by Peter Corris
‘Not really’. She sucked on her cigarette and then on her drink, taking in smoke and gin as if they were tea and toast. ‘He did two tours in Vietnam and he always said that if Charlie didn’t get him some jealous husband would. Drink up.’
She was almost through hers and staring at the blueish pitcher. She had a long start on me and I had almost twice her body weight, I reckoned I could stay the pace. When we’d replenished and she’d got another cigarette going she asked me about her mother and seemed satisfied with the account I gave.
‘We never got along, and I never got along with Peter. Only with Lee. Lovely Lee.’ She laughed and smoked jerkily. ‘Never got along with my husband either. He’s a film producer and I’m an actress. Was an actress. Bad combination. He gave me this house in the divorce settlement, the bastard. Bought it for me, and my fuckwit of a lawyer let him get away with it. What’s the name of that movie? Planes, Trains and Automobiles — that’s this place.’
The words were tumbling out, alternately slurred and too precise as the liquor got to her. She topped up her glass and raised it to her mouth. It was lipstick smeared around the whole rim and she didn’t quite make the contact, a few drops spilled down her chin. I looked away and she caught the reaction.
‘I know, I know. I’m a sloppy drunk. Can’t help it. Nothing else to live for. What d’you want?’ She gazed at me blearily through her cigarette smoke, forcing her eyes to focus, imprinting more wrinkles. Suddenly she appeared to get everything together and to have a moment of clarity. I’d seen it before in hopeless drunks- a flash of sobriety before the shutters come down. ‘You’re not a journalist. Haven’t taken a single note, not one! What do you want?’
I judged that I only had her attention for a short time and that it was worth the risk. I took out the photograph of David Trumble and put it down in front of her. ‘Do you know who that is?’
She barely glanced at the picture. ‘Course I do. It’s Lee.’
‘It’s Sean Trumble’s son, David. Trumble hired me to investigate his suspicion that Lee North was the boy’s real father.’
She threw back her head and let out a shriek of laughter. The sound was cut short as she gasped for breath. Alarmed, I got out of my chair but she made a fierce gesture for me to stay away. She gulped in air somehow and followed it with a couple of lungsful of smoke and more gin. When she spoke her voice was wheezy and thin.
‘Of course he fucking was. Of course! Lee fucked everything. He fucked me when I was fourteen and let me tell you those were the best fucks I ever had. Best ever! Best!’
‘But his mate’s wife… ‘
‘He fucked her the night of the wedding. Sean passed out and Lee did the job.’
‘How do you know?’
‘The silly bitch told me. Told me when she heard she had cancer. Wanted to know whether she should tell Sean. Idiot. Oh, Lee. Oh, lovely, lovely Lee
She was weeping now, the tears falling into her glass and down the front of her dress. She dropped her cigarette and I bent down and retrieved it from the dusty floor. I picked up the photograph and put it in my pocket.
‘Is there anything I can do for you, Maria?’
‘Yes,’ she sobbed. ‘You can piss off.’
Families are hell. Who said that? I drove back to Glebe, feeling none of the satisfaction that usually comes with having got the answers to the questions. I opened a can of beer and sat down to consider my next move. There was no proof of either discovery-that Eric Trumble had fathered Lee North and that Lee North had fathered David Trumble-but I had no doubt that both things were true. But could I communicate that certainty to my client? And should I? I’m no social worker, but you’d have to have the sensitivity of a sewer pipe not to be concerned about how the revelation could affect the prospects of young David,
One can became two and I switched to cask white without getting any inspiration. I fed myself and the cat out of cans and settled down to scribble some notes on the meeting with Maria North-Barr. Of the three people I’d met so far in the case, only Rose North had any serenity and it was partly due to senile dementia. An unhappy business. I flicked on the television and turned it off almost straight away. I picked up Theroux’s Happy Isles of Oceania but put it down after a few pages. I had all the spleen and depression I needed.
The sound of the doorbell was welcome. I took another swig of wine and wandered down the passage to open the door. Sean Trumble stood there, pale and tense, his hands thrust in the deep pockets of an anorak. The night had become cold without me noticing.
‘Well, what’ve you found out?’
I told the first lie to come into my head. ‘I haven’t started on it yet.’
His right hand came out, holding a heavy pistol. ‘I know you’re lying, Hardy. Get back in there and keep your hands in sight or I’ll put a bullet in you.’
You don’t argue with a Vietnam veteran and an ex-mercenary. I backed down the corridor towards the stairs. He stepped inside and flicked the door closed with his foot.
‘Anyone else here?’
‘Yeah. Three cops. We’re playing a little poker.’
‘I’m not in the mood for jokes. Turn around and keep moving.’
‘I prefer to keep an eye on you and I’m telling you I haven’t…’
He raised the pistol an inch. His hand was steady.
‘You’re lucky I don’t make you fucking crawl. You saw Rose North and Maria today. Had a good long talk with the both of them.’
‘How could you know that?’
‘Think I’m stupid? Think I’d trust someone in your stinking business?’
‘You didn’t follow me. I’d have spotted you.’
‘ I didn’t, but the other guy I hired did. I guess he knows the tricks of the trade as well as you, maybe better.’
It wasn’t as much of a blow to my pride as if Trumble himself had tailed me, but it was bad enough. I turned around and went back to the living room and my glass of wine. Trumble watched me but there was indecision written all over him. He couldn’t be sure there wasn’t anyone else in the house and if he shot me he might not learn what he was burning to know. I emptied my glass.
‘Want a drink, Sean?’
‘Fuck you, I… ‘
I tossed the glass from one hand to the other. An old trick but he was so agitated he fell for it. His eyes followed the glass for an instant, long enough for me to take a long step and chop down on his forearm with a clenched fist. If you hit the right spot in the right way, the nerves jump and the hand opens. He dropped the pistol and I shirt-fronted him, throwing him back against the stairwell. He hit awkwardly and the breath whooshed out of him. I picked up the pistol and ejected the magazine before tossing it to him. He tried for it, but he dropped the catch.
‘I’ll get you a drink anyway. You’re going to need it.’
I put three fingers of Scotch on top of a couple of ice cubes and drew off another glass of wine for myself. When I got back he was slumped in a chair, rubbing his forearm. He accepted the glass and took a gulp.
‘There was no need for that. I wouldn’t have shot you.’
‘Matter of professional pride.’
He’d closed off my options, so I told him what the two women had told me-straight, word for word as close as I could remember it, no punches pulled, no embellishments. He sipped his whisky as he listened. I finished about the same time he emptied the glass. He swilled the ice cubes, clockwise, then anti-clockwise. My nerves were screaming but he seemed to relax.
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it,’ I said.
He stared at the floor and appeared to go into a kind of trance. When he spoke his voice seemed to be coming from far away. ‘So David’s not my son. He’s my father’s grandson. And he’s my… nephew.’
I nodded.
He smiled, put the glass down on the floor, stood and held out his hand. ‘That’s close enough. Thanks, Hardy.’
‹‹Contents››
Archie’s Last Case
Archie Merrett lived in a Glebe flat a few streets away from my place. I used to see him pretty often in the pub. We’d have a drink or two, pass the time. Archie had plenty of time to pass and he appeared to have lots of money to spend as he was doing it. He was about sixty-five when I first met him ten years ago; he had no hobbies apart from the horses and drinking, and he said he’d come back to Sydney after retiring and living on the Gold Coast for a time.
‘It was all different in my day, boyo,’ he told me almost every time we talked. ‘We earned our dough.’
I’d nod and drink some beer and try to catch what he was saying above the noise of the television. He was usually saying the same thing.
‘What’ve you done today, Cliff?’
‘Served a summons or two, collected a debt, held a guy’s hand while he had a meeting with some people he’d never met before.’
Archie’s old eyes, peeping out between puckered wrinkles, would light up. ‘Any trouble?’
‘No.’
‘Different in my day.’
‘When you were all boyos.’
‘You can laugh, but it used to be a tough racket.’
He was referring to the private enquiry agent business which he’d been in from the time he got back from New Guinea in ‘46 until his retirement about twenty years later. In those days, according to Arch, most of the work was in divorce-although Arch preferred to call it ‘matrimonial’.
‘It scarred a man, Cliff, all that climbing in and out of windows, taking photos, going to court and hearing the terrible things men and women said and did to each other. It put me off marriage, I can tell you.’
I liked to hear his stories about the Fifties when I’d been body-surfing, boxing and thinking about girls and adventures in foreign parts, so I’d often egg him on with a remark like, ‘Ruined a few suits too, eh, Arch?’
A throaty, fifty-a-day chuckle. ‘You bet. Did I ever tell you about the time I was under a bedroom, down with the cat shit and spiders, with a stopwatch in my hand.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well I was. I’d got a bit of stick from a judge about being vague in my evidence and I’d decided to go scientific. I was going to time those bloody bed squeaks-so many to the minute.’
“What happened?’
‘Bloke must’ve weighed twenty stone, wharfie he was, and this little slip of a woman. Don’t know how she survived it. Anyway, I’ve got the stopwatch out and the torch on and I’m counting the squeaks and suddenly the whole bloody lot’s coming down on top of me. Bloody borer in the bearers.’
Arch’s wheezes and gasps would overwhelm him for a few minutes until he caught enough breath to light another cigarette. Then he’d tell me about the time he was out on a window ledge and felt a sneeze coming on, or when the grandmother kidnapped her baby grandson from her Protestant daughter-in-law so she could have him baptised as a Catholic. I liked Arch and his stories. The emphysema and circulation problems got him in the end, of course. I visited him in hospital a few times. They put a hole in his neck and took off one of his legs. Then he died and I missed him.
A few weeks later I was surprised to get a call from a solicitor who said he was the executor of the estate of the late Mr Archibald Ronald Merrett, deceased as of 1/5/90. It took me a second for the name to register.
‘Arch,’ I said. ‘Oh, yes. What can I do for you?’
It turned out Arch had left his case files to ‘my friend and confidant, Mr Clifford Hardy, for his education’. The solicitor sent them round the next day-three cardboard boxes which had formerly contained bottles of Reschs Pilsener and were now jammed full of manilla folders, some bulging, some containing only a single sheet. I stacked the boxes under the stairs and didn’t look at them for months until I was laid up with a sprained ankle, the result of jumping for a smash that Yannick Noah couldn’t have reached. Just for something to do, I dragged out the boxes and started reading. I forgot about the ankle and the pain and about how I had to be careful not to take too many pethidines with alcohol. I could hear Arch’s ruined voice talking to me from the pages. Especially when I got to the last file in the third box. It was a thick file: transcripts of interviews, memos, photographs, receipts. I read it all through. There was also a tape. I put it in the machine, poured out a glass of white and sat back to listen. I’d heard old Arch tell a hundred stories, but it was an eerie feeling to hear him telling one last yarn…
Alistair McLachlan gave me the drum. He was the solicitor representing Mrs Thelma Lucan-Paget in her divorce action against her hubby, George. Thelma had the goods on George- notes, receipts for presents, a hotel bill. The core was Mrs Beatrice Butterworth.
I said to McLachlan, ‘Uncontested, Mac?’ He didn’t like being called that. He didn’t like me, full stop. But he knew I did good work. ‘Not clear at this stage, Merrett. Probably. There’s a lot of property involved. No children, thank God. But things to be sorted out.’
Gravy for you, boyo, I thought. McLachlan told me what he wanted-a series of photographs plus an affidavit. My job was to snap George and Bea leaving her flat at Rose Bay, going to dinner or whatever they were doing that evening, toddling back to the flat, closing the door. The pictures had to be timed and annotated: 27/2/66-8.30 p.m.: subjects entering Romano’s… I was happy to do it. A nice clean one. No lock-picking, no bribing hotel employees, no stealing bedsheets. On the evening appointed, I loaded up the old Ashai Pentax and headed for Evans Road, Rose Bay.
Medium-sized block, older style, garden courtyards on the ground floor, balconies on the upper levels. Beatrice Butterworth’s flat was at the back; it had both features-a small balcony and a landscaped courtyard. The balcony would have had a nice harbour view-say, thirty grand, all up. There was a wide driveway that was marked out in parking spaces, six of ‘em, one for each resident. Bit tricky if you were pissed to park and unpark, but otherwise okay. I’m back there, behind a tree, camera at the ready, super-fast film, and the door opens. A bloke answering the description I’d been given- heavy build, balding, fleshy face-comes down the steps with this good-looker on his arm. She was twenty years younger than him, say thirty, blonde, wearing a blue silk dress, a real sort. A pleasure to take her picture. They sidle up, chatting and laughing, to this silver-grey MG sedan. I took another picture as he helped her in- great legs she had, take your breath away.
Off we went towards the city. I was following in my FE. I had a sense that there was something wrong but I couldn’t put my finger on it. They went to this Greek joint in Elizabeth Street, overlooking the park. I’m close behind them. They give each other a peck-I snapped that, nice shot-and go in. Nothing to do now but go and have a couple of beers and a counter tea, pick ‘em up again on the way out. Starters, mains and afters, bottle of plonk, coffee, what are we looking at, hour and a half? I moved off and, again, I got this feeling that worried me. Didn’t know what it was, probably imagination. An hour later and I was back there, too nervous to eat. I’m jotting down times and places in my notebook, sniffing around. Couple of smokes and here they come again. Christ but she was beautiful, like a film star, and fat George could hardly keep his hands off her. Didn’t blame him. Anyway, I got a good kiss shot with his hand on her bum. I skedaddle around and through the park so I’m ready to follow them back to Rose Bay, and that’s when I twigged. ‘Arch,’ I said to myself, ‘we’ve got company.’ He was good, very good. A little bloke, nothing special about him-sports jacket, open-neck shirt. But I saw the camera as he got into his blue Mini and I realised that I’d seen the car before-in the street at Rose Bay. I also had something you need in this game, call it intuition: I knew this bloke and me had been working the same side of the street. Tricky situation. He must’ve seen me. I’m five ten, not skinny, and this was an uncontested. How careful did I have to be? Only thing to do was pretend I hadn’t seen him, play along, and see what happened.
Back to Rose Bay. George scrapes his MG on the brick wall of the flats and they both get out laughing. What’s a few hundred
bucks to George? I drove on. I hadn’t quite finished the job but what the hell? I was more interested in the bloke in the Mini. I parked further up the street and came back quickly on foot. Lucky. George and Bea were having a smoke out in the open, looking from the street down towards the water, before going in to co-respond. The little bloke got a shot of George lighting her up. Then he looked around nervously. He was looking for me but he had no chance. He raced around the back when they went down the drive and got a picture of Bea opening the door to her flat. Nice work. It occurred to me that if I grabbed his camera I’d have the best series of sneak photos since the world began.
I scooted away back to the street and crouched down behind the Mini. When he put his key in the lock I came up behind him and gave him the old forearm-bar. It works particularly well on little men, cuts off the wind and the resistance. In New Guinea we used it on Jap sentries, before slipping the knife in.
I said, ‘Put the camera on the roof of the car. Leave the key in the lock and stay very still. If you don’t, I’ll break your bloody neck.’
He does what he’s told, very meek and careful. I slid my hand away long enough to get inside his jacket and grab his wallet. Then it was chin up again and don’t move a muscle.
‘Let’s talk,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. We’re in the same game. I’m Ted Pike.’
‘What game would that be, Ted?’
‘Private enquiries. My ticket’s in the wallet.’
I let him go and grabbed hold of his car keys and the camera. He turned around slowly and faced me-pale, pixie features, bat-wing ears, a face only a mother could love. But not distinctive. He stood about five foot six and would’ve weighed about nine stone. Slip in anywhere, you’d never notice him. I took my time opening his wallet. He wasn’t going away, not with me in charge of his car and his camera and his cash. He had a fair bit of money in his wallet and his PEA licence. Besides, he’d been waiting for me.
‘So,’ Ted said. ‘Do we talk?’