by Peter Corris
The Greenwich Apartments
( Cliff Hardy - 8 )
Peter Corris
Peter Corris
The Greenwich Apartments
1
The building that went by the name of the Greenwich Apartments was a small block of flats, six two-bedroomers on three storeys, in behind a lively section of Bayswater Road, Kings Cross. To get to the flats I’d passed a brasserie and a restaurant and a wine bar. It was 9 p.m. and all three places were full. Someone had told me once which was the most trendy and hardest to get a table at, which was the next most desirable and which finished third, but I couldn’t remember the sequence. Beside the entrances to the building that weren’t places to eat and drink at, there were a couple of medicos’ nameplates, discreet neon signs advertising massage, and even a plaque for a fellow practitioner-Terry Stafford, Private Inquiries. Never heard of him.
The traffic was heavy and the area was parked solid. There were cars in ‘No Standing’ zones and across driveways. It was as if everybody in Sydney wanted to pack into this couple of acres. I walked up a lane into a bricked courtyard in front of the flats. Light-coloured brick with dark trim around the windows; decent-sized balconies on the second and third levels. Ivy or something like it crawled up the front of the building and had got a grip on a couple of the balconies. It snaked up a drainpipe towards the roof. No graffiti, no broken windows. A nice place.
The courtyard was boxed in on all sides; lights showed in the other apartment buildings on two sides. The wall behind me was blank-back of a hotel, possibly. No lights showed in the Greenwich Apartments. I stood in approximately the spot where Carmel Wise had been shot dead ten days before.
Here and there bricks were missing or had crumbled and some weeds had sprouted. There were plane trees for shade and a bench to sit on; there was a drinking fountain and a bicycle rack. There was a low pedestal in the middle of the square where a plastic and glass illuminated sign carrying the name of the place had been mounted. It was taken away after the bullets that hadn’t hit Carmel Wise had smashed it. Maybe some of the bullets had hit the girl and the sign; I hadn’t mastered all the exact details yet because Leo Wise had only hired me a few hours before. Leo Wise was Carmel’s father. He also owned the block of flats.
‘The Greenwich Apartments, it’s called,’ he’d said that afternoon. ‘Not too far from here. Maybe you know it?’
I shook my head. I’ve had my office in St Peter’s Lane for more than twelve years (I’d stopped counting at twelve), a stone’s throw from the Cross, but my work tends to take me out of the area. I could name a few nearby pubs but no blocks of flats. ‘No, afraid not,’ I said ‘is that why you came to me? For my local knowledge? If so, I ‘m sorry, I…’
He leaned forward. A big man, 50 plus with a heavy, forceful face and a manner to match. Expensive clothes, expensive teeth, not much hair and no nonsense. ‘I’m a bereaved man. Hardy. I don’t show it. I don’t go around crying. I go to work and get on with it but I feel just as bad as…’
‘As who?’ I said.
‘As her mother!’ He banged my desk with his fist: my notebook shifted and a little dust lifted and settled. There was nothing else on the desk.
‘I understand what you mean.’
‘You’d have seen the reports in the a paper… of Carmel getting shot.’ His mouth twisted bitterly. ‘Everybody’s seen them. That’s one of the worst things.’
‘I read something. She was twenty-one, I think it said. I don’t remember her job. No motive.’
‘She was a videotape editor and a filmmaker. Serious work. That didn’t stop the crummy headlines. “Video Girl Slain in Cross”. Crap!’
‘I remember now. There were a couple of hundred videos in the flat
…’
‘Not one of them was a dirty movie. Not one!’ The fist came down again. ‘But the papers made it look as if they all were. Her mother’s
… bloody broken.’ He stared through the dirty window. I’ve tried cleaning the windows inside but no-one is ever going to clean them outside-three floors up in Darlinghurst-so what’s the point? He would have seen a bit of guttering hanging from the roof and the top of a church against a grey sky. I know because I’ve sat in the client’s chair myself when business was slow, and pretended to be a client with an interesting case for me to handle. The fantasy has never taken me far; somehow it feels worse in the client’s chair than in my own.
‘The publicity stops,’ I said. ‘The police get on with it quietly.’
‘There’s things the police don’t know,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m here. I’m told you can do a job and keep your mouth shut.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘That’s what I need. There’s a strange angle on this, bloody strange. Anything about it in the papers’d probably send Moira, that’s my wife, right around the bend. I’d end up with no wife as well as no daughter. The police talk to the reporters, everyone knows that. The reporters pay them.’
‘Probably. I know a couple of cops who wouldn’t do that. I could have a word with them if you want.’
He shook his head. ‘Can’t risk it. Look, it could be nothing or it could lead into all sorts of shit. I just don’t know. I’m not worried about myself. I’ve got nothing to hide.’
‘Come on, Mr Wise. You’re a businessman-investment consultant, did you say?’
His face was set grimly; it looked like the sort of face that could smile or cry it necessary, but only if he let it. ‘What I’ve got to hide’s hidden. And I’ve got no connections to any of this. Just… information.’
‘Which you won’t give to the police because you’re worried about publicity.’ I moved the notebook an inch to the right. ‘It’s thin, Mr Wise.’
‘It’s not thin, it’s complicated. I want you to look into it, follow things up if you can, if there’s anything to it…’
‘Why?’
‘To get whoever it was that killed Carmel.’
‘Revenge,’ I said. ‘Trial. Publicity.’
‘Carmel was an innocent bystander. With that clear I don’t mind the publicity. It’s all this “video girl” bullshit I can’t handle. Please, Hardy, I need your help. What’re your fees?’
‘A hundred and twenty a day plus expenses.’
‘Retainer?’
‘Two days pay, up front.’
He got a cheque book from his inside jacket pocket. To get it he had to open the jacket. He was thick-bodied but not fat; he wore a white shirt and plain tie. There were sweat patches under his arms although the day was cool and his suit was lightweight. I sweat under pressure myself so I was sympathetic. He poised a ballpoint over the cheque.
‘I’ll give you a week in advance.’
‘Easy,’ I said. ‘Give me the information you won’t give the cops first. Then we’ll see.’
The Greenwich Apartments, Leo Wise told me, were built in the 1930s when materials were plentiful and work was scarce.
‘They’re well-built, see? The builder could get the right timbers and everything and the workers wanted the job to last so they took care. I bought the place about three years ago. It was run-down of course, and two of the flats’ve been empty for a while. I’m… I was going to do them all up, eventually.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘So, numbers four and five, they’re empty. There’s a couple in number two, been there the whole time. And there’s a young bloke in three. Agent reckons he’s all right, pays on time.’
I wrote ‘agent?’ on a page of my notebook and waited for him to say more. He was looking out the window again. Getting to the hard part, I thought.
‘Flat one’s on the ground, right on ground level. No stairs or anything. You jus
t walk in from the courtyard. Bugger all view, no balcony, smaller than the others if anything.’
He stopped again and it seemed like the time for me to say something. ‘Do the tenants have leases?’
‘What? Oh, no. Month to month. The place’s got a few plumbing problems, roof’s not too good. The rent’s reasonable to take account of that. I wasn’t rushing anybody. When they came vacant I just let them lie. I would’ve made some arrangements for anyone who was left when I wanted to get moving. I’ve got other places. Wouldn’t have been any problem.’
I nodded, but he was going to need prompting. ‘What about flat one, Mr Wise? What’s the story?”
He sighed and stopped looking through the dirty glass. Another sigh and a rub of his hard jaw and he was ready to talk. ‘That’s the one Carmel was using. She had a TV set there and her video collection.’
‘Collection?’
‘Yes. Old movies mostly. Foreign, a lot of them. It was her hobby as well as her work. She had a flat in Randwick but I suppose the videos took up too much space. Look, I’m not saying she was normal, but she wasn’t a freak. She…’
I clicked my tongue the way you do to soothe an angry dog. ‘Okay, okay.’
He fought for control and got it. ‘Right. Anyway, she asked me if she could use the flat and I said okay. Christ, I wish…’
‘I don’t understand. This flat-what about it?’
‘It’s been vacant the whole time I’ve had the building.’
‘Well, no difficulty then.’
‘I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have let her use it and I meant to do something about it. I never did. Busy. You know how it is?’
‘I’m not with you,’ I said. ‘Sounds like you didn’t need the rent.’
‘That’s the point. The rent’s been paid, on the knocker, every fortnight. Regular as clockwork and no-one ever spent a night there. Not for three years.’
2
I crossed the courtyard, ducking my head to avoid a plane tree branch, and pushed open the glass door that led to the small lobby and the stairway of the Greenwich Apartments. The lobby was dark, illuminated only by the light coming in from the courtyard through the door and the big window beside it. The floor was a concrete slab covered with lino tiles; there were no discernible smells. The letterboxes were set under the window. All six had light padlocks on the inside; none carried a name tag. The door to flat one was right in front of me, tucked in below the stairs, and I used the key Leo Wise had given me to open it.
I put my hand on the wall where a light switch should be and found it. The room I was in was small and made smaller by the stacks of video cassettes. They were in tiers on top of the TV set, in and on boxes, spilling over from collapsed piles into jumbled heaps on the carpet. A director’s chair with red canvas seat and backing was lined up in front of the television set. There were cassettes on it as well. A VCR was on the floor beside the TV and a telephone sat on top of a pile of movies next to it.
I skirted around the plastic and cardboard boxes and checked the other rooms-small bedroom, single bed, chest of drawers, built-in wardrobe (empty), more video cassettes, dozens of them, in and out of their boxes, all over the bed and around it on the floor. Kitchen-basic fittings, bar fridge, cupboards empty apart from China tea, coffee (instant) and sugar. Bathroom-no bath, just a shower, hand-basin and toilet. Soap, towel, toilet-paper. No videos in the bathroom or kitchen. There were small windows in each room. Those from the bathroom and kitchen looked out into a kind of well, cluttered with plumbing and ventilation ducts, between this building and the next.
The window in the front room was covered with an old Holland blind. Suddenly, the light bulb hanging from the ceiling blew and the room went dark. I lifted the blind and felt the dry, old fabric crack and tear as it moved. It hadn’t been lifted for a long time. Light from the courtyard where Carmel Wise had died seeped into the room.
I went into the bathroom, removed the bulb from the light fitting there and replaced the blown one in the front room. I took the boxes off the director’s chair and sat down facing the TV. I sniffed the air. Dry, the flat didn’t have any problems with damp which was no doubt good for the videos. No recent cooking or smoking but no recently opened windows either. No radio, no stereo, no old-time dance records. It looked as if all anyone had ever done in this place was watch the box, drink China tea and instant coffee and maybe talk on the telephone. It made no sense, there had to be more.
I got up and checked the rooms again. It was the cassettes that had thrown me off. Bright covers and dull; Gothic script and computer print; VHS, Super, Stereo 2000. They took all the attention. They made the mind wander off onto thoughts of Hollywood and J. Arthur Rank. But under the bed, down there with the dust and fluff, were three large, strapped-up and locked-tight suitcases. I dragged them out.
‘If you’re full of videos,’ I said to them, ‘I’m off the case.’ It was a joke of a sort, better than no joke at all and I sniggered. The place was getting to me; the plastic jumble offended my orderly mind. I liked the suitcases a lot better. I even liked them being locked. Professional skills to be called into play. Hardy earns his dough again.
Two of the suitcases were matched, the third was the odd man out-similar in size, good quality leather, slightly different in style. I started with that. The lock yielded easily to a small blade on my pocket knife. In Beirut you’d have to think about booby traps. This wasn’t Beirut. I flipped open the lid and the mass of clothes and papers and books lifted as the pressure came off. I put the clothes-a man’s jacket, several pairs of trousers, a couple of sweaters and shirts, socks, underwear, sandals and shoes-aside and looked at the other stuff. There were a couple of paper-back novels, some magazines, a pocket-sized spiral-bound notebook like my own, bills and receipts, bus and train tickets, the stubs of movie tickets, supermarket checkout dockets. The detritus of a modern city life but, as far as I could tell from a quick look, nothing with a name on it. There were also two fat manila envelopes, quarto size, filled with black and white photographs and negatives. Another manila envelope bulged with toothpaste, a toothbrush, shaving cream and a couple of disposable razors.
I examined the clothing. It would have fitted a man two inches smaller than me, say around five foot ten, and about a stone lighter, around eleven stone. It was all Off the rack stuff, medium quality, worn but not worn out. There were no name tags, no laundry marks, and there was nothing in any of the pockets.
The matched cases would have been tougher to open; the locks were better made, with tricky sliding covers on them. But the keys were tied to the handles with light string. The first one I opened was full of women’s clothes and shoes; the second contained more clothes plus a couple of handbags and purses. There were toilet articles, makeup, tampons, hairpins and all the other things that make a woman’s bathroom cupboard different from a man’s. The clothes were better quality than the man’s; they had been worn less frequently and were better cared for. They were also more exotic.
I called them Mr and Mrs Greenwich in my imagination. Mr G. had nothing you couldn’t buy and wear in Sydney; Mrs G. had some Thai silk scarves, some embroidered and beaded things that looked foreign, and a pale blue sari.
I got cramped squatting on the floor in the bedroom so I carried the handbags and purses and all the man’s personal things out to the kitchen and put them on the table. The water was running and the gas was connected. Instant coffee, Cliff? Why not? Black? Fine. I sipped the coffee and dumped the contents of the purses out on the table. The woman was Mrs Greenwich no longer. She was Tania Hester Bourke, born Sydney, 6 May 1950, 168 centimetres tall, 55 kilos, brown hair, brown eyes, no visible scars. She had been licensed to drive in the state of New South Wales in 1980, had a Bankcard and an American Express card as befitted an Air Pacific hostess, and went to a dentist in Macquarie Street. All this came from the first and most obvious things I poked through. If I’d really dug I could probably have got to her HSC results and her first Cosmo subsc
ription. There was a passport, cheque books, bank statements, parking tickets, the lot.
The coffee was foul. I emptied it into the sink and spread out a batch of the photographs. About half of the selection showed houses, boats and beaches without people-empty, deserted scenes probably caught in the early morning. The others were the exact opposite-people in rooms and on the same boats and beaches. People playing games, drinking, talking. Nothing indiscreet. Maybe some of the cigarettes were more Griffith than Virginia but that’s hardly a crime nowadays. One photograph showed a familiar face circled in red by a felt-tip pen. A woman’s face, turned to the camera, one among a smiling group around a table. I turned the picture over; sure enough, that name again- ‘Tania’, printed in block capitals with the same pen.
All this needed leisurely inspection. I could get Helen Broadway’s opinion on the woman’s things and perhaps get a lead on the man. I could try to identify the houses, boats and beaches. Lots to do, clues to follow, lives to construct. What I do best. I realised that it was getting late and that a drink would be welcome. Promising start, time to go. I could take some of the stuff with me and come back for the rest later. I found a green plastic garbage bag in the kitchen and dumped the handbags, a selection of the makeup, the photographs and Mr G.’s bits and pieces into it; folded up, I could easily carry it under one arm. I tossed in a pair of gold sandals with high heels and thin straps just for luck and went through to the front room.
It occurred to me that nothing I’d done so far had any obvious connection with the video girl. Evidence about her was scattered all over the room. I put my bundle down and took a closer look at the videos. Among the pre-recorded cassettes, European, British, American and Australian, were a lot of tapes for home recording. The names of movies presumably taped from TV were printed on the boxes- The Left Hand of God, Marked Woman, The Running Man- none of my favourites. I’d seen The Running Man way back, at a drive-in with my soon-to-be wife (later to be my ex-wife), Cyn. I saw it again on TV by accident. In it Laurence Harvey does the worst Australian accent in the history of the cinema. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to tape it. For the hell of it, maybe to get a laugh at the accent, I put the cassette into the recorder and hit Play. It was worse than I’d thought-a long, boring sequence with some people seen on a boat at a distance. Barely focused. Arty. I hit Stop and picked up my bundle.
