The Dunbar Case - [Cliff Hardy 38]

by Peter Corris

  ‘You pity me, right? Fuck you.’

  I moved towards the door. I heard him suck in a deep breath.

  ‘Cliff.’

  I turned back.

  ‘Don’t say you weren’t warned.’

  ‘About who in particular?’

  His troubled voice sank to a whisper. ‘About every one of the fuckers. They’re a volatile lot. I doubt that any one of them trusts the other.’

  ‘Not unusual in a crew like that.’

  ‘Yeah, but if anyone tells you Jobe’s a spent force, don’t believe it.’

  ‘Sounds as if you—’

  ‘Just an observer.’

  My nod didn’t mean I believed him.

  ~ * ~

  I’d thought my session with Pete would have taken longer. I thought he might have filled me in with some details about the Tanners, might even have taken me to meet a useful person or two. I didn’t anticipate that he’d be so reluctant to help. I was there so briefly I could’ve had dinner with Marisha but she’d have made other arrangements by now so I had time to kill.

  I drove into the city centre. Newcastle wore a rundown look and I recalled reading that a plan to spend millions on a revamp had fallen through and that the money men, local authorities and the state government were still trying to thrash out a deal. It looked overdue; road markings were faded, the buildings were rust-stained from leaking guttering and everything seemed to need an injection of money and ideas.

  I found a parking spot and had a meal in the first decent-looking eatery I came to. Fish, as recommended by my cardiologist and generally my preference anyway. A half-bottle of white wine to go with the food and wash down the necessary pills. Service was slow, which suited me. I read some Conrad and scribbled some notes. Black coffee to finish.

  I bought a bottle of wine at a pub, programmed the GPS and followed the directions to Redhead on the coast a bit north of the city. Marisha’s address was a block of flats on the road that ran along the beach. If she was up high enough and in front she’d have a view across the road, the dunes and the beach straight out to the South Pacific Ocean.

  It was just after nine o’clock when I buzzed her flat. She released the door after telling me to come up two flights. I went up slowly—you don’t want to arrive on a woman’s doorstep puffing. She had the door open waiting for me. No ceremony. She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around me. I hugged her and felt a surge of feeling that’d been missing for a long time.

  She hung on to my arm and pulled me inside. I hadn’t seen her since Lily’s wake when she’d been one of the most distressed people there before she became one of the drunkest. She hadn’t changed much—still looked as though she could do a triathlon the way she used to. She seemed reluctant to let me go and I wasn’t struggling. I waved the bottle of red.

  ‘Good one,’ she said. ‘Let’s crack it and drink a toast to Lily. How are you?’

  I knew what she meant. The name had to come up and she’d done it in the best way possible.

  ‘Healed,’ I said.

  ‘Jacket off, have a seat, I’ll open the plonk.’ She looked at the label. ‘Shit, that set you back a bit.’

  I put my jacket on the couch on top of a pile of newspapers and magazines—the room was pleasantly untidy, a bit like Marisha herself, who wore a wrinkled skirt and a shirt half tucked in, half out.

  ‘My client, you mean.’

  She unscrewed the cap on her way to the kitchen. ‘Yeah, I heard you were working again. Having fun?’

  She came back with two glasses, put them on the coffee table in front of the couch and poured. Then she sat in a chair across from me but not far away. She raised her glass.

  ‘Lily,’ she said, ‘from two who loved her.’

  We drank.

  ‘I asked if you were having fun.’

  ‘It’s a good question. I haven’t thought about it.’

  I was having trouble thinking about anything except her smooth olive skin, dark eyes and the way her overbite gave her a smile all her own. I drank some wine to stop from staring at her.

  ‘Some of it’s fun,’ I said. ‘Some of it’s a bit like what you do—talking to people, finding things out.’

  She nodded, still smiling. ‘But there’s a difference. I haven’t been shot ten times.’

  ‘Nowhere near ten.’

  We drank and didn’t talk for a minute. I pointed to the curtains drawn across floor to ceiling windows. The flat was at the front of the building. ‘Must be a great view.’

  ‘You don’t want to talk about the view, do you, Cliff?’

  ‘No.’ I finished the wine, stood and moved towards her. She put her glass down and I took her hands and pulled her up and towards me. She came smoothly and we kissed as if it was something we’d rehearsed. She tasted of wine; she smelled of the sea.

  ‘You’ve been swimming,’ I said.

  ‘Every night.’

  We kissed again. We pressed close. I was getting hard.

  ‘Lily said—’

  ‘I know. She told me. She said I was your type.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Come on, then.’

  We were both eager but not impatient. We took our time and discovered what pleased us both the most. Then it became urgent and we fucked vigorously. After we finished we lay wrapped together in the semi-darkness. She ran a finger down the pale spots that marked where they’d split me open.

  ‘I heard about this but I forgot about it just now. Didn’t seem to cause you any trouble.’

  ‘It doesn’t. Mind you, if we’d done that, say, a day or two before the heart attack, you’d have had to heave me off and give me CPR.’

  ‘I’m good at that. Anyone who does a triathlon should know how to do it. I’ve done it twice to blokes younger than you who didn’t know their hearts were iffy.’

  ‘They say I’m good for quite a while yet if I look after myself. Which I do, more or less.’

  ‘You look pretty good. Not much flab.’

  ‘None at all on you.’

  ‘I’ll get the wine.’

  We sat in the bed and drank the wine. We filled each other in on what we’d been doing over the past couple of years—solid journalistic work for her and plans for a book on crime in the Hunter Valley, and some interesting cases for me in amongst the routine stuff.

  Marisha was still on the right side of fifty; I’d crossed that line. We stayed close, but the days of multiple fucking were past for both of us. We fell asleep before even getting near to talking about why I’d contacted her.

  ~ * ~

  I woke up alone in the bed and had the momentary feeling of not knowing where I was or even who I was. But the sensation passed almost immediately. The bed was warm from Marisha’s body and retained her scents of sea, sweat and sex. Light flooded into the room through the open door. I pulled on my boxers and went into the sitting room where Marisha was standing by the big window with the curtain drawn back. She wore a blue silk dressing gown.

  ‘There’s your view,’ she said.

  It was all I thought it would be—a busy road contrasting with silent dunes, an empty beach and the ocean rolling away forever. I put my arms around her and she rested back against me.

  ‘It’s why I bought the place.’

  ‘Wise move.’

  ‘I’ll make some coffee, then you can tell me why you’re here.’

  She was slipping back into professional mode. I told her I needed to get some pills from my bag in the car. I had a quick shower, dressed and got the pills. I arranged them in the palm of my hand and ran the tap for a glass of water. She watched me as I swallowed them.

  ‘Every day?’

  ‘Every bloody day.’

  ‘You didn’t bring the bag up,’ she said. ‘Not planning to stay? Love me and leave me?’

  I kissed her. ‘Not this time.’

  ‘Meaning there’ll be others?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  She began to spoon coffee into a plunger pot. ‘Me to
o. So what’s on your mind?’

  ‘More who.’

  She smiled. ‘There’s no one else around, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Glad to hear it, but I was thinking of Jobe Tanner.’

  She dropped the scoop and coffee spilled over the bench. ‘My God! How the hell did you know?’

  ~ * ~

  8

  When she’d calmed down, Marisha explained that Jobe Tanner was one of the principal sources she was using for her book on crime in the Hunter Valley.

  ‘This is utterly hush-hush,’ she said. ‘Until now literally no one knows about it.’

  I had to wonder about that after what Pete had said.

  ‘How did you get him to talk?’

  ‘It wasn’t easy. Took almost a year of negotiation. But eventually things fell my way. He’s getting old and he’s found religion. He wants to go out with a clean slate—well, a cleaner one.’

  ‘He’s snitching?’

  ‘Not exactly. He’s not naming names. Not of live people, that is. Plenty of dead ones. He’s pointing me in the right directions, showing me how things were done.’

  ‘Were done?’

  ‘Are still being done, but not by him. Now you have to tell me why you scared the shit out of me. What’ve you heard?’

  I tore a paper towel from the roll, put it under the lip of the bench and swept the coffee grounds into it while I thought what to say. I tapped the grounds into the pot. ‘I haven’t heard a single thing about Jobe doing anything but being the tough, controlling bastard he has the reputation for.’

  ‘What then?’

  I explained about being pressured by the Tanners without saying much about what had taken me to Bathurst. I told her I’d seen Pete McKnight.

  ‘Pete keeps himself informed,’ I said, ‘and when I said I needed a counterweight to Hector and Joseph he just stressed Jobe’s name.’

  ‘How do you interpret that?’

  ‘One, that there’s friction between father and sons and I’d already got a whiff of that. Two, that he believes Jobe is what he’s always been. That suggests your secret is safe.’

  ‘Mmm, maybe. I really need this coffee, then you can tell me what you want me to do.’

  She made the coffee, warmed some croissants and we sat at the kitchen table. She was still anxious and I could understand why. If word got out that Jobe was talking there would be some very nervous and nasty people around. I was undecided about what to ask her. The last thing I wanted to do was add to her anxiety.

  ‘I suppose I was going to ask if you knew anyone who knows him and could help get me to see him, but now

  ‘I’ll think about it. How long can you stick around?’

  ‘Not long. I’m supposed to see the guy I went to Bathurst to see pretty soon.’

  ‘You haven’t said much about him. Should I know more?’

  ‘Just this—the Tanner brothers are hoping to make some kind of big score with him when he gets out. Do you know of anything that might fit that picture—a drug shipment, a big robbery take unaccounted for, a scam that needs a finishing touch?’

  ‘I’ll think about that as well. Are you looking for a connection between the Tanners’ interest in the guy in prison and your client’s interest in him?’

  ‘I can’t see how there could be. Boil it all down and the events are separated by over a century. But I have to consider the possibility.’

  We fixed on where and when we’d meet later and left the flat together. Marisha drove off in her Subaru without telling me where she was going or asking me what I was going to do. She kissed me goodbye, but a lot of the heat had gone out of things on her part. It couldn’t be helped; she was involved in something delicate and dangerous and I’d blundered into it. She had to decide whether helping me was worth the risk. That meant weighing a lot of work against something very new and maybe ephemeral. The odds were against me.

  I located a swimming pool with a gym attached and spent the morning working out and struggling through twenty laps.

  I was walking to my car, thinking about lunch, when my mobile rang. Wakefield. I realised I hadn’t contacted him after my meeting with Twizell.

  ‘Hardy.’

  ‘I thought I’d have heard from you before this.’

  .I’m sorry, things got complicated.’

  ‘Complicated how? Did you put my questions to him?’

  ‘Yes, and I’m sure he knows something, but he’s bargaining with us. He wants you to use your influence to ... help him at his parole hearing.’

  A pause, then an impatient grunt. ‘Well, tell him I will.’

  ‘I think he’ll want something more concrete.’

  ‘That’ll take time.’

  ‘That’s what he’s got.’

  ‘Are you trying to be funny?’

  ‘No, and my sources were right, the Tanners are keeping a close eye on him and they’re putting pressure on me.’

  ‘To do what, kill him?’

  I laughed. ‘No, it’s not clear what they have in mind. I’m in Newcastle trying to find out.’

  ‘You’re where? You’re supposed to be in Bathurst.’

  ‘As I said, it’s complicated.’

  ‘Hardy, if you’re trying to string this out...’

  ‘Listen, Professor, some very nasty people have threatened me and my family. I take exception to that and I’m trying to deal with it, but it’s connected somehow to Twizell. I’m dealing with different parts of one thing here, I think.’

  Something about my tone of voice must have made an impact. I could almost see him moving the phone away from his ear, backing off. When he spoke again his voice was placatory.

  ‘I’m sorry. I have faith in you. When do you see Twizell again and what exactly does he want?’

  I told him and he said he’d try to pull some strings. I said I’d call him after tomorrow’s meeting with Twizell and that was it. He’d shown no interest in my statement about a threat. I opened the car door and froze when I saw another little foil package sitting on the seat. I took a tissue from my pocket, used it to pick up the foil, blew my nose on the tissue and went to the nearest rubbish bin to drop it in.

  I got in the car and began to worry. No surprise that the Tanners had reach in Newcastle, but how did they know I was there? And if they’d picked me up yesterday, had they tracked me to Marisha’s place? If that wasn’t enough to worry about, I could always turn my attention to Wakefield. He seemed indifferent to the Tanners. Was that just single-mindedness, or did he know more about the Tanners and the state of things in Newcastle than he was letting on?

  I didn’t feel like eating but I had to fill in the time somehow and I thought I’d go back to the place where I’d had dinner the night before. I was a few blocks away from it when a police car cruised up and waved me into the kerb. One of the uniforms got out while the other sat with his radio phone at the ready. I wound down the window and put my hands in clear view on the wheel.

  ‘Could I see some ID, please, sir.’

  I showed him my driver’s and PIA licences.

  ‘I’ll have to ask you to accompany us to the station.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll tell you when you get there. Are you going to cooperate?’

  ‘Can I follow you?’

  ‘We’d prefer that you didn’t.’

  They do that. Sometimes it’s because they want to look the car over, sometimes because, in this day and age, a man without a car is just that much more vulnerable. Hard to tell which in this case. He stepped back as I opened the door and rewound the window. You lock this model Falcon with the key. I was about to do that when he stopped me.

  ‘I’ll take the keys. Someone’ll collect the vehicle.’

  They were interested in the car.

  ~ * ~

  Newcastle police station was on Watt Street, not far from the harbour in one direction and the ocean in the other. There were other institutional buildings nearby, like the Anglican cathedral a
nd a hospital. The building had the unimaginative, solid lines common to most police stations. The detectives’ room, to which one of the uniforms took me after doing some business at the front desk, was tidy, unlike some, and dominated by clicking computer keys, like most.