The Reward

by Peter Corris

  When she’d finished I said, ‘You suggested that maybe it’s not surprising that Max isn’t here. What did you mean by that?’

  She picked up a pencil and tapped on the desk with it for a minute. Then she put it back. ‘Have you ever been disabled, Cliff? Put out of action for a while?’

  I nodded. ‘I had an eye injury. I was effectively blind for a bit.’

  ‘Right. Did you notice an increased sensitivity to sound and smell and all that, the way the books say?’

  ‘I did, yes. It went away when I could see again.’

  ‘Did you have a partner at the time?’

  Helen Broadway, I thought. Yes, by god I did. I nodded.

  ‘Touch became important, right? And smell and taste?’

  ‘That’s right.’ I had no idea where this was heading, but it made me feel vaguely uncomfortable. I sipped the coffee and wished Max would come.

  ‘Well, it’s like that with me since . . . this happened. I can read people’s body language, pick up things from the way they move, the tone of voice, the balance of positive and negative in what they do. D’you understand?’

  ‘What’s this about, Penny.’

  ‘If you asked Max why he’s late he’d say he was giving us a few minutes to get to know each other. But that’s only partly true. What he’s really doing is using you as a way of finding out what I think of him. Is that too devious for you?’

  ‘A bit. Yes.’

  ‘I’m in love with him. I have been since the first day. He’s smart and funny and not vain. He’s stubborn about his deafness and the most understanding person I’ve met about my condition. I’m crazy about him. I want him very badly.’

  ‘Penny, I . . .’

  ‘I can have sex, you know. Everything’s all right down there. Masturbate. It’s fine. It’d take a little ingenuity but I reckon Max is an ingenious enough man. You’re embarrassed. I understand. But just hear me out. Pretty soon, Max will ask you what you think of me and then he’ll sidle round to asking what I think of him. He will, believe me.’

  ‘Okay. I believe you. What d’you want me to do?’

  ‘Tell him.’

  ‘It’s my turn to read minds. He’ll say he’s nearly twice your age.’

  ‘So he’s got twenty years and I’ve got forty. Say we had twenty together. I’d settle for that.’

  Max strode into the room and dropped his briefcase with a thud. ‘Hello, you two. How’re you getting along?’

  20

  Coffee all round. Penny went to work at the computer. Max and I huddled in a corner. I told him about the phone call from Claudia Vardon.

  ‘She’s the key to the whole thing, Max.’

  ‘Hold on, hold on. We could be getting our wires crossed here. The whole thing, for me, is the suppression of evidence, the corruption of police officers, the cover-up of a major crime. Plus . . .’

  ‘The murder of Ramona Beckett.’

  ‘Exactly. We’ve got a handle on the first parts of it, with or without your mystery lady.’

  ‘Not much of a one as things stand. A tape of some women talking dirty.’

  ‘Don’t mumble. You’re giving yourself away. What was that you said?’

  ‘All we’ve got is a tape of some women talking in a brothel.’

  ‘Wrong. I taped Sligo. I meant to tell you that. You heard what he said. It was virtually a deathbed testimony. That’s pretty powerful stuff. You’re getting sidetracked by this woman. Women can do that better than men.’

  I couldn’t help trying to steer him in the direction Penny had pointed. ‘Is that right, Max? You’d know, would you?’

  He didn’t bite. ‘Save the irony. Cavendish is the target.’

  Against every logical instinct I wanted to play it the way Claudia outlined. ‘She, this Claudia Vardon woman, knows more about all this than we know.’

  Jesus, you’re obsessed. Okay, so what do you want to do?’

  ‘How’s this? You and Penny find out everything you can about Sean Beckett. When we tackle him we’re going to need some ammunition unless he just goes to pieces. That’s a day’s work. Claudia rings tonight. If nothing comes of that we go up against the lot of them with whatever we’ve got.’

  ‘What will you be doing?’

  ‘I’ll do the same on Cavendish. I’ve got a few mates in the legal game. I’ll look in on Leo Grogan if that’s possible.’

  ‘It feels like marking time.’

  ‘Make some copies of the tapes. Check on the bank accounts. Check on whether anything’s turned up on the Barry White hit. Since we don’t think there’s anyone here keeping an eye on us, you can do that. Come on, Max, you’re a copper. You know the drill. Background, mate, background.’

  Max looked over to where Penny was working and from the expression on his face I got the feeling that she’d read him exactly right. His lean face softened and there was something wistful in the tilt of his head. Or was I imagining it? She sat very straight in the wheelchair. Her thick dark hair was brushed back, revealing small, delicate ears and a shapely neck. Maybe Max was a neck man.

  He nodded. ‘All right.’

  I cupped my ear. ‘Speak up!’

  Max laughed. ‘You bastard.’

  Penny looked across and smiled. I gave her a thumbs up and left them to it.

  Leo Grogan had been transferred to a private hospital in Marrickville. Against the odds, and to the surprise of the medicos, he’d survived the crisis and was on the way to at least a partial recovery. There was some doubt as to whether he’d gain the full use of his left side but, as Leo drank with his right arm, I doubted that this would worry him too much. I got this information from an obliging nurse at the hospital where I represented myself as a relative.

  ‘Poor Mr Grogan hasn’t had any visitors,’ the nurse said. ‘He’ll be glad to see you.’

  ‘I’m sure he will.’ I meant it. I had a half bottle of Johnny Walker red in my pocket. I don’t like hospitals. People die in them and have bits removed, so I went as quickly as I could through to the ward which Leo shared with two other men. He was sitting up watching television. His head was bandaged and there were a couple of tubes running into his left upper arm.

  ‘Uncle Leo, my favourite uncle,’ I said. ‘How’re you getting along?’

  ‘What the fuck’re you doing here, Hardy?’

  ‘Is that any way to greet your one and only visitor?’ I pulled the curtain half around, shielding us off from the other two patients, both of whom had their televisions going. Leo looked alarmed until I produced the bottle. He nodded vigorously and pointed to the tray carrying a water carafe and two glasses. I switched off the TV, poured two solid shots, added water and put the whisky in the top drawer of his bedside table under a pair of pyjamas.

  Leo put half of his drink down in a gulp. ‘You’re a lifesaver. Now what the fuck do you want?’

  ‘Same old Leo. Oh, not much. Just keeping you up to date on the investigation that might still pay off big for us.’

  ‘It’s us now is it? That’s all bullshit, Hardy.’

  ‘Maybe. Did you know Barry White was dead?’

  Leo finished his drink and reached for the drawer. I held it shut. He rolled his eyes. ‘I might’ve known. Yeah, I heard about Barry. I guess Rinso finally got him, eh?’

  ‘Rinso?’

  ‘Give us another drink and I’ll tell you about it. Truth is I was never too happy about spending time with Barry like I’d been doing lately in case Rinso turned up.’

  I was all at sea and another violation of hospital rules seemed the only way to enlightenment. I made Grogan another drink and sipped my own while he told me about the long-running feud between Freddy ‘Rinso’ Persil and Barry White. Apparently White had got Persil’s daughter hooked on heroin, had supplied her and used her and sold her the junk that had killed her. Persil was in gaol at the time, but he’d sworn to kill White. According to Grogan, he was released three days before White was shot. I tried to think back to White’s panicked phone
call. I’d assumed then that what was alarming him had to do with the Beckett case, but that was just an assumption.

  ‘What’s the matter, Hardy,’ Grogan mocked. ‘Some sweet theory gone out the fucking window?’

  ‘Maybe. What about you, Leo. Who gave you the heave-ho?’

  He laughed. ‘Nobody. I was pissed and I fell down the fucking steps. Lucky I’ve got this good hospital insurance. Part of my package. They reckon I might be partly paralysed but that’s bullshit. Between you and me, I’m faking it a bit so’s they’ll keep on their toes.’

  His second drink was gone and he was looking at the drawer again. I was having mixed feelings. If all this was true, then Claudia was off the hook as an actual and would-be killer. But could Grogan be trusted? Then something he’d said came back to me.

  ‘Leo, you said you’d been spending time with Barry White lately. I only heard about two meetings—sounds like there was a few more.’

  ‘You’re a prize prick, Hardy, but you’re not dumb. Yeah, there was another meeting. Give me another drink and I’ll tell you about it. Make it quick, they’ll be coming around to feed us some fucking slop soon.’

  I gave Leo a weaker drink and showed him what was left in the bottle before putting it back in the drawer. He nodded and took a more judicious sip.

  ‘This woman came to see me. What she didn’t know about the fucking Beckett case wasn’t worth knowing. She knew I’d been on the team and she asked me if I knew anything, anything at all, that was off about the investigation. Well, I hadn’t thought about it for years, but I remembered that scene between Johnno and Peg, just like I told it to you.’

  ‘For the second time,’ I said.

  Leo swigged his drink. He was feeling pleased with himself now. ‘For the fucking third time. We get together again and this time she’s got Barry White along. I go through it again. Then she sets up the meeting with you and Barry and I have to act it out the way Barry told you it happened.’

  ‘I never knew coppers were such good actors.’

  ‘Are you kidding? You have to be, the fucking bullshit you have to say in court and write down and tell the brass, not to mention the crims, gets you that way. Anyway, that’s it. I asked for a monkey and I got it. She and Barry set you up to do whatever you fucking did. And you still haven’t told me what that was.’

  ‘You say she knew everything about the case. What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean every fucking thing. All about the girl who went missing, the family, the lot. It seemed to me she wasn’t even surprised when I told her about the note and that. It was as if she already knew about it.’

  ‘So, do you think she was a secretary to the old man, or the mother, or worked for the lawyer, or something like that?’

  ‘Be buggered,’ Leo said. ‘I reckon she was one of the kidnappers, or knew them, and she’d come up with a way to have a go at the reward money.’

  ‘Took her a long time.’

  Leo shrugged. ‘Playing safe. Maybe something changed in the set-up. Maybe she’d finally decided it was time to dob someone in.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  ‘They’re late with the fucking lunch.’

  ‘I thought you said it was slop.’

  ‘It is, but it breaks up the day.’ He raised his almost empty glass. ‘It’ll go down a bit better with this inside me.’

  ‘Watch out they don’t smell your breath.’ I took a deep breath myself and asked the question I’d been holding back. ‘What did she look like, Leo, this woman.’

  ‘Fucking good-looker, Hardy. Too good for you.’

  ‘Be specific.’

  Leo shrugged and his flabby jowls bounced. ‘Tallish, great figure, good tits and arse, everything. She wore big dark glasses and that sort of makes it hard to describe her face.’

  ‘Hair?’

  ‘Dark. Funny thing was, I kept feeling that I’d met her before.’

  21

  Marrickville Park is my kind of place—a big, open space, roughly mown with a football oval, plenty of trees, not too many flowers and some grass tennis courts tucked away in one corner. The croquet lawn in the opposite corner is a bit of an anomaly, but live and let live. You don’t see grass tennis courts much any more. They remind me of the great days of Australian tennis—Hoad and Rosewall, Laver and Emerson, Newcombe and Roche. They weren’t such great days in other ways—Bob Menzies, six o’clock closing, Vietnam—but I yearn for them sometimes when I hear about crack and child pornography and the hole in the ozone layer.

  I parked in Frazer Street and wandered through the park to the courts, kicking at pine cones. I was having trouble being objective about this twisting, turning mess of a case I had on my hands. I’d started out greedy for a hundred thousand dollars, had entertained thoughts of a whole lot more money and now was mostly hoping that Claudia Vardon, or whatever her name was, wasn’t too deep in the criminal soup. Who was I to be judgmental? I’d recently killed a man, falsified evidence and served a gaol term. As a private investigator I was more or less on probation. My personal needs were greater than my professional standards and I knew it. Had always known it.

  Two good players were on the courts—a baseliner and net-rusher. The baseliner had a double-fisted backhand like Agassi and the serve-volleyer had obviously modelled his game on Edberg’s. It had always seemed to me that a serve-volley player should beat a baseliner because that game requires a high passage over the net—easy meat for the volleyer. It hadn’t proved true over the years, but here on a suburban court, with a couple of fit A-graders at work, it was. The surface made the difference. The grass took the Edberg-style underspin and flat shots and kept the ball low. The Agassi clone couldn’t get topspin on either side and had to hit up. Stefan was there at the net and Andre was dead. I felt like applauding. But it would be like applauding the dinosaurs. I’d read that less than 5 per cent of professional tennis is played on grass these days.

  I wasn’t convinced that Claudia was one of the kidnappers, or an associate of one. It didn’t seem to fit. Against that, Peggy Hawkins was certainly just such a player in the game. Why not someone similar from the opposing side that turned out to be unopposed? It was all confused by my feelings for her which were mixed to say the very least. The strong sexual attraction had to be balanced against the ruthless way she’d used and manipulated me. My ribs were still sore and I still had sutures in my tom ear and I felt humiliated about being delivered home like a gift-wrapped package. I had a strong wish to meet up with those three blokes again with the odds better balanced.

  As I watched the balls go over the net and hit the fences with the force good players can generate, I realised that the best way to resolve all my dilemmas was to act like the volleyer—take the high ground and the initiative. I had to try to find Claudia Vardon before she phoned me and started calling the shots all over again. It had to be Claudia who’d met with Leo Grogan and set the ball rolling. The dark hair was no problem.

  It seemed reasonable to begin in Glebe. She appeared to be able to keep track of my movements there. She’d certainly known when I’d got back the other night. Most likely she’d just driven past, but if her intention was to keep really close tabs on me there was a chance she was staying somewhere nearby. There are no flash hotels in Glebe, just good, serviceable motels like the Rooftop and the Haven Inn on Glebe Point Road and the University Motor Inn across the way from what it gets its name from. I’m quite well known in all three of them, especially the Rooftop where I’ve occasionally put witnesses and other parties who needed putting. It has a swimming pool where you’d imagine—a big plus in summer and, besides, anxious people like to be able to go up on a roof and look down on the world that’s giving them a hard time.

  I did a quick check on the motels, giving them my description of Claudia and the car. Three blanks. I extended the search to Chippendale and Camperdown but came up with the same result. I couldn’t see Claudia staying in a backpacker hostel. The Blackwattle Bay end of Glebe is full of blocks of flat
s and flats become available for short-term leases and sub-lets. Claudia’s operation had obviously been well-planned, so securing a second base in advance wasn’t out of the question. More in hope than expectation, I toured the streets and looked in on the car parks. I knew a few of the residents and could ask them later, but the more I carried out this exercise, the more I realised I was kidding myself. She was too smart to be found by the equivalent of turning over rocks.

  I went home to find a message from Max on the answering machine. The house seemed emptier and more desolate in the day than at night. The empty rooms and the bachelor routines I mostly enjoyed felt like signs of failure and put me in a bad mood. I phoned and got ready to go into the usual routine with Penny.

  ‘Penny, this is Cliff. Max wants to talk to me.’

  ‘And I want to talk to you. Did he say anything.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About me! Who d’you think?’

  I hadn’t given it any thought since my attempt to read Max’s body language. That was too slim a foundation to make a comment on, and after my wasted effort I wasn’t feeling obliging. ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘He will. I’ll put him on.’

  I wished I could feel as optimistic as Penny and I was feeling more sour by the minute when Max came on the line.

  ‘I’ve been onto that Redfern D—Fowler. He says . . .’

  ‘A guy named Freddy Persil shot Barry. I got all that from Grogan.’

  A pause, then Penny’s voice, choked with anger. ‘Don’t do that, Cliff! You know he can’t hear you. Why’re you screwing him up like that?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Penny. I haven’t had a good morning. Look, I’ve found out a few useful things. I’ll put them in a fax.’