fully endowed with brains, good looks and life itself. A blond with a face that was all eyes, cheekbones and mouth: it was a candid shot, she was sitting in a chair, waving her hands and talking. It would be hard to imagine anyone within view not looking and listening.
‘Which one?’ I said. ‘Which university?’
‘There’s more than one?’
‘Three’, I said, but I knew which one he meant; the old one, the one with ivy and tradition, the one I hadn’t dropped out of.
‘Law school’, he said. ‘Going straight into law school. Sounds funny to me, but I was looking forward to talking to her about it. We wrote each other plenty, I felt like I knew her, sort of…’
‘What happened?’
He squashed out his half-smoked cigar in the little ashtray on my desk, and sighed. Just for an instant, with the breath leaving him, he seemed oddly vulnerable. ‘Her mother died last year, cancer. Di was real cut up when she sat those exams. I wanted to come out for the funeral and all, but I couldn’t get away. I wrote that I’d get work here so that I’d be around, she seemed real pleased.’
‘Did your wife marry again?’
He shook his head emphatically. ‘Never got divorced, one of those things. Di moved in with a girlfriend after Coralie died. She was going to live in college she said-a scholarship, that right?’
I nodded. ‘You keep saying what was going to happen-what did happen?’
‘I got here early December, soon as I could. She’d been gone a week when I arrived.’
‘Gone where?’
‘To the States, would you believe it? She took off with some kid to California and here I am stuck, just locked in up there in Queensland for the first eight weeks solid.’
He’d used his American connections to make the initial trace. Diane Holt had US citizenship and a passport from a trip to New Caledonia she’d made with her mother. She left Australia on Pan Am bound for San Francisco on 27 November at half past five in the afternoon. She had a cabin bag and a light suitcase which had been carried for her by one Vincent Harvey.
‘He’s Australian’, Holt said. ‘Graduate student at Stanford, that’s…’
‘I know, university in California. Felix Keesing, anthropology, Roscoe Tanner and McEnroe, tennis. Does Di play tennis?’
‘Sure, plays everything.’ He pulled a sheaf of papers from the pocket that hadn’t held the wallet. ‘All I know about him and some stuff about her is right here.’ He gave me the papers and wiped a hairy arm across his face. ‘Shit, it’s hot.’
We coped with that in the saloon bar of the big hotel down the street where Holt was staying. He said he was a retired drinker but he must have been title-holder in his day: I drank light beer and he had beer with whisky chasers.
Holt had used Raymond Evans’ agency to do the basic digging on Diane, her mother and Harvey, and I was impressed with the results. We had a straight teenager with the usual tastes and habits and no shadows, until the six months of her mother’s illness came along. Raymond’s report said: ‘Ms Holt appears to have moved into a kind of top gear when she learned of her mother’s cancer. By all reports she worked extremely hard at her studies and alternated periods of intense nursing with heavy socialising. Drink amp; drugs-moderate amp; experimental; sex probable (see Harvey, V.); politics-radical; criminality-negative.’
Harvey had taken a B A in history and psychology and an MA in sociology at the University of Sydney. He’d done his course work for his Stanford PhD on ‘Advertising, the media and opinion formation in Australia’ and when he carried Di Holt’s suitcase at Mascot he was going back to write up his fieldwork for the dissertation. Raymond reported that Harvey had met Diane Holt when he was interviewing the father of one of her school friends who owned an advertising agency.
I tapped the papers and forced down some more beer. ‘This is good work’, I said. ‘But I think you might need a California man on it now.’
‘Tried that’. Holt said. ‘San Francisco private eye found out Harvey had dropped out of Stanford. Big deal. Said he couldn’t find Australians, charged me high.’
‘Jesus. Did he call himself a private eye?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Must be the fog. Still…’
He broke in impatiently. ‘I’m a Stanford man myself, got a friend on the faculty there. He tells me this Harvey has gone political-makes speeches on the campus time to time.’
‘Radical polities’, I said tapping the papers again.
‘Yeah, beats me. I just figure it might be best for an Aussie to talk to them and find out what the hell’s going on.’
‘Why didn’t Raymond handle it?’
‘He recommended you.’
And that was how I came to be on Flight 532 out of Sydney for San Francisco via Honolulu. I had a visa which would allow me to go in and out of the US as often as I liked for the next five years. It sounded like a threat. I watched ‘Chariots of Fire’ for the third time and admired the way they gave you two of the cute little bottles when you ordered a gin and tonic. I didn’t eat any of the food which was all the colour of raw liver. I read The White Hotel on the second leg of the flight, and couldn’t sleep afterwards.
It was raining in San Francisco and the cable cars were out of operation being overhauled, but it was Sunday and a lot of the city was working, and that was novel. I checked into a Fisherman’s Wharf motel and caught up on some of the lost sleep. After a shave and shower I went out and bought some of the Gallo Chablis I’d been reading about for years in American novels. I also bought a turkey and avocado sandwich big enough to choke Phar Lap and went back to the motel to review the case. The wine was fine, a bit fruity; the label said it was 12 per cent alcohol and I confirmed that with a few solid belts. The sandwich was excellent-survival in these foreign parts was assured. The thinking didn’t take long; the only lead I had was to Stanford University in Palo Alto. Twelve per cent is an assertive wine-I had another nap.
It was well into Monday when I presented my international driving permit and American Express card at Hertz and took possession of a red Pinto. The freeway to Palo Alto wasn’t any worse than the Sydney versions and the low, exhaust-blasted structures along the road looked like Haberfield with a dash of Barcelona. Since the energy crisis hit they’ve dropped the speed limit and everyone drives slowly to save petrol. They were forgiving about my hesitations and sudden surges of doubt about the automatic transmission and which side of the road to travel on.
I put on dark sunglasses and blinked a lot and told myself that Palo Alto with its gum trees and ordered streets was nothing like Canberra. I drove cautiously onto the Stanford campus, learning that here joggers and cyclists rule.
At Students’ Records a bored woman with a lot of gold chains round her neck told me that Vin Harvey had not enrolled for the new quarter. When I asked why not, she got sly and started demanding ID. I left after getting a squint at the address on the VDT screen-72 Manzanita Park. I located it on a campus map. and walked there dodging the bikes. It was an eye-opener amidst the affluence. Low cost student housing covering an acre or so. The buildings, box-like, pale cream corrugated iron jobs were like beached whales. I felt a wall and judged it to be more tin than iron. The layout reminded me of the army and the atmosphere reminded me of caravan parks at home where I’d gone looking for people who couldn’t afford to hide anywhere else.
Number 72 was no different from the others except that it had a poster on the outside advertising the delights of the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Pasted to the rippled surface the picture of the boardwalk and the sea had a disjointed, chaotic look. There was also a poster for a recent on-campus Grateful Dead concert, but there were plenty of those around.
A tall, stringy black youth answered my knock. He wore a light grey track suit and sneakers and he bounced just standing there in the doorway.
‘I, ah, was hoping you might know something about Vincent Harvey.’
‘Who was hoping?’
