Peter Corris - Forget Me If You Can

So I wouldn’t swear to it, but as far as I could tell I’d never had a client by the name of Hennessy or an enemy or a friend in the past seven years. To the best of my knowledge, the only Hennessy I’d ever come up against was the brandy in the bottle, and not much of that since the recession. I went through again, looking for the initials MH and came up with a few, but all men and either dead or harmless. The message on the home phone worried me. It meant she could have the address. What next? Dog turds under the front door?

The problem was, I couldn’t see what I could do about it. You can change phone and fax numbers as much as you like, all you’ll do is piss off your friends and clients. There are ways of finding out the numbers. I was in very bad odour with the New South Wales police force just then as a result of finding evidence that cleared a guy they thought they had dead to rights in a fraud case. In any case, I couldn’t see myself going to them and asking for a number trace. For harassing phone calls? From a woman? I’d be a laughing stock.

I told Joan Dare about my problem over dinner in an Indian restaurant in Glebe.

‘Your trouble is, you’re a linear thinker,’ Joan said. Joan is an ex-lover. We have a meal occasionally and talk, usually about sport, politics and mutual acquaintances. She has her life all straightened out. She edits a gardening magazine and has brought her two great passions- gardening and writing-together.

‘I know I am. It’s the only way I can think. What would a non-linear thinker make of it?’

We were pushing the remnants of the pappadams and chutneys around. I’d drunk most of the bottle of Wolf Blass but that was all right because I could walk home. Joan is nervy and thin and can’t hold much drink, so she tends to favour expensive wine and enjoy the glass or two she has. The Wolf Blass had hit the spot. She sipped at the tiny amount she had left. ‘You’re thinking in terms of a woman from the past with a grudge against you. Right?’

‘Sure.’

‘Don’t. Think of a man who’s out to get you here and now. You’ve admitted business has ground to a halt. I can see that you’re rattled.’

I nibbled at a fragment of pappadam. ‘Very devious.’

‘Worked, hasn’t it? If you’ve neglected something you should be

… Don’t stare at me like that. You look as if you want to break my nose.’

‘Tommy Aarons! I forgot all about him.’

Joan snapped her fingers. ‘There you are. Now you know where to go looking. Don’t tell me the details. Just thank me nicely, buy me a cup of coffee and I’ll be on my way. Glad to be of service.’

That’s pretty much what happened. Joan and I had had a tortuous affair way back when I’d used her as a port in the storm of my marriage to Cyn. She’d endured it for her own reasons for a long time, then she’d shut me out of her life for years. These days we were comfortable with each other’s surfaces-friends. I kissed her goodnight. She got into her Honda Civic, parked beside the building that houses the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre, and drove away. I set off for home almost at a jog, thinking about Tommy Aarons.

Tommy was an ex-boxer, ex-copper, turned security guard. He’d saved some money and borrowed some more and set up his own small security firm. It was nothing fancy, just half a dozen men and three women, providing light-duty bodyguards and surveillance, checking for insurance claim cheats, shoplifters and pilferers, strictly small-scale stuff.

I’d first met Tommy back in the old days when he was a very promising middleweight and I used to knock around with the boxing crowd. Learning from experience was Tommy’s great strength. A hiding from Wally Carr took him out of boxing and into the police force; it was a very short time before he realised how slow promotion was unless you were prepared to do certain things and lick certain arses.

Tommy discovered that there were many more private security guards in the state than police officers and pondered the fact. He took his minuscule superannuation and his considerable skills and built on them. We’d stayed in touch as beer-drinking and sparring partners, bemoaning the declining quality of beer and the state of boxing, and he’d asked for my advice when he was setting up his business. Everything had gone nicely until a month or so ago when one of his female employees had charged him with sexual harassment.

This was a particularly vexing problem for Tommy. He was a discreet, selective, non-demonstrative, non-political homosexual.

‘My sex life’s almost as dull as your average straight’s,’ he once told me. ‘I’ve never… well, I’ve never done a lot of things.’

The obvious defence wasn’t available to him. Tommy had built his business on stature and reputation: 184 centimetres, 80 kilos; former number two contender for the Australian middleweight title; senior constable, New South Wales Police Force. No room in there for anything, pink. He asked me to investigate Liz Richards, the woman who’d brought the charge. I agreed because Tommy was a mate and because I thought it unlikely that he was guilty.

Still, I was reluctant to take the matter on because it was a messy, nebulous kind of thing. Tommy was an attractive man; Ms Richards, to judge from her photo, was an attractive woman. Who was to say what went on in the realms of fantasy and make-believe?

The few preliminary enquiries I made confirmed this reluctance. It looked to me as if Ms Richards could be a lesbian. According to Tommy, she shared a flat with another woman who was seldom around and favoured mannish sports jackets worn with straight-leg jeans and medium heels. Hard to tell. The scenario hadn’t appealed to me; the hearing seemed a fair way off and I had shamefully neglected the matter when ‘Maureen Hennessy’ hove into view.

Now, the Aarons case seemed to have possibilities to line up with Joan’s lateral thinking. I convinced myself that this was the way of it. Tommy’s accuser, or an accomplice of hers, had cooked up the strategy to deflect me from my obligation to Tommy. It had bloody nearly worked. I only had two days now to turn up something useful on Liz Richards. I went to bed full of resolve and purpose which an empty bed only intensified.

The next day I swung into action. I put messages on the answering machines containing veiled hints to the caller that I was onto her and that I was going to see that she’d suffer penalties under the several laws she’d broken. I’d torn up the last vast ream of faxed newsprint and turned the machine off. Now I scrabbled around in the office rubbish bin, thankfully unemptied, and recovered the top sheet which, of course, contained the number of the sending machine. I wrote out a message in block capitals using a thick marking pen:

HARDY TO YOU. I KNOW WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT. SEND AS MUCH CRAZY SHIT AS YOU LIKE, IT’LL ALL HELP TO HANG YOU.

I phoned Tommy, told him I was sorry about my slackness and promised him I’d work around the clock. I then set about a proper surveillance of and enquiry into Liz Richards and her flatmate, one Marion Jacobi. Ms Jacobi was tall, slender and red-headed. The brief I’d been given by Tommy-’mannish sports coats, etc’-was very misleading. That night she wore a drop-dead, knee-length black silk dress, high heels and a white jacket. She and Liz Richards, who was attractive in a heavyish way, met two very attentive men for dinner at a Bondi fish restaurant, pushed on for a frisky drink at a club in Edgecliff and wound up in Potts Point being squired through a huge security gate into an apartment block that looked like something out of old Hollywood with a touch of old Morocco. I went home confused.

One of the strange things about these harassment matters is that the accused and the accuser usually continue to work together. It’s as if they’re bound together by the matter at issue and neither can surrender any ground. Liz Richards went to work and stayed there all day. You can’t watch two places at once efficiently, but it wasn’t far from Tommy’s offices in Bondi Junction to the Richards’ flat in Paddington and, as far as I could tell, Marion Jacobi spent the day inside.