Wet Graves (2 page)

“Don't patronise me, Mr Hardy. I don't need anything clarified, thank you very much. My father did not commit suicide. Will you help me find out where he is or what's happened to him?”

“Have you got anything to support your opinion that he didn't kill himself?”

She nodded vigorously. “I knew the man. He was a happy, easy-going man, in good health, with no problems of any kind. He wasn't bored. He loved life.”

“Maybe the police mentioned misadventure? Misadventure strictly means accident.”

“Some accident. Have you walked across the bridge lately?”

I hadn't, but from driving across it more times than I cared to remember, given the toll, I had an impression of a high fence beside the footway. I found myself drawing a rough sketch of the coathanger, complete with crosshatching and the water underneath.

Louise Madden drew a deep breath. “I don't expect miracles. Roberta said you have friends in the police force. Can you talk to them, find out what they did and see if there's any more to be done? They
must
have been left with questions.”

“I don't want to sound reluctant to work for you, Ms Madden, but I like to have everything understood upfront. Private enquiries can be expensive and inconclusive. They've passed a freedom of information act in this state against all my expectations. You could apply for all documents and material considered by the police. That might be all I get, anyway.”

“No! It'd take months or years. This thing is eating me up. I'm trying not to let it obsess me, trying to keep a sane perspective on things.”

“I'd say you were doing fine.”

“Thank you. But I want something done—now!”

“Okay. I'll get the details from you—names, dates and so on, and I'll need a retainer of a thousand dollars. Any unexpended part of that's refundable.”

“Good.” She got a cheque book from a pocket in her overall and I started asking questions and writing down answers. Louise Madden was thirty-five, single, no children, self-employed. She had a degree in agricultural science from the Hawkesbury College and she lived at Leura in the Blue Mountains. Her landscape gardening business employed three people beside herself and was prospering. Her father, Brian Madden, fifty-six, schoolteacher, of Flat 3, 27 Loch Street, Milson's Point, had been reported missing early on the morning of 5 May. A man answering his description had been seen walking towards the bridge footway from the north shortly after dawn. I got the names of the police officers Ms Madden had spoken to in person and on the telephone. She'd kept notes of the conversations and was prepared to let me see them.

“Have you got a key to his flat?”

“No. There was no need. Dad always leaves a key under a flowerpot at the back.”

“Trusting,” I said.

She passed her cheque across the desk. “He's a lovely man, Mr Hardy. He's gentle and kind. My mother died when I was twelve. Lots of fathers couldn't have coped, but my Dad did. I never felt that I lacked for anything, not really.”

“No money worries?” I said.

“My mother had had a long and expensive illness and I think Dad was still paying off hospitals and doctors for years after she died. He loved the school he was at and wouldn't go for promotions that'd take him away. So there wasn't much money, but it never seemed to matter. I went to James Ruse High and on from there. It must have been tough for him at times, but he never complained.”

“You say his health was good?”

She tucked the chequebook away, clicked off her pen and gave me
her
level look. “You mean, what about his sex life? You'd probably also like to know about mine. Mm?”

“Natural curiosity, nothing more.”

She grinned. “Dad played golf at Chatswood. I understand there was a woman there he spent some time with. I don't know her name but I could find out. We saw each other most weeks, Dad and me, but we didn't live in each other's pockets.”

“The name could be useful.”

“You're being diplomatic, I see. I'm bisexual and I'm between partners at the moment. I believe in being upfront too, Mr Hardy, and I want you to understand that I owe my Dad more than he's got from the bloody police so far.”

“I understand. I'll do everything I can. Have you got a recent photograph of your father?”

“Not very recent. The one I had I gave to the police, and they haven't returned it yet.”

“I should be able to get hold of it.”

She stood up and straightened her overall. “I must say I'm a bit disappointed.”

“How's that?”

“Roberta said you were … charming and quite funny.”

I was standing too by this time and I waved my hand at the papers on the desk. “I've got a few problems that're cutting down on the charm and the laughs. Tell you what, though, I could show you something that'd give you a laugh.”

“What's that?”

“My garden. The only way to landscape it'd be with a jackhammer.”

So at least I sent her off smiling.

I took a fresh manila folder, wrote “Madden” on the outside, tore off the three sheets of notepad and put them inside. Begin as you mean to go on—neat and tidy. Then I leafed through the forty-five printed pages of the Act. As I read, the lines from the Paul Simon song came into my head—“There must be fifty ways to leave your lover”. There were nearly that number of ways to lose your licence, temporarily or permanently: to commit an indictable offence was a pretty good way, also to be cited adversely in evidence given in court; to employ as a sub-agent an unqualified person could get you in trouble and “unduly harassing any person” was pretty bad. A bit further down in section 17, subsection 1, I found it: “Every licensed private enquiry agent shall paint or affix and keep painted or affixed on his place of business in a conspicuous position a notice showing in legible characters his name and description as a licensed private enquiry agent.”

The damning evidence was right there on the desk in front of me—the card with the hole through it. I didn't even have the pin. I was in total breach of 17(1). But how could they know? The card had been on my door when I came in an hour before, hadn't it? Well, had it? I couldn't be sure.

All good clean fun, but it wasn't funny, really. The licence was my meal ticket. Without it, I couldn't earn Ms Madden's thousand bucks or anyone else's. I had a mortgage to pay and a Ford Falcon to support. I had bills on the noticeboard at home and I needed about 2000 calories a day to keep going. I folded the letter and put it in the pocket of my sports jacket which hung on the back of the chair I sat on. No doubt about it, I was neat and tidy today. I could drop in on my mate, Detective Inspector Frank Parker, and get a look at the missing persons file on on Brian Madden and talk over the Hardy licence lifting case at the same time. Maybe I'd meet a nice, friendly woman at police headquarters and bump into someone at the bottle shop who was looking for a clean, light room in Glebe—$80 a week, share the bills and feed the cat.

I got up and put on my jacket. Then I saw the jury duty notice and bent over to fill in the form attached. I ran my eye down the fine print and discovered that licensed enquiry agents were ineligible to serve on juries. I crumpled the letter and scored a direct hit on the wastepaper basket.

2

The letter from Detective Sergeant Griffin had invited me to contact his office for more information about my court appearance, but I had something of Ms Madden's caution about writers of official letters. “Bypass A Bureaucrat Today” is my motto. There ought to be a T-shirt.

I set out to walk to the new police fortress in Goulburn Street, partly for the exercise and partly because I like to see how my law and order tax dollar is being spent. I went down William Street and cut up Yurong to Oxford. It was July but warm and dry after a few weeks of cold and wet, and the lightly dressed and briskly moving people seemed to be relishing the change. These days I feel like closing my eyes when I walk through the city. You can't rely on a building you visited on Friday afternoon still being there on Monday morning, and most of the new stuff going up looks as if it has been designed by architects who stalled at cubism.

As I turned out of Oxford Street I almost collided with a man who was so wide he almost took up half of the footpath. If the woman standing behind him had been at his side they would have had to erect a detour sign.

“Say, buddy. Can you direct us to your Sydney Harbour Bridge?”

I pointed and tried to use language they would understand. “Walk north,” I said. “It's a mile or so.”

His mouth dropped open and the fat on his cheeks sagged towards his neck. “Walk? Did you hear that, honey? We have to walk.”

The woman, wearing a white sweatshirt and black trousers, looked like a two-tone bowling ball. “Isn't there a bus or a streetcar?”

I shook my head. “Better to walk. The buses are full of muggers.” I nodded, stepped onto the road to get around them and headed towards the police building. I regretted being a smartarse before I got there and turned around to make amends, but they were getting into a cab, him in front, her in the back. I made a mental note to be nice to the next tourist I met.

From a distance, the Sydney Police Centre looks all right—a combination of grey shapes, more or less inoffensive. Up close the slim pillars and the boxy structures behind them look like a house of cards propped up by king-size cigarettes. The architects have inserted grass and bricks everywhere grass and bricks can go, and haven't stinted on polished marble and automatic doors. I went into the lobby, which looks like a cross between a bank, heavy on the bulletproof glass, and a five-star hotel, heavy on the pile carpet and rounded edges. The place bristles with pamphlets emphasising community policing, and the lighting is soft to suggest that harmony and understanding begin here. The only thing to suggest that crime is being fought here too is that the cops in the glass and aluminium bunkers wear their caps.

I presented my credentials to a series of interceptors who made phone calls and ran metal detectors over me. A young constable escorted me silently up two flights of stairs and along a corridor to Frank Parker's office. We stood outside the door and I looked at the cop.

“Am I allowed to knock or do you have to do it?”

“You can knock, sir.”

“Thank you.”

I knocked and I heard Frank say, “Yes.”

“What now?”

The constable opened the door. “Mr Hardy to see you, sir.”

“Thanks, son. Come in, Cliff.”

My escort had snapped back into a position resembling attention. I said, “At ease,” and went into the room. The door was closed quietly behind me.

“Take a seat, Cliff,” Frank said. “What's the matter with you? Why are you looking like that?”

“I've been a prick to people twice in the last twenty minutes,” I said. “I don't know what's wrong with me.” I sat in one of the two well-padded chairs and looked around the room. Frank's office in the old College Street police building had looked something like a World War I trench and smelled like a snooker hall. This was all beige carpet, off-white walls and tinted glass. The old fixed squads in the police force—homicide, vice, fraud and so on—had been broken up in favour of units that drew on personnel as required and pursued cases as directed by policy-makers who weren't always policemen. Unlike the old top cops, who had diplomas from rugby league clubs and testimonials from priests and master masons, these guys had LLBs and criminology degrees and used terms like “targeting” and “social worth”. Frank's job was to liaise between the thinkers and the doers, so he got carpet and tinted glass. He liked the new honesty but missed the old sweat and dirt.

“Can't afford a conscience in your game, Cliff,” Frank said. “Maybe you can do a few good deeds and get even. Meantime, I hate to push you out of the confessional, but …” He gestured at his thick stratifications of paperwork.

“I thought we might go out for a beer.”

“No chance. I've got a meeting in fifteen minutes.”

Frank looked greyer of hair and skin than he used to, but maybe it was the tinted glass. Then again, we hadn't played tennis in months, or sat in a beer garden, so I suspected lack of sun was the cause. His nose was dipping towards his papers. Not the time to encourage him to take more exercise. I put my two requests to him, and he had the phone off the hook before I finished talking. He read while he listened, grunted and made notes through the two calls. He put the phone down and looked at his watch. I can take a hint; I stood and moved towards the door.

“Hold on, Cliff. Let me think. Yeah, I reckon I can do it. What about a beer around about six tonight?”

“I thought you didn't have time to drink beer. I got the feeling that if you
did
drink beer, you wouldn't have time for a piss afterwards.”

“Don't joke. This could be serious. You've been mentioned in evidence given in the Lenko trial.”

“What?”

“That's what Griffin tells me.”

Beni Lenko was an alleged hitman accused of shooting and killing the husband of Didi Steller. Didi was a society woman with much more money than sense who'd ordered the hit on her hubby and then taken a kilo of sleeping pills. Beni complained about being short-changed on his fee and had talked his way into a murder charge. I'd read about the case in the papers but, to the best of my knowledge, I'd never met Didi, Beni or the late husband, whatever his name had been. I stood on Frank's beige carpet with my mouth hanging open. “That's crazy,” I said.

“I'll try to find out more about it and fill you in at six. Meantime, you'd better get on to Cy Sackville.”

“I will. Thanks, Frank. I don't understand this.” An indifferent day had got worse, much worse, but I wasn't going to drop my bundle. Not Hardy. “What about the Madden matter?”