by Peter Corris
Frank and I could take care of ourselves and I had no doubt Townsend could arrange protection. Besides, now I had house security—not as good as his, but good enough. But maybe the smart play was to let the Internal Affairs people have their way and tackle Perkins and Kristos later when they were demoted, suspended or cut loose, if that’s what happened.
The morning paper had a brief, ill-informed report on a man murdered in Blakehurst. I spent most of Monday cleaning out the Newtown office and convincing myself that sitting tight was the right thing to do. It was a wet, dreary day and my mood deteriorated with the weather. Handling old case files wasn’t calculated to improve things. I’d meant to throw a lot of this stuff away when I’d moved from Darlinghurst but somehow I hadn’t got around to it. I knew there were some things I wanted to keep and I couldn’t find the will to do the sorting. Seemed easier just to bundle it all up and stick it out of sight.
Same thing now. Why not heave it all? I thought, but I knew I wouldn’t. Over the years I’d handled hundreds of cases, mostly small, some medium, a few large. There was no pattern to the outcomes, which varied between success, stalemate and failure. As I reached into the back of the lowest drawer of the filing cabinet, the one that always stuck after I’d once kicked it shut in a display of temper, I felt something unusual, unexpected, behind the last bunch of folders I’d left in the cardboard box I’d used to transport them. I pushed the folders out of the way and scrabbled in the back of the box. What I came up with was a bundle in plastic wrapping so old it had gone dry and crisp.
I knew what it was, although I didn’t like to think how long it had been since I’d put it there and completely forgotten about it—a long time, much water under many bridges. Soon after I’d opened my office, a woman had come in and tried to hire me to shoot her husband. She had the gun for the job—a Walther P38. She was in a distraught state over her husband’s infidelity. I calmed her down and persuaded her there were better ways of getting even. I introduced her to a lawyer who shepherded her through a divorce that netted her a solid percentage of the husband’s considerable fortune. I kept the gun, wrapped it up in a couple of plastic bags, shoved it in a box and forgot about it.
The plastic came away easily and the gun was still in good condition as far as I could tell. No rust and the magazine released easily. I expelled the bullets, which also seemed to be as good as new. I doubted that the pistol had ever been fired. How she got hold of it I never knew. I worked the action a few times and it seemed free. I had cleaning equipment at home. What’s a private detective without a gun? Except that I wasn’t a private detective any longer. I put the Walther in the pocket of my leather jacket, zipped it up tight.
I carted the boxes of files and other things like the coffee maker, the fax machine and the computer and printer back to Glebe and installed the useful bits in the spare room. The files stayed in boxes on the floor. After watching the news—nothing on Gregory—and eating something, I poured a glass of red and amused myself by cleaning the pistol. I was putting off ringing Townsend for an update on Jane Farrow. I’d had a few glasses and was feeling the effects. I thought about my once-legitimate .38 revolver and the illicit .45 automatic and a bit of the Oscar Wilde line popped into my head, with a variation: To lose one pistol, Mr Hardy …
I was smiling at my own wit when the door buzzer sounded. I assembled the pistol and went to the door. The peephole showed me Lee Townsend standing back so that I could see most of him. Townsend, the short-arse, knew better than to stand close up.
I opened the door, holding the pistol behind my back. He was carrying a bottle. Shaped up as a better guest than I was a host. He came in and saw the gun.
‘Jesus Christ, Cliff. What’re you expecting?’
I laughed. ‘I was cleaning it. I was going to ring you but now you’re here.’
‘You’ve had a few.’
‘Ready for a few more. What’s that you’ve got there?’
‘Wolf Blass. We have to talk.’
‘Right. Through here.’
I led him to the kitchen and handed him the corkscrew, always to hand. ‘Crack it. I’ll get the glasses.’
To do him credit, he didn’t make a survey of the sixties decor or the much earlier structural decay. He opened the bottle with an expert touch. I got two glasses and we perched on either side of the bench. I put the gun on the sink and poured.
Townsend drank half the glass in a gulp. ‘Have you been married, Cliff? Or lived with women? Other than Lily, I mean.’
The wine was several notches better than the stuff I’d been drinking. I sipped it. ‘Yeah, two or three.’
‘Did you ever think you’d made one happy?’
It wasn’t what I wanted to talk about, but something in his manner made me respond. I thought about Cyn, Helen Broadway, Glen Withers …
‘No,’ I said, ‘not really.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Not sure. Partly to do with me, I guess, the way I am.
But I don’t think the women I’ve been with had a great capacity for happiness. Not many women do.’
‘Just women?’
I supposed this was leading to Jane Farrow by a roundabout route so I went along with it, although philosophising wasn’t my strong suit. ‘I think men achieve it more easily, at least for some of the time, from what they do. With women, it seems to be harder. This’s partly the wine talking. Where’s this going, Lee?’
He drained his glass as if he was trying to catch up with me. I poured him some more.
‘Jane tore strips off me when she heard about what she called our cowboy show last night.’
‘That shouldn’t surprise you.’
‘No, what surprised me was some of the things she said about … well, us. I mean, there was mutual attraction, sure. And good sex. But I thought her real interest in me was closely tied in with what I could do for her. But it turned out she was more on about how disappointed she was that I hadn’t trusted her and had gone behind her back and shaken the feelings she was starting to have for me. Coming from someone like her, I tell you it cut through.’
I nodded and we both drank some more wine.
He went on, ‘I got defensive, angry, upset. She wanted to know how it was we weren’t charged and how there was nothing much in the media.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I was tempted to tell her the truth, but my back was up and I lied. I said that Parker had used his influence as a former deputy commissioner to get us off the hook and the police had given the media bugger-all. She seemed to accept that.’
‘Good.’
‘We were at my place. We both calmed down and sort of apologised and we ended up in bed.’
‘Good luck to you. When was this?’
‘This afternoon. She had the day off. The thing is, she wants to go ahead with her plan, and just the way you suggested—targeting Perkins. And she wants to do it soon.
23
I could think of a number of theoretical objections to the plan, but remembering the character of Jane Farrow, I knew that none of them would sway her. If she was determined to go ahead, that was fine with me and the thing for Townsend and me to do was offer her as much support as we could and look to satisfy our own needs—for me, justice for Lily’s death, for Townsend, a big story and, possibly, the saving of his relationship with Farrow.
I said these things, more or less, as we finished off the bottle of wine. For a small man, Townsend appeared to hold his grog well. He was determined to drive home so I got out some biscuits and cheese as blotter and brewed coffee.
‘How soon’s soon?’ I asked.
‘She says a couple of days.’
‘Can you set things up that quickly? You told her it’d take a week. It’ll be a rush but she’s calling the shots.’
‘Hmm … First I have to know the meeting place. She says she’ll try to make it somewhere people can hide.’
‘Their people or ours?’
‘That’s one of the pr
oblems, isn’t it?’
‘It could be. When d’you expect her to get back to you on that?’
Townsend shrugged. ‘With her, who knows? She’s an alpha female. There’s a bit more I have to tell you.’
I told him to have something to eat and to drink some coffee before he did. Gave me time to anticipate what it might be. Difficult to see how things could be more uncertain or dangerous.
He cleared his throat. ‘After we’d … reconciled, I showed her the little Morello video and told her about the photographs.’
He obviously expected me to explode and, maybe if I hadn’t had so much to drink, I would have. But for an aggressive, assertive man, he was now showing a vulnerability I hadn’t seen before and I didn’t have the heart to make it any harder, at least until I’d heard him out. Stay calm, I told myself.
‘That’s without showing the face of the woman or using her name, right?’
Relief showed in his every movement as he drank more coffee. ‘Yes, of course.’
I felt I’d been too soft. ‘It wasn’t a fucking rhetorical question. Did you or didn’t you use the name, let it slip between kisses?’
‘I did not.’
‘Okay. Well, in a way it puts the matter into an interesting perspective. Did you tell her I had the photos?’
‘No, but she knows we’re working together and …’
‘Right. So if anyone comes after me or you in the next couple of days, we’ll know she’s playing for the other side, won’t we?’
He went pale, almost yellow under my spotty light. ‘I didn’t think of that.’
‘Have to think of everything. Cheer up—you’ve got good security and so have I. Just keep a wary eye out.’
Some of the self-confidence was back. ‘You’re making fun of me.’
‘Just a bit. Look on the bright side, Lee. If we don’t get any flak coming our way you’ll know we can trust her to do what she says she’s going to do. Isn’t that a comfort?’
‘Anyone ever told you what a prick you are?’
‘Just a few.’
Townsend went home and I cleaned up, put the pistol away and went to bed. I woke up in the early hours zooming out of a fierce nightmare. One of those that make you relieved that you’re awake, at home and still alive. I’ve heard that the part of the brain that produces nightmares is the same part that affects schizophrenics. If that’s true, their pain and fear must be truly terrible.
The experience left me too shaken to get back to sleep. I tried to read Doctorow’s book about Sherman’s march through Georgia. Great stuff, but I couldn’t concentrate and some of it was too bleak for my mood. I got up, made coffee, ate two boiled eggs and moved restlessly from one room to another. Wandering about in an empty house in the early hours of a soon-to-be winter morning isn’t good preparation for confident forward planning. I worried about where things stood with Townsend and Farrow and the Northern Crimes Unit and the Internal Affairs people. Complicated. Twisted.
Pieces of the nightmare came back to me the way they can after the event. It had something to do with a threat to my daughter Megan as a child. Not a lot of sense in that, because I didn’t meet her until she was past adolescence. But perhaps that was the source of the mental disturbance. Trouble was, she seemed to have a blind brother and that made no sense at all.
Dawn and the opportunity to go up the road for the papers came as a relief. It was drizzling. I pulled on a plastic raincoat with a hood and I was about to leave the house when the thought struck me that Jane Farrow had had plenty of time to relay the information about the Morello evidence, if that was the game she was playing. I put the Walther in my pocket.
Nothing happened, except my feet got wet in leaky sneakers. I read the papers. Still no significant coverage of Gregory’s death. It was being sat on very effectively. Mid-morning the phone rang.
‘Hardy.’
‘Mr Hardy, this is Hannah Morello.’
I had a full cup of coffee in my hand and I spilled some. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. Why should anything be wrong?’
‘I’m sorry. That’s good. What can I do for you?’
‘Oh no, you can’t brush me off like that. What’s been happening?’
I gave her an abbreviated version of events, stressing that no mention had been made of her in the proceedings.
‘You didn’t sound so sure of that when I said who I was.’
‘It’s at an edgy stage, Mrs Morello. I couldn’t see how you’d be in danger, and I’m glad you’re not alarmed. Townsend and I could be in the firing line. We’ll have to wait and see. Now, what was it?’
‘I don’t suppose you know the school holidays have started.’
‘I didn’t, no.’
‘There speaks the childless man. Well, they have, and I got a call from Pam in Rockhampton. She’s fine. She’s settled in with her sister. Apparently they’ve got a big place and she wants me and the kids to come up and stay for a while.’
‘Sounds good. Rocky’d be better than down here at this time of year.’
‘Milly and Josh’re dead keen and I could do with a break. I just wondered if I was going to be needed while you go about nailing those bastards.’
‘Maybe later if the photographs need to be verified, but for now …’
‘Given you’re not a hundred per cent sure I’d be safe, going to Queensland would be a bloody good idea. Thank you, Mr Hardy.’
She rang off. Not entirely pleased. Couldn’t blame her, but at least one niggling area of worry was out of the way. There were plenty more to be going on with.
I went to the gym, parked where I had the night I was attacked, and got through a pretty solid workout. A few people I knew were there and we yarned in between sets and cracked the usual gym jokes.
Heard about aerobics in hell?
No.
Starts with ten million leg lifts.
I enjoyed the companionship and felt my mood, which had been dark ever since Lily died, begin to lift a bit. I felt so good physically that I even did some stretching. Not much.
With the coldness of the day, a hot spa appealed and I soaked in the bubbles for a full cycle. I passed on the sauna—enough is enough. I wandered down to the Bar Napoli and had a flat white. At one time, when I had a second generation Italian offsider named Scott Galvani, I acquired a smattering of Italian. I’d lost it, but it was good to hear the language being spoken around me and to pick up a word or two. I’d been to Italy once, very briefly, liked it a lot. Looking at the wall posters—the standard stuff: the Colosseum, Pompeii, the Isle of Capri—I thought I’d like to see it again, closer up and for longer. I realised that I was looking ahead, beyond settling accounts for Lily.
The drizzle had stopped but the day was overcast with more rain predicted. I walked back to my car parking spot and was about to open the door when I heard a shout from somewhere above me.
‘Hey!’
The memory of the attack here and my army training and long experience kicked in, and I had the pistol out of the raincoat pocket and was crouched down with the car for cover before the sound of the shout had died away. I looked up and saw a man leaning out of a window, well above me and to my left. He was in his pyjamas and had a stubbie in his hand. I lowered the pistol and stood.
‘What?’ I said.
‘I seen you here last week when you got attacked, like.
You all right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s thanks to me, mate. That bugger was going to do you. I yelled at him and he pissed off.’
The window was in a building about ten metres away. I approached it. ‘Well, thanks. What happened next?’
‘Like I say, he shot through and I was going to call the police and that. Couldn’t find me phone. Tell you the truth I was a bit pissed. I found the mobile and took another look out and you was up and moving and looked like you was gonna live, so I didn’t do nothin’. Glad to see you’s all right.’
He reached up to close
the window but I raised a hand to stop him. ‘Hold on. Did you get a good look at the guy who attacked me?’
‘Yeah, mate. Pretty good.’
‘Big, dark bloke in a suit, right?’
‘Shit, no. He was littler than you but he musta been strong the way he grabbed you. Sort of medium-sized solid bastard. Bald head.’
‘Drove off, did he? What sort of car?’
‘Jesus, now you’re asking. Hey, this isn’t police stuff, is it, ’cos I …?’
‘Nothing like that.’ I opened my wallet and took out a twenty and a ten, all I had. I bent, put them on the ground and pinned them down with loose piece of concrete.
‘This is yours and I’m gone as soon as you tell me about the car.’
‘No car, mate. He went off on a fuckin’ motorbike, and don’t expect me to tell you what kind because I don’t know one from another.’
My informant wasn’t a witness who’d stand up in court. By his own admission he was drunk when he saw what he saw. But that didn’t matter to me. His description fitted the man who’d been with Kristos at the murder of Robinson as caught on film by Danny Morello, and his departure by motorbike was too much of a coincidence not to connect it with Gregory’s murder.
You don’t comb Sydney for medium-sized, strong men covering their baldness with a cap and driving a motorbike. But now I had a credible description of the man who’d probably killed Lily. I looked forward to finding out who he was and to meeting him.
24
I couldn’t wait any longer. If I could get hold of Kristos I’d find a way to make him tell me who his bald-headed killer mate was and all this farting about with Perkins and videos could stop right there. I had a few persuaders—the photos, kept in a deep slit in the driver’s seat of the car, the Walther and a Swiss army knife. Whatever it took. I had Jane Farrows’s mobile number and I rang it. She answered.
