man job, Clive.’
Clive evidently said he’d drop by, because Soldier put the phone down and wiped his hand over his face edgily. I didn’t fancy what was coming up. It sounded like a pressure session, and Soldier looked like the boy who knew how to apply it. I felt sick and scared at the thought of what I had to do, but there was no cavalry coming. He told me to get up, and when we were both on our feet I made a slow, awkward lunge at him which gave him plenty of time to lay the flat of his gun along the side of my head. The sound inside my skull was like a rocket being launched and the colour behind my shut eyes was a blinding white, but I’d dipped with the blow a bit, and as I went down I thought I can do it.
I lay very still and let the blood drip into my ear. There was a lot of blood luckily, and I was so afraid that my pulse must have slowed to ten beats a minute. He bent down to look at me, swore, and went out of the room.
Getting to the bookshelf was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It seemed to take forever, but my eyes were open and I was seeing okay when I clawed out the three volumes of Russell’s auto-biography and got my hands on the old, illegal Colt I keep behind there. I pulled it out of the oilskin wrapping, cocked it and wriggled back to where I’d been. He came back into the room with a wet dishcloth in one hand and his gun in the other; his chest was thin, and covered in elegant beige silk. I shot for his leg but I was in no condition for shooting; the Colt jerked in my shaky hand and the bullet went into the embroidered pocket of the shirt. His yellow eyes flashed as the last messages his brain would ever send went through; and then blood welled and spurted and he went down backwards, awkward, and dead.
I picked up his gun and put it in my pocket and then I got the dishcloth and dragged myself to the bathroom. My face was covered in blood and I suddenly thought about his blood and vomited into the basin. After a bit more of that I cleaned myself up as best I could and went back to the phone. Horace was at home, and I told him to drive to Glebe and call me from a public box in about half an hour. He tried to order me about, but I suppose something gets in your voice after you’ve just killed a man, and he didn’t try it for long.
My head was aching badly now, but I examined it carefully and looked into my eyes and concluded that I had a mild concussion at worst. My treatment for that was time-tested-painkillers and whisky. I took both upstairs and sat on the balcony to wait for Clive.
He arrived in the Volvo and he was all alone. I went down and let him in. He’d sweated a bit into the neck of the pastel shirt, but he was still the image of the over-fed businessman with nothing but money on his mind. I put my gun an inch or two into his flab and moved him down the passage to the living room. I had a lot of blood on me and was feeling pretty wild from the codeine and the whisky and he just did what I said without a murmur. He was scared. He almost tripped over the corpse.
‘Soldier isn’t quite with us’, I said.
He looked down at the bloody mess on the floor and all the golf and Courvoisier colour in his face washed away.
‘You’ve been keeping bad company, Clive’, I said. ‘Want a drink?’ He nodded and I poured him a splash of Scotch. The phone rang, and Silverman told me where he was. Patrick was still looking at Soldier and I had to jerk his hand with the glass in it up to his mouth.
‘We’ve got a visitor’, I said. ‘I’m going to let him in. You sit there, if you’ve moved an inch when I get back I’m going to break your nose.’
I got a miniature tape recorder out of a cupboard in the kitchen, and went through to answer the soft knock on the door.
Silverman started to say the things you say when you meet people with guns and beaten-up faces, but I told him to be quiet. In the living room I sat him down with a Scotch and started the tape. I put Soldier’s gun on the coffee table for added effect.
‘What’s Clive doing here?’ Silverman said.
‘Oh, he belongs, he murdered your son.’
It stunned Silverman into silence, and set Patrick talking as I’d hoped it would. There was nothing much to it. Patrick was in deep financial trouble, and hoped for the Forbes Realty deal on the Glebe land to pull him out. But he was running short of time and he got the wind up when Silverman made a few enquiries about the firm. The squatters really got up his nose; he hired Soldier Szabo and some other muscle to help him there and Soldier was still around when Kenneth was caught snooping in Leichhardt.
‘So you killed him’, Silverman said quietly.
‘It was an accident, Horace’, Patrick muttered. ‘Soldier hit him too hard. It was an accident.’
‘Maybe’, I said. ‘And maybe you killed him when you found out who he was. What else could you do?’
‘It wasn’t like that’, Patrick said quickly.
‘The body might tell us something. Of course you had to get rid of the body-you should have thought about the parking ticket.’
‘There was no ticket when we…’
‘No ticket? Well, tough shit, they blow away sometimes. Did Szabo tell you about the speeding ticket?’
Patrick put his face in his hands. ‘No.’
‘What did you do with my boy?’ Silverman said. All the imperiousness and arrogance had melted away. He was just a little fat man, sad, with quivering jowls and a bad colour. ‘Where’s my boy?’
I gave Patrick a light touch on the cheek with the gun.
‘Answer him!’
‘I don’t know.’ He looked at Szabo; the front of the stylish shirt was dark, almost black. ‘He didn’t tell me.’
‘Clive’, Silverman said desperately, ‘I must know, we’ll get you off lightly. Hardy…’
I didn’t say anything. Something like hope flared in Patrick’s face for a second but it died. He was telling the truth and he had nothing to sell.
‘He didn’t tell me’, he said again.
After that we had the cops and an ambulance, and a doctor who looked at me and put some stitches in my head. I made a statement and Silverman made a statement, and Patrick phoned his lawyer. Eventually they all went away, and I drank a lot of Scotch and went to sleep.
They knocked down the houses anyway and built the home units which look like an interlinked series of funeral parlours. I hear the residents have trouble getting their cars in and out. Clive Patrick went to gaol for a long time, and I got paid, but nobody has ever found any trace of Kenneth Silverman.
Stockyards at Jerilderie
She was leaning against the peeling plaster wall outside my office and looking only fifty per cent likely to knock on the door. I hurried down the passage towards her, glad that I’d had a shave and that my clothes were more or less clean-business in the private enquiries game was slow; I understand it’s the same in imported limousines and oil shares.
‘Did you want to see me? I’m Cliff Hardy.’ I put a hand out which she shook as she told me her name and then I used it to open the door. Like me, the office was neater than usual; I’d used some of the idle hours I’d had lately to clean things up a bit and I’d even put a bunch of flowers in a vase on top of the filing cabinet. They were starting to droop a bit but still had a few days left in them. She sat in the chair in front of the desk and crossed her legs; they were long, thin legs and the knees jutted up high. She was a long, thin woman in fact, around thirty-five with nice, brown eyes. She wore a plain linen dress and a light beige jacket; like her they were nice, not flashy, maybe even a bit severe.
She shook her head at the cigarettes I offered and came to the point. ‘How honest are you, Mr Hardy?’
‘Moderately’, I said. ‘I believe in moderation in all things.’
She thought that over for a minute and looked at me like a horse buyer inspecting yearlings. As I say, I was clean and a bit tanned from being under-employed; I was also a bit under-weight but that was a plus, surely. ‘What do you charge for being moderately honest?’
