Marjorie Legge was currently married to a man whose name I couldn’t recall but who was reputed to be a very heavy number. With those connections, Marjorie Legge could be a very dangerous person to offend.
Phillip Broadhead was known as ‘Mr Racing’. He gave his occupation to the various committees of inquiry that investigated him over the years as ‘commission agent’. No-one knew what that was. but everyone knew what Phil did, which was more or less what Phil had always done. He was the finance behind several leading on-course bookmakers, and also the money and the muscle and whatever else was required, behind Sydney’s major SP operation. Phil had gone to one of the pricier Sydney private schools (where he had probably run the book on the GPS Head of the River). He knew policemen and politicians and trade union bosses and media magnates and everyone else it was useful to know. He had one conviction, back in the forties, for assaulting his then wife.
Phillip Broadhead had been investigated and written up in the tabloids so many times that all this was on the public record. There were many entries on him in the indexes to the recent spate of books about organised crime in Sydney. The sorts of books journalists write when they get hold of one hard piece of information, and embellish it with a lot of speculation and off-the-record stuff. Phil was good embellishment but his police record was the best pointer to the amount of protection he had. The mind boggled at the thought of fearless, freelance Carmel Wise sniffing around him.
All this phoning and cross-referencing took a couple of days. It was interspersed with pill-taking, eyedrops and long sleeps. The house brick effect hadn’t developed, but the right eye was sore all the time and the other got tired from over-use. It was hard to read, hard to watch television, hard to sit still. It was also hard to follow developments regarding Helen’s flat. The more I thought about Phil Broadhead’s mansion at Huntley Point and Jan de Vries’ unhappy-sounding home at Lane Cove, the more I wanted to stay in Glebe.
‘The loan looks okay,’ Helen told me on my third night home.
‘Oh, good. Can you apply that to any place you find, or is it tied to…?’
‘Go on, say it. I know you’ll have some smart name for the place.’
‘The cancer ward.’
She laughed. ‘Shit, Cliff. No, it’s good for a couple of months. Any place that passes inspection.’
‘And how’s that going?’
‘Still waiting.’
‘Still looking?’
‘No. I know I should be.’ She poured some coffee and held up the pills inquiringly. When I shook my head she went on. ‘How many houses have you owned?’
‘Just this one. Me and the bank.’
‘I’ve had a couple. It’s always the same. Once you get interested in a place you start imagining yourself there-shopping, parking, making changes, you know.’
‘Mm.’
‘I shouldn’t be doing it with this joint. Not if it’s going to fall through.’
‘Fall through,’ I said. ‘Interesting choice of phrase.’
‘Stop it, Cliff.’
‘Sorry. When will you hear?’
‘Tomorrow, I hope.’
‘Shouldn’t there be lots of places going. I mean, with the tax changes? Aren’t people getting out of property as an investment? I read something about it. They’ve got to sell before a certain time to avoid the taxes. It should be a buyer’s market.’
‘I like this place.’
‘Yeah. Well, tomorrow.’
‘What’re you going to do? More phoning?’
‘No, I’m finished phoning.’ I told her about Marjorie Legge and ‘Mr Racing’ and the other new threads I had to pull.
‘So, what next?’
‘Action.’
‘Cliff, you can’t..
‘Gentle action. I’m going to the police.
‘You’re what?’
‘I need them.’
‘You always say you don’t need them, apart from Frank Parker. You don’t need the leaks and the paperwork and the lack of imagination.’
‘I just need them for tomorrow.’
17
I phoned Mercer the next morning before putting through a call to Drew. They call it chain of command or some such thing-I think it’s so they can keep an eye on each other. Drew wasn’t happy about it, but he agreed to let me come to the police building to investigate the evidence they were holding in the Carmel Wise case.
‘You want to see the car or what?’ Drew managed to keep the hostility under check, just.
‘I want to see the bag.’
‘What bag?’
‘The bag that the cassettes were in.’
‘Why?’
‘Maybe it isn’t her bag.’
He laughed. ‘You won’t get anywhere with that. Hardy.’
‘Why not?’
‘It isn’t anybody’s bag, or it could be anybody’s. It’s a supermarket shopping bag, plastic, not new, smeared with prints.’
‘I want to seethe videos then.’
I could see the leer on his face. ‘No, can’t allow that. No facilities here for that.’
‘I just want to look at the stuff, I mean, examine it physically, not experience it emotionally.’
‘Huh?’
‘I just want to look, not play.’
‘College Street annexe. Make it 11.30. I’ll give you fifteen minutes.”
I was getting around the house on my own by this time-showering and dressing, managing the stairs, but the great big outside world was another matter. I almost went headfirst into the gutter trying to get into the taxi, and I bumped my head when I got out. The restricted vision made me slow and tentative on the city footpaths, and hesitant about crossing the roads. Still, it was good to be a part of functioning humanity again.
I copped my first handicapped person joke from Bill Moore, the receptionist at the police building, an old warrior out to graze whom I knew slightly. ‘Well, what d’you know?’ he said. ‘Private eye is right, just the one, eh, Cliff?’
‘Shit, Bill,’ I said, ‘it’s supposed to be a disguise and you penetrated it right off. I’m here to see Detective Constable Drew, in the annexe he said.’
‘Lucky you. Hold on.’ He lifted a phone and spoke briefly into it. ‘Okay. I should search you for concealed weapons but if you had one and it was concealed you’d have trouble finding it with one eye, wouldn’t you.’
‘I don’t know.’ I mimed shooting with two fingers. ‘I close this eye anyway, when I shoot.’
‘Through there, Cliff. Look after yourself.’
I went down some steps, using the handrail, and through a set of heavy glass doors. The place was halfway between a laboratory and a locker room. Scientific equipment was lined up on benches; there were stools and small tables, ropes and pulleys and several well-stocked bookcases. Along one wall was a bank of green lockers. A tall man whose little remaining hair was blonde, sat on a stool near the lockers. He beckoned me over.
‘Hardy?’
‘Yes.’
