Heroin Annie

by Peter Corris

  We sat there uneasily; Barton answered the phone a few times, wrote things in files on his desk and signed things a secretary brought in. He finished the whisky and didn't make another. I was thinking about taking him up on the drink offer when the door opened and two men walked in. One was big, with a blank, hard face. The other man, much smaller, was pudgy looking and pale; his soft brown hair was cut short and his expensive clothes looked slept in. His expression was timid; he wasn't the laughing GI of yesteryear but he was Gerry Hadley just the same. There was heavy sticking plaster down one side of his face and along his jaw.

  When he saw me he buckled at the knees and the guy with the cold eyes had to hold him up.

  ‘You can't do this’, he babbled. ‘I haven't got it, I …’

  ‘Shut up, Hadley’, Barton said. ‘Put him over there, Carl.’ The big man dropped Hadley into a chair, Barton waved at him and he went out. Hadley's hands were shaking as he tried to light a cigarette. Barton got up and helped him. When the smoke was in the air he clapped Hadley on the back.

  ‘Your lucky day, Gerry, I think. Now I just want exactly as you told me.’

  Hadley looked at him uncertainly. ‘You mean, like everything.’

  Barton nodded. I got up and poured myself some whisky, Hadley nodded when I looked across at him and I poured him one too.

  ‘Thanks. Well, I went to see Trudi like Sir Peter wanted and I tried to find out where she kept the film.’ He drank and tapped the glass. ‘I had a bit of this before, Trudi could be a pretty scary dame you know.’

  ‘Go on’, I said.

  ‘Well, I took along a gun just for show. I told her what was up and she went wild, she wouldn't even listen.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She looked as if she didn't believe it. I'd always sweet-talked her, you know? I guess she was in love with me.’

  I felt sick and drank some whisky. ‘I asked you what she said.’

  ‘Not much. She cried, then she laughed. She laughed at me and I got mad. Then she did this to me.’ He lifted his hand to his face. ‘I saw red and the gun went off.’ He finished the drink and looked down into his glass like a man staring into his own coffin.

  ‘Did you look for the film? I said.

  ‘No. I panicked, the phone started to ring and I ran.’ He looked across at Barton. ‘I guess you told him what happened after that.’

  ‘Yeah’, I said. ‘Tell me one thing—how did you feel about Trudi?’

  It came to me then that Hadley wasn't very bright. He looked desperately from me to Barton wondering how to play it, looking for a clue.

  ‘The truth’, I said.

  ‘Oh, I don't know, I guess I was sick of her, you know? She was a hell of a lot older than me, and she clung so close; I mean she just stuck there all the time.’ He waved his hands helplessly. ‘she was so old you know?’

  ‘And she charged you rent?’

  ‘She sure did!’ Grievance made him jerk his head up and tighten his soft jaw. ‘She was the tightest bitch in the world. I had only ten per cent of the operation; most of what I had was leased, the car and all. She kept me tied up tight.’

  I had to smile then because I could see how to handle it and because of the irony of it all. I stood up.

  ‘Come on, you two. We're going to have a little look at something you'll want to see.’

  But Barton had had enough. His hand moved on the desk, and the guy who'd escorted Hadley in came back again. I guessed that he was Barton's persuader. Barton jerked his head at me. ‘Carl, restrain him.’

  Carl came across walking light and bouncy and reached for me. I swivelled away and hooked him near the ear. He fell back, looked surprised and came in again with his hands up and moving in and out as if he was almost clapping. One hand whipped out at me and I felt the wind of it as I went under. Carl bent too and dug me savagely in the ribs with a stiff hand. I wasn't in the mood; I kicked him in the crotch and when he went down on one knee I brought my knee up under his chin. His head snapped back and clicked nastily and he stretched out on the deep pile carpet.

  ‘Too fancy’, I said. ‘Stop playing games, Barton, you'll get your film. Come on.’

  Barton got up, pulled Hadley to his feet and we all went out like the best of friends. Barton collected keys from the front desk and we drove to my office in a white Mercedes.

  ‘Where's your Merc, Gerry?’ I asked him, but he didn't reply.

  We went up the three flights of stairs and into my office. I pushed Hadley down into a chair while Barton looked distastefully around him.

  ‘What do you do in here?’ he said.

  ‘Make an honest living, or try to.’ He laughed, took out a handerchief and dusted off the edge of the desk before sitting down. I unlocked the safe and took out the film and the stamps.

  ‘Now this’, I said to Barton, ‘is you in your starring role, and these are stamps Trudi bought with the -money you paid her. There's about seventy thousand bucks worth here and they're not getting any cheaper. In five years they'll be worth double that and so on.’

  Hadley looked greedily at the envelope. ‘I don't get it’, he said.

  I laughed. ‘You're so right, you don't. Let me tell you two things, Gerry—Trudi had the big C, she was on the way out. And she made a will leaving every bloody thing to you—the business, the jewels, this handy little number, the lot. You should have been patient.’

  ‘All very interesting’, Barton said. ‘But, ah … the film.’

  I tossed it to him. ‘Show it to your mates in the boardroom.’ He caught the packet and turned it over in his hands like a gold nugget.

  ‘That's about it’, I said. ‘You can both go.’

  ‘The stamps’, Hadley said.

  ‘Oh, yeah’, I shook them out into the glass ashtray, lit a match and put the flame into the little nest of paper. Hadley stood up and rushed me but I stiff-armed him back. The paper burned and a wisp of dark smoke curled up to join the other stains on the ceiling.

  ‘Go away’, I said.

  Grant called that evening to tell me that they'd picked up Hadley trying to get on a train to Melbourne. His story was that he and Trudi had quarrelled over business and that the gun had gone off accidently.

  ‘Ten years’, Grant said, ‘out in five and we'll deport the bastard. He can't inherit the loot of course. He's really pissed off about that.’

  I laughed. ‘You can see his point of view. Well, he did everyone a favour except himself.’

  ‘How's that?’

  ‘Trudi had a slow death coming, he saved her that.’

  ‘That's her, what's this ‘everyone'?’

  ‘Just an expression.’

  I sat in the office the next day and didn't get any business. Before leaving I picked up the ashtray, went to the window and let the ashes float out onto the warm air.

  California dreamland

  I hadn't liked finding the body. It was under the house in a spot which the foundations and the hot water pipes had made as dry as the desert. It was shrunken and mummified by the dryness, and when I pulled her out the woman looked more like a leather, laboratory specimen than someone who had laughed and drunk and made love.

  Rosa Torrielli had done all of those things in good measure, and there were still some faded shreds of the clothing she'd done them in clinging to the corpse. A crumbling fragment of lilac silk, a silver thread.

  The house was one of a hundred in a street in Lilyfield—wetherboard up on high, brick foundations—and I'd traced Rosa there through a series of interviews with landlords and boarders and drinkers that seemed to stretch on without end. But it had ended, and the de facto husband who'd put her under the house had ended his life in prison. All neat and tidy—a Cliff Hardy Investigations special.

  Tony Torrielli had hired me to find his mother, and as he'd especially applied for the job in the U S Consulate in Sydney to look for her and had saved money for the work, I was glad I'd found her. Torrielli had been taken back to the States by his father,
who was Rosa's third or fourth husband, and he was as American as cherry pie.

  ‘That was fine work, Mr Hardy. I sure am obliged to you.’ We were in a pub near my office in the Cross and he was holding his glass carefully so as not to spill anything on his light grey three piece suit.

  ‘I'm sorry it turned out so grim’, I said. It hadn't, for me. I had his cheque in my pocket covering my modest daily rates and the expenses racked up on the road and in the boozers.

  ‘Fine work.’ He bought another round, drank half of his Scotch and left. I finished his drink along with mine, and wondered what he'd do with the knowledge that his mother was a good-time girl who probably hadn't given him a second's thought since his dad took off home.

  My next two jobs flowed from the Torrielli case by recommendation. The first was a simple body-guarding of a very rich and very nervous visitor to Sydney from Las Vegas. The second started when the biggest man I'd ever seen knocked on my office door on the hottest day in Sydney since they started keeping records. The temperature hit thirty around 9 o'clock in the morning, and kept climbing. His knock shook the door so hard I thought the heat might be expanding the old building and splitting it like a paper bag.

  I bellowed ‘Come in’, to show that I was half an inch over six feet, 170 pounds and used to having sledge hammers hit my door.

  He opened the door very gently and ducked his head the way he must have been doing since he was fourteen. If he said he was six ten you wouldn't have argued with him, and if he was lighter than 240 pounds it would only have been by a glass of beer or two. I stood slowly as if the size of him had pushed me up on a beam balance.

  ‘Nice to see you’, I said. ‘Take whatever you want, say whatever you like, spit on the floor.’

  ‘Tony Torrielli said you were tougher than’, he said. ‘Said you had to be heavy with some people when you were lookin' for his mom.’

  ‘I write my own reports’, I said. ‘Sometimes I use poetic licence.’

  ‘I'm interested in your licence to investigate. Mind if I sit down?’

  ‘Try it.’ I waved expressively at the only other chair and sat back down myself. His chair held, but he might have been doing complicated isometrics.

  ‘I'm Wesley Holt’, he said, ‘engineer’. It came out in a voice that rumbled like a big train in a small tunnel. He used that upward inflection that makes Americans sound uncertain, but I was pretty sure he was Wesley Holt, and if he said he was an engineer that was good enough for me. I nodded intelligently.

  ‘Came down here to a job in Queensland because I wanted to see my daughter. She came back here after her mother and I split up.’

  He told me he'd graduated in 1956 and taken jobs all over the world including the Pacific. He'd met Coralie Burnett from Wahroonga in New Guinea. He lit a cigar, maybe in honour of Coralie. I refused one and opened a window, being a clean-air person these days, but good-mannered about it.

  ‘Didn't last’, he said blowing smoke at the windows. ‘Year and a half and she was back here in Sydney with the kid.’

  ‘Didn't like the tropics?’ My ex-wife Cyn hadn't cared for them: I'd taken her to Fiji on a half-business, half-pleasure trip, and it had been a full-time hell: one mosquito bite and she turned red, two and patches of her hide developed the texture of half-cooked porridge.

  ‘Loved New Guinea’, he said. ‘Hated me. I was a wild guy in those days—booze, broads and work, that was me. Coralie was smart, I don't blame her.’

  ‘This is about the daughter then?’

  ‘Yup. Diane. I've only seen her a couple of times and not for the last five years. I've got a whole bunch of pictures though.’ He pulled out a fat wallet that had compartments and divisions like a brief case. He rifled for a minute then pushed a photograph across the desk.

  ‘Bright kid’, he said. ‘Cleaned up everything in school here last year. She was supposed to go to university in Sydney this year.’

  The photograph distracted me from what he was saying; the image was of a big, young woman who looked fully endowed with brains, good looks and life itself. A blonde with a face that was all eyes, cheekbones and mouth: it was a candid shot, she was sitting in a chair, waving her hands and talking. It would be hard to imagine anyone within view not looking and listening.

  ‘Which one?’ I said. ‘Which university?’

  ‘There's more than one?’

  ‘Three’, I said, but I knew which one he meant; the old one, the one with ivy and tradition, the one I hadn't dropped out of.

  ‘Law school’, he said. ‘Going straight into law school. Sounds funny to me, but I was looking forward to talking to her about it. We wrote each other plenty, I felt like I knew her, sort of …’

  ‘What happened?’

  He squashed out his half-smoked cigar in the little ashtray on my desk, and sighed. Just for an instant, with the breath leaving him, he seemed oddly vulnerable. ‘Her mother died last year, cancer. Di was real cut up when she sat those exams. I wanted to come out for the funeral and all, but I couldn't get away. I wrote that I'd get work here so that I'd be around, she seemed real pleased.’

  ‘Did your wife marry again?’

  He shook his head emphatically. ‘Never got divorced, one of those things. Di moved in with a girlfriend after Coralie died. She was going to live in college she said—a scholarship, that right?’

  I nodded. ‘You keep saying what was going to happen—what did happen?’

  ‘I got here early December, soon as I could. She'd been gone a week when I arrived.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘To the States, would you believe it? She took off with some kid to California and here I am stuck, just locked in up there in Queensland for the first eight weeks solid.’

  He'd used his American connections to make the initial trace. Diane Holt had US citizenship and a passport from a trip to New Caledonia she'd made with her mother. She left Australia on Pan Am bound for San Francisco on 27 November at half past five in the afternoon. She had a cabin bag and a light suitcase which had been carried for her by one Vincent Harvey.

  ‘He's Australian’, Holt said. ‘Graduate student at Stanford, that's …’

  ‘I know, university in California. Felix Keesing, anthropology, Roscoe Tanner and McEnroe, tennis. Does Di play tennis?’

  ‘Sure, plays everything.’ He pulled a sheaf of papers from the pocket that hadn't held the wallet. ‘All I know about him and some stuff about her is right here.’ He gave me the papers and wiped a hairy arm across his face. ‘Shit, it's hot.’

  We coped with that in the saloon bar of the big hotel down the street where Holt was staying. He said he was a retired drinker but he must have been a title-holder in his day: I drank light beer and he had beer with whisky chasers.

  Holt had used Raymond Evans' agency to do the basic digging on Diane, her mother and Harvey, and I was impressed with the results. We had a straight teenager with the usual tastes and habits and no shadows, until the six months of her mother's illness came along. Raymond's report said: ‘Ms Holt appears to have moved into a kind of top gear when she learned of her mother's cancer. By all reports she worked extremely hard at her studies and alternated periods of intense nursing with heavy socialising. Drink & drugs—moderate & experimental; sex probable (see Harvey, V.); politics—radical; criminality—negative.’

  Harvey had taken a BA in history and psychology and an MA in sociology at the University of Sydney. He'd done his course work for his Stanford PhD on ‘Advertising, the media and opinion formation in Australia’ and when he carried Di Holt's suitcase at Mascot he was going back to write up his fieldwork for the dissertation. Raymond reported that Harvey had met Diane Holt when he was interviewing the father of one of her schoolfriends who owned an advertising agency.

  I tapped the papers and forced down some more beer. ‘This is good work’, I said. ‘But I think you might need a California man on it now.’

  ‘Tried that’, Holt said. ‘San Francisco private eye found out Harvey had
dropped out of Stanford. Big deal. Said he couldn't find Australians, charged me high.’

  ‘Jesus. Did he call himself a private eye?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Must be the fog. Still …’

  He broke in impatiently. ‘I'm a Stanford man myself, got a friend on the faculty there. He tells me this Harvey has gone political—makes speeches on the campus time to time.’

  ‘Radical politics’, I said tapping the papers again.

  ‘Yeah, beats me. I just figure it might be best for an Aussie to talk to them and find out what the hell's going on.’

  ‘Why didn't Raymond handle it?’

  ‘He recommended you.’

  And that was how I came to be on Flight 532 out of Sydney for San Francisco via Honolulu. I had a visa which would allow me to go in and out of the US as often as I liked for the next five years. It sounded like a threat. I watched ‘Chariots of Fire’ for the third time and admired the way they gave you two of the cute little bottles when you ordered a gin and tonic. I didn't eat any of the food which was all the colour of raw liver. I read The White Hotel on the second leg of the flight, and couldn't sleep afterwards.

  It was raining in San Francisco and the cable cars were out of operation being overhauled, but it was Sunday and a lot of the city was working, and that was novel. I checked into a Fisherman's Wharf motel and caught up on some of the lost sleep. After a shave and shower I went out and bought some of the Gallo chablis I'd been reading about for years in American novels. I also bought a turkey and avocado sandwich big enough to choke Phar Lap and went back to the motel to review the case. The wine was fine, a bit fruity; the label said it was 12 per cent alcohol and I confirmed that with a few solid belts. The sandwich was excellent—survival in these foreign parts was assured. The thinking didn't take long; the only lead I had was to Stanford University in Palo Alto. Twelve per cent is an assertive wine—I had another nap.

  It was well into Monday when I presented my international driving permit and American Express card at Hertz and took possession of a red Pinto. The freeway to Palo Alto wasn't any worse than the Sydney versions and the low, exhaust-blasted structures along the road looked like Haberfield with a dash of Barcelona. Since the energy crisis hit they've dropped the speed limit and everyone drives slowly to save petrol. They were forgiving about my hesitations and sudden surges of doubt about the automatic transmission and which side of the road to travel on.