by Peter Temple
Next, the writing desk. Nothing. Just a pad and two pens. Where would his papers be? I looked in all the obvious places, then the less obvious. Nothing.
Des walked around after me, leaning on the aluminium stick. ‘Anythin about the money?’ he said.
‘Nothing.’
There was a phone-fax-answering machine on the desk. I picked up the handset and pressed the redial button.
Nothing. The last number dialled on this phone had been erased.
The answering machine light was blinking. I pressed Play.
Six or seven calls. Not a single message.
‘When you rang, did you leave messages?’ I asked Des.
He shook his head.
I went back to the kitchen and pocketed the shopping dockets and credit card receipts. On the way out, I had a look in the flat box on the wall under the security monitor. It held a video recorder. Gary could tape his callers. If he got around to putting in a tape.
The front door closed silently behind us. In the lift, I said, ‘I’d say he’s been away a fair while.’
Des shook his head in disgust. ‘Lyin low. Told ya.’
Inside the gate, I offered him the keys. ‘You might want to check Gary’s mailbox.’
‘You do it,’ he said. ‘Me fingers can’t do the fiddly things anymore.’
Box number five was empty.
Outside, Des said, ‘Reckon you could run me home?’
‘Easily. Anyone been asking about Gary?’
‘Ask me about Gary? Might as well ask a bloody sheep where the dog’s gone.’
Des lived in deepest Northcote, near the railway line. As we pulled in to the kerb, two young women, both in black, both with cropped bleached hair, comb number one, nose rings, both carrying plastic shopping bags, arrived at the gate next door. One was a full head taller than the other. Des gave them an enthusiastic wave. They waved back, smiling.
‘Lovely girls,’ he said. ‘Strong too. Mow me lawn. Push-mower. Never asked em. The small one, what’s her name, forget for the minute, one Satdee she knocks on the door, says she’s mowin for exercise, mow anything, free mowin, what about me lawn? I was in that. Thinkin of payin some bloke to do it if I could find the extra. Lots of girls live around here. Mostly girls, really. Bloody paradise for a young bloke.’
I had my doubts about that, but I didn’t mention them.
‘Got the phone on?’
‘Course.’
‘Give me the number. I’ll ask around, give you a call.’
Des studied me. ‘Dead spit of Bill,’ he said with a shake of the head. ‘Didn’t play any footy, did ya?’
‘Not much.’
‘Got photos of the old days. Laurie Diggins used to take em. Mad bugger. That day too, day yer mum read us the bit. Hold on. Give ya somethin.’
He got out. I passed him the briefcase. Watched him lurch up the path, struggle to get the key into his front door. Open. No. More struggle. Wait.
I should have gone with him, helped him.
Open. He’s in. He was gone no more than a minute, came out with a big black album in his hand. Paused at the gate, rested the album on it, leafed through. Found what he was looking for in seconds, put a finger in the place.
He came over to the car, leant down and looked at me. ‘Never took anythin out of this book before,’ he said. ‘The wife kept it up. Gave her all me old photos, ones me mum took, and she kept it up. The Brownie. Box Brownie. Took good photos.’
I said, ‘Des, don’t take anything out of the book. I’ll come around, you can show me the pictures.’
He pulled a photograph out of its corners, offered it to me.
‘The day,’ he said. ‘That’s the day.’
Back at the office, I sat at the tailor’s table and studied the small sepia picture for a long time. My mother at nineteen or twenty was striking, a face of planes and hollows, a wryness in the way she tilted her square chin. Something of her was in Claire, my daughter: the sharp cast of face, the emphatic nose, the quizzical eyes.
Women. For men, all I had on the Irish side was my father and his father in old smoke-stained photographs on a pub wall. It was all I wanted. My mother’s father, I first feared and then loathed. For the rest, women. My grandmother, my mother, my sister, my transient first wife, my daughter, my wife Isabel, missed every day.
Linda, loved, absent, presumably gone.
I shut down on women, turned my thoughts to the home of Gary Connors. There was no toilet bag in the bathroom. The second largest suitcase of a four-bag set, a three-day suitcase, was missing. Gone on a trip. But the alarm system was off. No tape in the security video recorder. And there wasn’t a single personal paper in the place-no letters, bills, statements, nothing.
I had a bad feeling about Gary Connors.
I rang Cyril Wootton.
‘Belvedere Investments,’ said Mrs Davenport, Wootton’s secretary. She was not of the customer-service generation trained to say: ‘How may I help you?’ Indeed, Mrs Davenport addressed callers in the manner in which a boarding school headmistress might speak to a teenage girl whose underwear drawer has been found to contain a choke-chain, a studded leather bra, two dozen condoms and a photograph of the chaplain, naked and handcuffed to a bicycle.
‘Jack Irish,’ I said. ‘Cyril decent?’
‘Mr Irish, this office has spent much of today engaged in an unsuccessful endeavour to contact you,’ she said.
‘The intelligent office,’ I said. ‘I’ve been reading about that. Very edge of the technology. But, I ask you, Mrs Davenport, will there still be a place in commerce for the old-fashioned warmth radiated by such persons as your good self?’
‘Putting you through,’ she said. ‘Mr Wootton, Mr Irish.’
‘Listen,’ Wootton said, ‘I’m just off to meet the persons expected, sworn statements needed today. Persons wish to catch flight home early tomorrow. Your friend wants to present the other side with the two statements tomorrow afternoon.’
‘My friend?’
‘The client is now represented by Andrew Greer.’
Andrew was my former partner, a friend from law school.
‘What happened to Cataneo?’
‘Skiing accident, I gather.’
‘Skiing? Where do you find snow this time of the year?’
Wootton coughed. ‘Exactly.’
‘Encouraging. Why doesn’t Drew do the statements?’
‘In Sydney until midday tomorrow.’
‘Cyril,’ I said, ‘in this matter, I’ve swum in the blue-green algae, snorkelled the solid-matter ponds. Get someone else.’
He sighed, the sigh of a man who has just seen the get-out chance in the eighth miss the start by six lengths.
There was a silence. ‘I have a professional responsibility to my client to act with the utmost expedience,’ said Wootton eventually.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Professional responsibility to the client. Crass of me. Still rooting that hairdresser client whose hubby did a runner with the Tattslotto win? The man you suggested I needn’t hurry to find? Or not find?’
Much longer silence. In the background, men were making playground noises.
‘Jack.’ He was on the verge of saying Please. I couldn’t let that happen.
I sighed. ‘When?’
‘Flight’s due in at 4.30. Say 5.45 tops. Mrs Davenport’s staying on.’
‘Gee, that’s an inducement.’ I paused. ‘I’ve got something I want you to do for me.’
He paused. ‘My dear fellow, you have only to ask.’
‘My,’ I said. ‘By the way, your responsibility is to be expeditious. Expedience you wouldn’t have any trouble with. Second nature.’
8
I was sitting in Wootton’s chair with my feet on his leather-topped desk when the foursome arrived: Tony Ulasewicz, Wootton, the two hookers from the Gold Coast.
‘My lawyer, Jack Irish,’ Wootton said. ‘Jack, meet Sylvia Marlowe and Carlette Foley.’
I stood up and shook h
ands. Sylvia looked achingly like the late Audrey Hepburn on mild steroids. Close to my height in short heels, clear, direct grey eyes, straight and shiny dark hair, almost no make-up, skin like eggshell. She was wearing a two-button pinstriped short-skirted suit, no blouse and her excessively long legs were bare. I took her to be the ex-ballet dancer. Carlette, on the other hand, looked like a pentathlete: short and wiry, cropped red hair, freckles, wide-legged stance, baggy black pants, tight sleeveless black top showing muscled arms. She radiated health and fitness; all she needed was a number written on her bicep in felt-tipped pen.
‘Tony you know,’ said Wootton. ‘Tony flew down with the girls.’
‘With the what?’ said Sylvia, looking at Wootton. She was half a metre higher, stronger and much, much prettier.
Wootton smiled, ran the side of his index finger along the underside of his clipped moustache. In the silence, you could hear a small abrasive sound. ‘Hah,’ he said. ‘Excuse the old-fashioned expression. Absolutely no disrespect intended. Absolutely. With Sylvia and Carlette, two-’
‘I’m sure everyone understands, Cyril,’ I cut in. ‘I suggest you leave me with Ms Marlowe and ask Mrs Davenport to come in and record Ms Marlowe’s sworn statement.’
‘Audio and video,’ said Wootton.
‘Video?’
Wootton went to the desk, beckoned me over and pointed to two buttons on the second shelf of the bookcase behind his chair. ‘When you’re ready, press both. Camera’s focused on the client’s chair. Press both again when you’re finished.’
‘Video all right with you, Ms Marlowe?’ I asked.
She looked doubtful. ‘What’s it for?’
‘Just backup in case the police query your testimony,’ said Wootton. ‘We won’t use it unless we have to. Easier than getting you down here again.’
‘Why don’t I just give a statement to the cops? Cut out all this.’
‘Let’s just say,’ said Wootton, ‘that we’re not entirely confident that the officers of the law always have the interests of justice at heart. I’ll send Mrs Davenport in.’
Mrs Davenport came in and gave Sylvia her disapproving headmistress look. How the patients must have loved her when she was the receptionist for a specialist in sexually-transmitted diseases.
Sylvia looked her up and down coolly. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘now that matron’s here, can we get on with it?’
Both women were smart and articulate and Sylvia took a pleasingly droll view of the world. We had a few laughs in the mere forty-five minutes it took to do the statements. Henceforth it was going to be hard to shake the case that Brendan O’Grady never left the company of Sylvia, Carlette and Tony between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m. on the night Frank Zakia was shot dead in Camberwell. Identity wasn’t a problem.
‘I think I can be said to know what Brendan O’Grady looks like,’ said Sylvia. ‘If necessary, I can supply distinguishing marks and measurements.’
Mrs Davenport’s eyebrows twitched.
‘I don’t think it’ll come to that,’ I said.
Mrs Davenport took fifteen minutes to produce the documents. She brought them in holding them upright by the edges as if to minimise contact with the paper.
I read the statements to each woman in turn, they read them and signed three copies. Mrs Davenport and I witnessed their signatures and she was out of the front door before the ink was dry.
‘I’ll be on my way, too,’ I said. ‘Pleasure to meet you. Have a good trip back.’
Sylvia looked me in the eye. ‘What’s to do in this dump at night?’
I wasn’t tempted. Tempted is a mild state. There is something a step or two up from tempted.
‘I’m sure Mr Wootton will see to it that you don’t want for anything,’ I said.
Wootton was quivering like a retriever waiting for the gunshot. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Booked you into the Sofitel. Everything you want. I’ll come around myself…’
She ignored him, maintaining her disquieting hold on my eyes. ‘Can’t you take care of that?’ she said, wickedness in the tilt of the Hepburn head.
I did the professional smile. ‘Love to but I have to take the children to their school concert.’
She smiled too. ‘Lying. Still, hookers scare some men.’
‘Scare them rigid.’
‘I wish,’ she said. She put out her right hand, suddenly businesslike. ‘Enjoy the concert.’
We shook hands. Our palms made a shell. Then she did a terrible thing: she scratched my palm with the nail of her longest finger. A gentle, sharp stroke of a scratch. An erotic frisson went through me, I fell through time, years dissolved, my legs felt unworthy of my weight.
My mother had a friend, much younger, Jane Beacham, a tall and slim woman, married to a stockbroker. I was sixteen. I have no idea how old she was. We were standing next to Jane’s car, the BMW without door pillars, on the broad driveway of my grandfather’s Brighton mansion. Late afternoon. I remember Jane’s strong blonde hair, roots dark with sweat after tennis, the gleam that lay on her light-brown skin, that she didn’t look at me, that she was looking at my mother, laughing, punching me gently on the upper arm with her left hand, holding my right hand playfully, her palm upward, not letting go.
Then she said, ‘Oh God, the time. Off, off. Lucy, darling, lovely afternoon. Jack, you’re my mixed partner for Portsea. Knock their socks off. People coming for dinner. Boring brokers. Nothing done, absolutely nothing. Neil will be livid.’
I remember the smell of juniper on her breath.
And I remember something else: her eyes locked with my mother’s, she drew a fingernail down the inside of my hand, from the callused flesh at the base of the fingers to the centre of the palm.
And there, in that tender delta, her long nail scratched.
Wanton. Exquisite. Unbearable.
‘Changing your mind?’ Sylvia said, still holding my hand.
I broke the clasp. ‘Another time perhaps,’ I said unsteadily. ‘Cyril, a word.’
He followed me onto the landing.
I gave him a card with Gary Connors’ name on it. ‘The favour,’ I said. ‘Just the most recent spending. Anything with his name on it. Might not be on his plastic. Might have paid cash.’
Wootton didn’t look happy. He didn’t like to use his expensive network of underpaid credit-card, airline and car-hire clerks when he wasn’t making anything out of it. ‘I’ll ring you after 9 a.m.,’ he said. ‘Once.’
‘Thank you. I leave the witnesses in your capable hands. In a very loose manner of speaking. Mind you don’t put it on Bren’s bill.’
Outside the bar door of the Prince, hand raised to push, I paused. Raised voices within. I hadn’t heard the Fitzroy Youth Club so animated since the night it became clear that the Fitzroy Football Club was going to be given to Brisbane. Given with a bag of money.
I pushed, looked straight across the room into the publican’s eyes. Stan was leaning against the service hatch between the bar and what would be called the kitchen if what came out of it could be called food. He gave me a resigned nod.
I sat down on the right flank of the club. No-one paid any attention to me. Norm O’Neill was saying, voice deep and dangerous, hands flat on the bar, heroic nose aimed at the dim, tobacco-dyed, fly-specked ceiling, ‘I suppose, Eric, I suppose, it’s off with the old and on with the new. Easy as that.’
‘Well,’ said Eric Tanner, looking a little shrunken, ‘can’t see the bloody fuss. Always bin me second team.’
‘Second team?’ Wilbur Ong said. ‘Second team? Since when did a man have a second team? Can’t recall you tellin us you had a second team. Bit of news. Bit of a shock. Takes a bit of gettin used to, that idea. Second team. Raises a question or two. How does a man get the proper spirit when his first team’s playin his second in a final? Got an answer to that? Got an answer, have you?’
‘Given the sides,’ said Eric, ‘that’s a bit hyperthetical.’
‘Oh it is, is it? Here’s an example: 1913.’
‘Oh right. Thought it was hyperthetical. Depends on bloody when then, does it?’
Eric sighed, made a gesture of dismissal. ‘Stuck in the past, you blokes. Can’t bring the Roys back, everythin’s moved on. Well, it’s round five and I’m not sittin around here anymore lookin at your ugly mugs on a Satdee arvo.’
Norm O’Neill took a deep drink, wiped his lips, didn’t look at Eric, said at a volume that bounced off the ceiling. ‘Yes, well, off ya go. What’s a lifetime anyway? Saint Kilda’s waitin for you. Club’s holdin its breath. Whole stand’ll jump up, here’s Eric Tanner, boys, welcome Eric, three cheers for Eric Tanner, hip bloody hip, bloody hooray.’
The whole bar had gone quiet. I looked around. Charlie was shaking his head, always a sign that something needed doing. I took a deep breath, cleared my throat. It felt like preparing for my first utterance in court, defending a burglar called Ernie Kyte, a nice man but invasive.
‘Time someone raised the matter,’ I said. It came out loud. ‘Either we go with Brisbane or we go with someone else.’
In the silence, you could hear the screeching complaint of a tram braking on Smith Street, then a match scratched against a box. I was rehearsing back-down strategies when Wilbur Ong let out a long sigh that turned into a low whistle.
‘Jack’s right,’ he said.
Another long silence, Norm stared straight ahead, tugged at a hairy earlobe. I signalled to Stan for a round. He took his time over it. When the last glass was put down, Norm said, ‘Well, bloody Brisbane it’s not. Never. Nothin much against the Saints. Few things but not much. Don’t mind that little Stanley Alves, gets a bit extra out of the lads. Shoulda won the Brownlow in ’75 when they give it to that Footscray bloke.’
‘Not averse to the Sainters,’ Wilbur said. ‘Put me mind to it, I could follow the team. Not the same but I could.’
‘Jack?’ said Norm. ‘Recall your old man used to have a few crafty ales with that Bray bloke, now he was a useful player for the Saints.’
‘Pick of the bunch, the Saints,’ I said.
