‘Thought you wanted to stay clean, Angel,’ I panted.
‘I do. There’s a hell of a difference between killing a guy and tax evasion; killing’s safer or hadn’t you heard?’
‘Yeah, I heard. Don’t count on it, it was the killing they got Terry Clarke for.’ I moved towards the desk. ‘I don’t think you’d do it.’
He fired and I felt the heat of the bullet as it went past my ear. The door slammed open and Ugly II’s face appeared with an expression on it that suggested he was ready to fire bomb the room if he was asked to. Angel waved him away.
‘Shoulder, left arm, right arm; you name it, Hardy. What’s this?’ His hand closed over the roll of film.
‘Bugger it all,’ I said. I slumped back down into my chair and looked at Joel who was stirring and muttering darkly. ‘What about another drink?’
Angel watched Joel get up and struggle to pull himself together, then he tossed him the film.
‘See if you can do a better job with this. Run it down to one of those one hour places. Nothing dirty is there, Hardy? Oh, Joel, before you go you could pour us both another drink.’
We got the drinks and Joel went out. Angel put his gun down on the desk and demonstrated to me how quickly he could pick it up again.
‘I can strip it in seventy-four seconds,’ he said.
‘Let’s see.’
He smiled. ‘Wouldn’t do you any good, there’s three other guys in the house as good as me.’
‘Better than Joel?’
‘Bit of a disappointment, I must admit. Where’d you learn to handle yourself-the service?’
‘Partly, Malaya.’
‘Yeah? I was in Nam-just for a bit, got too goddamn hot.’
‘Private Angel?’
‘Sergeant Pietangeli.’
We didn’t say much after that and Joel got back with the prints in just over the hour. Angel motioned him away, and let the prints slip out onto the desk. I stopped breathing while he arranged them in a line; he shuffled them around a bit, but the expression on his face told me nothing except that he was interested. He looked up at me and the stillness was back in his eyes and hands.
‘Guy’s name?’
‘Don’t know.’
He drained the few drops left in his glass and stared at the wall behind where I was sitting; I’d already looked at it, the bullet had cracked and split the plaster and knocked a chunk out that was roughly the shape of Italy.
‘Tell Pauline to be patient.’
‘What?’
‘Tell her wait. Tell her to borrow some money or something. End of the year at the latest, I’ll give her everything she wants. Now, get your lousy Australian ass out of here.’
Kay delayed looking over Sydney several times and it was into the New Year before we were having that first, tentative drink at the airport. She looked wonderful-tall, tanned from skiing and slim from her energetic, self-denying lifestyle.
‘You don’t look too bad, Cliff, considering.’
‘Considering what?’
‘You know. When did you last take a break, fishing?’
‘Never caught a fish in my life. Boring.’
‘Well, Pauline thinks you’re the best. She got her money not long after she went to Melbourne.’
‘Yeah, she got it.’
‘Why so sour about it?’
I hadn’t meant to tell her but I did. I gave Pauline Ben Angel’s message and she took it to heart-borrowed some money, paid me and went to Melbourne. I didn’t feel good about it; the case felt incomplete and although there’d been something totally convincing about Angel I was left with no ideas. Then, a few weeks later, Tolley Angel was killed in a car accident. Along with her was Claude Murray-Jones, forty-nine, screenwriter of Drummoyne. The BMW had left the highway at speed, rolled and burned. The police had asked the driver of another car reportedly at the scene of the accident to contact them, but with no result.
‘That’s awful,’ Kay said. ‘But I can’t see what is has to do…’
‘I took some photos of her and this Wilcox. Angel saw them-that was the first he knew they were having an affair. I tipped him off, by accident.’
‘Yes.’
‘Angel couldn’t get his hands on any money he couldn’t account for, remember?’
‘Yes, Pauline wrote me.’
‘There was a three hundred thousand dollar insurance policy on her life. Angel was the beneficiary. That’s where Pauline got her money.’
I had another drink and Kay didn’t, and it got worse from there. We gave it a try, went to the places you go to when you’re trying to be happy, but it didn’t work. She didn’t like the sound of the job they offered her, she didn’t like the editor and she didn’t like the weather. I drove her past Angel’s place at Camp Cove; she looked but she didn’t say anything. Next day she caught a plane back to New York City.
‹‹Contents››
The Arms of the Law
The voice on the phone was hoarse and not much more than a whisper. ‘Hardy? This is Harvey Salmon.’
‘Oh yeah,’ I said, ‘and who else?’
‘Huh?’
‘The way I hear it, Harvey, you haven’t had a private phone conversation in years.’
‘Don’t joke, Hardy. This is serious.’
‘Must be. When did you get out?’
‘Today. I need your help.’
‘Mr Salmon, I’d reckon you need prayers and airline tickets in about that order.’
‘Stop pissing around. I want to meet you to talk business. D’you know the Sportsman Club, in Alexandria?’
I did know it although I didn’t particularly want to; it was a dive that went back to six o’clock closing days and beyond as a sly grog joint and SP hangout. In those days the sport most of its associates were familiar with was two-up. I’d heard that it had gained some sort of affiliation with a soccer club, but it had still worn the same dingy, guilty look when I last drove past.
‘It’s one of my favourite places.’ I said. ‘Are you a member there?’
‘Yeah, about the only place I still am a member.’ His voice was bitter. ‘Meet me there in an hour and we’ll talk work and money.’
‘I don’t know…’
‘A thousand bucks, Hardy, for two days’ work.’
‘Okay.’ The phone clicked as soon as I had the second syllable out. I sat there with the instrument in my hand thinking that I was about to associate with a known criminal. But then, as a private investigator, I did that a lot of the time and it was what my mother had predicted I’d end up doing anyway. Besides, we’re associating with criminals all the time-motor mechanics, doctors, real estate agents-it was only the ‘known’ part that made this any different.
I needed the thousand bucks, not because business was especially slow. It wasn’t; I had a few party-mindings and money-escortings to do in the days ahead, and I was on a retainer from a group of wealthy Ultimo squatters who were trying to keep leverage on the smelly company that owned their row of terraces. But things kept getting more expensive, like food and Scotch and sneakers, and it would take a lot of fear to turn me away from a thousand dollars.
The name Harvey Salmon generated a certain amount of fear, mind you. He’d been a key man in a syndicate which the press had dubbed ‘the rainforest ring’ because the marijuana grown in Australia, or some of it, had been cultivated in rainforests. But the ring had operated on a broad field, importing from South-East Asia and exporting to the US, and there had been the usual number of couriers killed and businessmen who’d found it expedient to go off into the bush with just their Mercedes and a shotgun.
The ring had collapsed under two simultaneous blows-the death, from a heart attack at the age of 43 while jogging, of Peter ‘Pilot’ Wrench who’d been the chief organiser. Some said that Wrench had got his nickname from his early days of flying drugs into Australia through the open northern door, others said it was really ‘Pilate’ because he always washed his hands of a bad deal and a bad dealer. The death of Wrench threw the lieutenants into confusion and doubt. One of them gave interviews to certain law enforcement officers which resolved the doubts of some of the others who got long sentences to repent in. The interviewee was Harvey Salmon who’d backed up his allegations with scores of hours of telephone tapes. I’d heard a lot of that on the QT from Harry Tickener and other journalists; for public consumption, Salmon had got fifteen years a mere eighteen months ago.