Heroin Annie

by Peter Corris

  ‘Morgan Lindsay’, she said. ‘Have you got a cigarette?’

  ‘No. Where are the paintings?’

  ‘Over there.’ She pointed to the far corner of the dark room. I picked up a box of matches from the floor and went across to the corner. The three canvases were stacked carelessly against the damp wall. I struck a couple of matches and peered at them but under those conditions it was impossible to tell which version of ‘Stockyards at Jerilderie’ was which. The woman was sitting listlessly by the ragged mattress listening to Steele's breathing which was harsh but even.

  ‘Where'd he get the money for the heroin?’ I said.

  ‘Pinched something from that bitch's house and flogged it. It must be bad stuff though, never seen him like this before. God, I wish I had a smoke.’

  I looked at Steele and thought that his colour was bad, he had a sort of nineteenth century opium-den pallor and then one of the things that had been jangling around loose in my mind clicked into place. I had a short talk to Morgan Lindsay and then Steele's breathing broke up into erratic gusts and we went out to look for a phone. I talked to her some more in the street while the ambulance was coming. But when we got back to the room, Steele and his torn shirt and the ragged mattress were covered with blood and vomit, and he was dead.

  I handed the three paintings over and Quentin de V C James pushed the buttons to get a cheque made out for me—promptly. He took the canvas with Dr Ernst's mark on it over to the window and let the expensive light flood over it. He put it down and shook his head.

  ‘Not my idea of $30 000 worth’, he said.

  I grinned. ‘Nobody's idea, it's a fake.’

  ‘Then they're all fakes.’

  ‘That's right, Steele did them all; the first one was a dry run which he wasn't happy with. Woods left it lying around and Leo Porter got hold of it. Then there was the deliberate fake to help authenticate the first-class fake. Steele killed her when she said she was going to burn that one and collect the insurance.’

  ‘But why? He'd have got his cut surely?’

  I shook my head. ‘He was past that. Have a look at these.’ I took out Primo's picture and laid it on the desk, then I opened up one of the books on Castleton. It had as a frontispiece a photograph of Castleton taken at a time when he was ill. The hair, the face, the lines of suffering were almost identical.

  ‘Remarkable’, James said.

  ‘Yeah, the woman filled most of it in for me. Steele was pretty nutty to begin with and the dope didn't help. He did a deep study of Castleton when he took on this commission for Woods. In the end he came to believe that he was Castleton or was his son or grandson—the Lindsay woman said he shifted around a bit on that point.’

  ‘And he cracked when she said she going to burn the painting?’

  ‘That's right. By then he believed it was real and that he'd painted it as a real artist.’

  ‘Is that why he went after the other pictures?’

  ‘Probably, but I think the girl might have helped a bit there. The rough jobs probably looked more like Steele's own work, if they turned up and someone saw Steele's style in them that would lead directly to him. The Woods woman wanted to get the rough copy back so as not to confuse the issue when she made her claim. That's why she came to me.’

  James was nodding sagaciously when a secretary came in and handed him an envelope. He passed it over to me and did some more beaming.

  ‘A brilliant piece of work, Mr Hardy, my congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘One would have expected you to look a little more pleased.’

  I said: ‘Would one?’, and got up and left. I was thinking of the pictures of Charles Castleton with his life sucked away by the booze and opium and Paul Steele, eaten down to the bone by smack.

  Blood is thicker

  He had a long, horsey face that needed a pipe stuck in it to bring it to perfection. His eyes were a washed-out blue, and his sandy hair was cut in a severe short-back-and-sides. He looked like the archetypal Aussie; a six footer, a survivor of Lone Pine and the Somme. He was from Taranaki, New Zealand. The black Oxfords were polished, the grey flannels were pressed and his tweed jacket had been expensive and fashionable twenty years ago. The woman with him was fashionable now and anytime; she was a tall, Viking blonde, in a green silk dress with modish accessories. He was Hiram Dempsey, farmer, and she was his daughter Susan, secretary.

  We were sitting in my dusty office with the linoleum decor and the streaky windows. Hiram made the introductions, mentioned the New Zealand policeman who'd referred him to me, and then let Susan take over. I could see the pride in his face when she spoke.

  ‘We want you to look for my brother, Mr Hardy. We understand you're very good at finding people.’

  I tried to look modest. ‘It depends how badly they want to stay lost; some dig in deep, some just stay on the surface. When did you last see this brother?’

  She looked at her father. ‘Fifteen years?’

  He nodded. ‘Fifteen, near enough.’ He had that slight Scots burr many older New Zealanders have, slurring the hard ‘i’ sound.

  ‘I scarcely remember him’, she went on, ‘I was only seven or so when he left.’

  ‘Why did he leave and where did he go?’

  Hiram looked over my head out at the fierce summer sky. ‘Robert and I didn't get along. I'm a farmer, he wasn't. I'm a Christian, he was a sinner.’

  ‘What sort of sins?’

  ‘Theft, drunkenness, loose living.’

  I though I had the picture. ‘When you say theft, do you mean robberies or '’

  ‘Cars.’

  ‘Right.’ It sounded familiar, a country boy out of his mind with boredom pinching cars, getting pissed and screwing girls. It happens; some of them become public servants.

  ‘Robert came to Australia, Mr Hardy, to Sydney. My mother, she died three years ago, said that he always talked about the big city and he meant Sydney.’

  ‘He might have moved on; New York's bigger, so's London.’

  ‘No.’ Hiram said the word harshly. ‘Robert sent his mother a postcard every few years. After she died I found them; they were posted in Sydney.’

  ‘Do you have them?’

  He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a slim stack of postcards held by a rubber band. He passed them across. The cards were mundane—the Bridge, the Opera House, the Zoo. The messages were minimal and written in a firm, round hand: ‘Dear Mum, Hope you are well. All's fine with me, loving it in Sydney and doing very well. Hope to get over to see you before too long’ — that sort of thing. They were dated at two and three year intervals, with a gap of four years in the middle of the sequence of seven. The last card was dated one month ago. Dempsey watched me examining it.

  ‘He didn't know his mother had died’, he said.

  I looked at him, there was something unyielding about him and I decided that I'd been wrong about the pipe, the prop he needed was a Bible. ‘Can you tell me why you want to locate your son now, Mr Dempsey? I gather you haven't forgiven him his trespasses.’

  ‘Don't blaspheme’, he snapped. ‘I have less than a year to live Mr Hardy. I'll be joining my wife before long. I have a growth. I'm hoping that my eldest son will farm my land; it's been Dempsey land for five generations.’ He let out a sound that in a weaker man would be called a sigh. Some of the lines around his eyes which I'd taken to be marks of country hardiness now looked like tiredness, and there was a fragility beneath his resilience. ‘It's unlikely I know’, he went on, ‘Robert was a wastrel but he might be redeemable.’

  ‘Sure. Well, we need a starting point. I gather you have another son; would he have had any contact with his brother?’

  ‘No. William is thirty and settled. He lives in Wollongong, he's an academic’ He spoke the words without much enthusiasm; Old Dempsey must have been a hard man to please, any son who didn't have cowshit on his boots wasn't a son at all.

  ‘He'd remember him, though. Could I have his address?�
� Susan gave it to me as the old man seemed to withdraw into himself. Maybe he was hoping that his Creator was a farmer. I asked for a photograph of the prodigal and she produced an old snapshot and a newspaper cutting. The photograph, which was yellowed and creased, showed a youth in his late teens standing beside a motor cycle. He was smiling broadly and he had a mop of dark curling hair; he was a good-looking lad.

  ‘That was taken of Robert just before he left’, Susan said quietly. ‘The motorcycle was stolen.’

  I nodded and looked at the cutting. It was a press photo of a picket line outside a shop or an office. The caption had been cut off but two words remained of a headline above the picture—‘sacks Clarke’. The picketers were carrying placards which were too blurred to read; the head of one of them had been circled in red ink.

  ‘We found this in mother's things’, Susan said. ‘We think she believed that to be Robert in the picture.’

  I studied the faces; it was possible, some weight had gone on and some hair had gone off. Maybe. The mother's eye plus intuition could have been right or it could have been wishful thinking.

  I turned the cutting over, on the back was part of an advertisement for motor cars. There was a picture of a Ford Falcon and the showroom's address was in Chatswood. I know a bit about Falcons because I own one; this model was a few years younger than mine, say in the early 70s.

  ‘How would your mother have got a Sydney newspaper?’

  ‘William used to send them when he thought there was something in them that might interest her. She was a great reader, and he sent the book pages and articles on writers and films and things.’ Susan looked at her father, who was sagging a little from the ramrod position.

  ‘My father is tired, Mr Hardy. Will you help us?’

  I said I would, collected a retainer and their address in Sydney for the next few weeks. They were visiting a few relatives, winding up the old man's life.

  I ushered them out, and set about earning their money by calling Harry Tickener at The News He confirmed that there were people in the organisation who could identify a newspaper from the type and lay-out, and that if the cutting was from one of the half dozen papers published by his employer I could find the issue in a bound copy or a microfilm.

  I walked the mile and a half to The News building, stopped to deposit the cheque and to buy some fruit for my lunch. These days I try to walk for an hour and eat fruit for lunch instead of sitting and drinking beer; I still miss the beer. The citizenry of Sydney were out in force in their light summer rigs; it was early summer but a lot of the women were tanned and it was a pity to take them off the beaches. Susan Dempsey had a good tan, I recalled, and looked like she'd play a great set of tennis; I'm pushing forty and the regimen has kept the fat down, but I still feel furtive when I have randy thoughts about females twenty years my junior. There's a bit of Hiram Dempsey in us all.

  Tickener was too busy to talk as usual. He introduced me to a sub on one of the papers, who instantly identified the cutting.

  ‘The Sunday Post’, he said. He was a little roly-poly man who scratched his head a lot with a pencil. ‘Only ran for a year or so, that narrows it down.’

  ‘Still a lot of looking.’

  ‘Yeah. Hold on. Who's this Clarke?’

  I said I didn't know.

  ‘Rings a bell’, he said. ‘Yeah, around that time. Come on we'll look him up in the cuts.’

  We went down to the library and he pulled out a metal drawer crammed with quarto size manila envelopes. All had names on them followed by occupations. Some were thin as if they could contain only a single sheet, others bulged fatly. Thomas Clarke's file was thinnish. He was a unionist involved in a strike at a food processing plant in Wollongong in 1972. Clarke had refused to work with non-unionists and had been sacked. Reading between the lines of the cuttings, the message was that Clarke had been trying to unionise the plant and had run foul of the management. The strike lasted two months, and the unionists won. A large item on Clarke's sacking had been published in The Sunday Post, and it included my photograph. The men were picketing a supermarket in Wollongong which stocked the company's products; a heavy man in the centre of the picture was identified as Clarke, the others shown were described as his ‘Supporters’.

  The sub made photostats of a few of the cuttings for me; I thanked him and left the building. Outside it was hot and cheerful, I felt pretty cheerful myself; I like the south coast, especially when someone's paying me to go there. I walked back to the office, drove home to Glebe and packed a bag. I put in swimming trunks and a towel but I left the snorkel and speargun behind.

  If you stay on the highway the drive to Wollongong is a two hour bore, if you turn off and go through the national park and the string of mining towns along the coast from Stanwell Park it's a lot better. I took the slow route and drove past the camp sites and beaches that would soon be filling up with holidaying hedonists. Packed in between the sea and the scarp on which the land slips so that people can't hang their timber and glass fantasies off it, the coal towns don't seem to have changed much in the past twenty years. The ocean was a deep blue and crashing in firmly as if rehearsing for a long, hot summer. There were one or two caravans already in place, forerunners of the tent and caravan cities that would spring up soon and last until April.

  It was after six o'clock when I reached Wollongong; I checked into a motel down near the beach and went for a swim. My body was winter pale and the water was icy cold. It was a brief visit to the beach. I went back to the motel, showered and changed and watched the evening news on TV. After a couple of beers and a barbecued steak at the pub opposite the motel I was ready to go to work.

  Dr William Dempsey lived in one of the fashionable hillside suburbs of Wollongong. I spoke on the telephone to his wife, who was also a New Zealander, and easily intrigued by the story of her husband's long lost brother. Dr Dempsey was lecturing at the university that evening and expected home soon after eight; I was invited for nine. As soon as I hung up I regretted that I hadn't asked what subject he taught—in my experience physicists and historians are as different as Afrikaners and Bantus. I arrived on time, and a thirtyish woman with a well-dressed, good figure let me in and took me through to a room which had a big window occupying most of one wall. The house was well up, and in the day the window would be full of first-class ocean view.

  She got me a Scotch and soda which was about three times too strong. She stood in the doorway looking agitated, her carefully prepared black hair was a bit astray.

  ‘I'm sorry he's late, Mr Hardy. He's never late as a rule. The meal's ruined.’

  There was a noise from the back of the house and she went off to deal with it. The room had some comfortable chairs, a TV set and a coffee table; there were magazines and books on the table and more books on the floor near one chair and a whole lot more in a big bookcase. I took a sip of the Scotch and went over to look—they were mostly novels and biographies, but here and there other books had been stuck in or lain across the top of the rows. These were studies of work-places, unions and aspects of the labour movement. Some had Dempsey's name in them and so did some of the novels. He could be a political scientist, economist or sociologist, it's hard to tell these days, but the novels ruled out physics.

  Mrs Dempsey, who'd introduced herself as Rosemary, came back carrying a Scotch that looked nearly as strong as mine. She was very edgy.

  ‘That was Graham, our eldest’, she said, ‘I'd promised him his father would come in and say goodnight, I don't know what to do.’

  ‘Have a drink and sit down.’ She was in that distracted state that comes from listening to your own fears. An outside voice is welcome and usually obeyed. She sat down and sipped mechanically.

  ‘Have you rung the university?’

  ‘Yes, just before you arrived. He left the lecture theatre on time.’

  ‘Would he stop off on the way, for cigarettes, wine?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Might have had a breakd
own.’

  ‘He's more than an hour late!’ She looked at me as if I were an idiotic child. ‘If he had a breakdown he'd call the NRMA and he'd call me!’

  ‘Let's give him a few minutes.’ I forced her to talk and learned that Dempsey was a senior lecturer in sociology. He had a PhD from the ANU and they'd been in Wollongong for five years. I sipped the Scotch and tried to think of more to say but her eyes were screaming at me. I got up.

  ‘Okay, I'll go and have a look for him. I'm sort of retained by the family anyway.’

  She told me that Dempsey was a tall, thin man with spectacles, who'd been wearing light drill trousers and an army-style shirt. The car was a red VW beetle. I told her I'd call as soon as I knew anything and advised her to get a friend over for support. She said she would. I drove the obvious route to the university and heard no sirens, saw no flashing red or blue lights. It was a Monday night, quiet, with four TV channels available.

  Dempsey was teaching a special course in industrial sociology, his wife had told me, and most of the students were adults who'd be rushing off to their own families and activities. The lectures were held in a set of halls at the northern end of the campus. I located them on the campus map and parked in the roadway at the front. The lights in the grounds were modern and bright but the lecture halls were in darkness. The doors were heavy jobs of the self-locking kind that could be operated by the last person out. I walked around the building and found a car park about fifty yards back surrounded by a chest-high hedge. I saw the shape of a VW in the corner of the park and broke into a run.

  William Dempsey was lying on the ground beside the car with his feet under the hedge. One side of his face was covered with blood and it had flowed up into his hair and down into his shirt, soaking into one of the pockets. He wasn't wearing spectacles. He was breathing evenly and the blood still oozed from a cut running along where his hair was parted. I opened the car door; there was a set of keys in the ignition and a briefcase on the passenger seat. Light from the car washed over Dempsey and he groaned. I squatted down beside him and told him to lie still.