‘Bruce mentioned this wino on the tape, Leon. You said you knew him too. D’you know where I can find him?’
‘He sleeps in a sort of chookhouse out in the back yard of a place in the street behind Bruce’s. I don’t know the number but you can’t miss it. It’s a three-storey terrace, free-standing, chunder-green.’
‘Okay, thanks.’
‘What’s the time?’ Her voice was blurry and she was having trouble hitting the hard consonants. Southern Comfort.
‘Nine-twenty. Why?’
‘At ten you’ll find Leon on the steps of the Haworth Arms.’ She spelled the word out.’
‘I’ve read the book,’ I said. ‘I’ll try there first. You okay?’
‘I will be when I’ve had a shower and some coffee and a hair of the dog. When will I see you next?’
‘What about Manny’s tonight, at six, say?’
‘Right.’
My parents had lived in Bronte some time before I was born. My sister remembers it; she says that that when they quarrelled he threatened to drown her at the beach. She’d just laugh at him and go off to the pub. It wasn’t so different from what I remembered happening when we lived at Maroubra. I can remember my father walking with me along that big, empty Maroubra beach while my mother was in the pub.
I had more leisure for these pleasant thoughts on this drive to Bronte. It was a bright, mild day and the council workers carving up a section of Oxford Street were whistling. I drove through the cutting and past Bronte beach which is scaled right down from Bondi-the sand, the grass, the changing sheds, the lot-and up towards the Waverley cemetery where the dead are laid out in rows on a headland, eternally oriented towards New Zealand.
A jogger strained up the grade and took a rest leaning on one of the sandstone horse troughs outside the cemetery. It was a long time since a horse had taken a breather there. I drove down beside the cemetery to take a look at the water before I plunged into pubs and rundown, chunder-green boarding houses. The dark blue sea, white-flecked and streaked with deep greens and silvery patches, rolled away forever to the east. The waves were high and even, occasionally rolling over and dumping with deep, resonant crashes. The board riders still defied them, but the waves could wait.
I located the Haworth Arms in my Guide to Sydney Pubs and headed for it. The warm day wouldn’t matter one way or the other to the step-sitters; their skins would be permanently tanned from years of walking the streets and sleeping rough. Leon, with a chookhouse to doss in, would be an aristocrat amongst them.
There were five of them on the steps, warriors of the bottle, who looked old but who probably weren’t. I addressed myself to the most awake-looking, a character with grey hair to his shoulders and a face as seamed as W. H. Auden’s.
‘I’m looking for Leon,’ I said.
‘Ain’t here. Got the price of a schooner, mate?’
I gave him a dollar and he put it carefully into the inside breast pocket of the ancient suit coat he wore.
‘I heard he was always here.’
‘S’right, but he ain’t. First time in I dunno how long.’ He turned to a small fat man who was rolling a cigarette out of what looked like cannibalised butts. ‘Seen Leon, Clyde?’ Clyde shook his head. I wondered if he thought that was worth a dollar, but he evidently didn’t because he didn’t look up. I carry a few cigarettes with me to prove that I’ve beaten the habit fair and square. I passed two across to Clyde, who put them cautiously into his makings tin.
‘Ta. Leon’s sick, probably, or dead.’
I jumped. ‘Why d’you say that?’
‘Stands to reason. He ain’t here, usually means a man’s sick or dead. Right, Stan?’
The man with the ploughed paddock face nodded. ‘Right.’
I drove back to Henneberry’s place and parked across the street. The sun hit the rounded white section of the flats, giving the building an exotic, Moorish look. I wondered how long it would take the landlord to re-let and decided it would depend on the carpet; he’d be slowed up if he had to replace it.
Life got a bit tougher in the streets further back. The houses were small and cramped; there was no view from here but some of the buildings actually grovelled down below street level as if emphasising the fact. The chunder-green joint stood out like an elephant among mice. It started about a foot back from the street and there was just enough room between the building and the fences on either side for a skinny cat to slip by.
I knocked on the front door gingerly. The disgusting green colour was everywhere and it had a slimy look as if it would come off on your hand. An enormously fat woman wearing a print dress and a crazily buttoned cardigan came to the door. She filled the doorway and when she spoke her three chins turned into four or five.
‘I’d like to see Leon, please.’
She looked at me and two tears as big as grapes squeezed out of her eyes and began to traverse the fat.
‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘He bloody died last night.’
9
Her name was Rose Jenkins. She was a talker, and she invited me back to her kitchen, where she made tea I didn’t drink. She gave it to me in great detaiclass="underline" she managed the boarding house in which there were fourteen roomers. Leon she let sleep in a lean-to out back for a nominal rent. Sometimes he’d come into the house to use the toilet; for the less serious calls of nature, he’d use the backyard. I was beginning to get a rounded-out picture of Leon.
I persuaded her to stop drinking tea and talking and show me the relevant scenes. The lean-to smelled bad. You could have called it airy and in winter it would be only marginally better than being out under a tree. There was a tattered mattress on the concrete floor with a heavy tweed coat, fashionable between the wars, thrown over it. The pillow was a pile of newspapers. The toilet was off a first-floor landing. Leon had come down from that level the short way, and his neck had been broken.
‘Did anyone see the fall?’ I asked.
Mrs Jenkins shook her head and the fat bounced and jiggled. ‘No, none of them what lives in the back part of the house was home when it happened. Mr Brass come home at about eight and he found the poor soul there. He was all hunched up against the wall and terrible broken up, they said.’
‘You didn’t see him?’
She shook her head again and looked away from the stairs. I walked up them counting, thirteen in all. The toilet had a light burning inside it and some light seeped out through the cracked door. There was a light switch on the landing; I flicked it and a sixty- or seventy-five-watt bulb came on above the top stair. There was a threadbare but intact carpet outside the toilet and a runner in the same condition on the stairs. I went back to the kitchen and asked Rose whether the landing light had been on yesterday in the afternoon and evening.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Some of me roomers are quite old, you know. They need the light.’
Then I asked her why she hadn’t asked me for any identification and why she was talking so freely to me.
‘Nothing would surprise me now,’ she said.
‘How’s that?’
‘They found quite a bit of money in Leon’s room, in the mattress. The police, I mean. They wouldn’t say how much, but someone said they filled a paper bag with it. I thought you were something to do with the money.’
I let her go on thinking it. I was thinking myself. A derelict with a bag full of money isn’t unique; Griffo had had a few thousand in the bank when he died, and he’d been panhandling for years. Also, Leon wouldn’t have been the first man to be murdered for the money in the mattress, but in those cases the murderer usually bothered to take the money with him or her. I was sweating in the warm, still air when I got back to the car and that made a drink seem like a good idea.
I found a pub within walking distance from where I’d parked and went in to do some more thinking over a middy. It had begun to look as if Mrs Singer had been on to something and that someone wasn’t happy about information about John Singer being passed around. My enquiry seemed to be the likely link between the deaths of Henneberry and Leon if the latter wasn’t an accident. I didn’t think it was. Information, whatever it was, had, in this scenario, caused the deaths of two men. I didn’t have the information myself but I was still looking for it and I had to face the fact that someone might object strenuously. Not for the first time I reflected that a hundred and twenty a day wasn’t a good rate for getting dead, but there was no point in upping the fees. A thousand a day is still a poor deal.