smoother.
I shrugged. That’s when he told me his name and offered me a filter cigarette. I refused the smoke and he asked to see my papers, quite politely. He looked through them quickly and handed them back. He seemed to be about to snap his fingers as a way of asking to see the. 45, but he stopped himself. I passed the gun across and he gave it a quick once over. He put it on the table and we both looked at it.
‘The licence isn’t for that gun,’ he said. So he did have brains. ‘Where’s the. 38?’ he added quietly.
‘At home.’
‘This is your car gun?’
‘Right.’
‘Sit down, Hardy.’ He reached across to drop his ash in the sink and stayed in a leaning position, very relaxed. He wasn’t easily placed as a copper; not one of the old belt-’em-by-accident-before-you-do-it-on-purpose types who might or might not be honest and not one of the new, flashy types who are interested in your money and their careers and who play a balancing game by their rules.
He got out a notebook that had been spoiling the sit of his jacket pocket and wrote down my name and address from memory.
‘What was the licence number again?’
I told him and he wrote some more. Then he said, ‘Excuse me’, and stuck his head out the door. He looked into the living-room for a minute and wrote some more before he put the notebook away.
‘We’ll need a full statement, of course. What do you want to tell me now?’ He stubbed out the cigarette in the sink and with it went the slight informality. He was all business now.
‘Not much to tell,’ I said. ‘I only met him yesterday.’
‘Maybe that was his unlucky day.’
‘Maybe, but I can’t see how.’
‘Let’s start with how you met him.’
It dawned on me that this was all technique with him. Leaning there in his sharp but uncared-for suit, with his hair a bit long and his voice almost professionally persuasive, he was like a cat with claws in. If you weren’t careful, you’d be telling him how much you fiddled on your income tax and all about the shoplifting you’d done back in the 1950s. I dug in a bit.
‘You’ve seen my papers, Parker. You know what I do for a living. I think a formal statement might be the best move and you can make up your mind what to do after that.’
He didn’t like it, and straightened up a little towards the six foot three which would give him two inches on me. Before he could speak, there was some swearing from the living-room. From the curses I gathered that the men were trying to prepare the body so they could move it. It wouldn’t have been a nice job and you couldn’t blame them for swearing. Parker took a look out-I didn’t-and when he turned back to me his face was a bit less hawkish and hard-lined.
I looked down at the Colt on the table and wondered if my ex-wife Cyn hadn’t been right all along about this job. ‘You deal with damaged people,’ she’d told me, ‘because you’re damaged yourself. You can’t operate with normal, decent people.’ She claimed that I mauled her decent people unless I was drunk, when I’d make fun of them to their faces. She said that my policeman mate Grant Evans and I were violence-prone anti-socials. She said Evans and I belonged in gaol with the other social rejects. She said a lot of things as our marriage crumbled.
Parker pushed the gun towards me to show he was a good guy and said, ‘College Street, now,’ to show he was a hard guy. He let me follow him to town in my own car, but he noted down the registration number and he didn’t give me back my jemmy.
We went into one of the bleak, soulless rooms at Police Headquarters and I gave a statement to a stenographer that left out certain details such as Mrs Singer’s name and the coffee bar meeting place. Parker looked in from time to time and listened to me talking. He didn’t seem to like what he heard. When the statement was typed up, he brought it to me for signing.
The room was getting to me by then and I had a delayed reaction to the whole foul business. ‘You don’t look too good,’ he said. ‘We’ll get some coffee and go up to the office.’
I could see why he didn’t say ‘my office’. Parker shared a room with three other detectives. They had the nasty view into east Sydney from their windows. Their desks were wedged in between filing cabinets and wastepaper baskets. A colleague at his desk kept his head down and ignored us.
I got a cup of coffee, was offered the comforts of tobacco again and sat at one of the detective’s desks while Parker read the statement. He didn’t seem to have any trouble with any of the longer words. He smoked his filter tip down far enough not to be a wastrel but not so far as to get all the packed-up gunk into his lungs. He finished reading.
‘Client’s name?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘Any marks where this kid hit you?’
I wasn’t sure myself; I pulled up my shirt and there was a light bruise, hardly visible. I’d probably made a little too much of it in the statement.
‘Bit slow, were you, Hardy?’
‘I’d had a few drinks.’
‘Have a few more with Henneberry?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
I named one of the pubs I’d visited that night. What I’d said probably wouldn’t hold up and the lie could turn Parker nasty, but it was the best I could do off the cuff. It was stuffy in the room and Parker took off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves. He had thin, sinewy forearms and the right one had a long white scar running along it. He saw me look at it.
‘Knife,’ he said. ‘Nasty things, knives. I don’t like to think of someone out there who can use one the way this bloke did. Do you?’
‘No.’
‘You might run into him, and Henneberry’s not going to be around to protect you.’ He got a nice bit of needle into that. ‘There might be no-one around at all. Have you thought of that?’
‘Yeah, but I don’t know if Henneberry’s death has anything to do with my little matter. I’m happy to go on with it for a while.’
‘Go on doing what?’ he asked sharply.
I grinned at him and shrugged. He leaned forward across the paper and files and other bureaucratic junk on his desk. ‘I have to try and find this maniac, Hardy. You look like a nuisance to me. I can keep you out of the area if I want to.’
I knew he could do it, and it was time to decide how to play him. Since Grant Evans got stuck at a high- middle level in the Force and threw it in to take a Deputy Commissionership interstate, I hadn’t an ally in the Police Department. It was a sad lack and maybe Parker could fill the role. I’d liked his style so far, particularly the way he hadn’t threatened to throw me down any stairs.
‘Do two things for me,’ I said. ‘Call Grant Evans in the west and ask him what he thinks of me. I think you’ll be satisfied. If you are, give me two days clear on it. I’ll give you anything I get. In two days I should find out what I want to know, anyway.’
‘Whatever the fuck that is,’ he growled. ‘What do I put in the report in the meantime?’
I reached forward and poked a finger into the paper on the desk top. ‘Reports,’ I said. ‘What’s in these, d’you reckon? You can say what you like in a report. You can say I’ve been warned, if you like. I won’t contradict you.’
He looked at the paper jungle in front of him with distaste. ‘Okay, Hardy. I don’t have to call Evans. We’ve got a note or two about you here and I looked at it while you were yapping. You’re sneaky, you hit a lot of lobs, but your sheet’s pretty clean. Lately, anyhow.’
‘You play tennis, do you?’
‘Yes. Pennant. You?’
‘Yeah, not pennant, though. Do I get the two days?’
His look seemed to measure me, weigh me and estimate my IQ. ‘You know,’ he said slowly, ‘I actually got
