Peter Corris: The Dying Trade

The woman was trying to light a cigarette with hands that were shaking like a tall mast in a high wind. She got there, drew smoke deep and blew it out. Her breasts rose firm and full under the halter top and her kicking-men-into-the-pool leg and its partner were pretty nice too.

“You’d better go Ross.” she said evenly. “Take the Alfa and leave it and the keys at the office.” Ross was big but my punch and the ducking had knocked the fight out of him. His silk and gabardine slacks were going to need some expert laundry work and his suede shoes were probably beyond repair. Water dripped from his thick black hair down over a face that was still handsome despite a badly set broken nose and a criss-cross of scars around the eyes and mouth. His look suggested that he might try to laugh it off, but the woman’s face was stony, so he turned away muttering under his breath and squelched off towards the garage. An engine roared a few seconds later. There was a crunch of metal on metal, then a screech of tyres on concrete. The engine noise rose then receded.

“Jesus Christ!” The woman shut her eyes and flicked viciously at her cigarette.

“Who was that?” I said.

“Nobody. Who the hell are you?”

I explained who I was as she poured us both tall glasses of lemon juice and tonic from the fixings on a slat table beside the pool. So far the Gutteridges I’d met seemed to be good at not drinking and kicking things into oblivion. I’d have preferred a bit more drinking and a bit more concern for the lower forms of life.

We sat down in garden chairs and I took a good look while I was talking. She was cool but exciting; there was a lot of work left in her but she looked as if she’d be very choosy about who got the job.

“Have you got any identification?” Her voice was breathy and there wasn’t a lot of power in it. She sounded tired and she didn’t look very interested in me as she handed back the documents.

“What can I do for you, Mr Hardy?” There was an ironic, unencouraging edge to the standard words. I put the papers away and took a sip of the drink. It quenched the thirst.

“This concerns your stepson and stepdaughter, Mrs. Gutteridge.”

“Sleeman!” she rapped out.

“Mrs Sleeman,” I said quickly.

“Miss!”

“All right, Miss, but I’m still here to talk about the Gutteridges.”

“That’d be right, private detectives are just about their style.”

“What do you mean, Miss Sleeman? Have they used private inquiry agents before?”

She put out her cigarette, lit another immediately and looked at me through the fresh, blue smoke.

“I wouldn’t know. Tell me what you want.”

I rolled a cigarette and got it going before I answered. She was hard to fathom, she seemed uninterested but it might just have been that she was gathering the energy to be really antagonistic.

“Your stepdaughter’s life has been threatened, your stepson wants to find out by whom.”

“Let’s call them Susan and Bryn, that step this and that routine makes me feel sick. Bryn wants to find out who and why, I presume?”

“The ‘why’ is my problem at the moment. ‘Why’ will tell me ‘who’, I hope.”

“Perhaps not,” she snapped, “I can think of lots of reasons to do down that little silvertail but they wouldn’t necessarily have names attached.”

“That’s interesting,” I said. “Give me some reasons.”

She flexed her back, emphasising her best features, and stretched out her long brown legs. It was hard to guess her age; the heavily tinted outsized sunglasses hid some of the signs, her cheekbones were high with the skin smooth and taut across them and her mouth was full of even, white teeth — but the rich can do a lot in those departments. Her figure was full, but firm looking, and if Ross had been taking liberties with her I could easily see why.

“I’m not very interested in this, Mr Hardy,” she underlined the statement with a sigh and took in some cigarette smoke. “I don’t like the Gutteridge children — that is Mark’s children — I appreciate that they’re grown-ups in the obvious way at least — for a lot of reasons that I don’t care to go into with you. You’d better tell me something to capture my interest or you’ll have to go. To be frank, you’re boring me.”

She pulled over a bottle of suntan lotion which had a $5.50 sticker on it and began rubbing it into her thighs. I gave her a brief version of what Bryn Gutteridge had told me which she listened to with enough attention to call me a dirty name for using the word “stepson” again. She snorted and choked on her third cigarette when I asked her if her late husband had had enemies.

“Hundreds,” she said. “He swindled dozens of people, defrauded scores.”

“What about you, Miss Sleeman, were you his enemy?”

She flicked the cigarette butt into the swimming pool and waved a hand back at the house.

“What do you think?”

I said I didn’t know. She yawned and turned her head away to look at the twenty foot high greenery which separated her swimming pool from her neighbour’s. I had a feeling that she was working hard at her tough act but if so she was succeeding well enough.

“Go away, Mr Hardy. I have nothing to say to you. I’m just not interested.”

“What are you interested in?”

“Not very much. Making more money, up to a point, and I read a lot.”

“I bet you do.”

She sneered at me very effectively which is an unusual thing for a woman to be able to do. “Don’t try your hard-case masculine stuff on me, Mr Hardy.” She lifted her head so that I could see her smooth, brown neck. “I’m forty, just about, I don’t look it but I am and I haven’t time to waste on men who are busy, busy at their little jobs.”

I couldn’t afford to let it go at that. I had too little to work on and I didn’t want to be thrashing about in the dark when I spoke to Susan Gutteridge that evening. I looked her over again; heavy smoking but not drinking, at least not in the mid-afternoon. She wore a brief but not ridiculous swim-suit that looked as if it’d been wet and dry a few times. At the other end of the pool was a medium high diving board, with well-worn fibre matting. It looked like she dived, swam in the pool and watched her weight. A lot of pool owners dangle their feet in the water while knocking back gin and sailing little boats made of their chocolate wrappers across it.

“You’re the best forty I’ve ever seen,” I said. “Who’s your doctor? Dr Brave?”

She dropped the bored display of the goods pose. Off came the shades and a pair of hard eyes bored into me. She had a strong-boned face that had never been beautiful but which must always have been arresting, as it was now. A few wrinkles around her eyes put her out of her twenties, but I’d meant what I said. She looked like one of those tennis playing women you see on local courts on the weekends, not aping youth but actually retaining it in the planes of her face and body.

“Why did you say that?”

“About Dr Brave? I don’t know. You look like someone who takes good care of yourself, possibly under medical advice. Bryn Gutteridge mentioned Brave this morning, his sister is at his clinic. Bryn’s not too happy about it. It just came into my head that as you dislike Mark Gutteridge’s son so much you might have a different taste in doctors.”

Her hard shell was beginning to split a little. She lit another cigarette with trembling hands and dropped the gold lighter onto the paving. She scrambled for a bit with one hand before giving up and working hard on the cigarette. She looked up at me as if I might just possibly be worth a minute’s thought. Her voice was raw with something more than tobacco smoke affecting it. “You’re right and wrong at the same time. Bryn’s been lying to you. He and Brave are as thick as thieves. Brave’s his head-shrinker, hand-holder and I don’t know what else. I detest him.”