‘If you can do anything, like some driving or something like that, I’ll get on to you.’
‘Thanks, Hardy. Appreciate it. The Northbridge place feels like a barn with only me in it. We’ve got a flat at the Double Bay marina. I’ll stay there until Pat gets back. You’ve got the number?’
I checked, told him I had it, reassured him again and hung up. I had a mental picture of him sitting by the phone, which I didn’t like too much-it could be a long sit.
Hilde came home and made coffee. I gave her and Frank some time on their own, and when I rejoined them for the drink they seemed to have spent it well. Hilde passed Frank his coffee and gave his bristles a rub.
‘Just like a Hun’, I said, ‘knuckling under to authority.’
She smiled at me. ‘Get stuffed, Cliff. How’s it going with the one with the sexy voice?’
I grunted. ‘It’d go all right if I wasn’t spending so much time with coppers.’
‘They’re not so bad.’ She ran her hand over the bristles again, almost as if she was just interested in the texture. Almost.
‘This is a conspiracy, Frank, you know that’, I said.
Parker nodded.
‘What is?’ Hilde said.
I filled her in on what was happening, partly to hear myself review it and partly because Hilde sometimes has a sensible suggestion to make. Sometimes she has a brilliant suggestion to make. But not this time.
‘You go out on a limb doing that, Frank’, she said.
‘I’m on the limb already. I haven’t got anything to lose.’
‘It’s all right for Cliff, she persisted. ‘He hasn’t got a reputation to worry about.’
‘A policeman hasn’t got a reputation either’, Parker said.
His voice was bitter-edged, impatient. ‘He’s got his job or he hasn’t got it. That’s all.’
‘Touched as I am by Hilde’s assessment of my character’, I said, ‘we can all do without the vocational philosophy. What bloody reputation does a dentist have anyway?’
She flared up. ‘I’m a dental researcher! And you’d have some reputation if you weren’t so dumb! If you stopped running around at all hours of the day and night… being bashed up.’
‘How would I make a living?’
‘You’re not dumb. You could be a crime reporter or a crime… writer or something…’
Parker burst out laughing and broke the tension. ‘Hardy! He couldn’t be a writer! I’ve read one of his voluntary statements-no one believed it.’
‘Poetic licence’, I said. ‘You should read my reports to clients. I’ll show you one, Hilde-I reckon you’d say I should stick to being bashed.’
She was still ruffled but the edge was off the moment. We drank some of her very good coffee, and talked about nothing for a while until I got us back on course.
‘How do we grab Spotswood?’
Hilde broke some conciliatory eggs into a bowl. She looked at Parker. ‘Where does he live?’
‘Where does he drink?’ I said.
Parker had the answer to that question and to a few others. I knew a bit about Catchpole and Spotswood myself because of their connections with Glebe, but Parker had done some deep spadework. The ‘Tiny’ nickname for Spotswood was ironic. When I’d last seen him there must have been sixteen stone on his six foot four frame and there were no signs that he was interested in dieting. He used to hang around Glebe in the days before the professional classes moved in. Back then, when the freeway was scheduled to go through a thousand bedrooms, and the banks wouldn’t lend on anything closer to the city than Haberfield, almost every street in Glebe had at least one boarding house and there was a drifting population of people who had reasons to drift.
In those days Tiny Spotswood drank at the Toxteth, bet at Harold Park and exercised his prostate in the place above the barber’s shop in Ross Street. He’d done some boxing in the 1960s and Liam Catchpole had been his manager. Boxing was dying then and people like Spotswood and Catchpole were part of the reason why. When Tiny had taken all the falls on TV and in the clubs anyone could stomach, Catchpole managed a liquor store in which you couldn’t have found an order form or an invoice if you searched for a month. Tiny’s job was loading and unloading the trucks, being around when restaurant and bar owners showed a lack of interest in being supplied by Liam and generally kicking when he was told to kick.
Most of that was before my time in Glebe, although I did arrive before the middle class invasion that changed everything. The boarding houses got changed back into family residences and trees started sprouting everywhere. The mortgage-holders objected to the twenty-four hour clink of bottles and rattle of trucks around Catchpole’s premises- they seemed to think it was worse than the sound of their renovating, even at the weekends. Once-firm understandings broke down and Spotswood got a couple of years for GBH. Catchpole moved away. No loss. He and Tiny would have genuinely shocked by the new power blocs like the Lesbian Mothers Against Rape, anyway.
I couldn’t imagine Spotswood moving to Mount Druitt though, and when Parker told me that he drank at the Crimea in Rozelle I wasn’t surprised. If you ignore Annandale and Lilyfield, Rozelle is just next door to Glebe, really.
The roads were still very wet as Frank and I drove to Rozelle with Hilde’s omelette and coffee inside us. Frank had left his car in Harbord and we were in the Falcon. I showed him the gun clip under the dashboard.
‘I think that’s illegal. Aren’t you restricted to carrying your gun on the left-hand side with a cork up the barrel?’
‘Something like that. Can we be sure Tiny’ll be there tonight?’
‘My information is that he lives there.’
‘Lives in a pub?’
‘Yeah. Do you know the Crimea?’
‘I know it. I’m not sure I’d even drink in it by choice, let alone live there.’
‘I’m glad you changed out of those poncy shoes then.’
‘They’re no good for stomping on fingers. So what’s Tiny doing these days? Besides helping Liam Catchpole help the authorities with their enquiries?’
The look he gave me wasn’t friendly. ‘Where’d you be if nobody told you anything?’
‘Stuffed.’
‘Right.’
Not even the cheekiest of real estate sharks would describe the part of Rozelle graced by the Crimea Hotel as ‘will suit Balmain buyers’. Narrowness is the theme; narrow streets, narrow houses, narrow shopfronts. The section is hilly and the streets run at odd angles but the effect is crippled rather than quaint. The pub, which faces a cramped football ground notorious for its bogginess in winter, juts out awkwardly on a corner, forming a crazy, erratic building line. The dominant colour is dirty grey, and the part of the upper level which hangs over the street looks too heavy for the narrow posts that support it. We parked near the football field pointing in the direction which I thought would get me fairly directly to Victoria Road-in the maze of small streets it’d be hard to be sure.
I had a shirt out over my pants again and Parker watched me sourly as I tucked the gun away behind.
‘Where’s yours?’ I said.
‘Under here’, he tapped his undamaged side, up near the armpit. He was wearing a light poplin zip-jacket and a clean white shirt of mine. At risk to its motor, I’d lent him my shaver and he had his beard down to a flat blueness. ‘I hope we don’t need the bloody things’, he said.
‘Has Tiny got any guts?’
We stepped clear of the car. ‘Opinions differ’, Frank said. It reminded me of the meaningless, pointless chatter we used to fall into in Malaya before we went in to some place where people were likely to shoot at us. It covered nervousness, or was supposed to. I didn’t like to be reminded of those feelings.
‘What else do we know about him?’
Parker adjusted the zip on his jacket. ‘He’s a boxing freak-knows who KO’d who where and in what round-all that crap.’
I stopped. ‘Have you got any ideas on how we’re going to get him out of the pub, if he’s there?’
‘No. My side is hurting, I’m getting involved with your housemate. I’m confused. I’m too angry for good ideas, or any ideas.’
‘Here’s one. The Boxing Commission’s sitting.”
