‘Soldier isn’t quite with us’, I said.
He looked down at the bloody mess on the floor and all the golf and Courvoisier colour in his face washed away.
‘You’ve been keeping bad company, Clive’, I said. ‘Want a drink?’ He nodded and I poured him a splash of Scotch. The phone rang, and Silverman told me where he was. Patrick was still looking at Soldier and I had to jerk his hand with the glass in it up to his mouth.
‘We’ve got a visitor’, I said. ‘I’m going to let him in. You sit there, if you’ve moved an inch when I get back I’m going to break your nose.’
I got a miniature tape recorder out of a cupboard in the kitchen, and went through to answer the soft knock on the door.
Silverman started to say the things you say when you meet people with guns and beaten-up faces, but I told him to be quiet. In the living room I sat him down with a Scotch and started the tape. I put Soldier’s gun on the coffee table for added effect.
‘What’s Clive doing here?’ Silverman said.
‘Oh, he belongs, he murdered your son.’
It stunned Silverman into silence, and set Patrick talking as I’d hoped it would. There was nothing much to it. Patrick was in deep financial trouble, and hoped for the Forbes Realty deal on the Glebe land to pull him out. But he was running short of time and he got the wind up when Silverman made a few enquiries about the firm. The squatters really got up his nose; he hired Soldier Szabo and some other muscle to help him there and Soldier was still around when Kenneth was caught snooping in Leichhardt.
‘So you killed him’, Silverman said quietly.
‘It was an accident, Horace’, Patrick muttered. ‘Soldier hit him too hard. It was an accident.’
‘Maybe’, I said. ‘And maybe you killed him when you found out who he was. What else could you do?’
‘It wasn’t like that’, Patrick said quickly.
‘The body might tell us something. Of course you had to get rid of the body-you should have thought about the parking ticket.’
‘There was no ticket when we…’
‘No ticket? Well, tough shit, they blow away sometimes. Did Szabo tell you about the speeding ticket?’
Patrick put his face in his hands. ‘No.’
‘What did you do with my boy?’ Silverman said. All the imperiousness and arrogance had melted away. He was just a little fat man, sad, with quivering jowls and a bad colour. ‘Where’s my boy?’
I gave Patrick a light touch on the cheek with the gun.
‘Answer him!’
‘I don’t know.’ He looked at Szabo; the front of the stylish shirt was dark, almost black. ‘He didn’t tell me.’
‘Clive’, Silverman said desperately, ‘I must know, we’ll get you off lightly. Hardy…’
I didn’t say anything. Something like hope flared in Patrick’s face for a second but it died. He was telling the truth and he had nothing to sell.
‘He didn’t tell me’, he said again.
After that we had the cops and an ambulance, and a doctor who looked at me and put some stitches in my head. I made a statement and Silverman made a statement, and Patrick phoned his lawyer. Eventually they all went away, and I drank a lot of Scotch and went to sleep.
They knocked down the houses anyway and built the home units which look like an interlinked series of funeral parlours. I hear the residents have trouble getting their cars in and out. Clive Patrick went to gaol for a long time, and I got paid, but nobody has ever found any trace of Kenneth Silverman.
Stockyards at Jerilderie
She was leaning against the peeling plaster wall outside my office and looking only fifty per cent likely to knock on the door. I hurried down the passage towards her, glad that I’d had a shave and that my clothes were more or less clean-business in the private enquiries game was slow; I understand it’s the same in imported limousines and oil shares.
‘Did you want to see me? I’m Cliff Hardy.’ I put a hand out which she shook as she told me her name and then I used it to open the door. Like me, the office was neater than usual; I’d used some of the idle hours I’d had lately to clean things up a bit and I’d even put a bunch of flowers in a vase on top of the filing cabinet. They were starting to droop a bit but still had a few days left in them. She sat in the chair in front of the desk and crossed her legs; they were long, thin legs and the knees jutted up high. She was a long, thin woman in fact, around thirty-five with nice, brown eyes. She wore a plain linen dress and a light beige jacket; like her they were nice, not flashy, maybe even a bit severe.
She shook her head at the cigarettes I offered and came to the point. ‘How honest are you, Mr Hardy?’
‘Moderately’, I said. ‘I believe in moderation in all things.’
She thought that over for a minute and looked at me like a horse buyer inspecting yearlings. As I say, I was clean and a bit tanned from being under-employed; I was also a bit under-weight but that was a plus, surely. ‘What do you charge for being moderately honest?’
It was my turn to inspect the goods. Her clothes and leather shoulder bag weren’t cheap, her short brown hair had been well cut and her teeth were good. ‘A hundred and twenty dollars a day and expenses’, I said. ‘I need a retainer, but that’s negotiable.’
She smiled, her lips were thin, but not too thin. ‘If Lang Hancock walked in you’d charge five hundred a day.’
‘If he walked in I’d walk out. I can’t stand hornrimmed glasses.’
She laughed and I saw a few more good teeth. ‘I hope we can do business. I want to recover something that belongs to me.’
‘What is it?’
‘A painting.’
‘Aha, go on, Miss Woods.’
‘I don’t think you’re taking me seriously.’
‘Maybe I don’t take painting seriously. Please go on.’
She drew in an exasperated breath. ‘All right. I recently split up with a man I’d been living with for a few years. We divided possessions, you know how it is?’
I did; I’d divided everything with Cyn my ex-wife, then she’d divided my share again seventy-five twenty-five. ‘Yeah’, I said.
‘It wasn’t a very friendly parting. Leo took this painting and refuses to give it up. It has a sentimental value for me, and I’ve heard he’s planning to sell it.’
‘Why don’t you buy it, then?’
‘It’s a matter of principle; it’s mine.’ I suppose it was then that I decided that I didn’t like her. There was something frozen and emotionless in her face and maybe the lips were too thin. But life is a struggle, and sometimes you have to prise the jaws apart and say the words that will make people put your name on cheques.
‘I see. What action do you have in mind?’
She mistook my attitude for complicity and leaned forward a bit over the desk. ‘I want you to break into his house and take the painting.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘It means nothing to Leo. He probably wouldn’t even know it had gone.’
‘No.’
She looked at me for a minute and then she shrugged and got up. Suddenly the flowers seemed to be drooping a bit more, and the dust motes in the air swarmed thick in the beams of light that came through the clouded windows. She adjusted the strap of her bag and walked out leaving the door open. I got up, closed the door, and tried to sit the flowers a little more proudly in the vase.
Three days later, as I read in The News, she was dead. She’d been found in her house in Paddington with her head caved in. She was thirty-four and described as an ‘art dealer’. I read the report, and felt vaguely sorry for her, the way you do, and vaguely pleased that I hadn’t taken her on as a client and then I forgot about it. The next day I got a phone call from Detective-Inspector Grant Evans, who manages to be both an old cop and old friend. He told me that my card had been found in Susannah Woods’ bag and asked if I knew anything about her.