Appeal Denied: A Cliff Hardy Novel

by Peter Corris

  Williams flipped open his notebook. ‘Ms Truscott was found in her home at eight am this morning by a woman who’d come to clean. She was in her bed in an upstairs room. She’d been shot in the temple at close range.’

  Lily’s bedroom: upstairs like mine, sparsely furnished and untidy like mine—books by the bed, clothes on chairs, coffee mugs, baby oil, tissues … I put two spoonfuls of sugar into my coffee, stirred it and didn’t say anything. I couldn’t speak; the picture in my head was too stark, too wrong.

  Williams sipped his flat white and then finished it in a couple of gulps, as if he needed the fuel for what he had to do. He drew in a deep breath. ‘I’m going to have to get a statement from you about your relationship with Ms Truscott, about where you’ve been over the past twenty-four hours, and I have to take possession of the pistol registered to you as a private investigator but that you are no longer entitled to use or possess.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  It jolted him. ‘Just okay?’

  I drank some coffee and found it bitter despite the sugar. ‘No, it’s not okay. As of now nothing in the fucking world is okay, but I’ll play along until you piss me off so much that I’ll do something everybody will regret—you, me, my lawyer, everybody except the media. Understand?’

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘Enjoying this, are you?’ I said.

  It was just a throwaway, letting-off-steam remark, but his reaction was strange, as if he’d been seriously challenged. He recovered quickly, though.

  ‘I was told you were difficult,’ he said.

  The Glebe police station was only two blocks away. Williams used his mobile to get the loan of a room and recording equipment and we walked there. He lit a cigarette as soon as he closed the phone. I was glad he didn’t offer me one because I might have weakened. On the walk I scarcely heard the traffic or felt the pavement under my feet. I was numb, dead to sensation. Williams had to haul me back before I stepped out against a red light into the path of a bus.

  The adrenalin rush from the near-miss got my brain working again. Two women I’d loved had died early—my ex-wife Cyn of cancer, and Glen Withers, who had virtually suicided. But I hadn’t been emotionally close to either of them at the time they died. This was emotionally different. I found myself calculating how long it had been since Lily and I had last made love.

  Williams tugged at my arm. ‘First you nearly walk into a bus, then you go catatonic. Come on.’

  We crossed the road and waited for the light to cross again. I was starting to take things in. Williams was older than he looked and not a bad guy. He shot me a couple of concerned looks. He didn’t swagger the way some cops do, and he didn’t expect people to step out of his way. He paused to stub his cigarette on the rim of a bin and drop it in.

  ‘You all right, Mr Hardy?’ he said. ‘You look cold. You should have put on a jacket.’

  ‘I’m all right. Let’s get this over with.’

  I’ve been in the Glebe police station quite a few times, never for drinks and nibbles. It’s been tarted up more than once over the years, but something of its essence always comes back—a look, smell and feel that speak of long hours, tiredness, loss, anger, frustration and takeaway food.

  Williams spoke to the woman at the desk and we were shown up a set of stairs to an interview room.

  ‘Water?’ Williams said.

  I nodded. He went out and came back with two plastic cups. He’d done this before and more times than me: he set up the video, adjusted the focus and the angle and we got down to it.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Colin Williams, Northern Crimes Unit, card number W781, interviewing Mr Cliff Hardy at Glebe police station.’ He glanced at his watch and announced the time and date.

  I identified myself, said I’d waived the right to have a solicitor present, and that I’d known Lillian Truscott for a little over two years. I said that we didn’t live together but spent a lot of time in each other’s company. I said that we’d taken a couple of short holidays together—to Byron Bay and North Queensland—and that I’d last seen her three nights before when she’d stayed at my place. I said that I’d spent time in my Newtown office in the afternoon of the previous day, had then driven home and from there walked to the Toxteth Hotel where I’d had a few drinks and played pool with my regular pool partner, Daphne Rowley. I went home, heated up some leftovers, watched television, read a book and went to bed.

  Williams was watching me and listening intently. He was confident that the equipment was working. I kept my head up and didn’t fidget.

  I said, ‘This morning I read the paper, did the crossword, drank coffee and then Constable Farrow called me. Following that, I met DS Williams at the Glebe mortuary.’

  I sipped some water and stopped talking.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s my statement. Oh, the pistol’s at home under lock and key. You can come by and collect it.’

  ‘I will, but first I’d like to ask you some questions.’

  ‘Ask. I’ll consider whether to answer.’

  ‘You’ve said when you last saw Ms Truscott. When did you last contact her?’

  ‘The night before last. We spoke on the phone.’

  ‘Planning to meet when?’

  ‘No plan, we played it by ear.’

  ‘It seems a very loose relationship.’

  ‘Think what you like.’

  ‘Ms Truscott was a journalist. Do you know what she was working on?’

  ‘Financial stories.’

  ‘Specifically?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’ll have to check her computer, if it’s still there.’

  ‘Do you have any reason to think it’s not?’

  My patience was running out. ‘Use your head.’

  ‘Speaking of finance, you’ve been barred as a private investigator. How are you making a living?’

  I drank some more water and sucked in a sour breath. ‘I’m not. I’m living on savings and trying to call in some unpaid debts.’

  ‘Did you and Ms Truscott ever quarrel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘She thought Anthony Mundine had a future. I wasn’t so sure.’

  I made a cutting motion and folded my arms. Williams turned off the video.

  ‘That doesn’t leave the best impression,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t give a shit. I’ll talk to you off the record if you’ll answer some questions for me.’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  I stood up. ‘That’s it then. Pop your cassette and we’ll get the gun. That’s if I can remember where it is.’

  ‘You’d better.’

  I let him have the last word. He had the body language of a man preoccupied with something other than what he was doing. Two preoccupied men together.

  3

  Williams followed me in his red Camry. He didn’t look too impressed with my house. Most don’t, unless they’re thinking potential. I gave him the .38 and he put it in a paper bag. Contrary to what people see on television, evidence bags are not made out of plastic. This isn’t environmentalism, just a matter of reducing the risk of contamination.

  As he was leaving, Williams said, ‘Why did you waive the right to a lawyer?’

  ‘I’ve caused mine enough trouble lately and run up more than enough expense for myself. I’ll swim along solo until I get out of my depth.’

  ‘You’re not what I expected.’

  ‘What did you expect?’

  With his hand on the front gate, he allowed himself a thin smile. ‘I said I wouldn’t answer any questions. I hope you’re not going to mount some sort of vigilante action on this, Mr Hardy.’

  ‘No chance of that, if you catch and convict the person responsible.’

  ‘We’ll do our best. We may need your … further help.’ He handed me his card.

  ‘Sergeant, that’s a two-way street.’

  Later that day Tony Truscott, Lily’s boxing brother, who was a good de
al younger than her, rang me.

  ‘Cliff, I just got back from Fiji and got the message on my phone. Jesus, how could this happen?’

  ‘I don’t know, Tony. They were on to me because she’d put my name in her passport as the one to contact, you being out of the country so often and all that.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Jesus, Lily …’

  ‘I identified her and I gave a statement to the cops. What’re they asking you to do?’

  ‘Nothing. They say they’re doing a fucking autopsy.

  Jesus …’ ‘That’s standard, mate. All I know is that she was shot at close range, probably when she was asleep. It doesn’t help, but … you know.’

  ‘I dunno what to do.’

  ‘Because your mother and father are dead and there’s no other siblings or kids involved, you’d be next of kin. They’ll want you to make funeral arrangements when the … her body’s released. Are you up for that?’

  ‘Fuck, no.’

  ‘Anyone with you who’s had some experience?’

  ‘Jerry Hawkins, I guess—my manager.’

  ‘Get him to make the calls—to the police and then to a funeral place. There’ll have to be a notice in the papers. She had a lot of friends, Tony. They’ll want to show up and you’ll have to arrange a thing for afterwards. Can Jerry organise all that? Did he know her?’

  ‘Yeah. He’ll do it.’

  ‘Give him my number and tell him I’ll help any way I can.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks, Cliff. You all right?’

  ‘No. She wouldn’t want any religion and she’d want a party. Can you make that clear to Jerry?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Tell him I want to say a few words. How about you?’

  He was crying and I was close.

  ‘I’ll … I’ll try. Jesus, Lily.’

  Lily was cremated at Rookwood. The ceremony, conducted by one of the writers she’d worked closely with on a Fairfax paper, Tim Arthur, went as she’d have wished—no bullshit, good jokes. Arthur did the honours well. He talked about the stories he and Lily had worked on together, and the couple of Walkley Awards they’d won. He said she’d deserved them more than him but he’d accepted just the same. Struck the right note. I spoke briefly, along with some friends and colleagues. Tony managed a halting, distressed sentence or two that didn’t help the rest of us keep our composure.

  The wake was at Tony’s place in Hunters Hill—a sprawling sandstone affair he’d bought with his winnings. Tony was doing pretty well as a world-ranked welterweight contender, fighting mostly in the US. I remembered that he’d got on the web when he’d paid his deposit on the place, and checked the history of the area.

  ‘Bet some of the nobs think it’s named after that governor bloke, the one who had the stoush with Macarthur over the rum and that.’

  Lily and I were having a celebratory drink with him at the time. ‘I thought that was Bligh,’ I said.

  Tony shook his head. ‘This Hunter bloke, too. Well, turns out it isn’t. It’s named after some farm in Scotland, so up theirs.’

  Tony had been nervous about moving into such an upmarket neighbourhood, but it had worked out all right. His house was one of the old ones designed by ‘some Frenchman’, he told us. Apparently Italian craftsmen had worked on it and that showed. When the neighbours saw that Tony was spending money on restoration rather than renovation, they accepted him.

  The day of the wake was cool and fine and the party took place mainly on the big upstairs deck that looked out over the Parramatta River. Jerry Hawkins had arranged the catering and there were masses of finger food and a flood of booze for the eighty-odd people attending. Lily’s favourite blues records—BB King, Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker—were playing and the only thing wrong with the party was that Lily wasn’t there. She’d have liked it.

  Two years and a bit with someone, especially the way we played it, isn’t long enough to get to know all a partner’s friends and a lot of the people there didn’t have a clue who I was until someone filled them in. I caught some curious glances and I could imagine the conversations.

  That’s her bloke.

  What does he do?

  He’s a private eye, or was until he got rubbed out.

  Are the cops looking at him?

  You’d reckon, wouldn’t you?

  Tony introduced me to Jerry and I thanked him for the good job he’d done. Tony was on orange juice—unless he’d spiked it. Who could blame him? He was about twelve years younger than his sister—‘an afterthought’ as she called him, and he’d looked up to her from day one. Their mother was a frustrated writer. She’d approved of Lily’s chosen profession. The father was a truckie who’d built up a middle-sized business. Tony was all the late-life son he could’ve asked for. According to Lily, they’d been a successful family until cancer got her mother in her mid-fifties and her father, at sixty-odd, a few years later. It was one of the reasons Lily hadn’t wanted children.

  With too many of these memories on my mind, I talked briefly to a few people I knew, but basically wanted to be on my own and let this ‘celebration of Lily’s life’ go on around me. I walked to the deck rail and looked out over the water. There was a good breeze and the boats were making the most of it. It’s not something I ever took to. The few times I tried, it seemed to consist of alternating between being bored rigid and working your arse off while someone yelled at you. I guess if you did it long enough to know what you were about and had enough money, you could get to do the yelling.

  I’d had a big scotch on arrival and a glass of wine since, or was it two? I finished the drink, whatever number it was, and thought about another. Against that, if I ate a few sandwiches and had some coffee and took a walk around the streets, it’d probably be safe to drive home. Home—not a lot to feel good about there. I was leaning towards another drink or two and a taxi, when a man appeared beside me.

  ‘Cliff Hardy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A small boat about to tip over in the wind caught my eye and I watched it without looking at the man who’d spoken. Rude of me, but for the first time in a while I was looking at some outside action, instead of in at myself.

  ‘I’m Lee Townsend.’

  That got my attention. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was miles away.’

  I recognised him. Townsend was an investigative print and television reporter, the sort that get up the noses of politicians, bureaucrats and business types—my kind of guy. He’d broken big stories on police corruption, political cover-ups and government department mismanagement. He’d fronted several television documentaries that had made his image as well known as his written work. He had a couple of spin-off books to his credit that I hadn’t read.

  I was facing him now, using the word loosely. He stood about 160 centimetres at the most and his build would have to be described as puny. The magic of television had concealed this.

  He saw my reaction. ‘Yeah, I know,’ he said. ‘People think I’m a six-footer like you.’

  I shook his hand. ‘Jean-Paul Sartre was one fifty-eight centimetres on his best days,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Thank you for that. Your eulogy was good. Spot on.’

  ‘You knew Lily?’

  ‘A bit in the early days when we were wage slaves. She had the handicap of being a woman, and I was too fucking small to be taken seriously.’

  ‘You both did okay.’

  He placed his glass on the balcony rail. Looked like scotch. He wore an expensive lightweight suit. I was in a dark blazer and dark pants, blue shirt—closest I could get to the suit look. No tie. Lily said ties were as stupid as gloves and she was right.

  ‘I’d like to have a talk with you,’ Townsend said. ‘Here, if you’re agreeable, or later if you’d prefer it.’

  He might have looked different from his TV persona but his strong, resonant, convincing voice was the same. I had a feeling he’d be worth talking to. In a strange way he reminded me of Lily—smaller, of course.

 
; ‘Now’d be good,’ I said. ‘Lately I’ve been talking mostly to myself. What about a drink? Was that scotch?’

  He nodded. I picked up his glass and mine and headed for the bar. The crowd had thinned out a bit but not much. You can count on journos to form a good, solid hard core at any boozy bash. They’ve always got plenty to talk about and it takes a long while for the grog to make them boring.

  Muddy was doing his number: Lily and I had seen the movie of the Band’s supposed last performance—The Last Waltz—before they kept reincarnating. Muddy had done the song in his suit, but still managed to look as if he was down on the delta:

  Ain’t that a man?

  Ain’t that a man, child?

  I did some handshaking and nodding on the way to the bar. I ate a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches while I waited to name my poison. I got my hands around two scotches large enough to sustain a decent talk and went back out onto the deck. Townsend was still there and on his own. I finished half my drink before I even got there. With the first drink and the wines— probably three if I was honest—on board and the emotional drag, the whisky hit me. I was suddenly conscious of the need to walk carefully and watch where I was going.

  I put his drink on the rail. ‘What’s on your mind?’

  ‘It’s a week since Lily was killed. What are your sources telling you about the police investigation?’

  ‘I don’t have any sources. The few I had don’t want to know me since I got scrubbed. I did have a particular bloke who—’

  ‘Frank Parker.’

  ‘Yeah, but Frank’s got other fish to fry. Plus he’s called in a lot of favours over the years, some of them for me. I’d say he’s just about tapped out. Why?’