Peter Corris - Deal Me Out

‘Where can I find one of those lanterns?’ I realised that I was whispering, and I repeated the question too loudly. There was no need to whisper, no-one was living there with that smell. She opened another door and went down a short corridor to a kitchen that ran across the width of the house. The smell was very strong. Erica used the torch to locate a kerosene lantern on a shelf. She held it out to me and shrugged.

‘I don’t know how they work.’

‘Give us your lighter.’

I lifted the glass, poked at the wick and got the thing lit. The light slowly penetrated the darkness and showed the outlines of the room-sink, table, bench, newspaper-lined shelves, old dresser crammed with enough cracked crockery to serve an orphanage. I inclined my head at the door at the end of the room, and Erica spoke in the same sort of whisper I’d used.

‘Toilet, bathroom, storage room-there’s a series of…’ She made a sloping motion with her hands.

‘Lean-tos?’

She nodded, and I opened the door and lifted the lantern above shoulder height. The kerosene smell helped a little but the stench got stronger in the bathroom and we found him in the storage room. The floor was a mess of paint tins, drop cloths, plumbing fittings and discarded machinery. He was propped up against the far wall and I heard the flies for the first time just as I spotted him. They buzzed as I kicked my way across the floor, rose in an angry cloud and settled. Erica stood stock still in the doorway; then I heard her blunder away in the dark and the sound of her retching and vomiting.

From the arrangement of the floor clutter, I decided that the body had been dragged across the floor and carefully wedged up between a wall and a heavy cupboard. Even by the dim lantern light I could see the dark smears and dried puddles of blood that marked the trail. As I got closer, there was a scurrying on the floor and a couple of rats raced for the darkness of the far corner. I came as close to the figure as I could stomach and raised the lantern. The dead man would have been unrecognisable as to features and not only because one side of the face and skull was collapsed. The rats had done a lot of work. Fingerprints were unlikely but I wasn’t going to have to bother about such things or his dental history. In life he’d been of medium height and stocky build. He wasn’t William Mountain.

I gave Erica the good news, if that’s what you could call it, and helped her to clean up the mess she’d made in the bathroom. Then I prowled around the house trying to find out what had happened. It wasn’t too hard. The man had been killed in a lean-to laundry by several blows to the head with several implements, including a bottle. Then he’d been dragged to the storage room. There was a blood-caked hammer that the flies had visited and lost interest in, along with an implement for manipulating the controls of a combustion stove and the bottle. The bottle had contained Suntory whisky.

‘Who is he?’ Erica fiddled with a cigarette but didn’t light it.

‘Don’t know. My guess is he’s from the car-stealing firm.’

‘Bill killed him?’

‘Looks that way. I’m going to go around and put things back and then we’d better get out of here.’

‘Leave me the torch. I don’t want to sit around in the bloody dark.’ She was getting her nerve back-not that she’d done too badly anyway.

I toured the house looking for signs of Mountain’s presence. There weren’t many: the beds were made, the dishes had been washed, the kerosene fridge was empty and turned off. I found no road maps, no newspaper clippings or note books with indentations I could shade in and read. All I found was the whisky bottle and a book with Mountain’s name in it. I took the book, put the lantern back on the shelf and we found our way out by torchlight.

Erica lit her cigarette as soon as we got through the gate.

‘What now?’

‘Off-as fast as we can.’

I plucked the cigarette from her fingers and took a drag, my first for years. I had to do something to get the taste of death and decay out of my mouth. The cigarette tasted like old dog blanket.

‘We don’t report it?’

I returned the cigarette. ‘How would you like to explain what you were doing in there?’

We didn’t talk much on the drive back to Sydney. Erica smoked a bit and yawned a lot. At Katoomba I asked her if it was Suntory whisky she had in the bag. She shook her head, turned around and rummaged and came up with a flask of Bundaberg rum. We both had a good pull on it, me telling myself it would help keep me alert for the drive. In fact I was alert enough, but discouraged.

Car Stealers Inc. would undoubtedly go looking for their boy before long, if they weren’t at it already. When they found him, Mountain would be in even deeper trouble. If he was the one who’d done the killing, his legal position looked very dodgy. The first few blows could have been in self-defence but the damage had gone way beyond that. By rights it was a police matter, but there were snags in that for me. Bring in the cops and the reporters come in the door behind them. Terry Reeves didn’t need his troubles served up to everyone at breakfast along with a dash of bloody murder.

Apart from that, I felt that I owed something to Erica by this stage. She’d shown guts and persistence in her search for Bill Mountain, as well as some compassion for Mai. I liked her well enough to worry about what might go on behind that fringe now that the Blackheath tip hadn’t paid off.

We were off the freeway and back into the cocoon of the inner west when she spoke up.

‘Won’t you get into trouble if you don’t report it to the police. I mean your licence and everything?’

‘Maybe. But I can handle a little pressure of that sort, or my lawyer can. You have to make your own judgements in this business. One standover man more or less won’t disturb my sleep.’

‘Are you sure that’s what he was?’

‘Pretty sure.’

‘Will you help me? Can I hire you to find Bill?’

‘You can’t hire me, I’m already hired. But he’s still the freshest trail in this mess.’

‘What will you do?’

I gripped the wheel and felt the tiredness grip me. I yawned impolitely. ‘I’m too tired to think now. Maybe I can go back to Mai and squeeze some more out of him. Maybe he has a way of contacting his principals and the information I’ve got now could give me some leverage. I don’t know.’

She huddled against the door and blew her nose violently. ‘I wish he hadn’t killed that man,’ she sniffed. ‘Why would he?’

I didn’t have any answer to that, certainly not at 2.45 am. Death has a draining effect on a normal person and we were both so normal and drained that we went into my house and dumped our bags on the floor without even discussing what we were doing. I showed Erica the plumbing and the spare room, which Hilde had painted and transformed in other ways from the bare cell it once was.

‘Nice room,’ she said.

‘Sleep tight.’

I took a pull on the rum and went to bed with the comforting warmth of the spirit in my mouth and throat.

Before dawn I woke up from a dream in which a man with a bashed-in head was following me round and round an overgrown garden. In the dream I was yelling, and I yelled for real when I stepped over a rusty gate, fell and woke up. Sweat was breaking out on my face as I sat up and instinctively looked to see if I’d woken Helen, but there was no Helen. I was half glad, half sorry for that. I lay back and waited for the sweat to dry; then I went deep under and slept without dreaming or turning over until 9 am.

The kitchen was filled with grey cigarette smoke when I got down there. Judging by the smoke and the butts, Erica had been up for a few hours. She didn’t look tired as she lifted the coffee pot. I nodded and sat down wondering why I wasn’t looking and feeling as good as her.