‘One of the actors took off,’ he said excitedly. ‘Burning rubber.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Stay with it.’
Jardie Butler turned out to be an expert driver of her Stag. We were whipping down Norton Street before I had the seat belt buckled.
‘I know where he lives-Balmain.’
‘That right?’
‘Yes. You might as well know, Josh and I had a bit of a thing before I met Kurt. Josh’s not over it properly.’
‘You think he could be the phone caller?’
‘I suppose it’s possible. See, he was all set to become the muscular hero of the 1980s before Kurt came along. Kurt got a couple of roles Josh thought he should’ve had. He’s taken it bad-this is the first time he’s agreed to work with Kurt.’
‘Missed out on you too did he?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Could Wild have been the voice on the phone?’
She was heading along the railway to the intersection with the Crescent, too fast I thought, but she braked and made the turn neatly. ‘He’s an actor-who knows what actors can do… and can’t do.’
I chewed on that for the rest of the drive down into east Balmain. Wild lived close to the wharf and the water but, he couldn’t have seen either from the small windows of the nondescript block of 1950s flats-he might as well have been in Haberfield. Jardie U-turned and rolled the car to the kerb just short of the drive with the practised ease of someone who’d done it before.
We walked up the drive and she pointed to a Moke parked skew-whiff beside the flats.
‘He’s here-at the back.’
The narrow concrete porch at the back would barely have kept the rain off the peeling door of flat three. For an almost star, Josh Wild didn’t appear to be doing too well. Jardie knocked and the door opened slowly. Wild’s face began to move into a smile at the sight of her until he saw me. Then it changed and blurred like a double exposed photograph. The flat door opened inwards but the screen door opened out and Wild used it to knock Jardie Butler out of his path. He growled like an animal, reached out for me and pulled on the front of my shirt. I went with the pull; he had a punch ready but he’d advertised it much too early. I went under the punch and bullocked him back into the hallway. He swung again but he was badly off-balance and I hooked his feet out, and down he went.
Jardie’s breathing was harsh in my ear as I stood over her crumpled ex-lover. There was a trickle of blood from his mouth but he hadn’t hit the wall or floor very hard and had no reason to be as relaxed as he was. I looked from him to her and couldn’t decide which sight I disliked more.
‘Wow!’ she breathed. ‘Is that how it’s done?’
‘It shouldn’t be that easy, big bloke like him. Take a look-you know him-reckon he’s okay?’
She brushed past me and leaned over Wild. All hunched up on the floor like that isn’t a man’s best posture, but with the thinning hair I could see now and the slack jaw muscles, it didn’t look as if he could have been a film idol for long. His gut looked a bit slack too, but even so he shouldn’t have been such a pushover.
Jardie straightened up. ‘He’s coked,’ she said.
‘You sure?’
‘Seen it a hundred times, him and others, He’d be calm and relaxed in a hurricane, that’s how it takes him. He couldn’t fight coked to defend his mother-Kurt’d be like a chainsaw.’
I got Wild up in a sort of fireman’s lift, carried him the few feet it took and dumped him on a battered narrow couch in the small, dark living room. I went out to the kitchen, wet a dirty dish-towel and slopped it over his face. He started to clean himself carefully with his eyes closed, like a cat. We ignored him.
‘How come he lives so low on the pig? Don’t actors make a good living?’
‘I didn’t realise he’d slid this far. I hate to think how much this stuff costs.’ She was standing by a low coffee table which had a mirror on it and a plastic packet and a short straw with the end scoop-shaped.
‘So he rushed off to make his connection here.’ There was a dribble of saliva on the mirror, and some of the powder was smeared in it. ‘I thought half the people in the acting game were on this stuff, does it turn them all into maniacs?’
‘No, different people handle it different ways. Josh must’ve been really strung out. Maybe he’s on something else too.’
‘Would it make him screw up his part?’
‘Christ, yes, it could. With Bob Space on the set though, it’s a wonder he didn’t write it in-make Josh a smack head.’
Wild’s eyes were open and he was finished washing his face. I took the cloth away and he smiled at me. ‘Everyone says that about Space, about him changing things. Isn’t that standard?’
‘Not quite. Look, Hardy, now I think about it I really don’t think Josh could be the caller. I mean, he’s a nut, and he probably still fancies me and maybe he hates Kurt. But he wouldn’t wreck the film-especially not needing money that bad.’
‘I suppose. Well, you talk to him and I’ll poke around-look for clues.’
‘To what?’
I shrugged. ‘Who knows, I’m a snoop. You’re a smart girl, you talk to him; if you decide he wouldn’t threaten to throw acid in your face, I’ll believe you.’
I could hear them murmuring as I searched Wild’s bedroom and the other small room he used to store things-mostly rubbish. He wasn’t a neat man or a clean one-he wasn’t very interesting either. Like alcoholics I’d known, his life seemed to be given over to drugs: he had smoking and sniffing and injecting devices, old containers marked with the residue of one dream-maker or another. The few books around had a drugs bias too. I could imagine him, like the dipsos, mapping out the geography of his days in terms of his hits-the only difference being that his hits were illegal and much more expensive. When I went back into the living room Wild was sitting up on the couch and Jardie was holding his hand.
‘You’d only be doing it for Kurt,’ Wild was saying.
‘What does it matter?’ she said. She looked across at me. ‘Not him-no chance.’
‘Okay.’
‘You take the Moke back to the set, the keys’re over there. I’ll bring him along in a while. Tell them everything is okay.’
I collected the keys and had all the fun of jarring my spine with my hair in my eyes as I drove the Moke back to Leichhardt.
A kind of defeated calm had settled on the three houses. I strolled past the car control kid and tossed him the keys.
‘He’ll be along in a bit.’
The kid’s jaw dropped and he looked at me as if I was Michael Jackson. Cheap trick, Hardy, I thought; but then, few jaws drop for me. I located Fuller and gave him the good news; he sent someone off to find someone to tell McLeish that he could go back to work
‘If he’s not too drunk,’ Fuller said. ‘Sometimes I wonder why I’m not making floppy discs or something-too many crazies in this business.’
‘We still haven’t found our chief crazy. How important is this picture to you? Financially, I mean.’
‘Bloody important. Why?’
‘That lets you out as a candidate for the phone caller; that is, if you’re not lying.’
‘Jesus, Hardy, don’t joke about it.’
‘There has to be someone who comes out better if the picture gets stopped, or delayed-who?’
‘No one.’ Fuller lit a cigarette to help him think. ‘I lose my shirt; Kurt misses out on a good role and they’re not so easy to come by; McLeish needs a commercial success for obvious reasons; Space wants the credit and he’s got points if we go into the black. Also I haven’t paid him for the property yet; if we don’t make the picture he’ll have to join the list of creditors and that’ll be long, believe me. The assistant cameraman wants to be cameraman, the wardrobe girl wants to be in casting-everybody wants to move up. Everybody needs Death Feast’
McLeish stepped through the fence looking spruce, too spruce. ‘Hey ho,’ he sang. ‘I hear the errant son returns, let’s be having you all.’
‘He’s drunk,’ I said.
‘He’s a good director when he’s paralytic, he used to be a great director when he was just pissed. He’ll do.’