‘Oh, yeah’, I shook them out into the glass ashtray, lit a match and put the flame into the little nest of paper. Hadley stood up and rushed me but I stiff-armed him back. The paper burned and a wisp of dark smoke curled up to join the other stains on the ceiling.
‘Go away’, I said.
Grant called that evening to tell me that they’d picked up Hadley trying to get on a train to Melbourne. His story was that he and Trudi had quarrelled over business and that the gun had gone off accidentally.
‘Ten years’, Grant said, ‘out in five and we’ll deport the bastard. He can’t inherit the loot of course. He’s really pissed off about that.’
I laughed. ‘You can see his point of view. Well, he did everyone a favour except himself.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Trudi had a slow death coming, he saved her that.’
‘That’s her, what’s this ‘everyone’?’
‘Just an expression.’
I sat in the office the next day and didn’t get any business. Before leaving I picked up the ashtray, went to the window and let the ashes float out onto the warm air.
California dreamland
I hadn’t liked finding the body. It was under the house in a spot which the foundations and the hot water pipes had made as dry as the desert. It was shrunken and mummified by the dryness, and when I pulled her out the woman looked more like a leather, laboratory specimen than someone who had laughed and drunk and made love.
Rosa Torielli had done all of those things in good measure, and there were still some faded shreds of the clothing she’d done them in clinging to the corpse. A crumbling fragment of lilac silk, a silver thread.
The house was one of a hundred in a street in Lilyfield-weatherboard up on high, brick foundations-and I’d traced Rosa there through a series of interviews with landlords and boarders and drinkers that seemed to stretch on without end. But it had ended, and the de facto husband who’d put her under the house had ended his life in prison. All neat and tidy-a Cliff Hardy Investigations special.
Tony Torielli had hired me to find his mother, and as he’d especially applied for the job in the US Consulate in Sydney to look for her and had saved money for the work, I was glad I’d found her. Torrielli had been taken back to the States by his father, who was Rosa’s third or fourth husband, and he was as American as cherry pie.
‘That was fine work, Mr Hardy. I sure am obliged to you.’ We were in a pub near my office in the Cross and he was holding his glass carefully so as not to spill anything on his light grey three piece suit.
‘I’m sorry it turned out so grim’, I said. It hadn’t, for me. I had his cheque in my pocket covering my modest daily rates and the expenses racked up on the road and in the boozers.
‘Fine work.’ He bought another round, drank half of his Scotch and left. I finished his drink along with mine, and wondered what he’d do with the knowledge that his mother was a good-time girl who probably hadn’t given him a second’s thought since his dad took off home.
My next two jobs flowed from the Torrielli case by recommendation. The first was a simple bodyguarding of a very rich and very nervous visitor to Sydney from Las Vegas. The second started when the biggest man I’d ever seen knocked on my office door on the hottest day in Sydney since they started keeping records. The temperature hit thirty around 9 o’clock in the morning, and kept climbing. His knock shook the door so hard I thought the heat might be expanding the old building and splitting it like a paper bag.
I bellowed ‘Come in’, to show that I was half an inch over six feet, 170 pounds and used to having sledge hammers hit my door.
He opened the door very gently and ducked his head the way he must have been doing since he was fourteen. If he said he was six ten you wouldn’t have argued with him, and if he was lighter than 240 pounds it would only have been by a glass of beer or two. I stood slowly as if the size of him had pushed me up on a beam balance.
‘Nice to see you’, I said. ‘Take whatever you want, say whatever you like, spit on the floor.’
‘Tony Torrielli said you were tougher than’, he said. ‘Said you had to be heavy with some people when you were lookin’ for his mom.’
‘I write my own reports’, I said. ‘Sometimes I use poetic licence.’
‘I’m interested in your licence to investigate. Mind if I sit down?’
‘Try it.’ I waved expressively at the only other chair and sat back down myself. His chair held, but he might have been doing complicated isometrics.
‘I’m Wesley Holt’, he said, ‘engineer’. It came out in a voice that rumbled like a big train in a small tunnel. He used that upward inflection that makes Americans sound uncertain, but I was pretty sure he was Wesley Holt, and if he said he was an engineer that was good enough for me. I nodded intelligently.
‘Came down here to a job in Queensland because I wanted to see my daughter. She came back here after her mother and I split up.’
He told me he’d graduated in 1956 and taken jobs all over the world including the Pacific. He’d met Coralie Burnett from Wahroonga in New Guinea. He lit a cigar, maybe in honour of Coralie. I refused one and opened a window, being a clean-air person these days, but good-mannered about it.
‘Didn’t last’, he said blowing smoke at the windows. ‘Year and a half and she was back here in Sydney with the kid.’
‘Didn’t like the tropics?’ My ex-wife Cyn hadn’t cared for them: I’d taken her to Fiji on a half-business, half-pleasure trip, and it had been a full-time helclass="underline" one mosquito bite and she turned red, two and patches of her hide developed the texture of half-cooked porridge.
‘Loved New Guinea’, he said. ‘Hated me. I was a wild guy in those days-booze, broads and work, that was me. Coralie was smart, I don’t blame her.’
‘This is about the daughter then?’
‘Yup. Diane. I’ve only seen her a couple of times and not for the last five years. I’ve got a whole bunch of pictures though.’ He pulled out a fat wallet that had compartments and divisions like a brief case. He rifled for a minute then pushed a photograph across the desk.
‘Bright kid’, he said. ‘Cleaned up everything in school here last year. She was supposed to go to university in Sydney this year.’
The photograph distracted me from what he was saying; the image was of a big, young woman who looked fully endowed with brains, good looks and life itself. A blond with a face that was all eyes, cheekbones and mouth: it was a candid shot, she was sitting in a chair, waving her hands and talking. It would be hard to imagine anyone within view not looking and listening.
‘Which one?’ I said. ‘Which university?’
‘There’s more than one?’
‘Three’, I said, but I knew which one he meant; the old one, the one with ivy and tradition, the one I hadn’t dropped out of.
‘Law school’, he said. ‘Going straight into law school. Sounds funny to me, but I was looking forward to talking to her about it. We wrote each other plenty, I felt like I knew her, sort of…’
‘What happened?’
He squashed out his half-smoked cigar in the little ashtray on my desk, and sighed. Just for an instant, with the breath leaving him, he seemed oddly vulnerable. ‘Her mother died last year, cancer. Di was real cut up when she sat those exams. I wanted to come out for the funeral and all, but I couldn’t get away. I wrote that I’d get work here so that I’d be around, she seemed real pleased.’
‘Did your wife marry again?’
He shook his head emphatically. ‘Never got divorced, one of those things. Di moved in with a girlfriend after Coralie died. She was going to live in college she said-a scholarship, that right?’
I nodded. ‘You keep saying what was going to happen-what did happen?’
‘I got here early December, soon as I could. She’d been gone a week when I arrived.’
‘Gone where?’
‘To the States, would you believe it? She took off with some kid to California and here I am stuck, just locked in up there in Queensland for the first eight weeks solid.’