by Peter Corris
He got up, tall and spare and snapped his fingers at Bruno. “Take him through to Room 38. I’ll be along in a minute. He’s not to see her until I’m there. Fifteen minutes Hardy!”
“For now,” I said.
Bruno opened the door and I followed him shakily out into the corridor. We walked warily, taking a couple of turns to right and left, not chatting. Bruno stopped outside a bolted door which had 38 painted in gold on its smooth black surface. He put his back against the door.
“We wait,” he said.
I didn’t argue. Balanced and braced like that he was about as movable as Gibraltar and I wasn’t feeling rebellious any more. I needed time to think out an approach to the woman whose problems had brought me here, and my condition for thinking wasn’t good. I’d come up with exactly nothing when Brave came round the corner. He’d put a fresh white jacket on over his white shirt and dark trousers. His eyes were dark, shining obsidian spheres and he seemed to be carrying himself very stiffly. He might walk and look lit up like that all the time, but there seemed a better than even chance that he’d given himself a shot of something. Bruno stepped aside, Brave drew the bolt, pushed the door open and I followed him into the room.
Room 38 was an expensively appointed sick room; there was a big low bed with a mountain of pillows and acres of white covers, assorted bottles on a bedside table, fruit in a beaten metal bowl, a streamlined portable TV set and a smell of money cloying the air. A woman, on the right side of forty but not by much, was sitting up in bed reading a paperback — Family and Kinship in East London. Her hair was dark brown, cut severely, her face was pale, puffy around the eyes. Bryn Gutteridge was right when he’d said that he and his sister weren’t look alike twins. This woman didn’t resemble him at any point. Reading, concentrating, she wasn’t bad looking, but she wasn’t interesting. When she looked up to see Brave standing at the end of her bed her face transformed. She swept her hand over her hair making it careless, pretty. She smiled a good wide smile and something like beauty flowed into the bones of her face. She held out her hands.
“Doctor, I didn’t expect to see you again today.” Brave moved around the bed. He took her hands, pressed them, laid them on the bed, not quite giving them back to her. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Susan,” he said. “This is Mr Clifford Hardy, he’s a private investigator.”
Her eyes flew open in alarm, she went rigid for a second then grabbed for Brave’s hand. She got it and calmed down, but she was strung up and stretched out and I doubted my ability to get anything out of her without having it filtered through Brave first. And he was making a lot of very strange moves. But I had to try. I stepped past Bruno and went up to the bed, facing Brave across it. I tried to keep roughneckedness out of my voice.
“Miss Gutteridge, your brother hired me…”
“Bryn!” Her hands shot up to her face and lines appeared around her mouth and neck which made her look fifty. She’d sweat and twitch if you said Santa Claus too loudly. Like Freud’s, most of my clients are middle-class neurotics, but some of them have real problems in a real, hostile world. Some don’t have any problem but themselves and I couldn’t be sure which category Susan Gutteridge fell into. Brave did some more hand-squeezing.
“Susan, you don’t have to talk to him if you don’t want, but he has been persistent and I judge that you should see him now, once and for all. I’ll stay right here and I promise I won’t let him upset you.”
Whatever he judged and promised would be fine with her. She relaxed and turned a scaled-down version of the smile on me.
“I’m sorry, Mr Harvey?”
“Hardy.”
“Hardy. I’m overwrought, one thing and another. If my brother and Dr Brave think it wise for me to talk to you then I’m sure it is. I’ve never met a detective before. It’s about the threats I suppose?”
“Yes,” I said, “and other things.”
“Other things?” She looked nervous. Susan Gutteridge’s rails were long and narrow and she had to summon all her strength to stay on them for very long. Maybe it was the surroundings — clinics, psychologists, threats — maybe a slight physical resemblance, but I found myself thinking of Cyn, my ex-wife. Cyn, beds, breakdowns, lovers, lawyers: I pushed myself back from it.
“I mean related things, Miss Gutteridge, family things mostly which might throw some light on the problem. Give me something to go on, you understand.”
Brave’s snort of derision underlined my own awareness of the cliched cant I was spouting, but cops have to say “it is my duty to warn you”, and doctors have to say “put out your tongue”.
“I’d like to hear your account of the threats,” I went on, “and your ideas and reactions. You’re a sensitive woman. The threats came from a woman and you might have picked out something that a man would miss.”
She looked blank. Wrong tack. I buttered her on the other side. “You have experience of people in need, social problems. Maybe you can guess at the disturbance in this woman’s mind, what she wants, what lies behind it.” That was better. Smugness crept into her face. She moved her hands away from Brave’s for the first time. She smoothed down the covers. It was hard not to dislike her.
“You are acute in your own way, Mr Hardy,” she said. “Of course, one of the worst things about this, for me, is the thought of how disturbed that woman must be to be saying those things. The person speaking to me on the telephone was emotionally disturbed. As you say, I have some experience in this area. The language was frightful.”
I suppressed an impulse to laugh. “Do you mean it was obscene?”
“Yes, horribly so. I had to burn the letters.”
“Were they obscene too?”
She started to look nervous again. “No, not at all, just awful.”
“Why did you have to burn them then?”
She plucked at the bedcover, shredding some of the raised nap and balling it in her fingers. “I meant that, well, the filthy language and the letters came from the same person. So I burned the letters.”
“You think the phone calls and letters came from the same source do you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Why, of course?”
“They must have.”
“Tell me one, just one, of the objectionable phrases in the phone calls.”
“I can’t, I couldn’t say it.”
“What were the letters about? The same thing?”
“No — sickness, decay, death.”
“Come on Miss Gutteridge, one phrase from the calls.”
She glared at me, bunched her fists and hammered them on the snowy bedcover. “Fucking capitalist!” she screamed in my face.
There was a silence that seemed to let the words hang in the air forever. Then she started sobbing and Brave moved in with all systems go. He took her hands and clasped them inside his while murmuring comforting, animal-like sounds in her ear. He swayed above her like a mesmerised snake putting the music back into the pipe. She regained control very quickly. I knew that this kind of command over another person was extremely difficult to obtain and incredibly costly to bring about in time and effort. There was no short cut to it and I wondered why Brave had made an investment of this order in this pathetic woman. There was no time for on-the-spot investigation. At a nod from Brave, Bruno moved forward and took my arm just above the elbow. His grip hurt like a dentist’s drill on a nerve.
“You’ve had your time. Hardy,” Brave said, “I hope you’re satisfied with what you’ve done.”
If that was supposed to make me feel sorry for the woman it didn’t work. Her problems were mine only in a-strictly professional sense, but I had to stay with them. At this point I had to assume that Bryn had hired me for reasons other than those he’d stated. That isn’t unusual, but you have to sort the real reasons out fairly quickly if you don’t want to be the meat in the sandwich all the way. I had to fire a shot in my own war.
“Goodbye, Miss Gutteridge,” I said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Out,” Brave hissed the word like a jet of venom and Bruno swung me round and we trotted out of the room like big Siamese twins joined at the shoulder.
We made the same turns in reverse and Bruno shooed me into the room I’d surfaced in before. I sat down on a chair near the desk and started scooping my things up and putting them in my pockets. Bruno stepped forward and a puzzled look spread over his face as he tried to work out whether he was supposed to stop me or not. He couldn’t tell and he couldn’t think and hit at the same time. Not many muscle men can and it gives the weaklings a fractional edge sometimes. I made a cigarette as the Italian hovered in the middle of the room looking like a discus thrower turned to stone in the middle of his wind-up.
“Don’t worry, Bruno,” I said. “I’ll wait here for your master and in a little while you’ll be able to go off and do something about your face.” That gave him something to think of. He put a hand up to his face and pressed gently. “Harder,” I said, “maybe there’s something broken.” He worked his jaw and grimaced. I might have been able to get him to give himself a karate chop but there was no challenge in it. The door swung open and Brave walked in. He sat down primly behind his desk and the first colour I’d seen in his face appeared — high red spots in his cheeks like daubings on a clown.
“You’ve been very troublesome, Hardy,” he said, “and achieved very little, I should imagine.”
“Why should you imagine that?”
“I won’t fence with you. You are a nuisance, plain and simple. A blunderer into delicate situations. The question is, how to be rid of you.”
I wanted to bring his dislike of me up as high as it would go.
“A blunderbuss,” I said.
He registered it like a deep internal pain.
“As I understand it,” he said slowly, “a private detective is without any authority and credibility if he is without a client.”
“You’ve read too much Chandler,” I said.
He looked puzzled for a second but didn’t let it stop him. “I think that’s so,” he went on, “and therefore you represent no problem at all Mr Hardy, none at all. Show him out Bruno.”
Bruno and I did our dancing bears act down corridors and through doors and in five minutes I was walking down the path towards the gate. The night air hit me hard and I gave my attention to finding a chemist for my head and a bottle shop for me.
4
The Green Man and Joe Barassi’s All Day All Nite Pharmacy at Drummoyne put me back together. I washed down two red Codrals with a couple of hefty slugs from a half bottle of Haig. I looked at the wound on my head in the mirror of the Green Man’s washroom. It didn’t look too bad, the blood had stopped seeping and I managed to clean the area up with damp paper towels. Whoever had hit me had known his business and had chosen to give me a purple heart rather than a posthumous medal of honour. I felt vaguely grateful to him and had another nip out of the Scotch bottle for him.
The traffic flowed easily over the Iron Cove bridge. People were all in the cinemas and pubs and there was little competition for me on the drive home to Glebe. I wasn’t up to shuttling the car into the courtyard so I left it outside the house with a steering lock on the gearshift which would hold up a good Glebe car thief for about two minutes. My head throbbed and a little laser of pain stabbed over the right eyebrow but I decided to try and make some sense of the night’s play before I let another Codral and some more whisky sing me to sleep. I sat in a bean bag with a tall Scotch and soda on the floor beside me. I rolled three cigarettes and set them in the grooves of the ashtray the way Uncle Ted used to. Uncle Ted had a good war, sent back hundreds from the Tobruk two-up games and survived. I’d survived high school, two erratic years at university and Malaya to become an insurance investigator — long hours, high mileage and pathetic incendiarists. The work had coated my fingers with nicotine, scuttled my marriage and put fat around my waistline and wits. The deals and hush-money made divorce work seem clean as riding a wave and bodyguarding noble and manly. Suicides and Svengalis were a different thing though, and I wasn’t sure that I was up to coping with them. I was on the third cigarette without having any inspiration, when the phone rang.
I heaved myself out of the bean bag and put the receiver somewhere near my face.
“Mr Hardy?” A woman’s voice, drunk or panicky.
“Yes, who’s this?”
“It’s Ailsa Sleeman, I found your card. I didn’t know what else to do. I’m frightened.”
“What’s happened?”
“It’s horrible. Bryn just called me, I don’t know why me, I suppose he just doesn’t know anyone else…”
“What’s happened?”
‘It’s Giles. He’s been shot. He’s dead.”
“When was this?”
“I don’t know. Bryn rang me about an hour ago. I’ve been trying to reach you since then.”
“You sound frightened Miss Sleeman. Why?”
“It’s hard to explain. Impossible over the phone. It’s to do with Dr Brave who you seemed interested in this afternoon. I’m afraid of him. I need help, perhaps protection. I’m willing to employ you.”
That was a switch. A few hours ago she was willing to forget me like a bad dream. This would give me two clients on the same case. I wasn’t sure it was ethical, it had never happened to me before. But if Bryn meant me to proceed with the investigation maybe I could work out a package deal. If Brave could carry through with his threat, I’d lose Bryn as a client so it would be convenient to stay with it on La Sleeman’s behalf. I was hooked on the Gutteridge’s now, and I felt that I’d got into some kind of conflict with Brave that had to be seen through. I needed a bit more to go on though.
“I’m interested Miss Sleeman,” I said in my deliberate voice, “but I need a little more information. Did Mr Gutteridge mention Dr Brave?”
“Yes, they’ve had a quarrel.”
“OK. Can you come in to my office in the morning?”
“Tomorrow?” The panicky note was back, “I thought tonight…”
“Miss Sleeman, I’ve driven a hundred miles today, been lied to, had two fights and lost one badly. I’m out of action until 9 a.m. tomorrow.”
All true enough, but what I really wanted to know was whether she was serious about her proposition and alarm, or was just feeling lonely for the night. She could be one of those rich people who think they have everything they need behind their high walls but occasionally have to send out for some help. Or she might still be in touch with the world outside. I also felt a need to do some talking on my own territory after the lies I’d been told so far. There’s something truth-inducing about a hard chair and a smell of phenol in the hall.
“All right,” she said. Her voice was steadier, no drink in it. “I’ll be in at 9 o’clock. You will help, Mr Hardy?”
I told her I would, made sure she had the address right, made a few reassuring noises and she rang off. The phone rang again almost as soon as I’d put it down. I let it ring a few times while I visited my drink and finished my cigarette. I took Bryn’s cheque out of my wallet and spread it out in front of me. It was one of those big, friendly cheques from a big, friendly chequebook. I’d hoped to collect a few more. I picked up the phone.
“Hardy? This is Bryn Gutteridge.”
“Yes?”
“A dreadful thing has happened Hardy.”
I had to decide quickly whether to let him tell it or to tell him I knew what was up and judge his reaction. The first way seemed to leave me more cards.
“You sound upset. Take it quietly and tell me.”
“Giles has been shot. He was in the car, going on an errand for me
… and someone shot him in the head. He’s gone.”
“I’m sorry Mr Gutteridge. You’ve called the police?”
“Yes of course. They’ve been and gone. They were very considerate. I was surprised.”
I knew what he meant but I wasn’t surprised. The Commissioner would have got in on this
quickly and he’d have kept the public lavatory prowl squad well out of it. “Do you want me in on this?”
“No!” Sacking people was second nature stuff to him. He did it with no embarrassment.
“The police will be prying into my affairs. That’s enough. When this is over I’m going away, perhaps for a few years.”
“I see. What about your sister?”
“I’ll take her with me. We’ll get out of this. Drop the investigation Mr Hardy. Thank you for…”
“For what? Just for interest, when did you decide to let the investigation drop, before or after Giles’ death?”
“Oh God, I don’t know. Before, I think. I’m not sure. Why does it matter?”
“It matters to me. What did Dr Brave say to you when you saw him this evening?”
“I didn’t see him, he rang.” He broke off confused and annoyed with himself for replying. “This is no longer your affair, Hardy.”
I didn’t have much of his time left. “Did he threaten you?” I said quickly.
“I’m hanging up Hardy. Send a bill.”
“You’ve overpaid me. Have this for free — Giles’ murder and the threats to your sister are connected. You can’t run away from it.” He hung up.
That left me with Ailsa. I took another pill and finished my drink.
I went to bed. The street was quiet, no dog races so my head was spared the roar of punters’ Holdens and the purr of the bookmakers’ limousines. It was too hot for the street fighters and gutter drinkers to be out lending the area colour and Soames must have had the music down low. I drifted off to the quiet hum of my fan. I slid into a dream in which Ailsa Sleeman, standing tall, reached down for my hands and lifted them up onto her massive breasts.
5
I woke with a headache that was partly due to the crack I’d taken the night before. I looked out of the window across the rusting roofs of Glebe. The sky had a dull, leaden look — the day was going to be hot. A Sahara wind was already whipping the ice-cream wrappers and other crap along the gutters. I made coffee but it was bitter and I swilled it down the sink. About the only good thing I’ve ever heard of Mick Jagger is that he likes scrambled eggs and white wine for breakfast. I made my version of scrambled eggs, piled a glass up with ice and topped it up with hock and soda. I put the drink down fast, made another, and took it, the food and The News out to the courtyard, feeling better every minute.