Authors: Peter Corris
She smiled. ‘Importing. Yes, of course.’
‘Then you can look through here inch by inch. See if you can find anything that might help us.’
‘Like what?’
That was harder, but I kept myself from shrugging and looking hopeless. ‘I don’t know. A diary, letters, maybe some numbers written down somewhere. A phone number—anything unusual that looks contrived or done for a purpose. The only thing that worries me is that they might come back. Is there anyone you can get to come and stay here with you?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, I can bring Max.’
‘Who’s Max?’
‘He’s my German Shepherd. He stands so high and he weighs about a hundred pounds.’
‘Get him on the phone,’ I said. ‘He sounds like just the bloke you need.’
Erica said she could walk across the park to get Max. That sounded all right to me; I’d have preferred park walking to hospital visiting myself, but it seemed unlikely that the ducks and joggers would be able to tell me anything useful. I drove to the hospital and parked as near to the place as the able-bodied and non-medically-qualified could get. Then I negotiated the barriers they put between the sick and the well. They wouldn’t let me see Mal, registered as Malcolm Fitzwilliam, who was recovering from a severe concussion as well as his other injuries, but Geoffrey Stafford was visitable.
They wheeled Geoff into the waiting room with the tiny, dust-shrouded windows where I’d spent nearly an hour waiting. Geoff didn’t look pleased to see me; he had one leg in a cast, half an arm was in plaster and held crooked by a metal strut and both his eyes were bruised the colour of eggplant.
‘What do you want, Hardy?’
‘For openers, how do you know my name?’
‘I did a bit of ringing around after you split the other night. With the gun and all I reckoned you’d be a private licence.’ Talking was difficult for him; all facial movement
would be for a while to come.
‘What happened?’
‘Three blokes—very quick and good, better than you.’
‘That makes them a hell of a lot better than you, son. Any talking?’
‘Not much, Mal didn’t have anything to tell them except ….’ He broke off and looked at me through slits in the bruised flesh. I didn’t feel particularly chipper, but I must have looked in the pink to him. He gave a malicious giggle. ‘Except your name.’
‘He told them that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And they still worked you over?’
He nodded and instantly regretted it. ‘Yeah. This bloody job turned out to be tougher than it looked.’
‘They often do. Did Mal say anything about the girl?’
‘The slappy? No, he’s a gentleman that way. He liked her, he told me.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Didn’t get a chance to say anything. I had a go, but they fixed me up fast. I was nearly out of it, but I could just hear what was going on. What the fuck is it all about? Mal said it was a small-time gambling debt. Needed time to pay, he said. Shit!’
‘Take too long to tell you. Ask Mal.’ I stood up. ‘What did they look like?’
He screwed up his eyes in an effort at recall and the effort hurt him. ‘Three, like I said. Nothing special. Average-sized blokes, one was a bit bigger.’
‘Fair or dark?’
‘Two dark, one redhead.’
‘Australian?’
‘Didn’t talk much, couldn’t tell. One of the dark ones could’ve been a dago.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Smell.’
‘Age?’
‘Not young. Thirtyish.’
I let that pass. ‘Clothes?’
‘Ordinary—jeans and jackets. The redhead had some gold chains around his neck. Ponce.’
‘You should’ve grabbed them and throttled him.’
‘Get stuffed.’
‘Don’t be like that, Geoff. You’ll mend. Sorry I didn’t bring any grapes.’
‘Get stuffed.’
He pressed a button and a white-coated male nurse came in and wheeled him away. I paced up and down in the gloomy little room trying to assess how much worse things had got. In general, the fewer trios of efficient heavies that know your name the better. It sounded like high time for me to get myself a dog like Max or go to Melbourne.
Back home I phoned Terry Reeves and gave him an edited version of what I had. My best card was the news that one of the phoney car renters was in the hospital.
‘Good,’ Terry said. ‘You put him there?’
‘No, but he won’t be driving cars for a bit.’
‘Where’s the one he took?’
‘Sorry, mate, it’s gone through the system.’
‘It figures. Well, at least I haven’t lost any more since I saw you. Any point in bringing a charge?’
‘Not if you want to crack the system and maybe recover the cars.’
‘That’s the second time you’ve said system—how d’you see it?’
‘Big operation, well-financed, good procedures, and there’s something else in it—something above and beyond the cars, but I don’t know what.’
‘Just stick to the cars, will you, Cliff? Keep your imagination in check.’
‘What about my initiative?’
‘What’s it going to cost?’
‘I’ve got to go to Melbourne.’
He groaned. ‘Maybe I’ll take a holiday when it’s all over. I need one I can tell you. Well, thanks for all the information, Cliff.’
‘You know how it is—little by little.’
‘Yeah, well, soldier on, Cliff, and listen, take care, all right?’
I rang off, and reflected on how much hung on this case—Bill Mountain’s life maybe, Erica Fong’s lungs and Terry Reeves’ long overdue holiday. TAA offerred me two flights—one I could catch easily and one I’d have to rush more. I accepted the challenge, packed a bag in record time and threw in West’s
The World is Made of Glass
and
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People.
My white jeans and shirt made me feel like a bowls player, so I put on a navy shirt and a leather jacket. I left my one funeral tie behind; I didn’t expect to be visiting the Melbourne Club.
O
N
the plane I skipped through
Intimate Sex Lives,
jumping from the ones who’d had a hell of a good time, like Picasso and Josephine Baker, to those whom sex had made thoroughly miserable, like D.H. Lawrence and Paganini. I decided that I was somewhere in the middle. The flight took about an hour; after five minutes the woman sitting next to me clicked her tongue disapprovingly when she saw what I was reading, and stared fixedly out the window for the rest of the hour. She seemed to disapprove of what she saw out there too.
My knowledge of Melbourne is sketchy. A flight attendant told me that she thought Bentleigh was a southern suburb; I knew the airport lay to the west of the city so I took the airport bus into town. The Tullamarine freeway must be one of the most boring stretches of road on the planet; either they picked a boring landscape to run it through or they made it that way in the process. Anyway, there was nothing on the run to occupy my thoughts or delight my eye until we reached the city, which looked pretty good in the afternoon sun, if you like broad, tree-lined streets and a flat landscape.
At the city terminal I hired one of Reeves’
Bargain Renta Cars,
thinking that I shouldn’t have any trouble with this item on the expense account.
‘I’m sorry about all the red tape,’ the woman who processed the hiring said. ‘It used to be simpler.’
‘That’s okay,’ I said. I looked for the hidden camera behind the desk, but couldn’t spot it. ‘Do you have a Gregory’s in the car?’
‘I’m sorry?’
I rapped the counter. ‘My fault—Sydney born and bred. I mean a street directory.’
‘There’s a directory in the glove box. Where are you going, Mr Hardy?’
‘Bentleigh.’
‘Just look in the glove box.’ Her manner became slightly distant; I was beginning to get bad feelings about Bentleigh.
The detective’s friend turned up trumps with just one Mountain, initial C., listed for Bentleigh. I located the address, Brewers Road, in the street directory and headed off. The Laser was responsive and toey in ways that were just a memory to my Falcon; for the first mile I felt like a rodeo rider getting a frisky mount under control. After that, the drive out to Bentleigh was a lesson in the differences between two cities. The Melburnians seemed to have flattened large sections of the city I remembered from my last visit, more than ten years ago, and swept freeways through the clearances. That sort of thing had met more resistance in Sydney, which was just as well for me or else my living room would have been a traffic island. Also, the traffic lights were advertised as carrying concealed cameras to catch sneakers-through-on-the-red, an Inquisitional touch Sydney lacks. The camera business reminded me of the time when Melburnians would turn pale at the ‘tow-away zone’ signs in Sydney and our stories about retrieving cars from great distances at monstrous expense.
It was after three when I reached Brewers Road. Kids were straggling home from school, battling a wind that whipped at the tails of their raincoats and shook the trees and shrubs in the well-tended gardens. Bentleigh was one of those flat Melbourne suburbs, with the odd suggestion of a rise and fall in the landscape, which made it just possible to imagine it as a pleasant place before 1835. Now it had a solid, comfortable post-war look of brick veneer and mortgages paid on time.
I cruised down quiet Brewers Road squinting at the numbers. The woodwork on the houses looked as if it got an annual coat of paint; the road was a polite half mile from the vulgar shopping centre; there was a big Catholic church on a rise at the end of the road and not a pub in sight.
Number thirteen was a model of the sort of place that predominated in the area: broad grass strip then a low wooden fence, freshly painted, with black wrought iron gates. Neither the gates nor the fence would keep anything out or in—the rose bushes were clipped back to prevent any suggestion of them climbing on the wood—but in that neighbourhood they were de rigeur. Inside the fence was a concrete driveway and strips of concrete ran all around the edges of the lawn and the garden beds to make the whole thing easy to mow. The house was a double fronted red brick veneer set squarely on the block. The wide Australian country verandah of yesteryear had withered away to a mean little cement porch.
I parked across the road from the conventional, respectable house, and mused on the differences between siblings. In this place wild William Mountain would stand out like boxing gloves on a ballerina, but his sister evidently fitted into the environment perfectly, like the gladioli or the shaven blades of buffalo grass.
The perfect orderliness of the street was somewhat disturbed by the rubbish bins which stood in front of the houses awaiting collection. Metal and plastic with lids neatly clipped on, they were very unlike the split, battered jobs in Glebe. But there were a few plastic garbage bags and even the odd cardboard box. As I watched number thirteen, a woman came from the back of the house carrying her rubbish bin. She rested the bin on the fence and opened the gate. A couple of steps across the footpath and she put the bin down on the grass near the gutter. This put it about a metre away from her neighbour’s bin which had a cardboard box next to it. The box might have
been sitting on the boundary line between the two properties as it appeared on the surveyor’s plan. The woman looked quickly back at the houses, bent over and moved the box so that it clearly belonged in front of number eleven. I could hear the chink of bottles as she moved the box.
I watched her go back through her gate and down the driveway beside her house. She was tall, with dark greying hair and a very stiff upright stance. Bill Mountain was tall with greying hair but he had the slumped shoulders of the writer and bar-leaner.
I drove down the road, turned and came back to park directly outside number thirteen. I was in the wrong clothes to pretend to be a policeman or anything else. I took my time getting out of the car, and locked it carefully so that if she was watching she could see that I had a pride in property to match her own. I resisted the natural impulse to step over low gates; I opened this one sedately and closed it behind me. Then I walked up the carefully constructed and carefully swept concrete path to the front of the house. No bell. I took out my operator’s licence with the photograph under plastic, did up the second top button of my shirt, and knocked.
She opened the front door, but left a screen door closed on a hook between us.
‘Yes?’ Suspicion, hostility and disappointment, all crowded into one word. Standing in the raised doorway she was taller than me which meant that she’d be close to six feet on the flat. She was wearing a cotton dress with a shapeless cardigan over it. Her face was gaunt, with sunken cheeks and eyes, and the skin around her chin and neck was scraggy. An unlovely woman. I held the licence folder up for her to see.
‘Ms Mountain?’
‘
Miss
.’
‘Yes, my name is Hardy, I’m a private investigator. I’ve flown from Sydney today to talk to you.’
It can go either way—they can slam the door on you or open up and want to tell you the story of their lives day by day since continuous memory began. Miss C. Mountain looked as if she’d like to slam the door, but something held her back, perhaps the mention of Sydney or perhaps the loneliness that seemed to stand beside her like a silent twin.
‘Why have you come to see me, Mr …’, she peered at the plastic through the wire mesh, ‘Hardy?’
‘It has to do with Bill, your brother.’
Her right hand shot up to grip her thin left shoulder in an oddly self-protective gesture. Her voice was a dry croak. ‘William. Yes.’
‘Well, he seems to be missing ….’
‘He’s here. William’s staying with me until he gets well.’
S
HE
let her hand fall from her shoulder and then clasped both hands together in front of her at waist height. She was very still and her plain, bony face and the flat lines of her body made her look like the patron saint of disapproval. There was something wrong about her stiffness, but I couldn’t work out what it was. Her statement had caught me completely on the hop; I hadn’t given a thought to what I might say to Mountain, because I figured the moment of meeting was days away at the earliest.