by Peter Corris
“I hope so. I’ve got something on but it should be worked out by then, one way or another. Remember the guy we met at Trueman’s?”
“Oh yeah, the actor. His bird was missing. Rushed her?”
“Not yet. Now the other favour.”
He looked quickly down at his typewriter, picked up a pencil and made a note on the copy.
“Are you sure you’ve got the time Harry? I’d hate to throw your schedule out.”
He looked embarrassed. “Shit. Sorry Cliff. It’s this piece on Moody. I want to get it right.”
“Read A. J. Liebling. Who’s your top crime man?”
“Garth Green.”
“Good memory? Knows the files?”
“Steel trap.”
“Will you introduce me to him?”
“Sure, when?”
“Now.”
He looked relieved and jumped up from his chair.
“Steady,” I said. “Are you sure he’ll be in?”
“He’ll be in.” Tickener came around the desk. “He works till two p.m. and drinks till two a.m. Let’s go.”
I followed him. There were a few people walking about in the corridor and a small clutch of reporters was grouped talking in a doorway. They parted like the waters when a six-foot girl with close-cropped red hair walked through the door. She was wearing boots, a long dark skirt and a tight-fitting jacket and she carried her head like a Queen. She had a high, proud nose and big dark eyes in a face as pale as a lily. I gaped with the journos but Harry seemed not to notice her and kept on his way. I wondered about Harry. He knocked on a door which had stuck to it a file card with the name garth green typed on it in lower case.
Tickener pushed the door open and I went in after him. A big man in shirtsleeves with heavy striped braces was sitting in a swivel chair looking out the window. With his grizzled balding head and meaty arms he looked like a cop which probably helped him in his calling. Looking out the window was probably a good idea for a crime reporter too. As sure as hell there’d be some of it going on out there. He turned slowly round to face us.
“Hello boy wonder,” he said.
“Harry laughed a little more heartily than he needed to. “Garth, this is Cliff Hardy, he . . .”
“Private man, I know.” He leaned forward to shake hands. “Glad to meet you.” I trusted him with my hand and he gave it back to me undamaged.
“Hardy’s on a case Garth, and he could use some help. I thought you might have something for him. OK?”
Green waved at him and pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket.
“I’ve got a piece on the run,” Tickener went on. “I’ll just get back to it.”
Green waved again and Harry gave me a nod before he scampered off.
“Good bloke, Harry,” Green said. He lit the cigar. “Doing well too. What can I do for you? Who do you want the shit on?”
“Not like that. It’s criminal history I’m after.”
“Why don’t you ask your mate Evans?”
“You’re well informed.”
“Good memory,” he grunted. “Read Harry’s stuff on the Costello case. You’ve got the right contact there. Evans is an honest cop.”
“That’s right and so I can’t use him right now. I’m in a bit too deep and there’s things I’d rather not say.”
He grinned; his big, boozy face broke up into amiable creases and more grizzled grey hair poked out of his nostrils. “I get like that myself sometimes. Let’s hear it. I’ll help if I can.”
I reached over and stubbed out my cigarette in the half tobacco tin he used for an ashtray. “It’s pretty general. What do you know about crimes, solved and unsolved, up around Macleay way?”
“A bit — when are we talking about?”
“Twelve years ago, maybe longer.”
He leaned back, took a drag on the cigar, sucked the smoke in and blew it at the ceiling. The action brought on a coughing fit which left him red in the face and clutching the edge of his desk. “I’ve tried everything . . . fucking pipes . . . these things.” He waved the cigar. “All the same, I have to do the drawback. All I want to do is smoke fifty plain Turf a day like I used to.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Too scared.” He put the cigar down; a thin column of smoke rose up from it like an Apache signal. “Macleay . . . not too hard to name the big one, bank job in . . . sixty-six.”
“What happened?”
“Two men did a Commonwealth bank on a Friday. Took away fifty thousand dollars.”
“Never caught?”
“Not a sign.”
“The money?”
“Never found. The bank put up a big reward but heard nothing.”
“That’s strange. Did you cover it yourself?”
Green picked up the cigar again. There was a faint curl of smoke coming from the end and he sucked it into life., blowing out an enormous cloud. He looked at it virtuously. “Yeah. I went up there and looked around. Thought I might get onto something and make a big man of myself. Nothing doing. It was a pretty amateurish job. They got away on foot. Dead lucky.”
“How did the cops figure it?”
“Same as me, two roughies who got lucky. The cops dragged in everyone they could think of but got nowhere. I wrote a piece on it . . . hang on.”
He lumbered over to a battered filing cabinet under the window. He pulled out a drawer and riffled through the folders standing up inside it. He took one out and back to the desk where he opened it and leafed through some foolscap sheets with news cuttings pasted to them.
“Yeah, here it is.” He handed the sheet across to me and I ran my eye over the columns of newsprint. It was a straight recital of the facts including a description of the bandits who’d worn stocking masks and carried sawn-off shotguns. I pushed the sheet back across the desk. Green fiddled with his cigar and looked at the wall over my head. His eyes screwed up and he let out a tired sigh. His first drink was still a good way off.
“Yes?” I said.
“I remember now, there was a whisper about it. They were trying to fit someone up with it, a standover man with some local form.”
He butted his cigar and a smell that would soon be a vile reek started to sneak across the desk towards me. I thought that it might help his anti-drawback campaign if he smoked better cigars. I was about to say so when he started drumming his fingers on the desk.
“I’m slipping,” he grumbled. “Can’t remember his name. Look Hardy, I’m rambling. This of interest to you, this the one?”
“It could be — missing money sounds right. What about the standover man?”
“The name’s gone but he went up for rape in Newcastle, young kid. He got ten years.”
I heard something click inside my head like a combination lock tumbler coming into place. I sat up sharply. Green looked amusedly at my reaction.
“That’s right, they didn’t have anything much on him for the Macleay job as I recall, just something about the company he kept. The cops were just as happy to do him on the rape charge. It was open and shut.” He leered at me and I winced at the joke. He laughed. “Now you look interested.”
“I am. I see a connection. How can I get some dope on this rape case?”
“I thought you were interested in lost money.”
“Yes, and lost women. Let me get it straight before I go off half-cocked. What was that about the company he kept, the rapist?”
“Jesus Hardy, it’s twelve years ago. I might be confusing it with something else.” He picked up the sheets of paper, aligned them and tucked them back in the folder. Handling the relics of the time gave him assurance. “I think it was just that this bloke, whoever he was, used to hang about with an Abo up Macleay way.”
“So what? There’s lots of them up there.”
“That’s right but you didn’t read the story very thoroughly did you?” He handed it back to me and I read it word by word. One of the tellers said that one of the bandits looked dark under the mask, like an Abori
gine. The thing was coming together now. I passed the cutting back.
“Pretty thin.”
“That’s what I said,” Green barked. “Macleay’s a racist hole; was then anyway, probably still is. It wasn’t much to go on but it was the only whiff the coppers had.” He blew a kiss at the wall. “But it died on them.”
I leaned forward, excited. “I’m sorry to press you, but the names are important, is there any way to get on to them?”
“Sally Fitch would be your best bet. Get at it from the rape angle. What she doesn’t know about criminal fucking isn’t worth knowing. I’ll take you along.”
We left the room and he moved along the corridor in that light, fast way that some big men can. He must have weighed sixteen stone and no-one got in his way. He nodded to people and I kept an eye out for the crew-cut redhead but she didn’t show. Green poked his head through a door then went in and I followed. It was another thirty-desk room with a good deal of noise and screwed up paper. Green ushered me across to a corner where a pot plant, a hat stand and a filing cabinet sheltered one desk a bit from the hurly-burly. He introduced me to the woman behind the desk; they ribbed each other about their drinking, smoking and other vices. Green shook my hand again and went away.
Sally Fitch was a lean blonde in her thirties. Her hair was rather faded and she showed signs of wear and tear; there was a scar running down the left side of her face that she covered with make-up. She was a good-looking woman, nonetheless. She lit a cigarette and looked me over with steady green eyes that wouldn’t be surprised at anything, not even if I leaped up that minute and threw myself out the window.
“What can I tell you that Garth can’t, Mr Hardy?” she asked. “Like those virtuous private eyes I can say I don’t do divorce work.”
I laughed. “I do when I can get it. It’s getting rarer.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Divorce is?”
“No, the dirty work those virtuous private eyes say ‘I don’t do’ to.”
She tapped ash off her cigarette and pushed it about in the glass ashtray. “Good thing too. Mine was as dirty as you’d hope to see. Well then, what?”
“I want to know all you can tell me about a rape case in Newcastle around 1966 or ‘67 — all the names, all the details. I don’t have time to look up the papers and my guess is it wouldn’t have made the papers anyway.”
“Why?”
“If I’m on the right track, the girl involved would have been a juvenile, very much so.”
She drew on her cigarette and let the smoke trickle out through her nostrils, an unusual thing for a woman to do. On her it looked amusing and I grinned. She didn’t notice. She scribbled “1967” and “Newcastle” on a blotter in front of her and drew lines around it. She embellished the lines, producing an ornate, curly doodle, then she got up and pulled a drawer out of her filing cabinet. Two drawers and some vivid swearing later she lifted out a thin manilla folder. A glossy photograph slipped out and I bent to pick it up.
“Hold on!” She came around the desk and retrieved the picture. “I don’t just hand this stuff out willy-nilly.” She smiled and softened her voice. “Anyway, don’t steal my thunder.”
I nodded and waited while she looked through the papers. There wasn’t much to it and it didn’t take her long. She closed the file and looked up.
“I think this is the one you want. The girl was fifteen, Newcastle, May 1967. It was a bit out of the ordinary; the girl knew the man who raped her. She knew the woman he lived with better. And the girl reported the rape to the police herself. There was a short piece, no details, in the Newcastle paper. No reporting on the trial, that’s the law.”
“Yes. You’ve got the names though?”
“Uh-huh. The girl was Naomi Rouble, the man was Joseph Berrigan. The woman he lived with was Patricia Baker.”
I nodded. “That’s it. It makes sense in a crazy way. What about the photo?”
“The girl. It was taken when she came out of the police station — suppressed of course.” She slid it across the desk. The hair was wild and dishevelled, the eyes were puffy from crying and it was eleven long years ago, but the face was unmistakably that of Noni Tarelton.
13
By the time I’d thanked Sally Fitch, looked in on Tickener and cleared the building (no sight of the redhead), it was midday. The streets were crowded with people doing their lunchtime shopping and gawking. George Street was a solid wall of bodies coming the other way and I gave up the battle and ducked into a pub to drink my lunch and do some thinking. I had a steak with the wine and turned the case over in my mind. A constant stream of smooth-voiced chatter from the businessmen pushing out their waistcoats with expense account lunches didn’t help, but then there wasn’t much to think about. Noni Rouble-Tarelton was on the run with a man who’d raped her eleven years before. He’d killed one person since getting out of jail and savagely beaten two more, both women. Now it looked like he was a blackmailer. There were still questions on all this but a few answers were coming in; the bank robbery and fifty thousand dollars was part of it. On the ethical side was the question of when to let the police in. That troubled me. It always does.
I walked up George Street through the thinning ranks as the slaves went back to work. The rain had cleared away and a pale sunlight was dappling the footpaths and glinting on the oil slicks on the road. I hailed a cruising cab and said I wanted to go to La Perouse. The cabbie was a chunky, greying veteran who looked as if he’d been born behind a steering wheel. He was reluctant about the trip.
“It’ll cost you.”
“La Perouse,” I repeated. “You could get lucky.”
He grunted and dropped the flag. He was sour at the possibility of having to drive back to town without a fare, but every profession has its perils. I settled back and endured his company. The traffic was light and we made good time. Long Bay didn’t look too bad in the sunlight, especially with the new outside walls. Inside them it was a different matter. I directed the driver through La Perouse’s neglected streets and we found the pub where I’d drunk with Jimmy Sunday. I tipped the driver and he forced out some thanks before slamming the door harder than he needed to.
A dark woman was behind the bar. She was sitting on a stool smoking and reading a magazine. Apart from her the bar was empty. I went up and laid a five dollar note on the counter and ordered a middy. She pulled it.
“Jimmy Sunday around?” I asked before she could get her hand on the money. She drew on her cigarette and expelled smoke over my head.
“Might be.”
“Will you have one yourself?”
“Tan.” She flicked out a glass and slid it under the gin bottle in a smooth, practised movement. I waited while she splashed tonic into the glass, dropped in some ice and made change from the five. She took a sip of the drink and sighed appreciatively.
“You know Jimmy?” she said.
“A bit. I was drinking with him here the night before last. Thought I’d run into him again.”
“What’s your name?”
I told her. She drank some gin and pulled on the cigarette, it burned down to the filter and she dropped it at her feet. She was a big woman wearing a blouse and jeans. A packet of cigarettes was in the top pocket of the blouse resting on the shelf of her big, stiffly brassiered bosom. She pulled out the cigarettes and got another one going.
“Jimmy’s around. Could give ‘im a ring if you like.”
“Thanks.” I drank some beer while she went off to the telephone at the far end of the bar. I wandered over to the wall and looked at the sporting photographs that are a part of the decor of all genuine Australian pubs, symbolising some mystic connection between athleticism and alcohol. The pictures were mostly of racehorses, stretched out near the winning post and standing in the victory ring with flowers around their necks. One of the winning jockeys was an Aborigine but none of the proud owners was anything but true-blue Caucasian. There was a collection of boxing pictures and a cartoonist’s attempt at capturing
the mystique of the Sands brothers: Dave, Alfie, Clem, George and Russell stood in a ring with their gloved hands clasped above their heads in the fighter’s victory salute. There was a close-up of dark little Elley Bennett landing one of his famous knockout punches on “Mustard” Coleman and another of Bobby Sinn, face wrinkled with concentration, picking off a bewildered Jimmy Carruthers with a classic straight left.
I turned when I heard the door to the bar slapping shut. I suppose I’d expected Sunday and had arranged my face in a grin but it slid away when I saw who’d come in and what they were doing. Ted Williams was slamming home the top bolt on the door. His companion was making shoo-ing gestures at the barmaid. She ducked under the bar and went out through a back door. I heard a key turn in its lock. Williams’ mate was an Aborigine, very dark and not young. He couldn’t have been more than five-foot-six tall but he must have weighed fifteen stone. He had massive shoulders and a chest like a grizzly bear. He was wearing thongs, jeans and an outsize black T-shirt; his black, wavy hair was slicked down with water as if he’d got out of the shower in a hurry. Williams hadn’t changed a bit which meant that he was still a black Goliath. The only difference was that he’d left his smile in Redfern. I opened my mouth to say something but Williams cut me off.
“You said your name was Tickener mate. Now it’s Hardy. We don’t like gubbs who hang around bullshitting us, do we Tommy?”
The bulldozer shook his head and shuffled forward a few inches.
“No suh, wese don’t.”
I tried to smile but the joke wasn’t for me and my mouth was desert dry. I backed off towards the bar with my near-empty glass in my hand. I wished it was a gun. I wished I were somewhere else. Tommy looked me up and down and came forward again, this time with the light, balletic step of a trained fighter. His massive arms swung loose at his sides and he turned them over like a man cranking a car engine. The bar top ground hard into my spine and there was nowhere else to go.
“Who’re you?” I croaked. “I was expecting Jimmy Sunday.”
He grinned and slammed one fist into a palm.
“Jimmy’s busy,” he growled, “I come to take care of you meself.”
