‘Yeah, and in the pubs, in cars, on the beach. You name it.’
‘How’s it organised?’
‘Now, that’s a big question.’ He took a cassette out of his jeans pocket and tapped it on the table. ‘I’m going to rap to this a little. You can listen in if you want.’
He went across the room, reached under a bench and pulled up a cassette recorder. Back at the table he took a gulp of coffee, put the cassette into the machine and got out a small notebook, which he consulted while he talked softly into the microphone. He was naming names and sums of money and recalling direct speech. He spoke for about fifteen minutes before clicking the recorder off.
‘Here’s the thing,’ he said. ‘I’m sort of in harness with this sociologist named Ann Winter. She’s working the same route as me, but for her PhD. She’s living right in the middle of the shit. We leave these cassettes for each other. Sort of swap information, you know? She goes more on the female angle. I tell you, it’s mean.’
I expressed a polite interest, but not much more. My business brings me into contact with a lot of people who do not share in this world’s joys-old whores of one sort or another, washed-up fighters, gaolbirds and drunks. I never heard of a city from Pompeii onwards that didn’t have them in good measure, and they’ll still be with us when disco and skateboards are history. You have to take the long view.
I was thinking that, as so often happened, I was off to a bad start. I’d hardly made a dent in the enquiry if all I’d achieved was to leave a freelance journo on the trail while I went off to bed with an ache in the midsection. Then Henneberry sat up straight and pulled in his slight stomach bulge.
‘Here’s Ann,’ he said.
Even in the half light, even in her dirty jeans and nondescript shirt, she was something special. She was tall, close to six feet in her medium-heeled boots. She had a bandanna around her wild, straggly black hair, and with her dark eyes and the big denim bag she carried she looked like a gypsy. Winter, I thought, a good outdoors country name. Maybe she is a gypsy. She thumped down heavily into the chair next to Henneberry and flopped a tobacco pouch and matches up onto the table.
‘I’m buggered,’ she said.
I tried to keep my eyes uninterested and my jaw firm, but Henneberry was beyond help. ‘Hey, hey, Annie,’ he stammered, ‘you’ll want a drink. Manny!’
‘Just the coffee, Bruce,’ she said. ‘If he puts that bloody grappa in it, I’ll fall asleep right here.’ She made a cigarette the right way, keeping more tobacco at the ends than in the middle and evening it up in the rolling. She stuck it in her mouth, lit it and inhaled and threw her head back to expel the smoke. She had a nice neck with dark, straggling hairs growing low on it.
She noticed me noticing. ‘Ann Winter,’ she said. ‘Hello.’
Bruce turned back from trying to catch Manny’s attention.
‘This is Cliff Hardy, Annie.’
I nodded and she pushed the tobacco at me. I pushed it back.
‘I thought you might want it, from the way you were watching.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I used to roll them. Gave it up. I just liked the way you did it. Good.’
She blew smoke over my head. ‘For a woman, you mean. Shit, there’s girls around here who can roll them one-handed in the dark.’
‘What do they do with the other hand?’
‘Almost anything.’ She laughed, the coffee arrived and she shovelled sugar into it. Henneberry watched her like a gambler watching the deal.
‘I need it,’ she said. ‘Must’ve walked fifteen miles today.’
‘How come?’ I asked.
She glanced at Henneberry, who gave her a lightning sketch of the encounter in the alley, as he called it. He made us sound like allies in a great and noble cause. She nodded and looked at me directly as she spoke.
‘One of the girls is going cold turkey and she’s on a weight-losing kick with it. She weighs twenty stone, near enough, and she’s walking it off. She said she’d tell me all about how she got that way. She’s serious. We went ten miles, I reckon.’
‘How did she get so fat?’ Henneberry said. ‘What’s that, three hundred pounds?’
‘Nearly,’ Ann said. ‘You wouldn’t believe it. She worked in a place that specialised in fat girls. The manager force fed them. She just blew up. Want to hear it?’ She got a cassette out of the bag. Bruce took it and put his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t shake it off, but she didn’t nuzzle into it with her cheek either. I showed her the picture of Singer and she looked at it carefully, slanting it to get more light.
‘Don’t know him,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t mind, though.’
Henneberry glanced sharply at her and I could sense the short circuits and sparks in their connection. I was surprised to find myself pleased by it. Henneberry kept talking, but she was bored by him; she smoked and her dark eyes drifted around the room registering and recording. They came to rest on me.
‘I never heard that Singer was connected with drugs and girls,’ I said. ‘But you never know with the smart ones. I’d be glad if you’d ask around, Ann.’
She nodded. ‘There’s a guy named McLeary who runs a lot of the massage places closer to the city. Most of the girls I know are streeties, but they drift in and out of the houses. One of the older ones might know something about your bloke, but you never know.’ She gave me another one of her direct looks. ‘He might have fancied the younger ones.’
‘It’s a wicked world,’ I said.
I thanked Henneberry and told him he threw a good punch, just like Fred. He’d forgotten my earlier remark and looked puzzled, then camouflaged his puzzlement in talk.
‘Say, Cliff, why don’t you check back with me? I might turn up something on your man.’ He dug into Ann’s bag for a pen and scribbled on a paper napkin. ‘Give me a call.’
I got out some money, but he waved it away. ‘Next time,’ he said.
I gave him a card instead, and passed one across to Ann. She fiddled with the tobacco and I took the pouch and made a cigarette, about the hundred and fifty thousandth I’d made. She opened her lips and let me put it in.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
I looked back as I left the place. Henneberry had his face close to Ann’s and he was talking again. Manny loomed up massively behind them with a hand outstretched for Bruce’s cup. He saw me looking at him and winked like an Irishman. It looked obscene on that sallow, culturally complex face. I walked back to my car, thinking about gypsies, Levantines and Americans. Then I wondered what nationality the twenty-stone whore was.
6
I had some aspirin and a touch more brandy for the stomach when I got home so I slept late. Hilde had gone when I got up. The News was neatly folded on the kitchen table and there was a manilla envelope on top of it. I opened the flap and slid out the photograph. John Singer looked up at me through crinkled, squinting eyes; he had several days’ growth of beard and his hair was fluffed out untidily. He looked much less like Caine than he had in the other picture.
The photograph seemed to reproach me. Singer had a challenging, macho look: I could interpret it as catch-me-if-you-can or would-you-have-the-guts-to-do-what-I’ve-done or, instead, I could stare right back at him and think he wasn’t so tough after all. It was a funny case. I could spend a few days on the streets getting negative responses, and that could be construed as a positive result. It wasn’t the way I liked to work.
I shaved, showered, and made and ate a breakfast that was also lunch. The News contained no news; at home we had problems between the states and the Federal government, not over principles but over money. Overseas, oil was going up and gold was going down; what that meant was anybody’s guess. The people who had the oil probably had all the gold they wanted, anyway.
After eating, I felt more resourceful. I had Bruce Henneberry to follow up on, I could contact Singer’s doctor to find out if he could have had anything nasty on his mind and there was always the Punk Palace of Fun. The creepy manager and my friends in the laneway could have been connected and could relate to my enquiries.