Peter Corris - Heroin Annie

I checked my distances again before I said it. ‘That clipping came from Dempsey’s mother, Belfrage. She kept it till the day she died.’

‘Died!’ Gibbons voice was an anguished groan. ‘Died, no…’

Belfrage swung the pipe, I put my right foot into Stewie’s groin and nearly tore Ginger’s head off with a roundhouse left: the. 38 cracked twice and a sharp, acrid smell filled the shack. Belfrage went back, buckled and went down. Gibbons let the hand holding the gun drop to his side. I bent and looked at Belfrage; one bullet had taken him in the throat and the other had gone through his jaw and up.

I took Gibbons arm at the elbow and shook it gently; he dropped the gun. ‘I couldn’t kill my brother’, he said.

‘I know’, I said. ‘Why did you stay here?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Harry paid well. I’ve done time. I made a fuckup of everything. I thought I could discourage Bill, talk to him later maybe… I don’t know.’

Ginger was unconscious and Stewie was holding his balls and not taking much interest. Gibbons had a glazed, resigned look and I remembered the proud austerity of the father, the warm hopefulness of the sister.

‘Get moving, Robert’, I said. ‘I’ll give you an hour. I’ll have to tell them you shot Belfrage but I’ll put it in the best light I can, maybe there won’t be too much heat. Go north, go a long way.’

He nodded and went out of the shack. I sat there for half an hour chatting to Stewie and Ginger. When the flies started to settle on Belfrage we went off to look for a telephone.

I told it to the cops pretty straight, leaving out the connection between Gibbons and Dempsey. After our little yarn about assault and abduction Stewie and Ginger were content to let me tell it-Stewie hadn’t understood what happened too well anyway. William and Rosemary Dempsey and I got together over some Black Label, and a couple of policemen interrupted us and it took a while to sort things out. The upshot was that Belfrage was officially unmourned for various reasons as much as I was unwelcomed. I got a much better welcome from Zelda; she forgave me for being work-obsessed that morning and we went out to eat and back to her house for a short session with the bottle and a long session between the sheets. Turned out she was work-obsessed too and we left it that I’d go down again to do some swimming when the weather was warmer.

I drove back to Sydney, and Rosemary and Bill came up to have a pow-wow with Susan. They paid me my fee but I never got to make my report to old Hiram: he went into hospital while I was away and the news was that he was in a coma and sinking fast.

Susan came to deliver the cheque in person; she was elegant but subdued, which made her look even more elegant.

‘What will you do with the land?’ I asked.

‘Keep it, Robert might come back.’

‘Yeah’, I said. ‘He might.’

It was one of those fifty-fifty days in Sydney; half the sky was grey, half was blue and it might rain or the temperature might hit thirty. Just then, in my office, which has spare lines as to furniture and a draught under the door it wasn’t hot, but my client was sweating. Mr Matthews was the sweaty type-his suit was a bit tight for his early middle-age spread; he carried too much flesh to be comfortable except perhaps in the bath or in bed. Still, there were no holes in his shoes and he was my first client in eight days.

‘He’s like a leech, Mr Hardy’, he said. ‘Like a vampire.’

The two descriptions didn’t line up for me, did he mean something slug-like and fat or a sleeker, classier bloodsucker? But I got the idea and he was the client, he could use whatever similes he liked. It was his old mum he was worried about.

‘I’ve been told that you’re good’, he said nervously. ‘I mean.. ’

‘You mean I won’t blackmail you?’ I said.

‘That’s right, I’m no good at blackmail, I can never find the right words in the newspapers to make up the threatening letter.’

His hands were pale and puffy, and he clasped and unclasped them as if he was practising handshakes. He looked even more nervous than before-nervousness is standard in a client, a sense of humour is a bonus.

I sighed. ‘I’m pretty honest, Mr Matthews, and I might be able to help you. Tell me more about this leech who has his hooks into your mother.’

He looked at his watch and I guessed he was in his lunch hour; leisured clients are a vanishing breed. ‘My father died six months ago’, he said. ‘He was old, it was expected. He left my mother quiet well provided for. She has a house free of debt, his superannuation and some income from shares and such.’

‘Do you live with her?’ I asked.

‘Oh no, I have a flat quite close. I’m single, but I left home many years ago.’ He let the words hang there for a bit, awkwardly. ‘I didn’t get along with my father,’ he added.

‘I see. What was this vampire’s name again?’

He looked puzzled for a second, the colourful language he’d used wasn’t his usual style. ‘Oh, that was a bit excessive perhaps-Jacobs, Henry Jacobs. He handled the arrangements for my father’s funeral, that’s how he and my mother became acquainted. He’s been dancing attendance on her ever since.’

‘What sort of attendance?’

‘Flowers; I suppose he gets them cheap. He takes her to dinner, it’s appalling.’

‘How old is your mother, Mr Matthews?’

‘Oh, not old, fifty-five I suppose. She was younger than father.’ Again, he hadn’t finished, he seemed to have a need to explain. ‘I’m an only child.’

He was a man of thirty-plus, still referring to himself as a child. It sounded odd and had a scent of parlours and lavender.

‘Tell me about this Jacobs.’

He described Jacobs as middle-aged and portly. He thought he might be a foreigner from the way he dressed, mentioning particularly his highly polished shoes. His funeral parlour was in Manly where Matthews and his mother also lived. I wrote down the addresses and leaned back in my chair; it creaked dangerously and I came forward quickly; the desk was a bit rickety and the carpet square was arranged off centre to hide the holes. I needed the work but I had to give him a few hard truths first.

‘I charge one hundred and twenty-five dollars a day and expenses, Mr Matthews. I also need a retainer of two hundred and fifty dollars.’

He didn’t blink. ‘I’ll be happy to pay it’, he said.

‘I have to do something’. He got out a useful-looking cheque book and I waited until he was writing before asking the next question.

‘What does your mother say about Jacobs?’

He looked up. ‘I wouldn’t dream of asking her about her personal life’, he said firmly.

Keep writing I thought, and he did. That would be right of course, he wouldn’t ask her, she wouldn’t ask him and nobody would ask dad. Clean rooms, neat garden, polished car and a shandy at Christmas if you were lucky. It wasn’t exciting-it was drawn blinds stuff, a high hedge and a smile for the neighbours, but it has compensations, it can make for very healthy building society accounts; I gave him a businesslike thrust. ‘Do you know anything about Jacobs’ business associates?’

‘Not really. He has a solicitor crony who has an office nearby. He’s introduced my mother to him. I’m very worried about it.’

‘Why?’

‘I think he might be trying to get her to change her will.’

‘Aha’, I said.

Manly is like a foreign country to people like me who live on the other side of the water. The roads are wide and the hills are gradual; some of the streets and cul-de-sacs have a European feel. Henry Jacob’s funeral parlour was genuinely Australian, that is to say, a genuine copy of the Californian model. The building was long and low with smoked glass windows and courtyards covered with little white stones. The funeral column in The News had told me that a show was scheduled for that afternoon. I parked across the street and watched the people dressed in dark, hot clothes mope about while a couple of gleaming limousines disgorged the living and transported the dead. Jacobs wans’t hard to spot; he had the act off perfect, the slow movement, the solicitude, the Nazi-like direction of the underlings. He was carrying thirty pounds he didn’t need, looked swarthy and seemed to shine somewhat from a distance. His teeth were very white and he showed them a lot. After the cortege had left I walked across the street and strolled past the sanctum; a grey-uniformed zombie standing outside the entrance gave me a hard stare. Next to Jacobs’ place was a luxury car showroom, then a Vietnamese restaurant and then a nasty cream brick building which carried a brass plate in front-W J Hornfield, LLB(Syd), Solicitor. A fine profession, I thought; my mother had wanted me to go in for the law and my father had thought I’d make a plumber-I’d been a terrible disappointment to them both.