That’s pretty much what happened. Joan and I had had a tortuous affair way back when I’d used her as a port in the storm of my marriage to Cyn. She’d endured it for her own reasons for a long time, then she’d shut me out of her life for years. These days we were comfortable with each other’s surfaces-friends. I kissed her goodnight. She got into her Honda Civic, parked beside the building that houses the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre, and drove away. I set off for home almost at a jog, thinking about Tommy Aarons.
Tommy was an ex-boxer, ex-copper, turned security guard. He’d saved some money and borrowed some more and set up his own small security firm. It was nothing fancy, just half a dozen men and three women, providing light-duty bodyguards and surveillance, checking for insurance claim cheats, shoplifters and pilferers, strictly small-scale stuff.
I’d first met Tommy back in the old days when he was a very promising middleweight and I used to knock around with the boxing crowd. Learning from experience was Tommy’s great strength. A hiding from Wally Carr took him out of boxing and into the police force; it was a very short time before he realised how slow promotion was unless you were prepared to do certain things and lick certain arses.
Tommy discovered that there were many more private security guards in the state than police officers and pondered the fact. He took his minuscule superannuation and his considerable skills and built on them. We’d stayed in touch as beer-drinking and sparring partners, bemoaning the declining quality of beer and the state of boxing, and he’d asked for my advice when he was setting up his business. Everything had gone nicely until a month or so ago when one of his female employees had charged him with sexual harassment.
This was a particularly vexing problem for Tommy. He was a discreet, selective, non-demonstrative, non- political homosexual.
‘My sex life’s almost as dull as your average straight’s,’ he once told me. ‘I’ve never… well, I’ve never done a lot of things.’
The obvious defence wasn’t available to him. Tommy had built his business on stature and reputation: 184 centimetres, 80 kilos; former number two contender for the Australian middleweight title; senior constable, New South Wales Police Force. No room in there for anything, pink. He asked me to investigate Liz Richards, the woman who’d brought the charge. I agreed because Tommy was a mate and because I thought it unlikely that he was guilty.
Still, I was reluctant to take the matter on because it was a messy, nebulous kind of thing. Tommy was an attractive man; Ms Richards, to judge from her photo, was an attractive woman. Who was to say what went on in the realms of fantasy and make-believe?
The few preliminary enquiries I made confirmed this reluctance. It looked to me as if Ms Richards could be a lesbian. According to Tommy, she shared a flat with another woman who was seldom around and favoured mannish sports jackets worn with straight-leg jeans and medium heels. Hard to tell. The scenario hadn’t appealed to me; the hearing seemed a fair way off and I had shamefully neglected the matter when ‘Maureen Hennessy’ hove into view.
Now, the Aarons case seemed to have possibilities to line up with Joan’s lateral thinking. I convinced myself that this was the way of it. Tommy’s accuser, or an accomplice of hers, had cooked up the strategy to deflect me from my obligation to Tommy. It had bloody nearly worked. I only had two days now to turn up something useful on Liz Richards. I went to bed full of resolve and purpose which an empty bed only intensified.
The next day I swung into action. I put messages on the answering machines containing veiled hints to the caller that I was onto her and that I was going to see that she’d suffer penalties under the several laws she’d broken. I’d torn up the last vast ream of faxed newsprint and turned the machine off. Now I scrabbled around in the office rubbish bin, thankfully unemptied, and recovered the top sheet which, of course, contained the number of the sending machine. I wrote out a message in block capitals using a thick marking pen:
HARDY TO YOU. I KNOW WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT. SEND AS MUCH CRAZY SHIT AS YOU LIKE, IT’LL ALL HELP TO HANG YOU.
I phoned Tommy, told him I was sorry about my slackness and promised him I’d work around the clock. I then set about a proper surveillance of and enquiry into Liz Richards and her flatmate, one Marion Jacobi. Ms Jacobi was tall, slender and red-headed. The brief I’d been given by Tommy-’mannish sports coats, etc’-was very misleading. That night she wore a drop-dead, knee-length black silk dress, high heels and a white jacket. She and Liz Richards, who was attractive in a heavyish way, met two very attentive men for dinner at a Bondi fish restaurant, pushed on for a frisky drink at a club in Edgecliff and wound up in Potts Point being squired through a huge security gate into an apartment block that looked like something out of old Hollywood with a touch of old Morocco. I went home confused.
One of the strange things about these harassment matters is that the accused and the accuser usually continue to work together. It’s as if they’re bound together by the matter at issue and neither can surrender any ground. Liz Richards went to work and stayed there all day. You can’t watch two places at once efficiently, but it wasn’t far from Tommy’s offices in Bondi Junction to the Richards’ flat in Paddington and, as far as I could tell, Marion Jacobi spent the day inside.
I’d pressed a lot of buttons that morning and tapped into the sources we private enquiry agents have for finding out your golf handicap and whether your ingrowing toenail is on the left foot or the right. When I got back to the office in the mid-afternoon (no abusive phone messages, no newsprint fax), I hauled in the catch and came up with nothing useful. If anything, the information seemed to confirm what had been denied by my experience the night before, that Liz Richards and Marion Jacobi, who was a qualified physiotherapist working from the flat, were lesbians. They belonged to the same gym, went on holidays together and shared the household expenses. But they signed no letters to newspapers, subscribed to no lesbian publications and didn’t put on sequins or leather for the Gay Mardi Gras.
I tapped the office cask of white wine and sat down to think things over. In New South Wales sexual harassment claims were sometimes made to the Anti-Discrimination Board which then attempted to conciliate the matter. Liz Richards hadn’t gone that route. She’d filed a civil suit which, if successful, put her in line for heavy compensation from the offender. That was the root of Tommy’s trouble. When he’d come to me he’d talked of cases where a quarter of a million dollars had been awarded to the victim.
‘I operate on a margin, Cliff,’ he’d said. ‘Something like that would put me out of business.’
There’s no way to insure against it and the allegation is difficult to defend. I rang my lawyer, Cy Sackville, to get the benefit of his encyclopedic legal brain and the news wasn’t good. Most such cases were settled out of court to avoid the adverse publicity. To Tommy, a hefty out-of-court settlement would amount to the same thing as a judgment against him. I wished I’d taken the whole thing more seriously at the beginning and hadn’t let myself be diverted by the abusive caller. There were many ways Ms Richards could have found out about Tommy’s strategy and cooked up one of her own. Angrily, I drained the third glass and headed out into the late afternoon.
I picked up Liz Richards when she left the office in Bondi Junction and followed her home. I was driving with three glasses of wine inside me on an empty stomach which was a stupid thing to do, but I did it. I ate slices of pizza as blotter as I drove. The flat was in a biggish block that overlooked the Showground and Moore Park. Nice view. I parked, ate and watched. The same two men the women had spent the previous night with arrived with bottles. It got dark. I could see shapes moving past the windows. They dimmed the lights. I left them to it, whatever it was.
I locked the car, climbed out, pushed open the gate on its one good hinge, all done on automatic pilot. I was tired and frustrated, looking forward to a shower and drink. The key was in my hand, centimetres from the lock before I realised that the door was ajar. My hand dropped and I felt a splinter from the jemmied jamb stick deep into my palm. The surprise and sharp stinging pain brought me to full alertness. I eased my. 38 out of its holster, crouched and pushed the door open enough to sidle through. Nothing happened, so I went in, keeping low and darting across into the open doorway of the front room on the right.
The house was quiet. I waited for a full minute, then stepped out into the hall. The hall light was on and so was the light on the stair landing and the one above that. She was hanging from the top balustrade. The ivory coloured lace wedding dress she wore was stained and soiled. The angle of her neck was cruel and unnatural; her face was dark and swollen and her eyes and tongue protruded clownishly. But in the harsh light I recognised her. I knew who she was, or who she had been twenty years ago.
