Peter Corris: Taking Care of Business

Walking, I’ve found, helps me to think, so I decided to walk home. It was a fine night. I walked down Goulburn Street, crossed the Darling Harbour walkway and made my way up through Ultimo towards Glebe. I couldn’t help remembering how it all used to be, with the sprawling goods yards and the factories and the early opening pubs. In many ways it’s better; I’m glad the ABC has its new building and I like the Powerhouse Museum. The fish market is fun and I’m told Glebe High School does some cutting edge stuff. I miss some of the scruffiness and am trying to keep it going in my own way with my ungentrified terrace house down near the water. ‘You’re on a nostalgic and totally unproductive, negative ego trip,’ my last girlfriend, Tess Hewitt, had said. She was probably right but I didn’t care.

Women I’d known and the past I’d lived through filled my mind. I realised, as I approached my street, that I hadn’t done any productive thinking about the Sentinel matter and Scott di Maggio’s dubious proposition. Worse than that I realised, as I turned the corner and a car cruised off in low gear, that I’d been tracked on foot and by car all the way home.

It’s a fair step from Goulburn Street to the bottom of Glebe Point Road and the walk, plus the food, wine and brandy gave me a good night’s sleep. I woke up late with bright light all around the edges of the window and a bladder crying for relief. But I lay there a while, thinking. It was perverse of me, but the fact that someone had followed Charlie and Colin from the meeting, and that I’d picked up a tail as well, intrigued me and made me more interested in what was going on with Sentinel.

By the time I’d got up, pissed, showered, shaved, dressed and eaten breakfast the post had arrived. An overdue rates notice reminding me of the interest accruing, an uncomfortably large credit card bill, car registration papers and an invoice for my gym fees amounted to shovels digging me in a deeper financial hole. The only other letter was hand-addressed in unfamiliar writing. Bad-temperedly, I ripped it open.

Dear Cliff

Funny way to address your father but I can’t think of anything better. I don’t like to ask you for money but I’m going to anyway. I know it wasn’t your fault you didn’t contribute anything to my first twenty years of life and you probably squared up by getting me out of the shit I was in but… I can’t think of a way to finish that sentence.

I’ve got a scholarship to study acting in New York. They tell me I can get work there waitressing or hooking (joke), but I need the fare. Hope you can help, love (yeah?)

Megan

It rocked me. When my ex-wife Cyn was dying she told me about the child she’d had. I was the father. The child had been adopted but had come looking for her mother. I’d extricated Megan from some dangerous company and we had had a wary, distant relationship in the two years since. She’d never asked me for anything before. I put the letter down with the unpaid bills and felt myself leaning towards what I’d come to think of as the Sentinel proposal. It was mostly the money but partly the interest generated by differences I’d observed between di Maggio and the others and the tails I’d spotted last night.

I knew that Megan was working front of house at a fringe theatre in Surry Hills. I’d meant to get along to one of their plays and hadn’t made it. I rang the place, got an answering machine and left a message for her that I’d help and could have some money for her within twenty-four hours. What did a return air fare to New York cost? I rang Qantas. Three and a half thousand economy for a ticket allowing a one year stay. How long did you need to study acting? Throw in five hundred mad money. Four grand. I didn’t have it but I thought I could get it.

I rummaged in the leather jacket I’d hung over the stairwell post and found the cards. The Hartley Agency’s card was surprisingly modest-no Tommy gun. I rang di Maggio’s number and got a female intermediary.

‘Cliff Hardy for Scott,’ I said in my hardest tone.

‘Just a moment.’

Di Maggio came on the line within seconds. ‘Cliff. Glad you called. Thought you would. I primed the switchboard.’

I registered that but made no comment. ‘I’m in,’ I said. ‘With a condition.’

‘Name it, mate.’

Like most Americans, he couldn’t get the accent or the rhythm right and I mentally deducted points for his even trying.

‘I need four thousand up front.’

‘You’ve got it. Give me your account number and it’s in there electronically as of ten minutes from now.’

I gave him the number but I couldn’t help thinking that, even for a hotshot American outfit, this was a bit too slick. Still, money oils the wheels.

‘Thanks, Scott,’ I said. ‘Well, I’m off to see Harry Tickener.’

‘Ah, Cliff, can I ask what brought on the rush of blood?’

I let a moment go by. There were things he possibly didn’t know-like the tails on the people leaving the meeting-and things he probably did, like the state of my finances.

‘No.’

He chuckled. ‘No problem,’ he said, and this time he got the cadences exactly right.

Harry Tickener kept his Nikes up on his desk and examined the uppers while I said my piece.

‘Are they paying out on policies?’ he asked when I’d finished.

‘Dunno.’

‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘They’re pretty big. A lot of things’d suffer if they went belly up.’

‘What about their directors?’

Harry smiled. ‘Probably haven’t got a bean to their names.’

‘You could find out, couldn’t you?’

‘Yeah. More to the point, if they’ve made any rearrangements lately. You said there were some other private enquiry agents in this with you. Would you care to name them?’

‘Not at this stage.’

‘Reputable?’

I made a so-so gesture.

‘What’re you doing in bed with people like that?’

‘I have my reasons, Harry. You said it was interesting. Interesting enough to look into?’

‘Sure.’ He grabbed a pad and pen and jotted down some notes. ‘I’ll get back to you when I know anything. And there’s no one else sniffing?’

‘As far as I know.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Sniff,’ I said.

I went to my office and phoned Bryce Carter at Sentinel. I got his voicemail, persisted with the switchboard operator, but got no further. I left him a message enquiring whether he’d got my report and when I might expect to be paid. I attended to a few inconsequential things. He phoned within the half hour.

‘I have your report, Mr Hardy. It seems satisfactory.’

‘Not what you were hoping, I guess.’

‘Hope doesn’t play much of a part in this business. You’ll be paid within thirty days, which is our usual practice.’

‘I’m pressed for cash. I wonder if I could see you to talk about that.’

Listening to the irritation in his tone was like striking sand in an oyster. ‘Mr Hardy, I’m aware that a mistake was made in commissioning you, but-’

‘Yeah, you meant to get the Hartley Agency.’

‘Nevertheless-’

‘Listen, Bryce. I could make trouble for you. Bad blue on your part-employing a one-man outfit and not the corporate, suck-up good boy. Know what I mean?’

‘No. I-’

‘I didn’t play along, did I?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I think you do. We should talk.’

I was bluffing, flying blind, but the silence on the other end of the line told me I’d hit a nerve. I pressed harder and Carter agreed to meet me.

Sentinel Insurance occupied several floors of a tower block in North Sydney. I was passed along by a couple of desk jockeys and finally admitted to an office that had the stripped down, bare look favoured by the modern executive. Too efficient to need much paper, too busy to harbour distractions, like paintings or books. Bryce Carter was thirtyish, buffed and polished in dress but worried in manner. He waved me to a seat and went back behind his desk.