Heroin Annie (25 page)

I hobbled across and bent down, but one look told me that tough Johnny Dragovic was dead. The dog had a length of chain attached to a collar trailing away in the dirt. It looked as if Dragovic had secured the dog, but not well enough. More hobbling got me over to the shack where there was more death. Mahony's eyes stared sightlessly up at the blue sky; his mouth was open and some flies were already gathering around the dark blood that had spilled out of it.

After that it was a matter of rum and true grit. I took an enormous swig of the rum and started on the trek back to my car. When I made it I was weeping with the pain and there was a saw mill operating at full blast inside my head. I got the car started and into gear somehow and kangaroo-hopped it back along the track until I reached a house. Then I leant on the horn until a woman came out, and I spoke to her and told her what to do.

Terry came to see me in hospital and Pat came and Sergeant Moles—it was like old times. The bullet had touched the bone but hadn't messed the leg up too much. No one wept over Doc Mahony and Johnny Dragovic, although Pat said that the Doc wasn't such a bad bloke, just greedy. Terry went off to play a tournament in Hong Kong, and one solitary night I went to the dog track and won fifty dollars on a hound named Topspin.

Escort to an easy death

The filing card pinned to my office door read ‘Cliff Hardy Investigations', and I noticed that the finger I used to straighten it with had a dirty nail. Not very dirty, but then the card itself wasn't very dirty and the drawing pin that held it wasn't very bent. But not clean and not straight. These were bad times. People were losing their jobs; people and things were going missing; people were getting more and more dishonest, in big and small ways, and no-one cared. It was all bad news for me: I made a living out of tidying up problems; finding a lost wife or husband, guarding a body for a while, seeing a sum of money safely from point A to point B. Now, tidiness and safety were not expected. I was losing business, and no-one cared.

I pushed the door open, it held on the frayed, lifted carpet while I picked up the mail, and then I flicked it back with my foot. The bills were for the usual things, small, corrective services performed on my body and various bits of machinery, and the baits were the same. I was offered female companionship, life insurance and a home on the north coast out of the smog of Sydney. I needed all those things; every forty-year-old male whose instincts are within a range of normal does. But to get them I'd had to be what I was not—prosperous. To hell with them; their market research was lousy. The women were probably ugly and the insurance would have fine print and the house would be sliding into the sea. I shovelled the brochures into the waste paper bin and made out a cheque for the smallest of the bills.

I sat and listened to the sounds of Sydney three floors down. They were busy sounds—trucks and cars and buses, all full of people all chasing a dollar. I'd sat for a whole day like that recently and for a few hours in quite a lot of days. I was a little panicky. As I stared at the office door a shape appeared in the pane of glass. It was a nice shape, not tall or short—trim-looking. The shape stayed there for what seemed like five minutes before it knocked. I let out a tense breath and said ‘Come in' in my best bass.

It turned out to be a woman with red hair, a red dress and red shoes. She carried a black shoulder bag and wore a wide, black belt around the dress; when she got up close I could see that the hair was a wig. I watched her walk towards the chair in front of the desk and lower herself into it. She moved all in a piece, not exactly stiffly, but not altogether gracefully either. It was if she'd learned it all from scratch late in life.

‘Mr Hardy', she said, ‘my name is Trudi Walker.'

‘I'm pleased to meet yon', I said.

‘Yes. I want to hire you to find someone.' Her voice was what used to be called fruity, she gave the vowels and dipthongs everything she had.

‘Male or female?'

She raised an eyebrow that had been plucked to a fine, dark line. She was heavily and expertly made-up; hard to guess her age, forty at least, maybe more. ‘Does it matter?'

‘Not really, but I have more success with women for some reason. I've found thirty-nine out of fifty women but only nineteen out of forty men.'

‘Perhaps you've just had more practice with women—your statistics suggest that.'

‘Yeah, maybe.'

‘It's a man in this instance.'

I shrugged. ‘Well, maybe I can improve on my figures. How long's be been gone?'

‘Two days.'

‘That's not really missing, Miss Walker, that could just be … away.'

‘No! I've seen Gerry every day for the past five years. We are business partners and friends. Something has happened to him.'

‘You could be right. What's the business?'

‘We run an escort service.'

And that, of course, was why she hadn't gone to the police and why she avoided the big agencies, which are plugged straight in to the newspapers and also why my fees didn't worry her. She paid over the five hundred dollars retainer and agreed to a hundred and twenty-five a day plus expenses without a frown. In fact she had very few facial expressions, permitting herself the eyebrow, a tight thin-lipped smile and that was about it. Gerry Hadley, she informed me, was an American she'd met when he was on leave from Vietnam. They'd corresponded for a few years while he was in the States and then he'd come over to join forces with her. She gave me two photos—P F C Hadley, twenty'ish, in battle dress, Mr Gerald Hadley, business-suited, well-fleshed, thirtyish. He had a round, corn-fed face with a bright smile.

Gerry and Trudi had separate apartments in the same building in Elizabeth Bay. They ran the agency from a business address in Potts Point, and from their apartments. Trudi still occasionally worked a shift; Gerry didn't, although the agency catered to both sexes.

‘When did you last see Mr Hadley?'

‘Three nights ago. We had dinner together. He was supposed to come to my flat for breakfast and a discussion the next morning. He didn't come, and I haven't seen him since.'

‘You've looked through his flat?'

‘Yes.' She reached into her bag, took out a door key with a red ribbon attached and handed it over. While I looked at the key I was thinking that there was a fair bit of between-the-lines reading to do here, but I decided to play it careful—I needed the work.

‘Could you give me a list of your employees, Miss Walker?'

‘Not off hand; I could arrange it if you'd call at the office.'

Job or not, I was already getting tired of her; the voice was annoying me the way plastic cutlery and Big Macs annoy me. I twirled the key by the ribbon.

‘Any of the girls missing?' I said.

The look she shot at me aged her ten years and I put her near fifty. ‘I don't know', she snapped. ‘Why?'

‘Any of the boys missing?'

She got half out of her chair and her face twisted up; two fissures appeared in the make-up beside her nose. ‘You bastard', she snarled. ‘You shit. You can …'

I put the key down and came around the desk to pat her shoulder. ‘Easy', I said, ‘easy; I'm sorry, but I had to find out how you feel about all this. You were acting till then, doing it pretty well, too.'

She sat back and dug in her bag for tissues. After dabbing and wiping some of the control came back, but I didn't have cosmetic-controlled agelessness in front of me now, I had a vulnerable woman with years on the clock and fear in her eyes.

‘I'm fifteen years older than Gerry, Mr Hardy', she said. ‘I go through tortures to keep up appearances, I eat almost nothing. I love him and everything I've done is … I can't bear …' The control went again and the tears streamed over her face like a flash flood. I felt sorry for her and realised at that moment that she'd dropped the voice—her vowels were a little nasal now and her delivery had the lazy, easy rhythms of Sydney.

‘I'll look for him', I said. ‘I'll call at your office and I'll look in his flat and I'll ask around. Two days isn't long. Does he have a car?'

She nodded. ‘A Mercedes, gone.'

‘Any friends in Sydney?'

She shook her head. ‘Just me.'

‘You don't know of any trouble—I mean competitors, the cops … any threats?'

There was panic in her face, clearly visible now that the make-up was eroded. ‘No', she whispered, ‘nothing.'

I gave her a receipt, and she got out a mirror and did a little repair work. I wrote down the addresses and phone numbers she gave me, and we got the whole thing on a business footing. She left and I went to the window and watched her step out on to the street; the first step was faltering but she quickly got into stride and looked like a proud, well turned-out human being as she turned the corner. I decided she had guts and that she was lying about there being no trouble in the air.

Over the next day and a half I did the things I said I'd do: I checked over Hadley's apartment and found nothing that you wouldn't expect to find about a Yank who ran an escort service and had a mistress fifteen years older than himself. He had two girls on the side and I looked them over-nothing. Same result with the four men employed by the Winsome Escort Agency. Two of them were gay and one was black; nothing in the patterns of their lives over the past few days had changed. The seven women were more varied: one was close to Trudi Walker's age with a similar manner, and one looked like a schoolgirl. Two of them had university degrees and one was a hang-glider. I used the phone till my arm ached and knocked on apartment doors with no result. My last call was on one of the girls—Tracey Talbot, who combined being escorted with freelance journalism. I drank coffee with her in her flat at Rushcutters Bay; it was a warm, soft afternoon and the water looked blue, bright and alive. Her window was full of harbour view. She had posters of world-famous harbours on the walls.

‘I love harbours', she told me. ‘I'm going to have my ashes scattered out there.'

‘We're all going to have our ashes scattered out there the way things are going', I said. I was feeling gloomy; asking the questions dully, now not expecting sparks. ‘You've got no idea where Hadley might take off to?'

She shrugged. ‘Not a clue, Mummy's boy as far as I could see. Tell you one thing though. I reckon Trudi's not long for this world.'

‘Why d'you say that?'

‘I did a story on cancer victims once, she's got all the signs.'

I sighed and finished the coffee—ashes and cancer, she'd be a wow of a companion for a night on the town. I used Tracey's phone to call Trudi, but she wasn't at the office and her home phone didn't answer. The receptionist at Winsome said she'd been trying to contact her for some hours without success. I looked at the girl who was dropping cigarette ashes in the dregs of her coffee and stirring them with a finger. I called Trudi's number again—the phone sounded as if it could go on ringing unanswered until the end of the world.

The apartment building was new and shiny; balconies hung off it out over the water like cars on a ferris wheel. Hadley's apartment was on the second floor and Trudi's was directly above it; I went up the stairs fast and stabbed the buzzer. The phone started ringing at the same time and the two sounds blended into a dirge. I pushed the door and felt it give; there seemed to be a lock not quite engaging. I hit it with my shoulder in the middle and applying the pressure upwards the way you should, and it sprang open.

The living room was big and bright; the walls and floor were white as if the room had been designed as a hymn to lightness. There were paintings, a bar, books, a record player and a TV set. The chairs and settee were white pine and the coverings were cream-coloured, except where Trudi's blood had got on the fabric. She was slumped in a way she'd never have permitted when she was in charge of her body. Her dress had been white, with gold trim, but now half of it was stained a dark red like the costume of a medieval courtier. The dress was also ripped from the neck to the armpit on one side, and on the other side the sleeve was half torn away. I eased the door shut behind me and went up close. She had a big wound in her neck. I looked past her to where a drinks tray sat on a small table; a bottle of brandy was shattered. The bullet had gone through something vital in her neck and there'd been a lot of blood. Her right hand was thrown back across the arm of the settee and it was bloody too; the nails on three fingers were split and broken. Her head had fallen back, drawing the skin tight; her make-up was flawless.

I put my hands in my pockets for safety and wandered around looking. The door was equipped with a heavy dead lock, two safety chains and a light, standard lock—the one I'd broken. The kitchen was uncluttered, the bedroom undisturbed. A cabinet in the bathroom was full of prescription drugs—medicines, capsules, pills. I didn't recognise most of them but they indicated a serious illness or powerful hypochondria and an obliging physician. In a second, smaller bedroom there was a single bed, a chair and a desk with a lot of locked drawers. I went back to the living room, located her bag and keys and unlocked the desk. The drawers were full of stationery, business letters, tax records, old cheque books. I flicked through the cheque stubbs which told me that she spent a hell of a lot of money on clothes. There were records of a couple of fixed deposit bank accounts with a few thousand dollars in each. The papers provided only one surprise—Trudi owned her own apartment and the one Hadley lived in, for which he paid her rent of one hundred dollars a week.

This was all taking time, because I was using a handkerchief to pick things up and a knife blade to turn over the papers. The bottom drawer held a fountain pen and a big bottle of ink. A few small drops of ink had split in the drawer—it was the closest she'd come to being messy. I lifted the bottle out, uncapped it and probed inside with the thin blade. A little fishing brought up two small keys on a thin ring. I dried them on a tissue; one had serial number, C140, on it, the other did not. I took the copy off the ring and dropped the original back into the ink. Then I prowled around the apartment looking for signs, bent twigs, freshly broken blades of grass. I found it down behind the TV set; a section of the high skirting board was hinged and swung out, a strand of hair from a mop or duster had caught at the spot. The safe, about six inches square, was set in the wall behind the board. I dialled C140 on the combination lock and the key turned smoothly. Inside was a reel of movie film and a plastic envelope. I closed the safe and took the stash across to the window. The film was a standard Super 8 job; the envelope contained about a dozen paper squares and rectangles, some brightly coloured and some dull—postage stamps.