by Peter Corris
‘I know this is painful for you, Ms Hammond, but I’d be glad if you could just answer a few questions. Why do you say you can’t have children?’
Her high heels tapped faster. ‘Because there is severe mental and physical disability in my genes.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘I didn’t have to be told. Take a look at my brother, Mr Hardy.’
‘Who told you?’
‘My mother.’
‘Did you ever inquire yourself about his condition, ask a doctor … ?’
‘No. I love Carl, strange as it may seem. I just want to make sure he’s as happy as he can be. That’s all. That’s my life.’
‘When did your mother die?’
‘Six years ago. She left Carl in my charge.’
We’d reached a row of benches outside a new steel and glass tower. I steered her towards one which was shaded by a tree growing in a large wooden box. ‘Sit down, Ms Hammond.’
She sat. The tension in her body was visible in every line; also the slight buffer zone created by the Valium between her and the world. On close inspection, she was a little too heavy-featured to be really good-looking, but she was impressive and there was energy and intelligence behind her sadness. ‘I can’t imagine what you have to say to me,’ she said.
‘Your mother lied to you,’ I said. ‘I suppose she was afraid that if you led a full, normal life you’d neglect your brother. She told you a very cruel lie. Perhaps she was ashamed.’
‘That’s impossible! My mother was never ashamed of anything. She was … was immensely strong.’
‘I imagine so. Nevertheless, the disability your brother suffers has nothing to do with genetics, at least as far as you’re concerned.’
‘What do you mean?’
I had to resort to my notes, but I pride myself that I gave it to her clearly and accurately. I explained the medical terms and stressed that the whole Rhesus tragedy could be easily averted by today’s technology. She sat perfectly still and absorbed it all. Tears were running down her face by the time I’d finished. She pulled a tissue from her leather shoulder bag and blotted the tears. Through all the distress her mind was razor sharp. ‘If what you say is true, how is it that I was born normal, and Carl had this terrible thing?’
‘I’m not very sure of my ground here,’ I said. ‘It could be a matter of chance, but if not, I think you know the answer.’
‘Different fathers?’
I nodded. ‘And the reason for your mother’s behaviour. Guilty people can be strong and vice versa. When did your father die?’
‘A few years after Carl was born. They were very unhappy, my mother and father. They fought terribly. I was very young and didn’t understand much. I thought it was because of Carl, or the money. But perhaps …’
She was sobbing now. I put my arm around her shoulders, and she rested her head against me. ‘You’ve got a lot to think about,’ I said. ‘Most of it’s very painful, but not all. You don’t have to think of yourself as cursed or tainted. I don’t want to push things, but Adamo’s a good man. I don’t see many, but I recognise one when I do. I think you’d find him understanding and sympathetic …’
She lifted her head and sniffed. ‘He’s very smart, too, isn’t he?’
I remembered Adamo’s firmness of purpose, his confidence that he could set things right if he just got a little help. ‘Smart enough to run a small business profitably,’ I said. ‘I’m here to tell you that’s tough. And smart enough to be in love with you and to hire me. Yes, I’d say he’s pretty bright.’
The House of Ruby
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ the woman behind the table said. ‘My name is Marcia. Do you want someone in particular, or a special service?’
‘In a way,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see Ruby.’
Marcia was a nice-looking woman, thirtyish, with short curly hair and a humorous expression. The fact that her ruffled blouse was open almost to the waist and her make-up would have looked garish out of the dim orange light was to be expected. This was The House of Ruby, massage parlour and relaxation centre in Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross, and the woman behind the table wasn’t selling raffle tickets. She pressed a red button on the desk. The blue button, I knew, summoned two or three women in various states of undress. The red one, appropriately, summoned Ruby.
‘Cliff, my love, you came.’
‘Once or twice, Ruby,’ I said. ‘It’s good to see you looking so well.’
Ruby is about fifty, and carries a lot of flesh on a large frame, but she carries it with style. Her hair is red and luxuriant, like her lipstick. She was wearing a purple silk dress that outlined her charms rather than displayed them. The dress was short, however; Ruby has great legs and them she displays. She reached for me with her ruby-ringed fingers and red-painted nails. ‘Just you come in here, love, and I’ll give you a drink and tell you a story that’ll make you weep.’
‘Private eyes don’t weep,’ I said.
Ruby burst into laughter, and I heard the woman behind the desk snigger a little too. Definitely the place to go to be appreciated for your wit, Ruby’s. She took me through a door and down a short passage to her private suite, which is fitted out like an erotic dream—silk and velvet hangings, black and red decor, pornographic paintings and photographs. Ruby poured generous measures of scotch into tall glasses and added ice. ‘Put you in the mood, Cliff?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘But it’s just a bit overdone. I kind of get out of the mood from having been put in the mood, if you follow.’
She nodded. ‘Me too, but it’s what the punters like.’
I lifted my glass and drank down some good, nicely iced scotch. ‘How’s Kathy?’
‘Fine. Two kids.’
Kathy was Ruby’s daughter, who I’d found one time after she’d run off on learning that her mother was a whore and a madam. Kathy was a convent-educated teenager at the time, and I’d taken her back to my place, where my tenant, Hilde Stoner, and I had talked to her for several days about life and the world. I’d shown her a bit of it, in the Cross and around Darlinghurst, and she got a different perspective on things. She’d been her mother’s greatest supporter ever since, and Ruby was a friend of mine for life. I could’ve fucked my brains out for free forever if I’d been that way inclined. As it was, I’d availed myself of Ruby’s services but twice, in moments of distress.
‘So, what’s the problem, Ruby?’ I said. ‘The girl out front looks nice—you seem to be keeping up your usual standards. Are you still catering to the taste for older women?’
Ruby drank deeply, which was a worrying sign; she usually sipped for a while and then forgot she had a drink. ‘Of course. Best decision I ever made. You get a better class of client and a more mature employee—less trouble all round. And Marcia out there? She’s the best. Professional woman, in the true sense of the word. She’s a doctor, would you believe? Runs a small practice part-time and does an elegant job here as well.’
‘So what is it? AIDS? Fred Nile picketing you?’
She waved her hand dismissively; the red stones in her rings glittered. ‘AIDS. Nonsense. As safe here as in Turramurra. Safer. Not that it hasn’t hurt business. All the publicity, I mean. But no, nothing like that. Sammy Weiss’s trying to put the squeeze on me.’
‘Sammy? Never.’
‘Can you believe it? He owns the building, or most of it. I know that, and he knows that I know. So I pay him rent, on a lease. Fine.’
‘He’s putting up the rent?’
‘No. He wants a percentage of my earnings, and he wants it to appear on the books as rent. He’s negatively geared all over the bloody place. It’s no skin off his arse, but I simply can’t afford it. Not a hike of two hundred per cent.’
I’d been sinking down in my velvet chair a little, lulled by the scotch and thinking the story wouldn’t have much bite. Now I sat up. ‘You mean double?’
‘No, I do not mean double.’ Ruby finished her drink in a swallow. ‘I don’t know what
I mean. All I know is he wants the rent to go this month up by as much again as it is now and by that much again next month. What’s that? He calls it two hundred per cent.’
‘I’d call it treble,’ I said.
‘I call it ruin. Will you talk to him, Cliff? I pay that and I’ve got to run this place like a cattleyard—use kids, junkies, all that shit. I’d rather close up, and that’d put some decent women out of work. And I’m helping Kathy’s husband get started as a nurseryman. I’ve got commitments. You know Sammy. I can’t think what’s got into him. He used to be a reasonable guy. Will you talk to him, Cliff? Please? I’m asking as a friend, and I’m paying. This is a business expense.’
I didn’t like to see Ruby knocking back the scotch as if she needed it, or the desperation in her eyes, so I said I’d talk to Sammy. That night I had nothing much else to do after I’d finished escorting a big gambler from the club in Edgecliff to the night safe in Woollahra, so I went looking for Sammy. Night is the only time to see him; that’s when he eats dinner at the Jack Daniels Bar ’n’ Grill and pays visits to several strip joint nightclubs in which he has an interest. What he does in the daytime I don’t know—sleeps or counts money, maybe both.
I found him in the Skin Cellar, a sleazoid hole in the wall around the corner from one of his classier joints in the Cross. The place was crowded, and the clientele was drunk and rowdy and giving the pre-owned blonde on the pocket-handkerchief stage a bad time.
‘Get ’em off!’
‘If I can’t touch ’em, I don’t believe ’em.’
‘Shake it, gran’ma!’
The music howled deafeningly, a clatter of drums and electric machines. Through the smoke I spotted Sammy sitting at a table with two other men. This was normal. Sammy has a wife named Karen, pronounced Kah-ren, who keeps him on a tight, monogamous leash. What wasn’t normal was the reaction of one of Sammy’s companions as I pushed my way through the smoke and the drunken lurching that passed for dancing. He pushed back his chair and stood—thin and dark like me, but 188 centimetres, giving him that uncomfortable two and a half centimetre advantage and with an acne-eaten face to back it up.
‘This guy’s carrying, Sammy,’ he grated.
Observant. I had my licensed Smith & Wesson .38 under my arm, the way the nervous winning gambler liked it. I nodded at Sammy, hoping to bypass the heavy, but he wasn’t buying it. I saw the fist just before it hit me and ducked. I hadn’t had a drink since mid-afternoon at Ruby’s, or I might have been too slow. As it was, I had the adrenalin edge: I let the punch go past and hacked at the guy’s shins with my right shoe. I connected and he yelped. He was reaching inside his jacket for something serious when I clipped him on the chin with a half-serious left hook. He was moving the wrong way, into the punch, and it snapped his neck back. That kind of pain makes you think about giving up, and he did. He slumped to the floor and I reached inside his coat, expecting to find a gun. Instead, my fingers closed over the handle of a chunky flick-knife held in a spring-loaded holster. I pulled it out, sprung the blade and dropped the knife on the floor. I brought my heel down hard on it.
‘Sammy,’ I said, ‘what the hell d’you think you’re playing at?’
‘Don’t move a muscle, shithead,’ a heavily accented voice said close to my ear. I smelled sweat and aftershave. The other man at the table had slid away and come up behind me while acne-scars had been doing his thing. I stood very still because I could feel something digging into my right kidney and I knew it wasn’t a broom handle. He dug the gun in some more and then moved it away. Professional. You know it’s there, but you don’t know precisely where. And it was no good thinking, He won’t kill me, not in a public place. Above that racket a shot from a small calibre pistol wouldn’t be heard, and a bullet in the leg is not a laughing matter.
‘Sammy,’ I said, ‘this isn’t your style.’
But Sammy Weiss seemed to be enjoying himself. His smooth, pasty face, normally fairly good-natured as long as things were going his way, was set in a scowl that he seemed to have grown used to. Sammy had put on weight since I’d last seen him, and lost some hair. But he was more snappily dressed and more carefully groomed—silk tie, shirt with a discreet stripe, lightweight double-breasted suit.
He snapped his fingers and his buffed nails gleamed briefly. ‘Toss him out, Turk. Don’t do no damage but, he’s got a nasty nature.’
‘Sammy …’
The pistol dug back in again, and the man I’d dropped was starting to get to his feet. Turk had all the moves; he jerked my elbow around, and you have to give when that happens. He prodded again and I found myself pushing through the crowd towards the door. I was confused by Sammy’s behaviour, but not completely thrown. Before we got to the door I sidestepped and watched Turk move automatically in the same direction. I dug my knee into his balls and reached for the gun, but he’d put it away and my move threw me a little off-balance. He recovered fast and stepped back—a medium-sized, dark guy, strongly built with a bald head and a thick, compensatory moustache. Stand-off. People were starting to notice us now.
‘See you again, Turk,’ I said.
He spat at my feet and backed away into the crowd.
I was still mulling it over the next morning—the change in Sammy Weiss from lair businessman who liked to flirt with the rough element to crime boss with minders—when Sammy’s brother, Benjamin, knocked and walked into my office.
‘I heard what happened last night, Cliff.’
‘I hope you heard it right, Benjamin,’ I said. No one ever called him Benny. He was an accountant, very straight.
‘I heard there was a gun and a knife. Sammy’s lost his mind.’ He put his hat on my desk, lowered his small, neat body into a chair and ran a tired hand across his worried face. Benjamin is older, smaller and quieter; the brothers look alike only around the eyes, where intelligence is suggested.
‘That’s how it looked to me. What’s going on?’
‘First, would you mind telling me what you wanted to see him about?’
That’s Benjamin, always getting the figures in the columns first. I told him about Ruby and Sammy.
‘That’s a good, steady business. The property’s being well cared for, and it’s appreciating. Things being the way they are, Ruby could probably handle a modest rent hike, but nothing like this.’
‘I agree. What’s got into your brother?’
‘He’s a changed man. Dresses differently, struts around with those two hoods. He’s drinking and gambling more, acting the big shot. But all this is so heavy-handed, dealing with you and Ruby like that. If he tries it on the wrong people …’ Benjamin shook his head and looked even more worried.
I knew what he meant. There were people in Sydney who’d take Sammy and Turk and the other guy apart just for fun. ‘There must be a reason,’ I said. ‘A woman?’
‘Come on. You know what sort of chain Karen keeps him on. No, I guess he’s just bored. That plus the piece that appeared in Sydney Scene about him.’
‘You’ve got me.’
‘It’s an insignificant little shoestring mag, run by a couple of queers. They did an article on Sydney’s crime czars and somehow Sammy got a mention and a quote. Now he thinks he’s Mr Big.’
‘Jesus. That’s dangerous.’
Benjamin leaned forward in his chair. ‘I love Sammy, Cliff. He’s a good man basically, always been very generous with me. He’s a good husband and father. I don’t want to see him get into trouble. Could you …’
‘Hold on. We’re talking conflict of interest here.’
‘I don’t see why.’ His small hands came up and he started ticking points off on his fingers. ‘One, Ruby wants Sammy off her back; two, I want Sammy to wake up to himself; three, you’d like to get your own back on Turk.’
‘Who says so?’
Benjamin smiled. ‘I know you, Cliff.’
I thought about it, but not for long. I had to admit it was an interesting problem. Tough, but not too tough. And I had an affecti
on for Sammy which dated back to the days of the Victoria Street green bans, when he was on the side of the angels. Good business, as it turned out: he made money on his houses in the street. Still. ‘What’re Sammy’s weaknesses?’ I asked.
Benjamin didn’t need his fingers. ‘First, he’s afraid of Karen; second, he’s a hypochondriac.’
‘That’s interesting. Who’s his doctor?’
‘He never goes near them. He doses himself for his imagined illnesses. He tells me about them all the time, but I’m sure he’s as healthy as a horse. So far.’
‘Leave it with me, Benjamin, along with a couple of hundred bucks. I’ll see if I can work something out.’
Benjamin wrote me a cheque. I gave him a receipt. He put on his hat and went, leaving me to do some thinking, of which two hundred dollars buys a fair bit.
Marcia was behind the table when I dropped in at Ruby’s that afternoon. She had on another plunging blouse, and I had the feeling that the parts of her body I couldn’t see weren’t warmly clothed either.
‘Ruby?’ she said.
‘No. I’d like to talk to you, doctor.’
She smiled, and I could see humorous lines under the make-up. ‘Ruby’s been chattering. I have to say she cheered up a bit after she saw you yesterday. She’s been very down.’
‘Do you know why?’
She shook her head and the jaunty, short hair bounced ‘No. This is an excellent establishment, and business seems to be good. You’re not a policeman, are you?’
‘Private enquiries. My name’s Cliff Hardy.’
It surprised us both that we shook hands.
‘What do you want to talk to me about?’
For the second time that day I told the story of Ruby’s troubles. This time there was a second strand—the metamorphosis of Sammy Weiss. Marcia listened intently, asking one or two questions. We had to break once while she dealt with a customer—for Henrietta and the special—but when I finished I felt as if I’d clarified a few things for myself as well as shared the problem with a good thinker.