Peter Corris: The Washington Club

She handed me a card with a couple of addresses and phone numbers written on it. I was being given my marching orders and I took them.

I lost my bearings when I left the building. I’d hardly noticed the garden on the way in but now it seemed to be much bigger than I’d thought, a maze of paths with some pretty tall trees blotting out the skyline and robbing me of any sense of direction. Two paths led back to the building, another ended in a paved courtyard. When I finally made it to the gate it wasn’t the gate I’d come in through. I didn’t care. An electric button opened it and I was out into the sort of air I could afford to breathe.

I was in a small lane beside the apartment block and with the water now in view I knew my way back to the car. I turned into the right street about seventy metres from the car. Bushes grew thickly in the front gardens and overhung the pavement so that I had to bend low to avoid them. At one point I stepped out onto the road to miss the heavy branches. There were a few cars parked along the street and one of them suddenly roared into life. The driver gunned the engine and went into a tight three-point turn for which there really wasn’t room. The noise and the violence of the manoeuvre took my attention. The car, a green Honda Accord, jumped the kerb and almost rammed a brick wall. It lurched back, tyres screaming, clipped a parked 4WD and roared off down the street.

I stood stock still, trying to get the number, but the light was wrong, acrid tyre smoke was hanging in the air and my eyes aren’t what they once were. I reached my car and turned to reconstruct what had happened. It wasn’t hard to do. The green car had been positioned so as to watch the main gate of the apartment block. The driver hadn’t seen me until I’d stepped off the pavement and then he’d got going fast. I tried to visualise the numberplate but couldn’t do it. MRA, maybe. I hadn’t seen it long enough. Then I realised that I had seen the driver’s face. Only a glimpse, not much more than an impression. I couldn’t put a name to it, but I knew I’d seen that face before. Somehow, in some context or other, it was on file in my memory.

It had been a little over a year since Glen Withers left me to marry a policeman. I’d heard they’d both been promoted and posted to Newcastle, which was nice for them. Glen was a Newcastle girl. I missed a lot of things about the relationship-the sex of course, the companionship, the laughs. On the material level I missed having Glen’s house at Dudley to go to when the only place to be was at the beach and, for a Maroubra boy, that’s just about all the time. I was still in Glebe with the mortgage almost paid off but I’d need a big loan to get the house back into decent condition. Years of neglect had taken their toll. It was worth doing, the place was an asset, but talk about the economic advantages of borrowing money has always confused me, so I just sit pat.

I drove home to Glebe, glad as always to be getting onto what I considered the right side of the harbour and trying not to think of the face I’d glimpsed in that brief blur of action. The only way to trigger memories like those is to think of something else and let it happen. I tried, but the only other thing I could think of was the face and body of Claudia Fleischman, her poise and control. It seemed unlikely that a bell would ring in my head while I was thinking along those lines. I turned on the radio, listened to Mike Carlton being nicer to a politician than I would have been, and ended up not thinking about anything.

My street has changed over the years. Harry Soames, with whom I had an amiable antagonism over music, car parking, drainage and almost everything else, moved out-or, as he put it, ‘up’, to Gladesville. I hope he enjoys the flight path. A few big houses that were divided up into flats occupied by students and dope-dealers have become family residences once again. Fewer motorbikes, more parking space, lots more Illawarra flame trees. My house has just about become the shabbiest in the street, with gaps in its fence, rust in the balcony iron and sagging guttering. A coat of paint would do wonders, they tell me. But if I painted the house the cracked path and lifting tiles in front would look even more daggy and the overgrown garden would lose what I think of as its charm. So I sit pat.

I eased the Falcon into a space between a Celica and a Commodore and cut Mike off in mid-sentence. The mail jutted from the letterbox and I grabbed it as I went past, stepping instinctively clear of the loosest of the tiles. Inside, the familiar smells and sounds told me who and what I was, as they always did. This was why I stayed. The bedroom held memories of my ex-wife Cyn, and Helen Broadway and Glen Withers; Annie Parker had slept in the spare room and the thought of her death from a hot-shot still gave me a pang. I’d killed Soldier Szabo by accident in the living room and O’Fear had played his last card out in the backyard. How could I sell all that to a business consultant?

After Glen left I went a few rounds with Johnnie Walker and Jim Beam until we decided to call it square. Nowadays I didn’t drink hard liquor until after six and I had a flexible limit-three to five drinks. I also didn’t rush it as in the old days, when the next thing my hand would touch after the front door was the cap on a bottle. I flicked through the mail which held no interest and checked the answering machine. The only calls were about a late video and a client explaining why his cheque was a little bit short of a full settlement.

The cat left not long after Glen and I could hardly blame it. It had to be able to do better than Vegemite toast and Weetbix. With the cat gone the mice asserted themselves. I kept hoping that another cat would adopt me the way the last one did. It had wandered in one day and treated the place as its own within minutes, pawing at the window it wanted left open and indicating where it would like the food put down. But so far no takers. The strays didn’t know what they were missing-I’d resolved to treat the lucky cat better, feed it regularly and give it a name.

I took the video out of the machine and restored it to its case. I put the borrowing card on top of the case and picked up a newspaper and a couple of books around the sitting room. I opened the back door and let some air in, also some leaves. Delaying tactics, feints, duckings and weavings. Effective. It was fully 6.30 when I made the drink-a Scotch and ice with a little water. I sat down in the kitchen, reached out to turn on the radio and the name of the driver flashed into my mind. The arrival of the information was so sudden and clear I almost dropped my glass-Harvey Henderson, better known to the police and his few friends as ‘Haitch’ Henderson because of the alliteration and because he spent some formative years in Pentridge Gaol’s notorious H Division.

Henderson didn’t look like a tough guy. He was short and stocky with a moon face and long soft brown hair. But the hair hid a half-bitten-off ear and other scars and I’d heard it said he didn’t have an original tooth in his head. He’d lost many of them in fights and bashings and ‘Corky’ Ryan had removed the rest with a pair of pliers when he was trying to get Haitch to tell him something Haitch didn’t know. Corky wasn’t around any more.

Henderson had served time for extortion, armed robbery and attempted murder in Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales. I’d run up against him years before when I’d been hired by a man who operated a dealership specialising in high-price imported cars and who’d been receiving extortion demands and threats to damage his stock. Henderson was behind it and I’d sent one of his minions to hospital. As it happened, Henderson was put away for something else and my client was satisfied. It was a few years back now and I couldn’t believe Haitch had a personal vendetta against me. That matter had been just one of his many sidelines that didn’t pan out. I thought hard, drank some whisky and couldn’t come up with any other connections between me and Henderson. He did anything and everything, from bodyguarding to body-damaging and body-disposal, standover, blackmail, you name it. His presence had to have something to do with the Fleischman case.