Saving Billie

by Peter Corris

  I met her at the back door. She scowled when she saw the gun in my hand, pushed me aside and went in to where Billie was sleeping—maybe.

  ‘What in the world is going on here, Mr Hardy?’ she said. ‘That woman should be in hospital, and what are you doing with a gun where my nephew’s working? I warn you, if you get him in any trouble I’ll . . .’

  Kooti appeared beside her. I’d put the gun away but he heard what she’d said and wasn’t happy.

  ‘Answer her,’ he said.

  Sharon came into the room. Mary Latekefu hadn’t met her, saw the resemblance, but wasn’t mollified. ‘Your sister is very sick.’

  ‘We had a doctor here this morning. A nurse is coming to give her some antibiotics.’

  The big Polynesian woman, looking even bigger in her civvies than she had in her nurses’ uniform, gave a short laugh and stalked to the back door. ‘Nurse! This place is filthy. She needs proper care in a proper hospital.’

  ‘It’s a long story, Sister,’ I said. ‘We had to find somewhere safe for a while. I’m sure Tommy’s not in any danger and he’s not involved in the . . . mess.’

  ‘What kind of mess?’ Kooti asked.

  ‘Important people, big money and some casualties.’

  ‘What kind of casualties?’

  ‘Fatal.’

  ‘That’s enough. We’re taking Thomas out of here now and I’m reporting you to the police.’

  ‘No!’

  Tommy fronted up with his slasher over his shoulder. He had a strip of cloth tied around his forehead and his body was running with sweat. His jaw was set and his eyes were bright. He looked something like a guerrilla jungle fighter, ready to die for his cause.

  ‘Thomas, you have to get away from these people.’

  Tommy carefully leaned the slasher against the house, took off his bandanna and wiped his face. ‘No, Aunty. You’re wrong. Cliff here’s my friend and I trust him. I’m not in any kind of trouble. I’ve got a job to do and I’m going to do it.’

  ‘That woman could die and you’d—’

  ‘A doctor came. He said she had some sort of infection and he’s treating her. If she’s not improved by tonight she’s going to hospital. Right, Cliff, Sharon?’

  ‘Right,’ I said, although he’d just cut my time to manoeuvre in half.

  Kooti looked at his nephew with amazement. ‘That’s about the most I’ve ever heard you say at one time, Tommy.’

  ‘Uncle Steve,’ Tommy said, ‘the man who owns this house trusts me, Cliff trusts me. No one much ever trusted me before. You remember what a piss-head, cone-head, fuckwit I was out at Liston? Well, I haven’t had a drink or any dope for days and I don’t want it.’

  Mary Latekefu shook her head disapprovingly at the language, but I could see she was impressed with Tommy’s resolution. Still, she was hard to move. ‘Who’s the doctor?’

  ‘An old friend of mine. He’s gone out on a limb for us.’

  ‘People do that a lot for you, do they, Mr Hardy?’

  ‘Sometimes. Billie benefited from the time she spent in the hospital, thanks to you. She doesn’t seem to be having any withdrawal problems. She’s been eating and drinking a bit. Apparently her temperature and other signs aren’t too bad. All I can tell you is that she’s in serious danger if she goes into hospital before we can . . . resolve her problem. I can’t say more than that.’

  ‘You’re a smooth talker, Hardy,’ Kooti said.

  To my surprise, Sharon flared up. ‘He’s a lot more than that. Please, we just need a little more time.’

  ‘Mary?’ Kooti said.

  She went back into Billie’s room and was away for a few minutes while the rest of us just stood about. When she returned she looked at her watch. ‘Either I get a call from this doctor by midday tomorrow reporting on her condition or what hospital she’s in or I report all this to the authorities. Stephen and I are staying in Sydney for a few days. Stephen has my mobile number.’

  She gave Tommy a kiss on the cheek and went down the path to the gate. Kooti shrugged as he watched Tommy pick up his tool and go back to work.

  ‘Looks like she’s running the show.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Give us her number. I’ve still got yours.’

  Kooti took a pen from his jacket pocket and scribbled a number on the back of a credit card receipt. ‘I like the way the kid’s shaping up.’

  I took the slip. ‘I just might need your help, Steve.’

  ‘Call me,’ he said.

  Ian Sangster’s nurse arrived, a no-nonsense middle-aged woman who was evidently used to Ian’s individualistic style of medicine. She examined Billie, who was sleepy but responsive, put a catheter in her arm, gave her a shot and left a vial of the medication and some pills with Sharon.

  ‘She’s not too bad,’ the nurse said. ‘Give her those later today and the injection tomorrow morning. Here’s how you do it.’

  She gave Sharon clear instructions and left. The number of people who knew about our bolt-hole was mounting, but it still felt safe. It was late morning and Sharon went off to get us some lunch. Tommy finally knocked off and drank about half a litre of water. He gestured over his shoulder at the house.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Not bad. I’m hoping to have everything settled by around this time tomorrow.’

  ‘Yeah? How?’

  ‘I’m still working on it.’

  Sharon came back with a swag of flat bread, Greek salad and dips, fruit and orange juice. We sat around a table on the back porch in the shade. Tommy hoed in, but neither Sharon nor I had much appetite. Tommy went to his room for a nap as Sharon tidied away the food.

  ‘Hey, don’t put it away. I’m as hungry as a horse.’

  Billie stepped onto the porch, grabbing the doorjamb for support. The stained nightdress barely reached her knees and it had slipped off her shoulder, leaving one breast nearly bare.

  ‘Billie, you shouldn’t be up,’ Sharon said.

  ‘Fuck that. I’m feeling better. That juice the old cow put into me hit the spot.’

  She took a few hesitant steps and slumped down into the chair Tommy had vacated. She tore off a few pieces of bread and used them to ferry some salad to her mouth in the approved fashion, Another couple of chunks went into the humous and eggplant dip and she chewed with enthusiasm. There was more colour in her face than I’d seen so far and her hands were steady.

  ‘Stop looking at me like that, you,’ she snapped. ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘You’ve had pneumonia,’ I said. ‘If you’re not careful you could get very sick.’

  The clinical word seemed to pull her up for a moment, but she waved it away and reached for the orange juice. ‘Anything to give this a boost? Where’s that brandy from last night?’

  ‘We drank it,’ Sharon said.

  ‘Fuck you. Hey, lighten up, you guys. I’m going to be fine. I’m a fast healer, right, sis? Remember when I had that . . . well, never mind.’

  ‘Clap,’ Sharon said. ‘At the clinic they said they’d never seen anyone get clear of it so fast.’

  ‘That’s me. Now let’s talk about what’s going to happen next. Where’s the cute kid, by the way?’

  I said, ‘He’s having a rest. Been working since first light. What’s going to happen is that we’re trying to keep you clear of Jonas Clement and Barclay Greaves, who both want you talking, then dead.’

  Billie swigged orange juice from the container and didn’t turn a hair. ‘Clement I know, sort of; don’t know the other one, but I’ve dealt with pricks like them before.’

  Sharon snatched the drink bottle away. ‘Didn’t you hear what was said last night? That guy was going to torture you.’

  Billie shrugged. ‘Didn’t happen. I don’t worry about shit that doesn’t happen.’

  ‘You’re impossible.’

  Billie lifted a shoulder and the top of the nightdress slid further, exposing a firm breast with a large brown nipple. ‘No, I’m very possible. What’s Mr Resourceful here going
to do next?’

  Sharon slammed her fist on the table and walked away.

  ‘Hey, bring back the fucking juice.’

  When Sharon didn’t respond, Billie turned her attention to me. She cupped her hand around the bare breast and teased the nipple with her fingers. ‘Well?’

  ‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘I bet when you were stripping you could swing the two tassels either way together, or one to the left and the other to the right.’

  She laughed. ‘You bet I could, while doing the fuckin’ splits.’

  ‘Bit past it now though, aren’t you?’

  Her eyes were dark recesses surrounded by lines, and the skin on her hands was slightly wrinkled, puckered around her wrists. For all her emaciation there was an underlying flabbiness about her, the result of years of abuse, and she seemed to be aware of it all at once. The animation left her face and she sagged in the chair. She hitched up the nightdress.

  ‘You’re an arsehole.’

  ‘An arsehole who might stop you getting killed.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m all for that as long as I get a go at the thirty grand.’

  ‘Twenty.’

  She grinned and tried to recover some of the bravado, but her bedraggled appearance and sour breath let her down. ‘We might try to up the ante.’

  ‘Don’t even think it. They’re out of your league.’

  ‘How about yours?’

  ‘We’ll see. Go back to bed, Billie. You’re tired.’

  She went and passed Sharon on the way. They didn’t speak.

  Sharon picked at the crumbs on the table. ‘She drives me mad, always did. Why d’you think she was so desperate about not seeing the police? I mean, with a lawyer and everything they couldn’t do too much to her. She doesn’t seem to be having withdrawal problems.’

  ‘I don’t know, but I agree she was desperate about it. As for the withdrawal, she’s still got a fever and she’s still got alcohol and Valium in her system. It might hit her yet.’

  ‘God help everyone if it does. Now, I heard what you said to Tommy and his uncle about getting things sorted out. Sounds as if you’ve got a plan.’

  ‘It’s sketchy.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me what it is?’

  ‘Better you don’t know. For your own good.’

  She stared out at the work-in-progress yard and made an exasperated grunt. ‘Men are always telling women what’s for their own good, instead of letting them decide for themselves.’ ‘I suppose that’s true. In this case . . .’

  ‘When’s it going to change?’

  I got up, reaching for my notebook which is never far from hand. ‘When you rule the world,’ I said.

  ‘Roll on the day.’

  She wandered out into the back yard, picked up a rake and started to tidy up some of Tommy’s rougher spots.

  I checked the numbers and dialled the radio station owned and performed on by Jonas Clement.

  ‘2BC FM.’

  ‘I have an important message for Mr Jonas Clement.’

  ‘I’ll put you through to his secretary.’

  When the secretary came on the line I asked to speak to Clement and was told he wasn’t available.

  ‘I understand that,’ I said. ‘I have a very important message for him. You should get this down word for word, okay? Tell him that Cliff Hardy called—he knows the name—and that if he wants to learn something about his son he should meet me tomorrow at eleven fifty am at the coffee shop on the top level of the Queen Victoria Building, Town Hall end. He’s to come alone and be strictly prompt. Have you got that?’

  ‘I think so. But what—?’

  ‘Just read it back.’

  She did and had it pretty right. I corrected a few things. She didn’t like it and tried to press for more personal details but I overrode her. ‘Just get that message to Clement or I guarantee you won’t have a job tomorrow.’

  I cut the connection, rang Oceania Securities and went through the same procedure, except that the message to Barclay Greaves referred to Clive McGuinness rather than Clement’s son and the time I specified was midday.

  I put the phone down and nodded to Tommy as he went past me out into the yard. He and Sharon wrestled for the rake and both laughed when Tommy let Sharon win. It was the most light-hearted moment I’d seen in some time and it gave me a lift. Then I put in a call to Hank Bachelor. I’d told Clement and Greaves to come alone, but I didn’t believe they would and neither would I.

  Why is it that, with emails and mobile phones, people are harder to get in touch with than ever? Probably because they move around more. There’s spam, so they put off reading emails or wipe them by mistake; the mobiles go on the blink, run out of charge and there are blank spots where they don’t work. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t get in touch with Hank. I was swearing about it when Lily Truscott rang me.

  She doesn’t beat around the bush, Lil. ‘Anything on Greaves yet?’

  ‘Not yet. Maybe soon.’

  ‘Like when?’

  ‘Don’t hold the page, Lil. Put in an ad.’

  ‘I’m not the editor anymore, remember? Oh well, is there anything I can do for you?’

  ‘Thanks. No. Why?’

  ‘You sound stressed, Cliff. Not your upbeat self.’

  We talked for a while about nothing in particular and I felt better. I changed into my gym gear and helped Tommy in the yard so that by evening I was tired. Tommy, Sharon and I cleaned up the remainder of the lunch food as well as plenty of toast. Billie slept or sulked. I slept.

  22

  I’d been in the QVB a few weeks before buying audio books for my daughter Megan at the ABC shop on the second level of the three-gallery structure. She was going on tour with a theatre company—a lot of boring bus travel. Megan’s an addicted reader but, like me, she gets sick trying to read in a bus. Okay on trains and planes. I got her The Woman in White and The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Seemed like a balanced selection. I remembered noticing that the coffee shop had been busy, and I wanted plenty of people around when I confronted Clement and Greaves, to deter them, or more likely their backups, from doing anything violent.

  After her additional doses of antibiotics, Billie was feeling a lot better in the morning and was beginning to harass Sharon about her money. I told Sharon to hold off until the afternoon when I hoped to be able to report some development. I had no real expectations; I just wanted to break the deadlock and see where the chips fell.

  Clement and Greaves had to be in the dark about a number of things. Clement didn’t know that Rhys Thomas was really working for Greaves. God knows what he’d been told about the death of his son. It depended on how Thomas and Kezza had played it, but it was unlikely to be the truth. Greaves had to be wondering about McGuinness and what had happened to the woman he’d had abducted and paid out money for with no result.

  With the two women squabbling and Tommy sweating as the day promised to be a scorcher, I was happy to leave Lilyfield. After sleeping in my underwear and sporting a three-day-old shirt, I wasn’t feeling fresh. For my own sake, I wanted something to happen, almost anything.

  Before leaving the house I wiped Jonas Clement’s gun clean of my prints and put it in a green bag. It was a Beretta nine millimetre with the latest word in silencers attached. Highly illegal, but a nice gun if you like guns.

  Thomas’s pistol was a Glock. There was blood on it— Thomas’s or Clement’s, I couldn’t be sure which. But I’d only handled it by the muzzle so that Thomas’s prints were still on the butt. I wiped the muzzle carefully and put it in with the other one. I wrapped a plastic bag around the handles of the green bag. When I took it off there’d be no prints of mine.

  Hank Bachelor hadn’t been available so I called Steve Kooti. I had the feeling that Kooti, despite his sincerity in turning over a new leaf, still hankered deep down for something more exciting.

  ‘I just want you there as a presence,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to say or do anything.’

  ‘What if I want
to say or do something?’

  ‘I’ll trust your judgement.’

  ‘And this gets the mess cleared? Tommy can get on with his job and that?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘You don’t fill me with confidence, Hardy.’

  ‘Mate, I play it by ear. Are you in?’

  ‘I’m in.’

  I found a parking place near the old Fairfax building in Jones Street and walked the rest of the way. The promised thirty-eight degrees were rapidly approaching and I was sweating by the time I got to the QVB. As arranged, I met Kooti on the escalator and we went up to the top level. Then he hung back and I went along to where a row of tables sits beside the gallery. It was eleven fifty exactly and Clement was there. He looked a very different man from the one I’d seen at his party not long back. His face was pale and drawn; his tie knot was slipped down and his shirt was crumpled. He fiddled nervously with the sugar sachets on the table.

  I circled stealthily and came up behind him. ‘Don’t turn round,’ I said. ‘I’m Hardy and this is your boy’s gun.’

  I dropped the green bag at his feet.

  ‘Rhys Thomas was quicker on the draw. His gun’s in here, too, with his prints on it.’

  He half turned, then stopped the movement. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Thomas standing almost hidden by a pillar twenty metres away.

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know what he told you, but Thomas shot your son. I was there. I saw it. He’s working for Barclay Greaves. Speak of the devil, here he is.’

  Greaves came striding towards us; he was early and agitated. Clement gave a roar of anger. He sprang from his seat and rushed at Greaves, who saw me, stopped and looked confused. Clement swung a wild punch that caught Greaves on the side of the head. He threw up his hands, lost his balance and hit the rail. His arms flailed and it seemed he might right himself, but he was clawing at thin air and he went over. His head cracked on the rail a level below. He let out a strangled cry and fell the rest of the way to the ground. Had to be thirty metres.