Saving Billie

by Peter Corris

  Sharon, squatting by the sofa, and Billie were talking quietly.

  ‘How is she?’ I said.

  ‘Not bad. Coming down from the sedation. I’m a bit worried about how she’ll be when she hits bottom.’

  ‘I’ve got a doctor friend who’ll give her something but probably not till morning.’

  Billie mumbled something and Sharon shook her head. ‘She could be bad by then.’

  ‘I’ve got some Panadol somewhere,’ I said. ‘Might knock her out with the brandy.’

  ‘She a junkie?’ Tommy asked.

  ‘Sort of,’ Sharon said. ‘Yeah, she’s been getting treatment but she’s had a shock tonight. We all have.’

  Crouched as she was there in the half-light, Sharon’s profile in shadow on the wall was slightly different with a hint of Aboriginality in her features.

  ‘I’ve got a little bit of grass,’ Tommy said. ‘For emergencies. Hey, you a sister?’

  ‘Back a bit. Thinned out by now.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. You’re welcome to the dope if you need it.’

  ‘Thanks. And she’s my sister by the way.’

  Tommy let go with one of his grins. ‘Hey, Cliff, you’re the odd one out here.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be the first time.’

  I took Sharon’s keys and went outside to move the Falcon and get the brandy. There was no moon and the street lights barely reached the yard, but the wide gate came open without too much effort and I parked the car where a couple of tall she-oaks would give it some cover. The bottle of Rémy Martin was almost full and I took a good swig before I went back into the house. It’s not every night you deal with an abduction, plus a murder and go into hiding from two powerful enemies. I took another swig.

  For all his brutality, Jonas Clement Junior had seemed to know what he was about when he checked Billie’s vital signs. She was pale and shaky, still wearing a faded nightdress Sharon had brought for her in hospital, but she wolfed down a peanut butter sandwich made by Tommy, drank a cup of milky instant coffee heavily laced with brandy, took a couple of Panadol and was ready to call it a night. We bedded her down on the sofa with Sharon’s jacket for a pillow, the sheet from the clinic, and an old rug from my car as extra cover because she was shivering slightly. She was snoring within minutes, but her breathing was shallow.

  ‘I’ve gotta go to bed, guys,’ Tommy announced. ‘I start as soon as the sun’s up. I’ll try not to disturb youse.’

  We thanked him and he left, padding barefoot down the hallway. Sharon settled herself in the only chair in the room, an old padded number leaking horsehair. ‘I’m sleeping here.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’ll see if I can find a sheet or something for you.’

  I turned on the lights in the rooms Tommy hadn’t dealt with other than replacing globes, and had to breathe shallowly against the smell of dead insects and stale air. Both rooms had a couple of mattresses, one on top of another, covered with thin grey blankets. When I shook out the blankets the rooms filled with dust and the blankets turned out to have been less grey originally. I took one through to Sharon who sniffed at it and sneezed.

  ‘If I get cold,’ she said. ‘Right, Cliff, I guess we’re safe here for now, but tell me what’s going on.’

  I laid it all out, as much to get it clear in my own mind as for her benefit. How Clement knew the whereabouts of Peter Scriven, the financier who’d absconded with multimillions, how Barclay Greaves wanted to horn in on the blackmail and settle an old score with Clement. I knew that Rhys Thomas, while on Clement’s payroll, was actually working for Greaves and I guessed that Clement Junior was either tied in with Thomas or planning to go it alone, probably the latter.

  ‘And all over what my junkie sister might or might not know?’

  ‘Yeah. Eddie Flannery found out something he shouldn’t, probably where Scriven is and what name he’s going under and so on. Clement had him killed but they think he passed the information on to Billie.’

  ‘What about your ex-client, Kramer?’

  ‘Hard to say. She was being helped in her research into Clement by Greaves, but whether she knew what his real intention was I don’t know. Somehow she got in the way and ended up dead.’

  ‘Who did that?’

  ‘At a guess a guy named Phil Courtney who works for Greaves.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘You met her. She was a hard case. Maybe Greaves told her he didn’t need her anymore after he thought he’d got control of Billie. Maybe she threatened him. Maybe she had something on him.’

  ‘Like what?’

  I shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe he had Eddie killed, not Clement, and Lou knew about it.’

  ‘Was she that hard a case?’

  ‘She was pretty desperate. But, look, it all comes back to Billie—what she knows.’

  The night had cooled down and Sharon pulled the dusty blanket close and tucked her legs up under it. The room had a fireplace and would be a nice, cosy spot in winter with a few logs burning. Sharon handed me her empty coffee cup and I poured her some brandy.

  ‘If anything,’ she said.

  ‘How’d you mean? She said she knew plenty.’

  Sharon sipped the brandy and let out a long sigh. ‘The chips were down, or that’s how it looked, and when the chips were down Billie’d always do the same thing—lie.’

  Billie was on the sofa not far away and still emitting tiny snores. But then, she’d faked a kind of coma for a long time back in Manly. I glanced at her and Sharon followed the look.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘D’you know what David Niven said about Errol Flynn?’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘He said, “You could rely on Errol. He’d always let you down.” That’s our Billie.’

  ‘Terrific.’

  ‘Why? Were you hoping she’d tell you where this rich runaway is so you could grab some glory? Sorry, Cliff, sorry, that’s unfair after all you’ve done. It’s just that it’s been a hell of a day, with guns going off and Sarah under threat and this old spooky house and everything.’

  ‘It’s okay, Sharon. But we’ve got two ruthless rich bastards to contend with and maybe the cops as well, depending on how Clement and Greaves play it. So I was hoping that we could use what Billie knows to get us out of this jam.’

  She drained her cup. ‘Well, we’ll just have to wait, won’t we? I’m going to try to get some sleep, but leave the light on, okay?’

  20

  Whatever the old mattresses were filled with, mine had set hard and lumpy. Sharon had taken the right option. I stripped, used my clothes as a pillow, and stretched out anyway with the dusty blanket over me, and all the guns to hand. I didn’t expect to sleep with so many questions begging for answers inside my brain, but I did, fitfully. I woke up with light streaming through the many missing slats of a venetian blind. True to his word, Tommy was at work already, slashing and raking. It was close to 7 am with the sun well up.

  Somehow I’d found, or engineered with my tossing and turning, a more or less comfortable niche in the decrepit mattress. I lay there, dozing on my back, until a fit of sneezing brought on by the dust in the blanket and the room forced me to get up. As I stood there, I had to laugh. I’d hated the discipline in the army and the routine in the insurance company work, but those jobs didn’t involve standing around in my briefs with my nose streaming and blood-smeared guns on the floor. Say what you like about the kind of work you’re in now, Cliff, I thought, but at least it’s not predictable.

  I looked in on the two sisters and both were asleep in a room kept dark by heavy curtains and with the doors to the kitchen closed. The light bulb had blown. In the bathroom I found a few scraps of soap and two old towels. I showered, dried off, took the damp towel out to the back porch and hung it over a rail. Tommy saw me and raised his hand but didn’t stop working. I fetched my travelling kit—razor, lather stick, toothbrush and comb—from the car, shaved and tidied myself up. I made a cup of instant coffee, thought about the b
randy but decided against it. As I put the bottle down Sharon appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Do you usually drink with your morning coffee?’

  ‘It’s been known.’

  ‘Does it help?’

  ‘Seems to, sometimes.’

  ‘Well, go ahead.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Make you a coffee?’

  ‘A latte.’

  ‘Funny.’

  She ran her hands through her hair and did some stretching exercises that made me feel stiff just to watch. I brewed the coffee and put the mug on the table.

  ‘Thanks. It’s not funny though, is it, Cliff? What’re we going to do?’

  I sipped the hot coffee and wished I had spiked it. ‘How’s Billie?’

  ‘Still out. You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘First thing is to get my doctor mate over to take a look at her.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Give me break, Sharon. I’ve never had to deal with anything quite like this before.’

  One of the first things I’d done after being hired by Lou Kramer was to take a note of the time slot of Jonas Clement’s radio program. I hadn’t got around to listening to it, but now I tuned in to the FM station on the Falcon’s radio: Owing to unforeseen circumstances, Jonas Clement will not be heard in his ‘You talk, we listen’ slot today. Bruce Salter will stand in for him.

  So Clement knew about his son’s death, but I was willing to bet there’d be nothing about it in the papers. Clement would have to contrive some kind of story and invent the circumstances to make it convincing. Big ask, but he had the connections to pull it off.

  I phoned Ian Sangster and he arrived soon after. Ian’s been my doctor since I got to Glebe and he’s stitched me up and medicated me more times than I can count. He’s a drinker and smoker who says his goal in life is to prove medical correctness about alcohol and nicotine and exercise is all wrong. So far, he’s holding his own. I introduced him to Sharon and we went in to where Billie was stirring. Ian has dealt with me in various places other than his surgery and nothing about the Lilyfield set-up fazed him.

  ‘Change not to be patching you up, mate,’ he said.

  Sharon introduced him to Billie and gave an account of what she’d been through recently. Billie was decidedly shaky, trembling and sweating. Ian waved me out of the room and it was some time before he called me back. He has a good manner and she had apparently let him examine her thoroughly. He stood up, felt for his cigarettes and lighter. Billie stretched out her hand for one but he shook his head.

  ‘Not now, Ms Marchant. Sorry, but you’ve got an upper respiratory tract infection. We need to get some antibiotics into you to clear your lungs. Then you can puff away as I do.’

  ‘What else?’ Sharon said.

  Ian fiddled with the cigarette. One of his techniques is to talk to the patient directly, not to go through intermediaries. ‘At a guess,’ he said to Billie, ‘you’ve got some serious dependency problems, plus you’re underweight and, I’d be willing to bet, constipated.’

  Billie nodded. Her voice had a wheeze and a raw, Marianne Faithfull quality. ‘Spot on, Doc.’

  ‘So?’ Sharon said.

  Ian looked around the room; the blanket over the chair Sharon had slept in, Sharon and me both in unwashed clothes, the air of a place far from functional.

  ‘Tight spot, Cliff?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  He spoke to Billie again. ‘You require proper medication and nursing, agreed?’

  Billie sank back against Sharon’s jacket. She didn’t need to say anything. She closed her eyes and we could hear her heavy, laboured breathing. Ian pulled the rug up to her chin and patted her head. ‘You’ll be okay.’

  He drew Sharon and me away to the kitchen and requested a cup of coffee. He saw the brandy bottle and held it up to the light. ‘Spike it, Cliff.’

  I made the coffee and he sipped it appreciatively. ‘Your sister should be in hospital, Sharon, but I gather that’s not an option.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Some high-powered people will be checking precisely that.’

  Ian lit the cigarette, drew deeply and sipped the coffee. ‘Okay. I’ll leave you some Valium and I can arrange for a nurse to come here and give her the antibiotics and ventolin and monitor her progress for forty-eight hours. That’s the best I can do. If she’s not significantly improved by then she goes to hospital whatever the consequences. Cliff, you know I’m putting my licence on the line here.’

  ‘Thanks, Ian.’

  ‘Thank you, doctor,’ Sharon said.

  ‘I’ll bill you, Cliff. Big time.’

  ‘I can pay,’ Sharon said.

  I waved away Ian’s smoke. ‘He’s joking, Sharon. We work it out in bottles of red.’

  ‘Blokes,’ Sharon said.

  Ian left and I went out to see how Tommy was getting on and to do some thinking. He’d cleared most of the lantana and other vines and was working on a corner of the yard choked by some shrub with multiple stems and stalks that looked ready to take over the world. He stopped and wiped away sweat.

  ‘You’re doing a great job.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s harder than I thought but I’m getting there.’

  ‘Mike been round?’

  ‘Once. He seemed happy.’

  ‘Should be. Sorry about barging in like this. Couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.’

  ‘Cops after you?’

  ‘Could be, but they’re not the main worry. We won’t be here long.’

  ‘Not a problem. How’s the sickie?’

  ‘Not too good, that’s why we’ll have to move soon. Found anything interesting under all the crap, apart from the statues?’

  ‘Mostly bottles, man, mostly bottles.’

  I hadn’t thought about the police for a while and I began to consider them as the best option despite Sharon’s earlier objections. Things had got more serious since then. I went back into the house to find Billie sitting up and nursing a big glass of brandy. Two pills lay on the rug.

  ‘She won’t take the Valium,’ Sharon said. ‘Reckons she’s all right. I’ve been thinking. Looks to me as if we’ll have to go to the police and tell them the whole story.’

  ‘No,’ Billie yelled and then collapsed with a fit of coughing. She hung on to the brandy though.

  Sharon tried to put her arm around her but Billie shook her off. ‘Look, Billie, I know there’s warrants and stuff on you but we can work it out. Cliff ’ll help, won’t you?’

  I nodded but I could see Billie wasn’t buying it. She fought for breath and took a big drink when she was able. ‘I can’t have anything to do with the cops.’

  ‘Why?’ Sharon said.

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Jesus, after all I’ve—’

  Billie could only get a few words out at a time. ‘That’s the . . . fucking trouble . . . with you . . . Sharon. Always fucking . . . doing things . . . for me.’

  ‘And you’re never fucking grateful.’

  It sounded like a script they’d played too often in the past and I didn’t want to watch a re-run. I moved away and left them to it. After a few more exchanges they were both crying and Billie’s breath was coming in ever shorter gasps. At this rate, I wouldn’t have the forty-eight hours to work with. Eventually there was silence in the room and I could hear the birds outside and the resounding thunk of Tommy’s slasher.

  Billie sucked in a painful gulp of air. ‘Please, please . . . please . . . no cops.’ She picked up the pills and popped them into her mouth with a big gulp of brandy.

  Sharon jumped forward to try to stop her but Billie swallowed and lay back with a smile on her face. ‘Don’t worry, sis. I’ve built up a lot of tolerance. Just let me dream for a bit. And, Sharon . . . ?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I want that twenty grand.’

  Sharon looked at me helplessly. ‘I should just piss off and leave you and her to work it out. Taking care of Sarah, that’s my responsibility.’r />
  ‘Won’t work, Sharon. Clement and Greaves both know you’re involved. But you should get on to Sarah and tell her to stick close to her boyfriend and be careful about where they go.’

  ‘Great. They’ll love that, like being in a movie. I don’t think.’

  ‘Can’t be helped. Is there any chance Clement or Greaves can find out where Sammy is?’

  Sharon considered. ‘No, but I take your point. Another reason why I can’t just walk away. Come on, Cliff, you’re the man of action who’s dealt with these sorts of bastards for years. What can we do? Don’t forget I’m paying you.’

  I grinned. ‘Out of Billie’s twenty thou.’

  Sharon looked at her sister on the bed. She appeared to be sleeping, but with Billie, who could be sure?

  ‘Fuck Billie. I almost wish that sadistic prick had—’

  ‘No you don’t. I’ve been thinking it over. The only thing to do is to set Clement and Greaves at odds. Hope they cancel each other out.’

  ‘How d’we do that?’

  ‘Go easy. I haven’t got that far yet.’

  ‘You probably broke that bandy one’s jaw and wrecked his dental work.’

  I shrugged. ‘Staying out of his way is one of the things I’m doing here.’

  ‘It was sort of exciting though.’

  ‘Don’t get hooked on it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen people, perfectly normal ones, drawn into this kind of thing and they get a taste for it. I knew a bloke like that who robbed a bank just to keep the adrenalin running after he got into some trouble that wasn’t his fault.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m a country girl now and that’s what I’m getting back to, ASA bloody P.’

  21

  Cliff,’ Sharon called. ‘Someone’s coming.’ .

  A car had pulled up in the street. I raced into the bedroom and picked up the .38. I couldn’t see how either Clement or Greaves could know where we were, but strange things happen. I stood by a window and watched the gate. Steve Kooti and Mary Latekefu came into view and hailed Tommy, still hacking away in a corner of the yard. Nothing to be done. They saw the Falcon. They went across and talked to him. Tommy gestured in the direction of the house. Perfectly natural for him to tell his nurse aunt there was a sick woman inside.