Brave’s snort of derision underlined my own awareness of the cliched cant I was spouting, but cops have to say “it is my duty to warn you”, and doctors have to say “put out your tongue”.
“I’d like to hear your account of the threats,” I went on, “and your ideas and reactions. You’re a sensitive woman. The threats came from a woman and you might have picked out something that a man would miss.”
She looked blank. Wrong tack. I buttered her on the other side. “You have experience of people in need, social problems. Maybe you can guess at the disturbance in this woman’s mind, what she wants, what lies behind it.” That was better. Smugness crept into her face. She moved her hands away from Brave’s for the first time. She smoothed down the covers. It was hard not to dislike her.
“You are acute in your own way, Mr Hardy,” she said. “Of course, one of the worst things about this, for me, is the thought of how disturbed that woman must be to be saying those things. The person speaking to me on the telephone was emotionally disturbed. As you say, I have some experience in this area. The language was frightful.”
I suppressed an impulse to laugh. “Do you mean it was obscene?”
“Yes, horribly so. I had to burn the letters.”
“Were they obscene too?”
She started to look nervous again. “No, not at all, just awful.”
“Why did you have to burn them then?”
She plucked at the bedcover, shredding some of the raised nap and balling it in her fingers. “I meant that, well, the filthy language and the letters came from the same person. So I burned the letters.”
“You think the phone calls and letters came from the same source do you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Why, of course?”
“They must have.”
“Tell me one, just one, of the objectionable phrases in the phone calls.”
“I can’t, I couldn’t say it.”
“What were the letters about? The same thing?”
“No — sickness, decay, death.”
“Come on Miss Gutteridge, one phrase from the calls.”
She glared at me, bunched her fists and hammered them on the snowy bedcover. “Fucking capitalist!” she screamed in my face.
There was a silence that seemed to let the words hang in the air forever. Then she started sobbing and Brave moved in with all systems go. He took her hands and clasped them inside his while murmuring comforting, animal-like sounds in her ear. He swayed above her like a mesmerised snake putting the music back into the pipe. She regained control very quickly. I knew that this kind of command over another person was extremely difficult to obtain and incredibly costly to bring about in time and effort. There was no short cut to it and I wondered why Brave had made an investment of this order in this pathetic woman. There was no time for on-the-spot investigation. At a nod from Brave, Bruno moved forward and took my arm just above the elbow. His grip hurt like a dentist’s drill on a nerve.
“You’ve had your time. Hardy,” Brave said, “I hope you’re satisfied with what you’ve done.”
If that was supposed to make me feel sorry for the woman it didn’t work. Her problems were mine only in a- strictly professional sense, but I had to stay with them. At this point I had to assume that Bryn had hired me for reasons other than those he’d stated. That isn’t unusual, but you have to sort the real reasons out fairly quickly if you don’t want to be the meat in the sandwich all the way. I had to fire a shot in my own war.
“Goodbye, Miss Gutteridge,” I said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Out,” Brave hissed the word like a jet of venom and Bruno swung me round and we trotted out of the room like big Siamese twins joined at the shoulder.
We made the same turns in reverse and Bruno shooed me into the room I’d surfaced in before. I sat down on a chair near the desk and started scooping my things up and putting them in my pockets. Bruno stepped forward and a puzzled look spread over his face as he tried to work out whether he was supposed to stop me or not. He couldn’t tell and he couldn’t think and hit at the same time. Not many muscle men can and it gives the weaklings a fractional edge sometimes. I made a cigarette as the Italian hovered in the middle of the room looking like a discus thrower turned to stone in the middle of his wind-up.
“Don’t worry, Bruno,” I said. “I’ll wait here for your master and in a little while you’ll be able to go off and do something about your face.” That gave him something to think of. He put a hand up to his face and pressed gently. “Harder,” I said, “maybe there’s something broken.” He worked his jaw and grimaced. I might have been able to get him to give himself a karate chop but there was no challenge in it. The door swung open and Brave walked in. He sat down primly behind his desk and the first colour I’d seen in his face appeared — high red spots in his cheeks like daubings on a clown.
“You’ve been very troublesome, Hardy,” he said, “and achieved very little, I should imagine.”
“Why should you imagine that?”
“I won’t fence with you. You are a nuisance, plain and simple. A blunderer into delicate situations. The question is, how to be rid of you.”
I wanted to bring his dislike of me up as high as it would go.
“A blunderbuss,” I said.
He registered it like a deep internal pain.
“As I understand it,” he said slowly, “a private detective is without any authority and credibility if he is without a client.”
“You’ve read too much Chandler,” I said.
He looked puzzled for a second but didn’t let it stop him. “I think that’s so,” he went on, “and therefore you represent no problem at all Mr Hardy, none at all. Show him out Bruno.”
Bruno and I did our dancing bears act down corridors and through doors and in five minutes I was walking down the path towards the gate. The night air hit me hard and I gave my attention to finding a chemist for my head and a bottle shop for me.
4
The Green Man and Joe Barassi’s All Day All Nite Pharmacy at Drummoyne put me back together. I washed down two red Codrals with a couple of hefty slugs from a half bottle of Haig. I looked at the wound on my head in the mirror of the Green Man’s washroom. It didn’t look too bad, the blood had stopped seeping and I managed to clean the area up with damp paper towels. Whoever had hit me had known his business and had chosen to give me a purple heart rather than a posthumous medal of honour. I felt vaguely grateful to him and had another nip out of the Scotch bottle for him.
The traffic flowed easily over the Iron Cove bridge. People were all in the cinemas and pubs and there was little competition for me on the drive home to Glebe. I wasn’t up to shuttling the car into the courtyard so I left it outside the house with a steering lock on the gearshift which would hold up a good Glebe car thief for about two minutes. My head throbbed and a little laser of pain stabbed over the right eyebrow but I decided to try and make some sense of the night’s play before I let another Codral and some more whisky sing me to sleep. I sat in a bean bag with a tall Scotch and soda on the floor beside me. I rolled three cigarettes and set them in the grooves of the ashtray the way Uncle Ted used to. Uncle Ted had a good war, sent back hundreds from the Tobruk two-up games and survived. I’d survived high school, two erratic years at university and Malaya to become an insurance investigator — long hours, high mileage and pathetic incendiarists. The work had coated my fingers with nicotine, scuttled my marriage and put fat around my waistline and wits. The deals and hush-money made divorce work seem clean as riding a wave and bodyguarding noble and manly. Suicides and Svengalis were a different thing though, and I wasn’t sure that I was up to coping with them. I was on the third cigarette without having any inspiration, when the phone rang.
I heaved myself out of the bean bag and put the receiver somewhere near my face.
“Mr Hardy?” A woman’s voice, drunk or panicky.
