by Peter Corris
‘Suppose I want to come back in an hour or so,’ I said. ‘What’s the drill?’
He didn’t answer and I thought he hadn’t heard me in the high wind. After a minute he nodded and turned his head towards me. ‘Sorry, mate. Channel’s a bit tricky just here. Have to concentrate. You can phone from the wharf over there. Cost you, though. This’s forty bucks. Be sixty to come over and get you.’
‘Okay. I hope I’ll be staying.’
‘Good luck to you, mate.’
It was getting dark when we docked at the small wharf in Bluefin Bay and a few of the houses had lights showing. I lugged the cooler up the rough track, which was longer than Gatellari had led me to believe. The wind buffeted me and I was sweating slightly by the time I got to the dirt road that fronted the scattering of houses running along to a point about five hundred metres away. The land rose sharply behind them and I could just catch a glimpse of tin roofs and windows on the hill. The view east past Barranjoey Head would be really something from there.
The water taxi pulled away from the dock and the wind carried the sound of its motor to me until it disappeared around the point. Ecco was the eighth house of the dozen or so with nothing between them and water but grass and trees. It was up towards the back of a sloping, bushy block and designed to harmonise with the surrounds and the conditions-cream-painted weatherboard, lots of glass, timber deck, double-pitch tin roof, louvred shutters to all the windows. There was a bougainvillea hedge in front and the path leading up to the front verandah had been built from old railway sleepers long before recycling was heard of.
I was suddenly nervous, the quintessential uninvited guest, but I told myself I had important business that couldn’t wait. The truth was, I had an urgent need to see the woman and the business was only a part of it. I snagged myself on the bougainvillea as I went through the opening. The thorns caught the back of my right hand and ripped the skin. I swore and sucked at the bleeding wound but not before some of the blood had got on my jacket. Fine way to go calling on a lady.
The front garden was badly overgrown, with weeds and blackberry threatening to take over the lawn, flower beds and shrubs. Someone had taken a bit of a hack at the mess recently with a scythe or bush knife but had given up without making much headway. Weeds poked up through gaps in the sleepers and the wooden steps leading up to the verandah. Still, the place wore its run-down air lightly, like an out-of-work actor who might suddenly land a big part and be very spruce again. I flicked at a buzzing mosquito and went up the steps.
The solid front door had stained-glass panels making it difficult to see in, but I was pretty sure I could detect a light towards the back. I put the cooler down. I thought I heard music far in the distance but it might just have been cicadas or all the other singing and croaking things out there having a good time.
I peered through the panel. Maybe I was mistaken about the light. I tried the handle and the door opened. Terrific security. I swore under my breath. I held the door a few inches open and went inside. The door swung back and I caught it before it closed. Was she here? Was anyone else here? Were there any guns about? I ignored the mosquitoes but wiped sweat from my eyes and palms. I had the. 38 in a dry hand.
‘Claudia,’ I said firmly, not too loud. ‘Claudia, it’s Cliff Hardy. Are you there?’
Peter Corris
CH19 — The Washington Club
The dim light at the end of the passage intensified as a door opened. Then another, closer light was switched on and it dazzled me.
‘Cliff? Is it you?’
‘It’s me.’ I still couldn’t see her. An old eye injury slows down my reaction time to intense light. A faint shape was beginning to take on firm outlines as it moved towards me. ‘Didn’t mean to alarm you,’ I said. I holstered the pistol. ‘But there’s no phone and… ‘
Then I could see and smell her. She was bare-footed and wore a long white dress like a singlet reaching to her ankles. Her hair was stiff and puffed out around her face, straggling to her shoulders. She smelt of tobacco and the sea. Her eyes were enormous, staring at me, and she had caught her lower lip in her teeth and was chewing it. For a moment I thought she was freaked out on some drug but she was steady. Alarmed, but not out of control.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
‘You’re covered in blood.’
I hadn’t noticed that my hand was still bleeding profusely when I’d struck out at the mosquitoes and wiped away the sweat. Blood had flecked my clothes and smeared my face so that I looked like a survivor from an Apache massacre. I found this out after she conducted me to the bathroom and made me strip off my jacket, pistol harness and shirt. She sat on the edge of the bath without speaking and watched me. Blood was still seeping from the tear and she reached up into a cupboard over the basin to get a packet of Band-Aids. Her breasts rose up under the thin cotton dress and her nipples were hard. I noticed and she saw me noticing.
What happened after that was more or less inevitable. She was naked under the dress and I soon had it off her. She undid my belt, pulled down my pants and took my cock in her hand. Somehow I got rid of my shoes, trousers and underpants. Somehow we made it to the bedroom. She took me in her mouth and sucked me until I begged her to stop. I licked her nipples and her rounded belly and below that and then she produced a condom and we were joined and thrusting urgently at each other as if we were anxious to end it but neither of us wanted to. I tried to hold back, couldn’t, came in a hot, shaking rush. She lay still for a minute, then began pushing back up at me. She gripped my buttocks, hauled me with surprising strength onto my hip and shoved against me. I could feel myself shrinking but tried to synchronise with her and at last she hammered into me, shuddered deeply and I felt her tense and then relax. We fell apart. I slid out and wrapped my arms around her. We were both sweat-soaked and breathing heavily.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Good. Lovely.’
‘Yes.’ I put on a brogue. I’m a ruined man.’
She giggled. ‘Are you Irish?’
‘Irish, English, French, gypsy… ‘
She kissed me. ‘A mongrel in other words.’
I could feel myself drifting towards sleep. ‘That’s right. Claudia
… ‘
‘Have a sleep, Cliff. You’re exhausted. All I’ve done for two days is sleep, swim and smoke.’
‘An hour,’ I murmured. ‘We have to talk.’
If she replied, I didn’t hear what she said.
22
The only thing I hadn’t taken off or had pulled off me before we made love was my wrist-watch. I woke up lying on my stomach with my hands under my head. The watch was pressing into my cheek. I looked at it and found it was after midnight. Claudia wasn’t in the room. The sweat and some blood had dried on me and my mouth was raw on the outside from kissing and on the inside from hours on the road, beer and fast food. I swung my legs off the bed and was almost surprised to find that they supported my weight. I took the watch off and put it on the bedside table. A drawer in the table was partly open and I did what Oscar Wilde advocated-yielded to temptation. I slid the drawer out and saw a set of credit cards in a soft leather wallet and an Australian passport. Flip, flop: Claudia Fleischman, colour photograph, expired.
I walked to the window. I could see Claudia in a rocking chair on the deck. She was wearing her white dress and rocking backwards and forwards, with apparent serenity. There was a length of batik cloth hanging on a hook on the back of the door and I wrapped it around me and went to the bathroom.
Under the shower I washed everything and let the warm water ease some of the ache from my bones. There were several toothbrushes in a mug. I selected the most battered, used it and dropped it into the tidy bin. I put a fresh Band-Aid on my cut hand, ran a wide-toothed comb through my hair and was ready to do whatever came next. On almost every front, I had very little idea of what that would be. I went out through French windows onto the verandah, scuffling my feet so she would hear me. The wind had dropped and the surf beating o
n the sand was a low murmur, like a deep bass note. She stopped rocking. I went up behind her and slid my hands inside the top of the dress. How many men have attempted to soothe away doubts by feeling a pair of tits?
‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘That’s nice.’
She reached back around the chair, went inside the lap-lap and gripped my cock. Her hand was cold.
‘Nowhere to go from here,’ I said. ‘I’m a detective, not a contortionist.’
She laughed, let go and turned around. She must have washed her hair which had been stiff with salt because it was now frizzed and rippled and wafted around her face. She had no make-up on and looked pale under the dim outside light. The recent stresses and scars had put faint lines beside her mouth.
‘We have to talk,’ I said.
‘Pity. We were doing so well with no talking.’
‘Things have been happening.’
‘Not here. Nothing ever happens here. That’s why I like it.’
‘You can’t… ‘
‘Ssh. I know. I found the wine. It was sweet of you to bring it. I drank the bit of gin Angela had here and couldn’t be bothered getting any more.’
We went inside to the old-fashioned but comfortable kitchen and I sat down at a big pine table. There was a combustion stove that must have been a plus in the winter and everything was solid and functional-frying pans on hooks, a pine dresser full of unmatched cups and plates and glasses, an Early Kooka gas oven. Claudia opened both bottles of wine-my mum would’ve liked her style- and set out biscuits, cheese and salami.
‘It’s tomorrow,’ she said, drinking a mock toast. ‘I wonder what the date is. I’ve got through another day. Well, Mr Detective, tell me all about it.’
I told her everything I’d done, leaving nothing out, although I might have got the sequence wrong here and there. I told her about killing Henderson and how it happened and about the grenade parts I’d found. I didn’t go into details about Anton Van Kep’s recreational practices, but I had to tell her enough for her to appreciate how the blackmail had been applied.
She looked me straight in the eye. ‘I’m surprised,’ she said. ‘He was perfectly adequate with me.’
I drank most of one bottle and put away a fair bit of the food. Claudia had a couple of glasses, toyed with the food and smoked a few of her Salems while she listened. When I finished she sat quietly and looked at me.
‘You put yourself in danger a couple of times.’
I shrugged. ‘It happens. I did all right with Rhino but I should probably have handled Henderson some other way. Maybe I should have used Noel to get to talk to him, but I didn’t think of it at the time.’
‘How do you feel about killing him?’
‘Not too bad. He was a killer himself. He tried to kill me and he might have killed Cy. I can live with it. I’m more worried about being found out. Also, it could be argued that I’ve made you an accessory after the fact.’
‘Having been framed for a murder, I’m not too worried about that. Who else knows about Henderson but you and me?’
‘As things stand, no one, unless Noel has a way of piecing it together. But he has a lot of reasons to keep quiet.’
‘Well, that might be all right. As a properly trained lawyer I shouldn’t say that, but I’ve learned lately that what they teach you in Criminal Law Honours doesn’t line up too well with the reality. But I don’t understand what’s going on. Who threatened Judith and who was this Henderson creature working for?’
‘That’s one part of the question I don’t know the answer to.’
‘What’re the other parts of the question?’
‘What this is all about. Say Henderson killed your husband and set Van Kep up to frame you. Say he was working for someone who’s organising all of this. Why? Who profits, and how?’
She stared at me, sipped some wine and didn’t answer. I got up and fetched my jacket from where it had been left on a chair outside the bathroom. I reached into the pocket and took out my notebook. The fake magazine mock-up and the brochure from the Washington Club came with it and I took the stuff back into the kitchen. I showed Claudia the diagrams of names, boxes, circles and arrows I’d made on loose sheets which I’d folded and put in the notebook.
I hadn’t looked at the sheets for a while and I added a few things from recent events. ‘I’m a bit behind with this.’
‘I’d say you were about twenty years behind. They do all this sort of thing with computers now. What does it tell you?’
I drew a line through the Judith Daniels box. ‘Not much. I thought I had something here with your stepdaughter… ‘
‘Ugh, don’t call her that.’
‘Sorry. But I believed her, more or less. I don’t envy Rhino.’
‘No, she’s a sad specimen. He’ll get clear of her sooner or later, the way all the others have. No self-esteem, that’s her problem. I tried to like her but it was impossible. She doesn’t like herself and won’t let you like her. Julius neglected her, then spoiled her rotten, then neglected her again. He made her what she is. Wouldn’t admit it of course, but in the end he didn’t much like what he saw.’
I drew another arrow connecting the Wilson Katz and Daniels boxes. The first one had gone Katz to Daniels, this went the other way.
‘What’s that for?’
‘Rhino told me she wanted him back.’
‘Poor thing. When you say you believed her, d’you mean you believe that Julius was afraid of me?’
I looked at her. I was feeling the effects of the wine, but not so much as to miss the challenge in her tone and manner as she fiddled with a cigarette and matches. Careful now, Cliff.
‘No,’ I said. ‘But I believe he told her so. Why, I haven’t a clue.’
She put the cigarette and matches down and had a sip of wine. ‘I’ve thought a lot about him these past couple of days. He was a devious man. I doubt if he ever trusted anyone, including himself. Slippery, you know?’
I nodded, relieved that the tense moment had passed. It was worth another belt of the dry white.
Claudia spoke slowly, as if weighing the words as they came out: ‘It would be like him, while thinking about how to get rid of me, to suggest to someone that the boot was on the other foot, so to speak. Do you understand?’
‘I understand what you’re saying, but that would be a pretty twisted mind.’ Then I thought of some of the subterfuges I’d perpetrated in my time and the question I’d been holding back all this time flashed in front of me in neon lights: Why did you come here?
‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘I suppose all minds are twisted in one way or another.’
She lit the cigarette and puffed the smoke away from me, but not that far away. ‘You’re chewing on something there in your twisted mind, aren’t you?’
I forced a grin. ‘Shit, I’m the one with the gypsy grandma. I should do the mind-reading act.’
‘C’mon, Cliff. Let’s be all grown-up about this. No, let’s be earthy! Let’s talk as good as we fuck.’
I sucked in a breath. Here goes, I thought. Another chance to screw everything up. But if I was evasive she’d know. ‘Why did you come up here, Claudia? And why did you bring the old passport?’
For some people, having their private effects snooped into, letters read, diary perused, is the ultimate betrayal. Nothing can repair the damage. My theory is that those who leave things where they can be peeped at want this to happen, at least on one level. It’s a convenient theory for someone in my line of work and helps to account for their overreaction. Others take it in their stride and Claudia was one of them.
She grinned at me, probing the gap in her teeth with her tongue. ‘Wouldn’t be much of a detective if you didn’t open the odd drawer, eh? I don’t blame you. I’m a terrible snoop myself. Let me loose in your place and I’d probably… ‘ She heard what she’d said and stopped. Apparently, like me, she was living whatever there was between us out minute by minute and this was the first time she’d looked ahead. A bleak expression sprea
d across her face.
I wanted to comfort her. To touch her, to tame a few of the wild hair tendrils, to kiss her and feel the jut of those marvellous teeth, but I sat still.
‘I thought I might be able to get it doctored to pass muster. Thought about doing a flit,’ she said. ‘Just grabbing all the money I could lay my hands on, getting on a plane to Majorca and pissing off out of all this. It looks like they can’t bring you back from there.’
They can for murder, I thought, but I didn’t say it. ‘What stopped you?’
‘I thought about a woman I knew who was in the witness protection program. New identity and all that. She’d got involved in a quite different legal problem, unrelated to what had gone on before, and it was a mess. Her life was hell and she went mad. I thought of how much worse it would be in a foreign country with fake papers and all that. I made a rational decision not to do it and now I’m glad I did.’
I was glad as well, but I wondered if our reasons were the same. She reached over and touched the Band-Aid on the back of my hand. ‘We can tell everything to this Leon Stratton, can’t we? We can make Van Kep admit he was lying-’
‘There’s a problem. Van Kep might change his story if he knew the guy who threatened him was dead. But I can’t make the connection without admitting that I killed him.’
‘It was self-defence. He was a known criminal. He tried to blow you up and he had a shotgun. You had to do it.’
I shook my head. ‘I didn’t report it. I removed evidence and disposed of it. I’d be up to my balls in trouble.’
She smiled. The bleak look remained and the effect was disturbing. ‘So it’s you or me?’
‘No, I’ll come clean if there’s no other way. I promise you that. But we still don’t know who’s behind all this. That’s the real problem. Van Kep knows there are wheels, within wheels. One dead heavy may not be enough to sway him. Besides… ‘
‘What?’
‘I want to know, don’t you?’
She sipped some more wine and reached for the Washington Club brochure. ‘Yes, of course. But mostly I want to be out of the firing line. What’s this?’