Peter Corris - The Big Drop

I put Cleo Laine on the stereo and thought about it. Reg ‘Woolfie’ Holland was one of the shonkiest operators in my shonky trade. He’d had a couple of convictions way back, but had kept his nose clean long enough to get a licence. I had never heard anything complimentary about his competence or honesty, and there’re not many people you can say that about. He’d used Rusty and Stafford as leg men before I knew, and now I could smell one of the oldest scams in the book-they’d probably been doing it in Pompeii.

It was getting late and the four or five minutes dancing with ‘Bomber’, plus the tension had tired me; on the other hand the wine had relaxed me. A hundred and twenty-five bucks gets you a twenty-four-hour-day if need be. I finished the wine, resisted another glass, and went upstairs to get my burglar’s suit on.

‘Woolfie’s’ office was a hole-in-the-wall in Surry Hills, as far as you can get from the fashionable coffee bars and still be in the locality. I remembered a heated discussion I’d had there with ‘Woolfie’ a few years back when he’d attempted to barge in on a case of mine. Blows hadn’t quite been struck but voices had been raised. Out of habit I’d noticed ‘Woolfie’s’ set-up and hadn’t been impressed. It had looked like an easy nut to crack, and it was; there was a lane at the back, a brick fence and a window that was child’s play. ‘Woolfie’ shared the space with Terry Collins, Hair Restoration and Scalp Revitalisation-Satisfaction Guaranteed and Chloe Smith, Literary Agent.

The office was a two-room affair both smelling of ‘Woolfie’s’ sixty-a-day cigarette habit. The answering machine was the only concession to style. The filing cabinets were an insult to a man who can open boxing gym lockers and back windows. I was thumbing through the files within seconds while holding a pencil torch in my teeth. Holland’s files were a mess, but like all of us self-employed types he had to keep some sort of record so that the taxation office wouldn’t immure him. The Carla Cummings file was a model of its kind. It opened with notes on a meeting between Cummings and ‘Woolfie’ and his engagement to investigate an accusation against Joseph Thackeray which was made in an anonymous letter to the author. A photocopy of the letter was enclosed, several copies in fact. The letter was undated, but the first Cummings-Holland meeting was six weeks back. Carbon copies of ‘ Woolfie’s’ reports were enclosed; they were all like the sheet I’d seen in Rusty’s notebook. One thing was sure, ‘Woolfie’ hadn’t written them unless he’d been going to night classes since I’d last seen him. I’d have bet anything though that he had written the original anonymous letter to set up the classic blackmail situation-get yourself hired and charge top dollar to investigate a threat that comes from yourself. Depending on how you play it you can spin it out as long as you like and, with a bit of finesse, wind it up so that everybody’s happy. ‘Woolfie’ had milked it for three thousand already. It’s an oldie but goodie; some people in the game used to regard it as almost legal.

I checked by pecking a character or two on the office Olivetti, but even ‘Woolfie’ wasn’t dumb enough to type the letter in the office. It was done on an upright electric, not the sort of thing he’d be likely to have at home. Proof, that’s the problem with exposing this sort of deal. I took one of the photocopies, leaving three, and went out the way I’d come. I went down the lane the other way and walked along the street onto which Holland’s office fronted to where I’d left the Falcon outside an instant printing shop.

I slept on it and sat down with coffee and strong light the next morning to look at the letter:

DEAR CARLA CUMMINGS

Your agent Mr Thackeray is a crook. He is robbing you blind. Have you made a will? He is conspiring with other parties to rob you even after you are dead. And that may not be long.

A friend.

Some friend. I stared at the lines on the photocopy paper until they blurred. I made coffee and drank it and poured wine and drank that too. The Singing Gulls was sitting, unopened, on the table and I looked idly at the beginning:

Kelly’s hopes soared as the cloud of dust on the horizon took firmer shape. She knew it would be Mark and that soon she would feel him holding her and her white silk dress would be grimy from his dust and sweat and that she wouldn’t care…

I almost gagged and slammed the book down on top of the note. Its straight edge defined something I hadn’t seen before-the original letter had been trimmed by a paper guillotine, possibly to remove a watermark. The guillotine blade must have had a nick out of it or a wobble because there was an irregularity in the trimmed edge. ‘Woolfie’s’ photocopy was A4 size, but had originally been on a sheet twice that size which had been halved by a guillotine stroke. Same nick or wobble.

I sat back and drank some more wine. Dumb ‘Woolfie’. Two pairs of scissors and he’d have had no problems. That set me thinking about paper guillotines and that train of thought led directly to the instant printing place across the road from Holland’s office. Dumb, but that dumb?

One blade stroke through a sheet of quarto in the print shop showed me that ‘Woolfie’ had fouled up. No point in wasting time. I went across the street and went up to the office of Reginald Holland, Private Enquiries, to make my private accusations. ‘Woolfie’ was in his shirt sleeves, which were dirty as the whole surface of him and many surfaces round about are dirty from his cigarette ash. His face was prune-like from trying to function through the fug and his dark hair was thin and defeated-looking. But ‘Woolfie’ is big and bulky, and he uses the bulk to intimidate when he can. I hadn’t knocked and he looked annoyed.

‘Piss off, Hardy.’

‘Don’t be like that ‘Woolfie’, we’ve got things to talk about.’

‘Yeah, like why you belted up the “Bomber”.’

‘The “Bomber’s” not even a Tiger Moth anymore, you know that.’

‘I’m busy, Hardy, I don’t need your crummy jokes this time of the day, or anytime.’

‘Busy at what?’

He glared at me and lit another cigarette from the stub of the last. His teeth were as brown as his fingers and the air was like in a billiard room at midnight. I didn’t want to spend anymore time with him than I had to. I took the sheets of paper out and smoothed them on his desk top.

‘Oldest one around, Holland, someone used it on Mae West when she was a girl. How’d you get yourself fixed up to do the investigation?’

What passed across his face almost made me feel sorry for him; it was a ‘ Oh no, caught again!’ look combined with a flicker of hope that I didn’t have the proof and maybe a bit of bluster coming up.

‘You used the paper cutter across the road on the note and the copies, sport-that puts you right in it.’ I blew on my palm. ‘There goes your licence. What’s a three thousand dollar fraud worth these days? Couple of years?’

He put down his cigarette, dropped the hand to a drawer, slid it open and pointed a dusty-looking. 38 at me. I laughed.

‘Don’t be silly ‘Woolfie’. I don’t want you. I’ll take the money out of your hide if I have to, but I don’t want you.’

The gun wavered and he put it down and picked up the cigarette again-easier to kill yourself than someone else.

‘What d’you want?’ he croaked.

‘Whoever put you up to it. Whoever wrote the reports and stands to gain. Straight deal-you tell me and I don’t tell anyone how naughty you’ve been.’

He groaned. ‘She’ll kill me.’

We went across the hall to Chloe Smith’s office, and as soon as ‘Woolfie’ came in, with me manful and commanding by his shoulder, she knew that her latest dream was a fizzer. She was a redhead, redder now than she had been once, and the dye job had hardened her features. Her thin face was beaky and aggrieved despite the touched up brightness of her eyes and lips. She looked at ‘Woolfie’ as if she was seeing him as he was for the first time.