by Peter Corris
She looked directly at me and took off her large-lensed sunglasses to reveal eyes hollowed by lack of sleep. ‘First off, Cliff,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for the way I behaved the day of the funeral.’
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Times like that, no one’s keeping score.’
She smiled and her oval face suddenly became longer and more attractive. She wasn’t beautiful, but she had something much more important. I guessed that any man lucky enough to have her would think she was beautiful, which is all that matters.
‘That’s the kind of thing Scott would say,’ she said. ‘Why do Australian men always talk in sports metaphors?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. Would you like some coffee?’
‘Yes, please. I remember how you looked when I walked past you. All the colour went out of your face and I thought you were going to drop your glass. You left then, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. Glen said it was a rude thing to do. She was right. Milk? Sugar?’
‘A bit of both, thanks. I blamed you, of course. You got him the job. I was out of my mind with grief and very mixed-up. You’d given him a job you hadn’t wanted yourself and he was dead within ...’
I put the mug on the desk in front of her and took mine back to a defensive position. ‘I went through all those thoughts myself, Gina. It wouldn’t be natural for you not to have had them. I wish I hadn’t made that call, or that I’d called somebody else, or that I’d taken the bloody job myself. But ...’
‘I know. It’s useless to think that way. Does no good at all. I don’t blame you now, I want you to know that.’
‘Thank you. Drink your coffee.’
She took a sip but she hadn’t come to drink coffee or to talk about the past. She hauled up her bag, opened it and took out a long, bulky envelope. It had the look of recycled paper—something from the good guys, the pure at heart.
‘This is from Sydney Casinos. They say they took out an insurance policy on Scott. Standard procedure for senior executives. The payout is $200,000. They deduct about twenty to cover costs of their own, but there’s $180,000 for the girls and me. What d’you think of that?’
I drank some of my fast-cooling coffee and resorted to the standard psychiatrist’s ploy. ‘What do you think of it, Gina?’
‘I think it’s a bribe. I think they’re saying—take this, Mrs Galvani, and shut up.’ She touched her headscarf and smoothed back a few errant strands. I guessed that she wasn’t used to having her hair constrained. ‘It’s funny. It’s really funny.’
‘What’s funny?’
‘I can’t afford not to take the money. We didn’t have anything saved and the mortgage on the Rozelle house is pretty heavy. It wasn’t going to be a problem with that money Scott was suddenly getting, but ... I can’t go back to work for a while and I have to be very careful about what I do.’
Gina, Scott had told me more than once, was a ‘thinker’. She had obviously been doing a lot of it lately. I drank some more coffee and let her talk, sensing that getting to whatever she’d come to me for would take some time. She tossed the envelope onto the desk like someone throwing money into a poker pot. Big pot. She told me that the Galvanis were looking for a pretext to take the twins away from her. Gina wasn’t a Catholic. Her parents had no money and the Galvanis had all the economic and moral clout.
‘I need this money. I can’t survive and raise Scott’s children the way he would have wanted without it.’
‘Take it, then,’ I said. ‘Corporations cover their insurance with other insurance. It’s all one big tax-deductible scam.’
She snorted derisively. ‘I know that. Government departments do the same. Everybody insures against everything so that no pain can ever be felt. No economic pain, that is.’
I nodded. She was getting to it now.
‘I’m taking the money, and there’s no strings attached. No one’s telling me how to spend it.’
‘Good.’
‘So I want to hire you to try and find out who killed him. Will you do it, Cliff?’
4
I tried to talk her out of it, using the usual arguments. But she put the obvious question and I had to admit that the police weren’t encouraging.
‘I’ll tell you what it’s like,’ she said fiercely. ‘It’s as if his body hadn’t been found. You’ve heard about how that affects people, how they live the rest of their lives in a sort of limbo. That’s how it feels. I’ve got a sister who had a baby when she was fourteen and had it adopted. She’s twenty-five now and she says a day doesn’t go by when she doesn’t think about that baby. And in case you’re wondering, yes, she got married and she’s had two children. Doesn’t change it.’
Uncomfortable territory for a middle-aged, childless, unmarried Australian male who expressed himself in sporting metaphors. I tried to think of other objections, but I knew she’d have them covered.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Scott and I used to talk about his work. He talked a lot about you, too. He said you were weak on analysis but good on persistence and results, and that’s what counted. I know what investigation’s like. I know it can cost a hell of a lot of money and that it doesn’t always resolve things. I’m putting pressure on you—because he was your friend and you got him the job—but I’m not saying you have to find the killer. That’d be unrealistic. I said try, remember? If I know we tried it’d help.’
I wondered if it would. I could have given her chapter and verse about the people who hired men like me to get their revenge. Some got ripped off, some saw no result at all. Others had the experience of discovering who had done them wrong but finding no legal remedy. A few had the satisfaction of having their enemies brought to court only to see them being acquitted on a technicality or being given a sentence they regarded as ten times too light. A very few got what they sought.
Her question came out of nowhere. ‘You’ve had a couple of wives, haven’t you, Cliff?’
‘One, and a few near misses. Lucky women.’
‘Scott was a wonderful husband. I thought I was so lucky to have him and I did everything I could to keep him happy and in love with me. I stopped smoking the day after I met him because I knew it disgusted him. I didn’t go around the house in jeans and sloppy joes all the time because I think that makes a man lose interest. He liked to make love in the afternoon, so I ... He wanted kids but not a whole houseful like his brothers. When the twins came I thought, How can things go this well?’
She was close to breaking but she struggled against it. She drank some of her coffee, a brave act in itself, and wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. Businesslike. No fishing for tissues, no props.
‘Okay, Gina,’ I said. ‘I’ll do what I can. You’re right about one thing, it could cost a lot of money. But there’s another side you haven’t thought about.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Investigations don’t always turn out the way you expect. I don’t just mean they lead nowhere. Sometimes, things come up people would rather not have known about. Do you know what I’m saying?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’
‘What if this had nothing to do with the casino job? What if it relates to something else, some case, some client?’ I drew in a breath. ‘What if he broke the law, suppressed some evidence, took a bribe? What if he had a girlfriend, or a boyfriend?’
Her eyes went wide with shock, as if she’d caught me pissing on his grave. ‘Scott? You can’t be serious.’
‘It happens, believe me. Do you still want to look into this, Gina?’
She wanted to scream, throw the coffee mug at me, break a few of my dirty windows. I could see it in the line of her jaw and the set of her body. She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. Then she dug into her bag and pulled out a chequebook. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I want you to do. Now, how much do I pay you and how do we proceed from here?’
I opened a drawer in the desk, the one above the deep one where I keep the cask of red wine. I contemplated producing
the cask as well as the contract form, but decided against it. I filled out the form and slid it across to her. ‘You sign that and you pay me $750 now. That’s for five days’ work.’
She scribbled on a cheque. ‘Full-time?’
‘Just about.’
‘I want you to work on it full-time. I want ...’
‘Gina,’ I said gently. ‘I admire you. It took guts to come here and go through all this shit. You mentioned being realistic before. Well, be realistic now. I’ll do my best. And I’m persistent, remember.’
She forced a smile, tore out the cheque and signed the contract form. I gave her the carbon copy and she folded it and put it away in her bag. Doing the routine things seemed to calm her and I continued the mood by getting out a notebook and jotting down a few details I already knew, like the address of Scott’s office, the registration number of his car and the name of the young woman who worked part-time as his secretary. Gina was in full flight—she gave me details of his bank accounts and a copy of his last tax return along with his passport. Then she produced two sets of keys.
‘These are the keys to his office. The police have looked through it and they gave the keys back to me. He was carrying them when ... when they found him.’
I nodded and took the keys. I couldn’t remember when I’d begun a case with such an accumulation of items. She tossed the other set of keys onto the pile.
‘These are for the BMW they gave him. I think it’s in a police pound somewhere or they might have taken it back. I don’t know.’
I handed her back the letter about the insurance, stood and came around the desk. ‘I’ll take care of it. Now you should go home to the kids. How’re you travelling?’
She stuffed the letter in her bag and slung it over her shoulder as she got up. ‘Cab. I’ve got Scott’s car, his real car, but I haven’t felt up to driving yet. I think I will soon. I know I will.’
‘Sure. I’ll come down with you.’
‘No.’ She put her hand on my arm and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Thank you, Cliff. I’m glad I did this. Goodbye for now.’
She went out and I heard her heels tapping steadily along the old brown linoleum to the stairs. The building is especially quiet on Mondays when some of the other tenants, like the osteopath and the grief counsellor, take a day off. A second-hand bookstore specialising in military history recently opened on the same level as me at the other end of the hall, but the proprietor’s hours appeared to be as erratic and unpredictable as most military campaigns. I went past the closed doors and down the stairs to the street. I bought myself a proper lunch in a cafe and planned to eat it in a leisurely fashion as befitted a man who’d been paid for five days’ work in advance. But I had no appetite and didn’t do much more than push the food around on the plate and nibble at the bread.
Back in the office, I rinsed the coffee mugs and filled one of them with red wine. An hour later it was empty and I had a few pages of notes. I’d rung Parker again, told him of my newfound interest and learned the name of the detective in charge of the case—Detective Sergeant Peter Carboni. The BMW Scott had been given by the casino was in a police compound at Leichhardt. I got the name of the officer in charge, rang him, explained my interest and got permission to take the car away upon producing my contract with Mrs Galvani.
From the day he had set up as a PEA, Scott had worked out of an office above a real estate agency in Lilyfield. He claimed that the location put him in an ideal position to go north, south, east and west as required. I suppose it did. Like me, he shared his office building with others, but his co-tenants were a solicitor, an accountant and a literary agent, all battlers. Scott and the literary agent, when they could afford it, used the secretarial services of Vita Drewe, an intense young woman who occupied a tiny office in the building and freelanced for all and sundry. I rang her number and got her answering machine. I left the message that I’d be coming to the office soon and hoped to talk to her.
I drove to Lilyfield in the mid-afternoon, trying to think of all this as a job, trying not to think of Scott as anything but a part of an equation that might or might not be solved. Some hope. I parked in the space the real estate agency declared, without justification given the layout, was for the exclusive use of its clients, and went up a narrow flight of stairs to the office level. A better set-up than mine—air-conditioning for one thing, newish carpet and clean windows. Something seemed to be happening in all the offices—machines clacked, phones rang and people walked around. I knew why I preferred the semi-derelict building I was in.
Vita Drewe’s cupboard-sized office was closed and locked. I went past the literary agency, where a photocopier was spewing out pages, to Scott’s door and unlocked it. The door had ‘Scott A. Galvani, B. Juris., Lic. Pvt. Enq. Agent’ on it in gold lettering. I wondered what the A in his name stood for. I went into the office and saw the signs of a thorough, legitimate search—filing cabinet drawers left slightly open, books disturbed, waste paper bin up on the desk. I leafed through the neatly labelled manila folders containing the contract forms, investigation notes and relevant documents. Like the rest of us, Scott kept minimal records, sticking to the letter of the law but preserving large areas of the client’s confidentiality. His final reports were models of typing and layout.
I ran through from ‘Allenby—missing daughter’ to ‘Williamson—advising on business security arrangements’, taking out files at random and not finding anything helpful. I hadn’t really expected to. If Scott had had secrets he wouldn’t have kept them here. Still, it was useful to take a look at his methods and to glance through some of his notes. As far as I could see, he ran a neat, economical operation, charging reasonable expenses, writing accurate reports. He stepped on official toes from time to time—the police, statutory authorities, municipal bodies—exactly as I would have expected. You can’t pry without offending somebody. I did notice that all the files were of cases concluded, one way or another.
Like me, Scott used a spiral notebook day-to-day, tore the pages out and put them in the file when the case was finished. I couldn’t find his current notebook or any current files. I was particularly interested in cases he had on hand when he’d taken the casino job. Maybe there was some unfortunate overlap, a fatal misunderstanding.
I could understand why Scott hadn’t put his current files on open display. I don’t myself when they contain sensitive information. I take them home and keep them in my bedroom. Maybe Scott did the same. Then again, in my house there’s only me. If someone comes looking for something and is hostile, I’m the only one in the firing line. Maybe Glen, but she can take care of herself. I couldn’t see Scott putting his wife and children in any kind of hazard.
I sat on the desk and stared around the room. No obvious hiding places—no wall safe behind the Drysdale print, no revolving bookcases, no hollow lampstands, no loose floorboards. The police had obviously moved the rug and Frank would have told me if they’d found anything unusual in Scott’s office. The walls and ceiling were gyprocked, the room’s dimensions were uncomplicated and unambiguous. There was nothing in the desk drawers that didn’t belong and the aluminium windows opened onto a straight drop to the street. I remembered Scott telling me he’d had the office painted not long ago and what a nuisance it had been putting drop cloths all over the place. The paint job was fresh and sparkling, so why was there a faint mark on the wall behind the filing cabinet? As someone had once said to me, the place to hide shit is in the barnyard.
I took a grip on the filing cabinet and rocked it to the right. It came up and I could see some manila folders lying on the polished boards, dead centre in the middle of a slightly dusty square. I hooked them out with my foot and lowered the heavy cabinet back into place. I congratulated myself on my powers of detection and sat down at the desk to examine the files. There were only two—business had been slow as he’d said. A Ms Angela Prudence Cornwall had hired Scott to investigate the financial affairs of her fiancé, Roger Cruise, before she let him take her do
wn the aisle. Scott seemed to have made very little progress on the matter. Brian Roberts, an Aboriginal Rugby League footballer was in dispute with his club over a requirement in his contract that he not drink alcohol. Apparently the club secretary, Allan Thurgood, was a notorious drunk and Roberts had hired Scott to provide some evidence on this to use as leverage. Scott had staked out a few venues, taken a couple of photographs. It didn’t seem like the stuff of murder and mayhem, but it was something to keep in mind.
5
I put the files under my arm and left the office. I could hear a soft clicking coming from behind Vita Drewe’s door. I approached it cautiously. I had met her a couple of times and felt I’d lost ground and credibility with each meeting. She was a tall, cranelike creature who favoured collarless shirts, weskits, jeans and Doc Martens. Gina Galvani had nothing to fear from her—she had a large framed photograph of a very soulful Virginia Woolf on her office wall—a certain sign of sexual orientation. The first time I met her, introduced by Scott when she delivered him some typing, she told me that working part-time for a PEA was amusing but sharing a room with two of them was oppressive. I thought she was joking.
‘She’s not,’ Scott told me. ‘She believes men deliberately contrive situations to outnumber women. Especially macho men like you and me.’
‘You, macho?’
‘Laugh if you will. It gets tricky.’
It got tricky the next time I was there. She had another woman with her in Scott’s office, making it pretty crowded. She was trying to persuade Scott to do something for this woman, gratis. Scott was resistant. My arrival broke up the gathering although as far as I could see the numbers were even. I made a remark to this effect and got a visual broadside from Vita that I could still remember. That was months ago. I tapped at her door, cautiously, as I say.
‘Come.’
Interesting choice of word. I opened the door and stepped in. She was staring at a screen as her fingers flicked over the keys. Normal enough, except that she was standing up, and the remote control keyboard was sitting on top of a bookcase at waist height. She inclined her long, narrow head at a chair that just fitted into the available space. Somehow it seemed wrong to sit and I closed the door behind me and leaned back against it. She looked annoyed. Her fingers became a blur and she completed whatever she was doing. The screen froze.