by Peter Corris
I finished the beer and set the can down on the wrought iron rail. ‘Thanks for the help and the drink.’
He waved it aside. ‘What'll you tell Evans?’
‘I'll tell him you co-operated.’
‘Fair enough.’
The morning was grey and cool; I showered and shaved and dressed. The Smith & Wesson went into a holster under my jacket and I put a couple of fake business cards in my wallet. The wallet didn't look healthy so I banked Silverman's cheque and drew out some money in a thick stack of small notes. As I was packing it away I took another look at the speeding and parking tickets. The parking ticket was dated eight weeks back and timed at 7.30 am, the speeding ticket was thirteen hours later on the same day.
Norton Street was fairly busy when I arrived but I managed to park exactly where the parking attendant had booked Kenneth's sports car. The spot gave me a clear view of the Forbes office, which was a converted two-storey terrace house behind a high wooden fence. I could see the windows of the upper level and down a lane which ran beside the building. The parking place was legitimate now, but ceased to be so at 7 am when a clearway came into operation.
I had only the vaguest idea of what I was going to do and I tried to think which of the business cards I had was the least incredible. I decided that I knew something about books and that I might be able to gauge the probity of the firm with the right approach. The small front courtyard behind the fence was covered in bark, and there were flowers in pots on either side of the solid door. I rang the bell and the door was opened by a girl who looked too young to be working; she had big eyes swamped in make-up, a lot of straight blonde hair, five inch heels—and she still looked fifteen. I looked over her shoulder and saw a cigarette burning a hole in a piece of typing paper on her desk.
‘Hey, your desk's on fire.’
She spun around, shrieked and snatched at the paper which knocked the butt on to the floor, where it started burning the carpet; she also knocked over a vase of flowers and spread water across the desk. She started to cry, and I went in and picked up the cigarette. I eased the big blotter out of its holder and used it to soak up the water. She stood watching me while I dried the desk and dropped the cigarette and sodden blotter into a tin wastepaper bin. I also read the letter—it advised a shopkeeper in Newtown with an unpronounceable middle-European name that his lease would not be renewed. The door had opened into what would have been the hall in the original house, but the wall had been taken out and it was now a fair sized office with two desks and several filing cabinets. The girl was fumbling on the desk for another cigarette. She got it going and sat down.
‘Thanks’, she said. ‘What can I do for youse?’
I handed her the burnt letter. ‘You'll have to do this again.’
She looked at it. ‘Shit’, she said.
I gave her the card that said I was a secondhand bookseller and asked to see Mr Patrick.
‘You need an appointment.’ She puffed smoke awkwardly and tried to look eighteen.
‘I just prevented your office from burning down.’
She giggled. ‘What do you want to see him about?’
I pointed at the card. ‘I want to open a bookshop; I need premises.’
‘Oh, you don't need Clive … Mr Patrick for that; Mr Skelton will do,’ she swung around to the empty desk. He's not here
I leaned forward and dropped my voice. ‘Well, you know, I might have to deal with Clive. You see, this is not just an ordinary bookshop, if you get what I mean.’ I did everything but wink, and she got the message. Just then a short, well-stuffed guy in a pale blue suit bustled into the room. He had a high complexion, and pink showed through the thin fair hair which was carefully arranged across his skull. He shouldn't have been that heavy and thin on top, he wasn't much over thirty. The girl batted her eyes at him.
‘Mr Patrick, Mr Henderson here wants to see you about business premises …’
‘Give him an appointment’, he barked. ‘Have you got the letter for that wog yet?’
She made her hands look busy on the desk. ‘It's almost done.’
‘Snap it up, Debbie.’ He turned without looking at me once and went out of the room. The girl looked helplessly at me.
‘He's nice really’, she said. ‘Now when are you free?’
The front door swung open and a man came through. He was tall, dressed in a narrow-cut dark suit: narrow was the word for him, he had a long, thin, swarthy face with a sharp nose, his dark eyebrows grew in a V over his yellowish, slanted eyes. He had close cropped black hair which receded on both sides and grew in a pronounced widow's peak in the front. His wolfish eyes swept over me as if he was measuring me for a coffin, then he dismissed me.
‘Is Clive in, Debbie?’ His voice was light and, although it sounds corny, musical. It also carried a distinct foreign accent. Debbie looked scared, and nodded mutely. He brushed passed me and went down the corridor.
‘Not Mr Skelton’, I said.
She pulled on the cigarette. ‘No, Mr Szabo.’
‘What does he do around here?’
She shrugged and pulled the desk calendar towards her.
‘Don't bother’, I said, ‘I think I'll look for a more friendly firm.’ She looked hurt behind her cigarette so I was careful not to slam the door. I scouted the building and established that it had only two exits—the front door and a gate that lead out to the lane at the side. I dodged the traffic across to the other side of the road, bought a sandwich and two cans of beer and settled down to watch.
A short, plump man with ginger hair arrived after ten minutes. If he was Mr Skelton he didn't look any more appealing than the rest of the gang. A bit after that Clive Patrick came out and drove off in a white Volvo, probably to a lunch he didn't need. Then Debbie stepped out and tottered down the street, she came back with a paper bag, a can of Coke and a fresh packet of cigarettes.
I'd finished the sandwich and the beer and was feeling drowsy when Szabo stepped out into the lane. I whipped the camera up and started shooting. The shots in the lane wouldn't be much good, the one when he reached the street would be better. He sniffed the air like a hunting dog and looked directly across the street at me; I snapped again and could see him registering the car, my face and the camera and then he was moving. I dropped the camera and turned the key; a bus roared away from a stop and held Szabo up. I was clear and fifty yards away when he made it round the bus; I glanced back at him, wolfish visage and widow's peak—he didn't look happy.
I'm about as interested in photography as I am in flower arrangement but, like a true professional, I knew the man to go to. Colin Jones was an army photographer in Malaya; if you could see it, he could photograph it. He worked for The News now and we met occasionally over a beer for me to tell him how much I envied his security and for him to say how much he wished his work was exciting like mine. I stopped in Glebe, phoned Colin at the paper and arranged to meet him outside The News building.
When I arrived Colin was standing there, smoking a cigarette and looking like a poet. The printers were on strike and there were picket lines in front of the building. The pickets were harassing the drivers who were loading the papers which were being produced by scab labour. Colin got me past the union men on the door and took me up to his smelly den.
‘Contacts do?’ he asked as I handed over the film.
I said they would, and wandered around the room looking at the pictures pinned on the walls; about fifty per cent of them were obscene. I used Colin's fixings to make a cup of instant coffee while I waited; the milk was slightly on the turn and the coffee ended up with little white flakes in it. I fought down the craving for sugar and a cigarette, and did some thinking instead. There wasn't much to do: Kenneth Silverman had been hanging around the Forbes Realty office one night and he hadn't been able to take his car away the next morning. That night, a Mr Szabo of that honourable enterprise had been booked for speeding while driving south in Ken's car, which may have had a bundle in the back. It was look
ing worse for Kenny every minute.
Colin sauntered in and handed me the prints. The light had been bad and my hands not all that steady, but the long, vulpine mug was there clear enough—identifiable.
‘Brilliant work, Cliff, Colin said ironically.
I pointed at his cigarette. ‘Smoking kills.’
Colin tapped the prints. ‘I'd say this joker could kill, too. When are you going to grow up, Cliff?’
‘And do what?’
He shrugged. I put the prints away and we shook hands. On the drive home I thought about what Colin had said; I was near forty and felt it; I had a house about half paid for, a car not worth a tank of petrol, two guns and some books. I had a lot of scars and some bridge work; on the other hand, no one told me what to do, I had no office politics to contend with and most of the bills got paid, eventually.
Musing like this is dangerous, it means defences are down and self-pity is up. I was still musing when I walked along the path to my house and only stopped when I felt something hard jab into my left kidney.
‘Let's go inside, Mr Hardy’, a lilting voice said. ‘You've taken liberties with me, I think I'll return the compliment.’
I half turned but the something dug deeper, painfully and I winced and stumbled forward.
‘Take the keys out, slowly, and pretend you're coming home with the shopping.’
I did it just as he said; the envelope with the prints inside was in my breast pocket and felt as big as a bible. He told me to open the door and I did that too, trying to avoid any jerky movement and cursing myself for not observing some elementary security precautions. A car is the easiest thing in the world to trace and this was just the boy to be getting my registration down as I was driving away in Norton Street. While I'd been exchanging wisdom with Colin Jones he'd been doing his job.
There was no point standing around in the hall. He prodded me with his hand, not a gun. I went, I had no booby traps, no buttons to push to release incapacitating gas; from the way he walked and held the gun I could tell that a sidestep and a sweeping movement aimed simultaneously at his ankle and wrist would get my brains all over my wall. He turned on lights as we went and that put a couple of hundred watts burning in the kitchen. He backed away and I turned around to look at him. His face was like a V—he had a narrow head with a pointed chin; his dark eyebrows were drawn together and down under the hair that receded sharply on both side.
He moved around a little getting the dimensions of the room straight and then he advanced on me keeping the muzzle of his gun pointed at my right eye. He was good and he'd done all this before. When he was close enough, he kicked me in the knee, and as I bent over he nudged me and I sprawled on the floor. I looked up at him thinking how nice it would be to get a thumb into one of those yellow eyes.
He smiled down at me. ‘Don't even think about it. Now I see you have a gun under your arm and something interesting-looking in the inside pocket. Let's have the gun—easy now.’
I got the gun out and slid it across the floor towards him. He lifted the pistol a fraction and I took out the envelope and pushed it across too. I started to pull myself up.
‘Stay there, in fact you can lie on your face.’
I could hear him fiddling with the paper and then I heard a snort.
‘You're a rotten photographer, Hardy, I'm twice as handsome as this.’
I didn't say anything; he was either vain or had a sense of humour; either way I couldn't see what difference it could make to me.
‘Where's the phone?’ I pointed and he motioned me to get up and go. The knee hurt like hell but it held my weight. The living room has some bookshelves, a TV set and some old furniture, also a telephone. He waved me into a chair and sat there opposite him while he dialled. The hand holding the gun was steady but he glanced uneasily at the photographs a couple of times. He still wasn't happy.
‘Clive? It's Soldier, I've got Hardy; he's got a collection of pictures of me taken in Norton Street.’
The phone crackled and Soldier's knuckles whitened around the receiver.
‘Listen, Clive’, he rasped, ‘you're in this. If I have to knock off this guy you're going to be part of it, not like the other one.’
He listened again and when he spoke his voice had lost its musical quality, it was full of contempt. ‘Of course I can't. We don't know where he's been or who he's talked to. There could be copies of the pictures. It's a two-man job, Clive.’
Clive evidently said he'd drop by, because Soldier put the phone down and wiped his hand over his face edgily. I didn't fancy what was coming up. It sounded like a pressure session, and Soldier looked like the boy who knew how to apply it. I felt sick and scared at the thought of what I had to do, but there was no cavalry coming. He told me to get up, and when we were both on our feet I made a slow, awkward lunge at him which gave him plenty of time to lay the flat of his gun along the side of my head. The sound inside my skull was like a rocket being launched and the colour behind my shut eyes was a blinding white, but I'd dipped with the blow a bit, and as I went down I thought I can do it.
I lay very still and let the blood drip into my ear. There was a lot of blood luckily, and I was so afraid that my pulse must have slowed to ten beats a minute. He bent down to look at me, swore, and went out of the room.
Getting to the bookshelf was one of the hardest things I've ever done. It seemed to take forever, but my eyes were open and I was seeing okay when I clawed out the three volumes of Russell's autobiography and got my hands on the old, illegal Colt I keep behind there. I pulled it out of the oilskin wrapping, cocked it and wriggled back to where I'd been. He came back into the room with a wet dishcloth in one hand and his gun in the other; his chest was thin, and covered in elegant beige silk. I shot for his leg but I was in no condition for shooting; the Colt jerked in my shaky hand and the bullet went into the embroidered pocket of the shirt. His yellow eyes flashed as the last messages his brain would ever send went through; and then blood welled and spurted and he went down backwards, awkward, and dead.
I picked up his gun and put it in my pocket and then I got the dishcloth and dragged myself to the bathroom. My face was covered in blood and I suddenly thought about his blood and vomited into the basin. After a bit more of that I cleaned myself up as best I could and went back to the phone. Horace was at home, and I told him to drive to Glebe and call me from a public box in about half an hour. He tried to order me about, but I suppose something gets into your voice after you've just killed a man, and he didn't try it for long.
My head was aching badly now, but I examined it carefully and looked into my eyes and concluded that I had a mild concussion at worst. My treatment for that was time-tested—pain-killers and whisky. I took both upstairs and sat on the balcony to wait for Clive.
He arrived in the Volvo and he was all alone. I went down and let him in, He'd sweated a bit into the neck of the pastel shirt, but he was still the image of the over-fed businessman with nothing but money on his mind. I put my gun an inch or two into his flab and moved him down the passage to the living room. I had a lot of blood on me and was feeling pretty wild from the codeine and the whisky and he just did what I said without a murmur. He was scared. He almost tripped over the corpse.
‘Soldier isn't quite with us’, I said.
He looked down at the bloody mess on the floor and all the golf and Courvoisier colour in his face washed away.
‘You've been keeping bad company, Clive’, I said. ‘Want a drink?’ He nodded and I poured him a splash of Scotch. The phone rang, and Silverman told me where he was. Patrick was still looking at Soldier and I had to jerk his hand with the glass in it up to his mouth.
‘We've got a visitor’, I said. ‘I'm going to let him in. You sit there, if you've moved an inch when I get back I'm going to break your nose.’
I got a miniature tape recorder out of a cupboard in the kitchen, and went through to answer the soft knock on the door.
Silverman started to say the things you say
when you meet people with guns and beaten-up faces, but I told him to be quiet. In the living room I sat him down with a Scotch and started the tape. I put Soldier's gun on the coffee table for added effect.
‘What's Clive doing here?’ Silverman said.
‘Oh, he belongs, he murdered your son.’
It stunned Silverman into silence, and set Patrick talking as I'd hoped it would. There was nothing much to it. Patrick was in deep financial trouble, and hoped for the Forbes Realty deal on the Glebe land to pull him out. But he was running short of time and he got the wind up when Silverman made a few enquiries about the firm. The squatters really got up his nose; he hired Soldier Szabo and some other muscle to help him there and Soldier was still around when Kenneth was caught snooping in Leichhardt.
‘So you killed him’, Silverman said quietly.
‘It was an accident, Horace’, Patrick muttered. ‘Soldier hit him too hard. It was an accident.’
‘Maybe’, I said. ‘And maybe you killed him when you found out who he was. What else could you do?’
‘It wasn't like that’, Patrick said quickly.
‘The body might tell us something. Of course you had to get rid of the body—you should have thought about the parking ticket.’
‘There was no ticket when we…’
‘No ticket? Well, tough shit, they blow away sometimes. Did Szabo tell you about the speeding ticket?’
Patrick put his face in his hands. ‘No.’
‘What did you do with my boy?’ Silverman said. All the imperiousness and arrogance had melted away. He was just a little fat man, sad, with quivering jowls and a bad colour. ‘Where's my boy?’
I gave Patrick a light touch on the cheek with the gun.
‘Answer him!’
‘I don't know.’ He looked at Szabo; the front of the stylish shirt was dark, almost black. ‘He didn't tell me.’
‘Clive’, Silverman said desperately, ‘I must know, we'll get you off lightly. Hardy …’
I didn't say anything. Something like hope flared in Patrick's face for a second but it died. He was telling the truth and he had nothing to sell.