‘How do you mean?’
‘Did she say she’d do something to hurt you if you didn’t restrain the child-what’s his name? Troy?’
‘Troy, yeah, little brat. Well, she reckoned I was careless, kind of thing, letting the kid ride around without a belt on.’ He showed her his palms apologetically. ‘I know, I know, I should’ve strapped him in, but you know how kids are, all over the place, can’t keep still.’
‘Terry, I’m trying to work out if you were provoked in any way, and, if so, whether or not you were justified in striking out at Mrs Sullivan. Mitigating circumstances, in other words.’
‘Talk English, can’t ya?’
She leaned forward. ‘We may be able to obtain a fine and a suspended sentence if we can show that your striking the woman-though to be deplored-was understandable given the nature and degree of her provocation.’
Baker muttered, ‘We should get the bitch to back down.’
‘I didn’t hear that, Mr Baker.’
Baker put his head on one side. ‘But you’d have her address, right?’
‘Terry, I’m warning you.’
But Baker was lost in staging another revenge and his mind drifted. Wait till the Sullivan woman was in a multi-storey carpark somewhere, shove a spud up her exhaust pipe so she can’t get the car started, then jump her, get her to withdraw all charges, maybe put her out of action somehow.
That’s if he could find her. Christ, the Sydney phone book was probably chocka with Sullivans.
He became aware of a snarling exhaust note outside the building. When it didn’t let up after half a minute, Baker went to the window.
He liked it, oh he liked it very much. Some bloke was parked across the street in a hotted-up panelvan, brrrapp-ing the motor, letting the vehicle hunt and rock a little as if he were slipping the clutch, ready to take off. But it wasn’t the panelvan that interested Baker, it was what it stood for. Clearly the poor bastard had been given a bum’s rush in court and he was shouting his grievances to the world through a megaphone: ‘Men and women are not equal… Justice for women, injustice for men… Modern justice, keeping a father away from his kids.’
‘Go for it,’ Baker muttered.
The lawyer joined him at the window. ‘Oh, God, not him again.’
Baker laughed. ‘Got lumbered with De Lisle, did he?’
‘If anything, De Lisle would be on his side. No, he’s been hassling us for months.’
She had her mouth open for more but just at that moment the traffic cleared and the panelvan screamed and leapt smoking and snaking away from the kerb, across the street and through the main glass doors of the courthouse.
They heard the crash. The screaming started a couple of seconds later. ‘He’s hurt someone,’ Ms Goldman said, and she hurried out.
Baker left, too, but he paused for a moment at her desk first. He spun the file around. There it was, Diana Sullivan, an address in St Leonards.
They were all moaning and wringing their hands at the front of the building. The panelvan had come right into the foyer and buried itself against the front desk. Baker saw blood and glass, a lot of it. If he’d been a different kind of a person he could have lifted the occasional wallet and handbag in all the confusion. As it was, he saw Ms Goldman helping a woman into the Ladies’. She saw him. ‘I’m sorry, Terry,’ she said, harried, pale-looking. ‘Ring me tomorrow?’
‘No worries.’
‘Great.’
Baker slipped away through a side door. Carol’s Kingswood was in a K-Mart five blocks away. It took him a while to find the street directory under the UDL cans and toys and other crap on the back floor. St Leonards.
But when he got to the address, no one answered his knock, and when he went around the side of the house, a woman from next door poked her head over the fence, demanding to know who he was and what he wanted.
He waved the classifieds section of a newspaper in her face. ‘I’ve come about the VW.’
‘I think you must have the wrong address. Diana doesn’t own a VW.’
Baker was perplexed.
‘Besides,’ the woman went on, ‘someone assaulted her and she’s gone to stay with her mother till the trial.’
Then, conscious that she’d said too much, the woman frowned and reached a fleshy arm over the fence. ‘Let me see that ad.’
Baker backed away. He said, ‘It’s okay, no worries, my mistake,’ and other unconvincing things as he backed out of there.
In the Kingswood again he planted his foot. If the nosy cow was calling the cops right now he’d better track down some mates who’d swear he’d been on the piss with them all afternoon.
So, forget the Sullivan woman.
Fix De Lisle instead.
Twenty-two
‘Just coffee,’ Wyatt told the kid waiting on them at the corner table, near a door, next to a window.
Liz Redding looked at him across the table, a faintly amused expression on her face. What he read there said that she thought him abstemious, and not only because he hadn’t ordered anything to eat, so he said, ‘And an apple danish,’ seeing her mouth stretch into a grin.
‘Now I don’t feel so bad about ordering scones and cream,’ she said. ‘It’s been a while since breakfast, and it’s a long drive up here.’
This was small talk. Wyatt didn’t try to look interested. Liz Redding wasn’t someone who’d indulge in it for long, anyway.
He nodded pleasantly, looked around. He was sitting where he could see the room, each door, part of the strip of asphalt outside. Liz Redding had her back unconcernedly to the room. That was a good sign, it said she wasn’t expecting trouble. Then he realised that she could see all she needed to see reflected in the mirror behind him. He decided that that was a good sign, too.
There were no other customers. The cafй was the kind of place that did plenty of business on weekend afternoons, a little on weekday afternoons, virtually none before lunch. All that glass on three sides admitted plenty of warming sunlight into the room. Wyatt could detect coffee in the air. The waitress had passed their order through a serving hatch behind the cash register and was perched on a stool now, chin down, frowning over the split ends in her hair. A radio murmured on a shelf behind her, too low for him to isolate one word from another. No music, so he guessed it was a talk show. Crockery clattered in the distant reaches of the kitchen.
The tables, chairs and benches gleamed with a honeyed, piney light. It was a restful place for a transaction outside of the law. Wyatt scratched one fingernail across the tucks in the check-patterned gingham tablecloth and saw Liz Redding’s hand there, long-fingered, elastic, appealingly knuckly. They were good hands to look at and he imagined the rest of her.
One hand seemed to twitch in reaction to him, lift, fall to the cloth and pick at the material. She said, ‘They want me to check the stones.’
He’d expected that. He passed her the Tiffany but then their orders arrived. Liz Redding’s eyes were avid, full of appetite. ‘Just in time. I could feel crankiness coming on.’
Wyatt watched her spoon the chocolatey froth of her coffee into her mouth, take the first sip, lick away the residue from her upper lip. She leaned toward him across the table and he thought for a moment that she wanted to kiss him, but she propped her chin in her cupped palm and said, ‘What’s the waitress doing?’
Wyatt looked past her to the cash register. ‘She’s gone out the back.’
‘Good.’
Liz sat back, fastened her jeweller’s glass to her eye, examined each of the stones intently. Wyatt watched her hands, the clean, healthy pores like pinpricks speckling the brown skin. She looked up. ‘So far so good. You haven’t substituted pieces of cut glass for the stones. Now to see that you haven’t substituted cheap diamonds for expensive ones.’
She was twinkling, enjoying herself. She handled the Tiffany again, peering for telltale scratches around the settings. Satisfied, she rummaged in her bag and brought out a tiny set of scales. Wyatt watched carefully, but her hands were quick and covert this time and he glimpsed nothing of what else she might have in the bag.