by Peter Corris
Glen was gathering up her things, a bag, sunglasses, keys. ‘You’re not even listening. You don’t give a shit!’
That got me out of my chair. I was suddenly aware of a gap, a yawning empty space, not between us, but in me. I moved towards her, reaching out.
She dodged and headed for the front door. ‘I’ll call you, Cliff. I’ll call you soon.’
I stood in the middle of the room listening to the sounds of an empty house-the refrigerator hum, the banging back screen door, the creaks and rattles. Glen’s cup sat on top of a book that balanced precariously on the arm of the chair she’d been sitting in. The book was Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore. I’d lent it to Glen with a strong recommendation. I realised that she’d brought it back and left it behind. I had an almost physical need to discuss the book with her, to learn what she’d thought of it. I didn’t even know whether she’d read it, and it looked like I never would. There was something bleak and final about the empty cup and I took it through to the kitchen and rinsed it, losing it among the other cups and plates and cutlery I’d rinsed or half-washed over the past few days.
I stood at the sink and let the emptiness take me over. I’d felt it before-when Cyn walked out on me, finally, and when Kay Fletcher had relocated to New York, and when Helen Broadway had gone back to her husband and child. The moment had an unmistakable smell, taste and feel to it, and each time it came, I never knew whether it was painful or somehow welcome. Frank Harkness, the eye doctor who I’d bodyguarded a few years back, had told me that the only antidote to one woman was another. But he’d found the ultimate cure in his wife, putting him a long way ahead of me.
In my brief discussion with Oscar Cartwright the night before, I’d negotiated a working agreement for the conditions to apply to my temporary appointment. They included very flexible hours, the right to continue working on cases I already had on hand and a relaxed dress code, very relaxed. In return for these concessions I agreed to scale down from a BMW to a Commodore. I’d made a crack about the chiefs driving foreign cars and the Indians driving Australian-made. It got a sort of a grin and Oscar said he’d consider changing the policy.
‘It’s a contra-deal situation,’ he’d said.
I asked him not to use language like that and got a laugh. I was a laugh a minute that night. These thoughts kept jumping in my head as I shaved and showered and got ready to go to the first regular job I’d had in almost twenty years. My arm was stiff but I exercised it brutally and at the end of the session in the doorway and on the floor I was sweating so much I had to shower again. I ran the water on the shoulder as hot as I could stand it and then cold and the equipment felt looser when I finished. One area of improvement.
It was almost midday and I felt justified in drinking some wine with my toasted cheese sandwich. No gin. I cleaned up the kitchen, put some clothes on to wash and phoned a courier to transport the dinner suit back to the hirers. I couldn’t stand the sight of the thing. I was dressed in my lightweight grey suit when I looked out the window and saw the grey sky and the blowing leaves and a neighbour wearing a sweater. I changed into dark trousers and leather jacket and took off the tie. I knew what I was doing, fiddling about, wasting time, putting off the moment. Washing the teapot my mother used to call it. I rang for a taxi to take me to work.
16
Oscar must have worded the casino staff up that I was a low-key type who didn’t require the red carpet treatment. Maybe the leather jacket was a bit too low-key for them, but at least I was wearing a clean shirt. I was shown to my office and introduced to Marie, my secretary for the duration. Marie was what you would call a big woman, close to 180 centimetres and heavy with it. She was dark-haired and vivacious, a toey character who looked as if being busy was her main joy in life. I was feeling tired already and I had to pump myself up to match her energy. From what I’d seen of the personnel so far, the casino resembled a TV studio in that every woman had a claim to good looks of one kind or another. The men were a good deal plainer.
Marie watched me try out my chair and desk for size and fiddle with some of the fittings. Then she handed me a printed sheet. ‘I always had a daily schedule drawn up for Mr Galvani and he’d work through it. We were getting to be a team. I was very sorry about what happened to him, Mr Hardy. I liked him a lot.’
‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘Please sit down. What would you consider being a team to be like, Marie? And the name’s Cliff.’
She sat and visibly relaxed into the chair. She was a comfortable kind of woman who liked to be at her ease. OK with me. ‘Generally speaking, I’d give him too much to do in a day and he’d run himself ragged getting through it. Then I’d over-compensate and give him too little and he’d be twiddling his thumbs. Getting the right balance is what I’d call teamwork.’
‘Couldn’t he initiate things himself?’
‘Leaving space for that is good teamwork!’
Bossy, but not overbearing. I grinned. ‘I get it. Well, for me, I think you should start out with the lightest schedule you can imagine and we’ll work up from there.’
‘Beginning tomorrow?’
‘That’s right. I’d like to have a little time to myself just now. No calls, no interruptions. Say, half an hour, and then I’d like to see Messrs Ralston and Carstairs. D’you think you could arrange that?’
She glanced at her watch. ‘They come on at four. I could send them straight up.’
‘That’s would be fine. What’s my title here again?’
‘Security Controller.’
‘Just tell them that the new Security Controller wants to see them. No explanation, no name. OK?’
She smiled, apparently enjoying the notion, and left, no doubt to plan what she considered a light program. I waited until the door was closed before taking off my jacket and draping it over the back of the chair. The air-conditioning kept the room at a comfortable temperature for any kind of dressing. Whether it was any good for thinking I didn’t know. Marie had given me a set of keys and I unlocked the top of the big filing cabinet that stood against the wall opposite my desk. It held a few thin files scattered among the divisions in the first drawer. The other drawers were empty. No problem to shift, even for a man with a crook arm.
I dropped a telephone directory on the floor, rocked the filing cabinet and slid the directory under it. I crouched and slid my hand into the gap. My fingers closed over the spiral binding of a notebook and I pulled it out. I restored things to normal and took the book back to my desk. Scott’s writing wasn’t neat but his notes were legible. The first dozen or so pages dealt with the Cornwall and Roberts cases. As I’d expected- records of interviews and telephone conversations, dates and times, scribbled phone and fax numbers, addresses and tentative conclusions. He kept a running account of his expenses and several receipts and dockets were stapled to the pages. Good work, conscientiously carried out. Full marks.
Two blank leaves followed and then the pages were written on again, more than a dozen of them. The only trouble was that every single word was written in Italian. My Italian is virtually nonexistent-limited to ordering certain items of food and drink and odd phrases picked up from books and the movies. Knowing Scott, these notes were probably filled with Sicilian slang and shorthand expressions and his own brand of abbreviations.
I flicked through the pages and could distinguish only words like ‘casino’, ‘Sydney Casinos’, and names like ‘Cartwright’, ‘Kemp’, ‘Anderson’. There have to be other names, I thought and I looked carefully for them, examining each page as if the meaning of the words might miraculously become clear to me. It didn’t and I had to conclude that if other names were mentioned, they were entered in some kind of code.
The intercom buzzed and I shoved the notebook in a drawer and pressed the button.
‘Mr Carstairs and Mr Ralston are here, sir.’
‘Send them in.’
I was standing when the pair entered, both looking apprehensive. Honest employment in their line of work is hard to c
ome by in a recession. Both did a double-take when they saw me.
‘Jesus,’ Carstairs said.
Ralston groaned. ‘Fuck me. This is the sack, then?’
Both wore neat suits, were well-groomed and bright-eyed. But it’s my belief that most of the evil in the world is perpetrated by men in suits. ‘I don’t think so, boys,’ I said. ‘Have a seat and let’s talk’
Stocky Carstairs unbuttoned his jacket as he sat down. Skinny, balding Ralston looked the more uptight. He sat and fingered his moustache.
‘As far as I’m concerned you two were just doing your job last night. Did it pretty well, too. If I’d known this was coming up,’ I waved at the office, ‘I’d have offered you some money to lay off me. Just to see your reaction.’
Ralston stiffened and I remembered where I’d seen him before. He’d been a Homicide detective back in the days before they split up the special squads. Fatter then and with more hair. I couldn’t remember the case or what our contact had been like. I wondered if he did.
‘We’d have knocked you back,’ Carstairs said. ‘Happens all the time. The job’s too good to risk it for something like that.’
I nodded, swivelled around and opened the bar fridge. I took out three stubbies of Toohey’s Draught and put them on the desk. I opened them and slid two towards Ralston and Carstairs.
‘Let’s have a drink to get this on a friendly footing.’
Carstairs reached for his bottle but Ralston shook his head. ‘Not allowed to drink on duty.’
I said ‘Cheers’ and drank. ‘Like when you were on the force, Mr Ralston.’
He nodded, ‘I remember you, too, Mr Hardy.’
‘We didn’t have any trouble did we?’
‘No.’
‘OK. You don’t have to drink if you don’t want to, but this isn’t any kind of a test. I’m the boss here for a while and if I say you can drink, you can drink.’
‘Right.’ Carstairs took a long swig.
Ralston gazed at the open bottle with burning eyes and I saw his whole history in that look. The lost weight, the precise movements, the raw nerves, the restrained emotions. Poor bastard. He was a dried-out drunk and I felt sorry for putting temptation in his way. I took a bottle of mineral water out and passed it across to him, sliding the beer towards Carstairs.
He took it gratefully and drank.
‘How did you get along with Galvani?’
The bad moment, the worst of moments, having passed for him, Ralston relaxed a little. ‘He was shaping up well. Bright bloke. Bit young for it maybe. Len had his doubts, but I thought he was ok.
‘His mind wasn’t on the job,’ Carstairs said. ‘Simple as that. He did what he had to do and did it pretty well, but he could’ve been a bloody sight better if he’d given it a hundred per cent.’
I drank some more beer and Carstairs did the same. Ralston sipped at his drink. ‘He was still working on a couple of cases from before taking over here. I’m afraid I’ll be doing the same.’
‘More to it than that, I’d say.’ Carstairs drained his stubby.
‘Either of you got any ideas on who killed him, or why?’
‘What is this, Hardy?’ Ralston burst out. ‘Are you really the boss here, or just investigating Galvani’s death?’
‘Easy, Keith,’ Carstairs murmured.
‘Good question,’ I said. “The answer is both, and I want some help from you two. Help me with this and I’ll give you a very big rap to the bloke who takes over from me.’
The two exchanged nods and Carstairs reached for the second bottle while Ralston worked on his moustache and the mineral water.
‘I spotted someone last night-a short, dark guy getting into a silver-grey Mercedes outside. This was when I was leaving. I only got a glimpse of him and I didn’t get a good sight of the licence plate-KI, might have been an F or an E, and there was a zero in the numbers.’
‘Not much to go on,’ Ralston said. ‘You couldn’t run an RTA computer check on that.’
‘I know. But does it ring any bells?’
Carstairs made a movement as if to loosen his tie, but he checked it. It was odds-on he was an ex-cop, too. He had a lot of the moves. ‘Shit, Mercs are like fleas on a dog around here, and dark, stocky guys’re about the same. Still, we can keep an eye out, right, Keith?’
Ralston nodded. He looked worried and I wondered if that was just a facet of his battle with the booze or if another talk with him might pay dividends. A 4 p.m. start was ideal for someone in his condition-it’d get him past the six o’clock horrors and with any luck leave him tired enough to sleep when he knocked off. I thanked them both for their cooperation and they got up and moved towards the door. Carstairs buttoned his jacket and swung around with his hand just touching the knob. Another old cop trick. ‘That woman with the Beretta…’
‘She won’t be around.’
He nodded and I could see that he was looking at the fresh scratch on my face, trying to read something into it. He and Ralston trooped out, looking a lot more comfortable than when they had come in. That was good. They were allies of a kind, and I needed all the support I could get. Carstairs’ appraisal prompted me to consider my quick answer and led to the thought that Vita Drewe could be one of those women who harassed and pursued those who had offended them-made late night phone calls, heaved bricks through car windows, poisoned pets. I might have deserved it, but I didn’t need it, not now.
17
As I’d expected, the casino job was routine followed by more routine. It was a fairly quiet night I was told, and I walked through my various duties without any difficulty. My visit to the cash collection room was brief. The sight of so much money, even though it was what they called a low count on a quiet night, was numbing. I had a very acceptable light meal in the executive dining room and before knocking off at 1.30 a.m., dog-tired, I checked with Ralston and Carstairs. No sightings of the Merc and their discreet, they claimed, enquiries hadn’t yielded anything. I’d already taken possession of a Visa card with a credit limit greater than all my personal cards lumped together. Now I was handed the keys and security remote controller for a fully-fuelled, current model, maroon Holden Commodore. A long-term Falcon man, I felt like a traitor driving it away, but after a kilometre or so I decided that the only thing I didn’t like about it was the colour.
Back in Glebe, I squeezed the Commodore into a parking space-an action certain to anger my neighbours. One car per house was the unspoken rule. Inside, I approached the answering machine with trepidation-half-wanting a message from Glen, fearing one from Vita. The only message was from the video store requesting the return of Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives, now long overdue. I’d watched it with Glen and I seemed to recall that her response had been strange, not nearly as accepting of Woody’s propositions as usual. I’d put it down to a reaction to all the publicity over the split with Mia Farrow and the molestation charges. Now, I wasn’t so sure, and it all seemed to have taken place in another life.
The cat reminded me that some things never change. I opened one of the tins Glen had bought and it sniffed at it and mewed, probably protesting at the drop in standards from the supposedly-fit-for-humans tuna.
‘That was an aberration,’ I told it, ‘in many more ways than one.’
It ate about half of what I’d doled out, leaving the rest for the cockroaches, before jumping out the window without so much as a grateful leg rub, I trudged up the stairs and fell into bed with Scott’s notebook pushed under the pillow. I fell asleep with the bedside light still on and dreamed that I was working in a Las Vegas casino, wearing a maroon tuxedo with a green ruffled shirt. I kept trying to slip into a toilet to remove the clothes but Carstairs and Ralston continually barred my way. Vita Drewe was a topless croupier, swinging her breasts from side to side as she leaned over the roulette wheel. Winners got to cup their hands around her breasts as she shovelled chips at them. Losers were marched away by Ralston and Carstairs. I must have rolled onto my shoulder because I woke up with
pain shooting through my arm and neck. I stumbled downstairs for painkillers, thankful that the dream had ended.
I woke up at about nine and made my first mistake of the day by reaching out for Glen. Not good to come up empty on your first move. I calculated I had about seven hours of being a private eye before I had to be a security controller again. I examined my face in the mirror as I shaved. The bruises and puffiness had almost gone and the scratch was little more than a dark line. Glen was right-I was a quick healer.
Primo Tomasetti used to run a tattoo parlour in Darlinghurst near my office building. I used to rent a parking space from him before the council introduced a sticker system for residents and commercial users. AIDS had done a lot of damage to the tattoo business, what with the heightened awareness of the dangers of contaminated needles and blood, and Primo had switched horses. Unbeknown to me, he had owned the freehold on the building he’d worked out of and he sold it for big money to a developer who’d gone broke trying to turn a buck on the property. Primo, a movie buff but a practical man, had set up a small production company making promotional and instructional videos and films for corporate clients. His office was in Bondi Junction, in the shadow of the freeway. I drove out there in the Commodore with Scott’s notebook in my pocket and a hundred questions in my head. Primo’s new office was on the tenth floor in a tower block and his secretary recognised me from earlier visits and told me that he hadn’t come in yet.
