“Oh yeah, the actor. His bird was missing. Flushed her?”
“Not yet. Now the other favour.”
He looked quickly down at his typewriter, picked up a pencil and made a note on the copy.
“Are you sure you’ve got the time Harry? I’d hate to throw your schedule out.”
He looked embarrassed. “Shit. Sorry Cliff. It’s this piece on Moody. I want to get it right.”
“Read A. J. Liebling. Who’s your top crime man?”
“Garth Green.”
“Good memory? Knows the files?”
“Steel trap.”
“Will you introduce me to him?”
“Sure, when?”
“Now.”
He looked relieved and jumped up from his chair.
“Steady,” I said. “Are you sure he’ll be in?”
“He’ll be in.” Tickener came around the desk. “He works till two p.m. and drinks till two a.m. Let’s go.”
I followed him. There were a few people walking about in the corridor and a small clutch of reporters was grouped talking in a doorway. They parted like the waters when a six-foot girl with close-cropped red hair walked through the door. She was wearing boots, a long dark skirt and a tight-fitting jacket and she carried her head like a Queen. She had a high, proud nose and big dark eyes in a face as pale as a lily. I gaped with the journos but Harry seemed not to notice her and kept on his way. I wondered about Harry. He knocked on a door which had stuck to it a file card with the name garth green typed on it in lower case.
Tickener pushed the door open and I went in after him. A big man in shirtsleeves with heavy striped braces was sitting in a swivel chair looking out the window. With his grizzled balding head and meaty arms he looked like a cop which probably helped him in his calling. Looking out the window was probably a good idea for a crime reporter too. As sure as hell there’d be some of it going on out there. He turned slowly round to face us.
“Hello boy wonder,” he said.
Harry laughed a little more heartily than he needed to. “Garth, this is Cliff Hardy, he…”
“Private man, I know.” He leaned forward to shake hands. “Glad to meet you.” I trusted him with my hand and he gave it back to me undamaged.
“Hardy’s on a case Garth, and he could use some help. I thought you might have something for him. OK?”
Green waved at him and pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket.
“I’ve got a piece on the run,” Tickener went on. “I’ll just get back to it.”
Green waved again and Harry gave me a nod before he scampered off.
“Good bloke, Harry,” Green said. He lit the cigar. “Doing well too. What can I do for you? Who do you want the shit on?”
“Not like that. It’s criminal history I’m after.”
“Why don’t you ask your mate Evans?”
“You’re well informed.”
“Good memory,” he grunted. “Read Harry’s stuff on the Costello case. You’ve got the right contact there. Evans is an honest cop.”
“That’s right and so I can’t use him right now. I’m in a bit too deep and there’s things I’d rather not say.”
He grinned; his big, boozy face broke up into amiable creases and more grizzled grey hair poked out of his nostrils. “I get like that myself sometimes. Let’s hear it. I’ll help if I can.”
I reached over and stubbed out my cigarette in the half tobacco tin he used for an ashtray. “It’s pretty general. What do you know about crimes, solved and unsolved, up around Macleay way?”
“A bit – when are we talking about?”
“Twelve years ago, maybe longer.”
He leaned back, took a drag on the cigar, sucked the smoke in and blew it at the ceiling. The action brought on a coughing fit which left him red in the face and clutching the edge of his desk. “I’ve tried everything… fucking pipes… these things.” He waved the cigar. “All the same, I have to do the drawback. All I want to do is smoke fifty plain Turf a day like I used to.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Too scared.” He put the cigar down; a thin column of smoke rose up from it like an Apache signal. “Macleay… not too hard to name the big one, bank job in… sixty-six.”
“What happened?”
“Two men did a Commonwealth bank on a Friday. Took away fifty thousand dollars.”
“Never caught?”
“Not a sign.”
“The money?”
“Never found. The bank put up a big reward but heard nothing.”
“That’s strange. Did you cover it yourself?”
Green picked up the cigar again. There was a faint curl of smoke coming from the end and he sucked it into life, blowing out an enormous cloud. He looked at it virtuously. “Yeah. I went up there and looked around. Thought I might get onto something and make a big man of myself. Nothing doing. It was a pretty amateurish job. They got away on foot. Dead lucky.”
“How did the cops figure it?”
“Same as me, two roughies who got lucky. The cops dragged in everyone they could think of but got nowhere. I wrote a piece on it… hang on.”
He lumbered over to a battered filing cabinet under the window. He pulled out a drawer and riffled through the folders standing up inside it. He took one out and back to the desk where he opened it and leafed through some foolscap sheets with news cuttings pasted to them.
“Yeah, here it is.” He handed the sheet across to me and I ran my eye over the columns of newsprint. It was a straight recital of the facts including a description of the bandits who’d worn stocking masks and carried sawn-off shotguns. I pushed the sheet back across the desk. Green fiddled with his cigar and looked at the wall over my head. His eyes screwed up and he let out a tired sigh. His first drink was still a good way off.
“Yes?” I said.
“I remember now, there was a whisper about it. They were trying to fit someone up with it, a standover man with some local form.”
He butted his cigar and a smell that would soon be a vile reek started to sneak across the desk towards me. I thought that it might help his anti-drawback campaign if he smoked better cigars. I was about to say so when he started drumming his fingers on the desk.
“I’m slipping,” he grumbled. “Can’t remember his name. Look Hardy, I’m rambling. This of interest to you, this the one?”
“It could be – missing money sounds right. What about the standover man?”
“The name’s gone but he went up for rape in Newcastle, young kid. He got ten years.”
I heard something click inside my head like a combination lock tumbler coming into place. I sat up sharply. Green looked amusedly at my reaction.
“That’s right, they didn’t have anything much on him for the Macleay job as I recall, just something about the company he kept. The cops were just as happy to do him on the rape charge. It was open and shut.” He leered at me and I winced at the joke. He laughed. “Now you look interested.”
“I am. I see a connection. How can I get some dope on this rape case?”
“I thought you were interested in lost money.”
“Yes, and lost women. Let me get it straight before I go off half-cocked. What was that about the company he kept, the rapist?”
“Jesus Hardy, it’s twelve years ago. I might be confusing it with something else.” He picked up the sheets of paper, aligned them and tucked them back in the folder. Handling the relics of the time gave him assurance. “I think it was just that this bloke, whoever he was, used to hang about with an Abo up Macleay way.”
“So what? There’s lots of them up there.”
“That’s right but you didn’t read the story very thoroughly did you?” He handed it back to me and I read it word by word. One of the tellers said that one of the bandits looked dark under the mask, like an Aborigine. The thing was coming together now. I passed the cutting back.
“Pretty thin.”
“That’s what I said,” Green barked. “Macleay’s a racist hole; was then anyway, probably still is. It wasn’t much to go on but it was the only whiff the coppers had.” He blew a kiss at the wall. “But it died on them.”
I leaned forward, excited. “I’m sorry to press you, but the names are important, is there any way to get on to them?”