by Peter Corris
The Dying Trade
( Cliff Hardy - 1 )
Peter Corris
Peter Corris
The Dying Trade
1
I was feeling fresh as a rose that Monday at 9.30 a.m. My booze supply had run out on Saturday night. I had no way of replenishing it on the Sabbath because we still had Sunday prohibition in Sydney then. I didn’t have a club; that’d gone a while before, along with my job as an insurance investigator. I also didn’t have a wife — not any more — or friends with well-filled refrigerators. Unless I could be bothered driving twenty-five miles to become a bona fide traveller, Sunday could be as dry as a Mormon meeting hall. I didn’t travel. I spent the day on Bondi beach and the evening with tonic water and Le Carre, so I was clear-headed and clean-shaven, doodling on the desk blotter, when the phone rang.
“Hardy Investigations?”
“Yes, Cliff Hardy speaking.”
“Good. Mr Hardy, I need your help. You’ve been recommended.”
I could think of perhaps ten people who’d mildly recommend me. None of them would know the owner of this voice — eight hundred dollars a term, plenty of ordering people about and international travel.
“Yeah, who by?”
He named a name and I heard a faint bell ring. An insurance area boss or something, a hundred years ago. Still, it was a better start than the faded wives whose husbands had taken a walk or the small businessmen with payroll panic.
“Who am I talking to?”
“My name is Gutteridge, Bryn Gutteridge.”
That didn’t mean anything to me. There are three million people in Sydney, maybe a hundred are named Gutteridge and I didn’t know any of them.
“What can I do for you, Mr Gutteridge?”
Mr Gutteridge didn’t want to say too much on the phone. The matter was delicate, urgent and not for the police. He said he wanted advice and possibly action and asked if I could come out to see him that morning. Maybe he wanted to see if I was the advising or the active type. I felt active.
“I ask for a retainer of two hundred dollars, my fees are sixty dollars a day and expenses. The retainer’s returnable if nothing works out, the daily rate starts now.”
He spoke as if he hadn’t heard me.
“I’m glad you’re free. The address is 10 Peninsula Road, Vaucluse. I’ll expect you in an hour.”
“The money’s OK then?”
“Oh yes, fine.”
He hung up. I leaned back in my chair and dropped the receiver onto the handset. I traced a dollar sign with my little finger in the dust beside the dial. Money would be no object to that voice; it came from a world of Bible-fat cheque books and credit cards that would get you anything, anytime.
I left the office, went down two flights of stairs and out into St Peters Street. It was hot already, and a dry wind was pushing the exhaust fumes and chemical particles down the throats of the people in the street. I went round the corner, down a lane and into the backyard behind the tattoo parlour. The tattooist lets me park my car there for ten bucks a week. I backed the Falcon out into the lane and headed north.
Gutteridge’s address fitted his voice. Vaucluse is several million tons of sandstone sticking out into Port Jackson. The sun always shines on it and the residents think it vulgar to talk about the view. I permitted myself a few vulgar thoughts as I pushed my old Falcon along the sculptured divided highway which wound up to the tasteful mansions and shaven lawns. Mercs and Jags slipped out of driveways. The only other under-ten-thousand-dollar drivers I saw were in a police Holden and they were probably there to see that the white lines on the road weren’t getting dirty.
Bryn Gutteridge’s house was a steel, glass and timber fantasy poised on the very point of a Vaucluse headland. It stretched its sundeck out over the sandstone cliff as if rebuking Nature for lack of imagination. The Falcon coughed its way through the twenty-foot high iron gates which were standing open and I stopped in front of the house wondering what they’d think about the oil on the drive after I’d gone.
I walked up a long wood-block path to the house. A gardener working on a rose bed looked at me as if I was spoiling the landscaping. I went up fifty or sixty Oregon timber steps to the porch. You could have subdivided the porch for house lots and marched six wide-shouldered men abreast through the front door. I stabbed the bell with a finger and a wide-shouldered man opened the door while the soft chimes were still echoing about in the house. He was about six feet two, which gave him an inch on me, and he looked like he’d been the stroke of the first rowing eight maybe ten years before when the school had won the Head of the River. His suit had cost five times as much as my lightweight grey model, but he still wasn’t the real money.
“Mr Gutteridge is expecting me.” I passed a card across into his perfectly manicured hand and waited. He opened the door with a piece of body language which stamped him as a man of breeding but a servant nonetheless. His voice was a deep, musical throb, like a finely played bass.
“Mr Gutteridge is on the east balcony.” He handed the card back. “If you wouldn’t mind following me?”
“I’d never find it on my own.”
He let go a smile as thin as a surgeon’s glove and we set off to discover the east balcony. The rich always have lots of mirrors in their houses because they like what they see in them. We passed at least six full-length jobs on the trek which put expensive frames around a thinnish man with dark wiry hair, scuffed suede shoes and an air of not much money being spent on upkeep.
The rowing Blue led me into the library cum billiard room cum bar. He stepped behind the bar and did neat, fast things with bottles, ice and glasses. He handed me two tall glasses filled with tinkling amber liquid and nodded towards a green tinted glass door. “Mr Gutteridge is through there sir,” he said. “The door will open automatically.”
That was nice. Perhaps I could have both drinks and take the glasses home with me if I asked. The oarsman shot his cuffs and went off somewhere, no doubt to fold up some untidy money. The door slid apart and I went out into the harsh sun. The balcony was got up like the deck of a ship with railings and ropes and bits of canvas draped about. I started to walk towards a man sitting by the railing in a deck-chair about twenty feet away. Abruptly I stopped. He was a picture of concentration, resting his arm on the railing and taking careful sight along it and the barrel of an air pistol. His target was a seagull, fat and white, sitting on a coil of rope ten yards from his chair. He squeezed the trigger, there was a sound like a knuckle cracking and the seagull’s black-rimmed eye exploded into a scarlet blotch. The bird flopped down onto the deck and the man got up quickly from his chair. He took a dozen long, gliding strides and kicked the corpse under the rail out into the bushes below.
I felt sick and nearly spilled the drinks as I moved forward.
“That’s a shitty thing to do,” I said. “You Gutteridge?”
“Yes. Do you think so, why?”
Despite myself I handed him the drink — there didn’t seem to be anything else to do with it.
“They’re harmless, attractive, too easy to hit. There’s no sport in it.”
“I don’t do it for sport. I hate them. They all look the same and they intrude on me.”
I had no answer to that. I look like a lot of other people myself, and I’ve been known to be intrusive. I took a pull on the drink — Scotch, the best. Mr Gutteridge didn’t look as if he’d be nice to work for, but I felt sure I could reach an understanding with his money.
Gutteridge stabbed a block of ice in his glass with a long finder and sent it bubbling to the bottom. “Sit down Mr Hardy and don’t look so disapproving.” He pointed to a deck-chair, folded up and propped against the railing. “A seagull or two more or less c
an’t matter to a sensible man and I’m told you are sensible.”
I thought about that while I set down my drink and unfolded the deck-chair. It could mean a lot of things, including dishonest. I tried to look at ease in a deck-chair, which I wasn’t, and intelligent.
“What’s your trouble, Mr Gutteridge?”
He put the pistol down and sipped his drink. He was one of those people you describe as painfully thin. He had a small, pointed blonde-thatched head on top of shoulders so narrow they scarcely deserved the name. His bony torso and limbs swum about inside his beautifully cut linen clothes. He was deeply suntanned but didn’t look healthy. Under the tan there was something wrong with his skin and his eyes were muddy. He didn’t seem particularly interested in his drink so the cause of his poor condition might not be that. He was somewhere in his late thirties and he looked sick of life.
“My sister is being harassed and threatened,” he said. “She’s being goaded into killing herself- in strange ways.”
“What ways?”
“Phone calls and letters. The caller and the writer seem to know a lot about her. Everything about her.”
“Like what?”
“People she knows, things she does or has done, the perfume she wears. That sort of thing.”
“Has she done anything special with anyone in particular?”
“I resent that Hardy, the implication…” I cut in on him, “Resent away. You’re being vague. Is this private information coming through damaging to your sister’s reputation?”
He clenched his teeth and the skin stretched tight over the fine bones of his face. Letting my roughness pass exasperated him. He gave a thin sniff and took a tiny sip of his Scotch. “No, it’s quite innocent — innocent meetings, conversations reported back to her. Very upsetting, almost eerie, but not what you’re getting at. Why do you take this line?”
“She might be a blackmail prospect, the harassment could be a softening up process.”
He thought about it. The outward signs were that he had good thinking equipment. He didn’t ape the appearance of a mind at work by scratching things or screwing up his eyes. I rolled a cigarette and put my own tired brain into gear. I find that people are very reluctant to tell you the nub of their worries. Perhaps they think the detecting should start early, as early as detecting what they really have on their minds. The trick was to hit them with the right question, the one to open them up, but Bryn Gutteridge looked like a man who could keep his guard up and slip punches indefinitely.
“How’s your drink, Hardy?”
“Like yours, barely touched.”
“You’re direct, that’s good. I’ll be direct too. My father committed suicide four years ago. He shot himself. We don’t know why. He was prosperous, healthy, the original sound mind in the sound body.” He looked down at his cadaverous frame. He was saying he wasn’t sound himself, underlining the verbal picture of his father. There was something disembodied about him, fragile almost. I thought I had my question.
“How was his love life?”
He paid serious attention to his drink for the first time before he answered. He looked like Tony Perkins playing a suffering Christ.
“You mean how’s mine,” he said. “Or you mean that as well. You’re an uncomfortable man, Hardy.”
“I have to be. If I’m comfortable for you I’m comfortable all round and nothing gets done.”
“That sounds right, glib perhaps, but right. Very well. His love life was fine so far as I know. He’d married Ailsa only about two years before he died. They seemed happy.”
“Ailsa?”
“My stepmother. Ridiculous concept for grown people — my father’s second wife. My mother and Susan’s died when we were children. We’re twins by the way, although we’re not alike. Susan’s dark like our father.” I nodded to show that I was following him.
“My father was fifty-nine when he remarried. Ailsa was in her mid-thirties I suppose. As I say, they seemed happy.” He jerked a thumb at the house. “He bought this to live in after he was married and he bought another place down there for Susan and me.” He pointed down into the expensive air over the balcony. “He wanted us all to be close but independent.”
It sounded about as independent to me as the pubs and breweries but Gutteridge didn’t need telling. He finished his drink in a gulp and set the glass down. A real drinker, even if he paced himself, likes to have them end to end, gets nervous in the gaps. I knew the signs from personal experience and it was comforting to observe that Gutteridge wasn’t a drunk. He ignored the glass and went on with his story without the support of liquor, another sign. He crossed his skinny ankles which were bare and black haired above long, narrow feet in leather sandals.
“Mark made a lot of money. He was a millionaire a few times over. Death duties took a lot of it, but there was still plenty left over for Susan and me. And Ailsa. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, we seem to be getting away from the matter at hand.”
“I don’t agree.” I said. My drink was finished now and the tobacco between my fingers wasn’t burning. I felt fidgety and ill at ease. Gutteridge’s personality had had a strange effect on me, his words were hard and economical. He’d be a terror in the boardroom when he was trying to get his way. He made me feel flabby and self-indulgent, this in spite of what I’d seen of his failings and the fact that it was he who had the million dollars. Or more. I felt about for the words.
“Things are connected,” I said. “It sounds obvious but sometimes the connections are extraordinary. I don’t mean to sound Freudian, but I’ve known men who’ve beaten the life out of other people because of what happened to them when they were ten years old. There’s a background, a connection to something else always. This trouble of your sister’s, you can’t expect to cut it out of your life, clean and simple. I’ll have to look around, look back…”
“You’re a voyeur,” he snapped.
We were way back. He was feeling intruded upon and that, with him, was dangerous as I’d seen already. I tried to slip sideways.
“Tell me how your father made his money,” I said. “And you could try thinking how it might link up with what’s happening to your sister.”
“Mark’s was real estate money, of course,” he said, sounding a bit too pat, as if he’d rehearsed the answer. “This place should tell you that. It’s the ultimate development, the ultimate spiel. He sold people on this sort of thing and he believed in it himself.”
“He was a developer then. Did he build houses himself?”
“Yes hundreds, thousands.”
“Good ones?”
“Fair, they didn’t wash away in the first rain.”
“He sounds like par for the course. What else did you know about his business?”
“I can’t see what you’re driving at.”
“Enemies, people with grudges, visiting the sins of the father and all that.”
“I see. Well, I don’t think Mark had enemies. He didn’t have many friends come to that, mostly business acquaintances, lawyers, a couple of politicians, senior administrative people, you know.”
“I get the idea. Pocket friends, just as good as enemies any day.”
“I don’t think you do get the idea.” He emphasised the words snakily. “My father was a warm and eloquent man, he won people to his point of view. He almost invariably got what he wanted. He pulled off some remarkable deals, some colossal gambles.”
“You liked him?” He looked down at the deck, the first evasive gesture he’d made.
“Yes,” he said softly.
It was beginning to look to me as if Mark Gutteridge and his manner of departing this life were more interesting than his children’s problems, but that wouldn’t pay the bills, so I just nodded, rolled another cigarette and snuck a look at my glass.
“Would you like another drink?”
“After you tell me some more about your sister’s problem. When it began and your ideas on it.”
“About a m
onth ago Susan got a phone call. It was from a woman with a foreign accent — French possibly. She talked to Susan about her underwear, what brands she bought and how much it cost.”
“No heavy breathing?” I asked.
“Nothing like that at all. She said things that upset Susan very much. Mostly about the money Susan spends on clothes and things. It’s rather a lot I suppose. Susan likes nice things, nice things cost money.”
His silver spoon was shining; some nice things don’t cost money and some things that cost money aren’t nice.
“It doesn’t sound particularly sinister to me,” I said. “It could almost be funny. Why was your sister so upset?” I could guess at what was coming next, but I wanted to hear how he put it.
“Susan has a strong social conscience. She’s involved on Community Aid Abroad, Amnesty International, Freedom from Hunger. She’s very busy and devoted to these causes.”
I could just bet she was. The sweat from all that devotion and business was probably running down into her crepe-de-chine knickers so fast that she had to change them three times a day. I was having trouble getting interested in Susan Gutteridge’s troubles and beginning to suspect that this investigation wasn’t going to bring out the best in me.
“There was more than one phone call? And you mentioned letters?”
“Yes, calls have come at all hours of the day and night. The Voice — that’s what Susan calls it — goes on and on about her private life, tells her how useless and parasitic she is, how meaningless her life is. It… she… refers to our father and tells Susan to do the same thing, tells her that she’s cursed and her suicide is ordained.”
I felt more interested and asked again about the letters.
“I only have one to show you,” he said. “Susan tore up another five or six, she’s not sure how many.” He stood up, six feet of bony, moribund elegance and took a folded sheet of paper from his hip pocket. He handed it to me and reached down for his air pistol.
“Please don’t do that,” I said.