He sighed. ‘I have to assume that this aggression, this… boorishness is your stock in trade. Yes, I’m concerned about my income and my reputation both-I assume you’re concerned about yours?’
‘Yeah. Fair enough, Mr Thackeray, didn’t mean to ride you. What’s troubling her? Not money? Not the bad reviews?’
He laughed a laugh that would have sounded good over the phone, rich and amused. ‘I doubt if she read them. She was such a carefree creature-scatterbrained you’d have said. She was the easiest of clients.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Oh, she’d talk to anyone, wouldn’t haggle about every little detail-not like some of them.’
The few writers I knew were drunks and fragile egotists; it was refreshing to hear about a carefree one.
‘Is she a good writer?’ I asked.
Thackeray plucked at his bow tie and looked past me through the dusty window out over rooftops to a dull, leaden sky. He shook his head.
‘Terrible,’ he said.
We did agenting things like writing and accepting cheques, and I undertook to follow Miss Cummings around for a while and check on her friends and see if I could find out what was on her mind and stopping her from writing another blockbuster.
Thackeray had given me Cummings’s schedule for the next couple of days and I planned to pick her up that night after a book launching in a city bookshop. The first thing I did after depositing the agent’s cheque was go to my favourite bookshop in Glebe Point Road for a copy of The Crying Gulls. I usually buy my second-hand Penguins and remaindered sports books there, so the proprietor gave me an odd look when I handed over six bucks for something that felt like a house brick.
‘You’ll hate it,’ he said. ‘It’s slop.’
‘I’ll use it to work on my pecs then.’ I needed both hands to carry the book and I waved aside the five cents changed he offered. ‘Give it to a poet,’ I said.
The book’s cover featured a sunburnt country scene with three figures standing on something reminiscent of Ayers Rock. The figure in the middle was a woman who looked like Olivia Newton-John dressed to boogy; the man on the left was a stockman who looked a bit like Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates; the man on the right resembled Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair. A banner read: ‘Their love was thunder, their hatred was fire’. Great cover. I tossed the book into the Falcon and drove home for a drink.
Six hours later I watched from my car the unedifying sight of the bookshop disgorging the launchers. Some of them were pretty well launched themselves. I recognised a batch of well-known writers and a heroin addict artist. There were a couple of journalists I’d drunk with on odd occasions-men and women with a keen eye for the free glass.
A woman answering Thackeray’s description of Carla Cummings was one of the last to leave. She was small, nothing over five feet in her high heeled shoes and she wore a tight, short black dress and a big red wig. She staggered a little and hailed a cab. Two men staggered with her. Cummings’s glittery dress and wig and the white overcoat one of the men had thrown over his shoulders made them look stagey and unreal, like figures in a rock film clip.
If there’s any work more boring that watching other people having a good time, I don’t know of it.
Carla Cummings and her two mates had some people’s definition of a very good time. I followed the taxi to the Cross where it dropped the threesome at a nightclub cum restaurant that boasts a fifties atmosphere. I parked illegally and when I got back Cummings was tucking into a huge dish of pasta. She ate sloppily and dropped her fork; she kept talking and her youngish companions, both well built, one dark one fair, kept laughing. That was the most fun she had. After drinking most of a bottle of red wine she went upstairs and danced with the men in turn. For someone as drunk as she was she danced pretty well, but I saw the strain on the dark guy’s face as he half-held her up. After that they walked-her very unsteadily-along the street eyeing the whores. No one got many giggles out of that so they took a cab to a high-priced apartment block in Potts Point. I sat in my car and listened to the movement of the water as lights went on and off three floors up. The water kept moving but the windows stayed dark and I drove home.
I was back in Pott’s Point at 8 a.m. and after an hour’s wait I was rewarded by the arrival of a silver Honda Accord, driven by a sleek character with a cravat, a yachtsman’s blazer and the trousers and tan to go with it. They drove to a breakfast place in the Cross where you can sit among the bricks and trees and watch the previous night’s crap being swept up and carried away by the lower classes.
The yachtsman looked to be doing some serious talking in the car so I got a table within earshot of the pair and ordered coffee. In surveillance you can work this close just once.
Cummings ordered an iced coffee and the yachtsman had a straight black, like me. When the orders arrived the writer proceeded to demolish a pale brown structure that looked like a model of Mont Blanc. She also had a plateful of croissants on the side. Her hand was shaking and she dropped some of the mixture on her dress where it joined last night’s food and drink stains.
‘I’ve been thinking it over, Leslie,’ she said.
Les sipped coffee and didn’t speak.
‘He’s irritating and moralistic, but he did a wonderful job for the first book.’
‘It sold itself, dear. The thing is-can he do the same again?’
She filled her mouth with pastry and cold liquid; I had to look away, and I had the feeling that Leslie wanted to but he didn’t.
‘I don’t know but that’s not really what I’m worried about just now.’
He leaned forward solicitously. ‘What are you worried about Carla? Can I help?’
She shook her head and crumbs sprayed on the table. ‘I can’t tell you, Leslie, but it is important to everything I do at the moment. It’s driving me mad
‘You haven’t signed a contract with Thackeray, have you?’
‘No, of course not. Don’t hound me, Leslie. It is about Joseph and when I get more reports… when it’s settled I’ll let you know about your offer.’
He smiled, showed beautifully capped teeth, a sagging jawline and an over-used charm that was losing its candle power. There was an air of desperation about him which he was desperately anxious not to show-and it showed. He tilted a thin, brown hand that carried a wide gold ring.
‘Just tell me, are you fifty/fifty in favour or…’
She drained her drink with a soft slurp and blotted up some croissant crumbs with a bony finger. ‘Sixty/forty,’ she said. ‘Can you run me home? I’ve got to change to give some ghastly talk.’
They got up, Cummings paid the bill the way she’d done the previous night, and they went streetwards. I let them go and ordered another coffee as an aid to thinking. There was some to do. Thackeray had more problems than he thought: I didn’t like the sound of reports and a settlement. It smelled too much of what I did myself, and that threw up some interesting possibilities.
Thackeray’s notes told me that Cummings was addressing the Hunters Hill Women’s Literary Group later that morning. It sounded as missable as my own hanging, so I decided to widen my terms of reference a little and see what Mr Joseph Thackeray was doing.
Thackeray’s office was in William Street, just a short walk from mine, but I didn’t have to get to his door for things to become interesting. There was a bank across the road from the building Thackeray was in, and as I passed it I saw Rusty Fenton looking out through the smoked glass windows. Now a bank is one of the last places you’d expect to see Rusty. When he has money he gives it to barmen not tellers. Rusty didn’t see me so I went into the bank by a side door and watched him. I’ve never known Rusty not to work in close harness with ‘Bomber’ Stafford and, sure enough, after a minute or so Stafford came hurrying out of Thackeray’s building and across the street. Rusty shot out to meet him, they had a quick confab and ran back across the street, defying the traffic. I watched through the smoked glass: Rusty and Stafford got into a van; Joseph Thackeray came out onto the street and looked up and down expectantly. He had on another silly, spotted bow tie; he still looked narrow and wispy and the smoked glass gave his skin an unhealthy grey sheen. A taxi pulled up,