Heroin Annie

by Peter Corris

  The shack, as I looked at it through the trees, was exactly that—an ancient, weatherboard affair that had lost its pretensions to paint long ago. Grass grew in the guttering and sprouted out through the lower boards. I squatted behind a tree for ten minutes soaking up the atmostphere—no sign of a car, no wisps of smoke in the air, no coughing. I did a complete circle of the place at about seventy-five yards distance, the way they'd taught me in Malaya. Still nothing. There are two theories on approaching a possibly defended place like this: one says you should keep circling and come in closer each time; the other has it that this causes too much movement and you should come in straight. The first way was out because there was a clear patch about fifty yards deep in front of the shack and I'm a straight line man myself, anyway.

  I made it down to the back door without any trouble. The building was a tiny one-pitch, three rooms at most. The noise I could hear inside was snoring. I gave it a few minutes, but it was real snoring, complete with irregular rhythm and grunts. I eased the door open and went in; floorboards creaked and the door grated, but Doc Mahony wasn't worried—he was lying on a bed in his underwear with a big, dreamy smile on his face—maybe he was dreaming of when he was young and slim and sober, which he wasn't anymore. There was an empty bottle of Bundaberg rum on the floor and one half full on a chair beside the bed.

  It was a dump comparable to the Frenchman's and the rural setting didn't help it any; you could hardly see through the dusty windows and the kikuyu poked up through the floor. I couldn't find the .22, which worried me, and I was also worried by the empty tins and the food and water bowls in the back room—I hadn't seen any sign of a dog. I filled the empty rum bottle with water and went back to the bed chamber. The Doc tried to ignore the first few drops but then I got some good ones down his nose and into his mouth and he spluttered and coughed and woke up.

  His face was pale, grimy with dirt and whiskers, and lumpy like his body. He had a few thin strands of hair plastered to his head with sweat, and a few teeth, but much of the beauty of the human face and form was lacking. He opened his eyes and his voice was surprisingly pleasant-sounding.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘I'm a friend of Pat Kenneally, Doc. You remember Pat?’

  He remembered all right, alarm leapt into his pale, bleary eyes and he made a movement with his hand. He changed the movement into a grab for the rum but I wasn't fooled. I pushed the bottle out of reach and felt under the bed, and came up with a shoe box. I took my gun out and pointed it at Doc's meaty nose.

  ‘Lie back. Get some rest.’

  Inside the box was a notebook with Pat's address and phone number written on the first page. The next few pages were taken up with the names and descriptions of greyhounds. Some dog owners were listed with telephone numbers and addresses. Also in the box was an array of pills and powders, a couple of hypodermics and some bottles of fluid with rubber membrane tops.

  ‘Nasty’, I said. ‘Poor little doggies.’

  He didn't say anything, but reached for the bottle again. There were still a couple of inches of water in the bottle and I poured enough rum into it to darken it up a bit. I handed it to him.

  ‘You'll ruin your health taking it straight. Now, let's hear about the bricks and the car and the bullets through the Frenchman's house.’

  He took a long swig of the diluted rum, swilled it around in his mouth and spat it against the wall. He followed this display of his manners with a racking cough and a long, gurgling swallow from the bottle.

  ‘I don't know what you're talking about’, he gasped, and then took another swallow.

  I tapped the notebook. ‘What's this—research for a book?’

  ‘I wanted to get Kenneally’, he said in the voice that was all he had left of his profession and self-respect, ‘but I don't know anything about that other stuff—bricks and bullets.’

  ‘It's God's own truth, Hardy.’ The voice came from behind me; it was the voice on the phone and now I didn't even need to turn around to know who it was. I felt something hard jab the nape of my neck. ‘Put the gun on the bed, Hardy. Do it slow.’

  I did it very slowly, and then I turned. Johnny Dragovic had scarcely changed at all in the past six years since I'd seen him in court when my evidence had helped to get him eight years for armed robbery. Johnny was a tough kid from Melbourne who'd decided to take Sydney on; he knocked over a couple of bottle shops, and moved up to TAB agencies, with some success. The Board hired me and some other private men and I got lucky, heard some whispers, and we were waiting for Johnny at the right time and place. Blows were struck, and Johnny turned out to be not quite as tough as he thought. But he was tough enough, and the automatic pistol in his hand made him even tougher. I said ‘Dragovic’, stupidly.

  ‘That's right’, he said. ‘Glad you remember.’

  My guts were turning over and I concentrated on getting my balance right and watching him carefully, in case he gave me a chance. I didn't think he would.

  ‘What's it all about then?’ I said.

  ‘It's about eight years, five at Grafton.’ The way he said it spoke volumes, he wasn't there to thank me for rehabilitating him.

  ‘Put it behind you’, I said. ‘You're not old.’

  The gun didn't move. ‘You bastard. I've kept going by thinking what I could do to you.’

  ‘Thinking like that'll get you back there.’

  ‘Shut up! I was nineteen when I got to Grafton, what do you reckon that was like?’

  ‘Scarey’, I said. I thought that if I kept him talking something might happen, he might even talk himself out of whatever he had in mind.

  ‘That's right, scarey. That's why I got you with the bricks and fixed your bloody car—to scare you.’

  ‘You win. You did it, you scared me. I'm scared now.’

  ‘You should be. I'm going to kill you.’

  ‘That's crazy’, I said desperately. ‘And not fair, I didn't kill you.’

  He laughed. ‘Sometimes, in that bloody hole, I wished you had.’

  ‘What about him?’ I gestured down at Doc who was listening and clutching the bottle like a crucifix.

  ‘He goes out too’, Dragovic said. ‘You kill him and he kills you. All in the line of duty.’

  ‘It stinks, Johnny, it won't work.’

  ‘It fuckin’ will! I've planned this for a while, been watching you until the right deal came up. It'll look like you caught up with the bloke who shot up the Frenchy's house and you shot him and he shot you. You'll take a while to die, though.’ He smiled and I could see how much he was enjoying it all, and how unlikely it was that he'd change his mind.

  Mahony raised himself slowly on the bed and swung his legs over the side. ‘This is madness’, he said. ‘I don't want any part of it. I'm going.’ He got off the bed and took a couple of shuffling steps towards the door before Dragovic reacted.

  ‘Get back here!’ he yelled. ‘Get back.’

  But Mahony opened the door and had half his body outside when Dragovic shot him. He crumpled, and I moved to the left and swung a punch which took Dragovic on the nose. Blood spurted and he blundered back, but kept hold of his gun. I made a grab for mine, missed and lunged out the door, nearly tripping over Mahony. I staggered, recovered my balance, and started to run for the trees about fifty yards away. I was halfway there when something stung my calf like ten sandfly bites; the leg lost all power and I went down, hard. Johnny Dragovic stepped clear of the doorway, carrying a rifle and started to walk towards me. I lay there in the dust watching him and watching the rifle and when he was about twenty feet away I closed my eyes. Then I heard a shot and didn't feel anything, so I opened my eyes: the rifle was on the ground close to me and Dragovic was yelling and rolling around and a greyhound was tearing at his neck. There was blood on Dragovic's face from my punch, and a lot more blood on his chest from the dog's attack. He screamed, and the dog's head came up and went down twice. I sat up and grabbed the rifle; the dog turned away from the bloody mess on t
he ground and sprang straight at me. I shot it in the chest and it collapsed and I shot it again in the head.

  I hobbled across and bent down, but one look told me that tough Johnny Dragovic was dead. The dog had a length of chain attached to a collar trailing away in the dirt. It looked as if Dragovic had secured the dog, but not well enough. More hobbling got me over to the shack where there was more death. Mahony's eyes stared sightlessly up at the blue sky; his mouth was open and some flies were already gathering around the dark blood that had spilled out of it.

  After that it was a matter of rum and true grit. I took an enormous swig of the rum and started on the trek back to my car. When I made it I was weeping with the pain and there was a saw mill operating at full blast inside my head. I got the car started and into gear somehow and kangaroo-hopped it back along the track until I reached a house. Then I leant on the horn until a woman came out, and I spoke to her and told her what to do.

  Terry came to see me in hospital and Pat came and Sergeant Moles—it was like old times. The bullet had touched the bone but hadn't messed the leg up too much. No one wept over Doc Mahony and Johnny Dragovic, although Pat said that the Doc wasn't such a bad bloke, just greedy. Terry went off to play a tournament in Hong Kong, and one solitary night I went to the dog track and won fifty dollars on a hound named Topspin.

  Escort to an easy death

  The filing card pinned to my office door read ‘Cliff Hardy Investigations’, and I noticed that the finger I used to straighten it with had a dirty nail. Not very dirty, but then the card itself wasn't very dirty and the drawing pin that held it wasn't very bent. But not clean and not straight. These were bad times. People were losing their jobs; people and things were going missing; people were getting more and more dishonest, in big and small ways, and no-one cared. It was all bad news for me: I made a living out of tidying up problems; finding a lost wife or husband, guarding a body for a while, seeing a sum of money safely from point A to point B. Now, tidiness and safety were not expected. I was losing business, and no-one cared.

  I pushed the door open, it held on the frayed, lifted carpet while I picked up the mail, and then I flicked it back with my foot. The bills were for the usual things, small, corrective services performed on my body and various bits of machinery, and the baits were the same. I was offered female companionship, life insurance and a home on the north coast out of the smog of Sydney. I needed all those things; every forty-year-old male whose instincts are within a range of normal does. But to get them I'd had to be what I was not—prosperous. To hell with them; their market research was lousy. The women were probably ugly and the insurance would have fine print and the house would be sliding into the sea. I shovelled the brochures into the waste paper bin and made out a cheque for the smallest of the bills.

  I sat and listened to the sounds of Sydney three floors down. They were busy sounds—trucks and cars and buses, all full of people all chasing a dollar. I'd sat for a whole day like that recently and for a few hours in quite a lot of days. I was a little panicky. As I stared at the office door a shape appeared in the pane of glass. It was a nice shape, not tall or short—trim-looking. The shape stayed there for what seemed like five minutes before it knocked. I let out a tense breath and said ‘Come in’ in my best bass.

  It turned out to be a woman with red hair, a red dress and red shoes. She carried a black shoulder bag and wore a wide, black belt around the dress; when she got up close I could see that the hair was a wig. I watched her walk towards the chair in front of the desk and lower herself into it. She moved all in a piece, not exactly stiffly, but not altogether gracefully either. It was if she'd learned it all from scratch late in life.

  ‘Mr Hardy’, she said, ‘my name is Trudi Walker.’

  ‘I'm pleased to meet yon’, I said.

  ‘Yes. I want to hire you to find someone.’ Her voice was what used to be called fruity, she gave the vowels and dipthongs everything she had.

  ‘Male or female?’

  She raised an eyebrow that had been plucked to a fine, dark line. She was heavily and expertly made-up; hard to guess her age, forty at least, maybe more. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Not really, but I have more success with women for some reason. I've found thirty-nine out of fifty women but only nineteen out of forty men.’

  ‘Perhaps you've just had more practice with women—your statistics suggest that.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  ‘It's a man in this instance.’

  I shrugged. ‘Well, maybe I can improve on my figures. How long's be been gone?’

  ‘Two days.’

  ‘That's not really missing, Miss Walker, that could just be … away.’

  ‘No! I've seen Gerry every day for the past five years. We are business partners and friends. Something has happened to him.’

  ‘You could be right. What's the business?’

  ‘We run an escort service.’

  And that, of course, was why she hadn't gone to the police and why she avoided the big agencies, which are plugged straight in to the newspapers and also why my fees didn't worry her. She paid over the five hundred dollars retainer and agreed to a hundred and twenty-five a day plus expenses without a frown. In fact she had very few facial expressions, permitting herself the eyebrow, a tight thin-lipped smile and that was about it. Gerry Hadley, she informed me, was an American she'd met when he was on leave from Vietnam. They'd corresponded for a few years while he was in the States and then he'd come over to join forces with her. She gave me two photos—P F C Hadley, twenty'ish, in battle dress, Mr Gerald Hadley, business-suited, well-fleshed, thirtyish. He had a round, corn-fed face with a bright smile.

  Gerry and Trudi had separate apartments in the same building in Elizabeth Bay. They ran the agency from a business address in Potts Point, and from their apartments. Trudi still occasionally worked a shift; Gerry didn't, although the agency catered to both sexes.

  ‘When did you last see Mr Hadley?’

  ‘Three nights ago. We had dinner together. He was supposed to come to my flat for breakfast and a discussion the next morning. He didn't come, and I haven't seen him since.’

  ‘You've looked through his flat?’

  ‘Yes.’ She reached into her bag, took out a door key with a red ribbon attached and handed it over. While I looked at the key I was thinking that there was a fair bit of between-the-lines reading to do here, but I decided to play it careful—I needed the work.

  ‘Could you give me a list of your employees, Miss Walker?’

  ‘Not off hand; I could arrange it if you'd call at the office.’

  Job or not, I was already getting tired of her; the voice was annoying me the way plastic cutlery and Big Macs annoy me. I twirled the key by the ribbon.

  ‘Any of the girls missing?’ I said.

  The look she shot at me aged her ten years and I put her near fifty. ‘I don't know’, she snapped. ‘Why?’

  ‘Any of the boys missing?’

  She got half out of her chair and her face twisted up; two fissures appeared in the make-up beside her nose. ‘You bastard’, she snarled. ‘You shit. You can …’

  I put the key down and came around the desk to pat her shoulder. ‘Easy’, I said, ‘easy; I'm sorry, but I had to find out how you feel about all this. You were acting till then, doing it pretty well, too.’

  She sat back and dug in her bag for tissues. After dabbing and wiping some of the control came back, but I didn't have cosmetic-controlled agelessness in front of me now, I had a vulnerable woman with years on the clock and fear in her eyes.

  ‘I'm fifteen years older than Gerry, Mr Hardy’, she said. ‘I go through tortures to keep up appearances, I eat almost nothing. I love him and everything I've done is … I can't bear …’ The control went again and the tears streamed over her face like a flash flood. I felt sorry for her and realised at that moment that she'd dropped the voice—her vowels were a little nasal now and her delivery had the lazy, easy rhythms of Sydney.

&n
bsp; ‘I'll look for him’, I said. ‘I'll call at your office and I'll look in his flat and I'll ask around. Two days isn't long. Does he have a car?’

  She nodded. ‘A Mercedes, gone.’

  ‘Any friends in Sydney?’

  She shook her head. ‘Just me.’

  ‘You don't know of any trouble—I mean competitors, the cops … any threats?’

  There was panic in her face, clearly visible now that the make-up was eroded. ‘No’, she whispered, ‘nothing.’

  I gave her a receipt, and she got out a mirror and did a little repair work. I wrote down the addresses and phone numbers she gave me, and we got the whole thing on a business footing. She left and I went to the window and watched her step out on to the street; the first step was faltering but she quickly got into stride and looked like a proud, well turned-out human being as she turned the corner. I decided she had guts and that she was lying about there being no trouble in the air.

  Over the next day and a half I did the things I said I'd do: I checked over Hadley's apartment and found nothing that you wouldn't expect to find about a Yank who ran an escort service and had a mistress fifteen years older than himself. He had two girls on the side and I looked them over-nothing. Same result with the four men employed by the Winsome Escort Agency. Two of them were gay and one was black; nothing in the patterns of their lives over the past few days had changed. The seven women were more varied: one was close to Trudi Walker's age with a similar manner, and one looked like a schoolgirl. Two of them had university degrees and one was a hang-glider. I used the phone till my arm ached and knocked on apartment doors with no result. My last call was on one of the girls—Tracey Talbot, who combined being escorted with freelance journalism. I drank coffee with her in her flat at Rushcutters Bay; it was a warm, soft afternoon and the water looked blue, bright and alive. Her window was full of harbour view. She had posters of world-famous harbours on the walls.