The Greenwich Apartments (15 page)

‘Thanks.'

‘How's the eye?'

‘Not bad.'

I left the pub and walked out into bright afternoon sunlight. I put on dark glasses, which sat awkwardly over the patched eye, and tried to flag down a cab. I couldn't see the signs properly and I waved at full ones and let empty ones go by. Eventually one pulled in. I lowered myself carefully into the front seat and gave him the Lane Cove address. He shoved the Gregory's at me and lit a cigarette.

‘Look it up for me, will you? I don't know that area too well.'

‘Mate,' I said, ‘with this eye I can hardly read the meter. Why don't you get on the road and pull over somewhere in the vicinity and check the address? And put the cigarette out, please. The smoke hurts my eye.'

‘Sorry, sir.' He was young and only practising at being tough.

To be perfect, Lane Cove should look different in autumn. There should be a carpet of russet leaves on the ground and the trees should be all soft reds and yellows. It isn't like that, but it looks as if it should be. The front gardens in de Vries' street were deep and wide and the side fences seemed designed not to spoil the afforested look.

‘Nice street,' the driver said. I'd been quiet on the drive and it seemed to make him nervous. ‘You live here?'

‘No. Visiting.'

‘How long you going to be?'

‘About an hour.'

‘Where to then?'

‘Glebe, I guess. Why? I don't fancy holding you here with the meter running.'

‘No, no. I need a break. I could take it now and be back in an hour. It'd suit me.'

‘Okay.' I paid him and gave him a reasonable tip, or Leo Wise did. He thanked me and came around to help me out of the car. He was dark, short and strongly built, around twenty years of age and trying to be friendly. I noticed he had a slim, battered paperback sticking out of the hip pocket of his jeans. ‘Thanks. What're you reading?'

‘Dostoevsky,
The Gambler.
You read it?'

‘Long time ago. I read a couple of his short ones.'

He grinned. ‘Me too. Okay, sir, I'll see you in an hour.'

De Vries' house was a wide timber construction, painted white, and well cared for. The garden featured the appropriate big, but not too big, trees along with some shrubs and a deep mat of ivy as ground cover. It was a pleasant, cool, shady garden in front of a pleasant-looking house. The only thing that wouldn't be good about it would be the mortgage payments.

I walked up to the front porch and rang the bell. The woman who answered it was big and fair with pale eyes and lips. She wore a shapeless white dress which badly needed washing and sandals with incongruously high heels.

‘Yes?' She leaned against the doorway and her eye level was nearly the same as mine.

‘Mrs de Vries?'

‘Yes, I suppose. Who are you?' She had an accent, somewhere between American and South African, which I hadn't detected on the phone.

‘My name is Hardy. I rang you a day or so back. I
need, very urgently, to talk to your husband.'

‘You need … very urgently,' she mocked. ‘So do I.'

‘I don't understand.' She started to close the door and I shuffled closer; maybe I put my patched eye where the shut door would go because she stopped the movement.

‘Go away,' she said.

‘Where's Jan de Vries?'

‘Gone. Left. What do you care? What does anyone care?'

‘When?'

‘See? Who cares? When? Why d'you want to know when?'

‘It's important.'

‘To you. Two weeks ago. I haven't heard from him in two weeks. Now, would you please go away!'

‘Mrs de Vries, have you ever heard of a woman named Carmel Wise?'

She pushed back some of the tumbling fair hair and looked hard at me. Some colour came into her pallid face. ‘Yes, I've heard of her. Jan's lover, she is.'

‘This is important, Mrs de Vries. Could I come in? I think we need to talk.'

‘I haven't talked to anyone for two weeks. Only the children. Are you a policeman?'

‘Not exactly.' I showed her my licence. She examined it and then my face. For a woman of her size, a man with a surgical eye patch can't be too frightening. She stood aside.

‘Come in.'

The passage was a sea of newspapers, magazines and children's toys and books. We picked our way over and through it and went into a living room where a party had been held. There was a glass on every level surface, bottles, cans, overflowing ashtrays, paper plates with food clinging to them and the sickly sweet smell of stale, trapped, over-used
air. She flopped into a chair, just missing a paper plate with cheese dip on it.

‘We had a party. At the end of the party Jan told me he was leaving me. And he left. I haven't …' She waved her hand at the room.

‘I thought you had children?'

‘Two. They are staying with friends.'

‘So should you.'

She shrugged; her big, loose breasts moved under the stained white dress. ‘I have no friends here.'

I looked around, stalling for time and wondering how to handle it. The room was big, the windows were big, the carpet was deep and through a door I could see a sunny sitting room with a polished floor. A load of washing had been dumped in the middle of the floor. It was an upper income house and should have been filled with sounds like Mozart on the hi-fi and the buzz of the home computer; instead it felt like an army barracks after the regiment has pulled out.

‘Mrs de Vries …'

‘Barbara.' I was sure now the accent was American. ‘Well, Mr Detective, what do you want with my husband?'

There was a slightly mad air about her, as if she'd built a sort of crazy shelter for herself. She kept tumbling and untumbling her hair. She was tilting but she hadn't fallen; I thought she could take some direct talking. ‘Carmel Wise is dead. She was shot.'

The hair flew everywhere and her hands slapped hard against her cheeks. ‘Oh, my god! Jan …?'

‘No. Not by him and he … he's alive as far as I know.' The words pushed ideas around in my brain.
Why not de Vries? Because of the bag of Beta tapes. Why is he hiding? Because he knows what killed Carmel?

‘What happened to Carmel?'

‘You knew her?'

‘Oh, sure. Jan brought her here. I could see what was going on. She wasn't the first and not the worst either …' She broke off and started gnawing at a knuckle. I told her the story in outline. She interrupted a few times and we established that the party had been held two nights before Carmel was killed. Barbara de Vries hadn't read the papers or watched TV in that time and she hadn't done much since. When I'd finished, the knuckle was red raw. She nodded sympathetically a few times but when she spoke it was all direct self-interest. ‘If she is dead, perhaps he will come back to me.'

‘Would you accept that?'

‘Of course. We Pennsylvania Dutch women will accept anything.'

‘Could you tell me a little about yourself and your husband? I'd like a photograph of him if you have one.'

She stood and tottered out of the room. When she came back she handed me a colour snapshot. It showed a stocky man with a drooping moustache and dark hair hanging over his forehead. He looked about as Dutch as Michael Spinks.

‘He doesn't look Dutch,' I said.

‘Yes, that's right. But he is and I'm not.'

‘But you said …'

‘Pennsylvania Dutch. That's what we're called at home. But I'm German by descent. Jan's people were Dutch but he is a 100 per cent American.' She said it with an ironic smile. There was more colour in her face and lips now and she looked as if she could be a good-looking woman in better circumstances.

‘Forgive me for being blunt, but what's he doing here, then?'

Again the smile. ‘A job. There are not so many jobs for 100 per cent Americans anymore.'

She told me that Jan de Vries was a graduate in film from somewhere and a PhD from UCLA. They
had met when he was attempting to run a small, independent film distribution company. He had hired her as a secretary and things had gone on from there. The company failed and Australia offered the best job prospects.

‘Jan is a radical,' she said. ‘We came here in 1975.'

‘Not such a good year for a radical,' I said.

‘Not at the end, no. Jan was furious about it.'

‘How does he feel about now?'

‘More furious still.'

‘What about you?'

‘I was a secretary, then I was a wife, now I am a mother. That is the trouble. Oh,' she tumbled the hair again, ‘it is good to talk. Thank you. I feel better. Would you like some tea? The kitchen is a mess too, but I could …‘

‘No, thank you. I have to go.' My hour was almost up. ‘You have no idea where your husband is?'

She shook her head. ‘I don't know where they went to do it.'

‘When did you last hear from him?'

‘On the morning after he left. He telephoned to ask if the children were all right.'

I was checking through my mental list, the one that covers what people do when they flit. ‘Did he take his passport, Mrs de Vries?'

The idea was a new one, but she shook her head quickly. ‘No. I saw it just now when I got the photograph.'

‘How did he sound on the telephone?'

She considered it as if for the first time. ‘I was so mad. I never thought he would leave me.'

‘He said he was leaving to live with Carmel?'

‘Live? I don't know. Live? I am not sure.'

‘What, then?'

‘He spent all the time at the party with her. Then he said he had to go with her. Something like that. I had drunk a lot. We fought. He said he had to go.
Go, I said. Go!' She was crying now but she stifled it and wiped her face with her hands. ‘I must pull myself together.'

‘I'm sorry. How did he sound on the phone?'

‘He sounded frightened.'

‘Frightened of what?'

She shook her head. I asked her if she wanted me to send someone over to help her but she refused. She said again, as if she liked the phrase, that she'd pull herself together. I thought she could do it. She said I could keep the photograph; I gave her a card and the usual spiel about calling me if anything happened or if she wanted help. She thanked me a couple of times. Before she let me out she kicked off her sandals; I expect she rolled up her sleeves as soon as the door was closed.

The taxi was waiting. I sniffed at the kid a bit for alcohol as I got in but all I smelled was tobacco. ‘Glebe, you said?'

‘Right.' I gave him the address and settled back to think about what I'd learned from Barbara de Vries. Suddenly I got a stabbing pain in the eye and I gasped.

‘Hey, you all right?'

‘Yeah. Just the eye. I need to put some drops in it. Could you stop a minute?'

He pulled over and I got to work on the patch. He turned off the meter and helped me by holding the bottle of drops and producing a tissue. ‘How'd it happen?'

‘I was running away from some people who didn't mean me any harm as it turned out. Thanks. That's good.'

‘What line of work are you in?'

I told him.

‘Yeah?' He fumbled for a cigarette, remembered and stopped. ‘That's tremendous!'

‘Let's get going. It's not really tremendous. It's
mostly like what you've just seen me do—visit people.'

‘I see the gun too.'

I grunted. ‘I haven't used one in a long time. How's the Dostoevsky going?'

He flicked the meter on, started up, checked the traffic and pulled out in a series of smooth, easy movements. ‘Finished it. Great! How d'you get into your business?'

‘By bad luck. What're your plans? Taxi driving must interfere with your reading.'

He laughed. ‘Yeah, it does. Everything does. Oh, I dunno. I've done a few things. Ran a lawn-mowing business for a while. Lotta work, not much dough. I sold it. I've got an interest in the cab. Not much but it's better than nothing.' He put his right hand across his body. ‘Scott Galvani's the name.'

‘Cliff Hardy,' I said. We shook quickly. ‘You're kidding—Scott Galvani?'

‘No, dinkum. My parents, they're Sicilian, but I was born here. They reckoned Scott was a true-blue Aussie name.' He laughed. ‘Maybe they were right.'

‘Maybe.' I glanced into the back seat and saw several paperbacks in a half beer carton. ‘You buy them in job lots? the books?'

‘Sort of. I carry a few around, never know what I'm going to read next. Think I might try Gunter Grass. What d'you reckon?'

‘Out of my depth,' I said. ‘You turn here. You know Glebe?'

‘Sure. I live in Leichhardt. Look, Cliff, what case're you working on now?'

‘I told you, it isn't like on TV.'

‘Still. You have to get around, right?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you can't drive?'

‘Not for a while.'

‘You need an assistant.'

‘No.'

‘Come on. A driver, call it.'

‘Why would you want to do that?'

He scratched his dark, whiskered chin. ‘Call it work experience. I'm thinking of going into the security business.'

‘It's overstocked.'

‘I'm multi-lingual. English, French, Italian … well, Sicilian.'

‘What else?'

‘I'm a wrestler. Would you believe it? I'm a top-notch wrestler and you know how much money there is in wrestling?'

‘How much?'

‘Zilch. Come on. Cliff. You've gotta go out again tonight, right?'

‘Why d'you say that … Scott?'

‘You didn't look happy coming out of that house. You looked thoughtful. Like you said, you visit people. I bet you've got someone to visit tonight.'

He pulled the cab up outside the house. The Falcon sat where Rolf had parked it. Helen's Gemini was behind it. I was tired and hungry and thirsty. I needed a rest and a drink and some time to think. And I had to go and see Mrs Wise. ‘Okay,' I said. ‘When can you knock off?'