my head. I got the car started and into gear somehow and kangaroo-hopped it back along the track until I reached a house. Then I leant on the horn until a woman came out, and I spoke to her and told her what to do.
Terry came to see me in hospital and Pat came and Sergeant Moles-it was like old times. The bullet had touched the bone but hadn’t messed the leg up too much. No one wept over Doc Mahony and Johnny Dragovic, although Pat said that the Doc wasn’t such a bad bloke, just greedy. Terry went off to play a tournament in Hong Kong, and one solitary night I went to the dog track and won fifty dollars on a hound named Topspin.
Escort to an easy death
The filing card pinned to my office door read ‘Cliff Hardy Investigations’, and I noticed that the finger I used to straighten it with had a dirty nail. Not very dirty, but then the card itself wasn’t very dirty and the drawing pin that held it wasn’t very bent. But not clean and not straight. These were bad times. People were losing their jobs; people and things were going missing; people were getting more and more dishonest, in big and small ways, and no-one cared. It was all bad news for me: I made a living out of tidying up problems; finding a lost wife or husband, guarding a body for a while, seeing a sum of money safely from point A to point B. Now, tidiness and safety were not expected. I was losing business, and no-one cared.
I pushed the door open, it held on the frayed, lifted carpet while I picked up the mail, and then I flicked it back with my foot. The bills were for the usual things, small, corrective services performed on my body and various bits of machinery, and the baits were the same. I was offered female companionship, life insurance and a home on the north coast out of the smog of Sydney. I needed all those things; every forty-year-old male whose instincts are within a range of normal does. But to get them I’d had to be what I was not-prosperous. To hell with them; their market research was lousy. The women were probably ugly and the insurance would have fine print and the house would be sliding into the sea. I shovelled the brochures into the waste paper bin and made out a cheque for the smallest of the bills.
I sat and listened to the sounds of Sydney three floors down. They were busy sounds-trucks and cars and buses, all full of people all chasing a dollar. I’d sat for a whole day like that recently and for a few hours in quite a lot of days. I was a little panicky. As I stared at the office door a shape appeared in the pane of glass. It was a nice shape, not tall or short-trim-looking. The shape stayed there for what seemed like five minutes before it knocked. I let out a tense breath and said ‘Come in’ in my best bass.
It turned out to be a woman with red hair, a red dress and red shoes. She carried a black shoulder bag and wore a wide, black belt around the dress; when she got up close I could see that the hair was a wig. I watched her walk towards the chair in front of the desk and lower herself into it. She moved all in a piece, not exactly stiffly, but not altogether gracefully either. It was as if she’d learned it all from scratch late in life.
‘Mr Hardy’, she said, ‘my name is Trudi Walker.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you’, I said.
‘Yes. I want to hire you to find someone.’ Her voice was what used to be called fruity, she gave the vowels and dipthongs everything she had.
‘Male or female?’
She raised an eyebrow that had been plucked to a fine, dark line. She was heavily and expertly made-up; hard to guess her age, forty at least, maybe more. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Not really, but I have more success with women for some reason. I’ve found thirty-nine out of fifty women but only nineteen out of forty men.’
‘Perhaps you’ve just had more practice with women-your statistics suggest that.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘It’s a man in this instance.’
I shrugged. ‘Well, maybe I can improve on my figures. How long’s he been gone?’
‘Two days.’
‘That’s not really missing, Miss Walker, that could just be… away.’
‘No! I’ve seen Gerry every day for the past five years. We are business partners and friends. Something has happened to him.’
‘You could be right. What’s the business?’
‘We run an escort service.’
And that, of course, was why she hadn’t gone to the police and why she avoided the big agencies, which are plugged straight in to the newspapers and also why my fees didn’t worry her. She paid over the five hundred dollars retainer and agreed to a hundred and twenty-five a day plus expenses without a frown. In fact she had very few facial expressions, permitting herself the eyebrow, a tight thin-lipped smile and that was about it. Gerry Hadley, she informed me, was an American she’d met when he was on leave from Vietnam. They’d corresponded for a few years while he was in the States and then he’d come over to join forces with her. She gave me two photos- P F C Hadley, twenty’ish, in battle dress, Mr Gerald Hadley, business-suited, well-fleshed, thirtyish. He had a round, corn-fed face with a bright smile.
Gerry and Trudi had separate apartments in the same building in Elizabeth Bay. They ran the agency from a business address in Potts Point, and from their apartments. Trudi still occasionally worked a shift; Gerry didn’t, although the agency catered to both sexes.
‘When did you last see Mr Hadley?’
‘Three nights ago. We had dinner together. He was supposed to come to my flat for breakfast and a discussion the next morning. He didn’t come, and I haven’t seen him since.’
‘You’ve looked through his flat?”
‘Yes.’ She reached into her bag, took out a door key with a red ribbon attached and handed it over. While I looked at the key I was thinking that there was a fair bit of between-the-lines reading to do here, but I decided to play it careful-I needed the work.
‘Could you give me a list of your employees, Miss Walker?’
‘Not off hand; I could arrange it if you’d call at the office.’
Job or not, I was already getting tired of her; the voice was annoying me the way plastic cutlery and Big Macs annoy me. I twirled the key by the ribbon.
‘Any of the girls missing?’ I said.
The look she shot at me aged her ten years and I put her near fifty. ‘I don’t know’, she snapped. ‘Why?’
‘Any of the boys missing?’
She got half out of her chair and her face twisted up; two fissures appeared in the makeup beside her nose. ‘You bastard’, she snarled. ‘You shit. You can…’
I put the key down and came around the desk to pat her shoulder. ‘Easy, I said, ‘easy; I’m sorry, but I had to find out how you feel about all this. You were acting till then, doing it pretty well, too.’
She sat back and dug in her bag for tissues. After dabbing and wiping some of the control came back, but I didn’t have cosmetic-controlled agelessness in front of me now, I had a vulnerable woman with years on the clock and fear in her eyes.
‘I’m fifteen years older than Gerry, Mr Hardy’, she said. ‘I go through tortures to keep up appearances, I eat almost nothing. I love him and everything I’ve done is… I can’t bear…’ The control went again and the tears streamed over her face like a flash flood. I felt sorry for her and realised at that moment that she’d dropped the voice-her vowels were a little nasal now and her delivery had the lazy, easy rhythms of Sydney.
‘I’ll look for him’, I said. ‘I’ll call at your office and I’ll look in his flat and I’ll ask around. Two days isn’t long. Does he have a car?’
She nodded. ‘A Mercedes, gone.’
‘Any friends in Sydney?’
She shook her head. ‘Just me.’
‘You don’t know of any trouble-I mean competitors, the cops… any threats?’
There was panic in her face, clearly visible now that the make-up was eroded. ‘No,’ she whispered,
