Authors: Peter Corris
‘Sit down, Mr Hardy, I can’t give you long.’
I thought he stressed
give
the way a man who charges a fortune by the hour might, but I could have been wrong. ‘This won’t take long. Doctor.’ I’d noticed the leather couch as soon as I entered the room but I was careful to avoid even touching it. I sat in a matching leather chair. The chair seemed to have been made exactly for the comfort of my often-stressed back. It immediately relaxed me which made me immediately wary.
He picked up a pencil. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Hardy?’
His voice was one of the best I’ve heard, rich and rewarding. If this voice gave you the news that you were dying of cancer it wouldn’t feel so bad.
‘I gather you haven’t come to see me in my professional capacity.’
‘No, more in mine, although I guess that’s semi-professional’
He smiled showing the strong white teeth I’d have expected. ‘You’re defensive.’ He looked down at a note pad and touched it with his pencil. ‘A private enquiry agent. Interesting activity?’
‘Occasionally. Your professional path has crossed with my defensive semi-professional one—you have a patient named William Mountain.’
He nodded; on his scale of fees that was probably a ten dollar nod. It forced me to go on.
‘I need some information about him.’
A shake of the head—another ten bucks.
‘Or at least your opinion.’
‘I can’t discuss my patients with you, Mr Hardy. How could I? This is the most confidential branch of the medical profession as you must be aware.’
‘I doubt that it’s more confidential than mine though. Maybe it is. Let’s see. Maybe we can trade confidences.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘I leaned forward from the too-comfortable chair across the table. The table had a beautiful surface and some padding around its edges, like the good doctor. ‘A few days ago William Mountain beat a man to death using, among other things, a bottle. This is known to me and a very few other people. It is not known to the police. Can you get more confidential than that?’
His big, fleshy lips pursed and he ran a broad, capable-looking hand through his bushy hair. ‘Are you sure of that?’
‘Are you surprised?’
‘Not really.’
‘Well, that tells me something. You think he’s a dangerous man?’
‘You can’t outfox me, Mr Hardy. I’m not going to confirm your guesses.’
‘Look, I’m not here to play word games. I’m trying to find this man. He’s in bad trouble and he needs help. His girlfriend wants to help him. I’m more concerned about other things, but I’ve seen some of the harm he’s done and I don’t only mean physical harm.’
That got a lifted eyebrow. No charge.
‘I think it’s better that he doesn’t do any more harm. There are two paths ahead of him—one leads to court and the other to the crematorium. Believe me. Either way you’re going to be called to talk to the authorities. If he gets a bullet in the head, it could be your fault for not talking to me now.’
‘You’re persuasive, Mr Hardy.’
‘I’m trying to be. I’m also telling you the truth.’
‘I believe you might be. Who would kill Mountain?’
‘Criminals, obviously.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s involved in something big and dirty. He’s being foolish. He’s threatening people who don’t know about turning cheeks.’
‘It doesn’t surprise me.’ He leaned back in his chair and then came abruptly forward. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
‘They’re your lungs.’
He got a long thin cigar out of a drawer, unwrapped it and lit it with a gold lighter. The smoke went down into his barrel chest and came out in a thin hard stream that floated up towards the extravagant ceiling rose. With the cigar in his hand and framed against a big window that ran from knee height almost to the ceiling, he looked like a wrestler on his day off.
‘William Mountain is a very disturbed man. It’s hard to
give a name to his central problem. You could call it an identity crisis but it would take a very broad definition of the word “identity” for that to cover it.’
‘Can you predict a likely outcome?’
‘To what?’
I gave him a summary of Mountain’s movements and actions; he drew on his cigar and listened patiently. I held back on the notes Mountain had kept on his sessions with Holmes, because I thought of that as a card I could play if I needed to. When I finished he sat quietly and puffed smoke. I assumed he was thinking, and God knows what his rate was for that. I let my eyes travel around the room taking in the bookcases with the glass fronts, the slimline electric typewriter on the desk and the Impressionist paintings on the walls. He stubbed out the cigar in an ashtray which he put back in the drawer he’d taken the cigar from.
‘It’s very difficult,’ he said melodiously. ‘I wish I could talk to him.’
‘Me too. Is he a likely suicide?’
He spread his hands non-committally.
‘What would you be advising him to do if he was here now?’
‘I don’t advise. I listen.’
‘Jesus, you’re doing pretty well out of listening.’
‘Don’t be offensive.’
For no good reason I looked again at the elegant typewriter on Holmes’ desk. I was letting my mind run free on the subject of Mountain, who had no doubt lain on the couch a few feet away and told Holmes a lot of things, some of them things it could be useful to know. I wondered if Holmes typed up his notes and where he kept them. Holmes followed my gaze. He looked impatiently at his watch.
‘Mr Hardy ….’
I got up and took a closer look at the typewriter. It had a sheet in it with a couple of lines of typed verse about a red
knight and blue blood that didn’t mean a thing to me. The typeface looked very similar to that on Bill Mountain’s postcard.
‘This is a super-portable, isn’t it—for travelling?’
Holmes sighed. ‘Yes.’
‘Mountain wrote a note on a slip of paper and stuck it to a postcard. I thought he might have pecked it out in a shop but these cost a mint; they don’t leave demo models around.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘Mountain’s got a traveller’s typewriter, expensive one. Means he expects to be writing.’
‘He’s a writer, isn’t he?’
‘Yeah, but he was totally blocked. He was obsessed with writing a novel; he couldn’t write it and it was eating at him. Right?’
Holmes nodded. ‘One of his obsessions.’
‘If he was actually writing this book, would that make a difference to him, to his behaviour?’
‘Conceivably. If it went well it could absorb him, calm him down. If it went badly it could push him in any direction.’
‘What if it went well and he managed to stay off the grog?’
‘That’s unlikely. Alcohol is one of his favourite, I might say most cherished, obsessions. And in case you think you’ve opened me up, I’d point out that Mountain is on the public record about that.’
‘Mm. But just say he was sober and writing well?’
He put the capable-looking hands on the desk and examined them as if he’d never seen them before. Then he looked at his watch.
‘I’ve got an appointment. I expected you to be some dim summons server, Hardy. I can see that you are not.’ He smiled and put a lot of warmth in it; the smile and the voice together would bowl over most women and a lot of men. ‘In fact I think you have a genuine interest in human
character which is quite an unusual thing to have. So I will take a chance with you. This is a complete shot in the dark, but I’d say that if Mountain managed to achieve the sort of self-control you’re talking about he would be capable of extraordinary things—a great novel, a terrible crime. Almost anything.’
I stood up and he stood too. We were about the same height as we faced each other over the antique desk. I guessed he would get a lot of transference from his patients—that process where the progressing patient imagines that he or she is in love with the analyst. Hilde used to say that it happened a bit with dentists, too. It wasn’t a problem I’d had to contend with. He came around the desk to see me out and we shook hands again.
I couldn’t resist it, he was just too comfortable and secure for my liking. ‘Did you know that Mountain kept notes on his sessions with you, Doctor? He analysed you, spotted a few weaknesses too.’
His grizzled, pepper-and-salt eyebrows shot up and he looked positively pleased. ‘Really! How interesting. But I can’t say I’m at all surprised. I recommended just such an activity as part of his therapy.’
I
DIDN
’
T
see the woman in the jodhpurs on my way out, but I did recognise Dr Holmes’ next patient as I passed through the gate a little ahead of him. Anyone who watched television or read the tabloids would know him from his talk show, where he smiled equally broadly at beauty queens with impoverished vocabularies and RSL officials emotionally arrested in 1945. He was never heard to voice an opinion and was known for his unflappability. He looked pretty flapped now as he advanced towards Holmes’ doorway, as if he was about to melt under the strain of all that affability. I greeted him by his Christian name and he shot me a look as haunted as any ever dreamed of by Edgar Allan Poe.
I drove to my office where the only thing happening was the gathering of dust. On the way back to my car I stopped in at the tattoo parlour on the ground floor, to try out the descriptions of my car park playmates on Primo Tomasetti. Primo has a photographic memory for the faces that sit on top of the bodies he tattoos.
There was no hum coming from the shop, which meant that Primo wasn’t working. I knew he’d either be dozing or sketching designs for tattoos, designs that would always owe a lot to Goya and William Blake. I pushed aside the curtain and saw him hunched over his cartridge paper with a crayon held in his thick fingers moving rapidly in bold strokes.
‘Where d’you get your inspiration from?’ I said.
Primo looked up and grinned. ‘It’s in the blood.’ He scratched at his wiry black hair and brushed the shoulder of the white lab coat he wore over a pink shirt. I once told
him he should put a row of ballpoints in the pocket of the coat and he’d look like Ben Casey, but, like everyone under forty, he’s never heard of Ben Casey. ‘My grandfather was the greatest document forger in World War I.’
‘On which side?’
Primo scratched some more. ‘I never bothered to ask. Does it matter?’
‘Not for World War I it doesn’t. Look, Primo, I ran into two unfriendly guys the other day—one big, flabby, bit slow, the other was smaller, dark with a bitter look, like he’d gone straight from the orphanage to Long Bay. Ferrety-looking. Any ideas? They seemed like a team.’
‘Hard to say, Cliff.’ He put down the crayon. ‘Can’t place the flabby one, he sounds like ten cops I know. What’s a ferret?’
‘Small animal they put down holes to flush out rabbits.’
He picked up the crayon and a rabbit appeared on the paper.
‘That’s fascinating. What happens next?’
‘You shoot the rabbits when they come out or wring their necks. I had an uncle used to do it. He’d ride for miles on his bike and he’d always bring back a bag of rabbits.’
‘Did he bring back the ferrets?’
‘Yeah, in a cage on the back of the bike.’
‘What did he send down after the ferrets to get them out of the hole?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Strange place, this Australia. Weird customs. Okay, a guy who looks like he could go down holes after rabbits. That sounds a bit like Carl Peroni.’
‘He didn’t look Italian.’
‘Not all Italians look like Al Pacino. Some in the north look like Robert Redford. It sounds like him is all I’m saying.’
‘Where does he hang out?’
‘Mostly in a coffee place with a pool room called the
Venezia. Off Crown Street, you know it?’
‘I think so, yeah. Thanks, Primo.’
‘Hang on, Cliff. I’d go very quietly there if I was you.’
‘I’m known for my tact.’
‘Seriously.’
‘I’m not planning to bust the Mafia, mate. I’m just going to show the flag, show that I know who works for who and how to find them.’
‘What good would that do?’
‘Always helps to be positive—attack the net.’
‘Attack the net. Is that how they catch the ferrets?’
‘No, that’s tennis. If I find out how they catch the ferrets I’ll let you know, seeing you’re so interested.’
‘You could ask you uncle.’
‘He’s been dead for twenty years.’
Primo starting hatching in a section of his drawing. ‘That probably means his ferrets are dead, too.’
Being mono-lingual, I’ll give the last word any day to a man who can make a joke in his second language. Besides, doing that usually makes people happy to talk to you again and Primo was a first-class source.
It was after five, getting towards wine or gin time rather than coffee time, but I wandered down to the Venezia anyway. It was a nice afternoon for a walk, or would have been sixty years ago when my rabbitto uncle was a boy. Now the traffic was banked up in William Street right back to the tunnel. The air was thick with fumes from idling engines; the case for lead free petrol seemed urgent.
I was wearing a white shirt, dark pants and my Italian shoes; I could play a fair game of pool but my Italian was non-existent beyond
una cappuccino molto caldo, per favore.
The Venezia has two entrances, one on one street and the other around the corner which is occupied by a florist. From the steady twenty-four-hours-a day, 365-days-a-week trade the Venezia did, you’d have thought they
could’ve bought out the florist and expanded, but maybe the florist didn’t have a price. I wandered in at Crown Street, bought my coffee and went through pinball and video game purgatory to the pool room. You could buy coffee in there and something stronger if you had the right look about you. All four tables were in operation and the couple of nests of tables and chairs were crammed full of men talking, sipping and smoking; no women. I leaned against the counter and watched a player run a series of balls into the pockets. He had the expert’s simultaneous total concentration and relaxation—whether he’d have grace under pressure was another question.
I finished the coffee and ordered another. The man serving it wore long sideburns that covered his cheeks to within a centimetre of his nostrils. He wasn’t busy but he seemed determined to give me the minimum attention he could get away with. I fumbled for money and counted it slowly to extend his attention span.