Peter Corris - Casino

Her question came out of nowhere. ‘You’ve had a couple of wives, haven’t you, Cliff?’

‘One, and a few near misses. Lucky women.’

‘Scott was a wonderful husband. I thought I was so lucky to have him and I did everything I could to keep him happy and in love with me. I stopped smoking the day after I met him because I knew it disgusted him. I didn’t go around the house in jeans and sloppy joes all the time because I think that makes a man lose interest. He liked to make love in the afternoon, so I… He wanted kids but not a whole houseful like his brothers. When the twins came I thought, How can things go this well…?’

She was close to breaking but she struggled against it. She drank some of her coffee, a brave act in itself, and wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. Businesslike. No fishing for tissues, no props.

‘OK, Gina,’ I said. ‘I’ll do what I can. You’re right about one thing, it could cost a lot of money. But there’s another side you haven’t thought about.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Investigations don’t always turn out the way you expect. I don’t just mean they lead nowhere. Sometimes, things come up people would rather not have known about. Do you know what I’m saying?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘What if this had nothing to do with the casino job? What if it relates to something else, some case, some client?’ I drew in a breath. ‘What if he broke the law, suppressed some evidence, took a bribe? What if he had a girlfriend, or a boyfriend?’

Her eyes went wide with shock, as if she’d caught me pissing on his grave. ‘Scott? You can’t be serious.’

‘It happens, believe me. Do you still want to look into this, Gina?’

She wanted to scream, throw the coffee mug at me, break a few of my dirty windows. I could see it in the line of her jaw and the set of her body. She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. Then she dug into her bag and pulled out a chequebook. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I want you to do. Now, how much do I pay you and how do we proceed from here?’

I opened a drawer in the desk, the one above the deep one where I keep the cask of red wine. I contemplated producing the cask as well as the contract form, but decided against it. I filled out the form and slid it across to her. “You sign that and you pay me $750 now. That’s for five days’ work.’

She scribbled on a cheque. ‘Full-time?’

‘Just about.’

‘I want you to work on it full-time. I want… ‘

‘Gina,’ I said gently. ‘I admire you. It took guts to come here and go through all this shit. You mentioned being realistic before. Well, be realistic now. I’ll do my best. And I’m persistent, remember.’

She forced a smile, tore out the cheque and signed the contract form. I gave her the carbon copy and she folded it and put it away in her bag. Doing the routine things seemed to calm her and I continued the mood by getting out a notebook and jotting down a few details I already knew, like the address of Scott’s office, the registration number of his car and the name of the young woman who worked part-time as his secretary. Gina was in full flight-she gave me details of his bank accounts and a copy of his last tax return along with his passport. Then she produced two sets of keys.

‘These are the keys to his office. The police have looked through it and they gave the keys back to me. He was carrying them when… when they found him.’

I nodded and took the keys. I couldn’t remember when I’d begun a case with such an accumulation of items. She tossed the other set of keys onto the pile.

‘These are for the BMW they gave him. I think it’s in a police pound somewhere or they might have taken it back. I don’t know.’

I handed her back the letter about the insurance, stood and came around the desk. ‘I’ll take care of it. Now you should go home to the kids. How’re you travelling?’

She stuffed the letter in her bag and slung it over her shoulder as she got up. ‘Cab. I’ve got Scott’s car, his real car, but I haven’t felt up to driving yet. I think I will soon. I know I will.’

‘Sure. I’ll come down with you.’

‘No.’ She put her hand on my arm and kissed me on the cheek. “Thank you, Cliff. I’m glad I did this. Goodbye for now.’

She went out and I heard her heels tapping steadily along the old brown linoleum to the stairs. The building is especially quiet on Mondays when some of the other tenants, like the osteopath and the grief counsellor, take a day off. A second-hand bookstore specialising in military history recently opened on the same level as me at the other end of the hall, but the proprietor’s hours appeared to be as erratic and unpredictable as most military campaigns. I went past the closed doors and down the stairs to the street. I bought myself a proper lunch in a cafe and planned to eat it in a leisurely fashion as befitted a man who’d been paid for five days’ work in advance. But I had no appetite and didn’t do much more than push the food around on the plate and nibble at the bread.

Back in the office, I rinsed the coffee mugs and filled one of them with red wine. An hour later it was empty and I had a few pages of notes.

I’d rung Parker again, told him of my new-found interest and learned the name of the detective in charge of the case-Detective Sergeant Peter Carboni. The BMW Scott had been given by the casino was in a police compound at Leichhardt. I got the name of the officer in charge, rang him, explained my interest and got permission to take the car away upon producing my contract with Mrs Galvani.

From the day he had set up as a PEA, Scott had worked out of an office above a real estate agency in Lilyfield. He claimed that the location put him in an ideal position to go north, south, east and west as required. I suppose it did. Like me, he shared his office building with others, but his co-tenants were a solicitor, an accountant and a literary agent, all battlers. Scott and the literary agent, when they could afford it, used the secretarial services of Vita Drewe, an intense young woman who occupied a tiny office in the building and freelanced for all and sundry. I rang her number and got her answering machine. I left the message that I’d be coming to the office soon and hoped to talk to her.

I drove to Lilyfield in the midafternoon, trying to think of all this as a job, trying not to think of Scott as anything but a part of an equation that might or might not be solved. Some hope. I parked in the space the real estate agency declared, without justification given the layout, was for the exclusive use of its clients, and went up a narrow flight of stairs to the office level. A better set-up than mine-air-conditioning for one thing, newish carpet and clean windows.

Something seemed to be happening in all the offices-machines clacked, phones rang and people walked around. I knew why I preferred the semi-derelict building I was in.

Vita Drewe’s cupboard-sized office was closed and locked. I went past the literary agency, where a photocopier was spewing out pages, to Scott’s door and unlocked it. The door had ‘Scott A. Galvani, B. Juris., Lie. Pvt. Enq. Agent’ on it in gold lettering. I wondered what the A in his name stood for. I went into the office and saw the signs of a thorough, legitimate search-filing cabinet drawers left slightly open, books disturbed, waste paper bin up on the desk. I leafed through the neatly labelled manila folders containing the contract forms, investigation notes and relevant documents. Like the rest of us, Scott kept minimal records, sticking to the letter of the law but preserving large areas of the client’s confidentiality. His final reports were models of typing and layout.

I ran through from ‘Allenby-missing daughter’ to ‘Williamson-advising on business security arrangements’, taking out files at random and not finding anything helpful. I hadn’t really expected to. If Scott had had secrets he wouldn’t have kept them here. Still, it was useful to take a look at his methods and to glance through some of his notes. As far as I could see, he ran a neat, economical operation, charging reasonable expenses, writing accurate reports. He stepped on official toes from time to time-the police, statutory authorities, municipal bodies-exactly as I would have expected. You can’t pry without offending somebody. I did notice that all the files were of cases concluded, one way or another.