“No.”
“Why not?”
“Too flash, she made you feel she was doing you a favour shacking up in your place.”
“I see. Well my information is she’s headed this way. You wouldn’t know where she’d go?”
She sighed, the way hotel keepers do when the beds aren’t full and the overheads are going up all the time. She reached out a meaty hand, knocked about from cleaning rooms and wrinkled around the three rings on her fingers. The fingers closed over the money.
“I haven’t seen her, but if Noni’s back in Newcastle she’s at one of two places.”
I waited.
“If she’s flush she’ll be at the Regal in the city.”
I thought about it. “I don’t think she’s flush but I’ll check it out anyway. What if she’s not?”
“She’ll be at Lorraine’s boarding house, Fourth Street. It’s a brothel.”
“Literally?”
She looked puzzled.
“I mean is it really a brothel?”
“Oh no, not strictly speaking, not any more. Probably was once. I mean it’s a dump, you can flop there for a dollar a night, single or double.”
“Sounds choice.”
She chuckled. “Right. Lorraine’s got one rule.”
“What’s that?”
“No blacks.”
I grunted and asked to use her phone. She pushed it across the desk to me and I reached into my jacket pocket, took out a pen knife and sawed through the cable.
“Hey!” she yelped and banged one of her big red hands down on the desk.
“You can splice it,” I said. “Give you something to do in the wee small hours.”
“You bastard. I could go out and phone.”
“You won’t. You don’t care that much.”
She grinned and picked up the cut ends of the cord. “You’re right. Give Noni a belting for me.” She rubbed the ends together. “Hey, there’s no electricity in this is there?” I told her there wasn’t.
Outside the Falcon was clicking and squeaking as it cooled down after the long drive. It started under protest and I had to coax it out onto the road. I joined in the thin stream of traffic, mostly trucks, heading for the city. The drizzle had stopped and the clouds had peeled back leaving Newcastle squatting sullenly in a pool of moonlight. It opened its mouth and sucked me in.
9
The Regal Hotel is in the middle of the city and it dominates the scene on the skyline and at ground level. The building is a tower with black and white facades alternating each storey so that it looks like a giant pile of draughts. I parked outside and made my usual mistake of trying to push open the self-opening doors. This leaves you with a hand held out impotently in front of you and gives the desk staff an initial advantage. Under the lobby lights my boots looked more scuffed and my denims more wrinkled than they did normally. The girl behind the desk was lacquered and painted like a Barbie doll; her fingernails were purple talons and her mouth was a moist, ripe plum. I marched up to the desk and looked straight and hard into her eyes. She blinked and lost a fraction of the sartorial advantage. Her greeting was an incline of the head. No “Yes sir”. That would have been a total defeat. I took out my licence card and the photograph of Noni and held them at her eye level, one in each hand.
“I’m a private detective on a missing persons case. Nothing sordid. I want to know if this woman is registered here.”
Her eyes moved lazily across my offerings. She might have been short of sleep or her lids might have been tired from heaving the enormous false lashes up and down. Her lips parted and tiny fissures appeared in the make-up beside her mouth. She was got-up to be looked at, not to talk.
“I can’t disclose any information about our guests.” She spoke as if she was reading the words off an idiot card pasted to my forehead.
“I’m not asking for any information. Just yes or no. If you say yes I’ll ask the manager and go through all the proper channels. If you say no I’ll be on my way.”
The impossible lashes fluttered up and she looked at the picture.
“No, then.”
“Thanks.” I put the card and the photograph away. Her face fell back into its fixed repose as if I had never caused it to move. I bounced away across the carpet and remembered not to try to open the door. Along to the left of the entrance a concrete ramp sloped down under the building. I went down into a dimly lit half-acre car park; there were a few score cars parked in rows. I walked quickly up and down the aisles between the cars – no Chev Biscayne.
I had a map of Newcastle in the car and checked it for Fourth Street. It runs through a housing estate near the northern edges of the suburbs up into the coastal ranges. It was a thirty-minute drive from the Regal to Lorraine’s boarding house but in terms of class and cash they were a million miles apart. The boarding house was a two-storey wooden job with peeling paint and a collapsed front balcony on the top level. There was about two acres of land around it and, as far as I could judge in the moonlight, what wasn’t covered by blackberries and bracken was serving as a motor car cemetery. A driveway at the side of the house was a shadowless black hole. The road ran steeply past the building and there were empty paddocks opposite it. Lorraine’s was flanked by cheap brick bungalows on either side, but there were vacant lots up and down the street as if parts of it had been blighted and made unfit for human habitation.
I cruised up the street and parked at the top of the hill about fifty yards beyond the house. The steel works was belching out white smoke and laying down a background hum a couple of miles away towards the water. A few headlights flicked along the roads below but Fourth Street was empty and silent. I checked the Smith amp; Wesson. The drizzle started again as I eased open the passenger side door and slipped out onto the road.
The gravel road was slushy under my feet as I moved up to the black tunnel beside the house. Bushes overgrew the driveway, their straggling ends whipped clean by cars brushing past them. The ground’s surface changed abruptly and I bent down to examine it. Deep fresh ruts were etched into the earth in an arc that curved around to a clear patch in front of the house. The ruts ended in a shallow ditch where the wheels of a vehicle had spun before getting a grip on the damp ground. Someone had left here in a hurry not so long ago. I moved up into the tunnel; blackness closed around me like a cloak and I bumped into the rear end of a car when I was about half way along the side of the house. I ran my hand across its boot which seemed to be about as wide as a bus. I put out a hand for the tail fin and the cold chrome rose up just where it should – a Chev Biscayne if ever I felt one.
I unshipped the pistol and held it stiffly in front of me like a divining rod. I skirted the car and felt my way along the weatherboards to the back of the house. A dim yellow light seeped out through a window and another thin block of it outlined a partly opened door. I kept my back pressed against the rippled wooden walls and scraped along to the door. I couldn’t hear anything except the droning of the steelworks and the tight hiss of my own breathing. A fly wire screen that looked as if a large dog had gone through it flapped open. I eased it away with the toe of my boot and pushed the door in. It swung easily, creaking a little, and gave me a view of several square feet of greasy green lino. I stepped into the room and my foot skidded in a dark patch just inside the doorway.
A woman was sitting on the floor with her back against a set of built-in cupboards. Her head lolled crazily to one side and a dark trickle of blood had seeped down from her mouth over her chin and onto the bodice of her cheap chain store dress. She was a thin, yellow woman with lank black hair and a scraggy neck with dirt in the creases. A vein in her forehead was throbbing and her flat chest was rising and falling in millimetres. I opened a door which let on to a long passage running towards the front of the house. The light barely penetrated six feet of its length but it seemed to be empty. I closed the door and bent over the woman. Her breath, what there was of it, was coming out in little erratic gasps and each one smelled more of stale gin than the last. I looked around the room. The bench tops were littered with bottles of sauce, food-encrusted plates and empty beer bottles. An electric toaster had one of its sides down like a drawbridge; crumbs were scattered around it and a fly was trapped in a smear of butter across its top. The mess – jars of jam, brimful ashtrays and slimy cutlery – flowed across the benches and into the sink. The detritus leaped across to the laminex kitchen table which carried a number of grimy glasses, pools of liquid and a two-thirds empty bottle of Gilbeys gin.