‘You armed?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘We had a fuckin’ nutter in here yesterday. Yugoslav, as you’d expect. Pulled out this fuckin’ great gun and threatened to kill everyone unless his missus was brought back to him.’
‘I don’t see any broken glass. What happened?’
The desk man thumped his meaty fist down on the papers in front of him. ‘They’ve cleaned up the blood. One of our blokes flattened him, but good. The prick. You’ll find Detective Pascoe one floor up and along to the right. Room 6.’
Down led to the interrogation rooms, up to better things. I knocked on a glass-panelled door and opened it when I heard someone say, ‘It isn’t locked.’
The speaker was Pascoe-shirt-sleeved, bulging with a combination of fat and muscle, perched on a desk and abusing someone on the telephone. His assistant of the night before was head down and arse up at a desk, working his way through a stack of files. Pascoe waved me to a chair and with his free hand mimed the action of rolling a cigarette. I took out my tobacco, made two and handed him one. He dipped his head towards the light. He sucked hard on his first drag and the rollie was nearly half-consumed. I sat and waited for him to finish his call. The young plain-clothes man was expressionless but taking everything in.
Pascoe banged the phone down. ‘So, the private dick. The tough guy who rolls his own and chucks things at hitmen. What can I do for you?’
I shrugged. ‘I dunno. Just staying in touch. Thought you might have mug shots for me to look at, might want to talk about an identification parade.’
‘Bullshit,’ Pascoe said.
‘Menzies wants to know if his client’s a suspect.’
‘That’s more like it. Yeah, why not? Tell him there’s a lot of self-made widows around. We catch a few of them. Not many. Our inquiries are proceeding. Anything else?’
‘I was wondering about my camera. When can I get it back?’
‘Got some more snooping to do, Hardy? Why don’t you earn an honest living? You look like a capable bloke. Evans speaks well of you.’
‘I’m hoping for better things. The camera?’
Pascoe turned to the younger man. ‘Why don’t you go out and get a cuppa tea, Ian?’
Ian moved with alacrity. ‘D’you want something, Colin?’
‘No, son. Just to be alone with my friend here.’
The door closed. ‘I should’ve asked him to get cigarettes,’ Pascoe said.
I started rolling.
‘The way things work,’ Pascoe said, ‘is that I pass this over to Homicide. But I still have an interest. If I come up with anything and hand it on and if it’s useful in some way…’
I gave him a cigarette and lit him up.
‘Thanks. And if it’s useful, I can still score points. You follow me?’
I nodded and lit my own smoke.
‘You’re in my bailiwick, Hardy. St Peters Lane, Darlinghurst. I can be useful to you or I can be a fuckin’ awful nuisance.’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘So, have you got anything to tell me?’
The plain fact was, I didn’t like his style and I trusted him even less. Ernie Glass would have called me a fool or something worse, but I stood up and squashed out my cigarette. ‘No. Nothing. How about my camera?’
‘Piss off.’
I went out quickly and took the stairs going down three at a time. I waved to the man on the desk and left the station. As I stepped onto the footpath I collided with someone coming the other way. We both lost balance and apologised. It was Pascoe’s offsider. I said I was sorry again and moved away.
‘Mr Hardy.’
I turned back. He was extending his hand. I shook it.
‘Ian Gallagher. I just wanted to say I thought you handled yourself pretty well the other night.’
‘I don’t think your boss agrees with you.’
‘Colin hasn’t got… ah, a lot of imagination. Now me, for example, I don’t think you came in just to ask about your camera.’
‘No?’
‘I think you might have been looking for a little reciprocity, some give and take. That’s not Colin’s style. You might do a bit better with me.’
He was a medium-sized, fair man with the Robert Redford kind of good looks. When I examined him a bit more closely I saw that, like Redford, he wasn’t quite as young as he seemed. There were slight crow’s-feet around his eyes and his skin was roughened by quite a few summers and winters. His blue eyes had a reproachful look. Could be a bit of frustrated ambition here, I thought.. ‘I haven’t got much to give,’ I said.
‘I’ll take an IOU. Colin Pascoe’ll never get anywhere with this. I’ve got a feeling about it. There’s something subtle behind it. Now, you haven’t just dropped it, have you?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘OK My guess is you’re still working for one of the lawyers or maybe for the widow. I’ll give you something. Viriginia Shaw, remember her?’
‘Miss Shaw,’ I said. ‘Meadowbank’s companion.’
‘Right. She gave us a cock and bull story about meeting Meadowbank at a business lunch and becoming attracted to him. Hard to picture, isn’t it?’
I shrugged. ‘Ava Gardner married Mickey Rooney.’
‘Virginia Shaw’s a high-class whore. She’s almost a professional co-re. Been up twice already. Three’s about the limit in that game before questions get asked. She wouldn’t come cheap and she’s got some nasty friends.’
‘Like who?’
He grinned. ‘That’s enough from me. I can see you’re interested, which means I was right-you’re still involved. So I’ve got something out of our talk after all. Just remember who to talk to first if you need any help. But the help won’t be free. Fair enough?’
He was away up the steps, not waiting for a response. A neat operator. Maybe Ernie Glass would have approved, but I think the idea was to manipulate the cops, not the other way around. Still, Gallagher had confirmed part of Virginia Shaw’s story. I walked to Riley Street where I’d parked. The hangover was a distant painful memory and I resolved not to do any daytime drinking. In my experience, hangovers are like old boxers, always ready to make a come-back. It was a warm morning, good for walking in the country or a park. Darlinghurst was something different. The money that had come into Paddington and Balmain to tidy up the houses and gardens, pave the footpaths and install speed humps hadn’t arrived here. The rows of terraces were faded and forbidding, patched with sheets of iron and three-ply and the plants that grew in the backyards looked as if they’d rather be somewhere else.
Still, I walked a few blocks for the exercise, passing the houses that wouldn’t open until the late afternoon when a woman would sit in the hallway with a magazine and a cigarette, showing her legs and tits, and the ones where pensioners anxiously parted the curtains watching for their cheques to arrive. There were shops that sold pies and Cokes to factory workers during the day and marijuana at night, and newsagents where the real selling items were kept under the counter. I felt almost respectable, with an office, a mortgage and a nearly paid-off car, but there were plenty of men around here lowering the level in their sherry bottles who had once been much more respectable than me.
I unparked the Falcon that was nearly mine and drove the short distance to St Peters Lane. Parking was a problem around here and I was in negotiation with a tattooist named Primo Tomasetti to rent a cement slab at the back of his parlour for a modest fee. Modesty was the main subject of the negotiation. I got lucky in Upper Forbes Street and found a decent-sized space-probably an ABC worker going to lunch. The thought sent me into a milk bar for a sandwich and a totally virtuous can of soft drink.
I climbed the steps from William Street and turned into St Peters Lane from Upper Forbes.
None of that trendy money had reached here either. The back walls of the buildings that front onto William Street were grey and bare apart from the graffiti and the stuff the bill posters put up- advertisements for rock concerts, boxing and wrestling matches, speedway events, martial arts- all the diversions of the 70s. The posters got ripped and flapped in the breeze like sails. A few days earlier I’d noticed a Van Morrison poster, stuck over a dozen others, that had come adrift and opened out into the lane like a door. I liked Van Morrison and was sorry I’d missed the concert. As I walked up the lane, something felt strange. I tried to register it: no cars where they shouldn’t be, no-one hanging about pretending to be what they weren’t…