Saving Billie (2 page)

‘I told you not to drink.'

‘You told me not to get drunk. I won't. You also said to circulate and look natural. That's what I'm doing.'

He smelled strongly of alcohol himself and something stronger than wine. ‘Keep your eyes open. Mr Clement's going to make a speech soon. There could be demonstrators.'

‘What, getting past you? Never.'

‘You're pissing me off, Hardy, but for your information they came up from the water one time. Worked their way up from one of the other houses.'

‘What was the occasion in aid of? Aboriginal land rights?'

I was sorry as soon as I said it. Hank needed this gig not to be a fuck-up and I wasn't helping. I turned towards Thomas to say something conciliatory, but he'd gone. Failing an invasion from the water, it looked like being a quiet night. Fine by me.

There was a stirring among the guests that signalled a significant moment and Jonas Clement appeared almost magically on the bandstand as the musicians let out a quiet riff and fell silent. Clement looked to be in his late forties; he was tall and well built with a full head of dark hair greying at the sides. He had a tan and white teeth and he wore his evening clothes as if they were something to relax in. The woman standing beside him was tall and blonde and everything else she should be. She stayed slightly behind Clement, but he reached back and squeezed her hand before stepping up to the mike.

The tall champagne drinker who'd commented on the flags earlier spoke next to my ear: ‘Ten to one, he clears his throat. Common touch. Unaccustomed as I am . . . like hell.'

Clement cleared his throat. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, friends . . . it's so good to see you here tonight supporting this brave and worthy cause. My wife Patty and I are hoping to raise enough money to . . .'

I tuned out after he got on to the need for laws to punish what he called traitors here and overseas, and moved to where I couldn't hear him as clearly. Most of the crowd was paying rapt attention, but there were a few cynics intent on drinking, like the one who'd picked Clement's mannerism so accurately. A couple of the men and a few of the women were clearly drunk and having trouble standing, let alone listening. One guy was busily cracking lobster claws and couldn't have heard what was coming over the microphone anyway.

Hank's remark about there possibly being some available women at the bash came back to me and I looked the group over with that in mind, not optimistically. That's when I spotted her. She looked and moved differently from the other guests. Not that she wasn't dressed appropriately. She wore a dark blue dress with a black jacket and had the requisite jewellery. Dark hair, fashionably spiked. She was medium tall and athletically built, marking her out from the models and the well-fed wives. More than that, she was slowly moving through the crowd towards the bandstand and there was purpose in her movement. At a party, especially a well-fuelled one like this, people move differently than they do at work or in the street. She looked as if she was working. In that context it seemed threatening and I headed in her direction, pushing people aside.

Clement was winding up and I could hear him again.

‘And so, thank you, each and every one, from the bottom of our hearts and I beg you to reach to the bottom of your pockets. Donation letters are on the way. Tell your secretary to expect one and put it at the top of your pile. Thank you, thank you.'

He finished. The dark-haired woman got there before me and grabbed the mike.

‘Mr Clement, do you have any comment about your connection with American arms manufacturers who supplied weapons to rebels in Sierra Leone and—'

Rhys Thomas was there in a flash, but not before Clement hissed ‘You slimy bitch' audibly. Thomas jerked the microphone from the woman's grasp and shouted to the musicians to start playing: they did, loudly. Thomas's grip on the woman's arm was vice-like and she was wincing with pain. I moved in quickly and dug into the nerve in his shoulder so that he let go. ‘There's a guy filming this back there,' I hissed. ‘Want to make it look worse?'

Clement, momentarily nonplussed, recovered quickly when he heard me. ‘Let her go, Rhys. She's nothing. You,' he pointed at me, ‘get her out of here.'

She was still gasping from the pain of Thomas's grip and let me escort her back past the musicians towards the steps leading to the house. By the time we'd gone up a step or two she'd recovered and resisted.

‘What the fuck are you doing? There was no one filming.'

‘I know, but he could've paralysed your arm. Let's see it.'

She slipped off her jacket and her bare, lightly tanned arm showed a redness that would probably become a deep, dark bruise where Thomas's meaty hand had been.

‘Jesus,' she said. ‘You're right.'

‘Better get moving. Thomas'll be looking for the video maker. He'll be very pissed off when he doesn't find him.'

We went up a few steps and she gave a short laugh. ‘No, not to worry. You can video with a mobile phone. He'll never know. Still, I made my point.'

‘You did. Is it true?'

‘You bet your life it's true.'

We'd reached the top of the steps with the gate in sight. She dug into her handbag and took out a tape recorder. ‘I've got that prick on tape and also what I said to him. Good copy.'

‘Journalist?'

‘And author to be. Well, you'd better get back to work. You're a minder if ever I saw one.'

I was reluctant to let her go. She had an attractive intensity and a voice that made you want to listen to her. ‘You could be wrong about that. I'm just filling in for someone.'

‘You don't work for Clement?'

‘I'd rather spend the rest of my life at a Kamahl concert.'

She laughed. ‘That's a good line.'

‘I stole it from somewhere.'

‘I guessed that. Never mind.'

‘I'm Cliff Hardy.'

She took a card from her bag and handed it to me, turned quickly and walked away. I had a weird feeling she was going to flutter her fingers at me without looking back, like Liza Minnelli in
Cabaret,
but she didn't.

2

T
hanks a lot, Cliff.' Hank's voice on the phone the next day was still full of wheeze and huskiness.

Since Hank, like many Americans, was incapable of irony, I had to accept that he meant it.

‘I understand Clement thanked you,' he said.

‘Not personally. He sort of conveyed his thanks. I think that's how he does things.'

‘Anyway, I'm still on the books with those people so I owe you.'

I'd gone back to Clement's party and continued on with my uneventful duties. I got some black looks from Thomas but one of Clement's minions had told me the boss was happy with what I'd done. I had another drink on the strength of that and called it a night as the party was winding down around 1.30 am. I'd had my three drinks and managed a couple of sandwiches and chunks of cheese as blotter so I reckoned I was all right to drive home.

Back in my place at Glebe, I took off the dinner suit and went through the pockets. I'd shoved the card the woman had given me in with my keys and it was crumpled. I smoothed it out. It identified her as Louise Kramer, feature writer on the
Sydney News,
a paper I'd never heard of. It carried her work and mobile phone numbers, and her email address. I put the card aside and made a mental note to check on her with Harry Tickener, who knows everything worth knowing about journalism and journalists in Sydney. She'd shown a lot of courage fronting Clement like that and I liked her feistiness. I thought I might give her a call and ask how her arm was. She was on my mind as I went up to bed—thirty-five or thereabouts, no wedding ring, black Irish looking with the pale skin, dark hair and blue eyes. Why not?

As it turned out she paid me a visit in my Newtown office later that morning, making her one of the earliest clients in my new set-up. When the renovators moved in on St Peters Lane, Darlinghurst, where I'd had my office since I'd got my PEA licence, all us low rent types moved out. I worked from home for a while, didn't like it, and took over an office in Newtown at the St Peters end of King Street. St Peters cropping up again was a coincidence but I liked it and took it as a good omen. Gentrification hadn't reached there, at least as far as commercial space was concerned, and the office was one floor up at the front overlooking the street. The stairs were sound, if narrow, and not well lit, and the windows facing King Street were grimy. But who needed to watch cars and buses and trucks go by?

My office had room enough for a desk, a chair each for me and the client, a couple of filing cabinets and a bookcase. There was a small alcove off it where a coffee maker sat on top of a bar fridge, sharing a double adaptor. A phone-fax and computer and printer needed a power board to run from the single power point in the office. I'd been there for three quiet months. Parking was a problem. So far the government's terror alerts hadn't brought me any business.

There were two other offices on this level. One unoccupied and the other bearing a stencilled sign that read ‘
MIDNIGHT RECORDS
'. So far I hadn't seen anyone go in or out, but maybe that figured. Toilet at the end of the hall with washbasin and tap. Pretty basic. Some clients like it, thinking that low overheads mean low fees; others take fright. Louise Kramer wouldn't have taken fright in Pamplona running the bulls. She plonked her backpack down on the floor and sat in the clients' chair. My coffee maker was emitting the croak it does when the brew is ready.

‘Is that drinkable?' she said.

‘Usually. Want some?'

I fixed her a mug with long-life milk and no sugar, like mine, and watched her try it. The spiked hair of last night was flattened down and she wore jeans and a V-necked, long-sleeved cotton top, sneakers. All business. The earrings and necklace had gone, of course, but her makeup was carefully applied and she was bright-eyed, close to hyper.

‘That's good, thanks. I live on this stuff. You?'

I shrugged. ‘Plus alcohol, adrenalin, carbohydrates.'

‘I did some quick research on you, Mr Hardy, and I'm puzzled by your presence at that party.'

‘I told you, I was filling in for a friend.'

‘Mmm, I wonder if I believe that.'

‘Look, Ms Kramer—' I waved the card I'd put on my desk to get the phone number—‘I'm pleased to see you looking so up, but I'm puzzled by your presence here. How's the arm, by the way?'

She touched her upper arm. ‘Bloody sore, but it would've been worse if you hadn't stepped in. That bastard Thomas grips like a bolt cutter.'

I drank some more coffee, not knowing how to play this. ‘You talk as if you know him.'

‘I know
of
him, like all Clement's functionaries. He was a steward at Randwick until he got sacked for doing things he shouldn't. He got the grip from controlling horses.'

‘Interesting,' I said.

‘Meaning, again, what am I doing here?'

‘You're drinking my coffee with enjoyment apparently, and saying interesting things. I'm not busy, as you can see. I'm not grizzling.'

‘Like I say, I've looked into you. For someone in your game you stack up pretty well. I'm thinking of hiring you.'

‘Well, we'd both have to think about that. You'd have to believe me that I was a fill-in at that event and I'd have to know what you're on about.'

She nodded. ‘I believe you.'

‘That's a start.'

She drew in a deep breath. ‘I'm writing a book about Clement. An exposé.'

‘What's to expose?'

‘A hell of a lot. Know how he got his kick-start capital?'

‘No.'

‘He puts it out that he got it speculating in stock in the dot com boom.'

‘Sounds possible.'

‘But he didn't. I've searched the records.'

I shrugged. ‘They can run and they can hide.'

‘Not from me. He got his start from some huge brokerage fees arranging loans. One was from the Niven-Jones bank, which was run by crooks, to Blue Rock Mining. As everyone knows, they went bust. There were a few others like that, but the really interesting one is from Tasman Investments to Peter Scriven. Twenty-five million, five million brokerage.'

That got my attention. I didn't follow the financial news but everyone able to watch TV had heard of Scriven. He'd been one of the media moguls of the nineties who'd slowly got in too deep and had skipped the country owing tens of millions and ruining many small businesses in the process. He'd left scores of employees high and dry and what he owed the tax office would put a dent in the current account deficit.

Louise Kramer enjoyed watching my reaction. ‘I reckon he helped Scriven get away and got well paid for that, too.'

I finished my coffee. ‘Hard to prove. Scriven's vanished.'

‘There're others around who know things. If I could get some details from one person in particular, I could pull the plug on Clement.'

‘Sounds personal.'

She drained her mug and put it on the desk where it made a ring to join all the other rings. ‘No. Professional.'

‘Was last night professional? Taking him on at his party? What did you have to gain?'

‘When word got around that I was doing this book, Clement at first tried to buy me off. Offered me a job and all that. When that didn't work he threatened me and the publisher. Legal bullying. Followed by more direct personal stuff.'

‘Like?'

‘Slashed tyres. Heavy breathers. Creeps hanging around. I put my head down and got on with my research. Just in case he might've thought I'd gone away, last night I was showing him I hadn't.'

‘Well, it's very interesting, Ms Kramer, but—'

‘Lou.'

‘Okay, Lou, but I can't see how I can help. I use the finance pages to wrap the fat from the griller.'