The Washington Club (12 page)

Frank sighed, swung away, gazed out the window and swung back again. ‘Have you got your notebook handy?' he said.

It didn't surprise me that I saw no one I knew on the way out of the building. For one reason or another, many of the cops I used to know have left the force and the new breed seems more interested in computer spreadsheets and printouts than in clocking faces. There seemed to be more women on the premises than I remembered from my last visit and several Asian faces. Some of the better old hardheads like Grant Evans, who'd stretched the rules for me a few times when I first got into the PEA game, would have struggled to accommodate these developments and made the adjustment more or less. But Grant had gone down to a force nine coronary a few years back, and I didn't like to think how close we were together in age.

The needle on the parking meter swung into the expired zone just as I reached the Camry. I gave it the finger, deactivated the alarm, opened the door and the mobile phone buzzed.

‘Hardy,' I said, crouching into the car.

‘Cliff, this is Claudia. I've been trying to get you on the other numbers, but . . .'

There was an edge to her voice, not hysteria or panic but in that territory. I sat behind the wheel and tried to project reassurance. ‘Okay, Claudia. I've been running about. Where are you, at home?'

‘Yes, yes. Kirribilli, although nowhere feels like home anymore.'

‘I understand. I'm coming over there now. Is that what you want? Is there something wrong? Something I can deal with?'

‘Jesus, wait a minute till I get a cigarette.'

I hung on, hoping the call wouldn't drop out. I've got no faith in mobile phones. A parking attendant rounded the corner and began checking the meters. Ten or so before she got to me—nine, eight . . .

Claudia was back on the line, sounding more calm but more angry. ‘Those bloody journalists. Christ, I hate them.'

Seven, six . . .

‘What's happened?'

We had a power shut-down here for an hour this morning and it turned my answering machine off. A call came through just as I was waking up from the Mogadon. The phone kept ringing and I couldn't understand why and I answered it.'

Five, four . . .

‘Yes. Who was it?'

‘I forget her name. Some smarmy bitch. She sounded so pleased to have got through
to me. She had a story just on that account I suppose. I was dopey. I could hardly understand what she was saying. I probably sounded drunk. Cliff, are you there?'

Three, two . . .

‘I'm here.'

‘She said . . . Jesus, she talked about how the murder of my lawyer would mean a delay in the trial. I hadn't even thought of that! I can't remember what she said, I was still too fuzzy, but I could grasp the implication.'

One . . .

‘Cliff, they're going to say I did this too! To gain time . . .'

‘That's ridiculous.'

The attendant glanced at me as I waved at her. She took it all in—the car, the mobile, the agitation—and took her revenge. She must have been Sydney's fastest infringement notice writer; she had the ticket made out and under the wiper and was past me and moving on before I could say a word, not that there was anything I could say with the phone to my ear.

‘Cliff! Cliff! Are you listening to me?'

‘Yes, of course. That's all crazy. You don't have to worry about that.'

‘But I abused her when I got her drift. God only knows what she'll write about me. And I will have to get another lawyer, won't I? And he might not want you to . . . I just don't know what to do.'

‘We can fix all that,' I said. ‘Don't worry. I'm on my way.'

‘No. No, don't come here. I can't stay in this place. You must have things to do. I'm going to go away for a few days. I need to think about everything.' The sharp edge was back in her voice. Along with the huskiness it made her sound slightly frantic.

‘Don't do that,' I said urgently. ‘You can come to my place. We . . .'

‘Don't be mad! I need to think about
you
among other things. Can't you see that? You can't run around doing what you have to do and baby-sit me as well. I've got to get myself together. I'll call you, Cliff.'

‘Claudia, don't . . .'

She hung up. I swore, dialled the number and got the engaged signal. I looked in the rear-vision mirror and saw the parking attendant coming back.
Can you be booked twice for the same offence?
I didn't know and didn't want to find out. I slammed the phone down, started the car and drove off. I headed up towards Oxford Street and stopped outside a pub. I looked longingly at it. It was an old-style Sydney pub with one of the Resch's pictures, showing a slender woman in a grey evening dress sharing a drink with a bronzed bloke in a dinner suit. These days, in that neck of the woods, the bloke was more likely to be in the dress and the woman in the suit. The thought amused me as I removed the parking ticket and dropped it on the passenger seat. I crossed the street and bought a take-away coffee.

I phoned Pete Marinos and got him in person for once. I told him that Claudia Fleischman was about to take off somewhere and that I wanted his watchdog to stick with her all the way.

‘Can do,
amigo
.' Pete likes to play the all-round wog.

‘This is serious, Pete. She's supposed to report to the cops regularly. She could be running out on that. She could be in danger. Is this guy any good?'

‘He's good. Where's she going?'

‘I don't fucking know!'

‘Take it easy, Cliff. I heard about Sackville. I get the picture. My man has to know if it's interstate, overseas or what.'

‘Is it the same guy I found in the garden?'

‘Yeah. But . . .'

‘Interstate just possibly, not overseas. No passport. Mostly likely Sydney local or environs—you know, Blue Mountains, like that.'

‘Okay. I'll give you his mobile number. You can stay in touch with him if it's in range.'

I wrote down the number and slowly drank my coffee, trying to remember how I handled all this stuff back before pagers and car phones and faxes. As far as I could recall, I put many miles on the odometer of the Falcon before last, got very sore feet and lost plenty of coins in vandalised phone boxes. I remember Cyn, my ex-wife, looking at the dusty car with its coat-hanger aerial and the
overflowing ashtray and the box of twenty-cent pieces and shaking her head.

‘Why do you do it?' she'd said.

She was an architect, worked in a smart office in Edgecliff, drove a Fiat. People came to her, she didn't have to go to them.

I can't remember my response. Anyway, it didn't convince her and she was soon on her way out of the marriage and headed back to the North Shore whence she hailed. Nowadays, I'd been told, she had an advertising executive husband, a couple of kids and was a competitive sailor. I could imagine all that and wished her well. She'd have been surprised at the Camry and the mobile phone, but not at my sexual involvement with a client, the parking ticket or at my decision of what to do next. The responsibility for the break-up of the marriage was a fifty-fifty split.

Haitch Henderson had a son named Noel. I'd found this out when I'd come up against Haitch the first time. Noel's mother was a prostitute and Haitch wasn't proud of the connection. But there's a little good in everyone, even a low-life like Haitch, and he'd accepted the boy and provided for him after a fashion. The fact that Noel, as a teenager, had adopted pimping and drug selling as occupations wasn't Haitch's fault, unless you believe that criminality is passed on in the DNA. I've never been able to decide on the point.

I knew that Noel did business in a block
of flats in Earlwood. The flats were in a building mounted high up above the Cooks River, high enough to make it look, on a good day with a blue sky, like something other than the industrial sewer and stormwater drain it was. Noel owned at least three of the flats, rented a couple more, scattered through the block, and he kept whores in them, selling drugs in different flats listed under different names with different phone numbers, as the spirit moved him. The women were available on call or for home services and there wasn't much they wouldn't, or weren't obliged, to do. The drugs were supposed to ensure their loyalty, but one of the women had kicked loose and told me about the operation. Although not proud of the strategy, I'd been planning to use Noel to get certain messages through to Haitch back when I had him in my sights, until other events overtook me. That was yesterday, this was today.

I knew Noel by sight; he resembled his father in that he looked soft and mild. He wasn't, but he hadn't the direct hardcore toughness of Haitch. Noel's style was more vicious and oblique. Courtesy of my informant, I'd learnt that Noel had an absolute obsession about the Citroen Goddess, never drove anything else, and kept several of them in a garage somewhere to recycle the parts.

‘His fuckin' car's the only fuckin' thing he loves,' she told me.

I drove to Marrickville, crossed the river
into Earlwood, and drove up to the big block of flats occupying the whole of a high bluff overlooking the river, the Marrickville golf course and the quiet park where not long back one notorious drug dealer had shot another to death.

Resident parking was provided for in the form of steel-framed, perspex-roofed carports grouped at the east end of the building near a thick stand of wattle trees which had somehow survived the developer's assault. There were twenty-four spaces, only seven or eight occupied—no Citroen.

I drove off and parked a few streets away under some plane trees that hung low over the road. Then I thought about car thieves and joy-riders and moved to a spot between two other cars that caught a bit of the street light. I locked up tight and walked back to the flats. One of the carports looked as if it hadn't been used that year or last. The oil stains were old and faded and grass had broken through the concrete in several spots. I took up a position near a tree beside this spot and had a view of most of the other slots and a clear sight of the arrival of any car calling this place home.

I used the mobile to call Pete's man.

‘The mobile telephone you have called is not answering. Please call again later.'

That could mean the phone was out of range or had been switched off or was subject to some kind of interference. It told me nothing and didn't make me any happier.

Waiting more or less patiently is something I've learned to do but never enjoyed. I took out the Colt, leaned back against the tree trunk and prepared myself. I looked around, made sure I couldn't be observed, and checked the Colt over, making sure the safety catch was on. There's probably as much villainy in Earlwood as anywhere else, but the usual atmosphere is quiet. The last thing I wanted to do there was fire a gun.

Leaves fluttered down on me as I checked the gun and I reflected for the umpteenth time on how all the senses sharpen up for this kind of activity. I could feel the leaves hit, count them, and felt I could tell a difference in their weight. Nutty, but that's the way it feels. Athletes talk about an adrenalin rush as if they actually experience it but I can't say I ever have. With me it's this honing-up of everything. It feels scary and good at the same time and there's nothing else quite like it. It's possible that I'm hooked on the feeling and will stay in this kind of work longer than I should. I don't know.

Traffic zipped along the road and over the bridge; kids kicked a football in drug-death park; I could hear the tyre noise and the thump of boot on pigskin clearly. There was no activity on the river. Old-timers recall swimming in it, catching fish fit to eat in it, kids playing on its sandy banks, but that's all long past. I was seeing things near and far with unusual clarity and could even spot a couple
of golfers indulging in their peculiar masochism in the distance.

After fifty-three minutes of this I had something to watch. A tall, blonde woman wearing a miniskirt, high heels and a silk blouse, trotted across the concrete towards the brick pillars that marked the entrance to the area in front of the carports. She lit a cigarette and puffed on it as she adjusted her sunglasses, consulted something from her shoulder bag and tugged at her pantyhose. She checked her watch, readjusted the shades, looked back at the flats and waved and had trouble standing still. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other and, just as I'd done a while before, looked around to see if anyone was about. She couldn't see me in the shadows. Satisfied, she blocked her left nostril with her little finger and sniffed hard. She repeated the action with her right nostril. Her head jerked back as she sniffed. A white Mercedes pulled up and she got smoothly into the front passenger seat—one of Noel's girls for sure.

More leaves fell; the footballers left the park and the traffic got heavier as streams of cars headed into the suburbs. The golfers vanished into a soft, blurry haze. At twelve minutes past six a powder-blue Citroen Goddess purred through the gate, swung in an elegant arc and slipped into a carport about five spaces away in the area reserved for the occupant of unit nineteen. The driver got out, activated the alarm and ran his eyes
appreciatively over the classic lines of his car. He bent and stared at the rear mudguard, straightened up, evidently satisfied, and strolled towards where I was waiting with an unlicensed gun in my sweating hand and not a legal leg to stand on.

‘Hello, Noel. Got a nice girl for me?'

I stepped out of the shadows and came straight up to him. He was wearing a double-breasted tan linen suit, chocolate coloured T-shirt, brown slip-ons. Five-ten, about thirteen stone, flab on him. He barely glanced at me. His round, pasty face was ill-tempered.

‘Fuck off.'

I was close enough now to bring my heel hard down on his shin and stamp on his foot. That got his attention; his head flew back and his shades slipped askew. I hit him harder in the ribs with a short left than I'd intended but his fat softened the punch. It winded him though and he sagged away from me. I grabbed his prominent right ear and let his whole weight pull against it. That brought him upright again, smartish.