The Empty Beach

by Peter Corris

  I was still reading when the phone rang.

  ‘Cliff Hardy? This is Ann Winter.’

  ‘Yes?’ I didn’t mean to sound abrupt, but something in her voice told me that she hadn’t rung me up to invite me around for a drink.

  ‘Look, I’m worried about Bruce. He was supposed to meet me here and he hasn’t showed up. He should be here. I’ve rung his flat, but there’s no answer. I thought you might know where he is.’

  ‘No, Ann, I don’t. I rang his flat, too.’

  ‘He left a cassette and he sounds really weird on it. There’s some stuff about you.’

  ‘What sort of stuff?’

  ‘Well, some names and places. Manny says he rushed off after he left the cassette. This is touchy stuff we’re into here and we’re very careful. We leave these messages …’

  ‘I know; Bruce told me a bit about it. You stay at Manny’s. Tell me where Bruce lives and I’ll go there. Give me the number of Manny’s place and I’ll call you if I find anything.’

  She gave me the information. I tossed down the rest of my drink and went out to the car.

  Bronte is a notch or two further down the socioeconomic scale than Bondi. The flats are smaller and less flash and there are weatherboard cottages that look as though they haven’t changed since the 1920s. I drove pretty fast, partly out of pleasure that the car would move like that, partly out of an instinct that there was some kind of trouble brewing. The streets got narrow towards Bronte and I had to be careful to avoid joggers and a few unhappy-looking guys working on old cars jacked up in front of blocks of flats.

  Bruce’s flat was in a white, waterfall-style building up over the rise, well back from Bronte beach. The waterfall effect was achieved by two cylindrical towers that flanked a flat-roofed central section. If it had been up to me I’d have taken my rooms in the right-hand tower on the top floor—best view. It turned out that Bruce’s place was in the left-hand tower. His door was at the back, away from the street and at the top of a set of exterior stairs like a fire escape. The backyard was concreted over and only six rotary clothes lines grew there.

  I knocked on the door and was answered by silence. I beat heavily on it and got more silence. The stairs were placed centrally, too far away to get a look through the window.

  I stood there, wondering why I knew something was wrong, why I knew I wasn’t just standing outside the door of someone who wasn’t home. Then I got it; there was a smell coming from around the edges of the door. I squatted and sniffed. There was a stench of shit.

  The Falcon may present a more respectable front these days, but fundamentally it’s the same old car. I got my .45 automatic from under the dashboard and a short jemmy from the boot. I splintered the door jamb and smashed the lock, then I kicked the door open and waited, flattened back against the wall. Nothing moved. Nothing happened, except that the smell grew stronger.

  Bruce Henneberry lay on his back, about three feet from the door. He made one of the worst corpses I’d ever seen, including those the guerrillas had played about with before and after death in Malaya, and I had to lean against the broken door and mutter things and get a grip on myself. I looked out into the yard and beyond, but my break-and-enter had disturbed no-one.

  I used the jemmy to ease the door shut and stepped into the room. There had been a hell of a lot of blood in Henneberry, and the carpet was thick and sticky with it. I skirted that and the body and looked around the flat, still trying to get control and make normal observations.

  The flat was in character; there were a lot of books of the kind that people who love to talk, love to read—Joan Didion, Toffler, Galbraith. They were in the standard student bookcase; bricks and plain pine planking. That and a couple of chairs and a TV set with a telephone on top of it comprised the furniture of the room in which Henneberry had died. His bedroom was spartan; double mattress on the floor with tangled bedclothes, more books, some clothes thrown over a Chinese saucer chair and some put away roughly in a chest of drawers. There were marijuana cigarette butts in a saucer by the bed. The bathroom was a bit streaky but basically clean; the kitchen was neat and didn’t look as if much food preparation went on there. A cassette player was plugged into a wall point; Henneberry evidently did his writing on the kitchen table. The light was good there and I found filing cards, manilla folders with notes, news clippings and other stuff in a cardboard box under the table. There were also a portable typewriter, a small plastic bag containing marijuana and cigarette papers and a half-empty bottle of brandy.

  All journalists keep an address book. Some combine this with a sort of diary, but there was no sign of any such item. That left the body and the nasty part. I squatted down just beyond the bloody swamp and tried to suspend all senses while I felt around Bruce. He’d been wearing jeans and an army shirt with deep front pockets and I found his wallet in one of them. I finger-tipped through it, but it was functional, nothing more. There was no diary, no address book. I got blood on my hands and went into the bathroom to wash it off. I’d been right about the bathroom the first time—there was no message written in soap on the mirror and nothing written in blood on the walls.

  I looked at my face in the mirror. I’d been sweating and my hair flopped down lankly onto my forehead. I was blinking convulsively and the search had given me a fixed, long-faced look, like a wax dummy. If someone had walked in, put a knife in my hand and said, ‘He did it’, I’d have believed it.

  I went out and looked at Henneberry again. His face was black, half of his intestines lay on the carpet beside him and he smelled like an open drain. I used the phone.

  ‘Manny’s.’

  ‘Ann Winter, please.’ Pause.

  ‘Ann Winter.’

  ‘Hardy. Get Manny to pour you a brandy.’

  ‘I don’t want brandy, I …’

  ‘Do it!’

  ‘Okay, I’ve got it. Now what?’

  ‘Bruce is dead. He’s been murdered. Drink the brandy.’

  There was a pause and her voice came through again harshly.

  ‘All right. I’m all right. Are you sure … it’s … not an accident or anything?’

  ‘No accident. Look, I’m going to have to phone the cops now, and they’ll look you up pretty soon. I don’t know whether this is connected with what you’re doing or with what I’m doing. Any ideas on that?’

  ‘No. I told you we were careful. I don’t think we’ve trodden on any big toes, but I don’t know …’

  ‘Okay. Did Bruce have an address book, diary, notebook, anything like that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s not here. That must mean something, but I don’t know what. Have you got that cassette?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hang on to it. Don’t give it to the cops. Who else knows about it?’

  ‘Well, Manny.’

  ‘Will he keep quiet?’

  ‘I think so. He’s …’

  ‘Okay, I know he’s there. You’d better go home. I’ll have to give your name to the police. Will the university have an address for you?’

  ‘No, only my supervisor, Dr Kenneth Badly.’

  ‘Right, I’ll give them that. It’ll take them a while to get to you and give you time to think. I take it you don’t mind holding out on the police a bit?’

  ‘Are you kidding? After what I’ve heard? No. But I want to see …’

  ‘No, you don’t. Believe me, you don’t. Give me your home number and I’ll talk to you later.’

  She did, and I rang off. Talking and acting in the real world of the living had steadied me, and I was able to take a closer look at Bruce. The killer had put something thin and strong around his neck and pulled. It would probably have been impossible to strangle someone of Bruce’s build with bare hands, but even with the garotte it hadn’t been easy; marks on the neck suggested that Bruce had got a hand up under the cord or had got leverage somehow. That had brought the knife into play. It looked as if the killer had cut and had gone on strangling.

  I too
k a last look around the flat to see if there was anything more to be learned. There wasn’t, but I found something I’d missed before. Down by the bed was a small bronze statuette mounted on a wooden block. A plate on the block read: ‘BRUCE HENNEBERRY’ and below ‘CHAMPION LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT DIVISION, A.A.L.O. 1977’. It hadn’t done him much good.

  I called the cops. While I was waiting for them, I called my lawyer Cy Sackville and put him in the picture.

  ‘Are you sure you didn’t do it?’ he asked.

  ‘He was the light heavyweight champion of Oregon and I haven’t used a disembowelling knife in years.’

  ‘Well, just play a straight bat with the police. Stonewall, you know.’

  ‘Trevor Bailey,’ I agreed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. I just wanted to see if you knew what you were talking about. How about my client? D’you think I can keep her out of it?’

  ‘Depends how hard they squeeze your balls. If I don’t hear from you in, say, six hours, I’ll start making noises. Okay?’

  7

  I SAT in a chair with my jemmy in my lap and waited. Two uniformed men came in; they looked at the body and looked at me and didn’t know what to say. Then Detective Sergeant Frank Parker arrived, and he knew just what to say. He issued orders in a rapid stream that set the patrol boys running and summoned technicians who photographed, dusted and measured in the way they do. He wandered around the flat after telling me to stay where I was. He was very tall and well-groomed with an expensive suit and good manners. I stayed put and watched him being efficient; it really was too soon to tell whether or not he had any brains.

  He certainly scored on style. His directives to the technical people suggested that he knew what they were doing and that they knew he knew. He bent down to look at things and didn’t seem to be worried about the crease in his nice dark blue pants; more points scored. When all the activity was going to his satisfaction, he called me out to the kitchen. I handed him the jemmy.

  ‘Illegal tool,’ he said. He had a good voice, like the voices you hear on the taxi radios but a bit smoother.

  I shrugged. That’s when he told me his name and offered me a filter cigarette. I refused the smoke and he asked to see my papers, quite politely. He looked through them quickly and handed them back. He seemed to be about to snap his fingers as a way of asking to see the .45, but he stopped himself. I passed the gun across and he gave it a quick once over. He put it on the table and we both looked at it.

  ‘The licence isn’t for that gun,’ he said. So he did have brains. ‘Where’s the .38?’ he added quietly.

  ‘At home.’

  ‘This is your car gun?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Sit down, Hardy.’ He reached across to drop his ash in the sink and stayed in a leaning position, very relaxed. He wasn’t easily placed as a copper; not one of the old belt-’em-by-accident-before-you-do-it-on-purpose types who might or might not be honest and not one of the new, flashy types who are interested in your money and their careers and who play a balancing game by their rules.

  He got out a notebook that had been spoiling the sit of his jacket pocket and wrote down my name and address from memory.

  ‘What was the licence number again?’

  I told him and he wrote some more. Then he said, ‘Excuse me’, and stuck his head out the door. He looked into the living-room for a minute and wrote some more before he put the notebook away.

  ‘We’ll need a full statement, of course. What do you want to tell me now?’ He stubbed out the cigarette in the sink and with it went the slight informality. He was all business now.

  ‘Not much to tell,’ I said. ‘I only met him yesterday.’

  ‘Maybe that was his unlucky day.’

  ‘Maybe, but I can’t see how.’

  ‘Let’s start with how you met him.’

  It dawned on me that this was all technique with him. Leaning there in his sharp but uncared-for suit, with his hair a bit long and his voice almost professionally persuasive, he was like a cat with claws in. If you weren’t careful, you’d be telling him how much you fiddled on your income tax and all about the shoplifting you’d done back in the 1950s. I dug in a bit.

  ‘You’ve seen my papers, Parker. You know what I do for a living. I think a formal statement might be the best move and you can make up your mind what to do after that.’

  He didn’t like it, and straightened up a little towards the six foot three which would give him two inches on me. Before he could speak, there was some swearing from the living-room. From the curses I gathered that the men were trying to prepare the body so they could move it. It wouldn’t have been a nice job and you couldn’t blame them for swearing. Parker took a look out—I didn’t—and when he turned back to me his face was a bit less hawkish and hard-lined.

  I looked down at the Colt on the table and wondered if my ex-wife Cyn hadn’t been right all along about this job. ‘You deal with damaged people,’ she’d told me, ‘because you’re damaged yourself. You can’t operate with normal, decent people.’ She claimed that I mauled her decent people unless I was drunk, when I’d make fun of them to their faces. She said that my policeman mate Grant Evans and I were violence-prone anti-socials. She said Evans and I belonged in gaol with the other social rejects. She said a lot of things as our marriage crumbled.

  Parker pushed the gun towards me to show he was a good guy and said, ‘College Street, now,’ to show he was a hard guy. He let me follow him to town in my own car, but he noted down the registration number and he didn’t give me back my jemmy.

  We went into one of the bleak, soulless rooms at Police Headquarters and I gave a statement to a stenographer that left out certain details such as Mrs Singer’s name and the coffee bar meeting place. Parker looked in from time to time and listened to me talking. He didn’t seem to like what he heard. When the statement was typed up, he brought it to me for signing.

  The room was getting to me by then and I had a delayed reaction to the whole foul business. ‘You don’t look too good,’ he said. ‘We’ll get some coffee and go up to the office.’

  I could see why he didn’t say ‘my office’. Parker shared a room with three other detectives. They had the nasty view into east Sydney from their windows. Their desks were wedged in between filing cabinets and wastepaper baskets. A colleague at his desk kept his head down and ignored us.

  I got a cup of coffee, was offered the comforts of tobacco again and sat at one of the detective’s desks while Parker read the statement. He didn’t seem to have any trouble with any of the longer words. He smoked his filter tip down far enough not to be a wastrel but not so far as to get all the packed-up gunk into his lungs. He finished reading.

  ‘Client’s name?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Any marks where this kid hit you?’

  I wasn’t sure myself; I pulled up my shirt and there was a light bruise, hardly visible. I’d probably made a little too much of it in the statement.

  ‘Bit slow, were you, Hardy?’

  ‘I’d had a few drinks.’

  ‘Have a few more with Henneberry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  I named one of the pubs I’d visited that night. What I’d said probably wouldn’t hold up and the lie could turn Parker nasty, but it was the best I could do off the cuff. It was stuffy in the room and Parker took off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves. He had thin, sinewy forearms and the right one had a long white scar running along it. He saw me look at it.

  ‘Knife,’ he said. ‘Nasty things, knives. I don’t like to think of someone out there who can use one the way this bloke did. Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You might run into him, and Henneberry’s not going to be around to protect you.’ He got a nice bit of needle into that. ‘There might be no-one around at all. Have you thought of that?’

  ‘Yeah, but I don’t know if Henneberry’s death has anything to do with my little m
atter. I’m happy to go on with it for a while.’

  ‘Go on doing what?’ he asked sharply.

  I grinned at him and shrugged. He leaned forward across the paper and files and other bureaucratic junk on his desk. ‘I have to try and find this maniac, Hardy. You look like a nuisance to me. I can keep you out of the area if I want to.’

  I knew he could do it, and it was time to decide how to play him. Since Grant Evans got stuck at a high-middle level in the Force and threw it in to take a Deputy Commissionership interstate, I hadn’t an ally in the Police Department. It was a sad lack and maybe Parker could fill the role. I’d liked his style so far, particularly the way he hadn’t threatened to throw me down any stairs.

  ‘Do two things for me,’ I said. ‘Call Grant Evans in the west and ask him what he thinks of me. I think you’ll be satisfied. If you are, give me two days clear on it. I’ll give you anything I get. In two days I should find out what I want to know, anyway.’

  ‘Whatever the fuck that is,’ he growled. ‘What do I put in the report in the meantime?’

  I reached forward and poked a finger into the paper on the desk top. ‘Reports,’ I said. ‘What’s in these, d’you reckon? You can say what you like in a report. You can say I’ve been warned, if you like. I won’t contradict you.’

  He looked at the paper jungle in front of him with distaste. ‘Okay, Hardy. I don’t have to call Evans. We’ve got a note or two about you here and I looked at it while you were yapping. You’re sneaky, you hit a lot of lobs, but your sheet’s pretty clean. Lately, anyhow.’

  ‘You play tennis, do you?’

  ‘Yes. Pennant. You?’

  ‘Yeah, not pennant, though. Do I get the two days?’

  His look seemed to measure me, weigh me and estimate my IQ. ‘You know,’ he said slowly, ‘I actually got some sleep last night. Good sleep. You’re benefiting. Piss off, I’ve got a report to write.’