He shuffled around in the tiny room until he found what he was looking for-a sherry glass with a gold band around it and a creamy residue in the bottom. There was a strong, mouldy smell of neglect, and I couldn’t tell whether it came from the room or the man, or both. I accepted Phillips’s offer of a chair at the table, ripped open one of the cans and put its clean edge to my mouth. He got the top off the flagon by sawing through the perforations with a blunt knife. He filled his glass, spilling a little on the table.
‘Cheers’, he said.
‘Cheers. Let’s have a talk, Mr Phillips.’
‘Let’s see the money.’
I got twenty dollars out of my wallet, and put the note under the flagon.
‘I can take the sherry and the money away with me if I want.’
He nodded, and tossed down the drink in one gulp. ‘I couldn’t stop you. I’m arthritic, don’t get around too good any more.’ He looked as if he’d never got around too good; his small, bent body had a frailness, a hospitalised look. He wouldn’t have been the man you hired when you wanted some muscle work done. If he’d made a living he must have had brains. He poured himself another brimming glass, drank half of it and topped it up.
‘Do you remember a case you handled nearly twenty years ago? To do with a man named Keegan-Peter Keegan?’
He looked at me, blankly.
‘You were hired by the estranged wife. Her name was Pat, maybe she was using the married name, maybe not. A small, dark, very good-looking woman. Two kids. She wanted the dope on the man she’d married; he’d turned out different from what she’d thought. Anything clicking?’
He held up his glass and looked at the golden liquid inside the dirty vessel as if it was the most beautiful thing in the world. ‘Mrs Patricia Keegan’, he said dreamily. ‘Athletic figure. Good mind. Low on money, high on pride. The husband was a wrong’un — sly grog, SP, prozzies, you name it.’
‘You remember all this?’
‘I wrote reports; I read ‘em over. They’re my favourite reading.’ He drank and poured again, both rapidly.
I got my photograph of the man in uniform and showed it to him. He got the spectacles out of the pyjama pocket again, wiped them on a sleeve which smeared them, and looked closely at the photo.
‘That’s him. Younger, of course. Put on a bit ‘a weight by the time I was on the job.’
‘How did you go about it?’
He probed with a corner of my card inside a filthy fingernail, prised out the dirt and flicked it on the floor. ‘You should know-ask around, stay up late, get up early, surveillance and observation.’
‘Where did Keegan live at that time?’ I tried to keep the question neutral, but he detected the increased interest. He sipped his drink and didn’t reply. I drank some beer and tried to wait him out, but he held the cards and he knew it.
‘How much?’
‘Fifty’, he said.
‘It’s a long time ago, the chances…’
‘Are bloody good that he’s where I say he is. He lived in Mosman, but he had another place-a special sort of place.’
I took out two twenties and a ten, and put them under the flagon. He’d poured carelessly; sherry had run down the side and now Henry Lawson’s head was bisected by a dark, sticky ring. Henry wouldn’t have minded.
‘Place called Hacking Inlet, d’you know it?’
I shook my head.
‘Little place in the National Park. They let people put houses up around there until just after the war. Then they stopped it. Place can’t ever get any bigger. This Keegan had a fibro shack down there-little dump, end of a dead-end lane, steep hill behind it and the bloody water on his doorstep. Nothing to look at from the outside, but I got a chance to have a close gander and a bit of a look inside. Very different bill of goods: big garage underneath. Looked from the lane like there was no driveway down to it, but there was. Bloody warehouse that garage-tinned food, fuel, booze, the lot. Withstand a siege. All mod cons-heating, flash plumbing. All inside this little dump you wouldn’t look at twice.’
‘Quiet place is it?’
‘Real quiet, except for the summer season when it’d fill up, I suppose. Be busy now, but there’s limits on what it can hold, see. Limits on the dunnies, ‘cos of the land and the septic tanks and that. An’ you know what those places are like, everyone turns off their brains when they get to the weekender or the holiday place. Bloody great hide-out.’
I finished my can of beer and set it down carefully on the scarred table. This sounded like the real thing. A man in Collinson’s game needed a bolthole, and this Hacking Inlet couldn’t be that far from the GPO.
‘Did he have many visitors?’
He shook his head. ‘Zero. I followed him there twice. Stayed a coupla’ days-no women, no men, just him.’
‘How did he strike you?’
‘Bloody dangerous.’
‘Did you tell the wife about this place?’
He’d had another sherry while I was doing my thinking; the level was down past the top of the label and the red glow in his eyes was like a three-unit fire. He nodded, but he was losing control and his head was loose on his scrawny neck like a puppet’s.
‘Honest operation. Put everything in the report. Honest as the day’s long. That’s why I’m here, like this.’
‘Who else would know about this-the surveillance and the place at Hacking Inlet?’
His red eyes went shrewd again and he poured another glass; I jerked it away from him and spilled half on the table.
‘Anyone else?’
‘Had a partner’, he mumbled. ‘Diddled me, a’ course, useless bastard.’
‘You had a partner when you did the Keegan job?’
‘Had ‘im twenty years.’
I was amused, despite myself. ‘Twenty years? A useless bastard?’
‘Well, he was a useful bastard, too. Yeah, Wally Bigelow, junior partner.’
‘How much would he know about the Keegan case?’
‘I’ve got no show of rememberin’ unless you let me have another drink.’
I nodded and he recovered the glass and tilled it; he had to use both hands to support the flagon and its neck and the top of the glass rattled like maracas. He transferred the two hands to the glass and got it up to his mouth where he held it, sipping. When he had drunk half of it I reached out and took the glass. I put it down on the table in front of him. He cupped his shaking hands around it.
‘Wally only knew about it in outline. He’d know the name, and he knew what sort of bloke this Keegan was. He didn’t do any of the work though, I did it all.’
‘Would he have known about the hide-out?’
‘No.’
‘Where is he now?’
His look was half-mournful, half-triumphant. ‘He’s dead. The business went to pot, Wally wasn’t any help. Bigger drunk ‘n me at the end. I found out he was sellin’ the stuff to the other side. Y’ know-wives an’ husbands and that. We split up. Sort of stayed in touch for a while; we were mates, really. Then he went to Queensland for his health. Then I heard he was dead.’
‘When?’
‘Oh, just recent, last coupla’ months.’
He lifted the glass and drank the rest of the sherry. I looked down at the money on the table and tried to calculate how many flagons it would buy him. Not enough. There weren’t enough. I stood up and he pushed the other can of beer across the table.
‘Never touch that stuff, he said, ‘doesn’t do you any good’.
16
They were waiting for me when I got home, and I have to admit they did it well, I pushed open the front door with the details of my interview with Phillips still being sorted in my head, half-expecting Parker and Hilde to be screwing on the stairs, and ‘Bully’ Hayes stepped out of the door immediately to the right of the front door. He slapped the side of my head with a heavy hand made heavier by the automatic pistol in it.
‘That’s for Tiny, Hardy’, he said. ‘And just an installment.’