“Where are you going?”
“Newcastle, first off.”
“Now?”
I had no one waiting up for me and the paper boy stayed his arm if he saw one uncollected on my doorstep.
“Why not?” I said.
8
A private detective leads a throw-away life for much of the time. Some men in the game overplay this by sleeping on couches in their offices and never changing their underwear. I don’t go so far; I’ve got a house in Glebe with reasonably civilised fittings and I sleep in a bed more nights than not. But some cases don’t let you go to bed on them and this was looking like just such a one. The Tarelton girl was running from one piece of trouble to another and there was no time for packing the matching pigskin luggage. I didn’t have too much to go on except that she and the car would stand out in Macleay like Gunsynd in the Black Stump Cup. She could become detached from the car but it would take a lot of work to tone down her eye-turning image and she was probably too vain to do so. Half the people I’d met that day seemed to come from Macleay or thereabouts and the place was fixing itself in my mind as a destination, a source and an answer.
I made two calls from a box outside the theatre. The first got me a sleepy-sounding Madeline Tarelton who said nothing while I gave her a sketch of events. She refused to wake Ted and wouldn’t or couldn’t confirm that Noni had an uncle up north. Just on spec I asked her what name the girl went by.
“Rouble, Noni Rouble.”
“Professional name?”
“No, her mother’s. She took it back when she broke up with Ted.”
“When was all this?”
“Years ago. Look Mr Hardy, this is scarcely the time… you should have got all this information from Ted this morning. Do you know your job or don’t you?”
“Sometimes I wonder,” I said. “I agree with you. Just an outline will do. Noni didn’t live with your husband for how long?”
“Oh most of her childhood.”
Where did she live?”
“Somewhere north. Really Mr Hardy…”
I apologised again, told her I was going north and called off.
The second call was to police headquarters in the hope that Grant Evans was on duty. He was and not too happy about it. He wasn’t working on the Simmonds killing but had heard the talk about it; so far the cops had nothing but questions.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like who was the blonde and what was that snooper Hardy doing at the scene?”
“And like, where’s the kid’s car?”
“Yeah. Can you help a little on some of these points? Hate to press you.”
“Quite all right. Maybe soon. Thanks Grant.” I hung up in the middle of a curse from him and it occurred to me that most of our telephone conversations ended like that. Lucky we were friends.
I drove through the city and over the Harbour bridge. Theatergoers clogged the roads and the drizzle had started in again making for slides, swearing and crumpled mudguards. I crawled along like a link in a slowly moving chain and failed in every attempt to jump a light mid get a run. On the north side the traffic moved faster and I could have got into top gear. Instead I pulled into a garage for petrol and a check on the oil and water. I used the lavatory and the smell of the greasy food in the place’s snack bar reminded me that I hadn’t eaten for ten hours. I bought a hamburger and a carton of chips and ate them as I drove. The Falcon groaned a bit under the unaccustomed load of the full tank, but nothing dropped off and when I’d made it to the beginning of the tollway I felt confident that she’d go the distance.
Since they put the tollway in, the drive to Newcastle is easy. The only danger in driving it at night is falling asleep at the wheel. I warded this off by taking quiet slugs from the Scotch bottle, letting (he liquor jolt me but not taking enough to get me drunk. My head was aching and the whisky was good for that, too. I should have been asleep in bed. Instead I was driving a tollway at night and drinking whisky. Mother wouldn’t approve. Father wouldn’t approve. But then Father never did approve. Funny thoughts. Maybe I was drunk. A few cars passed me but neither the Falcon nor I was feeling competitive and we couldn’t have done much about it anyway. The road was slippery and I swayed about a bit and got bored by the dark, indeterminate shapes whipping by. I wished I had a radio. I wished I had new tyres, but I stayed loyal – I didn’t wish I had a new car.
Like all big cities, Newcastle emits a glow which you pick up a few miles out. It’s composed of neon glare, factory smoke and the small glimmers of a hundred thousand light globes and television screens. There’s a good measure of the day’s wastes drifting about as well; Newcastle is like Sydney, you can taste it about as soon as you can see it. I felt the grittiness of the air and its load of rubber and gas between my teeth as I began the descent from the hills towards the city.
Newcastle sprawls about like a drunken whore: it trickles off towards the coalfields in one direction, climbs up into the hill country in another and slides down to the sea on the east. The beach is a surprise; a fair-sized slice of white sand in front of a reasonable stretch of water for humans to swim in. It’s like a reward to the city’s inhabitants for putting up with so much else that is appalling. I hadn’t been there for five years but the bird’s eye view I got of it from the highway suggested that it was much the same, only worse. The long flat approach from the south is a ribbon of used car yards, take-away food stands and decaying wooden houses. A string of motels five miles out from town invite you to stop over, miss the city and push on to the clean country up ahead. I pulled into one of them, the Sundowner, which had a “Vacancy” sign with the second “a” flickering fitfully on and off.
A middle-aged blonde woman with big bouncing breasts under a black polo neck sweater was behind the desk in the office. She ran an experienced eye over my clothes and wasn’t too happy. Also I wasn’t carrying luggage and they never like that. She sneaked a look past me at the Falcon and wasn’t impressed by that, either. Luckily I wasn’t planning to stay. She probably would have made me pay in advance and leave a deposit. I reached into my pocket for the photograph of Noni and laid it on the desk in front of her impressive mammaries. I opened my wallet, letting her see the fifties in it and took out my operator’s licence which I put down next to the picture.
“Ever see her?” I asked.
She looked at it for a hundredth of a second. “Sure.”
I was so surprised I had to ask her again. It isn’t usually that easy. My puritanical soul told me it shouldn’t be that easy. But I’d heard her right.
“Anyone along here’d know her.” There was a tone in her voice that was hard to interpret, maybe amusement. I looked at her and noticed her colossal double chin. She smiled and the chin tensed up a bit. “That’s Noni Rouble. Haven’t seen her for years.”
“How is it you know her then?”
She asked me why I was asking and I told her some lies. She looked closely at the photograph of me on the licence, the one taken three years back and in a good light. She wasn’t too happy about it so I eased a five dollar note out of the wallet and let it sit on top to get some air.
“I suppose it’s alright,” she said, eyeing the money. “Noni was an R and R girl around here – oh, seven or eight years back.”
“R and R girl?”
“Right. Not to put too fine a point on it, she slept around with the American soldiers. You know, the ones on leave from Vietnam. She stayed here a couple of times. She stayed all up and down this strip.” She waved her hand at the road.
“Somebody had to do it I suppose,” I said.
“Yes.” She shrugged and her heavy bosom lifted and subsided like a swell on the sea. “Nothing to do with me.”
The thought crossed my mind that she was just the right age to have done the same thing when the Yanks were here in World War Two and to resent the passage of time.
“You didn’t like her?”