and was settled in the bucket seat, turned around and with the gun pointing at my chest, before my bum hit the vinyl.
‘Right. Now you tell me what you were doing out at the tennis club the other night. Said you wanted to see me, but you sloped off.’
I shrugged. ‘Case of mistaken identity, Dave.’
The freshly cut, raw metal end of the rifle barrel jerked a fraction. ‘That’s not good enough.’
‘Have to do, until you tell me how you found me and why it matters so much.’
It was dark inside the car, just a little of the street light seeping through, but I could see enough to detect something odd about his face. It had an artificial look, as if it didn’t quite belong to the person behind it. He said, ‘One of the people playing on the other court recognised you. He’s a cop, or was. Said you were a private detective.’
‘When you asked around?’
‘Right.’
‘Why?’
The noise he made was exasperated and angry. At that range a. 22 bullet can kill you. He was sweating and I could feel something potentially very harmful building up inside him. I said the first thing that came into my mind. ‘Do you know someone named Colin Cook?’
He sighed. ‘Shit. Is that what this’s all about?’
‘Is for me,’ I said. ‘Looks like you’ve got bigger problems.’
‘Let me get this right. Someone spotted me, thought I was Colin, and hired you to check on me?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Who?’
I shook my head and didn’t say anything. He sat and thought while I examined what I could see of the gun. Cheap pea rifle, basically; sawn-off barrel and stock, solid magazine, maybe twelve-shot, semi-automatic. Very illegal, very nasty, but hastily contrived, not professional.
Abruptly, he said, ‘The word on you is that you’re more or less honest.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Your client legitimate? I mean…’
‘I know what you mean, Richmond. And I’m getting a bit sick of this. Yeah, legitimate, solid citizen, parent, taxpayer. What the hell are we doing here?’
He slid the safety catch forward and pushed the spring that released the magazine. He caught it as it fell free.
‘Empty,’ he said. ‘There’s just one bullet in the breech.’
I managed a derisive snort. ‘Thanks a lot. One’s all it takes.’
‘I’m not a killer, Hardy,’ Richmond said. ‘Let’s talk. Have you got anything to drink in that dump of yours?’
David Richmond didn’t look like a drinking man. He had a hard, disciplined, compact body and there was no spare flesh around his face. But he put his first scotch down in record time and held out his glass for another. He’d left the. 22 in the car, so I poured willingly.
‘I knew Col Cook,’ he said. ‘How much have I got to tell you before you open up?’
‘More than that,’ I said.
‘Right. Well, I met Col in Victoria. I was designing houses and he was building them.’
‘Yurts and such?’
His eyebrows shot up, animating his face somewhat. Under the light tan it still retained a tight, unnatural look. ‘You know about yurts?’
‘Not really. Go on.’
‘All kinds of weird materials and designs- circular, like the yurts, cylindrical, crystal-shaped. The banks were lending money for land and building like never before. Col and me worked on a few projects together, then we both got burned when a couple of things went wrong and the funds started to dry up.’
I sipped some scotch and nodded. So far, his story jibed with Andrea’s.
‘Well, we were both in trouble. Then this opportunity came up. One of our clients had a big dope plantation near Castlemaine. Col had a truck. I had a secure telephone and reasons to pay lots of calls on people. Neither of us had any criminal associations. It went well for a while.’
‘Then?’ I said.
‘It went bad. There was opposition. To cut a long story short, Col ran over a guy with the truck and killed him. It was put down as an accident but it preyed on Col’s mind. He’d had some kind of Quaker upbringing. That’s how he got into the alternative lifestyle thing. He went nuts.’
That didn’t sound quite right. ‘What about his family?’ I asked.
Richmond shook his head. ‘He didn’t have a family. He was a very secretive, lonely type. Always going off on his own. Hard to get to know. Hard to understand.’
‘He had a wife and a kid,’ I said. ‘She spotted a photo of you.’
‘Jesus. I didn’t know.’
I poured us both some more scotch. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, the operation folded. We’d both taken a good whack out of it. Col comes to me one day and tells me he’s sent most of his money to the wife of the bloke he’d run over. Then he breaks down. I try to steady him but he rushes off. Next I hear, he’s drowned off some beach. I got scared. I thought he might have left a letter for the police or a lawyer or something. He might have put us all in the shit. I didn’t know about the wife and kid. I thought he’d offed himself. Was it an accident?’
‘That’s what the insurance company decided.’ I put my hand up to my face, tapping my cheek. ‘What about this?’
‘Col and me looked pretty much alike as it happened. When he shot through that night he left some stuff behind, including his passport. I didn’t have one. I went to this doctor in Melbourne and got a bit of plastic surgery done. Didn’t take long or cost that much. I used the passport and went to Thailand.’
‘Why Thailand?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve got friends there and plenty of Aussies pass through. You can get the news from home. Six months and no news, so I came back, settled in up here.’
I sat and thought about the story. It could have been true. On the other hand, Richmond might have killed Colin Cook and stolen his money. He looked prosperous-the Volvo was newish, his clothes were good. For a man who had done a little criminal activity six years ago his behaviour when I turned up seemed like an over- reaction.
He saw my scepticism and touched his face. ‘Plastic job turned out not so good.’
‘You could have it done again,’ I said. ‘You look to have the money.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘I’m wondering whether to believe your story.’
‘I left the gun in the car, didn’t I?’
‘I’m wondering why you had it in the first place.’
He looked around the room. ‘You could be taping me.’
I laughed. ‘The only tapes here go from Benny Goodman to Dire Straits.’
He sighed. ‘OK. OK. I made a couple of deliveries from Thailand. No problems. I’ve burned the passport and I’m a hundred per cent legitimate now, but… it leaves you edgy.’
‘So it should,’ I said. ‘Drug couriers are arseholes in my book. So you chopped down your rabbit shooter and came to see if I was a narc or someone connected with your deliveries?’
‘Yeah. I improvised.’
‘You seem to be pretty good at doing that. I still don’t know whether to buy your story or not.’
He put his glass carefully on the floor and stood up. ‘What difference does it make? We don’t have any beef, do we?’
‘I suppose not. What’s this legitimate business you’re in now?’
‘I’ve got a little health farm and sports centre at Bowral. I’m the tennis coach, as well as the proprietor. I
