Burn, and Other Stories

by Peter Corris

  ‘Help you, mate?’

  One of the pair watching the players had got up and fronted me. Evidently I’d ventured a bit deep into private territory. Maybe he thought I was a spy from Leichhardt or Waverley. I was caught on the hop and couldn’t think of anything clever or devious to say, not that there was any real need.

  I said, ‘I wanted a word with David Richmond.’

  He shrugged. ‘After the set, all right? Dave and me have got a bet on.’

  I looked across at the court. The two players had come off. The score must have been 6–1. David Richmond was standing mid-court waving a ten-dollar note.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, but the man I’d been talking to was already on his way. He went onto the court, put his ten bucks along with Richmond’s under a spare racquet, and took up his position. He hit a ball to Richmond who whacked it back, flat and hard. I turned my back on the court and walked away. Colin Cook had held his racquet in his right hand and had absolutely nothing unusual about him, according to his missus. Dave Richmond hit a classic, one-fisted backhand, like Rod Laver or John McEnroe—left-handed.

  ‘He’s left-handed, Mrs Cook.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I didn’t know whether to say I was sorry or not. I had her clipping and photograph on the desk in front of me and I’d made out a refund cheque for some of the money she’d paid me. I told her on the phone I’d be sending these things in the mail.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure. It would be impossible for a right-handed person to play tennis like that. I once saw Boris Becker change hands to reach a shot, but that was just a little flick. Mr Richmond’s left-handed.’

  ‘But he does look like Colin?’

  ‘I’d say so, yes. Older, of course.’

  ‘Of course. Well, thank you, Mr Hardy.’

  And that was that, or so I thought. The Cook file became one of the very slimmest in my drawer and I got on with other business. Two days later I was walking towards my front door when David Richmond stepped from behind the overgrown vines that fill up most of the garden. The weapon he was holding looked like a cut-down .22 rifle. He had it levelled at my belt buckle.

  ‘I want to talk to you, Hardy.’

  I felt for my keys. ‘You don’t need the popgun for that.’

  ‘Keep your hands clear.’

  ‘Keys.’

  ‘Bugger the keys. We’re going to my car. The gun’ll be inside my jacket but still pointing at you. Don’t get any ideas.’

  From the way he spoke and moved I concluded that he was serious. That made him dangerous and obedience the best policy. He guided me towards a Volvo parked two cars away from my Falcon. He opened the front and rear passenger doors on the kerb side and told me to get in the back. I did and he flicked the door closed and was settled in the bucket seat, turned around and with the gun pointing at my chest, before my bum hit the vinyl.

  ‘Right. Now you tell me what you were doing out at the tennis club the other night. Said you wanted to see me, but you sloped off.’

  I shrugged. ‘Case of mistaken identity, Dave.’

  The freshly cut, raw metal end of the rifle barrel jerked a fraction. ‘That’s not good enough.’

  ‘Have to do, until you tell me how you found me and why it matters so much.’

  It was dark inside the car, just a little of the street light seeping through, but I could see enough to detect something odd about his face. It had an artificial look, as if it didn’t quite belong to the person behind it. He said, ‘One of the people playing on the other court recognised you. He’s a cop, or was. Said you were a private detective.’

  ‘When you asked around?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Why?’

  The noise he made was exasperated and angry. At that range a .22 bullet can kill you. He was sweating and I could feel something potentially very harmful building up inside him. I said the first thing that came into my mind. ‘Do you know someone named Colin Cook?’

  He sighed. ‘Shit. Is that what this’s all about?’

  ‘Is for me,’ I said. ‘Looks like you’ve got bigger problems.’

  ‘Let me get this right. Someone spotted me, thought I was Colin, and hired you to check on me?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Who?’

  I shook my head and didn’t say anything. He sat and thought while I examined what I could see of the gun. Cheap pea rifle, basically; sawn-off barrel and stock, solid magazine, maybe twelve-shot, semi-automatic. Very illegal, very nasty, but hastily contrived, not professional.

  Abruptly, he said, ‘The word on you is that you’re more or less honest.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Your client legitimate? I mean …’

  ‘I know what you mean, Richmond. And I’m getting a bit sick of this. Yeah, legitimate, solid citizen, parent, taxpayer. What the hell are we doing here?’

  He slid the safety catch forward and pushed the spring that released the magazine. He caught it as it fell free.

  ‘Empty,’ he said. ‘There’s just one bullet in the breech.’

  I managed a derisive snort. ‘Thanks a lot. One’s all it takes.’

  ‘I’m not a killer, Hardy,’ Richmond said. ‘Let’s talk. Have you got anything to drink in that dump of yours?’

  David Richmond didn’t look like a drinking man. He had a hard, disciplined, compact body and there was no spare flesh around his face. But he put his first scotch down in record time and held out his glass for another. He’d left the .22 in the car, so I poured willingly.

  ‘I knew Col Cook,’ he said. ‘How much have I got to tell you before you open up?’

  ‘More than that,’ I said.

  ‘Right. Well, I met Col in Victoria. I was designing houses and he was building them.’

  ‘Yurts and such?’

  His eyebrows shot up, animating his face somewhat. Under the light tan it still retained a tight, unnatural look. ‘You know about yurts?’

  ‘Not really. Go on.’

  ‘All kinds of weird materials and designs—circular, like the yurts, cylindrical, crystal-shaped. The banks were lending money for land and building like never before. Col and me worked on a few projects together, then we both got burned when a couple of things went wrong and the funds started to dry up.’

  I sipped some scotch and nodded. So far, his story jibed with Andrea’s.

  ‘Well, we were both in trouble. Then this opportunity came up. One of our clients had a big dope plantation near Castlemaine. Col had a truck. I had a secure telephone and reasons to pay lots of calls on people. Neither of us had any criminal associations. It went well for a while.’

  ‘Then?’ I said.

  ‘It went bad. There was opposition. To cut a long story short, Col ran over a guy with the truck and killed him. It was put down as an accident but it preyed on Col’s mind. He’d had some kind of Quaker upbringing. That’s how he got into the alternative lifestyle thing. He went nuts.’

  That didn’t sound quite right. ‘What about his family?’ I asked.

  Richmond shook his head. ‘He didn’t have a family. He was a very secretive, lonely type. Always going off on his own. Hard to get to know. Hard to understand.’

  ‘He had a wife and a kid,’ I said. ‘She spotted a photo of you.’

  ‘Jesus. I didn’t know.’

  I poured us both some more scotch. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, the operation folded. We’d both taken a good whack out of it. Col comes to me one day and tells me he’s sent most of his money to the wife of the bloke he’d run over. Then he breaks down. I try to steady him but he rushes off. Next I hear, he’s drowned off some beach. I got scared. I thought he might have left a letter for the police or a lawyer or something. He might have put us all in the shit. I didn’t know about the wife and kid. I thought he’d offed himself. Was it an accident?’

  ‘That’s what the insurance company decided.’ I put my hand up to my face, tapping my cheek. ‘What about this?
’

  ‘Col and me looked pretty much alike as it happened. When he shot through that night he left some stuff behind, including his passport. I didn’t have one. I went to this doctor in Melbourne and got a bit of plastic surgery done. Didn’t take long or cost that much. I used the passport and went to Thailand.’

  ‘Why Thailand?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ve got friends there and plenty of Aussies pass through. You can get the news from home. Six months and no news, so I came back, settled in up here.’

  I sat and thought about the story. It could have been true. On the other hand, Richmond might have killed Colin Cook and stolen his money. He looked prosperous—the Volvo was newish, his clothes were good. For a man who had done a little criminal activity six years ago his behaviour when I turned up seemed like an over-reaction.

  He saw my scepticism and touched his face. ‘Plastic job turned out not so good.’

  ‘You could have it done again,’ I said. ‘You look to have the money.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘I’m wondering whether to believe your story.’

  ‘I left the gun in the car, didn’t I?’

  ‘I’m wondering why you had it in the first place.’

  He looked around the room. ‘You could be taping me.’

  I laughed. ‘The only tapes here go from Benny Goodman to Dire Straits.’

  He sighed. ‘Okay. Okay. I made a couple of deliveries from Thailand. No problems. I’ve burned the passport and I’m a hundred per cent legitimate now, but … it leaves you edgy.’

  ‘So it should,’ I said. ‘Drug couriers are arseholes in my book. So you chopped down your rabbit shooter and came to see if I was a narc or someone connected with your deliveries?’

  ‘Yeah. I improvised.’

  ‘You seem to be pretty good at doing that. I still don’t know whether to buy your story or not.’

  He put his glass carefully on the floor and stood up. ‘What difference does it make? We don’t have any beef, do we?’

  ‘I suppose not. What’s this legitimate business you’re in now?’

  ‘I’ve got a little health farm and sports centre at Bowral. I’m the tennis coach, as well as the proprietor. I keep a flat in Petersham, too. I like those grass courts. Do you play tennis?’

  ‘Not in your league,’ I said. ‘Okay, Richmond. I don’t like you but I believe you. Why don’t you grow a moustache? There’s a nice woman in Sydney who doesn’t need to see that face in the papers.’

  We were in the hallway, moving towards the front door. He stared at me with his oddly bland eyes. ‘You’re a strange man, Hardy.’

  ‘I’m in a strange business,’ I said.

  The Big Lie

  Robert Adamo was a slender, medium-sized man with a slow, disconnected way of speaking. ‘Mr Hardy, I hope you can help me,’ he drawled. ‘I’ve never hired a private detective before.’

  ‘There’s a first time for everything, Mr Adamo,’ I said. ‘I don’t ask as many questions as an accountant or cost as much as a plumber. What’s the problem?’

  He glanced around my office for a moment, which is all the time it takes to register the minimal furniture and non-existent decoration. ‘I want to find someone. That is, I saw her yesterday, but …’

  ‘Hold on. Who’re we talking about?’ I’d already written Adamo’s name and address on a foolscap pad, along with the fact that he ran a picture framing and art restoration business in Paddington. Then I’d written MP for missing person, and drawn the male and female symbols and a question mark.

  ‘Valerie Hammond. She’s my fiancee. We were going to be married in two months.’

  I scratched out the male symbol. It took a bit of hacking and slashing through Adamo’s reticence and shyness, but I eventually got something I could put down in point form on the pad. Adamo and Valerie Hammond had met when she’d come to collect a painting she’d had framed. They got engaged after six months. The date was set; then Valerie Hammond disappeared. She moved out of Adamo’s house, where she’d been living for three months, quit her executive job with Air France and dropped out of sight.

  ‘So you had an argument,’ I said. ‘What about?’

  ‘No argument. Nothing. I asked her to marry me. She said yes. Then she was gone.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I said.

  His long, bony hands were in his lap now, twisting and flexing. They were strong-looking hands, and Adamo himself was a strong-looking-man—straight dark hair, firm chin, high cheekbones. ‘I … I looked for her, but I didn’t know what to do. She took her clothes and she got a reference from Air France. She’s very good at languages.’

  It was a better start than some. Adamo was a very well-organised guy: he had a recent photograph of his girl, who was a blonde with a high forehead, big eyes and a sexy mouth—165 centimetres, fifty-five kilos. I did the conversions to the old system on my pad. Valerie was twenty-five to Adamo’s twenty-nine; she’d learned French, German and Italian from her Swiss mother, and she and Robert had had a lot of fun in Leichhardt restaurants. His people were Italians who’d come out in the sixties when Roberto was a small boy. He was Robert now, and his Italian was rusty. I got the rest of the dope on Valerie—parents both dead, no siblings, only friends known to Adamo were Air France people he’d already talked to with no result. Valerie Hammond seemed to lead a quiet, very constrained life.

  ‘Sorry to have to ask,’ I said, ‘but does she have any … peculiarities? I mean does she smoke a lot, or drink or gamble?’ I gave a little laugh to help the medicine go down.

  Adamo shook his head. ‘Nothing like that. She is very quiet, a very private person. That’s why I’m dealing with you rather than the police.’

  ‘What does she spend her money on? She’d be on a good salary with the airline.’

  ‘Don’t know. We never talked about money. I’m very careful about money. Running a small business isn’t easy.’ His eyes flicked around the office again and I could sense him weighing up incomings and outgoings the way I did myself, periodically. ‘All I can tell you is that she’s careful about it, too.’

  I made a note on the pad. ‘She must’ve saved a bit then. You don’t know what bank she used?’

  He shook his head. ‘She didn’t have any money.’

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Adamo, but you don’t seem to have known a lot about the woman you were going to marry.’

  ‘Am going to marry,’ he said fiercely, ‘when you find her.’

  I nodded. His firmness deflected me from that approach. ‘Tell me about seeing her yesterday.’

  ‘In Terrey Hills. Mona Vale Road.’ He checked his watch. ‘At half-past three. She got in a Redline taxi and drove away. I was in my van. I’d been delivering a picture I’d restored.’

  It turned out that he’d tried to follow the taxi but couldn’t do it. I’d have been surprised if he could; following taxis is a lot harder than it sounds. He also didn’t get the taxi’s number, which was disappointing but not fatal. I took the photograph and got addresses and phone numbers and $300 from him—two days’ pay—and told him I’d phone him within forty-eight hours.

  ‘I love her,’ he said. ‘No matter what.’

  ‘There could be problems you haven’t anticipated, Mr Adamo,’ I said. ‘Emotional things …’

  He shook his head. ‘I deal with artists every day. I know about such things. They’re a part of life. I want Valerie for better or for worse.’

  He was serious and I was impressed. He lived in Lilyfield, only a hop, step and jump from Glebe, where I live. I could always drop in on him and take a look at the coop Valerie had flown. Unlikely to be necessary; people can be hard to find, but it’s a matter of categories. Clean-living, good-looking quadrilingual blondes who get reference from their employers aren’t as hard to find as some.

  It’s not often in a missing persons case that you have the luxury of two clear, fresh trails to follow. As I get older, luxury appeals to me more. I rang Redline Cabs and spoke to a g
uy I know there who helps me because I once helped him. He undertook to find out from the service dockets which driver had picked up a fare in Mona Vale Road, Terrey Hills, approximately twenty-four hours ago, and to put me in touch with him or her.

  Then I rang an employment agency which had once provided me with a typist when I needed one to make up a long and largely fictitious report. Amy Post was the typist; we’d had a brief, non-title, sexual bout and had remained friends. Amy was an executive in the company now.

  ‘Amy? It’s Cliff Hardy.’

  ‘God, so it is. Let me guess—you need a physiotherapist who can do bookkeeping and house repairs.’

  ‘I don’t need anyone. I …’

  Amy’s voice went smoky. ‘We all need someone, Cliff.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘Right now, I’ve got a profile of a person who’s left a job and is looking for another. I’ll give you the details, and you tell me where she goes looking. Okay?’

  ‘Okay. She, eh? Hmm.’

  ‘It’s business. A man’s paying me to find her.’

  Amy’s voice went professional. ‘Shoot.’

  I gave her the details, such as I had, of Valerie Hammond’s age, appearance, qualifications and experience. Amy said, ‘Fluent in all of ’em?’

  ‘So I understand.’

  ‘Half her luck. She wouldn’t need to be out of work a minute. And with a good reference? Shit, she could walk in anywhere and ask for top dollar. Got your pencil sharpened? No joke intended.’

  Amy gave me a list of eleven likely employers—airlines, travel agents, convention organisers, consultants. I noted down the addresses and numbers and the names of her contacts at each place. Efficiency was Amy’s god, and that was one of the things that had kept our affair light—she’d sensed that my ramshackle operation ran the way I liked it, and in a manner she couldn’t bear. I drew a line under the last entry and thanked her.