The Dying Trade ch-1

by Peter Corris

  “Hundreds,” she said. “He swindled dozens of people, defrauded scores.”

  “What about you, Miss Sleeman, were you his enemy?”

  She flicked the cigarette butt into the swimming pool and waved a hand back at the house.

  “What do you think?”

  I said I didn’t know. She yawned and turned her head away to look at the twenty foot high greenery which separated her swimming pool from her neighbour’s. I had a feeling that she was working hard at her tough act but if so she was succeeding well enough.

  “Go away, Mr Hardy. I have nothing to say to you. I’m just not interested.”

  “What are you interested in?”

  “Not very much. Making more money, up to a point, and I read a lot.”

  “I bet you do.”

  She sneered at me very effectively which is an unusual thing for a woman to be able to do. “Don’t try your hard-case masculine stuff on me, Mr Hardy.” She lifted her head so that I could see her smooth, brown neck. “I’m forty, just about, I don’t look it but I am and I haven’t time to waste on men who are busy, busy at their little jobs.”

  I couldn’t afford to let it go at that. I had too little to work on and I didn’t want to be thrashing about in the dark when I spoke to Susan Gutteridge that evening. I looked her over again; heavy smoking but not drinking, at least not in the mid-afternoon. She wore a brief but not ridiculous swim-suit that looked as if it’d been wet and dry a few times. At the other end of the pool was a medium high diving board, with well-worn fibre matting. It looked like she dived, swam in the pool and watched her weight. A lot of pool owners dangle their feet in the water while knocking back gin and sailing little boats made of their chocolate wrappers across it.

  “You’re the best forty I’ve ever seen,” I said. “Who’s your doctor? Dr Brave?”

  She dropped the bored display of the goods pose. Off came the shades and a pair of hard eyes bored into me. She had a strong-boned face that had never been beautiful but which must always have been arresting, as it was now. A few wrinkles around her eyes put her out of her twenties, but I’d meant what I said. She looked like one of those tennis playing women you see on local courts on the weekends, not aping youth but actually retaining it in the planes of her face and body.

  “Why did you say that?”

  “About Dr Brave? I don’t know. You look like someone who takes good care of yourself, possibly under medical advice. Bryn Gutteridge mentioned Brave this morning, his sister is at his clinic. Bryn’s not too happy about it. It just came into my head that as you dislike Mark Gutteridge’s son so much you might have a different taste in doctors.”

  Her hard shell was beginning to split a little. She lit another cigarette with trembling hands and dropped the gold lighter onto the paving. She scrambled for a bit with one hand before giving up and working hard on the cigarette. She looked up at me as if I might just possibly be worth a minute’s thought. Her voice was raw with something more than tobacco smoke affecting it. “You’re right and wrong at the same time. Bryn’s been lying to you. He and Brave are as thick as thieves. Brave’s his head-shrinker, hand-holder and I don’t know what else. I detest him.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve said all I’m going to say. I don’t care if I never see Mark’s children again and that goes double for Brave. I want to be rid of the whole bloody crew of them.” She stood up, tall and struggling for her natural composure which I’d somehow shattered. “Off you go, Mr Hardy. I’m going to try to have a sleep and forget you ever happened.”

  I took out one of my cards and put it on the arm of my chair. She didn’t look at it and turned towards the house. I stood up, stiff and tense from the pressure exerted by her abrasive personality. I started to walk towards the garage, then I turned towards her.

  “One last question, Miss Sleeman.” The distance between us was widening.

  “Yes?”

  “Why isn’t Dr Brave listed in the medical register?”

  She turned her face towards me and howled, “Go away!” She jerked off her sunglasses and threw them blindly away from her. They sailed through the air, spiralling down like a disabled fighter plane and dropped into the pool.

  “Why?” I shouted.

  She clenched her fists by her sides and the face she lifted up was a mask of pain. She spoke harshly, grittily. “He’s not a medical doctor, he’s a psychologist from somewhere… Canada… somewhere. Now will you please go!”

  She marched into the house and I went.

  3

  I drove across to The Rocks and bought a paper from a barefoot kid in the public bar of the Eight Bells. The pub is tucked away in a crevice of the sandstone and claims to be directly descended from the first inn built by the waterside in Sydney and maybe it is. Its other main claim to fame is that Griffo drank and fought there, and since Griffo drank and fought in every pub in The Rocks this is incontestable. Seekers after authenticity are starting to discover the pub and pose a threat to its integrity, but for the moment it’s holding its own against the pressure to become another unisex, unidrink playground. The counter tea, served early, was steak, salad and chips and I ordered it along with a litre carafe of the house plonk. This made me an eccentric in the saloon bar where workers in singlets were putting down beer with their food and a scattering of executives and trendies were drinking wine from bottles with theirs. They gave me a beer glass with the carafe which suited me fine.

  The paper was full of the usual drivel — the Pope pronouncing on sex and politicians claiming to speak for the common man. The lead story was about Rory Costello — standover man and armed robbery expert, who’d been sentenced to twenty years in Long Bay. He’d escaped ten days ago and had been sighted simultaneously in Perth and Cairns. The steak was good and the wine fair. I ate and drank slowly and tried to make some sense of the information I had on the Gutteridge case so far.

  I hadn’t established any clear connection between the threats to Susan Gutteridge and the suicide of her father, if it was suicide. Bryn Gutteridge hadn’t provided any connections out of his picture of his father — an honest, if forceful, businessman. Gutteridge’s ex-wife had a different picture of him — unscrupulous and dishonest, with a thousand enemies, any one of whom could be taking it out on the daughter. This view of the late Gutteridge appealed to me most, but that could have been my bank balance and prejudices speaking. Against Bryn’s story in general was that he had lied about his attitude to Dr Brave, or a lie was implied in what he’d told me. That is, if Ailsa Sleeman was telling the truth. She was a complex woman who’d seen two tycoon husbands off, but she had no obvious reason to lie on this point. It was easily checked, but that went for Bryn’s story too. He seemed to be in dubious control of his cool. Maybe he lied about everything. Maybe he was an eccentric millionaire who liked to send private detectives on wild goose chases. Suddenly, that seemed like a clean, uncomplicated thing to do — to chase wild geese in northern Canada. I ate, drank, smoked and thought until it was time to go and meet the stricken sister.

  Leafy Longueville features trees and water glimpses. There’s some big money and a lot of middle-sized money around; the middling people are working to keep up with the big people who are looking across the Lane Cove river towards Hunters Hill, where everybody has big money, and wondering if they can afford the move. The people work outside the area, send their kids out of it to school and don’t talk to each other. They spend their time cultivating high, privacy-making hedges and looking the other way.

  At 7.15 Longueville is quiet. Hoses sprinkle on lawns and the big cars are all sitting in their garages. Nobody and nothing moves in the front grounds of the houses. The terraces and swimming pools out back could be awash with gin and naked women, but you’d never know from the street. The clinic was a block from the suburb’s main road. That put it close to the river, and into the heart of the Hunters Hill envy zone. I didn’t lock the Falcon because there are no car thieves in Longueville and I didn’t take my gu
n because there are no muggings either. Longuevillians do their thieving in the city five days a week, nine to five, and they get away from it all at home. The Brave clinic was an assemblage of white brick buildings with tinted glass standing in an acre or two of lawn and trees. There were no fountains or benches of the kind that are supposed to soothe troubled minds. Rather the air was of tight security. There was a high cyclone fence with concrete-embedded posts and a glassed-in reception booth which looked a bit too well equipped electrically for the sort of place the clinic was supposed to be. Since my commando days I’ve always been tempted by cyclone fences — the sadistic instructors must have sent us over hundreds of the bastards at terrific risks to our virility — but not this one. It was wired up to blazes and looked as if sirens would wail if you touched it, while relaying TV pictures of your blackheads to the main block.

  I walked up to the booth. Some distance from it a metallic voice bounced off my chest.

  “Please state your business.”

  The guy in the booth leaned forward to look at me through the glass. He wore a white shirt, grey jacket and black tie. Through the thick glass his face was a pale, distorted blob. No microphones were visible. He just spoke in my general direction and I heard him loud and clear. I had to assume he could hear me.

  “I have an appointment to see one of Dr Brave’s patients at 7.30. My name is Hardy.”

  He pressed a button, a pane of glass slid back. He put his right hand through and snapped fingers tightly gloved in black leather.

  “Identification please.”

  I fished in my pocket and pulled out the licence card. It looks like a student ID card and would get me into Robert Redford movies half-price if I looked twenty years younger and could stand Robert Redford. I handed the card over. More glass slid back and the guard looked me over critically like a Russian customs officer who can be satisfied as to your identification but is pretty unhappy that you exist at all. He nodded, handed back the card and pressed a button; a gate beside the booth swung open.

  “Please walk up to the largest building ahead of you, Mr Hardy. Stay on the path all the way please.”

  I went through. There were a few lights up on poles and some in hatches at ground level. They focused on the wide, intricately laid brick path. There was no excuse for slipping off it onto the velvet grass but I dawdled off to the left and took a couple of steps on the sward just for the hell of it. Closed circuit security TV is even more boring than the public kind, and I might just have made someone’s day.

  Close up all the buildings had a severe practical look. The main block had heavyweight glass and timber doors at the top of a dozen steps. I went up, pushed them open with a featherlight touch and went into a cool, navy-carpeted lobby with a reception desk set at an artful angle. No blondes A tall burly guy who looked like an Italian eased himself off the desk and stepped towards me. He was wearing a denim suit with knife edge creases and white shoes. His white silk shirt was open far enough to show a gold medallion nestling in a thatch of thick, black hair. His waist was slim, there was no fat on him and only a slight thickening of his features betrayed how many fights he’d been in. He looked as if he’d won most of them.

  “Please come with me, Mr Hardy. Dr Brave is waiting for you.”

  He inclined his black pompadour towards a teak door at the end of the room. He’d said it before, more or less, but he was still having trouble wrapping his western suburbs Italian accent around the polite words He was built for action and it was a pity to make him talk. He ushered me through the door and down a long corridor done up in the same style as the lobby. Glass-panelled doors opened off it at frequent intervals and the Italian plucked at my sleeve when I slowed down to take a look through one. The place was getting to me — it looked like a jail for people who were very rich and very sorry for what they’d done. I passed him on the left and pulled open the next door on that side.

  “Interesting place this,” I said, sticking my head into the room. Empty, sterile; with bars on the windows. A hand fell down on my shoulder and the fingers closed vice-like around the bone. He pulled mc back as easy as a kid pulling on a wad of gum.

  “Don’t do that again, Mr Hardy.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Just curious.” I had a feeling that he was trying to hurry me through this part of the building. I wondered why.

  “Don’t be.”

  We were side by side when we reached die next door on the right. I hunched myself and cannoned into him blasting him against the wall. I opened the door and stepped in. He recovered fast and moved towards me. When he was half-way through the opening, I swung the door back full into him. He took some of it in the face, some at the knee and the handle in the solar plexus. He collapsed like a skyscraper in an earthquake. I turned around to look at the room. I caught a glimpse of a man with a bandaged face sitting on a bed before I felt like I’d been dumped by a gigantic wave: a ton of metal tried to tear my head from my shoulders and sandbags crashed into my belly and knees. I went down into deep, dark water watching a pin-point of light which dimmed, dimmed and died.

  Everything hurt when I swam up out of the dark. I tried to slide down into it again but I was slapped hard across the face and pulled up into a sitting position on a short, hard couch. I turned my head painfully and saw the Italian dusting off his hands. He looked bad — one side of his face was a purple smear and he stood awkwardly, favouring one leg. But he was on his feet and in better shape therefore than me. Sitting behind a table in the middle of the room was the man I’d seen pulling into Gutteridge’s driveway in the Bentley. His face had the colour and texture of chalk. His hair was jet black and there was black hair on the backs of his hands. His eyebrows were thick, black bars that met in the middle; he looked like a chessboard come to life. His voice was soft with a burr that could have been Scots but might have been the echoes and rings inside my head.

  “You have been very foolish, Mr Hardy. You were asked to observe certain civilities. May I ask why you did not?”

  “I wasn’t asked, I was told.” My voice seemed to come from somewhere behind me but it would have hurt too much to turn and look. “This place made me feel rebellious.”

  “Interesting. It’s supposed to have the opposite effect. But never mind. The question is, should you be allowed to see the person you’ve come to see after this behaviour? I have my doubts.”

  I swung my legs off the couch and wrestled myself into a less invalid position. I felt in my pocket for my tobacco, then I noticed that Brave had the contents of all my pockets neatly arranged in front of him. He waved a hand at the Italian who reached over to the desk top, picked up my tobacco and matches and tossed them into my lap. I rolled a cigarette, lit it and drew the smoke deep. It caught halfway down where everything felt loose from the moorings and I gasped for breath and spluttered. The Italian clouted me hard enough on the back to clear the smoke and rearrange some organs.

  “Gently Bruno,” said Brave, “Mr Hardy’s had a nasty fall.”

  My voice was wheezy and thin. “You can’t stop me seeing her,” I said, “not when her brother’s OK’d it.”

  Brave smiled. “Her brother’s not her keeper,” he said.

  “Who is? You?”

  “In a way, but not as you may think. Miss Gutteridge is in poor health physically, and she has been under severe strain. Being questioned by a roughneck detective could do her great damage.”

  Bruno cracked his knuckles to remind me that I wasn’t the only roughneck around. I had been out-muscled and now I was having professional rank pulled on me. It seemed time to fight back.

  “You’re not a medical doctor. I checked the register. What are you, a PhD? They’re drip-dry on the hook I hear, at some places,”

  It upset him. He lifted a hand to his ear and pulled the lobe gently down. He dropped the hand to push my things contemptuously around on the desk.

  “Your qualifications are here,” he said. “Sleazy and sordid. And your physical powers seem ordinary. Wha
t point are you trying to make by insulting me”

  “At the most,” I said, “you’re a psychologist. You may not even be that, reputably. You’re not a psychiatrist, that needs a medical degree. I question your professional and legal right to prevent me seeing anyone at all, especially someone who’s nearest of kin has endorsed me.”

  He gave it some thought, then spoke rapidly, the accent now twanging angrily in his voice. “Who told you that I was a psychologist?”

  “I could have worked it out myself,” I said, “but since you ask, Ailsa Sleeman.”

  “I see. Did she know you were coming here?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Who else?”

  I kept lying. “A guy named Ross, Miss Sleeman’s boyfriend; my answering service; a petrol station attendant I asked directions from; maybe Giles, Gutteridge’s man.”

  Brave looked like the subtle type. I didn’t think he really intended to have me dumped in the harbour and he knew I didn’t think it, but if he found the threat worth implying I could find it worth countering. But I was getting impatient and didn’t want to lose the initiative, if that’s what I had.

  “How about it, doctor? Do I see her now or come back with a court order?”

  “You’re being foolish again. Bryn wouldn’t take out a court order against me. He wouldn’t go against my advice on this.”

  “You’ve convinced yourself, you haven’t convinced me.”

  He ignored me. His eyes were as dark as an arctic night under the heavy brows and they seemed not to be registering my presence in front of him at all. I didn’t look much. My hair was matted around a wound on the back of my head that was seeping blood and I had the general look of a man who’d been sick for a week and hadn’t changed his clothes, but to be looked through quite so devastatingly was disconcerting. He spoke slowly as if talking to himself. “However, they’ve all been through a lot and it might be best for you to do your clumsy act and run along.”