He was a plump, red-faced little number with lots of chins and thin hair. His dark blue suit had been artistically cut, but the unfashionable lines of his body had easily won out. He looked like a funny, little fat man, but I had a feeling that his looks were deceptive.
‘I’m Horace Silverman, Mr Hardy’, he said. ‘This is my wife, Beatrice. I’m in real estate.’
I nodded; I hadn’t thought he was a postman.
‘We are concerned about our son’, Silverman went on. ‘His name is Kenneth.’ I opened my mouth, but he lifted a hand to silence me. ‘Kenneth left home a year ago to live with other students. He was attending the university.’
‘Was?’ I said alertly.
‘Yes. He suspended his studies; I believe that’s the term. He also changed his address several times. Now we don’t know where he is, and we want you to find him.’
‘Missing Persons’, I said.
‘No! We have reason to believe that Kenneth is in bad company. There may be… legal problems.’
‘How bad?’
‘The problems? Oh, not bad. A summons for speeding, a parking violation. Others may be pending.’
‘It doesn’t sound serious. You’d be better off using the police, scores of men, computers…’
The red deepened in his face and his big, moist mouth went thin and hard; any affability he’d brought in with him had dropped away.
‘I said no!’ He slammed his palm down on my desk. ‘I’m involved in some very delicate business negotiations; very delicate, with a great deal of money involved. The slightest complication of my affairs, the slightest hint of police hanging about, and they could fall through.’ He got the words out with difficulty through the rising tide of his anger. He seemed intolerant of opposition. Maybe Kenneth knew what he was doing. The woman blew smoke and looked concerned but said nothing.
‘Okay, okay’, I said. ‘I’m glad of the work. I charge seventy-five dollars a day plus expenses. You get an itemised account. I take a retainer of two hundred dollars.’
He dipped into the bulging pocket of his suit coat and fished out a chequebook. He scribbled, ripped and handed the cheque over-five hundred dollars.
‘Do you want them shot, or tortured to death slowly?’ I said.
‘Who?’
The woman snorted ‘Horace’, crushed out her cigarette in the stand and levered herself up from the chair. I gathered that they were going.
‘Not so fast. I need names, addresses, descriptions, photographs
…’
He cut me off by hauling a large manila envelope out of his other pocket and dumping it on the desk. I hoped his tailor never saw him out on the street.
‘I’m busy’, he said shortly. ‘All you’ll need is there. Just find him, Mr Hardy, and report to me.’ He’d calmed down; he was happiest telling people what to do.
‘It could be unpleasant’, I said. ‘He might be smoking cigarettes, taking the odd drink…’
‘A full report, no punches pulled.’
‘You’ll get it.’ I opened the door and he bustled out. She cruised after him, still looking concerned. He seemed to have brought her along just to prove that the boy had a mother.
I sat down at the desk again, propped the cheque up in front of me and opened the envelope. There were three photographs, photostats of a parking ticket and a speeding summons and of a letter, dated two months back, from the Registrar of the University of Sydney. It was directed to Kenneth at an address in Wahroonga. There was also a sheet of Horace Silverman’s business paper half-covered in type.
The typed sheet gave me the low-down on Ken. Born in Sydney twenty-one years ago, six feet tall when last measured and slim of build, fair of hair with no marks or scars. The last meeting with his parents was given and dated-a dinner eight weeks back. Two addresses in the inner suburbs were listed, and it was suggested that the Registrar’s letter had been sent to Ken’s home address by mistake. His interests were given — tennis, bushwalking and politics. His major subject at university was psychology, and a Dr Katharine Garson was listed as his student counsellor.
The photos were black and white, good quality, good size. They showed a young man in his late teens or around twenty, all three shots roughly contemporaneous. Kenneth Silverman had it all-thick, wavy hair, even features, broad shoulders. I’d have taken bets that his teeth were good. One of the pictures showed him in tennis gear, and he looked right; in another he was leaning against a sports car and he looked right in that too. I couldn’t see any resemblance to Horace, maybe a little to Beatrice. There were none of those signs-weak chin, close-set eyes-that are supposed to indicate, but don’t, character deficiencies. Kenneth Silverman looked healthy and happy.
Sydney University was just down the road and Silverman’s last known address was in Glebe, my stamping ground. I went down to the street and along to the backyard of the tattooist’s shop where I keep my car. In an ideal world, I’d find the boy in Glebe before three o’clock, deposit my cheque, draw some out and be home in time to invite someone out to dinner.
The Fisher Library of the University of Sydney is a public place, like the whole campus. This statutory fact has been found useful by a few Vice-Chancellors who’ve felt the need to call the cops in. I got there a little after midday and looked up Dr Garson in the handbook-a string of degrees, senior lecturer in psychology. The Psychology Department was in one of those new concrete buidings that academics have allowed themselves to be herded into. They have as much personality as a bar of soap and, in my experience, they have a corresponding effect on the people who work in them. Not Dr Garson though; she’d done her concrete cell out with pictures that actually looked like people and places, and she had a flagon of sherry sitting on the window ledge.
‘A sherry?’ she said when she’d installed me in a chair.
‘Please; then I can show you what good manners I’ve got, how well I can sip and murmur appreciatively.’
‘Don’t bother’, she said pouring, ‘piss is piss.’ She set the glass on the desk near me and took a belt herself. ‘So you’re a private detective? Some of my colleagues wouldn’t allow you on the campus, let alone in their rooms.’
‘It’s a public place.’
She raised one plucked eyebrow. ‘So it is.’ She finished her sherry and poured another. She had fine bones in her wrists and even finer ones in her face.
‘I want some information about a student you counselled.’
She laughed. ‘Unlikely.’
‘I want to help him-find him, that is.’
She sipped. ‘Perhaps he wants to stay lost.’
‘He still can if he wants to.’ I drank some of the sherry, dry. ‘I find him, report to his father and that’s that.’
‘You don’t look like a thug, Mr Hardy, but you’re in a thuggish trade. Why should I help you?’
‘One, you’ve got an independent mind, two, Silverman might be in trouble.’
She didn’t jump out of her skirt at the name but she didn’t treat it like a glass of flat beer either.
‘Kenneth Silverman’, she said slowly.
‘That’s right, rich Kenneth who dropped out and disappeared. His Mum and Dad would like to know why. You wouldn’t be able to put their minds at rest by any chance?’
‘No.’
‘Can’t or won’t?’
‘Can’t. I was surprised when he dropped out, he was doing well.’
‘What did you do about it?’
She finished her sherry with an exasperated flick. ‘What could I do? I counsel twenty students and teach another sixty. I wrote to him asking him to contact me for a talk. He didn’t.’
‘Had you counselled him much?’
‘No, he didn’t seem to need it.’
‘It looks now as if he did.’
