Peter Corris - Deal Me Out

‘Well, what do we know about Blackheath?’

She looked across at me. Her face was an interesting colour under the amber street lights. Her eyes seemed very dark and her teeth very white. ‘Are you working on your car case or looking for Bill, with me?’

‘It’s a nice point. Does it really matter? You’ve got the picture now. The other people looking for him are a hell of a lot rougher than me.’

‘That’s true. Let me think for a minute.’

‘How can you think? You haven’t got a cigarette.’

That earned me a smile; she proceeded to pollute my personal space. After a few puffs, she threw the cigarette out the window. Her sunglasses had slid down across her eyes from their perch on top of her head, and she pushed them back again. They took some of the fringe up and I saw the worry line again.

‘I’ll do a deal with you?’

‘I feel like one of your brothers again-the dumbest and littlest one.’

‘I’ll tell you about Blackheath if you’ll come up there with me.’

‘Your deals are all the same. I suppose I should be glad the terms haven’t got worse.’

She smiled at me with her white teeth, and I did the best I could in return with my yellowed fangs. ‘Okay. Deal. We’ll go first thing in the morning.’

‘No. We’ll go now.’

I dropped Erica on the smart side of Centennial Park and drove home to Glebe to prepare for the trip to the mountains. It was late and I was tired, but after the suburban people-and-property work I’d been doing of late, the search for William Mountain was a change and a challenge. I put on old jeans and boots, and tossed a bush jacket into the car along with a torch and a spotlight I could rig to the battery-all probably a city man’s overreaction to the harsh demands of the country.

Erica arrived in a taxi, and slung her bag into the back seat as she got in beside me. The bag clinked.

‘He might need something to drink.’

‘Probably,’ I said. ‘So might I.’

I hadn’t driven to the Blue Mountains for years, and I was surprised to see how easy they’d made it. The freeway runs you smoothly out to Parramatta, and it’s plain sailing from there to the beginnings of the climb at Springwood. Erica was silent for the first part of the trip, but she opened up after Springwood and told me about life with Mountain-the drinking bouts, blocks and euphoric breakthroughs that seem to be part of the writerly life. She spoke of camping trips that sounded more like fun, and filled me in on Blackheath.

‘There’s an old house up there,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure who actually owns it. It’s half falling down. Bill took me there to stay once. It’s a great spot-clean air, you know?’

She’d created enough fug in the car to prompt a rude remark, but I resisted the temptation. I just said I’d heard about clean air.

‘You get up in the morning and really feel alive. Feel like going for a long walk, not like in the city.’

‘Can you find the house in the dark?’

She looked back at the tangle of glass, metal and electrical wire on the back seat and smiled. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. The place is in the town, not half way up a mountain. There’s street lights. Mind you, there’s no light in the house except kerosene lamps.’ She paused, maybe to enjoy a memory. ‘D’you think he’ll be there?’

I blinked a few times to get rid of a momentary blindness caused by some passing high-beam headlights. ‘What do I know? I’m the guy who said Mai wouldn’t be in the pub tonight, remember?’

‘You did a good job there though.’

It was the first bit of praise I’d earned from her. ‘Thanks. We’ve got a few worries with this.’

She lit a new cigarette. ‘You tell me yours.’

‘First, why did Mountain mention Blackheath to Mai? It seems indiscreet.’

She blew smoke at the windscreen. ‘And?’

‘The opposition. What’ve they made of it? I haven’t been up here for years. What’s Blackheath like now-biggish?’

‘No, smallish, especially now-not many holiday people around.’

‘That’s what I was afraid of. If the car lifters went up there to flush him out the odds are that they’d be able to do it. He’s a pretty distinctive bloke, even without the big beard. What’d he be, six foot two?’

‘Three,’ she said. ‘He’s six foot three.’ She fell silent after that. I thought what an incongruous pair they’d make, but of course, that could’ve been half the fun.

We went through Katoomba somewhere around midnight. The moon was nearly full in a clear sky that seemed to have twice as many stars in it as it does over the city. I stopped on the outskirts of the town to stretch my legs and empty my bladder. I shivered as I stood there in my cotton shirt and unlined jacket. Steam lifted pleasingly from the stream of urine. Like most city people, I like the country in small doses. The light breeze carried tree smells that evoked boyhood memories of holidays in big guest houses with stiff, cold sheets and mountainous plates of toast. I doubt if they serve that much toast these days.

From the road, Blackheath first appeared out of the blackness as a spread of lights to the right. Erica directed me around a few turns of the wide, quiet streets and down to a big corner block where an overgrown garden spilled out over broken fences on two sides. The house was set well back from the street behind high, wild hedges and shrubs that had grown to the size of trees.

I parked further down the street, and we came back quietly on foot. My boots had rubber soles and Erica wore cloth-topped espadrilles with rope soles. She also had a padded jacket, so she probably wasn’t shivering as I was. We were noiseless on the footpath as we walked around two sides of the block. There were no lights showing in the house. I put my mouth close to Erica’s ear and whispered: ‘Where would he put a car?’

She pointed into the backyard. There was a dark hole looming beside an outhouse, which showed grey with strips of peeling paint in the moonlight. I stepped over a rusty gate, took a few shuffles through the knee-high grass and probed the black hole with a torch beam. As I switched on the torch a dog howled and I froze. It was some distance off, but the hair stood up on the back of my neck just the same. The light showed that the grass had been flattened by a vehicle and by some comings and goings on foot, but the hole, between the outhouse and what I now saw was a thick, sprawling blackberry patch, was deep and empty.

I went back to the gate and shook my head at Erica’s upturned, enquiring face. Following Hardy’s first law of entering strange houses at night, we went around to the front gate. It creaked open, and then we were pushing through undergrowth and straggles of privet up to the front porch. The smell from the house was so strong that it was a wonder it wasn’t catchable from the street. The scents of the trees and bushes must have concealed it.

Erica’s grip on my arm almost cut off the circulation. I eased her hand away, turned the knob and opened the door. The stench was like a combination of rotting meat and of a science lab in which something had gone very wrong. I’d smelled it before, in Malaya when the bodies had lain in the sun in jungle clearings and the smell of putrefaction had soaked the still hot air. This wasn’t quite as bad, but it was bad enough.

The torch beam showed a long front room with a fireplace in which a fire had been thoroughly set. The furniture was standard for such places, a mixture of styles and periods, mostly sagging, all looking comfortable.

‘Bedrooms.’ Erica pointed to the doors off to the right and left. I looked in at the right but the double bed was undisturbed; the other room was empty, and though the smell had penetrated, neither room was its source.