some sleep last night. Good sleep. You’re benefiting. Piss off, I’ve got a report to write.’
I called Sackville from a phone booth outside the police building and then I called Ann Winter. She coughed as soon as she answered.
‘Sorry, I’ve been smoking non-stop. What’s happening?’
‘Not much. A pretty smart cop is on the job. Can I come over and hear the cassette?’
‘I’m at the dump; there’s no recorder here. Look, come over and get me. We can go to my people’s place and play it. I don’t want to stay here tonight, anyway.’
I drove back to Bondi and located the dump, which it was. The street was two-thirds taken over by apartment blocks and Ann’s place was a set of semi-detached, two-storey houses that looked as if their owners had decided to sell later when the price was right. The houses were blighted; guttering drooped, slates were missing on the roofs and a couple of the windows were blanked out by sheets of tin nailed up behind shattered glass. The brick fence had collapsed and the concrete path to the door of the house on the right was cracked and lumpy. It was a good bet that the other paths would be the same. The whole lot was waiting to be levelled so that ten storeys of glass and pre-poured concrete could rise on the site.
I knocked on the ramshackle door and Ann came down some creaking stairs to open it. A smell of fried food and damp wafted over me. ‘Choice, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’ She gave me an address in Point Piper and I drove there, trying to hold myself together against the culture shock. We pulled up in front of a high wall that looked as if it was shielding half a million dollars worth of house. It was like taking Cinderella away from the housework and up to the palace.
8
Ann Winter’s daddy’s house was the sort of place you could visit late at night without waking anyone up. It was built in wings around a swimming pool and a couple of courtyard gardens. I upped the price to three-quarters of a million as we moved through it. We went in by some floor-to-ceiling glass doors and down a carpeted corridor to a bedroom. From the familiar way she threw her cardigan onto the bed and kicked her shoes off against the wall, I took this to be Ann’s room. It had just about everything you’d want: books, a big TV set, a double bed, an exercise bike, a turntable, big speakers and a cassette player.
‘D’you want a drink?’ She waved a hand at a cupboard under the bookcase.
‘No, I want to hear the cassette.’
She took it out of her bag and slipped it into the machine.
‘I’m going to wash.’ She punched the ‘play’ button and went out of the room. Bruce Henneberry’s drawling voice blocked out the sound of water running.
‘October 3,’ he said, ‘One pm. Two items for Cliff Hardy. One, Leon. Talked to him this morning. He knows things and he’ll talk for money. I got an interesting sample-social security scam. Two, the Mellow Yellows. Ashram on Salisbury Street. Guy I saw is Brother Gentle. Off the planet but knows the oldies. Have notes. Have to run, will fill in later.’
I played it through again. Ann came back into the room with a freshened-up look. She leaned against the wall and listened.
‘Pretty cryptic,’ I said. ‘Was it always like that?’
‘No, that’s just a notes tape. It’s not cryptic. Leon, he’s a wino who lives near Bruce. He’s the real thing-picks up cigarette butts in the street, pisses in public. He’s been charged with exposing himself hundreds of times, does a few days or weeks and they let him out. He’s around, no-one notices him, he probably hears things.’
‘Mellow Yellows?’
‘Meditation freaks. Salisbury Street, as Bruce says. Said.’ She stopped and looked at me. I was sitting on the bed and I wondered if she was recalling being in it with Henneberry.
‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Shit, shit, shit. You still haven’t told me how Bruce died. Was he shot, or what?’
‘He was stabbed,’ I said.
‘It would be something sneaky like that. He was so brave, you know?’
‘I know. I saw him in action.’
She gave a sour laugh. ‘He came over here to avoid the draft initially. Then he went back and came out again. He was so nice. Some of the kids…’ She broke off and went over to the cupboard, which turned out to be a small refrigerator-cum-bar, she got out a can of beer and held it up. I nodded and she got another one. We popped our cans and I suppose we drank a toast to the late champ.
‘You make him sound like a crusader,’ I said. ‘Crusaders in that business get stomped on.’
She shook her head hard. ‘He wasn’t crusading.’
The image of Henneberry on his living-room floor was still sharp in my mind and I didn’t want to talk about him in case I let it slip that ‘stabbed’ wasn’t exactly right. I pointed to the cassette player.
‘Who would have heard this besides you?’
She drank some more beer, showing me that nice neck again.
‘Hell, I don’t know. People at Manny’s could have heard it. They play music tapes on the same machine. Our stuff gets mixed up with it sometimes.’
‘Doesn’t sound very secure.’
‘That’s what I thought, but Bruce said it was. You hide shit in the barnyard, he said.’
Yanks, I thought. ‘Did you leave tapes every day?’
‘No, not every day. But he was going to turn up with one today for sure.’ She finished her beer and set the can down on the floor. Then she dropped down beside it and let her long legs sprawl out on the thick, white carpet. She bit her lip. ‘Sometimes he’d just sing the “Star Spangled Banner” or quote a poem…’
I nodded. ‘Did he ever make copies of a tape?’
‘Yes, if it was something important. One for him and one for me.’
I thought back to the layout in the flat. No cassettes around.
‘Would it upset you too much to play it again?’ I asked.
She scrambled across to the fridge. ‘I’m going to get pissed tonight. Let’s hear it again.’ She got a half bottle of Southern Comfort from the bar and a nice Swedish-looking glass. She asked me if I wanted a drink, I said, ‘No’, and she rewound the tape and played it again. She poured out a big dollop of the booze and knocked it back while I listened closely, trying to pick up background noise. There was traffic, conversation and the sound of things being put down.
‘Manny’s?’ I said.
‘Could be.’
I reached over to recover the tape, but the machine was too complicated for me. She pressed the right button and I lifted the cassette out. I was very conscious of her, close and smelling of tobacco and Southern Comfort. She had a patterned cardigan on over a skivvy; her jeans were white but dirty and her feet were bare. She looked more like a gypsy than ever with her hair tangling down onto her shoulders.
‘Do you like this room?’ she asked suddenly.
I glanced around critically. ‘I’m too poor to like it,’ I said.
She emptied her glass and topped it up. ‘Bruce didn’t like it, and he was rich.’
I could feel the cracks opening in her tough facade and the development of a jumpy, unpredictable logic that might help her through her pain but that only she could follow. I’d seen it before.
‘Well, there’s a lot here…’
‘Here!’ She waved her free hand at the walls that had posters on them that looked hand-painted and the shelf of hard-cover books. ‘There’s nothing here, nothing! You should see the rest of the place. Wanna see it?’
When it came to prostitution and drugs she was as tough as she needed to be, but death was another matter. Maybe she’d never had any direct contact with it before, coming from that Point Piper cocoon. An instinct told me that no comfort from me would be welcome.
‘Another time. I’ve got to go. Will you be all right?’
‘D’you mean will I take pills or something?’ She gave a skittish laugh and raised her glass. ‘Not me. I’ll bomb
