where Ramsay is.’
‘Where?’
She took me by the arm and steered me away from the house. ‘I’ll tell you, but there’s a price.’
We reached the street and crossed to where our cars were parked. ‘What’s the price… Tanya?’
‘You remembered my name. That’s a start. Come home with me and stay the night. You don’t have to sleep with me. I just can’t bear to be alone tonight. Please.’
‘You can’t be serious. You don’t know a thing about me.’
‘I’m a risk taker. Are you?’
‘When the odds are right. You know where Hewitt is?’
‘I do, as of last week anyway. She boasted to me about getting him.’
‘She?’
‘Right. Are you on?’
Following the Porsche in the Falcon was like a duck following a swan. We ended up in Coogee at an apartment block that overlooked the water. She glided into the underground car park and I found a space on the street. She’d told me the unit number and I buzzed it at the security gate and she let me in. I took the lift to the fourth floor.
‘This is it,’ she said as she opened the door. ‘What d’you think?’
‘Give me a minute.’ The track lighting was held down low and everything under it gleamed — the polished wood, the glass, the paintwork. The living room had a knockout view of the water through a window that occupied the whole wall. The balcony outside it was bigger than my backyard and had more greenery on it. I waved my hands in the air, imitating a conductor. ‘What can I say. It’s fabulous, darling.’
She laughed. ‘You’re right. It’s over the top. It was his, now it’s mine.’
‘Sounds like a Patsy Kline song.’
She sat down on one of the overstuffed leather-covered chairs. ‘Something like that. Thanks for coming back with me. You don’t really have to stay. I just didn’t want to walk into this bloody mausoleum alone tonight.’
She made coffee and we talked. Her very rich husband had left her for a very young woman and it had rocked her badly. Trying to restore her confidence she’d tried escorts and Prue Bonham’s soirees but the artificiality of it wasn’t working for her.
‘What did she say about me?’ she asked. ‘I know she said something.’
‘She said you were still hunting.’
She gave the kind of throaty laugh only a pack-a-day cigarette habit can give you. ‘She’s right. You bet I am. But you’re taken, aren’t you?’
I wasn’t and wasn’t looking to be, so I said, ‘Sort of. Yeah.’
She shrugged. ‘That’s the way it is. Give me a hug and a kiss and I’ll tell you what you want to know.’
We embraced and her firm, slender body sent out a Siren call I responded to despite myself. We kissed and I was carried back twenty years to when every kiss tasted of smoke and no-one cared. I was getting hard and I tried to kiss her again but she eased back.
‘Bad timing,’ she said. ‘Ramsay’s with a woman named Regina Kipps. She’s fat and fifty and she lives in Concord. She’s in the book. Goodnight, Cliff.’
12
I creaked and groaned through my routine at the gym next morning and then met Peter Lo in the same place as before. He was his usual cheerful, well-exercised self, while I was still feeling the effects of my encounters with Stivens, one whisky too many and a late night. I was also feeling guilty about not returning Tess’s call of the day before. Truth was, I wasn’t sure what to say to her.
‘So, Cliff,’ Peter said after taking in some coffee and a chunk of blueberry muffin, ‘I hear you’re mixed up in a murder down Lugarno way.’
I drank some coffee. ‘I wouldn’t say “mixed up in”. As you boys would say, I interviewed the deceased before he was the deceased.’
‘You wouldn’t catch me using language like that. Not long before, I gather.’
‘That’s right. Is this on the record? I didn’t kill him.’
Lo grinned and munched on some more muffin. ‘No-one thinks you did, but some people think you could’ve been more helpful.’
‘What is this, Peter? It sounds as though you’ve spent more time chatting about me than asking about the drug scene down there.’
‘The two matters are kind of connected, wouldn’t you say?’
‘What’re you telling me?’
‘They did the autopsy yesterday. Jorgensen had a considerable amount of coke and heroin in his system.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Weird bit of overkill, what with the other signs. The thing is, I just had to make a little noise or two about drugs down there and this all came up, including your name. So what’m I going to do? Play dumb and when someone later finds out I do know you and I was showing an interest, what’re they going to think? You follow me?’
‘I don’t want to get you into trouble.’
‘Don’t worry. I’m not. The thing is, the way the job is these days, you just can’t afford to leave question marks in people’s minds.’
‘So.’
‘So I went to Stankowski and told him that I knew you from the gym.’
‘That’s all?’
‘That’s all. He said he’d seen you and wanted to see you again. I’m surprised he hasn’t already. No, I’m not surprised. You must’ve left home at around six.’
‘That’s right. So you didn’t pick up anything useful, or if you did you won’t tell me.’
‘How good’re you at lateral thinking, Cliff?’
‘About as good as I am at transcendental meditation.’
‘You ought to try that. I can tell that you’ve got a lot of unresolved internal conflicts.’
‘I wouldn’t know what to do without them. What’s the point?’
‘Just this, Inspector Beth Hammond has been assigned to liaise on the Jorgensen case with Stankowski.’
‘I don’t know her.’
‘You don’t want to know her. She’s a bluestocking with a rat-trap mind. That’s not the point.’
I swilled my cool coffee around and drank it down. It tasted bitter, unusual in Paolo’s place, but the taste might just have come from the knowledge that a cop was seeking me out and I was being asked to play guessing games. It was one of those moments when in the old days I’d roll a cigarette, fiddle with it, and hope for enlightenment. Nothing to fiddle with now and I wasn’t going to start biting my fingernails. Peter was about to speak but I stopped him. ‘A woman.’
He smiled. ‘That’s right. Somehow there’s a woman’s angle to the business.’
Peter left and I ordered another coffee to wash away the taste of bitterness and considered what to do next. It seemed to me that the field was narrowing down. Jason had said that a woman had threatened him over what he knew about drug selling and now he was dead of physical and pharmaceutical assault. There were two women involved with him — Sammy and Danni — and both could be candidates, unless the cops had some others, always a possibility. But from where I stood it didn’t look as if Marty Price was headed for a happy outcome. Me either. From what I’d seen of Sammy I judged her to be capable of many things, but I didn’t rate her as either a drug
