Lugarno ch-24

by Peter Corris

  ‘I don’t. Do you?’

  ‘Not really, but it must be thousands, tens of thousands most likely. I was like that. The tedium of it… Anyway, I provide an outlet, relief, an alternative. Call it what you will.’

  ‘For a fee?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m not up on this but I’d imagine you’re breaking several laws to do with introduction services and so on, and your tax situation must be interesting. Your power bills’d be worth looking into and I wonder if your building modifications had council approval.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  I swilled the dregs of my drink. ‘Not at all. I couldn’t care less one way or the other about your lonely hearts club. I suppose I’m just encouraging you to tell me about Ramsay Hewitt.’

  ‘Hmm, you might not have as much leverage as you think. I paid a good deal to steer certain things through the council.’

  ‘Corruption.’

  Peter Corris

  CH24 — Lugarno

  She nodded. ‘Grease to the wheels of enterprise, call it. And there are a couple of police who are not unaware of what goes on here.’

  ‘Good for you, but I suspect you’re smart enough to know how easily it could all come tumbling down. Ramsay Hewitt.’

  ‘I met him on an environmental demonstration. Don’t look so surprised; I have a life apart from this. He was so full of aggression and so vulnerable underneath.’

  ‘Yeah, and then with a good thick layer of self-pity under that.’

  She let that pass. ‘I contributed some money to the cause and then sort of took him under my wing a bit. Not sexually, I thought I’d made that clear to him. I’m on a different path in that regard as I’m sure Tanya told you. But Ramsay turned out to be a very needy boy and I wasn’t about to give him what he needed. So…’

  ‘So you didn’t give him the Merc and the clothes and pay his university fees?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘He wrote a note to his sister using your notepaper but blanking out the phone number. I’m told he stayed overnight.’

  She shrugged. “There’s room.’

  I was tired and not in the mood for a jigsaw puzzle. ‘You’ll have to tell me a bit more, Mrs Bonham. I’m puzzled.’

  ‘Don’t call me that! Call me Prue. I’m not some dried up suburban housewife.’

  Her flare-up sparked me a bit and I straightened in the chair. I could tell her reaction wasn’t only to being called something she didn’t like. What was really bothering her was close to the surface now and I just had to ease it up.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  ‘Did you take any notice of the men who were here tonight?’

  ‘Youngish, good-looking. Rent a bloke?’

  ‘Yes, some of them are escorts. Some are the male equivalents of the females.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ I said. ‘An overhead for you if you’ll excuse the expression. But where’s this going?’

  ‘I’m not proud of this. I told Ramsay to leave me alone. He was too clinging. He took it very badly. Before he went, he took some things he shouldn’t have, including cash. He just disappeared. I tried to contact him but I think he felt so guilty about stealing from me that he went to ground.’

  ‘So, you don’t know where he is now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was here not so long ago.’

  It was getting late and even under the flattering light she was beginning to wilt and talking to the likes of me about this subject hadn’t helped. But she was game; she got up and held out her hand for my glass. ‘I think I’ll have a drink. You?’

  I nodded and admired her still athletic movements — nothing surgically enhanced there. She left and came back quickly, carrying glasses that seemed to hold the same sort of booze. I took a sip; it was better Scotch than she’d given me before. This woman knew the angles.

  ‘He came around a couple of times. He had a nice car and clothes. I don’t know. He was a little drunk. He paid me back some of the money he’d taken. I felt guilty.’

  ‘He’s an adult, sort of.’

  ‘Yes. You’re right. Sort of. D’you know why he’s like that?’

  I thought I did, based on my past experiences with Ramsay, but I wasn’t telling. ‘Not sure doesn’t mean don’t know,’ I said. ‘Where do you think he is, Prue?’

  ‘With some woman, and living off her no doubt, but I don’t know who.’

  I had the feeling that there were things she wasn’t telling me and wouldn’t, but I didn’t know what they were or whether I wanted to know. I finished my drink and left. She didn’t see me out.

  When I reached the porch I smelled cigarette smoke and there was Silver Hair, standing in the shadows.

  ‘Hey, Mr Hard-to-get,’ she said. ‘I think I can help you.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘I hung around for a bit out here with another prospect but he didn’t work out. I was eavesdropping. I know where Ramsay is.’

  ‘Where?’

  She took me by the arm and steered me away from the house. ‘I’ll tell you, but there’s a price.’

  We reached the street and crossed to where our cars were parked. ‘What’s the price… Tanya?’

  ‘You remembered my name. That’s a start. Come home with me and stay the night. You don’t have to sleep with me. I just can’t bear to be alone tonight. Please.’

  ‘You can’t be serious. You don’t know a thing about me.’

  ‘I’m a risk taker. Are you?’

  ‘When the odds are right. You know where Hewitt is?’

  ‘I do, as of last week anyway. She boasted to me about getting him.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Right. Are you on?’

  Following the Porsche in the Falcon was like a duck following a swan. We ended up in Coogee at an apartment block that overlooked the water. She glided into the underground car park and I found a space on the street. She’d told me the unit number and I buzzed it at the security gate and she let me in. I took the lift to the fourth floor.

  ‘This is it,’ she said as she opened the door. ‘What d’you think?’

  ‘Give me a minute.’ The track lighting was held down low and everything under it gleamed — the polished wood, the glass, the paintwork. The living room had a knockout view of the water through a window that occupied the whole wall. The balcony outside it was bigger than my backyard and had more greenery on it. I waved my hands in the air, imitating a conductor. ‘What can I say. It’s fabulous, darling.’

  She laughed. ‘You’re right. It’s over the top. It was his, now it’s mine.’

  ‘Sounds like a Patsy Kline song.’

  She sat down on one of the overstuffed leather-covered chairs. ‘Something like that. Thanks for coming back with me. You don’t really have to stay. I just didn’t want to walk into this bloody mausoleum alone tonight.’

  She made coffee and we talked. Her very rich husband had left her for a very young woman and it had rocked her badly. Trying to restore her confidence she’d tried escorts and Prue Bonham’s soirees but the artificiality of it wasn’t working for her.

  ‘What did she say about me?’ she asked. ‘I know she said something.’

  ‘She said you were still hunting.’

  She gave the kind of throaty laugh only a pack-a-day cigarette habit can give you. ‘She’s right. You bet I am. But you’re taken, aren’t you?’

  I wasn’t and wasn’t looking to be, so I said, ‘Sort of. Yeah.’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s the way it is. Give me a hug and a kiss and I’ll tell you what you want to know.’

  We embraced and her firm, slender body sent out a Siren call I responded to despite myself. We kissed and I was carried back twenty years to when every kiss tasted of smoke and no-one cared. I was getting hard and I tried to kiss her again but she eased back.

  ‘Bad timing,’ she said. ‘Ramsay’s with a woman named Regina Kipps. She’s fat and fifty and she lives in Concord. She’s in the
book. Goodnight, Cliff.’

  12

  I creaked and groaned through my routine at the gym next morning and then met Peter Lo in the same place as before. He was his usual cheerful, well-exercised self, while I was still feeling the effects of my encounters with Stivens, one whisky too many and a late night. I was also feeling guilty about not returning Tess’s call of the day before. Truth was, I wasn’t sure what to say to her.

  ‘So, Cliff,’ Peter said after taking in some coffee and a chunk of blueberry muffin, ‘I hear you’re mixed up in a murder down Lugarno way.’

  I drank some coffee. ‘I wouldn’t say “mixed up in”. As you boys would say, I interviewed the deceased before he was the deceased.’

  ‘You wouldn’t catch me using language like that. Not long before, I gather.’

  ‘That’s right. Is this on the record? I didn’t kill him.’

  Lo grinned and munched on some more muffin. ‘No-one thinks you did, but some people think you could’ve been more helpful.’

  ‘What is this, Peter? It sounds as though you’ve spent more time chatting about me than asking about the drug scene down there.’

  ‘The two matters are kind of connected, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘What’re you telling me?’

  ‘They did the autopsy yesterday. Jorgensen had a considerable amount of coke and heroin in his system.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Weird bit of overkill, what with the other signs. The thing is, I just had to make a little noise or two about drugs down there and this all came up, including your name. So what’m I going to do? Play dumb and when someone later finds out I do know you and I was showing an interest, what’re they going to think? You follow me?’

  ‘I don’t want to get you into trouble.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m not. The thing is, the way the job is these days, you just can’t afford to leave question marks in people’s minds.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘So I went to Stankowski and told him that I knew you from the gym.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘That’s all. He said he’d seen you and wanted to see you again. I’m surprised he hasn’t already. No, I’m not surprised. You must’ve left home at around six.’

  ‘That’s right. So you didn’t pick up anything useful, or if you did you won’t tell me.’

  ‘How good’re you at lateral thinking, Cliff?’

  ‘About as good as I am at transcendental meditation.’

  ‘You ought to try that. I can tell that you’ve got a lot of unresolved internal conflicts.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what to do without them. What’s the point?’

  ‘Just this, Inspector Beth Hammond has been assigned to liaise on the Jorgensen case with Stankowski.’

  ‘I don’t know her.’

  ‘You don’t want to know her. She’s a bluestocking with a rat-trap mind. That’s not the point.’

  I swilled my cool coffee around and drank it down. It tasted bitter, unusual in Paolo’s place, but the taste might just have come from the knowledge that a cop was seeking me out and I was being asked to play guessing games. It was one of those moments when in the old days I’d roll a cigarette, fiddle with it, and hope for enlightenment. Nothing to fiddle with now and I wasn’t going to start biting my fingernails. Peter was about to speak but I stopped him. ‘A woman.’

  He smiled. ‘That’s right. Somehow there’s a woman’s angle to the business.’

  Peter left and I ordered another coffee to wash away the taste of bitterness and considered what to do next. It seemed to me that the field was narrowing down. Jason had said that a woman had threatened him over what he knew about drug selling and now he was dead of physical and pharmaceutical assault. There were two women involved with him — Sammy and Danni — and both could be candidates, unless the cops had some others, always a possibility. But from where I stood it didn’t look as if Marty Price was headed for a happy outcome. Me either. From what I’d seen of Sammy I judged her to be capable of many things, but I didn’t rate her as either a drug tsarina or a murderer. Conclusion inescapable — it was time to take a look at Danni.

  I rang Price and caught him before he went to work. The clean-up must have been pretty good and Sammy must have had a good explanation for her injury because Price didn’t mention anything untoward happening.

  I asked him whether his daughter was at home and whether he knew her movements.

  ‘She tells me nothing. We leave notes for each other.’

  ‘Did you leave her a note about Jason’s death?’

  ‘No. She’s left her skateboard and protectors in a heap by the front door so I guess that’s where she’s going. I’ve got to rush, Hardy. If you have anything to communicate call the office.’

  And speak to Junie, I thought. I said I would and hung up.

  Kingsgrove was not one of those places touched by the magic Olympic wand. Nothing significant had gone on or passed through here. The rain of the day before had cleared and the sun was shining, showing the place in its best light, but it still wore a slightly depressed and neglected look. The railway station looked much the same as it had since its last facelift quite a few years back. The skateboard park, going by the name of Skate City, was in a barn-like building tucked away in a lane behind the main drag, Kingsgrove Road.

  It wasn’t the sort of place a man my age could blend into. I was too formally dressed as well, even though I was tieless and jacketless in drill trousers and a dark shirt. I parked as close as I could in the lane and stayed in the car. The skateboarders, male and female, waiting for the place to open, wore a uniform of back to front caps, baggy pants to just below the knee, loose T-shirts and sneakers. Hairstyles varied from number ones to ponytails. Backpacks were almost universal.

  The skaters ranged in age from the pre-pubescent to the early twenties and at least half of them, young and old, male and female, smoked cigarettes. Most of them arrived on their skateboards, wheeling in, jumping gutters and slaloming through other riders to come to what looked to me like ankle-snapping halts. There was a small car park, littered with signs warning: LOCK YOUR CAR, wedged between the building and an anonymous structure with no apparent function. I kept an eye on that space for Danni’s Honda. That was a mistake. Skate City opened and the riders filed in, feeling in their pants leg pockets for money or passes. A low-slung car pulling into the car park took my attention and by the time I was sure it wasn’t Danni’s I was too late to get more than a fleeting look at a group of three rollerbladers who arrived together at speed: I got an impression of smarter clothes, helmets, colourful knee and ankle protectors and smooth styles before they disappeared into the building.

  Could be her. It was dumb of me to have thought she’d drive up. Inviting a snapped aerial or worse. I got out and did a slow recce of the surrounding streets. A racing green Honda sports coupe carrying the registration number Price had given me was parked in a No Parking zone a block and a half away. The inside of the car was in the same condition as Danni’s bedroom, if not worse — clothes, magazines, drink bottles, cigarette packets, food wrappers. I could see the strap of a shoulder purse sticking out from under the front seat where it had been carelessly shoved and I wondered briefly whether it’d be worth my while to break in and take a look. But the Honda was almost new and the security alarm was bound to be working, and by now there were people on the street and traffic on the road. Nothing for it but to get a look at her in motion and then tail her to wherever she might be going.

  I shifted my car to a legal position a short distance from hers and then walked back to the skateboard park. I could hear the noise of the place from a considerable distance — a series of resounding metal clangs and clashes. There’s an open-air skateboard run in Glebe behind the Harold Park Paceway so I had some idea of what to expect — a dipping, swooping, swirling surface with flat sections at either end. The Glebe kids perform amazing sweeps and flips and other manoeuvres that look potentially fatal, each pass e
nding with the skateboard slamming down on the metal surface. They seem to find it fun and they do it for free. I wondered what you got for your money inside Skate City.

  A black kid wearing a Skate City T-shirt and sporting dreadlocks and two lip rings was sitting behind a desk just inside the door. He wore earphones and was watching a rock video on a portable TV set. I flashed my licence folder at him.

  ‘Health and safety,’ I said. ‘No trouble. Just a look around.’

  ‘Two dollars.’

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  He took his eyes off the screen just long enough to indicate that he knew I’d spoken. ‘Two dollars.’

  I paid and went inside. The interior was darkish but probably not inconveniently so to these kids with 20/20 vision. It took me a minute or two to adjust before I could make out the curving, W-shaped surface and a wide, looping flat track that ran around the edges. The flat track seemed to be confined to rollerbladers, but both skateboarders and rollerbladers used the other area. It was hard to tell what previous function the building had served — a warehouse or store of some kind. A mezzanine ran around three sides, reachable by a narrow iron ladder. The riders and rollers were moving too fast to pay me any attention and I went up the ladder to the mezzanine to get a bird’s eye view of the whole thing.

  From my vantage point and with my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see that at the far end of the building there was a bank of soft drink and food vending machines, toilets and a couple of doors leading to God knows what. This area was in shadow, but I could see a dozen or so kids hanging about there drinking from cans and smoking, despite the NO SMOKING signs everywhere. The noise of the skateboards slamming down on the metal and the shrieks and yells were deafening, plus there was music blaring from a PA system. It wasn’t a place for conducting quiet conversations but other kinds of intimacy were possible. A little way along from me, wedged into a galvanised iron corner, two boys with their pants around their ankles were kissing and mutually masturbating.

  I turned my attention to the slightly banked track, wide enough to allow three rollers to travel abreast, and spotted a dark, strongly-built young woman whizzing around in a blur of lycra, Nike and spandex. She appeared to be involved in a race with at least two other people, one male, one female, and they weren’t letting other people get in their way. They swept around the track using elbows and hands to clear their paths and drawing verbal and physical responses from the other rollers. I squinted as the dark one, now clearly in the lead, swooped down not far below me. Dark hair escaping the helmet, strong jaw, full mouth, squarish face — Danni Price for certain.