The Empty Beach

by Peter Corris

  ‘That little twat can’t read,’ he said. ‘And you’d need the mouthwash handy if you were going to suck her.’

  ‘He wanted to show me his dick,’ the blonde chirped.

  ‘If he did, you wouldn’t know whether to lie down or open your mouth.’

  ‘You’re a shit, Bob. I know what you want.’

  He sighed. ‘I want to keep Mac happy and draw my pay. That means keeping sluts like you unbruised. You won’t be the last, Sharon.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘it’s been exciting talking to you, but I think I’ll be going.’

  ‘You do that.’ He rubbed against the car like a cat. ‘I’m a bit disappointed. Thought you might have a go.’

  Sharon wriggled in her moulded bucket seat and pulled her top down an inch.

  ‘Get rid of him, Bob,’ she hissed. ‘Mac’s coming.’

  I turned and saw the bull-like man heading towards us with his head down and his shoulders hunched. He kicked savagely at a can in his way and it screeched and clattered across the concrete.

  Bob had straightened up like a guardsman awaiting inspection. I grinned at him. ‘Another time,’ I said. I backed across to my car, got in and drove away before Mac made it out to the street. In the rear vision mirror I saw Bob pull open the kerbside door so that Mac could settle in behind the left-hand drive steering wheel.

  3

  MY habit is to run a good check on the client before pounding the pavement and knocking on doors, otherwise a man could end up working for a white slaver or a politician. The little I had on Singer was from one source only—a friend in the credit rating racket. I needed more, so I called Harry Tickener at the News and got temporary researcher status, which admitted me to the paper’s first-class library.

  Mrs Singer had been right about John’s penchant for the low profile. The newspapers had reported as fully as they could on his disappearance, but they were scratching to fill the space when it came to background dope. He had extensive business interests concentrated in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, was fifty-eight years of age and president of his tennis club. That last piece of data showed how hard up the papers had been for copy.

  There was no photograph of him. I read the reports carefully. Singer had been in the habit of jogging along the roads at first light (not down on the sand, where you couldn’t move for seekers after aerobic fitness). He’d gone for his run early on a bleak August morning and that had been the last anyone had seen of him. A towelling headband he always wore had been washed up on the beach later the following day, and that was it.

  My client hadn’t rated a mention in the papers at all; she hadn’t been seen anywhere wearing anything, hadn’t put flowers around the necks of racehorses or danced with the premier. My jottings from these stunning pieces of journalism hardly filled half a sheet of notebook paper.

  I found Harry Tickener belting his typewriter in his latest attempt to win the elusive Walkley Award. Harry has filled out a bit over the years, but his mind is still lean and sharp. I tried the name Singer on him.

  ‘Nope,’ he said. He stared down at his copy paper as if he might forget forever the next thing he wanted to say. ‘Never heard anything about him. Try Garth.’

  ‘Thanks, Harry.’

  He waved a hand, but already had the other on the keys, chasing the Walkley. Harry will spend a week drinking and going to the races when it suits him, but when he works he works.

  Garth Green is known as ‘the bear’ because he’s big and brown and sprouts hair everywhere. He lost his struggle against the cigarette habit and coughs happily along, quoting John O’Hara: ‘When I first lit and inhaled a cigarette I knew I was not taking a Horlicks malted milk tablet.’ I wish I could see it like that. We exchanged the usual insults and I named my man.

  ‘Singer … Singer.’ He sucked on his cigarette and drew the smoke down to his boots. ‘I heard a bit about him before he went for his dip. A Brit, wasn’t he? Word was he was an ex-commando and as tough as they come. He had to be to make a go of it in the game he was in.’

  ‘No whispers? Slow gee gees, little girls, little boys?’

  ‘You’ve got a filthy mind, Cliff. No, not a thing. He ran a solid operation in the eastern suburbs. Tom McLeary has a big part of it and someone else whose name eludes me. Mac’s a tough guy, too.’

  ‘Mac?’ I said. ‘Would he be a shortish character, built like a bull?’

  ‘That’s him. Not a nice bloke, but he hasn’t killed anyone recently that I know of. Famous for his bad temper. He’s exploded in public a couple of times and made some lawyers and dentists rich.’

  ‘How did he and Singer get on?’

  ‘Don’t know. Uneasily, I’d guess. What’s the story?’

  ‘Off the record. Someone thinks he might be still alive. I’m sniffing at it.’

  A great gust of coughing swept Garth up, doubled him over and left him gripping the edge of the desk.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘I thought I was going to see a lung.’

  ‘No lungs left.’ He lit another cigarette and blew smoke at me.

  ‘How crooked was Singer, Garth?’

  ‘Hard to say. Fifty per cent might be right. Some pretty heavy people running things out there, Cliff. You want to watch your step.’

  I thumped my chest. ‘I don’t smoke. My wind is sound. I’ll run away.’

  It was late in the afternoon and the city traffic was thickening fast. I decided to have a drink while it eased off and then potter around in Bondi for a bit to get the feel of the place. On the off chance, I stuck my head in at the photo room, where they have a thousand pictures of Sophia Loren and one of Bertrand Russell, if you’re lucky. It’s heavily protected territory, out of bounds to all but the properly accredited. Most of the minions enforce the rules but Thelma Clark doesn’t, and she was there when I called in.

  ‘S for Singer,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ she said. ‘I can’t see you. Along the right-hand wall and you’ve got twenty seconds.’

  I slid in, slithered along the wall and grabbed the box that contained the photographic likenesses of people from Silverman to Sixtus. Marion Singer had been wrong; there was a picture of Singer talking to a judge of the licensing court who was obviously the main subject of the shot. Someone had bothered to tag Singer, too, so he achieved immortality. The judge was pretty well known, so I went over my twenty seconds and looked in his box as well. There were three copies of the photo which did not name Singer. I slipped one of them into my pocket. Thelma didn’t even look up as I went out.

  I walked to a pub where they leave the lights on in the saloon bar so you can see what you’re drinking. I bought a scotch and a packet of chips and sat down to study the picture.

  It’s hard to tell in photographs when you don’t have a point of reference, and the judge could have been Alan Ladd-sized for all I knew, but Singer looked big. I’d put him at around six feet two with a strong build; he had a large, slightly meaty face with wavy fair hair. He looked a little like Michael Caine, the English actor. I drank and munched chips and decided that he looked a lot like Caine. That made it instantly impossible to assign any characteristics to him; I thought of Caine in Alfie and The Eagle Has Landed and Singer took on some of that role-switching insubstantiability. I put the picture away and had another drink and thought that an Englishman that big with a face like that shouldn’t be too hard to spot, even if he was looking crook.

  I’d been wearing slacks with shoes and white shirt for my meeting with the widow Singer. Very square and all wrong for Bondi of a spring evening, so I drove home to Glebe to change. Things have looked up at home since I took in a tenant. The newspapers, delivered while I’ve been away on high-powered forty-eight-hour surveillance jobs, and the green plastic garbage bags, symbols of collections missed, haven’t built up in the front garden. Hildegarde is twenty-two, a final year dentistry student. She answered an advertisement I put in the local paper for a lodger. She was the brightest-looking applicant, and she told
me that she had no unsavoury habits or hobbies. She smiled when she said that and then told me she played tennis a lot. That was good enough for me.

  She was making coffee when I went in. I had a lightning-fast shave, put on jeans and a T-shirt and came through, sniffing the coffee aroma. Hilde poured me one.

  ‘Going out?’

  ‘Yep, Bondi.’ I sipped the coffee, which was better than I’ve ever been able to make.

  ‘A yacht party?’

  ‘There’s no yachts at Bondi, you ignorant Balt.’

  Hilde has a clean German skin and long, pale hair which she ties back or lets loose, according to her mood. We’ve been close to going to bed together a couple of times, but haven’t quite got there. I doubt that we will now, although then a long celibacy was nagging me. She’s too independent, I’m too mistrustful. We play tennis occasionally and she beats me.

  She drank the coffee scalding, the way she can.

  ‘Bondi,’ she said, ‘let’s see. Surf. You don’t surf. Rock music. You don’t need it. I don’t know anything else about the place, except it’s got a lot of New Zealanders. Do you speak New Zealand?’

  ‘Sure. Pakeha, Waikato. I’m working, love. What’ll you do tonight?’

  ‘Study,’ she said. ‘Root canals.’

  I shuddered and blew on the coffee. ‘Torturers all.’

  She grinned at me. ‘I need to practise. How about a session in the chair?’

  ‘Get out of my house. Any mail?’

  She pointed to a few envelopes beside the bread box, and I poked at them without interest. I took the picture of Singer from my hip pocket and passed it across the table.

  ‘What d’you make of him? Would he need the novocaine?’

  She studied the picture. ‘No chance. A real tough guy.’ She frowned. ‘He looks like someone I know.’

  I sighed. ‘Michael Caine.’

  ‘That’s right! I loved him as the good Nazi.’ She gave me a challenging look across her cup. Her people left Germany sometime in the 1920s and went to Palestine to grow olives. They were interned by the British and put on ships going here and there. The Stöners ended up in Australia and became Stones. Hilde’s an anarchist freethinker, but she likes to play the Hun.

  ‘He was great,’ I said. ‘But this isn’t him. This bloke could mean big money for me if I find him … or if I don’t.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither do I. Well, I’m off to Bondi. Thanks for the coffee.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to eat?’

  ‘What do they eat in Bondi, do you reckon?’

  She shrugged. ‘Dunno. Fish and chips, I suppose.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  I reclaimed the picture, checked that I had some business cards and money and set out for Bondi where Sir Charles Kingsford Smith nearly got drowned and where John Singer did, maybe.

  4

  BONDI is flat country. The place is crowded with big blocks of flats, small ones, and divided houses in a pattern forced by the passionate desire of Australians to live by the sea as if they are reluctant to desert the fount of life. By day the suburb is a mixture of the smart and shabby; most of the buildings are painted white, but on some of them this gives way to green or grey at the sides. Some of the backs are grimy. Some of the gardens are smart and well watered; some feature palm trees tattered like old umbrellas in front of windows with faded, stained blinds.

  Night changes all that. The neon glow compensates for the immense dark blankness of the sea. The haphazard levels of the buildings take on a foreign, exotic look and the penthouse dwellers sip their drinks high above the streets like fat, privileged eagles in their eyries.

  I parked near the Regal again and strolled around the streets. There were too many cars for the air to be really pleasant, but the light breeze and the sea were doing their best. Up there in an eyrie with a scotch and a cigar, it would be pretty good. Food wouldn’t be a problem; along the Parade you could eat Russian, Lebanese, Italian, Chinese and Indonesian and have a choice of places to do it in. You could take most of those culinary delights away, too, as well as the standard varieties of chicken and burger.

  This profusion of food blunted my appetite. I walked, reflecting that these Bondi people were a breed apart; they ate out and lived on top of each other. Next to food joints, secondhand furniture places seemed to be the most common businesses. Those flats needed furniture, and I wondered if it was cheaper tenth hand than third hand. I doubted it.

  The pubs were doing good business. So were the coffee bars, and a disco joint had the air of a car with its motor idling, waiting for the action to start. There were plenty of Asians and a few big, broad-featured Maoris among the street people. Humanity flowed freely along the main street, trickled down across the grass to the pavilion and sand and clustered in humming, twittering groups outside places of entertainment. The background to it all was the steady, pounding rhythm of money being spent.

  I had one good contact in Bondi. Aldo Tomasetti is the brother of Primo, who runs a tattoo parlour in the Cross and who lets out a space at the back for me to park my car. Aldo is in the same game.

  I tramped up Bondi Road two blocks back from the Parade and turned north. Aldo’s place is a hole in the wall between a delicatessen and a place where women cater to the needs of men, credit cards accepted. The delicatessen was open and my appetite returned. I bought a sandwich and some orange juice and went into Aldo’s.

  He was working on an arm, a big, wide, fair-skinned arm that already had some snakes and dragons on it. Aldo was adding an eagle. The arm’s owner grinned at me; he had a blank, comic-strip face and you could see why he wanted his body covered with pictures.

  ‘Hey, Cliff,’ Aldo said. ‘Good to see you.’

  ‘Excuse me eating,’ I said.

  ‘Have some wine with it. Flagon’s over there.’

  I got some paper cups and filled three with the red.

  ‘You shouldn’t drink for twenty-four hours after being tattooed,’ Aldo said.

  The customer looked alarmed and Aldo slapped his shoulder. ‘I’m joking. Drink up. How’s it going, Cliff?’

  ‘Okay. Do you remember a guy named Singer? Used to own this and that around here?’

  ‘Sure. Dead.’

  ‘So they say.’ I watched the tattooee carefully to see if there was any reaction to the name, but his face stayed blank. He seemed to be enjoying the wine, though. I finished the sandwich and wiped my mouth with the wrapping paper.

  ‘Did you ever hear anything different, Aldo? You know—boat offshore, frogmen, that sort of crap?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. Was he kinky?’

  ‘Not that I know. Why?

  ‘Just thinking. That Commander Crabb slept in his frog suit. Did you know that?’

  ‘No.’ I was aware of how little I knew about Singer. I didn’t know how he talked, how he walked, what he drank. All essentials. I quizzed Aldo and he gave me the names of two hotels where Singer used to drink. One was on my list as one of his business interests. He also named three taxi drivers whose cabs Singer owned and he knew there were a good few more. There were no taxi drivers on my list.

  To my great surprise, the customer spoke up brightly. ‘You oughter look for Leon, mister. He knows everything that happens around here.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Derro,’ Aldo said. ‘Wanders up and down. Funny guy. I once heard him speaking perfect Italian and you’d think he couldn’t talk at all. Pissed all the time.’

  I finished my wine and put the juice on the floor.

  ‘Thanks again. Have some juice.’

  ‘I’ll give it to the girls next door for their vodka.’

  I nodded and took a closer look at the tattoo. The tips of the eagle’s wings were being inked in with brilliant reds and blues. My grandfather had had naval tattoos acquired in Port Said when he was fourteen; he used to show them to me fifty years later. One carried the name of his ship and he was still proud of
it. I wondered whether John Singer had any tattoos.

  So I hit the street with my photo and my list and my expense account. Although the pubs were busy, they hadn’t reached that frenetic stage when everybody seems to be shouting while a full-scale brass band plays in the background. I had a discreet word to a barman here and a barmaid there, but drew blanks. I limited myself to half scotches with soda and ice, which made me belch but otherwise did little harm.

  Mrs Singer was right; I did have something against pinball. The Punk Palace of Fun was a garish barn with strobe lights and brain-scrambling music. The machines gave out bleeps and blasts that the players seemed to understand and respond to. The non-players stared vacantly around them through their cigarette smoke; the users worked with the intensity of brain surgeons. The light sharpened their features, accentuated their youth. I felt the same kinship with them as I would with Chinese border guards.

  At the back, in the shadows but not out of range of the noise, was a tiny recess with a table, a telephone and mine host. He was about thirty with sparse hair, a sunken chest and a grey, twitching face. He took a long look at the photo, which he held in a hand that vibrated like a musical saw.

  ‘Could be. I dunno.’

  ‘He’s the owner. How long have you been here?’

  ‘I dunno. Coupla years.’

  ‘Have you ever seen this man?’

  ‘I wouldn’t see the owner, man. I manage for a guy who rents. He might rent from someone else, for all I know.’

  ‘You might have seen him somewhere else. On the street?’

  ‘Could be.’

  I got ten dollars out and put it on the table, keeping my index finger down hard on one corner of the note.

  ‘Think.’

  ‘I could ask around.’

  I got out one of my cards, put it on top of the note and took my finger off. He grabbed with one of his dancing hands. He’d spend the money on something to put in a vein or up his nose and wouldn’t remember who had given him the card or why, but you never knew.

  ‘Give me a call if anything comes.’