Forget Me If You Can

by Peter Corris

  I told her I drank and that I was only a few minutes away. I turned off Parramatta Road and drove through the leafy, gentrified streets of Stanmore. Her house was an imposing Federation job set in a big overgrown garden at the bottom of a street that ended at the railway line. The location—the tracks were within seventy metres of the house—would have sliced thirty grand off the value. A train rumbled past as I pulled up and a plane roared low overhead at the same time. Double-glazing would be an essential.

  The name of the house on the brass plate by the front door was Rosalind. It should have been Neglect. I’m an expert on neglected houses, my own being an outstanding example, but this one had mine beat to a frazzle. The tiles on the porch had cracked and lifted as weeds pushed up through them. A tangle of shrubs and weeds and creepers had invaded the porch and the window ledges. Small gardens grew in the guttering, spilling out to trickle down the brick walls.

  I rang the electric bell and got no result so I knocked hard on the door, dislodging flakes of paint. High heels clicked on boards and I heard a muttered curse as a step was missed. She flung the door open and looked at me with the same deep, dark eyes as her mother. ‘Mister Hardy, please do come in.’

  She was tall and thin, wearing a blue silk dress that would have fitted better if she had another kilo or two of meat on her bones. Her dark hair, with a little grey in it, was swept back and held with a blue headband in a style ten years too young for her. I put her age at about forty-five. I took the hand she extended—the free one, the other carried a glass—and shook it. ‘It’s good of you to see me like this,’ I said. I reached inside my jacket. ‘You wanted some identification.’

  She waved that away and swayed slightly but regained her balance quickly. ‘Now that I’ve seen you I have no doubt whatsoever that you’re who you say you are. Not that I really care. Come in and have a drink.’

  I followed her into the house, which smelled of damp and dust, through to a big tiled kitchen with French windows letting out onto a back garden more wild than the one in front. The windows were open and a train rattled by, shaking the cocktail fixings set out on an old-fashioned card table. She pointed to a pair of deckchairs with slightly torn canvas. ‘Sit you down. I was just having a martini. You’ll join me?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  She slugged back the rest of the drink she’d carried and poured two more from a crystal pitcher. Her hand shook but she managed to get the glasses two-thirds full. Then she dropped an olive in each and added more gin. ‘Gilbey’s gin keeps you thin,’ she said. ‘I believe that, I really do.’

  I reached forward to take the glass, doubting her ability to get it to me. She smiled, lifted her own and steered herself into her chair. ‘Cheers.’

  I drank. The vermouth bottle was on the table but it might just as well have stayed in the cupboard. The drinks were almost pure gin, diluted a bit by melted ice. Not that I minded. She took a hefty pull and extracted a cigarette from the packet on the table. It gave me a chance to study her. My original guess at her age was way off—she couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, but cigarettes and booze had put ten years on her. Her hands were slender and young-looking, but the fingers were heavily nicotine-stained; the flesh around her neck was firm although her chin was sagging and her fine eyes were disfigured by deep pouches and a mass of premature wrinkles.

  ‘So, you’ve been out to see Rose and now you’ve come to see me. All about poor Lee. That’s strange. I haven’t thought about Lee in ages. Mind you, at one time I used to think about him a lot.’

  ‘It must have been a shock, to hear of his death in that way.’

  ‘Not really’. She sucked on her cigarette and then on her drink, taking in smoke and gin as if they were tea and toast. ‘He did two tours in Vietnam and he always said that if Charlie didn’t get him some jealous husband would. Drink up.’

  She was almost through hers and staring at the blueish pitcher. She had a long start on me and I had almost twice her body weight, I reckoned I could stay the pace. When we’d replenished and she’d got another cigarette going she asked me about her mother and seemed satisfied with the account I gave.

  ‘We never got along, and I never got along with Peter. Only with Lee. Lovely Lee.’ She laughed and smoked jerkily. ‘Never got along with my husband either. He’s a film producer and I’m an actress. Was an actress. Bad combination. He gave me this house in the divorce settlement, the bastard. Bought it for me, and my fuckwit of a lawyer let him get away with it. What’s the name of that movie? Planes, Trains and Automobiles—that’s this place.’

  The words were tumbling out, alternately slurred and too precise as the liquor got to her. She topped up her glass and raised it to her mouth. It was lipstick-smeared around the whole rim and she didn’t quite make the contact, a few drops spilled down her chin. I looked away and she caught the reaction.

  ‘I know, I know. I’m a sloppy drunk. Can’t help it. Nothing else to live for. What d’you want?’ She gazed at me blearily through her cigarette smoke, forcing her eyes to focus, imprinting more wrinkles. Suddenly she appeared to get everything together and to have a moment of clarity. I’d seen it before in hopeless drunks—a flash of sobriety before the shutters come down. ‘You’re not a journalist. Haven’t taken a single note, not one! What do you want?’

  I judged that I only had her attention for a short time and that it was worth the risk. I took out the photograph of David Trumble and put it down in front of her. ‘Do you know who that is?’

  She barely glanced at the picture. ‘Course I do. It’s Lee.’

  ‘It’s Sean Trumble’s son, David. Trumble hired me to investigate his suspicion that Lee North was the boy’s real father.’

  She threw back her head and let out a shriek of laughter. The sound was cut short as she gasped for breath. Alarmed, I got out of my chair but she made a fierce gesture for me to stay away. She gulped in air somehow and followed it with a couple of lungsful of smoke and more gin. When she spoke her voice was wheezy and thin.

  ‘Of course he fucking was. Of course! Lee fucked everything. He fucked me when I was fourteen and let me tell you those were the best fucks I ever had. Best ever! Best!’

  ‘But his mate’s wife …’

  ‘He fucked her the night of the wedding. Sean passed out and Lee did the job.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The silly bitch told me. Told me when she heard she had cancer. Wanted to know whether she should tell Sean. Idiot. Oh, Lee. Oh, lovely, lovely Lee …’

  She was weeping now, the tears falling into her glass and down the front of her dress. She dropped her cigarette and I bent down and retrieved it from the dusty floor. I picked up the photograph and put it in my pocket.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Maria?’

  ‘Yes,’ she sobbed. ‘You can piss off.’

  Families are hell. Who said that? I drove back to Glebe, feeling none of the satisfaction that usually comes with having got the answers to the questions. I opened a can of beer and sat down to consider my next move. There was no proof of either discovery—that Eric Trumble had fathered Lee North and that Lee North had fathered David Trumble—but I had no doubt that both things were true. But could I communicate that certainty to my client? And should I? I’m no social worker, but you’d have to have the sensitivity of a sewer pipe not to be concerned about how the revelation could affect the prospects of young David.

  One can became two and I switched to cask white without getting any inspiration. I fed myself and the cat out of cans and settled down to scribble some notes on the meeting with Maria North-Barr. Of the three people I’d met so far in the case, only Rose North had any serenity and it was partly due to senile dementia. An unhappy business. I flicked on the television and turned it off almost straight away. I picked up Theroux’s Happy Isles of Oceania but put it down after a few pages. I had all the spleen and depression I needed.

  The sound of the doorbell was welcome. I took another swig of wi
ne and wandered down the passage to open the door. Sean Trumble stood there, pale and tense, his hands thrust in the deep pockets of an anorak. The night had become cold without me noticing.

  ‘Well, what’ve you found out?’

  I told the first lie to come into my head. ‘I haven’t started on it yet.’

  His right hand came out, holding a heavy pistol. ‘I know you’re lying, Hardy. Get back in there and keep your hands in sight or I’ll put a bullet in you.’

  You don’t argue with a Vietnam veteran and an ex-mercenary. I backed down the corridor towards the stairs. He stepped inside and flicked the door closed with his foot.

  ‘Anyone else here?’

  ‘Yeah. Three cops. We’re playing a little poker.’

  ‘I’m not in the mood for jokes. Turn around and keep moving.’

  ‘I prefer to keep an eye on you and I’m telling you I haven’t …’

  He raised the pistol an inch. His hand was steady.

  ‘You’re lucky I don’t make you fucking crawl. You saw Rose North and Maria today. Had a good long talk with the both of them.’

  ‘How could you know that?’

  ‘Think I’m stupid? Think I’d trust someone in your stinking business?’

  ‘You didn’t follow me. I’d have spotted you.’

  ‘I didn’t, but the other guy I hired did. I guess he knows the tricks of the trade as well as you, maybe better.’

  It wasn’t as much of a blow to my pride as if Trumble himself had tailed me, but it was bad enough. I turned around and went back to the living room and my glass of wine. Trumble watched me but there was indecision written all over him. He couldn’t be sure there wasn’t anyone else in the house and if he shot me he might not learn what he was burning to know. I emptied my glass.

  ‘Want a drink, Sean?’

  ‘Fuck you, I …’

  I tossed the glass from one hand to the other. An old trick but he was so agitated he fell for it. His eyes followed the glass for an instant, long enough for me to take a long step and chop down on his forearm with a clenched fist. If you hit the right spot in the right way, the nerves jump and the hand opens. He dropped the pistol and I shirt-fronted him, throwing him back against the stairwell. He hit awkwardly and the breath whooshed out of him. I picked up the pistol and ejected the magazine before tossing it to him. He tried for it, but he dropped the catch.

  ‘I’ll get you a drink anyway. You’re going to need it.’

  I put three fingers of Scotch on top of a couple of ice cubes and drew off another glass of wine for myself. When I got back he was slumped in a chair, rubbing his forearm. He accepted the glass and took a gulp.

  ‘There was no need for that. I wouldn’t have shot you.’

  ‘Matter of professional pride.’

  He’d closed off my options, so I told him what the two women had told me—straight, word for word as close as I could remember it, no punches pulled, no embellishments. He sipped his whisky as he listened. I finished about the same time he emptied the glass. He swilled the ice cubes, clockwise, then anti-clockwise. My nerves were screaming but he seemed to relax.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it,’ I said.

  He stared at the floor and appeared to go into a kind of trance. When he spoke his voice seemed to be coming from far away. ‘So David’s not my son. He’s my father’s grandson. And he’s my … nephew.’

  I nodded.

  He smiled, put the glass down on the floor, stood and held out his hand. ‘That’s close enough. Thanks, Hardy.’

  Archie’s Last Case

  Archie Merrett lived in a Glebe flat a few streets away from my place. I used to see him pretty often in the pub. We’d have a drink or two, pass the time. Archie had plenty of time to pass and he appeared to have lots of money to spend as he was doing it. He was about sixty-five when I first met him ten years ago; he had no hobbies apart from the horses and drinking, and he said he’d come back to Sydney after retiring and living on the Gold Coast for a time.

  ‘It was all different in my day, boyo,’ he told me almost every time we talked. ‘We earned our dough.’

  I’d nod and drink some beer and try to catch what he was saying above the noise of the television. He was usually saying the same thing.

  ‘What’ve you done today, Cliff?’

  ‘Served a summons or two, collected a debt, held a guy’s hand while he had a meeting with some people he’d never met before.’

  Archie’s old eyes, peeping out between puckered wrinkles, would light up. ‘Any trouble?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Different in my day.’

  ‘When you were all boyos.’

  ‘You can laugh, but it used to be a tough racket.’

  He was referring to the private enquiry agent business which he’d been in from the time he got back from New Guinea in ’46 until his retirement about twenty years later. In those days, according to Arch, most of the work was in divorce—although Arch preferred to call it ‘matrimonial’.

  ‘It scarred a man, Cliff, all that climbing in and out of windows, taking photos, going to court and hearing the terrible things men and women said and did to each other. It put me off marriage, I can tell you.’

  I liked to hear his stories about the Fifties when I’d been body-surfing, boxing and thinking about girls and adventures in foreign parts, so I’d often egg him on with a remark like, ‘Ruined a few suits too, eh, Arch?’

  A throaty, fifty-a-day chuckle. ‘You bet. Did I ever tell you about the time I was under a bedroom, down with the cat shit and spiders, with a stopwatch in my hand.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well I was. I’d got a bit of stick from a judge about being vague in my evidence and I’d decided to go scientific. I was going to time those bloody bed squeaks—so many to the minute.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Bloke must’ve weighed twenty stone, wharfie he was, and this little slip of a woman. Don’t know how she survived it. Anyway, I’ve got the stopwatch out and the torch on and I’m counting the squeaks and suddenly the whole bloody lot’s coming down on top of me. Bloody borer in the bearers.’

  Arch’s wheezes and gasps would overwhelm him for a few minutes until he caught enough breath to light another cigarette. Then he’d tell me about the time he was out on a window ledge and felt a sneeze coming on, or when the grandmother kidnapped her baby grandson from her Protestant daughter-in-law so she could have him baptised as a Catholic. I liked Arch and his stories. The emphysema and circulation problems got him in the end, of course. I visited him in hospital a few times. They put a hole in his neck and took off one of his legs. Then he died and I missed him.

  A few weeks later I was surprised to get a call from a solicitor who said he was the executor of the estate of the late Mr Archibald Ronald Merrett, deceased as of 1/5/90. It took me a second for the name to register.

  ‘Arch,’ I said. ‘Oh, yes. What can I do for you?’

  It turned out Arch had left his case files to ‘my friend and confidant, Mr Clifford Hardy, for his education’. The solicitor sent them round the next day—three cardboard boxes which had formerly contained bottles of Reschs Pilsener and were now jammed full of manilla folders, some bulging, some containing only a single sheet. I stacked the boxes under the stairs and didn’t look at them for months until I was laid up with a sprained ankle, the result of jumping for a smash that Yannick Noah couldn’t have reached. Just for something to do, I dragged out the boxes and started reading. I forgot about the ankle and the pain and about how I had to be careful not to take too many pethidines with alcohol. I could hear Arch’s ruined voice talking to me from the pages. Especially when I got to the last file in the third box. It was a thick file: transcripts of interviews, memos, photographs, receipts. I read it all through. There was also a tape. I put it in the machine, poured out a glass of white and sat back to listen. I’d heard old Arch tell a hundred stories, but it was an eerie feeling to hear him
telling one last yam …

  * * *

  Alistair McLachlan gave me the drum. He was the solicitor representing Mrs Thelma Lucan-Paget in her divorce action against her hubby, George. Thelma had the goods on George—notes, receipts for presents, a hotel bill. The core was Mrs Beatrice Butterworth.

  I said to McLachlan, ‘Uncontested, Mac?’

  He didn’t like being called that. He didn’t like me, full stop. But he knew I did good work. ‘Not clear at this stage, Merrett. Probably. There’s a lot of property involved. No children, thank God. But things to be sorted out.’

  Gravy for you, boyo, I thought. McLachlan told me what he wanted—a series of photographs plus an affidavit. My job was to snap George and Bea leaving her flat at Rose Bay, going to dinner or whatever they were doing that evening, toddling back to the flat, closing the door. The pictures had to be timed and annotated: 27/2/66—8.30 p.m.: Subjects entering Romano’s … I was happy to do it. A nice clean one. No lock-picking, no bribing hotel employees, no stealing bedsheets. On the evening appointed, I loaded up the old Ashai Pentax and headed for Evans Road, Rose Bay.

  Medium-sized block, older style, garden courtyards on the ground floor, balconies on the upper levels. Beatrice Butterworth’s flat was at the back; it had both features—a small balcony and a landscaped courtyard. The balcony would have had a nice harbour view—say, thirty grand, all up. There was a wide driveway that was marked out in parking spaces, six of ’em, one for each resident. Bit tricky if you were pissed to park and unpark, but otherwise okay. I’m back there, behind a tree, camera at the ready, super-fast film, and the door opens. A bloke answering the description I’d been given—heavy build, balding, fleshy face—comes down the steps with this good-looker on his arm. She was twenty years younger than him, say thirty, blonde, wearing a blue silk dress, a real sort. A pleasure to take her picture. They sidle up, chatting and laughing, to this silver-grey MG sedan. I took another picture as he helped her in—great legs she had, take your breath away.