The January Zone

by Peter Corris

  ‘Go for his nose,’ I said to it. ‘You could win on a knock-out.’ The cat wiped its whiskers and jumped out the window. A wind had sprung up and the open window rattled in its warped frame. I shut it and the cat looked at me through the glass.

  I was in the Falcon, turning into Glebe Point Road, when it occurred to me that Helen might ring again and get Trudi, again. I’m very good at thinking up things to worry about.

  The Beta House is a large building in Newtown which is something in between a squat and low rent accommodation. It’s for people who are on the way down or just possibly taking a breather before making a comeback. I’d had dealings with its residents before. They tended to be defensive, eccentric or downright aggressive. There’s no way into the place unless someone inside lets you in or throws you a key. All the windows are two floors up and the fire escape rusted and rotted into disuse long ago.

  I parked in King Street outside an all-night video shop and walked down the narrow street to the Beta. It hadn’t changed in the couple of years since I’d been there. It was still a dark green five storey pile with broken windows boarded up, water dripping from broken pipes down the outside walls and roof iron lifting and thumping down as the night wind caught it. There’s always someone at home in the Beta. I could hear rock music coming from the fourth floor; a toilet flushed at the back, gurgled and flushed again and again.

  I picked my way between the abandoned cars and refrigerators and, in the lane on the west side, found the window I wanted on the third floor and in the centre of the building. I collected some small stones and pelted it until a light came on.

  ‘What the fuck you want?’ The shape in the window was squat and wide with a belly that kept it back from the opening.

  ‘It’s Hardy, Sammy. Let me in.’

  ‘Got the key money, you cunt?’

  I held up a $10 note. Sammy Trueman spat out into the night but missed me by a long way. Trueman had run a gymnasium in Newtown until he’d run out of fighters he could throw to the lions. As the boxing business sagged Trueman went down for the count. He’d had one good fighter in recent times, an Aborigine named Jacko Moody, who’d won national titles and then given the game away for football. Trueman thought I’d had a hand in that and I liked to think he was right. He hated me but he couldn’t afford to hate $10.

  A string came snaking down the side of the building with a key tied to the end of it. I untied the key, replaced it with the $10. The string floated up and I went to the front of the building. The key turned easily in the lock; I opened the door and held it open with a piece of wood I found among the litter just inside. I figured that $10 should buy me a convenient exit as well as entry.

  The stairwell stank of beer, piss and shit, some of it human, some animal. I went up three flights, feeling my way more than seeing because most of the light bulbs had blown. Trueman’s room was along a corridor past a dozen doors to rooms like his. It reminded me of prison cell block without the bars. I had to step over boxes of bottles and ruptured garbage bags. My foot skidded on something soft and ripe smelling that had slipped from a bag.

  Trueman’s feet shuffled and he opened the door outwards on rickety hinges. He collapsed in a fit of coughing when he stretched out his hand for the key. I held it back. ‘I’m here to see Sammy Weiss.’

  ‘Don’ know ‘im.’ His singlet was grey and the room behind him was filled with smoke and the stench of sweaty, unwashed clothes.

  ‘Don’t give me that, Trueman. Now you know I can come in there and take back the 10 bucks and break whatever bottle you’ve got. So be nice. Weiss, where?’

  ‘One up and towards the front. Red door. You’re a bastard, Hardy. You took away the best boy I ever had.’

  ‘You had some good ones and they all ended up the same way. Except Moody.’

  ‘You cost me 50 grand, maybe more.’

  ‘Think of it in terms of brain cells. Moody saved himself a couple of million of them when he quit you.’

  ‘What’s a fuckin’ Abo need with brains?’

  I dropped the key at his feet and headed for the stairs. It was even gloomier on the next level; I passed a half open door from which the marijuana smoke was softly eddying along with sitar music. A bit further on a door stood wide open and I saw a group of people on their knees in front of an altar draped in black cloth. The signs and figures painted on the cloth were repeated in chalk on the floor. The worshippers were murmuring and swaying gently as incense smoke billowed up from behind the altar.

  The red door was closed. No exotic smells or sounds, just the rhythmic grunting and wheezing of a heavy snorer deeply asleep. I knocked but the snoring didn’t miss a beat. It was my night for easy doors; this one would have been a pushover with a nail file. I unzipped my jacket so I could get at the gun but I wasn’t really expecting to need it except perhaps to shoot rats.

  It was a small room, narrow and low-ceilinged, with a window set up too high to look out of. Depression was the keynote and it continued with the gas ring, the hand basin in the corner and the rickety card table on which there were a few books and a portable typewriter. Sammy Weiss lay on his back on the narrow bed. He was wearing baggy cotton underpants and a pyjama coat with no buttons. His fish-white chest and belly rose and fell as he snored. He had a three-day stubble and the smell reminded me of when a flagon of wine had broken in the boot of my car and stayed there a few days. Lying beside the bed were an empty bottle of rum, two wine bottles ditto and a flagon of sherry with enough left in it to make a trifle. Crumpled sheets of paper overflowed a box that had held half a dozen cans of beer; the empty cans were in the wastepaper basket along with more paper.

  I filled a can at the hand basin and trickled the water onto Weiss’s face. He grumbled, turned his head and twitched. I kept pouring and he came awake spluttering and moaning.

  ‘What this? Shit, what’re you doing. Ooh, I’m gonna be sick.’

  ‘Keep it down, Sammy, unless you’ve got a bucket handy.’

  He forced his eyes to stay open and he tried to sit up but he couldn’t make it. ‘God, I’m gonna die.’

  ‘Not yet. We have to talk, then you can die. When you come off the wagon you really come off, don’t you? What happened, Sammy?’

  His eyes were red and dry-looking. He knuckled them violently and moistened his lips with his tongue. ‘Is there anything left?’

  ‘Bit of sherry.’

  ‘Gimme.’ He twitched violently and attempted to locate the flagon beside the bed. I moved it away with my foot.

  ‘Talk first. Clam up and I pour it down the sink a drop at a time.’

  ‘Christ, Hardy, have a heart.’

  ‘Sammy, I haven’t got the time for games. You were watching Karen Weiner’s flat. That I know. What happened next?’

  ‘N-nothing. I found out who she was. Pretty smart, eh?’ He forced himself up onto his elbows and looked at me with his chins up. ‘I haven’t lost the touch.’ He looked around at the room and let himself slide back. ‘Yes I have,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve lost the fuckin’ touch.’

  ‘Cut out the self pity. What did you see?’

  ‘I saw where she lived. Saw her husband come by before he went off to the Philippines or wherever. Saw her up at her window.’

  ‘And you saw someone march her out, didn’t you?’

  ‘I dunno. Come on, I need that drink.’

  I picked up the flagon and swilled the few inches in the bottom around. ‘It’s not good for you, Sammy.’

  ‘Okay, okay, she left with this weird-looking guy. I dunno who he was or anything. He could’ve been her pusher. You know what they’re like. Some of them go for the rough stuff.’

  I gave him the flagon and he drained it in a long gulp. He shuddered. ‘God, that’s rough.’

  ‘Chivas Regal’d taste rough to you now. We’ll get back to the bloke when your mind’s cleared. What’s all this? What put you back on the piss?’

  Weiss dropped the flagon to the floor. ‘I had it. The big story. Janua
ry and Weiner’s wife. January was making all that noise in the States. He’d come back a hero and I could pull the plug on him. I could do it slow or fast.’ His voice trailed off and I had to move closer to the smell to hear him. ‘I could milk it a bit. Get a few statements from the colleagues. Test the water…’

  ‘So what happened?’

  He belched and I moved back again. ‘I had a few to celebrate,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Then I came back here to write. And I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t get into it. Couldn’t find a hook. Just couldn’t…’

  ‘So you went out for more help?’

  ‘Yeah. No bloody good. I tried. See the paper? I tried, but it’s all shit. I can’t do it.’

  ‘Did you make any phone calls? Talk to anyone?’

  He shook his head and groaned.

  ‘That’s tough, Sammy. I’m bleeding for you. But this is more important. The Weiner woman’s been kidnapped and January’s the one getting the pressure. Tell me about the man who took her away.’

  I was watching Weiss’s face, looking for signs that would help me to assess what he said. Suddenly I was aware of someone watching me. I turned towards the open door but the gap was filled with the big, wide body of Inspector Lloyd Tobin. The man named Ken with whom I hadn’t hit it off at lunch stood behind him. Tobin took a slow, heavy step into the room.

  ‘This is all very interesting, Hardy. Why don’t we have a nice quiet talk about it?’

  25

  WEISS levered himself up again. ‘Gidday, Lloyd, what…?’

  ‘Shut up.’ Tobin came into the room; Ken followed, closed the door and stood with his back to it. Ken’s pale eyes were riveted on me as if he’d memorised everything else about the room and was now concentrating on the essentials.

  I moved away from the bed. ‘Tobin,’ I said. ‘Family matter?’

  ‘Don’t piss me around, Hardy.’ He was wheezing with the effort of having climbed the stairs. ‘What’s this about January and a kidnapping?’

  I shrugged. Ken smiled and took his hands out of his pockets.

  ‘God, it stinks in here,’ Tobin said. ‘How can you live like this, Sammy?’

  ‘He’s got no graft coming in,’ I said.

  Tobin shook his head. ‘You’re obvious, Hardy. That’s your trouble. We’re going to talk about this the hard way or the easy way. Which is it to be?’

  ‘What’s the hard way?’

  ‘After Ken here knocks you around a bit.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right then,’ I said. ‘I thought you were going to try it yourself. I’m not too worried about Ken. Nobody with razor cut hair ever gave me much trouble.’

  Weiss had fallen back on the bed. He watched us with wide eyes and kept licking his dry, cracked lips. Tobin eased his big shoulders inside the well-cut suit. ‘I didn’t mean a fair fight, Hardy. I’d join in from time to time. We could take as long as we liked. No one’d care in a shit hole like this. I could’ve made busts for six different offences on the way up.’

  I was thinking fast. I hadn’t got anything out of Weiss of value yet and it was clear I wasn’t going to get a private session with him. Also there was no point in trying to keep January’s association with Karen Weiner secret. If Weiss didn’t tell Tobin he’d tell someone else. Tobin wasn’t my idea of an ally but this time he wasn’t an outright enemy either. I sat down on the chair by the card table.

  ‘We can talk, Tobin. Just as an act of good faith, how about telling me what brought you here?’

  Ken looked disappointed but Tobin’s rubber hose days were behind him. He relaxed, sniffed a few times, brushed the blanket with his hand and perched on the end of the bed like a fat owl.

  ‘Fair enough, Hardy. I heard that this piece of shit was celebrating. Off the water wagon and back on the hard stuff. I wondered what he had to celebrate. The last I’d heard from him was about you and January. I thought there might be something in it for me. Is there?’

  ‘What’re your politics, Tobin?’

  ‘Politics? Shit. My politics’re vote for Lloyd Tobin. He knows what’s best for himself.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Well, it’s like this. January’s mistress is Karen Weiner. Her husband is …’

  ‘I know who he is. So?’

  ‘There’s some crazy out to get January. He bombed the office, took a shot at Trudi Bell…’

  ‘I don’t remember a report on that last incident.’

  ‘There wasn’t one. It was just before we went to Washington.’

  ‘Where January nearly got barbecued. You’ve got an exciting job, Hardy.’ Tobin took out a tin of cigars and lit one; he blew out a stream of smoke as if he was spraying disinfectant around. ‘And Mrs Weiner’s been kidnapped, did I hear you say?’

  ‘That’s right. I think Sammy saw the kidnapper. I’ve got a few other possible leads on him. Nothing much.’

  ‘Sammy’ll tell us all about him, won’t you, Sammy?’

  ‘Not much to tell,’ Weiss muttered.

  ‘You’d be surprised.’ Tobin puffed more smoke. ‘A bomber and a gun merchant. Sounds promising, Hardy.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s political or terrorist. Seems to be personal.’

  ‘That could depend on your point of view. Well, it seems as if we’re both holding good hands. I’ve got control of Sammy’s information and you’ve got leads and…background. Right?’

  I nodded. Tobin was corrupt and ruthlessly ambitious and a hundred other unlikeable things but he wasn’t stupid. I looked at the typewriter on the desk in front of me. The sheet of paper sticking up had a half line of type on it : ‘Peter January’s erogenous zones…’ Ken shifted his feet impatiently.

  I suppressed a sneeze; the air was dusty as well as evil-smelling. ‘As they say in Washington, Tobin, we need to cut a deal.’

  ‘You do,’ Ken said.

  Tobin tapped ash onto the floor. ‘Shut up, Ken. Let’s hear it, Hardy.’

  ‘We cooperate. You get the bomber but with a minimum of violence and getting Karen Weiner out safe is the top priority. I control the story. I keep January as clean as I can.’

  Weiss yelped: ‘Hey, that’s my story!’

  ‘Shut up! Okay, Hardy, you’ve got a deal. Let’s hear all about it, Sammy. It happened before you got pissed, I take it, so I want it all crystal clear.’

  ‘Not here,’ Weiss moaned. ‘I need to clean up and breathe some fresh air. I need some coffee.’

  Tobin looked at me. ‘How long’ve we got?’

  ‘Next contact is seven o’clock tomorrow.’

  Tobin stood up. ‘Tons of time. Let’s get out of this pigsty.’

  Weiss washed his face, got dressed and we tramped down the stairs. Tobin wheezed after one flight. Outside, he pointed across King Street. ‘McDonalds,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry.’

  Weiss whimpered. ‘Jesus, Lloyd, I can’t face food.’

  ‘You can look the other way. Got a bottle on you, Ken?’

  Ken nodded and Tobin looked pleased. ‘We’ll put a drop in the coffee. Might even give you a belt, Sammy. If you’re good.’

  We went into the place which was almost empty. It needed sweeping and disinfecting after a hard day’s cooking and selling. Tobin ordered two hamburgers with French fries, Coca Cola and coffee. Weiss wanted water; Ken and I settled for coffee. We took a table in the corner and Tobin spread his food out in front of him. Apparently he liked to look at it for a while before he ate it. Ken spiked the coffee from a flask of Bundaberg rum.

  ‘Here’s to you, Sammy.’ Tobin lifted his cup and took a gulp. He opened the polystyrene box and examined the hamburger. ‘Looks okay. Now, what have you got to say.’

  Weiss sipped water and scratched his head. His fingernails were black and he still smelled bad. ‘I saw her leave with a weirdo. I told Hardy that.’

  Tobin spoke through a mouthful. ‘Height?’

  ‘Average.’

  ‘Shit,’ Ken said.

  I drank some of the coffee. It wasn’t good to start with and the rum
didn’t help it much. I was dead tired; I knew I shouldn’t be drinking. ‘Think back, Sammy,’ I said. ‘They’re coming out into the lane. Who’s taller, him or her?’

  ‘Him.’

  ‘By how much?’

  ‘Couple of inches.’

  Tobin raised an eyebrow as he swallowed. It was an uncomfortable thing to watch.

  ‘She’s a tall woman,’ I said. ‘Five eight or so. Makes him a fair height.’

  ‘And thin,’ Weiss said. ‘Real thin.’

  Tobin nodded. ‘You’re doing fine, mate. I’m proud of you. Go on.’

  Weiss closed his eyes. ‘Thin but like he was fit, with muscles, you know?’

  ‘Unlike many,’ I said. ‘What about his hair and complexion?’

  ‘Sort of stringy hair, dark and a bit long. Sallow, I’d call him.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’ said Ken.

  ‘Never mind.’ Tobin started on his second hamburger. ‘Now, would you say he was a good type, British say, like me and Hardy? Or a wog or a Jew boy like you?’

  ‘What about Scotch?’ Ken poured more rum into his coffee.

  ‘Don’t confuse him,’ Tobin said, ‘and the Scotch aren’t sallow. Sammy?’

  ‘Could’ve been mixture. English maybe with…I don’t know, Lebanese or something.’

  ‘I’d like a mixture,’ Tobin said softly. ‘I’d love Lebanese. What was he driving?’

  ‘A car.’

  Tobin’s cheeks bulged as he chewed. ‘I hope you’re not trying to be funny. What sort of car? What number?’

  ‘I don’t know about cars and I didn’t get the number. I can’t even remember what colour it was.’

  ‘Anything else?’ I said. ‘Clothes?’

  ‘Dark.’

  Tobin held out his coffee cup for more rum. ‘Not much to go on. What’ve you got, Hardy?’

  ‘We’ve got him on tape. Trying to get an identification of the accent. We get the feeling he’s local. Talks about watching January’s office. Sounds as if he belongs to the area.’ I got out my wallet and extracted the note. ‘We’ve got two others like these.’