‘Kathy Martin?’
‘Yes.’ Up close, she was the original outdoors girl with a demoralising sheen of good health.
‘My name is Hardy, I’ve been hired by Mr Horace Silverman to look for his son. I understand you were a friend.’
‘Yes.’ I got the impression she wasn’t a big talker.
‘Well, can we have a chat?’
She looked at her watch. ‘I have a tutorial in an hour and I haven’t done all the reading.’
‘It won’t take long.’ I herded her across to a bench. She sat down after looking at her watch again.
‘When did you last see Kenneth?’
‘Nearly two months ago.’
‘Where?’
‘At his place.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘He had a squat in Glebe, Sweatman Street.’ She gave me the number and I wrote it down.
‘Why was he squatting? He had plenty of money didn’t he?’
‘Kenny stopped taking his family’s money. He went left, extreme left.’
‘Did you?’
‘Not so extreme.’
‘Did you quarrel?’
She frowned. ‘A bit, but we didn’t split up, if that’s what you mean.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘No, he was around. I saw him, we did what we usually did. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘One day he was there and the next day he wasn’t?’
‘It wasn’t a day-to-day thing.’ She tapped her battered briefcase. ‘Look, I really have to read this stuff.’
‘Won’t keep you a minute. What did you do about it-Kenneth’s disappearance?’
‘Nothing. I said you wouldn’t follow. It wasn’t a disappearance. The people he was in with, they do it all the time-go north, take jobs for money, you know?’
‘So you weren’t worried.’
‘What could I do?’ she snapped. ‘I couldn’t go to the police or anything, they were really out in Kenny’s terms. I didn’t know his family. I just hoped he’d turn up; I still do.’
‘What about the people at the squat?’
‘They were raided. The house was taken over.’
‘This was after Kenneth went missing?’
She paused. ‘Kenneth sounds weird. Yes, I think so, soon after.’
I tried to digest the information and lost her while I did it. She got up and said goodbye in a voice that meant it. I thanked her and watched her walk away with that long, bouncy step and the thought came to me that Kenny had at least one good reason to stick around.
Sweatman Street has seen worse days; the big, two-storeyed, bay-windowed houses had been broken up into flats and rooms until recently, when small, affluent families had taken them over. More European cars and four-wheel-drives than beaten-up Holdens with a rust problem. The street is down near the water and getting more leafy and smart daily and the pockets of poverty in it are not old-style-port and pension-but new-style; dope and dole poverty.
The address Kathy had given me was the last house in a terrace of twenty. It featured weeds and broken glass and peeling paint. The windows at the side and back were set too high up to see in. Around the back, I was surprised to find that all the fences dividing the yards had been removed. This left an immense space which was taken up with trees, rubbish and children’s play gear in about equal proportions.
The broken windows at the back of the house were boarded up and the door was nailed shut. I gave it an experimental tug, and a shout came from behind me.
‘Hey! What’re you doing?’
He was big, with a lot of hair on his head and face. His jeans, sneakers and T-shirt were old and dirty. I stepped down from the door and tried to look innocent.
‘Just looking’, I said.
He was close enough for me to see the aggression pent up in him and something else-there was a nervousness in his movements and a frozen look in his eyes that I’d seen before in speed-freaks and pill-poppers. I opened my hands in a placating gesture which he misunderstood, perhaps deliberately. He crowded up close and bumped me back against the crumbling brick wall. I wasn’t ready for it, and lost a bit of breath.
‘Take it easy’, I said. I put out a hand to hold him back and he swept it aside. His punch was a clumsy looping effort, and I couldn’t resist it; I stepped inside and hit him short, just above the belt buckle. He sagged and I grabbed him under the arms to hold him up.
‘Let him go.’ Another man came from behind the trees; he was slighter and clean-shaven and he dropped into a martial arts pose about ten feet away from me. I let the bearded man slide down the wall.
‘Don’t be silly’, I said. ‘All this is silly; I just want to ask a few questions. I’m looking for someone.’
‘Do him, Chris’, my winded opponent said, and Chris didn’t need any encouragement. He jumped up and let go a flying kick at my shoulder. It was a good, high jump, but the trick with this stuff is not to watch the acrobatics. I ducked under it and kicked the leg he landed on out from under him. He went down in a heap and the stiff-armed chop he came up with might have looked good on the mat but was way too slow in the field. I swayed away from it and hit him just where I’d hit his mate; and that was a mistake because he had washboard muscles there, but I had the combination ready and the next punch landed on his nose where there aren’t any muscles, just nerves to cause pain and bloody vessels to break. He yelped and threw his hands up over his face.
So I had one on the ground and one with a bloody face and no information. Then I heard a slow, ironic handclap; she was standing on the steps of the next house, dark and fat in a shapeless dress and with a cigarette between her lips.
‘I didn’t start it’, I said inanely.
‘Who cares?’ She seemed to find it all funny; flesh on her face shook as she laughed and she puffed at the cigarette without touching it.
I fished out my licence card and waved it in front of Chris and his mate.
‘I’m a private detective. I’m looking for Kenneth Silverman; now who’s going to talk to me? There’s money in it.’
The woman took the cigarette out of her face and tried a fat, pursed-up smile.
‘Now you’re talking’, she said. ‘Come along here.’
‘Don’t talk to him, Fay’, the bearded one said.
‘Shut your head, Lenny. Come on whatever your name is, I’ll talk your arse off.’
I went past my opponents and followed her to a back door in the middle of the row. We went into a kitchen that was neither dirty nor clean. I smelled something vaguely familiar, and sniffed at it.
‘Candles’, she said. ‘No power in here. I can make you a coffee, though.’ She gestured at a small stove hooked up to a gas cylinder.
‘Don’t bother, thanks. Do you know Silverman?’
‘Straight to it, eh? What about the money?’
I got out ten dollars and put it on the cracked linoleum-topped table.
‘And another if I’m satisfied’, I said.
‘Fair enough.’ She bobbed her head and the fat bounced on her and ash fell down onto her lumpy chest. ‘Yeah, I knew Kenny, he lived down the end there.’ She waved back towards the scene of my triumph. ‘He left when they cleared us out; no, a bit before that.’
‘Who’s “they”?’
‘The developers-Forbes Realty. They own this terrace and a few others. Cunts!’
‘What happened?’
‘Came around one morning, about six o’clock, two big blokes with a guy in a suit. He told them what to do-they dumped all our stuff out; everything, every fucking thing, just out in the bloody street. Then they boarded the place up.’ She laughed.
‘What’s funny?’
‘I was thinking, Lenny lost a fight that morning too-it’s bullshit, that karate crap.’
I grunted. ‘You said Silverman had gone by this time?’
She squinted at the ten dollars, remembering, or pretending to. ‘Yeah, he wasn’t in the house that morning. No sign of him. I think some of his stuff got dumped, but I’m not sure. It was a pretty wild scene.’
‘Why are those two so jumpy?’
She spat the cigarette stub out onto the floor, put her thonged foot on it and fished a packet of Winfield out of her pocket.