Forget Me If You Can

by Peter Corris

  ‘This will sound silly,’ I said, ‘but are you sure there was no message—a note, a phone call?’

  ‘Of course not. What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure. He appears to be a nice, considerate lad. I see he’s got your birthday marked on his calendar. I can’t believe he’d put you through this sort of worry. Have you checked your letterbox?’

  ‘My accountant handles all the bills and I don’t get many letters, not since the divorce … But I check the box daily.’

  I’d noticed that the telephone was attached to an answering machine. ‘What about telephone messages?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I walked over to the instrument. The light was flashing. ‘You don’t play back your calls?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about it. I never touch it. Jamie’s friends use it. He runs downstairs and takes the calls upstairs. It’s all beyond me.’

  I felt sorry for her in her lonely, isolated existence but even more sorry for Jamie. I even felt a little sorry for Roger. I hit the button and a young voice came through loud and clear: ‘DON’T WORRY, MUM. I’M FINE. I’M STAYING WITH A FRIEND FOR A WHILE. I NEED TO WORK A FEW THINGS OUT AND I THINK YOU DO AS WELL. I’LL BE IN TOUCH SOON. LOTS OF LOVE.’

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ she said, ‘but what on earth does he mean? Where is he?’

  ‘Who’s his best mate, Mrs Truscott?’

  Joel Lawson was another tall, lean teenager. I talked to him on the putting green at the Chatswood golf club where he’d gone immediately after school. He was rolling them in and leaving them close, one after another. I interrupted him, introduced myself and showed him my ID.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘a private eye.’

  ‘Think of me as a social worker,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for James Truscott. His mother’s worried about him.’

  He tapped his ball with the toe of his putter. ‘Why?’

  ‘She doesn’t know where he is. Do you?’

  ‘Didn’t Jim tell her?’

  ‘Son, if he’d told her she wouldn’t be paying me to find him. This is serious. Where is he?’

  Tap, tap. I was about to grab the putter when he reversed it and flicked the ball up into his hand. Neat catch. ‘What’s her problem?’

  ‘He’s a diabetic. She worries.’

  ‘He can play thirty-six holes in a day. He’s fit. She’s an idiot.’

  I was inclined to agree but she was writing the cheques. ‘She’s got the say, Joel. Where is he?’

  ‘It’s no big deal. He’s with Julie, Julie Massingham. She’s his girlfriend.’

  It sounded as if he wished she was his, but that wasn’t my problem. He gave me her address and phone number. ‘Tell him to come and have a game. I’ll lick the arse off him.’

  I grinned. ‘What’s your handicap?’

  He dropped the ball onto the green and lined up a putt. ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘Work on it.’

  I called Julie’s number as I drove towards the address in Willoughby. A young female answered. I hung up.

  The house was an old weatherboard, probably scheduled for demolition when the owner could get the right price. For now, a student share-rental joint if ever I saw one. I opened the rusty gate and walked up the overgrown path. The grass in the front yard had been half-cut fairly recently. At a guess, the Victa had run out of fuel and the mowing person had run out of money or energy or both.

  My knock brought a pretty dark-haired teenager to the door. I tried as best I could to minimise the tough look my broken nose and generally battered appearance give me. ‘Julie Massingham?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I showed her my PEA licence and kept the smile in place. ‘My name’s Hardy, Ms Massingham, as you see. I’ve been hired by a Mrs Truscott to find her son. Is he here?’

  ‘Yes, Jim’s here.’ She let out a sweet, tinkling laugh that made me feel better about everything. A great laugh, that. Lucky Jim, I thought.

  The boy appeared, lanky and awkward, in the passage behind her. ‘Jule? Who’s that?’

  I went in and gave him my spiel. No fists to fend off, no abuse, no running out the back door. Easy money.

  It was pretty much the way I thought it would be. Jim had wanted to prove to his mother that he could look after himself for a while. He showed me the careful record he’d kept of his glucometer tests, his diet chart and daily weigh-ins. We drank Diet Coke in the untidy but clean kitchen. They were amused that I didn’t have a hipflask of Scotch to spike it with.

  ‘I knew she’d worry,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t dream that she wouldn’t get the phone message. A private detective. Jesus!’

  Julie gave him a more-than-sisterly, less-than-totally-committed kiss. ‘Might be a good thing. Get the message across to her.’

  I drank some Diet Coke. It’s a whole lot better when it’s not lukewarm and flat. ‘What message? That her Jamie can manage his diabetes, or that he’s got a girlfriend?’

  ‘She’s got a lot to learn,’ Jim said.

  Forget Me If You Can

  ‘Hardy, you vile, low animal. I’m going to get you. I’m going to make you wish you’d been aborted. I’m going to …’

  I snatched the phone up and shouted into the receiver even though I knew I was wasting my time. She had a tape playing. There was no one listening to me. It made no difference. If I cut the call off she just rang again and played the tape. My answering machine tape at the office had been filled, night after night, with a stream of abuse and threats. It seemed she wanted to make me suffer for ruining her life, but how, when and why I’d done this was never made clear. She wept, she raged, she swore. If there was a theme to it, it was that there was no love in the world—due to me. She certainly knew something about me—the abuse contained names and mentioned places and events that were familiar, but there was no pattern to them, no clue to her identity.

  I’d had to turn the fax off. She fed reams of newsprint through, eating up my fax paper. Tying up the phone and forcing me to kill the fax was costing me business. I’d changed the office number, which was a nuisance in itself, but now she’d got onto the home number and was doing the same thing.

  I left the phone off the hook which meant that no one could get in touch with me. What use is a private detective who can’t be phoned or faxed? What was I supposed to do—walk down George Street with a sandwich board advertising my services?

  I was thinking these thoughts as I sat by the useless phone with a big Scotch in my hand at 4 o’clock in the afternoon—at least two hours before my big Scotch drinking time. I wanted to curse her, but how do you curse someone you don’t know, whom you’ve never met?

  It started with a phone call. ‘Mr Hardy, my name is Maureen Hennessy and I’d like to meet you to discuss a very delicate matter.’

  I could remember the voice, just. There was nothing distinctive about it. A normal voice. Like mine. ‘Yes, Ms Hennessy. Would you come to my office and we can …’

  No, she couldn’t come to the office and she couldn’t explain why. Could we meet at the Archibald Fountain in an hour? I’d had some odd meetings at odd places in my time but that was a first. Why not? I thought. I had nothing immediately pressing to do and it was only a short walk down the way. I showed up and she didn’t. I walked around the fountain in the sunshine. Everybody looked impossibly young. I began to feel like a fool. I started peering at women, wondering. If this went on too long I’d be arrested as a public nuisance. Did I feel I was being watched? The thought occurred to me and as soon as it did I had the feeling. Big help.

  I went back to the office via a William Street pub where I had a couple of drinks to wash away the feeling of foolishness. The first of the messages was on the tape.

  ‘Hardy, you prick. You cocksucker. I saw you there—six foot one of pure stupidity. How did it feel to be waiting for nobody? That’s what it’s like, arsehole. That’s what it’s fucking like!’

  I was so shocked I didn’t do any of the things I should have—checked the t
ime, taken the tape out and kept it. When I got over my surprise I shrugged, rewound the tape and got on with things. One of those days. But it turned out to be many days, running into the second week and a serious nuisance. After that first one, the messages were always recorded with the voice slightly distorted. The stuff coming through on the fax was simply sheets of the Sydney Morning Herald cut to fit.

  After a few days of this I rooted back through all my files to see if I’d ever done anyone by the name of Hennessy an injury. The files only went back six or seven years. I was buggered if I was going to keep nearly twenty years worth of useless paper just to feed the silverfish. Also I’d lost some stuff when I’d moved office after a couple of shotgun blasts had rearranged the first one. I’m not a good record keeper; things tend to get scrambled, and I’m not patient when it comes to going through them, especially if I’m in an evil temper.

  So I wouldn’t swear to it, but as far as I could tell I’d never had a client by the name of Hennessy or an enemy or a friend in the past seven years. To the best of my knowledge, the only Hennessy I’d ever come up against was the brandy in the bottle, and not much of that since the recession. I went through again, looking for the initials MH and came up with a few, but all men and either dead or harmless. The message on the home phone worried me. It meant she could have the address. What next? Dog turds under the front door?

  The problem was, I couldn’t see what I could do about it. You can change phone and fax numbers as much as you like, all you’ll do is piss off your friends and clients. There are ways of finding out the numbers. I was in very bad odour with the New South Wales police force just then as a result of finding evidence that cleared a guy they thought they had dead to rights in a fraud case. In any case, I couldn’t see myself going to them and asking for a number trace. For harassing phone calls? From a woman? I’d be a laughing stock.

  I told Joan Dare about my problem over dinner in an Indian restaurant in Glebe.

  ‘Your trouble is, you’re a linear thinker,’ Joan said. Joan is an ex-lover. We have a meal occasionally and talk, usually about sport, politics and mutual acquaintances. She has her life all straightened out. She edits a gardening magazine and has brought her two great passions—gardening and writing—together.

  ‘I know I am. It’s the only way I can think. What would a non-linear thinker make of it?’

  We were pushing the remnants of the pappadams and chutneys around. I’d drunk most of the bottle of Wolf Blass but that was all right because I could walk home. Joan is nervy and thin and can’t hold much drink, so she tends to favour expensive wine and enjoy the glass or two she has. The Wolf Blass had hit the spot. She sipped at the tiny amount she had left. ‘You’re thinking in terms of a woman from the past with a grudge against you. Right?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Don’t. Think of a man who’s out to get you here and now. You’ve admitted business has ground to a halt. I can see that you’re rattled.’

  I nibbled at a fragment of pappadam. ‘Very devious.’

  ‘Worked, hasn’t it? If you’ve neglected something you should be … Don’t stare at me like that. You look as if you want to break my nose.’

  ‘Tommy Aarons! I forgot all about him.’

  Joan snapped her fingers. ‘There you are. Now you know where to go looking. Don’t tell me the details. Just thank me nicely, buy me a cup of coffee and I’ll be on my way. Glad to be of service.’

  That’s pretty much what happened. Joan and I had had a tortuous affair way back when I’d used her as a port in the storm of my marriage to Cyn. She’d endured it for her own reasons for a long time, then she’d shut me out of her life for years. These days we were comfortable with each other’s surfaces—friends. I kissed her goodnight. She got into her Honda Civic, parked beside the building that houses the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre, and drove away. I set off for home almost at a jog, thinking about Tommy Aarons.

  Tommy was an ex-boxer, ex-copper turned security guard. He’d saved some money and borrowed some more and set up his own small security firm. It was nothing fancy, just half a dozen men and three women, providing light-duty bodyguards and surveillance, checking for insurance claim cheats, shoplifters and pilferers, strictly small-scale stuff.

  I’d first met Tommy back in the old days when he was a very promising middleweight and I used to knock around with the boxing crowd. Learning from experience was Tommy’s great strength. A hiding from Wally Carr took him out of boxing and into the police force; it was a very short time before he realised how slow promotion was unless you were prepared to do certain things and lick certain arses.

  Tommy discovered that there were many more private security guards in the state than police officers and pondered the fact. He took his minuscule superannuation and his considerable skills and built on them. We’d stayed in touch as beer-drinking and sparring partners, bemoaning the declining quality of beer and the state of boxing, and he’d asked for my advice when he was setting up his business. Everything had gone nicely until a month or so ago when one of his female employees had charged him with sexual harassment.

  This was a particularly vexing problem for Tommy. He was a discreet, selective, non-demonstrative, non-political homosexual.

  ‘My sex life’s almost as dull as your average straight’s,’ he once told me. ‘I’ve never … well, I’ve never done a lot of things.’

  The obvious defence wasn’t available to him. Tommy had built his business on stature and reputation: 184 centimetres, 80 kilos; former number two contender for the Australian middleweight title; senior constable, New South Wales Police Force. No room in there for anything pink. He asked me to investigate Liz Richards, the woman who’d brought the charge. I agreed because Tommy was a mate and because I thought it unlikely that he was guilty.

  Still, I was reluctant to take the matter on because it was a messy, nebulous kind of thing. Tommy was an attractive man; Ms Richards, to judge from her photo, was an attractive woman. Who was to say what went on in the realms of fantasy and make-believe?

  The few preliminary enquiries I made confirmed this reluctance. It looked to me as if Ms Richards could be a lesbian. According to Tommy, she shared a flat with another woman who was seldom around and favoured mannish sports jackets worn with straight-leg jeans and medium heels. Hard to tell. The scenario hadn’t appealed to me; the hearing seemed a fair way off and I had shamefully neglected the matter when ‘Maureen Hennessy’ hove into view.

  Now, the Aarons case seemed to have possibilities to line up with Joan’s lateral thinking. I convinced myself that this was the way of it. Tommy’s accuser, or an accomplice of hers, had cooked up the strategy to deflect me from my obligation to Tommy. It had bloody nearly worked. I only had two days now to turn up something useful on Liz Richards. I went to bed full of resolve and purpose which an empty bed only intensified.

  The next day I swung into action. I put messages on the answering machines containing veiled hints to the caller that I was onto her and that I was going to see that she’d suffer penalties under the several laws she’d broken. I’d torn up the last vast ream of faxed newsprint and turned the machine off. Now I scrabbled around in the office rubbish bin, thankfully unemptied, and recovered the top sheet which, of course, contained the number of the sending machine. I wrote out a message in block capitals using a thick marking pen:

  HARDY TO YOU. I KNOW WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT. SEND AS MUCH CRAZY SHIT AS YOU LIKE, IT’LL ALL HELP TO HANG YOU.

  I phoned Tommy, told him I was sorry about my slackness and promised him I’d work around the clock. I then set about a proper surveillance of and enquiry into Liz Richards and her flatmate, one Marion Jacobi. Ms Jacobi was tall, slender and red-headed. The brief I’d been given by Tommy—‘mannish sports coats, etc.’—was very misleading. That night she wore a drop-dead, knee-length black silk dress, high heels and a white jacket. She and Liz Richards, who was attractive in a heavyish way, met two very attentive men for dinner at a Bondi fish restaur
ant, pushed on for a frisky drink at a club in Edgecliff and wound up in Potts Point being squired through a huge security gate into an apartment block that looked like something out of old Hollywood with a touch of old Morocco. I went home confused.

  One of the strange things about these harassment matters is that the accused and the accuser usually continue to work together. It’s as if they’re bound together by the matter at issue and neither can surrender any ground. Liz Richards went to work and stayed there all day. You can’t watch two places at once efficiently, but it wasn’t far from Tommy’s offices in Bondi Junction to the Richards’ flat in Paddington and, as far as I could tell, Marion Jacobi spent the day inside.

  I’d pressed a lot of buttons that morning and tapped into the sources we private enquiry agents have for finding out your golf handicap and whether your ingrowing toenail is on the left foot or the right. When I got back to the office in the mid-afternoon (no abusive phone messages, no newsprint fax), I hauled in the catch and came up with nothing useful. If anything, the information seemed to confirm what had been denied by my experience the night before, that Liz Richards and Marion Jacobi, who was a qualified physiotherapist working from the flat, were lesbians. They belonged to the same gym, went on holidays together and shared the household expenses. But they signed no letters to newspapers, subscribed to no lesbian publications and didn’t put on sequins or leather for the Gay Mardi Gras.

  I tapped the office cask of white wine and sat down to think things over. In New South Wales sexual harassment claims were sometimes made to the Anti-Discrimination Board which then attempted to conciliate the matter. Liz Richards hadn’t gone that route. She’d filed a civil suit which, if successful, put her in line for heavy compensation from the offender. That was the root of Tommy’s trouble. When he’d come to me he’d talked of cases where a quarter of a million dollars had been awarded to the victim.

  ‘I operate on a margin, Cliff,’ he’d said. ‘Something like that would put me out of business.’