by Peter Corris
“Kinky,” she said.
“No, just tucking you in.”
“Tuck me in some more.”
I did and tucking got to touching and we used our hands on each other urgently which, as it turned out, we both liked.
After, she got us drinks and brought them back to the bed. “Pretty good?” she said.
I nodded. “Very, very good. Tell me about your life.”
The drinks were pretty heavily diluted with water, which is the way I’ll always take my second whisky, by preference—especially at 2 a.m. She took a healthy pull on hers and looked up at the high, off-white ceiling. Good teeth, I thought, good everything.
“Where to start? Great question though. Ah … my kid’s name is Verity. Sorry.”
“So you should be. Poor kid.”
“I bowed to pressure.”
“Uh huh. How long’ve you been married?”
“Twelve years, nearly thirteen.”
“This the first time you’ve been allowed out?”
“It’s the first time I’ve been allowed out as you put it, yes. It’s not the first time I’ve been out.”
“You’ve had affairs with men before?” I arranged my face to make sure she knew I was joking.
“Affairs and … honourable stand-offs.”
“I won’t even ask what that means. Are you going to trifle with my affections?”
“Probably.” She slid her hand under the sheet. “I’m certainly going to trifle with these.”
It went on like that until close to dawn. I slept for a while, and when I woke up I was alone in the big bed. There was a small wardrobe in one corner of the room, an upholstered chair with clothes thrown over it, a low table near the bed carrying a stack of books—no other furniture. The heavy curtains over a big window were only half-drawn and light was coming in strongly through the gap. I got up, jerked the curtains apart and was hit in the eye by the view of Elizabeth Bay. The sky was an intense blue and there was a light swell which kept the boats moving at their moorings in a slow, rhythmic dance. From this distance the Darling Point shoreline looked green and unsullied. I went back to the bed, pulled up the pillows and sat and looked at the dancing boats.
Helen came in carrying a breakfast tray; she was wearing the silk thing again and it only looked better for a few creases. As I watched her it struck me that her features looked very different in the natural light. Her nose was still nicely crooked and her dark eyes deep with the fine lines ready to appear; but a tightness was gone, and the pugnacity was reduced. Sex and a little sleep seemed to do her a power of good. Her hair was spiky and sticking up irregularly; I wanted to smooth it down, groom her like a cat.
“I thought you’d be a coffee rather than tea man—toast not cereal, honey not jam.”
“Right three times.”
We settled the tray on the bed, kissed briefly and got into the food.
“Did you tell me anything about the job you’re on last night? I have this weird memory; I forget almost everything I’m told immediately and remember it all much later.”
“No, I didn’t tell you.”
“Are you going to?”
“What’s the point?”
She laughed. “Oh, I can react all right at the time I’m being told. My understanding’s not impaired.”
“I’ll decide according to the quality of the coffee.”
I drank some and she looked at me expectantly.
“Well?”
“The coffee’s good—that means I don’t have to tell you. It’d be a punishment to be told about it.” She punched me lightly, but a light punch from her was a fair tap.
“All right, all right, I’ll tell you.”
“It’s just that I saw the gun, you see. Do you really need to carry a gun around with you when you work?”
I shrugged.
“I’ve never fired a gun in my life,” she said.
“You’re not missing much. I thought all country women kept guns in the kitchen. By the stove. Dumb place to keep it, come to think of it.”
She’d drawn away a bit on the bed and she drank some coffee before answering. “I’m not a country woman, originally. I grew up in Sydney and only moved up there when I married Mike.”
“That’d be when you were about twenty-two.”
“Twenty-one; so you really are a detective?”
I grunted. “So-called. Mostly I go along with people when they move money about, or do things like you saw me doing the other night. I look for missing people, too. That’s what I’m on now, sort of.”
“You don’t have to tell me about it if you don’t want to.”
“No, I don’t mind. He’s not really missing. I saw him last night in fact. He’s the son of the guy who took me away from you at Roberta’s. Remember?”
“I do. I wasn’t pleased. I met him, Mr … Guthrie?” “Yeah. Well, he’s hired me to find out what’s gone wrong with his kid. There’s something bloody funny about it, that’s for sure. I followed the kid and the people he was drinking with last night, and that’s when I ran into the two unfriendly guys I dropped off at your front door.”
I put my cup down, took hers and put it down and gently eased across the bed. I licked my finger and smoothed down her hair.
“I’m not a gunman,” I said. “I’m not a thug.”
“I know.”
“Once in a while things get very heavy in what I do—not very often, not even once a year. I haven’t got a thing about guns. I got a bellyful of guns in the army.”
She grabbed my face, squeezed and kissed me—she was a very physical woman. “We’ll leave the army for later. I don’t think I could remember any more.”
She lifted her arms and I pulled the robe up and off. We remembered some of the things we’d done in the night and tried out some new ones.
Later I showered and dressed, and wandered around the flat scratching at my heavy beard. She made a few phone calls, and her movements suggested that it was time for me to be on my way. I helped her pull up the bed; we stood on opposite sides of it and looked at each other.
“You’re smiling,” she said. “You don’t do that all that often.”
“Wait until you know me better. Sometimes I smile all day. Do nothing else.”
“I’d like to see that.”
For her, that was a commitment. I felt I could presume just a little. “You’ll see it. What’re you going to do today?”
“Going out—lunch.”
“What’s a good time to ring you?”
“No special time. I’m busy being free. Why don’t you give me your number? Let impulse rule.”
I wrote the number down for her, and she let me out of the flat and the building. I could feel myself smiling again as I walked down the sunny street.
I took a good look along Greenknowe Avenue and around a few corners before I approached my car. It was after 10 a.m. and the parking ticket was fluttering on the windscreen. There was no one watching the car that I could see. I drove to St. Peter’s Lane and left the car where it costs me ten bucks a week to park rather than twenty-five a night, and went up to my office. I was still smiling and even whistling—something that gives pleasure to no one but me—as I climbed the stairs.
No water view here, no high ceilings with plaster roses and soft, off-white paint. The office has cream-coloured walls which are trying to turn green of their own accord, and a ceiling so stained and dirty it looks as if it could once have been the floor. The filing cabinet has a typewriter sitting on it with a cover to keep the dust out; nothing keeps the dust off the windows or the desk top. You have to pay for a view and plaster roses and clean paint—the dust is free.
I wrote out a cheque for the parking ticket, put it in the envelope provided, and felt virtuous. I entered the fine in a notebook under “expenses” and felt businesslike. There weren’t many entries under “expenses,” and I couldn’t decide whether to feel economical about that or non-industrious. I took the spare electric razor from the de
sk drawer and went down the hall to shave and clean up. A quick wash and mouth rinse, and I was ready to add something to the expense list.
I sat in my swivel chair that has given up swivelling, put my Italian shoes up on the desk and thought about Helen Broadway. I wanted to ask her what part of Sydney she’d grown up in, and what she’d been doing on 11 November 1975. I wanted to know if she played tennis and if she’d read The Great Gatsby. I wanted to know what she liked to eat besides toast and drink besides coffee and scotch. But right now Paul Guthrie was paying and I’d have to wait until I was on my own time.
Primo Tomasetti, the tattooist who rents me my carparking space, has a darkroom in his place of business. If walls could speak, those of his darkroom would tell Z-rated stories. I walked into the tattoo shop, held up the film cassette from the miniature camera and Primo nodded. He was working on the very large forearm of a biker who was watching the work, with his lips moving. The needle buzzed like a tormented bee.
“What’s that, Primo?”
He kept his dark head with its wild, uncombable curls bent over the arm. He looked up to a sheet of grubby paper with typing on it and then back to the job. His white coat was spotless as always, he wore Italian shoes too but his were pointed.
“Rules of his club, Cliff.”
The biker glowered at me and pushed back his thick, greasy hair with his free hand.
“Good idea,” I said. “What’s the first article?”
Primo looked up enquiringly at the customer who gave him a sullen nod and me a look of hostility mixed with suspicion. But he was pleased with what was happening, and it made him half-civil.
Primo tested his handiwork by reading directly from the skin: “No member shall use a machine of under 1500cc.”
“That lets me out,” I said. “Everything set up in the darkroom?”
The camera uses a standard 15 mm film, and processing these days is child’s play even to the technically handicapped like me. I did the things you do with the solutions and pegs and fixative and came up with my usual result: two of the four profile shots were blurred, the others were okay. Only one of the almost full-face shots was worth looking at but it was pretty good. You wouldn’t have called “the cop” photogenic, but the camera had caught the full venality of him, the forcefulness of the fleshy face and malevolence of his down-turned mouth. The face stood out clearly against the indistinct background—if you knew him in life you’d know him from this picture.
I ran off a few copies, cleaned up my own mess the way my mother taught me, thanked Primo and went off to phone Frank Parker. He was at home, doing nothing, and invited me over to see him.
“Bullet-proof vests?” I said.
“Tennis gear, we’ll have a game.”
Frank’s place was in Harbord and the suburb looked particularly well on the clear, bright day. The street was middle-income, middle-mortgage territory. Frank’s house was one of the smallest; he must have been one of the few residents without children. Signs of them were everywhere around the other places—bikes, toys, and icy pole wrappers trapped at the feet of gate posts.
Frank was already in his tennis clothes; I went inside and changed into the down-market tennis gear I keep in the car—and we walked a couple of blocks to the local courts. Parker’s house had a strange, alien air to it and he seemed glad to be out on the street. He was nervous though, and he bounced the balls continually on the walk.
The three cement courts had good surfaces and clear markings. Parker spoke briefly to the manager, who lived in a house beside the courts in what looked like happy semi-retirement. The nets were in a big box; Parker dug one out and we got set up. There was no one else around to play and it occurred to me that Parker was a sitting duck if someone wanted to take him out now. I mentioned this while we were measuring the net.
He whacked the top vigorously. “Anyone thinks I’m going to sit around going crazy, they can think again. I’m not sure those go’s at me have been fair dinkum anyway.” We satisfied ourselves about the net height and Parker nudged his racquet cover with his foot—the shape of his pistol was clear under the vinyl.
It became obvious almost from the hit-up that Frank was about a 10 per cent better tennis player than me. His backhand was confident, mine isn’t. He’d even learned how to impart some topspin to it, a thing unimaginable in the days when I learned to play. Against that, he had a tendency to hit his serve too hard which made him liable to double fault. He had quickness and range at the net, but lobbing was my forte.
It was a beautiful day, and Liam Catchpole and murderous Mazdas and police corruption seemed far distant things as we played. We both had authoritative forehands, and some of our best rallies were of that standard that lifts you out of yourself and gives you a glimpse of what real sporting excellence might be like.
Frank won the first set 6-3; I pegged him back in the second when the double faults began to creep in and I got a good percentage of my lobs over his head and in. At 6-all we decided to play a lingering death tie-breaker, which I won 9-7.
It was good to be walking back with a sweat up, despite the beginnings of a blister on my hand. Frank had stopped bouncing the balls.
“Kenny Rosewall grew up around here,” he said. “Played on those courts.”
“Yeah? I wonder where he is now?”
“Dallas, Miami, one of those places.”
“Ever see him?”.
“Bloody oath. I saw him beat Hoad for the Australian title in 1955. Straight sets.”
“Remember the score, Frank?”
“Never forget it: 9-7, 6-4, 6-4. Amazing man.”
“That’s right. What d’you think of Cash?”
We talked tennis until we got back to his empty house. I showered and changed, and joined him in the kitchen.
“I don’t eat lunch,” he said. “How about you?”
“Don’t care. How about some coffee?”
“Right. Can you get through to six without a drink?”
“If I have to.”
He laughed. “Same here. But I’m doing it. Worst possible thing for a man in my situation would be to go on the grog. I haven’t done anything about your enquiry yet. Anything new?”
The kitchen was small compared to the one in Helen’s flat; it was more modern but, oddly, less practical. There seemed to be gaps in the equipment, and a shortage of spoons and crockery which reflected the departure of Nola. The bathroom had a spartan, austere air, and it looked as if the rest of the house would rapidly get that way too. Frank made coffee in a twelve-cup filter machine, and he did it neatly and efficiently, as if he enjoyed it. All Parker’s work that I had seen was neat and efficient.
He poured two big mugs, set the milk and sugar down on the table and eased down into a chair.
“Pretty fair work-out,” he said.
I put my photographs on the surface and swivelled them around to face him.
“That’s young Guthrie,” I said. “You’d know Catchpole and Dottie Williams—question is, who’s the other joker?”
He sipped his coffee and studied the pictures carefully.
The coffee was strong, but a touch bitter. I wouldn’t have minded some lunch—you can’t be too careful about getting a low blood sugar level.
“He looks familiar, but I just don’t know. He’s a cop, wouldn’t you say? Or was.”
I hadn’t considered the “was” angle. “That was my impression. I didn’t speak to him, mind.”
“I’m not surprised. He doesn’t look as if he’d go in for the small talk all that much. Where was this, by the way?”
I told him about the events of the night before, editing slightly. Parker was smart enough to do his own filling in. My account upset him: I’d seen an academic learn that one of his students was a spook and a union leader find out that his right-hand man was in the pay of the bosses. Frank’s reaction to my tale of the two police types in the Cross affected him the same way.
“You didn’t hear anything, I suppose?”
> “Shit, no. I kept my distance.”
“Wise. You should know what to look for, did you pick up anything at all from the way they acted?”
“The dark guy’s the boss. There’s something on between Dottie and the kid—she was feeling his bum.”
“Brilliant. Can I keep one of these?” He took one of each photograph.
“Sure. Look, this might be indelicate, but I’m on good expenses for this job and …”
“You wound me, Hardy. You wound me deeply.”
8
We left it that Frank would get in touch with me as soon as he had anything useful. I told him I’d have a word with Tickener about a former senior police officer prepared to make revelations. I couldn’t tell whether or not Parker was serious about that; it would have gone against at least one of his prejudices—a belief that all journalists were frustrated somethings-else; and therefore untrustworthy. The tennis, the lunch-skipping and the abstinence suggested to me that Parker had action in mind rather than talk.
When I got back to Glebe it was after four o’clock, much closer to six than twelve and, therefore, by that logic, time for a drink. I changed my underwear and socks and tucked the denim shirt into my pants—a complete re-vamping of the wardrobe for me. The gun was in a clip under the dashboard of the Falcon. I was working on a big white wine and soda, sucking at the ice, when the phone rang. Helen Broadway, I thought, no, not yet.
“Hardy? This is Paul Guthrie.”
“Yes, Mr Guthrie?”
“Ray’s been here. Everything’s a shambles. Could you come over?”
“Where’s here?”
“Northbridge; you’ve got the address!”
“I’m coming. Anyone hurt?”
His voice was a bitter rasp. “Physically, no.”
I gulped down the rest of the drink and hurried out to the car. It wasn’t a good time of day to negotiate the approaches to the Harbour Bridge, the bridge itself or the exits, and the going was slow. The traffic stayed sluggish on the other side and it wasn’t familiar territory to me. I had to jockey for the correct lane and I’d forgotten that the Cammeray bridge goes over parkland, and not water. But I found the turn-off and followed the golf course boundary into the heart of the suburb.
