Peter Corris: The Big Drop

‘You think I was wrong?’

‘You said taking revenge would make you feel better-did it?’

As I spoke, my eye fell on a bright poster on the wall; the burst of colour reminded me of the blowtorch flame and I went cold inside. She considered my question.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Good.’

‘You need treatment for your legs.’

I looked down; from the instant Willie had gone out the window until that moment, the burn hadn’t hurt. I saw that the synthetic material of my socks had singed and hardened, and was sticking to the raw, burnt flesh. It hurt like hell.

‘I know a doctor, better get to him.’

‘I would like to pay the expense, also for your help, Mr Hardy. Thank you.’

She held out her hand and I shook it. Her skin was warm, and there was the same strength in her hand that I’d felt in her arm. She was strong all over and inside as well. She’s the most beautiful thing in the world, I thought, and then I realised that the pain was making me dopey.

‘Okay, Miss Seneka,’ I said. ‘I’ll send you a bill.’

I headed for home, wincing every time I had to use the clutch and brake. At home I could phone my Doctor mate, Ian Sangster, who’d come over and dress my wounds and prescribe some pills I could take with alcohol. Before I got there, though, I stopped at the end of Glebe Point Road, hobbled to the rail and threw the parcel and the S amp;W. 38 as far as I could out into the dark water.

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Nothing was going right; I hadn’t had a client in two weeks and I hadn’t paid a bill for a month. That’s the way you have to look at it in this game-it’s clients balanced against bills. If it ever gets to be clients balanced against bank account I won’t know what to do. My ex-wife, Cyn, once told me that I was a private investigator because I didn’t have the character to starve in a garret. Maybe she was right; anyway she didn’t stick around to starve with me and make it romantic.

My mind was running on romance when the phone rang-maybe this was it.

‘Hardy Investigations.’ I realised I was crooning like Kamahl. ‘Hardy speaking,’ I said gruffly.

‘You sound like two different people.’ The voice was young, female and educated, a winning combination for someone who is more or less the opposite.

‘Not really, I was thinking about two different things at once. I can do that sometimes. How can I help you, Ms…?’

‘You can help me by thinking about just one thing-how I can get my ex-husband to pay me the two hundred thousand dollars he owes me.’

‘It sounds well worth thinking about,’ I said.

‘She said you’d be interested. She also said you were good at your work.’

‘She being?’

‘Kay Fletcher.’

‘Aha.’

‘She said you’d say that too. I’ve got a letter from her for you.’

‘Did she tell you what I’d say to that?’

‘No. She didn’t know. Will you see me?’

Kay Fletcher was a journalist I’d had a brief affair with a few years before. She was based in Canberra then and had moved on and up to New York since. We’d clicked well at first, and then her ambition and my inertia pulled us apart. I’d thought of her often but had not made contact beyond a letter and a card.

My caller’s name was Pauline Angel, and I asked her to come round to my office from her hotel in Double Bay. That gave me time for a quick shave and brush up, and a clearing of the rubbish off the desk and a general rough dusting with a copy of Newsweek.

She was everything her voice had promised; there was New York stamped on her clothes and the city had brushed her Australian voice a bit. I put her age at around thirty, which would have made her a few years younger than Kay and a few more still younger than me. Her class was middle, her intelligence was upper. She handed me the envelope and I put it away in a drawer.

‘Aren’t you going to read it?’

‘Not until I’m wearing my silk pyjamas.’

‘I’m not sure I like that remark; it’s cheap.’

‘You don’t have to like it. I’d be embarrassed to read the letter in front of you-I might laugh or cry. Tell me about the two hundred thousand.’

‘Ben and I split up a year ago, in New York actually. We had an apartment near the park and we sold it-Ben sold it, but it was in both names. I signed the papers. Just over four hundred thousand dollars. Jesus!’ She got a cigarette out of her jacket pocket and lit it. I passed an ashtray across and tried to concentrate on the two hundred grand rather than a few cents worth of cigarette smoke. I didn’t find it easy.

‘You’re legally divorced?’

‘Sure. Ben’s married again. But we didn’t make any legal arrangements about a settlement or anything-it was just understood that the money’d be split fifty-fifty.

‘No two people understand the same when it comes to money. He won’t divvy?’

‘He says it’s all gone. I don’t believe him.’

‘Gone how?’

‘In a shares deal; it’s absurd, he’s an architect, he doesn’t know about shares.’

I could have told her about some people who didn’t know about shares until they found out the hard way, but I didn’t. In my experience, people who’ve lost a lot of money usually have a fair bit left. I took some of hers from her, got her address and the details on the husband, and promised her I’d look into it and report quickly. At one hundred and twenty-five dollars per day-that’s the least I could do.

It was a nice day for a drive, particularly for a drive to Watsons Bay. The address Ms Angel had given me turned out to be for a house overlooking Camp Cove and therefore the city and other expensive and expansive views. I stood outside it for a minute, looking down past the house at the view-that was free and no-one tried to stop me.

That all changed when I reached the gate which was a high, solid, metal-bound piece of hardware set on massive hinges in a wall that looked thick enough to withstand artillery. I banged with the heavy knocker and heard a bell ring inside-nice trick. Then I noticed a bell button on the wall and I pressed it, but it only got me more bell, not knocking. I felt disappointed, and was ready to be critical when I heard footsteps approaching the gate. Heavy footsteps, big-man footsteps. The face that appeared when the well-concealed panel in the gate lifted wasn’t one you’d make suggestions to about the doorbell. The face was big and broad to start with, and ugly to go on with-heavy, dark brows under a crew cut and everything underneath, the broken nose, scarred eyes and thin, battered mouth saying TOUCH.

‘Yes sir?’ The ‘sir’ came out strangled, as if it was a word in a foreign language he’d just recently learned.

‘Is this Mr Angel’s residence?’

‘Yes.’ His hands, well out of sight, moved quickly; he brought a camera up to the aperture in the gate and quickly snapped my picture. Probably not one of my best with my mouth hanging open. ‘What d’you want?’ he rumbled.

‘Never mind.’ I ducked aside and walked off, feeling like idiot of the month.

It was late afternoon, time to drive my humiliation home with me to Glebe and give it a drink and do some thinking. As it turned out I didn’t get the chance to drink or think; I walked up the overgrown path to my terrace house and the house fell on me; then the ground turned to thin air and all sights and sounds turned into a roaring black hum.

When I came out of it I was lying on my back in the passageway inside the house. The peeling wallpaper and tattered carpet isn’t too good at the best of times, and wasn’t nice to regain consciousness with. Neither was the man who stood with his back to the door looking down at me. He looked about eight feet tall but that could have been because I felt about three feet at most myself. He could have been the cousin of the guy at the gate in Camp Cove; he wasn’t quite as dark and ugly, but definitely was of the same stamp. He was a bit more articulate.