just hear what was going on. What the fuck is it all about? Mai said it was a small-time gambling debt. Needed time to pay, he said. Shit!’
‘Take too long to tell you. Ask Mai.’ I stood up. ‘What did they look like?’
He screwed up his eyes in an effort at recall and the effort hurt him. ‘Three, like I said. Nothing special. Average-sized blokes, one was a bit bigger.’
‘Fair or dark?’
‘Two dark, one redhead.’
‘Australian?’
‘Didn’t talk much, couldn’t tell. One of the dark ones could’ve been a dago.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Smell.’
‘Age?’
‘Not young. Thirtyish.’
I let that pass. ‘Clothes?’
‘Ordinary-jeans and jackets. The redhead had some gold chains around his neck. Ponce.’
‘You should’ve grabbed them and throttled him.’
‘Get stuffed.’
‘Don’t be like that, Geoff. You’ll mend. Sorry I didn’t bring any grapes.’
‘Get stuffed.’
He pressed a button and a white-coated male nurse came in and wheeled him away. I paced up and down in the gloomy little room trying to assess how much worse things had got. In general, the fewer trios of efficient heavies that know your name the better. It sounded like high time for me to get myself a dog like Max or go to Melbourne.
Back home I phoned Terry Reeves and gave him an edited version of what I had. My best card was the news that one of the phoney car renters was in the hospital.
‘Good,’ Terry said. ‘You put him there?’
‘No, but. he won’t be driving cars for a bit.’
‘Where’s the one he took?’
‘Sorry, mate, it’s gone through the system.’
‘It figures. Well, at least I haven’t lost any more since I saw you. Any point in bringing a charge?’
‘Not if you want to crack the system and maybe recover the cars.’
‘That’s the second time you’ve said system-how d’you see it?’
‘Big operation, well-financed, good procedures, and there’s something else in it-something above and beyond the cars, but I don’t know what.’
‘Just stick to the cars, will you, Cliff? Keep your imagination in check.’
‘What about my initiative?’
‘What’s it going to cost?’
‘I’ve got to go to Melbourne.’
He groaned. ‘Maybe I’ll take a holiday when it’s all over. I need one I can tell you. Well, thanks for all the information, Cliff.’
‘You know how it is-little by little.’
‘Yeah, well, soldier on, Cliff, and listen, take care, all right?’
I rang off, and reflected on how much hung on this case-Bill Mountain’s life maybe, Erica Fong’s lungs and Terry Reeves’ long overdue holiday. TAA offerred me two flights-one I could catch easily and one I’d have to rush more. I accepted the challenge, packed a bag in record time and threw in West’s The World is Made of Glass and The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People. My white jeans and shirt made me feel like a bowls player, so I put on a navy shirt and a leather jacket. I left my one funeral tie behind; I didn’t expect to be visiting the Melbourne Club.
9
On the plane I skipped through Intimate Sex Lives, jumping from the ones who’d had a hell of a good time, like Picasso and Josephine Baker, to those whom sex had made thoroughly miserable, like D.H. Lawrence and Paganini. I decided that I was somewhere in the middle. The flight took about an hour; after five minutes the woman sitting next to me clicked her tongue disapprovingly when she saw what I was reading, and stared fixedly out the window for the rest of the hour. She seemed to disapprove of what she saw out there too.
My knowledge of Melbourne is sketchy. A flight attendant told me that she thought Bentleigh was a southern suburb; I knew the airport lay to the west of the city so I took the airport bus into town. The Tullamarine freeway must be one of the most boring stretches of road on the planet; either they picked a boring landscape to run it through or they made it that way in the process. Anyway, there was nothing on the run to occupy my thoughts or delight my eye until we reached the city, which looked pretty good in the afternoon sun, if you like broad, tree-lined streets and a flat landscape.
At the city terminal I hired one of Reeves’ Bargain Renta Cars, thinking that I shouldn’t have any trouble with this item on the expense account.
‘I’m sorry about all the red tape,’ the woman who processed the hiring said. ‘It used to be simpler.’
‘That’s okay,’ I said. I looked for the hidden camera behind the desk, but couldn’t spot it. ‘Do you have a Gregory’s in the car?’
‘I’m sorry?’
I rapped the counter. ‘My fault-Sydney born and bred. I mean a street directory.’
‘There’s a directory in the glove box. Where are you going, Mr Hardy?’
‘Bentleigh.’
‘Just look in the glove box.’ Her manner became slightly distant; I was beginning to get bad feelings about Bentleigh.
The detective’s friend turned up trumps with just one Mountain, initial C, listed for Bentleigh. I located the address, Brewers Road, in the street directory and headed off. The Laser was responsive and toey in ways that were just a memory to my Falcon; for the first mile I felt like a rodeo rider getting a frisky mount under control. After that, the drive out to Bentleigh was a lesson in the differences between two cities. The Melburnians seemed to have flattened large sections of the city I remembered from my last visit, more than ten years ago, and swept freeways through the clearances. That sort of thing had met more resistance in Sydney, which was just as well for me or else my living room would have been a traffic island. Also, the traffic lights were advertised as carrying concealed cameras to catch sneakers-through-on-the-red, an Inquisitional touch Sydney lacks. The camera business reminded me of the time when Melburnians would turn pale at the ‘tow-away zone’ signs in Sydney and our stories about retrieving cars from great distances at monstrous expense.
It was after three when I reached Brewers Road. Kids were straggling home from school, battling a wind that whipped at the tails of their raincoats and shook the trees and shrubs in the well-tended gardens. Bentleigh was one of those flat Melbourne suburbs, with the odd suggestion of a rise and fall in the landscape, which made it just possible to imagine it as a pleasant place before 1835. Now it had a solid, comfortable post-war look of brick veneer and mortgages paid on time.
I cruised down quiet Brewers Road squinting at the numbers. The woodwork on the houses looked as if it got an annual coat of paint; the road was a polite half mile from the vulgar shopping centre; there was a big Catholic church on a rise at the end of the road and not a pub in sight.
Number thirteen was a model of the sort of place that predominated in the area: broad grass strip then a low wooden fence, freshly painted, with black wrought iron gates. Neither the gates nor the fence would keep anything out or in-the rose bushes were clipped back to prevent any suggestion of them climbing on the wood- but in that neighbourhood they were de rigeur. Inside the fence was a concrete driveway and strips of concrete ran all around the edges of the lawn and the garden beds to make the whole thing easy to mow. The house was a double fronted red brick veneer set squarely on the block. The wide Australian country verandah of yesteryear had withered away
