by Peter Corris
‘She was terrified.’
‘Of what?’
‘A man.’
I sat on the arm of one of the chairs. That perched me well above her in a dominant position. No great achievement; she was a guilty, frightened woman and I wasn’t proud of pressuring her.
‘Tell me,’ I said.
She said Mary Oberon had paid a month’s rent in advance. I’d have been willing to bet she’d extracted an extra month as a bond of sorts but I didn’t interrupt her. She’d left before the month was up taking everything with her, which wasn’t much to start with—clothes, toiletries, a computer, a mobile phone, an mp3 player which the woman called an earplug thing. I asked how she knew the music was terrible if Mary Oberon had listened through earplugs. She said she heard it sometimes when Mary played it without the earplugs just to annoy her. She left after being threatened by the only visitor she ever had—a bearded man driving a white car.
‘Threatened how?’ I said.
‘They had arguments the couple of times he called. He woke her up in the morning and I could hear their voices raised.’
I bet you could hear them, I thought. Raised or not.
‘Then one afternoon he came and they went outside. It looked as though he was trying to make her get into his car. I was watching from the side window. She wouldn’t go. He got into the car and he tried to run her over. He drove the car over the gutter and up onto the nature strip and she had to jump out of the way. She fell over and he drove off. You can still see the marks the car wheels made on the grass.’
‘Did you go out to her?’
‘No, I was too frightened. I thought he might come back.’
And you didn’t want to get involved. ‘What happened then?’
‘She came in and I heard her crying in her room for a while. I went shopping and when I came back she was gone. No note. She took the key to the house and her room. I had to change the lock on the front door and get . . . two more keys cut.’
And then some, I thought. I felt sure she knew more than she was telling me but had no idea how to tease it out other than by being direct. I stood and then sat down abruptly. She almost yelped in alarm.
‘There’s something you’re not telling me. What is it? Quickly.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Will you leave if I do?’
‘Probably.’
‘Wait here.’
I didn’t. I followed her out of the room and down the passage to the kitchen. Her purse was sitting on a bench. She opened it, took out a banknote and handed it to me. It was a Fijian fifty-dollar note.
‘I found it down behind the bureau in her room. Please take it and go.’
I put the note in my pocket and moved away. ‘Why did you try to keep this from me? Don’t tell me you thought she might come back for it.’
‘Because I don’t like you.’
‘It’s mutual.’
I left the house and went around the corner. There were two deep gouges in the grass on the nature strip about a metre in from the kerb. Impossible to tell whether it had been a serious attempt to run the woman down, but it was certainly enough to give anyone a hell of a fright. I looked up and saw the woman watching me from the house. The curtain twitched back closed when she saw me looking. I wondered if she’d reconsider her next tax return. Probably not, that kind of greed is ingrained.
Back in the car I looked again at the photo of Mary Oberon. Her skin appeared to be dark but not very dark, her eyes slanted slightly and she had a fine blade of a nose. A strong suggestion of Indian ancestry I hadn’t noticed before. I started the engine and at that moment what had swum at the edge of my consciousness about the driver of the Commodore came into clear focus. The man had a jutting chin and a beard.
On the drive back to the city I considered the information I’d picked up. An Indian prostitute being threatened by a man who looked likely to be the one who’d killed Bobby Forrest. Hard to make sense of, but it suggested a course of action if I was inclined to take it. Should I? I knew I wasn’t directly responsible for Bobby’s death. He wouldn’t have wanted me to bodyguard him. I anticipated that he might be under surveillance and had warned him, but I hadn’t thought he was in mortal danger. But that raised another concern. Had he put himself in that danger by hiring me? That possibility nagged at me all the way back to Pyrmont.
My mobile had been buzzing and chirping practically all day. I sat in my office, scrolled through and thought about deleting all the unfamiliar numbers and names. Most of them were bound to be media people, calling and texting, looking for dirt on Bobby Forrest, but you never can tell. I worked through them, deleting the media stuff, which left me with calls from Frank Parker and Megan and a text with the source blocked that read: leave it alone. he had it coming.
I rang Frank and assured him that I was okay and probably not facing any serious problems with the police. He offered to help in any way he could and I told him I’d keep that in mind.
‘You’re not going to follow this up, are you?’
‘Only if it follows me.’
‘Jesus, Cliff. Let it go.’
‘Probably will.’
It was a constant theme with my friends—advising me to stick to the nuts and bolts of my business and not go involving myself in the labyrinth of people’s problems. My ex-wife Cyn had said it was a psychological quirk that I should try to do something about.
‘How?’ I’d asked.
‘See a psychiatrist.’
‘I’ve seen too many Woody Allen movies to take them seriously.’
That started a fight, one of many. Cyn didn’t find Woody funny.
Megan didn’t join the ‘leave it be’ chorus, not explicitly, but she did want to know whether I’d need the couch again and I told her I wouldn’t. Part of me wanted to let it go and just maybe I would have if it hadn’t been for the text message. That made it personal and Bobby had paid for at least a few days’ more work. I scribbled down the text message and looked at it. ‘Had it coming’ suggested something in the past rather than the trouble Bobby had brought to me, but I had no handle on that. Sophie Marjoram hadn’t helped.
I left the office still undecided about what to do. I drove to Glebe and took a careful look along the street before pulling up at my house. Still no sign of the media pack. I got out of the car and was about to lock it with the remote control when I became aware of someone bearing down on me from across the road. He was big and moving fast.
‘You bastard,’ he shouted and swung his fist at me.
It’s a good idea to be moving forward when you punch but only if it’s a straight punch. Move forward and swing roundhouse and you’re liable to lose your balance. That’s what he did. The punch missed anyway because I swayed back away from it. I caught his fist as it moved past, twisted his arm and had him pinned against the car with one bent arm and the other flapping ineffectively. I leaned my weight against the bent arm. He swore and the fight went out of him.
‘All right, all right. Let me go.’
He was big but a lot of the bulk was fat. He was breathing hard from just a few rushed steps and a poor attempt at a punch. I didn’t think he could cause me much grief. I released him, stepped back and let him unwind himself. He grabbed at the car for support. He was red in the face and older than I’d expected. It was my day for putting the moves on unequal opponents.
He was wearing a dark suit over a black T-shirt; a pair of heavy sunglasses stuck out of the pocket where people used to wear display handkerchiefs. Maybe some still do. If he put them on he’d have something like the hoodlum look, but one who should leave the heavy work to younger men. He brushed himself down.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘For what? That you didn’t break my jaw? Who the hell are you?’
‘You don’t recognise me?’
‘No.’
‘Yeah, well, I’ve stacked on the kilos a bit. You don’t look all that much different, Hardy. Greyer, few
more wrinkles, but I knew you straight off. I’m Ray Frost—Bobby Forrest’s father.’
We went into the house and I made coffee while he used the toilet.
‘Crook prostate,’ he said when he came out. ‘Crook just about every other bloody thing but I’m still here.’
I poured coffee into two mugs. He refused milk and sugar.
‘Got anything to give it a lift?’
I put heavy slugs of Hennessy brandy into both mugs and we went into the sitting room. He put his mug on the coffee table and felt in his jacket pocket.
‘All right to smoke?’
I put a saucer on the table and drank some of the laced coffee while he coughed, got a cigarette lit and coughed some more.
‘No point quitting,’ he said. ‘I could go any day and a few fags aren’t going to make any difference.’
I nodded. He took a big slurp of coffee and a couple of lungs full of smoke and probably felt better, although he looked worse.
‘You did me a very good turn twenty-odd years ago. Remember that?’
‘I didn’t remember the name but when Bobby told me about you I looked up the file. Yeah, it worked out okay for you, didn’t it?’
‘Right. When Bobby told me about his bloody problem I advised him to look you up. Charlie Bickford, the shyster—remember him?’
I nodded.
‘Dead now. He always reckoned you were one of the few blokes in your game he could trust. He said you did the job and didn’t play both ends against the middle like most of them.’
‘I’m sorry for what happened. I didn’t see it coming. It was a tricky business, all that online stuff, but it didn’t seem . . .’
‘I know. I know. Look, I’m sorry I took a swing at you. Not your fault. I just had to take it out on someone. My only kid. I’m going to miss him like hell. I have to do something about it.’
‘The police are on it.’
‘The cops.’ He dismissed them with a wave of the hand that held the cigarette. Ash fell on the floor. ‘Sorry. How many contract killings do they clear up?’
‘You think it was a contract killing?’
He finished his coffee in a gulp. ‘I can’t get over the feeling that it was to do with me.’
I didn’t tell him that I had something of the same reaction, but what he said put us on the same page. I took a good look at him while he worked his way through his cigarette. Apart from all the weight he would’ve been reasonably presentable but without Bobby’s bone structure. That must have come from his mother. And Frost was dark. The gangsta clothes might have been an affectation or a necessary look. I went back to the kitchen and recharged our mugs. He had another cigarette going.
‘What do you do that could get Bobby killed?’
‘I run a business that provides men and machinery to construction companies. You wouldn’t believe what goes on in the tendering process, the bribes, the deals, the fucking politics of it all. I step on toes all the time.’
‘What kinds of toes?’
‘Big ones. Bad ones.’
‘Why the clothes? The Mafia image?’
‘The people I deal with—union types, security guys—you’ve gotta look the part. I need your help, Hardy.’
‘You’ve got a funny way of going about getting it.’
‘I said I was sorry, for Christ’s sake. What do you want me to do, kiss your boots?’
He was naturally aggressive, but so am I. ‘Drink your coffee and make that your last cigarette. Passive smoking kills. Have you stayed out of trouble the last twenty-odd years? I seem to remember you were in a spot of bother once.’
He drained his mug and stubbed out the cigarette. ‘I’ve sailed a bit close to the wind a few times, I suppose, but I’ve never had any charges laid since . . . what you’re talking about. I was young and dopey back then.’
‘Not that young. What d’you mean you need my help?’
‘What do you bloody think? I want you to find out who killed my boy.’
‘And then do what?’
He felt for his cigarettes, remembered and stopped. He shook his head. ‘No, I’m not asking you to drop him in a hole. Let the law take over.’
He was hard to read. The aggression was real enough; it masked the grief, but that was real, too. Believing and trusting him was another matter. But how many of my clients had I fully believed and trusted? A majority, I thought, but not a big majority.
‘Well?’ he said. He wasn’t pleading but he wasn’t demanding either.
‘Why me?’
‘I remember that you were good. Discreet, didn’t blab about what you were doing and you got it done. You’re involved in this anyway. I’ve got blokes I could get . . . ask to do it, but they’re too close to my business.’
‘You don’t trust them.’
‘You could say that.’
‘You reckon you’ve got candidates—people who might’ve wanted to hurt you this badly?’
‘Yeah, a few. I don’t know. It could still be connected to that fucking online dating shit. I wish he’d never . . .’
He broke off and looked at me, his eyes shrewd. ‘You’ve got some ideas of your own, haven’t you?’
I told him Bobby had paid me some money and that I’d followed up a couple of leads out of obligation. I said I had some more questions and some ideas about how to ask them.
‘You mean who to ask them.’
‘No, I mean how to find out who to ask.’
‘You’ve lost me, but that’s what I want to hear. Will you do it, Hardy? I’ll pay whatever it takes.’
I wanted to do it and I had to do it. I had no other client and the publicity I’d got wasn’t likely to bring people running. I felt the obligation to Bobby and an obligation to myself to follow up the leads I’d uncovered, and I’ve never liked leaving unfinished business.
I keep a few contracts in the house from the time when I worked at home. My contracts are about as bland and non-specific as the law allows. They simply state that the undersigned has agreed to commission my services as a private inquiry agent and agrees to the following terms and conditions. These relate to the schedule of fees, my responsibility to report findings and termination arrangements. Frost read it through very carefully. The space for the amount of the retainer was blank. He put a big, blunt, nicotine-stained finger on it and looked at me.
‘Negotiable,’ I said.
He nodded, took out his wallet and peeled off ten hundred-dollar notes.
‘Give me your bank details,’ he said. ‘I’ll transfer five grand today. Will that do?’
I filled the amount in on the form. He nodded, took a silver ballpoint pen from his breast pocket and signed both copies. I signed and gave him one copy. I wrote the bank account information on the back of one of my cards.
‘I’ll need names and any relevant information about the people you suspect,’ I said.
He flicked the card before tucking it away with his Ray-Bans. ‘I’ll put it all in an email.’
‘Just a few more things. Bobby’s mother?’
‘Died ten years ago. The usual, breast cancer. We were separated.’
‘Have you met Bobby’s girlfriend, Jane Devereaux?’
‘Once. Nice girl.’
‘That’s all?’
‘It was a very brief meeting. I’ve got to go. Arrangements to make when they release Bobby’s body. Shit, have you got any kids?’
‘One, a daughter.’
‘Try not to outlive her.’
‘Let me know the arrangements,’ I said. ‘I’d like to be there.’
‘I will. Thanks, Hardy.’
We shook hands and I saw him out.
I phoned Frank Parker. He was in the city and we arranged to meet for a drink at a pub in The Rocks. I walked. I had two solid measures of brandy inside me on an empty stomach and the last thing I needed was a DUI problem. I enjoyed the walk through Walsh Bay and the sound and sight of the harbour always gives me a lift. The pub had a colonial theme but it’s not overdon
e—no leg irons, no cat o’ nine tails. I got there first and settled inside with a middy of light. In fact the theme was more nautical than correctional and I studied the paintings of tall ships as I waited.
Frank appeared carrying a stubbie. ‘Got any convict ancestors, Cliff?’
‘A couple, I believe.’
‘Me, too. Cheers. Okay, exploit me.’
‘Ray Frost, what do you know?’
Frank almost choked on his drink. ‘Ray Frost—you’re not in trouble with him, are you?’
‘No, he’s a client.’
Frank shook his head, took a drink and cleared his throat. ‘I thought you’d have more sense.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s a crook. He’s also a ruthless bastard.’
‘He said he hasn’t been in trouble for years.’
‘All that means is that he hasn’t been caught. He’s seen off a few people who got in his way. Not that they didn’t deserve it.’
I remembered Frost’s phrase, I’m not asking you to drop him in a hole. I said, ‘He’s Bobby Forrest’s father. He wants me to help find out who killed his son.’
‘Don’t touch it.’
‘He thinks it could be something to do with his business. Some kind of payback.’
‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. He’s bad news, Cliff. He’s a standover merchant. He puts pressure on people to accept his bids for jobs. Not only on the construction people, on the contractors and sub-contractors as well.’
‘What kind of pressure?’
‘Every bloody kind—financial, political, physical.’
‘Wouldn’t it be standard practice in that kind of game?’
‘Frost took it to a new level. He’s been up before a few Royal Commissions.’
‘When?’
‘The last one was only a couple of years ago.’
I drank some beer and wished I’d bought it full strength. ‘I must’ve been overseas. When before that?’
‘Back a bit. He’s cunning and he’s got some protection. What has he told you?’
‘Not much. He says there’s a few people who’d be capable of hurting him in that way. He’s sending me the names.’