Peter Corris - Casino

The intercom buzzed and I shoved the notebook in a drawer and pressed the button.

‘Mr Carstairs and Mr Ralston are here, sir.’

‘Send them in.’

I was standing when the pair entered, both looking apprehensive. Honest employment in their line of work is hard to come by in a recession. Both did a double-take when they saw me.

‘Jesus,’ Carstairs said.

Ralston groaned. ‘Fuck me. This is the sack, then?’

Both wore neat suits, were well-groomed and bright-eyed. But it’s my belief that most of the evil in the world is perpetrated by men in suits. ‘I don’t think so, boys,’ I said. ‘Have a seat and let’s talk’

Stocky Carstairs unbuttoned his jacket as he sat down. Skinny, balding Ralston looked the more uptight. He sat and fingered his moustache.

‘As far as I’m concerned you two were just doing your job last night. Did it pretty well, too. If I’d known this was coming up,’ I waved at the office, ‘I’d have offered you some money to lay off me. Just to see your reaction.’

Ralston stiffened and I remembered where I’d seen him before. He’d been a Homicide detective back in the days before they split up the special squads. Fatter then and with more hair. I couldn’t remember the case or what our contact had been like. I wondered if he did.

‘We’d have knocked you back,’ Carstairs said. ‘Happens all the time. The job’s too good to risk it for something like that.’

I nodded, swivelled around and opened the bar fridge. I took out three stubbies of Toohey’s Draught and put them on the desk. I opened them and slid two towards Ralston and Carstairs.

‘Let’s have a drink to get this on a friendly footing.’

Carstairs reached for his bottle but Ralston shook his head. ‘Not allowed to drink on duty.’

I said ‘Cheers’ and drank. ‘Like when you were on the force, Mr Ralston.’

He nodded, ‘I remember you, too, Mr Hardy.’

‘We didn’t have any trouble did we?’

‘No.’

‘OK. You don’t have to drink if you don’t want to, but this isn’t any kind of a test. I’m the boss here for a while and if I say you can drink, you can drink.’

‘Right.’ Carstairs took a long swig.

Ralston gazed at the open bottle with burning eyes and I saw his whole history in that look. The lost weight, the precise movements, the raw nerves, the restrained emotions. Poor bastard. He was a dried-out drunk and I felt sorry for putting temptation in his way. I took a bottle of mineral water out and passed it across to him, sliding the beer towards Carstairs.

He took it gratefully and drank.

‘How did you get along with Galvani?’

The bad moment, the worst of moments, having passed for him, Ralston relaxed a little. ‘He was shaping up well. Bright bloke. Bit young for it maybe. Len had his doubts, but I thought he was ok.

‘His mind wasn’t on the job,’ Carstairs said. ‘Simple as that. He did what he had to do and did it pretty well, but he could’ve been a bloody sight better if he’d given it a hundred per cent.’

I drank some more beer and Carstairs did the same. Ralston sipped at his drink. ‘He was still working on a couple of cases from before taking over here. I’m afraid I’ll be doing the same.’

‘More to it than that, I’d say.’ Carstairs drained his stubby.

‘Either of you got any ideas on who killed him, or why?’

‘What is this, Hardy?’ Ralston burst out. ‘Are you really the boss here, or just investigating Galvani’s death?’

‘Easy, Keith,’ Carstairs murmured.

‘Good question,’ I said. “The answer is both, and I want some help from you two. Help me with this and I’ll give you a very big rap to the bloke who takes over from me.’

The two exchanged nods and Carstairs reached for the second bottle while Ralston worked on his moustache and the mineral water.

‘I spotted someone last night-a short, dark guy getting into a silver-grey Mercedes outside. This was when I was leaving. I only got a glimpse of him and I didn’t get a good sight of the licence plate-KI, might have been an F or an E, and there was a zero in the numbers.’

‘Not much to go on,’ Ralston said. ‘You couldn’t run an RTA computer check on that.’

‘I know. But does it ring any bells?’

Carstairs made a movement as if to loosen his tie, but he checked it. It was odds-on he was an ex-cop, too. He had a lot of the moves. ‘Shit, Mercs are like fleas on a dog around here, and dark, stocky guys’re about the same. Still, we can keep an eye out, right, Keith?’

Ralston nodded. He looked worried and I wondered if that was just a facet of his battle with the booze or if another talk with him might pay dividends. A 4 p.m. start was ideal for someone in his condition-it’d get him past the six o’clock horrors and with any luck leave him tired enough to sleep when he knocked off. I thanked them both for their cooperation and they got up and moved towards the door. Carstairs buttoned his jacket and swung around with his hand just touching the knob. Another old cop trick. ‘That woman with the Beretta…’

‘She won’t be around.’

He nodded and I could see that he was looking at the fresh scratch on my face, trying to read something into it. He and Ralston trooped out, looking a lot more comfortable than when they had come in. That was good. They were allies of a kind, and I needed all the support I could get. Carstairs’ appraisal prompted me to consider my quick answer and led to the thought that Vita Drewe could be one of those women who harassed and pursued those who had offended them-made late night phone calls, heaved bricks through car windows, poisoned pets. I might have deserved it, but I didn’t need it, not now.

As I’d expected, the casino job was routine followed by more routine. It was a fairly quiet night I was told, and I walked through my various duties without any difficulty. My visit to the cash collection room was brief. The sight of so much money, even though it was what they called a low count on a quiet night, was numbing. I had a very acceptable light meal in the executive dining room and before knocking off at 1.30 a.m., dog-tired, I checked with Ralston and Carstairs. No sightings of the Merc and their discreet, they claimed, enquiries hadn’t yielded anything. I’d already taken possession of a Visa card with a credit limit greater than all my personal cards lumped together. Now I was handed the keys and security remote controller for a fully-fuelled, current model, maroon Holden Commodore. A long-term Falcon man, I felt like a traitor driving it away, but after a kilometre or so I decided that the only thing I didn’t like about it was the colour.

Back in Glebe, I squeezed the Commodore into a parking space-an action certain to anger my neighbours. One car per house was the unspoken rule. Inside, I approached the answering machine with trepidation-half-wanting a message from Glen, fearing one from Vita. The only message was from the video store requesting the return of Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives, now long overdue. I’d watched it with Glen and I seemed to recall that her response had been strange, not nearly as accepting of Woody’s propositions as usual. I’d put it down to a reaction to all the publicity over the split with Mia Farrow and the molestation charges. Now, I wasn’t so sure, and it all seemed to have taken place in another life.

The cat reminded me that some things never change. I opened one of the tins Glen had bought and it sniffed at it and mewed, probably protesting at the drop in standards from the supposedly-fit-for-humans tuna.

‘That was an aberration,’ I told it, ‘in many more ways than one.’

It ate about half of what I’d doled out, leaving the rest for the cockroaches, before jumping out the window without so much as a grateful leg rub, I trudged up the stairs and fell into bed with Scott’s notebook pushed under the pillow. I fell asleep with the bedside light still on and dreamed that I was working in a Las Vegas casino, wearing a maroon tuxedo with a green ruffled shirt. I kept trying to slip into a toilet to remove the clothes but Carstairs and Ralston continually barred my way. Vita Drewe was a topless croupier, swinging her breasts from side to side as she leaned over the roulette wheel. Winners got to cup their hands around her breasts as she shovelled chips at them. Losers were marched away by Ralston and Carstairs. I must have rolled onto my shoulder because I woke up with pain shooting through my arm and neck. I stumbled downstairs for painkillers, thankful that the dream had ended.