The Dying Trade

by Peter Corris

  She smiled for the first or second time since I’d met her. It was a nice smile but under careful control. “I don’t know why you wanted to come out here. The food isn’t that good and the view is rather corny. I’ve been here before.”

  “Why did you agree to come then?”

  “To show anyone who might be interested that I’ve got protection.”

  “I guess you hired me a couple of hours ago then.”

  “Well, yes, I did in a sense. But are you interested in the complete job now you know what’s involved?”

  I gave it about half a second’s thought. Handled right it would keep me clean of guard duty and the cheap rooms and caravan parks for weeks. I had too much good wine inside me to think of much else. I believed at least half of Ailsa’s story and that was enough. I told her my rates and conditions of work. She pulled a chequebook from her bag and wrote words and digits on it with a gold pen. I put it in my wallet, not too far from Bryn’s cheque so that the two of them could debate the ethics of it.

  I had just enough cash to cover the bill and I was feeling clever and successful when we walked out into the parking lot. The sun was beating down hard and the shade had retreated from the Porsche leaving its rear bumper shimmering and reflecting like a white hot steel mirror. Ailsa stepped up to the driver’s door, pressed the button in and pulled the door free. She had it three inches open before my half-stewed brain got the message. I took two rabbity leaps across the melting asphalt and swept her off in a diving football tackle. Her bag came adrift from her shoulder and flicked the car door full open as we hit the ground. The Porsche burst into flame like a Molotov cocktail on impact, the bonnet lifted and the windows cracked in quick succession like rifle shots. Hellish heat surged towards us as I rolled Ailsa over three more times in the gravel and tar.

  “You should always lock your car,” I ground into her ear as we came to rest twenty feet away from the inferno.

  CHAPTER 6

  We were both shaking as we brushed the grit of the parking bay off our clothes. Ailsa’s white pants were a ruin and her smock was smeared and torn. My trousers had a great three-cornered tear in the knee and blood from a bad graze was seeping into the ragged edges of the tear. The car was burning fiercely, the tyres were bubbling like lava and the vehicle was sinking slowly, lopsidedly onto the rims. There was a stench of burning rubber and vinyl and a cloud of dark smoke had settled in the still hot air over the parking area. I put my arm around Ailsa’s shoulders and helped her across to the steps in front of the hotel. Staff from the place were thronging about and Ailsa accepted a woman’s offer of help to a toilet where she could clean up.

  The manager came out and mumbled about calling the police. I told him I’d do it myself if he could show me to the phone and produce some brandy. He seemed relieved to escape the job and took me into an office which contained a desk, chair, a telephone, a pot plant and a bar. I’d always wondered what hotel managers did in their offices. This one must have twiddled his thumbs and drank. He left me in the room telling me to help myself. I mixed a strong Hennessy and soda, sat down with it behind the desk and dialled a number. The voice at the other end was tired and unsympathetic. It had answered ten thousand telephone rings and never once heard good news.

  “Police, Evans speaking.”

  “Grant, this is Cliff Hardy.”

  “Oh good, you’re going to pay me the money you owe me and take me on a holiday to Coolangatta.”

  “This is serious, I need your help. And I might be able to help you with something you’ve got on your plate.”

  “Yeah? What would that be?”

  “I can’t tell you just now.”

  “That’s terrific. Well I’ll just drop everything here. It’s nothing much, a couple of murders and a multi-million dollar extradition job and hurry on over to your place. What shall I wear?”

  “Stop joking, I’ve been bombed.”

  “You’re always bombed, tell me something new.”

  “I mean really bombed, detonator, gelignite, explosion, flames. I’m OK and my client’s OK but a Porsche is dead.”

  “You’ve got a client and he’s got a Porsche? Maybe you will pay me what you owe me.”

  “She has one. It’s dead now, but she’ll have another tomorrow.”

  “You sound more or less sober. Are you dinkum, Cliff?”

  “Yes, blood oath I am. Here’s what I’m asking. If you’ve got some cars that aren’t busy picking up the take, send them over to the pub at Watson’s Bay. The sightseers will need dispersing, the car will need towing to your forensic parlour, Miss Sleeman will be requiring a lift to Mosman and I’d like to come down and see you.”

  “Charmed. Consider it done, anything else?”

  “No. See you soon Grant.”

  “Yeah. I don’t like that crack about the take, Cliff.”

  “That’s because none of it ever reaches you, mate. You’ve got to put yourself forward, make friends.”

  I hung up on his stream of obscenities. Grant Evans was ex-army, ex-Malaya, like me. His sense of humour wasn’t his strongest point, but he was fairly honest like me. That made us mavericks in our respective professions and useful to each other. We were also old friends who’d been under fire and under the weather together too many times to count.

  The manager was hovering outside the door. I told him the police were on their way and that I’d probably be able to see that the matter was kept pretty quiet. He looked pleased and showed me through to where Ailsa was sitting in a private room. She doused her cigarette and came up out of her chair to meet me. We put our arms around each other and stood together, not moving. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to do—coming that near to death seemed to draw us close.

  “The police are coming,” I said after a minute or so, “they’ll take you home.”

  “You saved my life,” she said.

  “And mine don’t forget.”

  She didn’t move away. “The tough guy’s tough guy.”

  “Not really. I nearly spilt the brandy they forced me to drink.”

  “You’re a drunk, but you seem to be lucky for me. Will you stay with it? This doesn’t change anything?”

  I told her I would and it didn’t and we were still patting each other like timid middleweights in a clinch when the manager came in to let us know that the Rose Bay cops had arrived. Ailsa continued not to do silly things. We walked out to the parking lot and she barely gave the burnt out wreck a glance. She answered a few basic questions from the senior uniformed man and then turned things over to me. Grant had clued the men up and they were willing for her to go home and for me to go down town and give a detailed account of the bombing. A cop picked up Ailsa’s bag from where it had landed after being blown clear by the explosion of the petrol tank. He handed it to her and ushered her into the back of one of the patrol cars. She mouthed “Tonight” at me and I nodded. The cop slammed the door and the car took off. I was surprised to find that I wished I was going with her, but it was time to start earning her money by playing the “bumping pitch and blinding light” stuff with the law.

  On the ride I tried to work out how to play the cards I had, or thought I had, but I found myself spending more time admiring the driving of the young detective at the wheel. He whipped the big Holden Kingswood through impossible gaps and caught every light from Watson’s Bay to East Sydney. He didn’t say a word on the journey.

  “Great driving,” I said as I got out in front of the central police building. He looked at me and jerked his head at the steps. A specialist.

  I went into the building and gave my name to the desk sergeant. He lifted a phone and spoke briefly to someone in Grant’s inner sanctum. The sergeant lifted old, tired cocker spaniel eyes to me.

  “You know the way?”

  “Yeah. OK to go up now?”


  He nodded wearily and turned his attention back to the stolen car sheet. He read it like a form guide maybe hoping that if he spotted a few on the way home he could get out from behind the desk. Then again, maybe it was just a stunt the police PR boys put him up to as something that would impress the public. I went up three flights in the creaking lift. The view from the corridor windows was dull, out across the commercial buildings of East Sydney. The park on the other side was a better eyeful. Grant was still on the dull side but I knew he hoped to go up a floor and cross over. I might be able to help him if I could persuade him at this point with nothing. I pushed open the door and went into the office he shared with two other senior men.

  Grant was alone. He was sitting at a desk which was untidy with papers, coffee cups and full ashtrays. He pushed himself back from the desk and waved me into a chair. He took hold of his spare tyre and pinched it.

  “I’m getting fat, Cliff, not enough action. Are you going to give me some?”

  I sat down. “Could be Grant, could be. I’d better fill you in.”

  I told him the tale, an edited version which left some things out and under-played others—especially the events at Brave’s clinic. Grant listened closely, making occasional notes. He ran his hand ruefully across the thinning dark hair on his skull. He was one of those men who took the disintegration of his body hard. His wife still appeared to think of him as the twenty-five-year-old paratrooper she’d married and his three daughters thought the sun shone out of him, but he bemoaned each lost hair and extra ounce. He’d been a superb fighting machine in Malaya and he’d killed three men on active duty as a cop, three hard men. He’d saved my life once in the jungle and kept me out of jail a few times since then. I usually played court jester to his gloomy king.

  “Well, you seem to have yourself a nice case,” he said when I’d finished talking. “Well-heeled client, real Lew Archer stuff. What do you want from me?”

  “Can you sit on the bombing for a while, keep it quiet?”

  “Yeah, I think so. No one really wants to know about car bombings. Everyone assumes they’re about crims and punters welshing on debts. Mostly they’re right. No reporters there?”

  “No, not that I saw. The management won’t talk, that’s for sure.”

  “Naturally. All right, quiet it is. What’s in it for me?”

  I rolled a cigarette and offered him the makings. He hesitated then took them and expertly made a cigarette. We both blew smoke at the stained, cracked ceiling.

  “I want to know something about the Gutteridge case. Four years ago, remember it?”

  “Yep, I was on it for a while.”

  “Did it get sat on? I hear there were some loose ends—an open safe for one.”

  “That’s right. He killed himself though. I was the first to see him and it looked real to me. I’ve seen a lot of dead men who got dead in different ways. I’d say this was an auto.”

  “Or set up by an expert.”

  “Maybe. Unlikely.”

  “What about the safe?”

  “Puzzling.”

  “Look, was it a bloody cover-up?”

  He stubbed the cigarette out and dusted his hands. It looked as if he was trying to stop smoking again. He’d tried it a dozen times to my knowledge and it always made him mean. His face set in one of its tough, bloody-minded official masks.

  “You’re asking everything and giving nothing. If you want to offer me something juicy out of the Gutteridge case forget it. I don’t want to know.”

  “No, it’s not that. I’m working on something connected with the Gutteridge case and I want to know all there is to know about it. It might give me some leverage. I’m pretty confident I can put your name in lights over something which has nothing to do with Mark Gutteridge’s death.”

  “Give me a clue.”

  “I can’t. You wouldn’t buy it at this stage.”

  Grant sighed. He reached into his pockets, pulled the hands out empty and did an isometric exercise against the edge of the desk.

  “You weren’t in Sydney when this thing came up?”

  “No, I was on a country job, Broken Hill and Melbourne after that. I had a holiday in Fiji on the proceeds, I must have missed it all.”

  Grant looked sour, I shouldn’t have mentioned the holiday, but he went on: “OK, well it made a fair splash in the papers. The open safe was hinted at in one of the papers, but that was as far as it went.”

  “Who called you?”

  “Servant, an old one, she’d been with the Gutteridge guy for years, nothing there. Nothing much for her in the will.”

  “Who else was around?”

  “The lot, from memory, a driver, two gardeners as well as the old housekeeper—that’s the underlings. Then there was the wife and a son and daughter. Probably ran out of places to spend their money in and had to stay home.”

  “Now Grant, don’t be bitter. They have their troubles just like you and I. The fix came in, did it?”

  “Yeah, the photographer arrived fast and fired off a few but the support squad had some heavies in it and they took over—OK Cliff, you’ve got the inside dope. Make me feel good about it within twenty-four hours,” he said, “or I’ll call it all square, all round.”

  The pressure of his job was getting to him, or maybe it was some other trouble. Whatever the case, now wasn’t the time to sketch out my suspicions. Just now he’d rather fight than think.

  “I think I can promise you that,” I said.

  “Lovely,” he gave me a tired smile. “Now, I got something off my chest and I’ve got your promise, my day is made. Shoot through Cliff. I’ll be expecting to hear from you.” I got up and patted him on the shoulder. He faked a collapse into his chair and picked up the top file in his IN tray.

  I walked down the corridor and took the lift again. From the noise it made I might just have caught it on its last journey. The desk sergeant called me over and handed me the phone. It was Grant.

  “I forgot to tell you to take care of yourself,” he said.

  “Why do you say it now?”

  “I keep up with what’s going on. Bryn Gutteridge’s chum was shot once, close in but very neat. Whoever did it had done it before.”

  “I’ll sniff every hand I shake and watch for bulges under jackets.”

  “If you meet him you probably won’t have time for one wisecrack.” The phone went dead. I hung on to it for a second listening to nothing.

  CHAPTER 7

  I realised how beat up I looked when I hit the street and how ill-equipped I was for the weather. The storm that had been brewing broke when I was in the police building. Rain sheeted down bringing clouds of steam up from the pavements. The water soaked into my torn pants and dirty shirt which was pinkish from diluted blood. I had a change of clothes back in my office and I decided to complete the picture of ruin by taking the short walk there despite the rain.

  I started out and caught sight in an oddly angled shop window of a red Volkswagen. It was well back and crawling along in the thick traffic. I took a turn and walked slowly down the street. A look in a parked car’s side mirror showed that the VW had stopped at the top of the street after making the turn. I still couldn’t get a glimpse of the driver.

  I walked back to St Peters Street the most direct way, cleaned up, changed my clothes and came down after checking that there hadn’t been any calls. The rain had stopped, the air was moist and clean-tasting and all the city’s photochemical sludge was running down the gutters to the sea. I got the Falcon out of the tattooist’s backyard and took off going south-east. The VW picked me up and stayed with me through Taylor Square, Moore Park and Kensington. He was doing it quite nicely, like a pacer, one out and one back, and then letting me get away a little. I cruised past the University and took the turn to Maroubra.


  The used car yards cuddled up against each other on both sides of the road over a short stretch of ugly Australia. I made a late turn left, a quick one right and pulled up under a heavily over-growing row of plane trees the council pruners must have missed. I pulled the Smith & Wesson out of its clip under the dashboard and jumped out of the car onto the road. The Volkswagen came round the corner and I faced it fifty yards ahead with the gun up. I counted on the element of surprise to bring the car to a stop but I was wrong. The driver slowed a fraction, then accelerated and came straight on like the Light Brigade. I swore, jumped aside, hit the Falcon hip and thigh and dropped the gun. The little red car roared to the end of the street, brakes screaming, then it slewed around in a full turn taking some of the sidewalk to do it, and came belting back towards me. Dead end street. That gave me a chance to reverse the roles. I picked up the gun as the VW passed me and had my car turning before its tail whipped around out of what had been a quiet little street twenty seconds ago.

  The Volkswagen was new and the Falcon was old, but the horsepower was all on my side. I had the car in sight as it turned onto the highway and kept with it through thick and thin. The traffic thinned as we got into Maroubra and I moved up closer. The driver appeared to be small with frizzy dark hair and I saw the flash of light on wrap-around sunglasses on one of the turns. From his driving I assumed that he was worried, it was jerky and he wasn’t timing things well.

  We moved on down towards the beach and then turned right up a steep hill flanked by tall apartment blocks with names like “Nevada” and “San Bernadino”.

  I crowded the VW near the crown of the hill opposite “Reno”, but the driver found a little more speed and went into a cheeky slalom down the other side. I took evasive action, conscious of my lack of insurance, but I was hard on its twin exhausts when we turned into a long, flat run parallel to the beach. A mistake, I’d surfed along this beach for ten years and knew its geography like the back of my hand. It was deserted now, dark clouds were boiling up out over the sea and the road was slick with oily rainbow patches showing between the puddles.