glasses of wine. I used the baton as a paperweight-I was starting to get used to having it around. I was standing by the window looking down into the street when Sanderson arrived in a white Mercedes and found a park on the far kerb. He waited for a break in the traffic and crossed quickly and anxiously, moving his head from side to side. He stumbled a little on gaining the footpath. He was a clumsy man with a lot on his mind.
He was breathing hard when he made it up the stairs and was grateful to sit down, no matter how plain the surroundings and uncomfortable the chair.
‘I’m not a well man,’ he said. ‘Heart trouble. I’m in line for a transplant.’
‘Should be out in the fresh air doing something healthy that you like, not sitting in offices.’
‘I like sitting in offices. Let’s get down to it. I asked around about you, Hardy. The word is you’re fairly honest.’
‘Is that the best I rate?’
‘In your game it’s pretty high. You had it right. I was robbed. Close to half a million that I was keeping from the tax hounds. Looking around, I don’t imagine you go out of your way to pay tax.’
‘I pay as little as I can get away with.’
‘Right. Well these bastards who broke in threatened me and the wife and took the money. I couldn’t make too much of a song and dance about it because of the tax angle and because my wife had no idea how much it was. She’d give me hell if she knew.’
‘So you put the word out that there’d be a reward for information.’
‘I did. I spoke to a couple of people. I told them that I had the serial numbers of the notes and that I’d do a deal with the bastards. And that there’d be something in it for whoever pointed me in the right direction.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. No feedback.’
‘Do you have a record of the serial numbers?’
‘What fucking good would it do? I’m not going to let the banks know I’ve got all this loose cash, am I? But I thought these people mightn’t know that. I thought the possibility of the money being traced just might induce them to cut a deal.’
‘So either the people you used to get the word out didn’t reach the right ears or the ones who grabbed it don’t believe it can be traced and have got on with spending it.’
‘Right.’
He looked old and sick but it was hard to sympathise with him unless he’d been hoarding the money to make a donation to the hospital after his transplant. I doubted it. I told him that Jerry Fowler had somehow got wind of the robbery and the reward and had a line on the perpetrators.
‘But he got killed,’ I said. ‘They got a line on him first.’
Sanderson shook his head. ‘That’s rotten. If I’d known something like that was going to happen I’d have just cut my losses.’
‘Would you?’
He looked at me, his pale, glittering eyes hard behind the lenses. ‘Probably not.’
‘That’s what I thought. Well, I’ve got a client who cared about Jerry Fowler and is willing to spend some money to find out who killed him. I’m going to try, but I’m not optimistic’
‘If you do find out, will you tell me? I’d make it worth your while.’
‘I’ll bet you would.’
‘Would your client want to… proceed legally?’
‘That’d be a complication for you, right? I don’t know.’
I could see Sanderson’s brain working, trying to figure out how he’d cope if the matter was to be played straight. What deals might he strike with cops, lawyers, the tax office? I didn’t like his chances and neither did he. I picked up the baton just to have something to do while he went through the options. The action caught his attention and his already pale face lost more colour.
‘What… where did you get that?’
I told him. He held out his hand for the baton and I passed it over. He examined it and let it slip from his hands. It clattered against the desk on its way down. He retrieved it, thumped the desk with it, turned and swiped at the filing cabinet. He moved towards me, suddenly energised, and swung. I ducked, gripped his wrist, twisted and the baton fell free. The momentary strength left him and he sank into the chair, breathing hard. He scrabbled a pill from his shirt pocket and held it up. He gasped, unable to speak. I rushed to fill a cup with cold coffee. He gulped the pill down, gripped the edge of the desk and fought for control. When he was composed I pointed to the baton.
‘You recognise this thing?’
‘Yes. It belongs to my stepson.’
Sanderson’s stepson, Nathan, worked for a security firm. They weren’t close, had little in common, but he’d never thought that Nathan was anything other than honest, if a bit thick and prone to violence on the football field. He’d shown Sanderson his baton and the nicks he’d filed in it for the number of heads he’d cracked. The notches hadn’t meant anything to me, but to Sanderson they stamped Nathan as the owner of the baton.
Between us, we put it together. The home invaders had worn balaclavas and tracksuits and one of them hadn’t spoken a word. Nathan would have known about the safe and suspected that it held a lot of money. He’d heard his stepfather rant about taxes enough times to doubt that the money could be traced. Somehow, through his association with a security firm, Jerry must have got a sniff of the involvement of Nathan or someone like him. Nathan or his associate got wind of Jerry’s interest and took care of Jerry and came after me. Jerry must have let slip my name somewhere along the line.
We sat and looked at each other. Sanderson’s colour was bad and I hoped he wasn’t going to have another cardiac episode there and then-didn’t look as if he could stand many more.
‘The one who tried to hit you with the baton-what did he look like?’
‘It was too quick and too dark to tell. Middling in every way’s my impression, but that’s all it is.’
‘And how did you say you dealt with him?’
‘I kicked him in the face and he went arse over tit down the stairs.’
Sanderson nodded.
‘What does that mean?’
‘He rang his mother the other day. She asked him why his voice was funny and he said he had a broken jaw that he’d got from an intruder with a baseball bat he’d run up against.’
‘I have to go after him,’ I said.
Sanderson’s smile was a grimace in a death’s-head face. ‘He flew out to South America yesterday. Holiday, he said, but with that amount of money…’
I met Zack Fowler again in the Novotel bar and told him what I’d found out.
‘Get Interpol onto it,’ he said.
‘No chance. The only evidence is the baton and you can bet Sanderson wouldn’t testify to it. It’s a dead end, Mr Fowler. I’m sorry.’
‘Poor Jerry. It was to be his big score but he struck out.’
‘It happens that way sometimes, but you’ve spent too much time in the States. Jerry would have said he made a duck.’
Crime writing
Theo Baldwin phoned me from Silverwater Correctional Centre and asked me to come and see him. Said he’d arrange for me to pay a visit even though I wasn’t a relative or a lawyer.
‘Sounds as if you’ve got some pull,’ I said.
‘You know me, Hardy. Always working the angles.’
‘You’ve got yourself a right angle now.’
