The Dying Trade ch-1 Read online

  He sneered at me. “You mentioned your fee and your terms on the telephone. You didn’t say anything about your sensibilities.” He slid back a lever on the pistol and checked a pencil-thin magazine of lead pellets. “Have another drink, Mr Hardy, and turn your attention to what you’ll be paid for.” He rammed home the lever. “Or piss off!”

  I shrugged. Big men were raping little girls, fanatics were torturing each other and people were going mad in cells all over the world. A protest here and now seemed a vain and futile thing.

  “I’ll take the drink,” I said.

  “I thought you might.” He moved along the deck to where it took a right-angle bend into what I supposed was the south balcony. His hand came up sharply and he squeezed the trigger six times. Fifty yards away the pellets rattled like hailstones against metal and glass.

  “The drink’s on its way.” He weighed the pistol in his hand.

  “This is the most fun I have,” he said. He waved the thing at me like a conductor’s baton, signalling me on. “Get on with it!”

  I got on. The paper could have been hand-rolled or beaten out with steam hammers for all I knew. It was a bit smaller all round than quarto and the words on it were in red ballpoint ink, printed in capitals like things of this kind usually are:

  SUSAN GUTTERIDGE YOU DESERVE TO DIE

  Gutteridge hadn’t fired his pistol while I was studying the note. He moved back to where I was sitting. He was tense, stretched tight.

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I wish she’d kept the other notes. Did any of them mention money?”

  He put the pistol down on the deck again and slumped down into the canvas chair. He was about to speak when the rower came out onto the deck carrying a tray with the drinks aboard. Gutteridge nodded at him in the first friendly gesture I’d seen him produce. He took one of the glasses and sipped it. “Just right, Giles,” he said. Giles looked pleased in a well bred way and extended the tray to me. I took the glass and put it down beside me. I thought Giles was all right but Gutteridge seemed to think he was something more than that. He picked up the threads.

  “Money, no I don’t think so. Susan didn’t say and I think she would have. I think the other notes were in the same vein as this, getting more savage.”

  “In what way more savage?”

  He spread his hands and took a deep, tired breath. “I didn’t see them all. One I did see said that Susan was sick. Another one said she was rotten. That’s what I meant, sickness, rottenness, death.”

  “I see, yes. I still think this could be connected with your father’s death in some way. But I suppose you’ve thought of that too?”

  “No, I hadn’t, but you’ve had experience of this sort of thing I presume, and I can see why the thought suggests itself. I don’t think it’s likely though.”

  This was better. He was beginning to afford me some field of expertise and it looked as if I might get enough cooperation from him to allow me to do the job. The sister was an unknown quantity at this point and my prejudiced snap judgment about her on the basis of the little I’d been told might be inaccurate.

  “What do you think is likely then?” I asked.

  “A crank I suppose, someone who gets kicks from baiting the rich.”

  “Maybe. Any political angle?”

  “I shouldn’t think so, we’re not at all politically-minded, Susan and I.”

  Of course not, with their money you don’t have to be. You win with heads and you win with tails, one way or another. But it would be easy enough to check whether or not Susan’s actions had offended some part of the lunatic fringe.

  “I have to know more about your sister, obviously,” I said, “I’ll have to talk to her. Where is she now?”

  “She’s in a clinic at Longueville. I suppose I could arrange for you to see her if you think it’s essential.”

  “I do. She took all this so badly that she had to go into a clinic?”

  “Partly this business,” he said slowly. “Partly that, but there are other things involved. My sister is a diabetic and as I said she keeps very busy. She neglects her diet and regimen and her health suffers. She spends a week or so in Dr Brave’s clinic a few times a year to recover her balance.”

  I nodded. I was thinking that my mother was a diabetic and she often went off the rails, but she didn’t go into clinics, just ate apples and drank milk instead of beer for a while. But then, she died at forty-five. Money helps. “A diabetic clinic doesn’t sound too formidable,” I said. “No reason why I shouldn’t see her if they had some notice.”

  He looked uneasy. “Dr Brave’s clinic isn’t exclusively for diabetics. It’s for people who need care in different ways. Some of them need mental care. I’m not wholly in favour of the place but Susan won’t hear a word against the doctor. She always seems rested and secure when she comes out so I go along with it.”

  He didn’t like going along with anything that wasn’t his idea, but his sister was his weak spot apparently. She was responsible for my being here talking to him and he didn’t altogether like it. He seemed anxious for our talk to end.

  “I’ll give you the address of the clinic and telephone to let them know you’re coming. When will I say?”

  “This evening, about seven or eight.”

  “Why not this afternoon? What will you be doing then?”

  They’re all the same, rich or not rich, when they’re paying for your time they want to see you running. Perhaps he thought I’d spend the day knocking down his retainer in a pub and doctoring the odometer on my car. I had a feeling that there was more to learn from him, perhaps just a point or two but they could be important. To get them I had to sting him.

  “I’ll be checking on things,” I told him, “including you. It’s standard procedure. Perhaps you could save me time and you money by telling me some more.”

  He bristled. “Like what?”

  “Like how do you keep this going? Like what share in it does your sister have? Like where can I find your… stepmother?”

  “Her? Why in hell do you want to know?”

  “The connections, that’s where they might lead.”

  He looked straight at me with all the hardness back in his face. He was a capricious bird, intelligent, resentful of something and charming in a grim way, and these qualities washed across him alternately like intermittent rainstorms across a desert. He held up three skeletal fingers. “I’ll answer your questions. One,” he touched the tip of the first finger to his mouth and pulled it away, “Mark left his money well invested, it brings in now much more than he ever had. I sit on some boards, I own a couple of concerns outright and have interests in quite a few others. Two,” he made the same gesture with the next finger, “Susan’s interests are quite separate from mine. She has business dealings of course, here and in New Zealand and the Pacific. She did a tour of some of the places where her firms operated a couple of years ago. She’s got a good business head, like me. Three,” the finger flicked, “Ailsa lives in Mosman. She sold this house to me and bought one over there. I can give you the address.”

  He did and I clinched the arrangement by accepting his cheque for the retainer and three days at the rate I’d quoted. I was convinced that he had the money in the bank to cover the cheque, but even if I hadn’t been, I’d still have taken the cheque because it’s nice to have your client’s name on a piece of paper if you have to yell for help. I agreed to keep him regularly informed and not to worry Susan unduly. The only thing he said about his father’s second wife was that I was on no account to bring her to his house. I agreed. Giles showed me out through the corridors and ballrooms saying just what he’d said on the trip in, which was nothing.

  I’d been in the house for over an hour so the gardener looked at me with new respect. I tried to look as if I always spent my Monday mornings with millionaires but I didn’t quite bring it off. My car betrayed me by refusing to start. It caught just as the gardener was sauntering over with a supercilio
us smile on his face to give me a push. I sprayed a little gravel over him and took off on the long drive to the front gate. I didn’t have to move over an inch to allow a white Bentley to go through the gate in the opposite direction at the same time as I did. The car was driven by a guy in a cap and through the grey tinted glass I caught a glimpse of a man whose face must have been paper-white in the sunlight, if he ever went out in it.

  2

  My first stop was the Public Library. I parked the car over near Mrs Macquarie’s chair and walked through the Gardens. There were people in shorts, shirt sleeves and light cotton dresses sprawling on the grass and eating lunches. Flights of gulls came wheeling down when they spotted bits of thrown and discarded bread. I felt like telling them to stick to the public parks, they were safer there than at millionaires’ mansions although the pickings mightn’t be so good.

  Who’s Who and Who Was Who confirmed the outlines of the Gutteridge family picture as Bryn had given it to me. His father had been self-made, no old school ties and titled antecedents to back him up. He had remained a very private individual; there were few entries under the categories of clubs and interests. Horse-racing was his only spotlight activity. The only thing to cross-reference him under was “money”. My researches turned up only two points of interest. One, Ailsa Gutteridge, nee Sleeman, had been married previously to James Bercer (deceased) who had been a tycoon on much the same scale and in much the same area of business as Gutteridge. Two, no Dr Brave was listed in the medical directory.

  I walked back through the park. The rubbish of scores of lunches was being picked over by the birds and made me feel hungry. I drove home to Glebe, stopping only to pick up a flagon of white wine. I was thinking about Ailsa Gutteridge. I had a feeling that she might be a key to it all. If I was wrong I was prepared to try a new tack, but it’s nice to get off on the right foot once in a while.

  My place in Glebe is a small, two-storey sandstone terrace close to the dog track. I put most of the severance money I got from the insurance company down on it and in good months I can make the payments. The dog track is a convenient meeting-place for some transactions in my trade and, as they say, Glebe is one of those places where if you can’t see a pub by looking both ways down the street then you must be standing outside one. The Falcon just squeezes into the back courtyard of the house which has two rooms up and three down. I cook, after a fashion, and listen to music on the bottom floor and sleep and read on the top.

  I showered in the outhouse two feet away from the toilet and wolfed down a curried egg sandwich and several glasses of the wine. I put Nina Simone on the stereo partly for pleasure and partly to annoy my neighbour on the left. She sings the songs other people write better than they do, but for Dr Harry Soames, my neighbour, Dylan is king and Mitchell is queen so that Nina’s versions of their stuff drives him beserk. Soames is an economist and when he isn’t on sabbatical he spends his time under earphones or bitching about my not repairing the iron lace on the front of my house. Word is that he wants to buy me out to raise the tone of the street.

  Three o’clock seemed as good a time as any to call on Ailsa Gutteridge. There wasn’t anything useful I could say over the phone and if she wasn’t home I could at least look her place over, ask around a bit about her and maybe wait a while. I eased the Falcon out of the courtyard by backing and filling. I find this relaxing, though Soames thinks it adds to the air pollution.

  Sydney was sweltering. The roads were bubbling asphalt cauldrons and white-hot concrete paths to hell. Most people had managed to stay inside or find some shade, but there were several thousand of us who had to cook slowly inside mobile glass and steel ovens. The crawl through the city seemed endless and the traffic only began to move when it got onto the harbour bridge. Off the freeway into the precipitous harbourside streets, the drive became less of a military manoeuvre and more of a social occasion, with the big cars deferring to each other according to a fine, dollar-determined etiquette of their own.

  Mosman looks nice from across the harbour and just as good up close. Mrs Gutteridge’s house wasn’t quite on top of the highest hill around but there was nothing blocking her view. The house was a gracious old brick job, very broad and deep with plenty of fresh paint on the woodwork and iron. A three-car garage at the side held a white Porsche sports car, a black Alfa Romeo sedan and a boat that looked eager to be off to Monte Carlo and quite capable of getting there.

  I parked at a forty-five degree angle outside the house and was walking towards the front steps when I heard a scream. I ran in its direction between the Porsche and the Alfa. Glare from the swimming pool hit me and turned the world momentarily white, but I kept moving towards the two shapes at the far end of the pool. They were struggling and looked like frames from an undeveloped film. As my eyes and brain got back into cooperation I could see a tall, heavy built man trying to hold a woman by the strap of her halter top. He was taking swinging roundhouse slaps at her at the same time. The woman was past her first youth but she wasn’t doing so bad; she was ducking some of the swings and getting in a few of her own. But he had the weight and reach on her and he must have landed a hard one to cause her to scream. I moved in behind him and shouted something. He let go and turned. He was hopelessly off balance and I hit him hard and low in the midsection. All the breath went out of him and he collapsed on his knees by the side of the pool. The woman recovered fast. She stepped in neatly and tumbled him into the water with a half kick, half push to the shoulder. The water was shallow but he went under once and sprawled, spluttering for a minute before pulling himself half over the tiled edge.

  The woman was trying to light a cigarette with hands that were shaking like a tall mast in a high wind. She got there, drew smoke deep and blew it out. Her breasts rose firm and full under the halter top and her kicking-men-into-the-pool leg and its partner were pretty nice too.

  “You’d better go Ross.” she said evenly. “Take the Alfa and leave it and the keys at the office.” Ross was big but my punch and the ducking had knocked the fight out of him. His silk and gabardine slacks were going to need some expert laundry work and his suede shoes were probably beyond repair. Water dripped from his thick black hair down over a face that was still handsome despite a badly set broken nose and a criss-cross of scars around the eyes and mouth. His look suggested that he might try to laugh it off, but the woman’s face was stony, so he turned away muttering under his breath and squelched off towards the garage. An engine roared a few seconds later. There was a crunch of metal on metal, then a screech of tyres on concrete. The engine noise rose then receded.

  “Jesus Christ!” The woman shut her eyes and flicked viciously at her cigarette.

  “Who was that?” I said.

  “Nobody. Who the hell are you?”

  I explained who I was as she poured us both tall glasses of lemon juice and tonic from the fixings on a slat table beside the pool. So far the Gutteridges I’d met seemed to be good at not drinking and kicking things into oblivion. I’d have preferred a bit more drinking and a bit more concern for the lower forms of life.

  We sat down in garden chairs and I took a good look while I was talking. She was cool but exciting; there was a lot of work left in her but she looked as if she’d be very choosy about who got the job.

  “Have you got any identification?” Her voice was breathy and there wasn’t a lot of power in it. She sounded tired and she didn’t look very interested in me as she handed back the documents.

  “What can I do for you, Mr Hardy?” There was an ironic, unencouraging edge to the standard words. I put the papers away and took a sip of the drink. It quenched the thirst.

  “This concerns your stepson and stepdaughter, Mrs. Gutteridge.”

  “Sleeman!” she rapped out.

  “Mrs Sleeman,” I said quickly.

  “Miss!”

  “All right, Miss, but I’m still here to talk about the Gutteridges.”

  “That’d be right, private detectives are just about their sty
le.”

  “What do you mean, Miss Sleeman? Have they used private inquiry agents before?”

  She put out her cigarette, lit another immediately and looked at me through the fresh, blue smoke.

  “I wouldn’t know. Tell me what you want.”

  I rolled a cigarette and got it going before I answered. She was hard to fathom, she seemed uninterested but it might just have been that she was gathering the energy to be really antagonistic.

  “Your stepdaughter’s life has been threatened, your stepson wants to find out by whom.”

  “Let’s call them Susan and Bryn, that step this and that routine makes me feel sick. Bryn wants to find out who and why, I presume?”

  “The ‘why’ is my problem at the moment. ‘Why’ will tell me ‘who’, I hope.”

  “Perhaps not,” she snapped, “I can think of lots of reasons to do down that little silvertail but they wouldn’t necessarily have names attached.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “Give me some reasons.”

  She flexed her back, emphasising her best features, and stretched out her long brown legs. It was hard to guess her age; the heavily tinted outsized sunglasses hid some of the signs, her cheekbones were high with the skin smooth and taut across them and her mouth was full of even, white teeth — but the rich can do a lot in those departments. Her figure was full, but firm looking, and if Ross had been taking liberties with her I could easily see why.

  “I’m not very interested in this, Mr Hardy,” she underlined the statement with a sigh and took in some cigarette smoke. “I don’t like the Gutteridge children — that is Mark’s children — I appreciate that they’re grown-ups in the obvious way at least — for a lot of reasons that I don’t care to go into with you. You’d better tell me something to capture my interest or you’ll have to go. To be frank, you’re boring me.”

  She pulled over a bottle of suntan lotion which had a $5.50 sticker on it and began rubbing it into her thighs. I gave her a brief version of what Bryn Gutteridge had told me which she listened to with enough attention to call me a dirty name for using the word “stepson” again. She snorted and choked on her third cigarette when I asked her if her late husband had had enemies.