or so cars, ordinary Holdens, Fords, VWs and a couple of sleek, well-polished jobs, parked in another space signposted Staff. I did up a few buttons on my sports shirt, tugged at it to reduce the wrinkles and stuck my briefcase under my arm. I closed the windows and locked the car. A few people strolling in the grounds looked up at the noise of the slamming door. The place was extraordinarily quiet. The strollers strolled on and I walked towards the sandstone steps leading up to a heavy door standing wide open.
The lobby was cool and quiet. Behind a reception desk a woman wearing a stylised version of a nurse’s cap was working at an electric typewriter that was almost noiseless. The place had more the feel of a hotel than a hospital. There were pigeonholes with keys hanging from them, some with mail tucked inside. The pictures on the walls were bright, landscapes mostly, and there was a big, three-dimensional model of the clinic and its grounds set out in a glass case. A wide cedar staircase ascended from the lobby and the entrance to the ground level was through a set of double doors. When I felt I’d absorbed everything useful, I coughed to announce my arrival.
The woman looked up and favoured me with a smile. Maybe I’d smile more if I had teeth like hers. ‘Can I help you, sir?’
I approached the desk, unzipping my briefcase and letting the edges of the papers show. I took out a Menzies card and handed it to her. She was standing now, a tall, slim woman wearing a white dress with a blue belt and a touch of blue at the neck and sleeves-nurse-like. She looked at the card and then at me.
‘Mr Menzies…’
‘No, no. My name is Vernon Morris. I’m an associate of Mr Menzies. I’d like to have a word with Mr Richard Maxwell, if I may. Legal matter. Won’t take a minute.’
She frowned. You should have telephoned.’
‘I did. On Friday. There should be a note of it. It’s a bit off the beaten track here, isn’t it? And this was the best time for someone from our office to come. I’m on my way back from my batch in Maianbar, you see, so it wasn’t too far out of the way. I was assured…’
She searched through the bits and pieces on the desk, opening and closing folders and slapping at piles of paper. A cork board with notices pinned to it, positioned handy to the telephone, yielded nothing. I craned forward, peering at the pigeonholes. They were tagged with initials. There was an RM all right, but the letters weren’t unusual. Who knows? It could have been Roger Miller.
‘I’m sorry. There’s nothing here.’
I plucked at the papers. ‘It’ll only take a minute. Perhaps you could ask Mr Maxwell?’
A new look came over her face-sceptical, defensive. She appeared to be a person whose natural bent was cooperation but who had learned to act differently, and I could see her registering and assessing details now-the battered nose, the creased clothes. ‘I’m not confirming that there is anyone of that name here,’ she said. ‘Do you understand?’
‘No, I don’t understand.’
It was only a slight movement and she did it well, but I knew what it meant and I looked automatically towards the double doors. Sure enough, they opened and a very big man in a white overall came out. A tailored overall, with zippers and well-cut trousers. He was well-cut and well-groomed himself with a body-builder’s chest and shoulders and that tapering look they have. In my experience, they taper both ways-physically from the thighs down and mentally from the mouth up. This one had the conventional bleached-blonde good looks marred by a bad case of adolescent acne-scarring. He probably wore pancake make-up when he competed.
‘Yes, Mrs Tomlinson?’ he said.
So far he was well within his field of competence.
‘This gentleman has no appointment and refuses to leave, Mr Matthews.’
‘I’m here on legitimate business,’ I said.
Matthews wore white tennis shoes and he came forward quickly and quietly. So far, no voices had been raised, no discordant sounds made. The King A. Hartwell Clinic was very big on quiet.
‘I think you should leave,’ Matthews said. He covered the last stretch very quickly and his big hand was on my shoulder, gripping hard.
‘I want to see someone in authority here.’
A quick nod from Mrs Tomlinson and Matthews went into action. He was good. He spun me around 180 degrees, literally. A well-balanced, very strong man can do that to a lighter one. Before I knew it, I was being marched through the door and down the steps. Matthews was an expert man-handler. He changed his grip, altered the pressure, kept me guessing as to where the force would be applied next. To someone with no experience of hand-to-hand fighting it would have been totally intimidating. I trotted along, pretending to be just such a person. My dust-streaked Falcon stood alone in the Visitors space like a UFO and Matthews steered me unerringly towards it.
He was enjoying himself. Some men are happy with pumping up their muscles, flexing them for admiring audiences, striving for yet more definition. Not Matthews. He wanted to use his strength against less strong men. A nasty trait, compensating for something. I let him frog-march me around to the driver’s side, so that the car body was between us and the clinic. I fumbled in the briefcase as if searching for the ignition key. Matthews’ wide blue eyes went even wider when I brought the Smith amp; Wesson out and jammed the muzzle up into his left nostril. For intimidation, the great advantage of a revolver is that you can cock it one-handed with the trigger action. Click, click. Sheer terror.
I felt the big man’s strength ebb away as he looked into my face. ‘You’ve had your fun, Matthews,’ I said. ‘Now prop yourself back against the car and be very careful. I don’t like gymnasium cowboys heavying me.’
‘Just doing my job,’ he said. He moved back. All the force had gone out of him. We both knew he could do things quickly but not quicker than a finger can pull a trigger.
‘Your job’s changed. You’re going to have to show a bit of initiative.’
‘How… how do you mean?’
I kept the. 38 nestled inside his nose and reached back for my credentials. ‘I’m a private investigator. My name’s Hardy. I want to talk to Dick Maxwell. Just talk. Let your eyes wander over this.’
I showed him the licence inside its perspex cover. Apparently he could read, but he didn’t say anything.
‘You can remember your routines, can’t you? Press this, snatch that, repetitions, all that shit?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK I want you to remember a few things. Tell Maxwell I found out where he was through Ernie Glass. Got that, Ernie Glass?’
‘Ernie Glass.’
‘Good. I don’t have any aggro with him that I know of. My client is Virginia Shaw. Who?’
‘Virginia Shaw.’
‘Right.’ I took the gun away and Matthews started to relax. I moved back a step, released the breech, and spilled the shells slowly into my hand. Matthews stared at me as if I was mad. I handed him the bullets and put the gun on the bonnet of the car. I flicked the breech closed and had a solid weapon in my hand, not a deadly one, but Matthews knew what it could do to his classic profile. He looked down at the bullets clustered in his big, callused paw.
‘Tell Maxwell I want to talk. That’s all. You’ve got the shells. I can’t harm him. I’ll wait here for ten minutes. If he doesn’t show I’ll leave, but tell him this, if I go away without seeing him the news of where he is travels all over Sydney, starting from when I get to a phone. Have you got that?’
Matthews nodded. He turned and walked towards the clinic. I knew he wanted to get things back on the old basis between us, with him grabbing and twisting things, but he was bright enough to understand that this wasn’t a matter of pecs and lats and half-nelsons.
14
I leaned back against the car, keeping well clear of the revolver, and rolled a cigarette. Everything felt wrong about the King A. Hartwell Clinic. Summoning the muscle when I’d done nothing more than be a bit insistent was an over-reaction. And Matthews wasn’t there to lift drunks in and out of bed. I studied the place as I smoked, keeping an eye out for flanking movements. The people walking in the gardens could well have been dipsomaniacs
