “No, I can’t make the connections. It’s all hooked up. Brave, Bryn, the files and the threats, but I don’t know how they’re linked exactly. That makes it hard to take the next step with any confidence.”

  “What are you going to do then?”

  I looked at her and ran my finger lightly across her high, sharp cheekbone. The skin was stretched thin and tight across it like a rubber membrane over a specimen bottle. “I haven’t finished checking all the possibilities I was working on yesterday. Brave is out of circulation of course.” I nodded at the newspapers lying on a bedside chair.

  “Yes,” she said, “thank God for that.” She was looking tired already and spoke slowly. “But I want it seen through, you’ll stay with it won’t you? Bryn’s dangerous, he’s got to be put away, and the bomb . . . !”

  “I’ll stay with it,” I said. “I was hoping you’d want me to.”

  “You should have known.”

  I nodded and we did some more quiet sitting. After a while her eyelids flickered and she said she was tired. It was partly that and partly the dope they were giving her. I got up from the bed but she motioned me closer, she patted her chest with one hand.

  “Touch me here, Cliff.”

  I did, she felt warm and firm. She reached up with both hands, grabbed my hands and pressed them hard against her breasts, her face contorted.

  “Cliff, the pale one, he was going to . . . to do something there next.”

  I felt a rush of atavistic rage. I gently freed my hands, smoothed her hair and kissed her forehead.

  “Don’t worry love,” I said harshly, “it’ll be all right, it’ll be over soon.”

  I promised to call the hospital twice a day and to visit whenever I could. She smiled and nodded and slid down into a deep sleep that the dope was calling her to.

  CHAPTER 16

  When I left the hospital I intended to finish yesterday’s job by checking on the residence of Mr Walter Chalmers, but sitting in the car with the engine running and the street directory beside me, I changed my mind. It suddenly seemed a hundred times more important to track down Bryn and his inquisitorial mate. Bryn was my starting point for this twisting, turning affair and it seemed like the right moment to check back to the beginning. And I was looking forward to a meeting with the man with the cigarette butts and the razor blades. I turned off the engine and reflected. Men like Bryn, with money like his, have houses scattered about the countryside—mood houses, hobby houses. I’d known one millionaire who kept a $50 000 hunting lodge on land which cost him $5000 a year to lease because he liked to go deer shooting about once every three years. He got shot to death up there on one of his rare visits but that’s another story. It was a sure bet that Bryn had hideouts on the sea and in the mountains, but they wouldn’t be public knowledge. How to find out about them? Easy. Susan Gutteridge, the lady on the mend. I tried to remember whether I’d mentioned a particular diabetes doctor or not and decided I hadn’t. But there was no doubt as to who was the best diabetes man in Australia, Dr Alfred Pincus. He charged like the six hundred, but there was more information about diabetes in that polished, clever dome of his than in a shelf of textbooks. I’d seen him on the subject on television and he was so interesting about it he almost made you wish you were a sufferer. Susan Gutteridge would contact him as sure as her bank balance was in the black.

  I walked back to the hospital lobby and looked Pincus up in the directory. His rooms were in Macquarie Street naturally, a half mile away. I went back and locked the car. This was as close as I could expect to park to the address anyway. I tramped down the street which was lined with coffee bars and chemist shops the way streets around hospitals and medical offices are. I found the three storey sandstone building which Pincus shared with a dozen or so other top-flight men on top of the hill which gave it a commanding view of the water. The brass nameplates told me that several of Pincus’ co-occupants were knights. The lift was ancient like the one in the police building, but it had been better serviced and it slid up its cable like a python up a tree. I got out at the second floor and fronted up to a door which had Pincus’ name and degrees and memberships of this and that engraved on it in a prince’s ransom of gold leaf. I pushed the door open and looked straight into the eyes of the secretary. She was worth a look, a Semite with raven dark hair and a pale golden face like the image on a Mesopotamian coin. Her nose jutted and her brow sloped back to where the sleek mane of her hair began. Her voice was deep and sweet coming up from well below a pair of heavy, firm breasts.

  “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.