To be perfect, Lane Cove should look different in autumn. There should be a carpet of russet leaves on the ground and the trees should be all soft reds and yellows. It isn’t like that, but it looks as if it should be. The front gardens in de Vries’ street were deep and wide and the side fences seemed designed not to spoil the afforested look.
‘Nice street,’ the driver said. I’d been quiet on the drive and it seemed to make him nervous. ‘You live here?’
‘No. Visiting.’
‘How long you going to be?’
‘About an hour.’
‘Where to then?’
‘Glebe, I guess. Why? I don’t fancy holding you here with the meter running.’
‘No, no. I need a break. I could take it now and be back in an hour. It’d suit me.’
‘Okay.’ I paid him and gave him a reasonable tip, or Leo Wise did. He thanked me and came around to help me out of the car. He was dark, short and strongly built, around twenty years of age and trying to be friendly. I noticed he had a slim, battered paperback sticking out of the hip pocket of his jeans. ‘Thanks. What’re you reading?’
‘Dostoevsky, The Gambler. You read it?’
‘Long time ago. I read a couple of his short ones.’
He grinned. ‘Me too. Okay, sir, I’ll see you in an hour.’
De Vries’ house was a wide timber construction, painted white, and well cared for. The garden featured the appropriate big, but not too big, trees along with some shrubs and a deep mat of ivy as ground cover. It was a pleasant, cool, shady garden in front of a pleasant-looking house. The only thing that wouldn’t be good about it would be the mortgage payments.
I walked up to the front porch and rang the bell. The woman who answered it was big and fair with pale eyes and lips. She wore a shapeless white dress which badly needed washing and sandals with incongruously high heels.
‘Yes?’ She leaned against the doorway and her eye level was nearly the same as mine.
‘Mrs de Vries?’
‘Yes, I suppose. Who are you?’ She had an accent, somewhere between American and South African, which I hadn’t detected on the phone.
‘My name is Hardy. I rang you a day or so back. I need, very urgently, to talk to your husband.’
‘You need… very urgently,’ she mocked. ‘So do I.’
‘I don’t understand.’ She started to close the door and I shuffled closer; maybe I put my patched eye where the shut door would go because she stopped the movement.
‘Go away,’ she said.
‘Where’s Jan de Vries?’
‘Gone. Left. What do you care? What does anyone care?’
‘When?’
‘See? Who cares? When? Why d’you want to know when?’
‘It’s important.’
‘To you. Two weeks ago. I haven’t heard from him in two weeks. Now, would you please go away!’
‘Mrs de Vries, have you ever heard of a woman named Carmel Wise?’
She pushed back some of the tumbling fair hair and looked hard at me. Some colour came into her pallid face. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of her. Jan’s lover, she is.’
‘This is important, Mrs de Vries. Could I come in? I think we need to talk.’
‘I haven’t talked to anyone for two weeks. Only the children. Are you a policeman?’
‘Not exactly.’ I showed her my licence. She examined it and then my face. For a woman of her size, a man with a surgical eye patch can’t be too frightening. She stood aside.
‘Come in.’
The passage was a sea of newspapers, magazines and children’s toys and books. We picked our way over and through it and went into a living room where a party had been held. There was a glass on every level surface, bottles, cans, overflowing ashtrays, paper plates with food clinging to them and the sickly sweet smell of stale, trapped, over-used air. She flopped into a chair, just missing a paper plate with cheese dip on it.
‘We had a party. At the end of the party Jan told me he was leaving me. And he left. I haven’t…’ She waved her hand at the room.
‘I thought you had children?’
‘Two. They are staying with friends.’
‘So should you.”
She shrugged; her big, loose breasts moved under the stained white dress. ‘I have no friends here.’
I looked around, stalling for time and wondering how to handle it. The room was big, the windows were big, the carpet was deep and through a door I could see a sunny sitting room with a polished floor. A load of washing had been dumped in the middle of the floor. It was an upper income house and should have been filled with sounds like Mozart on the hi-fi and the buzz of the home computer; instead it felt like an army barracks after the regiment has pulled out.
‘Mrs de Vries
‘Barbara.’ I was sure now the accent was American. ‘Well, Mr Detective, what do you want with my husband?’
There was a slightly mad air about her, as if she’d built a sort of crazy shelter for herself. She kept tumbling and untumbling her hair. She was tilting but she hadn’t fallen; I thought she could take some direct talking. ‘Carmel Wise is dead. She was shot.’
The hair flew everywhere and her hands slapped hard against her cheeks. ‘Oh, my god! Jan…?’
‘No. Not by him and he… he’s alive as far as I know.’ The words pushed ideas around in my brain. Why not de Vries? Because of the bag of Beta tapes. Why is he hiding? Because he knows what killed Carmel?
‘What happened to Carmel?’
‘You knew her?’
‘Oh, sure. Jan brought her here. I could see what was going on. She wasn’t the first and not the worst either…’ She broke off and started gnawing at a knuckle. I told her the story in outline. She interrupted a few times and we established that the party had been held two nights before Carmel was killed. Barbara de Vries hadn’t read the papers or watched TV in that time and she hadn’t done much since. When I’d finished, the knuckle was red raw. She nodded sympathetically a few times but when she spoke it was all direct self-interest. ‘If she is dead, perhaps he will come back to me.’
‘Would you accept that?’
‘Of course. We Pennsylvania Dutch women will accept anything.’
‘Could you tell me a little about yourself and your husband? I’d like a photograph of him if you have one.’
She stood and tottered out of the room. When she came back she handed me a colour snapshot. It showed a stocky man with a drooping moustache and dark hair hanging over his forehead. He looked about as Dutch as Michael Spinks.
‘He doesn’t look Dutch,’ I said.
‘Yes, that’s right. But he is and I’m not.’
‘But you said…’
‘Pennsylvania Dutch. That’s what we’re called at home. But I’m German by descent. Jan’s people were Dutch but he is a 100 per cent American.’ She said it with an ironic smile. There was more colour in her. face and lips now and she looked as if she could be a good-looking woman in better circumstances.
‘Forgive me for being blunt, but what’s he doing here, then?’
Again the smile. ‘A job. There are not so many jobs for 100 per cent Americans anymore.’
She told me that Jan de Vries was a graduate in film from somewhere and a PhD from UCLA. They had met when he was attempting to run a small, independent film distribution company. He had hired her as a secretary and things had gone on from there. The company failed and Australia offered the best job prospects.
