The Big Drop

by Peter Corris

  ‘Piss off, Hardy.’

  ‘Don’t be like that ‘Woolfie’, we’ve got things to talk about.’

  ‘Yeah, like why you belted up the “Bomber”.’

  ‘The “Bomber’s” not even a Tiger Moth anymore, you know that.’

  ‘I’m busy, Hardy, I don’t need your crummy jokes this time of the day, or anytime.’

  ‘Busy at what?’

  He glared at me and lit another cigarette from the stub of the last. His teeth were as brown as his fingers and the air was like in a billiard room at midnight. I didn’t want to spend anymore time with him than I had to. I took the sheets of paper out and smoothed them on his desk top.

  ‘Oldest one around, Holland, someone used it on Mae West when she was a girl. How’d you get yourself fixed up to do the investigation?’

  What passed across his face almost made me feel sorry for him; it was a ‘Oh no, caught again!’ look combined with a flicker of hope that I didn’t have the proof and maybe a bit of bluster coming up.

  ‘You used the paper cutter across the road on the note and the copies, sport—that puts you right in it.’ I blew on my palm. ‘There goes your licence. What’s a three thousand dollar fraud worth these days? Couple of years?’

  He put down his cigarette, dropped the hand to a drawer, slid it open and pointed a dusty-looking .38 at me. I laughed.

  ‘Don’t be silly ‘Woolfie’. I don’t want you. I’ll take the money out of your hide if I have to, but I don’t want you.’

  The gun wavered and he put it down and picked up the cigarette again—easier to kill yourself than someone else.

  ‘What d’you want?’ he croaked.

  ‘Whoever put you up to it. Whoever wrote the reports and stands to gain. Straight deal—you tell me and I don’t tell anyone how naughty you’ve been.’

  He groaned. ‘She’ll kill me.’

  We went across the hall to Chloe Smith’s office, and as soon as ‘Woolfie’ came in, with me manful and commanding by his shoulder, she knew that her latest dream was a fizzer. She was a redhead, redder now than she had been once, and the dye job had hardened her features. Her thin face was beaky and aggrieved despite the touched up brightness of her eyes and lips. She looked at ‘Woolfie’ as if she was seeing him as he was for the first time.

  ‘He knows,’ she said.

  ‘Woolfie’ nodded and dropped into a chair in front of her desk. He dislodged a pile of manuscripts which cascaded over the floor in their loose-leaf binders, manilla folders and exercise books. There were a lot of manuscripts in the room and the shelf that carried the line ‘Client’s works’ had only a few, thin volumes on it.

  As it came out it was a typical loser’s story. Smith and Holland had convinced each other that they could pull off the big one—that ‘Woolfie’ could milk Carla Cummings for enough money to enable Chloe to put on a good enough front to get Cummings to come over to her once ‘Woolfie’ had sown enough seeds of doubt about Thackeray. She showed me the letterheads she’d had planned and told me about the flash office she was going to rent in Paddington. Smith had got wind that Cummings’s next book was to be a private eye yarn and ‘Woolfie’ had turned up at the right time—just after the letter about Thackeray had been delivered—to offer himself as an informant initially and then as an investigator.

  ‘It wouldn’t have worked,’ I said. ‘She has this yachting type with capped teeth sniffing at her for his ten per cent, probably others as well.’

  Chloe flared at that. ‘It would have worked! Reginald would have influenced her to accept my services.’

  ‘Reginald Who?’ I said. ‘Woolfie’ lit another cigarette.

  ‘What are you going to do, Hardy?’ he asked.

  ‘How much of the money can you give back?’

  He shrugged. ‘Half.’

  ‘I’ll take that and talk to Thackeray and Cummings. She might think she got her money’s worth in a funny way. You never know, ‘Woolfie’, you might end up in her next book.’

  I smiled, but they didn’t. I got a cheque from ‘Woolfie’ and got out of his office before my clothes smelled as bad as his. For no good reason I’d brought The Singing Gulls with me from home, and I grabbed it out of the car and went back to Holland’s office. He looked at me through the haze with red, tormented eyes.

  ‘What now, Hardy?’

  I threw the book on his desk. ‘Read that,’ I said. ‘Part of your punishment.’

  Rhythm Track

  He was wearing the oldest T-shirt I’d ever seen; it was a faded blue, tattered around the neck and sleeve ends, and had holes everywhere. The almost obliterated letters across the chest read CREDENCE. His thin, nicotine-stained fingers flew across a couple of thousand buttons and switches, then he sighed and poured himself a cap full of Jack Daniels Tennessee whisky. He tossed the drink off, capped the bottle and picked up an electric guitar.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ I whispered.

  ‘Rhythm track,’ Vance Hill said. ‘Shh.’

  I shushed and watched the strong fingers dance along the frets as he strummed; his long black hair flopped as he jerked his head convulsively. After a few seconds he nodded, flipped a switch and the studio filled with the music. He strummed and jerked for a few seconds and the jumpy chords he was hitting seemed to sit in the air in front of him. I wanted to tap my foot but kept it still. After a few seconds he said ‘Shit!’ and hit a button. The music stopped.

  He took another drink and lit a menthol cigarette. When he turned around to face Hill he looked about five times older than his fifteen-year-old T-shirt.

  ‘You hear it? Nowhere near blappy enough. I can’t get it. I try for more blappy and I just get blah-balah. We need Tim.’

  ‘Easy, Con, we’ll get him. This is Cliff Hardy, he’s a private investigator—finds people. Right, Hardy?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said. I nodded to Con, who acknowledged me with a double puff on his cigarette. ‘You seemed to be doing all right to me.’

  He shook his head. ‘I was doing lousy. I’m a keyboards man. Without a good rhythm track this’ll sound like shit.’

  ‘I just brought you in here to give you the feel, Hardy.’ Hill said. ‘Let’s go outside and talk. Don’t worry, Con.’

  ‘I won’t breathe either,’ Con said. He pushed some more buttons and we went out of the studio.

  The place was packed into a high, narrow-fronted building in Annandale. Outside the studio door there was a narrow passage leading to a narrow office and reception area. Hill waved me into a chair and lifted his hand to a young woman who was answering a telephone behind the glass panel. She grimaced and made a throttling motion with one hand.

  ‘Want some coffee, Hardy? Drink or anything?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ I got out my notebook and balanced it on my knee. The denim under it was fashionably faded but unfashionably thin and non-stretch. ‘Tim Talbot’s his name. That real, or nom de stage?’

  ‘Real. Tim’s a studio muso, I doubt if he’s ever been on a stage.’

  ‘Introvert?’

  Vance Hill looked as if he’d heard the word before but couldn’t quite remember what it meant. The young woman came to his aid. She’d slipped out from behind the glass and into a chair near mine.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He is.’

  ‘Hardy, this is Ro Bush. Ro, Cliff Hardy.’

  We nodded at each other. She was a brunette with very white teeth, lustrous brown eyes and an athletic figure. I was nodding in approval as well as greeting. She wore a white sleeveless top and jeans, no jewellery, short fingernails and an intelligent expression.

  ‘Tim’s shy,’ she said, ‘withdrawn even. He doesn’t get on with many people. He’s also tremendously talented.’ She shot a look at the door that led to the studio which I interpreted as saying that not everyone on the premises was equally talented.

  Hill leaned forward in his chair. ‘Like I said on the phone, we’re working on the theme song for The Dying Game. Great song, sure hit. Tim wrote it and start
ed on the recording with Con and a couple of others. The vocal’s fine and we can probably do something with the bass track, but there’s some mandolin to go on and a rhythm track needed. Tim’s the only guy who can do it. Jesus, just the rough demo he laid down sounds a hundred times better than anything else we’ve tried.’

  ‘When’s the last time you saw him?’

  Hill looked at the woman. ‘Week ago?’

  She nodded. ‘Week and a day.’

  ‘Why’d he leave?’

  ‘He had a fight with Sport and Con,’ Ro Bush sighed. ‘And me and Vance for that matter.’

  ‘What sort of fight?’

  ‘Artistic,’ she said. ‘Tim didn’t want strings and choir, he wanted a smaller, rougher sound.’

  ‘Won’t do,’ Hill snapped. He was about my age or a bit younger but his energy seemed to have run out. He wasn’t fat, but tired and slumped he looked it. His skin was greyish and his eyes had an unhealthy, fishy look. ‘This is for a movie, a big movie; it opens with wide shots, we’ve gotta have the treatment on the song.’

  Ro Bush shrugged the way you do when you’ve heard something twenty times before. ‘Tim argues the opposite—big visuals, small sound.’

  I grinned at her. ‘Who’s right?’

  ‘Tim,’ she said.

  Hill groaned. ‘The money’s right, like always, and the money says give it the treatment. Christ!’

  ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Back and forth for a few hours, then Tim storms off—this is around dawn you understand—and that’s the last anyone’s seen of him.’

  I scribbled. ‘This is Tuesday, a.m.? Right?’

  Hill nodded.

  ‘How much booze?’

  ‘In who?’

  ‘In everyone.’

  ‘Lots,’ Ro Bush said. ‘There always is, they were all drunk except me. I get sick if I drink very much.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  Hill shrugged. ‘Sometimes, not that night I don’t think.’

  ‘Talbot uses drugs?’

  ‘They all do,’ she said. ‘Tim’s no different.’

  ‘Terrific. Okay, well I’ll need the names and addresses of all the disputants, picture of Talbot, some ideas about his friends, how he spends his time and so on. Who can give me that?’

  ‘I can.’ She got up and went behind the glass. I thought there was something shifty about the look Hill was giving me and there was no point in just noting the fact in my notebook.

  ‘This doesn’t quite hang together, Mr Hill. The police could look for him, or his Mum or someone. What do you know that I don’t know?’

  Hill made a face like a man having wind trouble. ‘You said it before—Talbot’s heavily into drugs. He’s supposed to be clean at the moment but this could’ve set him off. If the cops find him they could have something on him—he’s no good to me in Long Bay.’

  I grunted. ‘Exactly who is who around here?’

  ‘I’m the boss of the record company, independent outfit—Centre Records. I’m the executive producer on this movie theme. Ro’s the manager of the studio here, smart girl.’

  I’d been around long enough to ask the right question. ‘Executive producer, who’s the actual producer?’

  Hill looked even more uncomfortable. ‘Not settled,’ he said. He handed me a card and a plain door key. ‘Can I assume you’ll do it?’

  ‘I’ll take a look, sure. A hundred and twenty-five a day and expenses.’

  ‘My number’s on the card. That’s a key to Tim’s place.’ He took a deep breath and tried to straighten his shoulders. He went back towards the studio and the shoulders had slumped again after the first step.

  ‘Here you are, Mr Hardy.’ Ro Bush handed me a typed sheet and a magazine clipping. The photo showed three men lounging against a big convertible which was full of musical instruments. The car had STEAM CLEANING stencilled on the side. One of the short fingernails touched the faces. ‘That’s Sport Gordon, that’s Jerry Leakey, don’t know what happened to him. Here’s Tim.’

  Talbot looked ill at ease in the company of the others; he was hanging on to the neck of a guitar sticking out of the car like a boy holding his mother’s hand. He was thin and young with a lot of hair; the thinnest part of him was his nose which was long and looked to be scarcely wider than my little finger. A crease ran across Jerry’s face which was perhaps symptomatic, but Sport Gordon presented full face and full force. He was muscular in a singlet and tight jeans, looking like young building workers do before the beer gets to them.

  ‘Steam Cleaning were pretty big a year or so ago. Sport did the vocal for the theme song by the way.’ Ro Bush smelled of something good and as she didn’t come much above my shoulder it was easy to sniff without being impolite.

  ‘Hill said that Talbot wasn’t a performer.’

  ‘He’s not, not really. Steam Cleaning were more of a studio band. They did some gigs, a few big ones too, but Tim played with his back to the audience most of the time.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of them,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t mean much, the last live band I saw was the Rolling Stones.’

  It wasn’t the way to her heart. ‘We call them the M’n M’s around here.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘You know—the little sweets, like smarties.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Also the multi-millionaires. See?’

  ‘I suppose so. What happened to . . . Steam Cleaning?’

  She shrugged. ‘They broke up. Nothing unusual—problems between Sport and Tim. They were the writers.’

  I couldn’t resist it. ‘Like Lennon and McCartney? Jagger and Richard?’

  ‘Mm, I don’t think they’d be flattered by the comparison.’

  ‘How come Sport’s singing now, then?’

  ‘Oh, that’s not strange. Tim’s the writer and the producer, and he picks the vocalist. Sport’s got a great voice.’

  I stored away the difference between Hill and Bush on the producer question and looked at the sheet. There were half a dozen names and addresses including Sport Gordon and Ro Bush. She studied me as I studied the list.

  ‘I consider myself a friend,’ she said.

  ‘We all need them. Thanks Miss Bush.’

  ‘Ro.’

  ‘Okay.’ I tapped the paper. ‘Music and cars?’

  She nodded. ‘Tim builds them, modifies them, drives like he plays—excellently.’

  ‘How much looking has anyone done?’

  ‘Not much. Vance called in at his flat. Nothing there. I rang Sport and Ian—they’re on the list. They hadn’t seen him. His family’s interstate, Brisbane I think.’

  ‘You’re the only woman on the list.’ I looked at her enquiringly.

  She shook her head. ‘No to what you’re thinking. He’s shy.’

  ‘I really need to know the economics and politics of this. This record’s important to who?’

  ‘Everyone: Vance needs a hit to get his label moving; Tim and the other session musos all need the money; Sport’s doing all right solo but he could use a hit single; the movie needs its theme.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘We get paid for the studio time. Doesn’t hurt to have nurtured a hit but there’s nothing riding on it for me, really. I’m worried about Tim, though.’

  ‘You sound like the only one who is. Hill’s worried about his hit and Con’s worried about his blaps.’ I looked at the paper again. ‘Con’s not on it.’

  ‘Con’s a creep and he’s out of his depth. I’m sorry, I have to get back to work. There’s more than one bloody record being made here although you wouldn’t know it sometimes.’

  I took a card from her too and went out onto the street. It was 11 p.m. an unusual time to start on an investigation but Hill had told me when he’d phoned in the afternoon that the musicians didn’t start work until night fell and kept at it until dawn. He’d wanted me to get the feel and I suppose I had: booze, drugs, temperamental outbursts and blaps all being recorded on thirty-tw
o tracks. I couldn’t help thinking of post-1970 pop music as a sick combination of adolescence and money; I didn’t feel comfortable with the matter but then, I’d once found a missing Jamaican marriage celebrant who’d specialised in Rastafarian weddings and I hadn’t felt comfortable with him either.

  Talbot’s address was in Glebe, handy to home. I drove down towards the water and took the last turn to the right. The street was dog-legged, with big buildings on either side. Talbot’s flat turned out to be a bed-sitter in the back of a house that had no water view. I picked my way down the dark corridors where one light in three worked. The key turned easily in the lock and I stepped into a room of stale smells.

  I have a friend who claims he can tell how much time has elapsed since anyone farted in a room. He says it’s never very long in a lived-in place. I’d have bet on a week here. The room had a bed, some books, three guitars in cases, a saucer with a few roaches in it and a pair of jeans, three T-shirts and a zip jacket. The guitar cases were the only items that got a regular dusting. The kitchenette had a half-loaf of green bread and a lump of ant-covered butter on a laminex table and a few basic bits of cutlery. There was milk in the fridge and some cans of Country Special beer.

  I opened one of the cans, sat on the bed and drank it. No letters from Brisbane, no suicide note, no ripped mattress, no blood. The room was neither cheerful nor depressing; there’d be some natural light in the daytime and it seemed quiet now. The carpet didn’t stick to the feet and nothing big scuttled in the corners. I finished the beer and belched—that’d have to do for occupancy. I let myself out and drove home.

  The next two days’ work was just as unprofitable. I tramped around the addresses Ro had given me and used the phone like Billy McMahon. In a city restaurant I talked briefly to Sport Gordon, whose chief amusements seemed to be flexing his muscles and shaking his head. I listened to impossible jargon in shops that specialised in gear for customising cars.