by Peter Corris
“He’s in love with the land,” she said.
“Uh huh.”
“He’s writing a book about it.”
“When? In his sleep?”
I only got information about her by way of trade. She’d been a librarian in Sydney before meeting and marrying Michael Broadway, teacher turned gentleman farmer. She’d done a degree by correspondence, and got first class honours in English.
“I’m depressed,” I said.
“Why?”
“I dropped out after one year of Law. I passed Constitutional History and Criminal Law—failed Contracts Torts.”
“What’re Torts?”
“I forget.”
Helen’s advice on my professional problem was to get hold of Ray Guthrie, tell him everything I knew, and detach him from the criminal element.
“He might be part of the criminal element himself by now,” I said. “And there’s his attitude to his real father to consider. I just don’t know how powerful a feeling that is. You’re a parent, tell me about what children feel for their parents.”
“Parents don’t know what they feel.”
“There you are, then.”
“It sounds as if it’ll all end in grief,” she said. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it sounds to me.”
“That’s why I have to stick with it and see it through in something like Parker’s terms. Not exactly his, but to some sort of resolution. If I’m on the spot, maybe I can cut down on the grief a bit.”
“I hope so.”
My arrangement with Parker was to meet him back at my place at around seven. That gave me several hours for my long shot. Mahoney Place is a narrow, one-way street in Surry Hills which runs off South Dowling Street, opposite Moore Park. I left my car in a lane nearby and walked in the park for a while, watching some kids risking their lives at grass skiing. I was trying to change gear out of “tenderness” and into “work.” Kids having a good time on the grass didn’t quite do it—maybe if one of them had broken his neck.
Right now, “work” meant going to make enquiries about a private detective named Phillips; “loathsome” in at least one person’s memory, who had pursued our noble calling in Mahoney Place twenty years before. It was hard to do without at least one decent drink inside me.
The street was narrow enough for a ball thrown against a brick fence on one side to rebound and hit the opposite fence on the full. That’s if you were good enough to judge the force and distance right; the kids who were playing this game halfway down the street were good enough. There were two of them—Mediterraneans—taking it in turns, I grinned at them and they stopped to let me pass—the coordination and the sweat on their faces was reassuring in the pinball age.
Number 32 was a white-painted brick wall, built on the street line with a door in it, no window. TOTAL GRAPHICS was painted in red on the bricks in metre-high letters. I knocked, reflecting that maybe I’d be more successful if I called myself TOTAL INVESTIGATIONS.
The man who opened the door looked pretty successful in his field, if clothes maketh the man: he wore a velvet shirt open to the waist, revealing a bushel of hair and a kilo of gold charms and medallions. His legs were stick-thin inside tight leather pants. His head was shaved and he wore a diamond stud in one ear. The shaved head gave him that exhibitionist look it always does. Otherwise, he was normal. He went back inside as soon as he’d pulled the door open and I had no choice but to follow him.
It was a long time back since it had been a private detective’s office. That would be just a bad memory. Now the deep, narrow room was scrupulously clean. Light came in through a bank of skylights high up on one wall. A long bench held half a dozen VDT screeens, each with a chair in front of it. There was a large bank of Swedish-looking storage baskets filled with paper and a bookcase half-filled with books whose spines looked all the same. A desk as big as a pool table was covered with coffee-making gear—an urn, filter machine, a grinder, packets of coffee, and filter papers.
Baldy practically ran back along the bench and threw himself down in front of one of the screens.
“Be with you in a minute,” he said. “This is nearly out. Bloody exciting.”
Nice to see a man happy in his work, I thought. I closed the door behind me and walked in. “Graphics” suggested paper and pens to me, scissors and set squares. Apart from the paper in the bins there was nothing like that. A big photocopier was in the corner, and here at least there was some frivolous paper—a big poster of Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane—1 was surprised it wasn’t a holograph.
The bald man’s hands danced over the keys and he tapped his sneakered foot as if he was playing Scott Joplin. I looked over his shoulder but couldn’t make anything of the zig-zag flashes that appeared on the screen.
“Got it!” he bawled. “Fucking A!” He swivelled around and stood up. Two long strides took him to the coffee table, and his leather pants didn’t split.
“Coffee?”
“Okay. Thanks.”
He shovelled coffee into a filter paper, fitted it into the machine and poured the water from a plastic jug. The machine was already hot, and the water hit the element with a loud hiss.
“Boil the water first. That’s the secret.”
I nodded. “I boil the water and then pour it in on top of the powder.”
He shrugged, stagily. “Barbarian. Well, what can I do for you?”
He took two polystyrene cups from a metre-high stack and set them on the table. He put two spoons of raw sugar into one and looked enquiringly at me. I nodded and held up one finger—I thought I might need the energy to keep up with him. He jigged while the coffee dripped through.
When the beaker was half-full with liquid the colour of shellac, he poured.
“Here you go. I live on the stuff—it calms me down.”
I drank; the coffee was strong enough to clean drains.
“I’m trying to locate a man named Phillips.” I put the cup down, dug out one of my cards and handed it over. “He was in the same business as me, and he had an office at this address. Some time back.”
He looked at the card and shook his head. Dead-end, I thought. “You don’t know him, that right?”
He fiddled with the stud in his ear. “I didn’t say that.”
“You shook your head.”
“I was shaking my head at the terrible design of this card.” He flicked it with his forefinger’s long nail. “Look at that lettering. De-pressing! That’s no way to win business, Mr Hardy.”
“I’ll get a new one designed,” I said. “I might give you the job if you can help me.”
He did some more stud twiddling. “Have a look at this.” He rummaged in a drawer and came up with a pile of cards held together with an elastic band. He flipped one over to me like a croupier. The words TOTAL GRAPHICS stood out black and bold against the gold background.
“Very nice, Mr …?”
“Style—Ian Style, good name isn’t it? It’s my real one, too.” He finished his coffee and poured another; I was still waiting for my tongue to stop throbbing. “You’re right, one Phillips had this place before me. That’s oh … seven years back. You should have seen it. A real mess.”
“No style, eh?”
He looked at me. “Oh, God,” he groaned. “I think I stopped counting remarks like that at about five thousand.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. Yes, Phillips. I kept getting mail for him for years. The re-direction system has never been very effective.”
“Where did you send it? Do you have an address for him, did you write it down?”
If he had had any eyebrows they would have shot up, but his head was quite hairless. “Write it down! No chance. We’re computerised here—totally.”
I smiled, although I didn’t think his joke was so much better than mine.
“I’ve got it on file.”
“I’d be grateful if you’d give it to me. I need to see him, urgently.”.
“Do I get
the re-designing job?”
“Sure.”
He got up and bounced across to one of the consoles. His fingers got busy, and symbols began scrolling on to the screen. I sneaked a look at the bookshelf—all computer manuals. He punched a key and froze the image.
“Here it is. Joshua Phillips, 33A MacDonald Street, Erskineville.”
I went back to the nineteenth century, and wrote it down.
“When was the last time you got mail for him?”
The screen came alive again and froze.
“About this time last year. An envelope, private. Nothing ever came back. Does that mean the address still applies?”
“I hope so. That’s amazingly efficient; I should get a system like that.”
“You’ll be out of business in five years if you don’t. More coffee?”
I refused the coffee, thanked him for the help and he said he’d submit some designs for the card. I thanked him again and let myself out. By that time he was sitting down at a keyboard again and the sneakers were beating a tattoo.
Erskineville has been hit by the middle class money only in patches. Most of it retains the old atmosphere of toil—awkwardly angled streets built for foot and horse traffic, and a mix of residential and factory buildings. A few of the terrace houses are wide and rise to three storeys, but most are more modest and some get down to the narrowness of 33A MacDonald Street. The house was so narrow that my car, parked exactly outside, seemed to overlap its boundaries.
The tiny place crouched behind a privet hedge three or four metres back from the street; that put its front door about forty metres from the railway line. A train rattled past as I pulled open the rickety gate. The line was on a viaduct over the road, and with the wind in the right quarter it must have sounded in 33A as if the trains were coming through the front window.
It was 4.30 in the afternoon, a time when there were a lot of reasons to be out. It occurred to me that I should have asked Style for Phillips’s phone number, which he would surely have had on file, along with his blood type and date of birth.
The man in striped pyjamas who answered the door to my knock looked as if he’d have a blood type all his own. His skin was white as few skins are; his sparse hair was white as were his eyebrows—his fiercely bloodshot eyes were all the more alarming in the almost colourless face. It was impossible to guess his age—I was having trouble with his species. He was a whole head shorter than me, so I got the red eyes upturned—an unnerving sight.
“Have you brought it?’’ he said.
“Brought what?”
“I rang up the bottle shop; they said they’d send it round if they had time.” The red eyes looked at me and judged me not to be a delivery person. “I guess they didn’t have time.”
“Are you Joshua Phillips? Used to have an office in Mahoney Place?”
“Yes. Phillips. That’s me.” His voice was reedy, as if it was wearing out. “Who’re you?”
I gave him one of my despised cards. He pulled spectacles out of his pyjama jacket pocket and looked at the card.
“It’s a mug’s game.”
“Maybe. I’m after information on a case you handled nearly twenty years ago. How’s your memory?”
The red glare dimmed and his eyes went cunning.
“It improves with money and sweet sherry.”
“Okay.” I stepped back. “What brand?’’
He grinned, showing two teeth, maybe three. There were thickets of white hair in his ears and in his nostrils. He cackled at me. “Flagon brand.”
The pub was ten minutes away by foot. I came back with a flagon of sherry for him and two cans of light beer for me. He let me in and we went down a dark, narrow passage to a kitchen which was lit by a single, naked bulb. The broken part of the window was blanked out with masonite; the unbroken part was so dirty that no light could penetrate. He put the flagon on a shaky, laminex-topped table which stood on an uneven floor covered with cracked, lifting linoleum.
He shuffled around in the tiny room until he found what he was looking for—a sherry glass with a gold band around it and a creamy residue in the bottom. There was a strong, mouldy smell of neglect, and I couldn’t tell whether it came from the room or the man, or both. I accepted Phillips’s offer of a chair at the table, ripped open one of the cans and put its clean edge to my mouth. He got the top off the flagon by sawing through the perforations with a blunt knife. He filled his glass, spilling a little on the table.
“Cheers,” he said.
“Cheers. Let’s have a talk, Mr Phillips.”
“Let’s see the money.”
I got twenty dollars out of my wallet, and put the note under the flagon.
“I can take the sherry and the money away with me if I want.”
He nodded, and tossed down the drink in one gulp. “I couldn’t stop you. I’m arthritic, don’t get around too good anymore.” He looked as if he’d never got around too good; his small, bent body had a frailness, a hospitalised look. He wouldn’t have been the man you hired when you wanted some muscle work done. If he’d made a living he must have had brains. He poured himself another brimming glass, drank half of it and topped it up.
“Do you remember a case you handled nearly twenty years ago? To do with a man named Keegan—Peter Keegan?”
He looked at me, blankly.
“You were hired by the estranged wife. Her name was Pat, maybe she was using the married name, maybe not. A small, dark, very good-looking woman. Two kids. She wanted the dope on the man she’d married; he’d turned out different from what she’d thought. Anything clicking?”
He held up his glass and looked at the golden liquid inside the dirty vessel as if it was the most beautiful thing in the world. “Mrs Patricia Keegan,” he said dreamily. “Athletic figure. Good mind. Low on money, high on pride. The husband was a wrong’un—sly grog, betting, whores, you name it.”
“You remember all this?”
“I wrote reports; I read ’em over. They’re my favourite reading.” He drank and poured again, both rapidly.
I got my photograph of the man in uniform and showed it to him. He got the spectacles out of the pyjama pocket again, wiped them on a sleeve which smeared them, and looked closely at the photo.
“That’s him. Younger, of course. Put on a bit ’a weight by the time I was on the job.”
“How did you go about it?”
He probed with a corner of my card inside a filthy fingernail, pried out the dirt and flicked it on the floor. “You should know—ask around, stay up late, get up early, surveillance and observation.”
“Where did Keegan live at that time?” I tried to keep the question neutral, but he detected the increased interest. He sipped his drink and didn’t reply. I drank some beer and tried to wait him out, but he held the cards and he knew it.
“How much?”
“Fifty,” he said.
“It's a long time ago, the chances …”
“Are bloody good that he’s where I say he is. He lived in Mosman, but he had another place—a special sort of place.”
I took out two twenties and a ten, and put them under the flagon. He’d poured carelessly; sherry had run down the side and now Henry Lawson’s head was bisected by a dark, sticky ring. Henry wouldn’t have minded.
“Place called Hacking Inlet, d’you know it?”
I shook my head.
“Little place in the National Park. They let people put houses up around there until just after the war. Then they stopped it. Place can’t ever get any bigger. This Keegan had a fibro shack down there—little dump, end of a dead-end lane, steep hill behind it, and the bloody water on his doorstep. Nothing to look at from the outside, but I got a chance to have a close gander and a bit of a look inside. Very different bill of goods: big garage underneath. Looked from the lane like there was no driveway down to it, but there was. Bloody warehouse that garage—tinned food, fuel, booze, the lot. Withstand a siege. All mod cons—heating, flash plumbing. All inside this littl
e dump you wouldn’t look at twice.”
“Quiet place is it?”
“Real quiet, except for the summer season when it’d fill up, I suppose. Be busy now, but there’s limits on what it can hold, see. Limits on the dunnies, ’cos of the land and the septic tanks and that. An’ you know what those places are like. Everyone turns off their brains when they get to the weekender or the holiday place. Bloody great hide-out.”
I finished my can of beer and set it down carefully on the scarred table. This sounded like the real thing. A man in Collinson’s game needed a bolthole, and this Hacking Inlet couldn’t be that far from the GPO.
“Did he have many visitors?”
He shook his head. “Zero. I followed him there twice. Stayed a coupla’ days—no women, no men, just him.”
“How did he strike you?”
“Bloody dangerous.”
“Did you tell the wife about this place?”
He’d had another sherry while I was doing my thinking; the level was down past the top of the label and the red glow in his eyes was like a three-unit fire. He nodded, but he was losing control and his head was loose on his scrawny neck like a puppet ’s.
“Honest operation. Put everything in the report. Honest as the day’s long. That’s why I’m here, like this.”
“Who else would know about this—the surveillance and the place at Hacking Inlet?”
His red eyes went shrewd again and he poured another glass; I jerked it away from him and spilled half on the table.
“Anyone else?”
“Had a partner,” he mumbled. “Diddled me, a’ course, useless bastard.”
“You had a partner when you did the Keegan job?”
“Had ’im twenty years.”
I was amused, despite myself. “Twenty years? A useless bastard ?”
“Well, he was a useful bastard, too. Yeah, Wally Bigelow, junior partner.”
“How much would he know about the Keegan case?”
“I’ve got no show of rememberin’ unless you let me have another drink.”
I nodded and he recovered the glass and filled it; he had to use both hands to support the flagon and its neck and the top of the glass rattled like maracas. He transferred the two hands to the glass and got it up to his mouth where he held it, sipping. When he had drunk half of it I reached out and took the glass. I put it down on the table in front of him. He cupped his shaking hands around it.
