I pushed the door open, it held on the frayed, lifted carpet while I picked up the mail, and then I flicked it back with my foot. The bills were for the usual things, small, corrective services performed on my body and various bits of machinery, and the baits were the same. I was offered female companionship, life insurance and a home on the north coast out of the smog of Sydney. I needed all those things; every forty-year-old male whose instincts are within a range of normal does. But to get them I’d had to be what I was not-prosperous. To hell with them; their market research was lousy. The women were probably ugly and the insurance would have fine print and the house would be sliding into the sea. I shovelled the brochures into the waste paper bin and made out a cheque for the smallest of the bills.
I sat and listened to the sounds of Sydney three floors down. They were busy sounds-trucks and cars and buses, all full of people all chasing a dollar. I’d sat for a whole day like that recently and for a few hours in quite a lot of days. I was a little panicky. As I stared at the office door a shape appeared in the pane of glass. It was a nice shape, not tall or short-trim-looking. The shape stayed there for what seemed like five minutes before it knocked. I let out a tense breath and said ‘Come in’ in my best bass.
It turned out to be a woman with red hair, a red dress and red shoes. She carried a black shoulder bag and wore a wide, black belt around the dress; when she got up close I could see that the hair was a wig. I watched her walk towards the chair in front of the desk and lower herself into it. She moved all in a piece, not exactly stiffly, but not altogether gracefully either. It was as if she’d learned it all from scratch late in life.
‘Mr Hardy’, she said, ‘my name is Trudi Walker.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you’, I said.
‘Yes. I want to hire you to find someone.’ Her voice was what used to be called fruity, she gave the vowels and dipthongs everything she had.
‘Male or female?’
She raised an eyebrow that had been plucked to a fine, dark line. She was heavily and expertly made-up; hard to guess her age, forty at least, maybe more. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Not really, but I have more success with women for some reason. I’ve found thirty-nine out of fifty women but only nineteen out of forty men.’
‘Perhaps you’ve just had more practice with women-your statistics suggest that.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘It’s a man in this instance.’
I shrugged. ‘Well, maybe I can improve on my figures. How long’s he been gone?’
‘Two days.’
‘That’s not really missing, Miss Walker, that could just be… away.’
‘No! I’ve seen Gerry every day for the past five years. We are business partners and friends. Something has happened to him.’
‘You could be right. What’s the business?’
‘We run an escort service.’
And that, of course, was why she hadn’t gone to the police and why she avoided the big agencies, which are plugged straight in to the newspapers and also why my fees didn’t worry her. She paid over the five hundred dollars retainer and agreed to a hundred and twenty-five a day plus expenses without a frown. In fact she had very few facial expressions, permitting herself the eyebrow, a tight thin-lipped smile and that was about it. Gerry Hadley, she informed me, was an American she’d met when he was on leave from Vietnam. They’d corresponded for a few years while he was in the States and then he’d come over to join forces with her. She gave me two photos- P F C Hadley, twenty’ish, in battle dress, Mr Gerald Hadley, business-suited, well-fleshed, thirtyish. He had a round, corn-fed face with a bright smile.
Gerry and Trudi had separate apartments in the same building in Elizabeth Bay. They ran the agency from a business address in Potts Point, and from their apartments. Trudi still occasionally worked a shift; Gerry didn’t, although the agency catered to both sexes.
‘When did you last see Mr Hadley?’
‘Three nights ago. We had dinner together. He was supposed to come to my flat for breakfast and a discussion the next morning. He didn’t come, and I haven’t seen him since.’
‘You’ve looked through his flat?”
‘Yes.’ She reached into her bag, took out a door key with a red ribbon attached and handed it over. While I looked at the key I was thinking that there was a fair bit of between-the-lines reading to do here, but I decided to play it careful-I needed the work.
‘Could you give me a list of your employees, Miss Walker?’
‘Not off hand; I could arrange it if you’d call at the office.’
Job or not, I was already getting tired of her; the voice was annoying me the way plastic cutlery and Big Macs annoy me. I twirled the key by the ribbon.
‘Any of the girls missing?’ I said.
The look she shot at me aged her ten years and I put her near fifty. ‘I don’t know’, she snapped. ‘Why?’
‘Any of the boys missing?’
She got half out of her chair and her face twisted up; two fissures appeared in the makeup beside her nose. ‘You bastard’, she snarled. ‘You shit. You can…’
I put the key down and came around the desk to pat her shoulder. ‘Easy, I said, ‘easy; I’m sorry, but I had to find out how you feel about all this. You were acting till then, doing it pretty well, too.’
She sat back and dug in her bag for tissues. After dabbing and wiping some of the control came back, but I didn’t have cosmetic-controlled agelessness in front of me now, I had a vulnerable woman with years on the clock and fear in her eyes.
‘I’m fifteen years older than Gerry, Mr Hardy’, she said. ‘I go through tortures to keep up appearances, I eat almost nothing. I love him and everything I’ve done is… I can’t bear…’ The control went again and the tears streamed over her face like a flash flood. I felt sorry for her and realised at that moment that she’d dropped the voice-her vowels were a little nasal now and her delivery had the lazy, easy rhythms of Sydney.
‘I’ll look for him’, I said. ‘I’ll call at your office and I’ll look in his flat and I’ll ask around. Two days isn’t long. Does he have a car?’
She nodded. ‘A Mercedes, gone.’
‘Any friends in Sydney?’
She shook her head. ‘Just me.’
‘You don’t know of any trouble-I mean competitors, the cops… any threats?’
There was panic in her face, clearly visible now that the make-up was eroded. ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘nothing.’
I gave her a receipt, and she got out a mirror and did a little repair work. I wrote down the addresses and phone numbers she gave me, and we got the whole thing on a business footing. She left and I went to the window and watched her step out on to the street; the first step was faltering but she quickly got into stride and looked like a proud, well-turned-out human being as she turned the corner. I decided she had guts and that she was lying about there being no trouble in the air.
Over the next day and a half I did the things I said I’d do: I checked over Hadley’s apartment and found nothing that you wouldn’t expect to find about a Yank who ran an escort service and had a mistress fifteen years older than himself. He had two girls on the side and I looked them over-nothing. Same result with the four men employed by the Winsome Escort Agency. Two of them were gay and one was black; nothing in the patterns of their lives over the past few days had changed. The seven women were more varied: one was close to Trudi Walker’s age with a similar manner, and one looked like a schoolgirl. Two of them had university degrees and one was a hang-glider. I used the phone till my arm ached and knocked on apartment doors with no result. My last call was on one of the girls-Tracey Talbot, who combined being escorted with freelance journalism. I drank coffee with her in her flat at Rushcutters Bay; it was a warm, soft afternoon and the water looked blue, bright and alive. Her window was full of harbour view. She had posters of world-famous harbours on the walls.