That was better. She nodded conspiratorially and went off into the kitchen. She made noises out there and came back with two hefty gin-and-tonics. She handed me one, sat down in a quilted armchair and waved me into another. She tucked her legs up under her and took a long pull at her drink.
“I understand,” she said throatily, “how can I help youse?”
I sipped the drink. It was something to take in slowly over half an hour with a novel.
“What can you tell me about Miss Pali? I understand she drives a red Volkswagen, is that right?”
“Yeah, like I said she comes in at all hours of the day and night. Makes a bloody awful noise that thing.”
“What does she do for a living?” She wasn’t stupid, she gave me a suspicious look. “Don’t you know?” I cleared my throat and took another sip trying to look guarded. “Well, we’re not sure, that is…”
“Umm, well I dunno. Seems to have plenty of money to judge by her clothes, not my taste of course but they aren’t cheap — slack suits and that. Could be some sorta secretary, ‘cept not in an office. She’s home a lot an’ types for hours. A couple of blokes come and bring.. ” she made a vague gesture with her hand. “Files,” I suggested, “papers?”
“Yeah, somethin’ like that. Folders and that.”
“I see. How many men?”
“Couple.”
“Can you describe them?”
“One’s a big bloke, bigger ‘n you and younger. Other one’s dark, not a boong, more dagoey looking, sharp dresser.”
“All business is it?”
She looked sly, “No way, young man stays the night sometimes.”
I took out a notebook and pretended to write in it. “You keep your eyes open, Mrs Williams.”
“Bugger all else to do here. I stay down sometimes see, go to a show and go up to Lithgow at the weekend. Got a coupla relations in Sydney.”
I wrote some more gibberish. “Can you describe them more closely, her visitors?”
“Nah, never looked that close. Both wear good clothes, better ‘n Bert’s.”
“Bert?”
“Me husband. Bert wears old fashioned clothes, he reckons bettors don’t like trendy bookies. I reckon they don’t like bookies full stop, but you can’t tell Bert a thing.”
The gin was getting to her and she was wandering into the dreary deserts of her own life. I only wanted the spin-off from that — the fruits of her boozy, envious snooping.
“I see. What else can you tell me? Does she have other visitors?”
“Yeah, course she does, other darkies mostly, but they piss off when the white blokes arrive.”
It was time to wind it up. “When did you last see her, Mrs Williams?”
“Yestiddy mornin’, didn’t come home last night don’t think. No sign of her this mornin’.”
“Is that usual?”
“No, always comes home sometime, he comes there, see. I dunno, suppose it’s all right, black and white and that. She’s a funny sort of blackie anyway, not an Abo’, comes from some funny place, New… somethin’, saw the stamp.”
The gin had hit her, she was coming apart and I pressed in for just this last scrap.
“New Guinea?” I prompted.
“No, I heard of New Guinea, Bert was there in the war. Never heard of this place, New…”
“Hebrides?”
“No, don’t think so.”
“Caledonia?”
“Yeah, that’s it, New Caledonia. Where’s that?”
I told her, thanked her for the drink and eased my way out. She slumped down in her chair muttering about a cruise.
Strictly speaking, it was a little too late for me to be making another call. I’d meant to give the Pali flat a quick once-over and be on my way, not get stuck drinking gin with a lady whose best days were behind her. Still, I’d learned a bit and this encouraged me to stick to my schedule and tackle Haines next. The traffic would hold him away from home for at least an hour after office hours, if he observed them. If he didn’t, then one time was about as good as another for what I had to do. It was a short drive but my shirt was sticking to my back and my throat was oily with the humidity and the almost neat gin when I turned into Haines’ street. It was a migrant and black neighbourhood which surprised me a little from what I’d heard of Haines, but perhaps he liked slumming. His flat was in a big Victorian town house, free standing with massive bay windows on both levels. Someone enterprising had made the building over into flats about thirty years ago and it was now in a fair way to return a thousand dollars a month. There was a small overgrown garden in front of the house and a narrow strip of bricked walkway down each side. At the back the yard had been whittled away to nothing to allow four cars to cuddle up against each other under a flat roofed carport. There were no cars at home.
I took this in from a slow cruise around the block formed by the street onto which the house fronted, two side streets and a lane at the back. I parked across the street and a hundred yards down, took the Smith amp; Wesson from its clip, dropped the keys under the driver’s seat and walked up towards the house. My car blended in nicely with the other bombs parked around it. Two black kids were thumping a tennis ball against a brick wall. I gave them a grin and they waited sceptically for me to pass. The iron gate was off its hinges and leaning against the fence just inside the garden. I went in and took the left hand path to the back of the house. It turned out to be the correct side; a set of concrete steps ran up to a landing and an art nouveau door with slanted wooden strips across it and a swan etched into the ripple glass. I coaxed the door open with a pick lock and slid inside leaving the door slightly ajar.
It was what the advertisements call a studio apartment — one big room with a kitchenette and a small bathroom off to one side. A three-quarter bed was tucked into the bay-window recess, and a couch and a couple of heavy armchairs were lined up against one wall with a big oak wardrobe facing them across the room. A low coffee table and a few cushions filled in some of the space and an old wooden filing cabinet stood in a corner away from the light. The rug left a border of polished wood around the room; it had been good and expensive fifty years ago and still had much of its charm.
In the kitchenette were the usual bachelor things and there was no one dead in the bathroom. There were no papers in the filing cabinet, just socks, underwear and folded shirts, all high quality. The drawers of the wardrobe held tie pins, cuff links, a couple of cigarette lighters and some dusty stationery. I flicked through the suits hanging in the long cupboards, four of them with custom labels, nothing in the pockets. Nothing either in the bathrobe, trench coat, duffel jacket or two sports coats. The shoes were in the bottom of one of the cupboards, formally aligned like waiters at a wedding breakfast. There were no bathing suits, no tennis sneakers, no camera, no records or cassettes. There was a small transistor radio, but no television and there wasn’t a book in the place.
I found the personal papers in a drawer in the base of the bed — on the side turned to the wall. They occupied one large manila envelope and it took me about two seconds to spread them out on the coffee table. They didn’t amount to much: five photographs and five pieces of paper. Unless he carried them around strapped to his thigh, this guy had made a point of not accumulating the usual pieces of plastic and paper that signpost our lives from the cradle to the grave. That in itself was interesting.
If they haven’t been kept with any special care, a collection of photographs is fairly easy to arrange from the earliest to the latest and so it was with this batch. The earliest picture, yellowed and a bit creased, was of a building I’d never seen before to my knowledge — a nasty red brick Victorian affair with a wall around it and the look of a women’s prison. Next oldest was a muzzy snapshot of a woman in the fashions of twenty years before. A young woman with flared skirts and plenty of lipstick — she looked vaguely familiar but it might just have been the clothes; my sister had looked much the same at the time. Number three, according to my layout, was a careful shot, taken with a good camera, of a landscaped garden — a beautiful job with rockeries and tiled paths and garden beds spreading out over what could have been an acre or more. The fourth picture was a booth print, passport size, of Ross Haines taken about five years ago. He had a dark bushy beard and was slimmer than he now looked; he was wearing a department store shirt and tie and a suit which, to judge from the cut of the shoulders and the lapels, had come off a fairly cheap hook. Haines wasn’t smiling or scowling or pulling any kind of face, just presenting his puss neutrally to the camera. The most recent of the photos could have been taken yesterday — it showed Ailsa Bercer Gutteridge, nee Sleeman. She wore light coloured slacks and a denim smock and her eyes were slightly crinkled up against smoke from a cigarette which she was holding rather stiffly in front of her. She looked a bit surprised, a bit off guard, but she wasn’t doing anything she shouldn’t unless you disapprove of smoking.