Peter Corris - Burn and Other Stories

When I got home I made a toasted sandwich, poured a glass of cask white and sat down with a ballpoint and paper to try to figure out what I had. The one glass became two and then three and four before I reached any conclusions. Four-glass conclusions don’t always mean very much, but I called a few people I knew in the journalism business and picked their brains about Peter Drewe. As a four-glass conclusion, this one was shaping up pretty well.

After making two phone calls, one to Madeline Ozal’s agent and another to Peter Drewe, I spent the morning in the Mitchell Library and then walked to Darlinghurst. I buzzed Peter Drewe’s flat and he answered immediately. He met me at his door and suggested that we go up on the roof. It was a mild day, two o’clock in the afternoon, and he had a six-pack of Coopers in his hands. I agreed. We sat on upturned terracotta garden pots and looked out over the city skyline. Drewe ripped the tops off two bottles and handed one to me.

‘Cheers.’ He drank and wiped his mouth. I realised that it wasn’t his first drink of the day by a long shot.

I sipped the beer. ‘It was your idea, the biography of Maddy, wasn’t it?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Her agent. You made the approach. You’ve got a reputation as a political journalist. This is a bit out of your usual territory, wouldn’t you say?’

He shrugged loosely. ‘Saw the chance to make a buck.’

‘I don’t think so. Your mother died three months ago. A week later you made contact with Madeline Ozal. Your colleagues report on a personality change — from being a hot-shot political reporter, rooting everything in sight, you became detached, almost ascetic.’

‘Bullshit.’ He lifted his bottle. ‘Is this being ascetic?’

‘You’re under pressure, son. Why don’t you screw Maddy?’

‘Who says I don’t?’

‘She implied it.’

‘OK. So what?’

I produced the ivory case and opened it. ‘I found it in Maddy’s aunt’s room. She’s missing, but she tore the place apart looking for this.’

He drained his stubby and opened another. ‘Go on.’

‘You and Maddy went to see Isabel Ozal. Whatever you said to her caused her to leave her husband. She said she was in love with another man.’

He smiled. ‘She must have weighed close to a hundred kilos.’

‘Yes. I think she was lying. About now, not about then. I think she had an affair with Ernest Macquarie, her brother-in-law.’

‘Proof?’

‘I have some, of a kind.’

‘Tell me. That’s what you were hired for.’

I shook my head. ‘First, you tell me what you found when your mother died.’ He was opening and closing the catch of the ivory case. The clicking seemed to have a mesmeric effect on him. ‘One of these,’ he said. ‘Identical to this. Except that the rose was inside. That was typical of Valerie. Isabel might lose her rose, but not Val.’

‘So, you discovered a connection between Macquarie and your mother. Who’s your father, Peter?’

His smile was bleak. ‘She told me she didn’t know. She told me that when I was too young to understand. Later, when I was old enough to understand and saw the way she lived, I believed her.’

‘Kemal Ozal knew your mother. He called her “that terrible woman”. Isabel had made a collection of her articles which she destroyed when she left. What did you say to her?’

He drained his second stubby and reached for a third. His hands were shaking and he had trouble pulling the tab. I took the bottle, opened it, and handed it to him. ‘Nothing, really,’ he said. ‘When Maddy was out of the room I told her that I knew everything. I mentioned the silver rose. I was bluffing. She didn’t react at all. That’s when…’

‘That’s when you decided that you might need to apply a little extra pressure. Me.’

He nodded and took a long pull on the bottle.

‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘You’ve spent three months taping Maddy’s reminiscences of the dopey films she’s worked on and the idiot actors she’s fucked because you wanted to find out-’

‘Whether we had the same father and who killed him. Right.’

‘But you didn’t learn anything.’

‘Not much. Her mother was a very good-looking woman, like Isabel must have been. That seems to have been their stock in trade. I’ve got a theory that they were both part-time whores, but no proof. Ernest Macquarie was a failure. He called himself a playwright but he never had a play produced. I checked with the Theatre Guild. He wrote advertising copy when he wasn’t drinking, probably when he was, too.’

‘You shouldn’t be so hard on him,’ I said. ‘I think he was your dad.’

He glared at me drunkenly and pushed back the lank, dark hair that had fallen into his face. ‘I was afraid of it,’ he muttered.

‘Because you’re in love with Maddy?’

‘Right. Fuck it. What’s your evidence?’

‘It’s not evidence. You don’t even have to listen.’

‘I have to know.’

I told him then about the collection of radio play scripts I’d seen in the Mitchell Library. They’d been published by a small, now defunct press under the name ‘E. Mack,’ but the library had identified Macquarie as the author. The Silver Roses was about a man who had a wife and two mistresses, one of them his wife’s sister. The wife knew nothing. The mistresses knew about the wife but not about each other. Separately, each threatened to kill him if he slept with anyone other than her and his wife. The Lothario in the play liked games. He gave each of the women a silver rose and the play revolved around the danger to him when one of these roses got lost or found, I forget which, compromisingly for him.

Drewe listened in silence. When I finished he said, ‘It sounds stupid.’

I stood up. ‘I’m no critic, but I thought it was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read.’

‘You think Isabel found out about Valerie and killed him along with the wife?’

‘Possibly. Or each one found out about the other and they did it together. Valerie’s article could have been written to protect them by putting the blame on the wife. We’ll never know.’

‘What about the ticket from Adelaide? What’s the significance of that?’

I shrugged. ‘What does it matter?’

Two days later they fished Mrs Ozal out of the harbour. I used my contacts to get a look at the autopsy report. Her stomach was full of booze and pills and salt water. In the language of the report, they found a small silver rose in one of her ‘body cavities’.

‹‹Contents››

Wilbur Hartwell was a star announcer on a top-rating radio station until his heart attack a few years back. He took his golden handshake and went fishing the way so many men do. He was back in Sydney looking for a job within a year.

‘It drove me crazy,’ he told me over an illicit (for him) beer one night in the Toxteth. ‘Catching fish. What’s the point?’

‘You should have eaten them,’ I said. ‘Nothing better for the heart.’

‘I did eat them. I ate the bloody things till I couldn’t stand the sight of them. By the way, how’s your cholesterol, Cliff?’

‘Low,’ I said. ‘Likewise my fat to body weight ratio, blood pressure and resting pulse rate. I had a checkup a couple of months ago.’

Wilbur, plump and rosy-faced, sighed. ‘How do you do it?’

‘Nothing to do with me. My ancestors did it. The way I live, I should be a hypertense, twitching wreck-or dead.’

That exchange had taken place six months back.

Wilbur, a friend of Cyn, my ex-wife, who somehow stuck on after Cyn and I broke up, settled into a job managing Radio 2IC. Funded from a thousand different sources, espousing of a thousand causes, 2IC tapped into a deep well of talent and called itself ‘the voice of the inner city’. I started listening when Wilbur took over the station. I liked the chat and the music. I was surprised when Charlie MacMillan got a regular evening spot. MacMillan was a sports commentator turned general know-all. He was a born-again Christian, a political reactionary and a racist. Trouble was, he could be funny, in a beer ‘n’ prawns kind of way, and he did have a knack for getting people who should have known better to argue with him on air.