White Meat Page 6

  He shrugged.

  “It is, it is!” Clyde squealed, “and she has an uncle there named . . . Ted or something.”

  “Bert,” said James wearily. “Bert, and he’s in Macleay not Newcastle. I remember now, she lived up there when she was young.”

  Clyde looked deflated at James’ knowledge. He changed posture and waved his hands about as if he was trying to think of an exit line. He didn’t find one and I jerked my chin at him. He went out and left the door open. I closed it and noticed for the first time a photograph pinned to the back of the door. It was a glossy postcard-size print with the Capitol theatre showing behind a woman. She was wearing denim shorts that looked like cut-down jeans with enough material whittled away to show the beginnings of the cheeks of her buttocks. She had on a blouse rucked up and tied under her breasts, striped socks pulled up calf-high and high-heeled sandals. In the black and white picture her hair looked as fair as a wheatfield and the set of her body dared you to touch her. Anyone with the juices still running would want to.

  I put my hand on the door knob and pulled the door open. James started in his chair.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Newcastle, first off.”

  “Now?”

  I had no one waiting up for me and the paper boy stayed his arm if he saw one uncollected on my doorstep.

  “Why not?” I said.

  8

  A private detective leads a throw-away life for much of the time. Some men in the game overplay this by sleeping on couches in their offices and never changing their underwear. I don’t go so far; I’ve got a house in Glebe with reasonably civilised fittings and I sleep in a bed more nights than not. But some cases don’t let you go to bed on them and this was looking like just such a one. The Tarelton girl was running from one piece of trouble to another and there was no time for packing the matching pigskin luggage. I didn’t have too much to go on except that she and the car would stand out in Macleay like Gunsynd in the Black Stump Cup. She could become detached from the car but it would take a lot of work to tone down her eye-turning image and she was probably too vain to do so. Half the people I’d met that day seemed to come from Macleay or thereabouts and the place was fixing itself in my mind as a destination, a source and an answer.

  I made two calls from a box outside the theatre. The first got me a sleepy-sounding Madeline Tarelton who said nothing while I gave her a sketch of events. She refused to wake Ted and wouldn’t or couldn’t confirm that Noni had an uncle up north. Just on spec I asked her what name the girl went by.

  “Rouble, Noni Rouble.”

  “Professional name?”

  “No, her mother’s. She took it back when she broke up with Ted.”

  “When was all this?”

  “Years ago. Look Mr Hardy, this is scarcely the time . . . you should have got all this information from Ted this morning. Do you know your job or don’t you?”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” I said. “I agree with you. Just an outline will do. Noni didn’t live with your husband for how long?”

  “Oh most of her childhood.”

  “Where did she live?”

  “Somewhere north. Really Mr Hardy . . .”

  I apologised again, told her I was going north and called off.

  The second call was to police headquarters in the hope that Grant Evans was on duty. He was and not too happy about it. He wasn’t working on the Simmonds killing but had heard the talk about it; so far the cops had nothing but questions.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like who was the blonde and what was that snooper Hardy doing on the scene?”

  “And like, where’s the kid’s car?”

  “Yeah. Can you help a little on some of these points? Hate to press you.”

  “Quite all right. Maybe soon. Thanks Grant.” I hung up in the middle of a curse from him and it occurred to me that most of our telephone conversations ended like that. Lucky we were friends.

  I drove through the city and over the Harbour bridge. Theatregoers clogged the roads and the drizzle had started in again making for slides, swearing and crumpled mudguards. I crawled along like a link in a slowly moving chain and failed in every attempt to jump a light and get a run. On the north side the traffic moved faster and I could have got into top gear. Instead I pulled into a garage for petrol and a check on the oil and water. I used the lavatory and the smell of the greasy food in the place’s snack bar reminded me that I hadn’t eaten for ten hours. I bought a hamburger and a carton of chips and ate them as I drove. The Falcon groaned a bit under the unaccustomed load of the full tank, but nothing dropped off and when I’d made it to the beginning of the tollway I felt confident that she’d go the distance.

  Since they put the tollway in, the drive to Newcastle is easy. The only danger in driving it at night is falling asleep at the wheel. I warded this off by taking quiet slugs from the Scotch bottle, letting the liquor jolt me but not taking enough to get me drunk. My head was aching and the whisky was good for that, too. I should have been asleep in bed. Instead I was driving a tollway at night and drinking whisky. Mother wouldn’t approve. Father wouldn’t approve. But then Father never did approve. Funny thoughts. Maybe I was drunk. A few cars passed me but neither the Falcon nor I was feeling competitive and we couldn’t have done much about it anyway. The road was slippery and I swayed about a bit and got bored by the dark, indeterminate shapes whipping by. I wished I had a radio. I wished I had new tyres, but I stayed loyal — I didn’t wish I had a new car.

  Like all big cities, Newcastle emits a glow which you pick up a few miles out. It’s composed of neon glare, factory smoke and the small glimmers of a hundred thousand light globes and television screens. There’s a good measure of the day’s wastes drifting about as well; Newcastle is like Sydney, you can taste it about as soon as you can see it. I felt the grittiness of the air and its load of rubber and gas between my teeth as I began the descent from the hills towards the city.

  Newcastle sprawls about like a drunken whore: it trickles off towards the coalfields in one direction, climbs up into the hill country in another and slides down to the sea on the east. The beach is a surprise; a fair-sized slice of white sand in front of a reasonable stretch of water for humans to swim in. It’s like a reward to the city’s inhabitants for putting up with so much else that is appalling. I hadn’t been there for five years but the bird’s eye view I got of it from the highway suggested that it was much the same, only worse. The long flat approach from the south is a ribbon of used car yards, take-away food stands and decaying wooden houses. A string of motels five miles out from town invite you to stop over, miss the city and push on to the clean country up ahead. I pulled into one of them, the Sundowner, which had a “Vacancy” sign with the second “a” flickering fitfully on and off.

  A middle-aged blonde woman with big bouncing breasts under a black polo neck sweater was behind the desk in the office. She ran an experienced eye over my clothes and wasn’t too happy. Also I wasn’t carrying luggage and they never like that. She sneaked a look past me at the Falcon and wasn’t impressed by that, either. Luckily I wasn’t planning to stay. She probably would have made me pay in advance and leave a deposit. I reached into my pocket for the photograph of Noni and laid it on the desk in front of her impressive mammaries. I opened my wallet, letting her see the fifties in it and took out my operator’s licence which I put down next to the picture.

  “Ever see her?” I asked.

  She looked at it for a hundredth of a second. “Sure.”

  I was so surprised I had to ask her again. It isn’t usually that easy. My puritanical soul told me it shouldn’t be that easy. But I’d heard her right.

  “Anyone along here’d know her.” There was a tone in her voice that was hard to interpret, maybe amusement. I looked at her and noticed her colossal double chin. She smiled and the chin tensed up a bit. “That’s Noni Rouble. Haven’t seen her for years.”

  “How is it you know her then?” />
  She asked me why I was asking and I told her some lies. She looked closely at the photograph of me on the licence, the one taken three years back and in a good light. She wasn’t too happy about it so I eased a five dollar note out of the wallet and let it sit on top to get some air.

  “I suppose it’s alright,” she said, eyeing the money. “Noni was an R and R girl around here — oh, seven or eight years back.”

  “R and R girl?”

  “Right. Not to put too fine a point on it, she slept around with the American soldiers. You know, the ones on leave from Vietnam. She stayed here a couple of times. She stayed all up and down this strip.” She waved her hand at the road.

  “Somebody had to do it I suppose,” I said.

  “Yes.” She shrugged and her heavy bosom lifted and subsided like a swell on the sea. “Nothing to do with me.”

  The thought crossed my mind that she was just the right age to have done the same thing when the Yanks were here in World War Two and to resent the passage of time.

  “You didn’t like her?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too flash, she made you feel she was doing you a favour shacking up in your place.”

  “I see. Well my information is she’s headed this way. You wouldn’t know where she’d go?”

  She sighed, the way hotel keepers do when the beds aren’t full and the overheads are going up all the time. She reached out a meaty hand, knocked about from cleaning rooms and wrinkled around the three rings on her fingers. The fingers closed over the money.

  “I haven’t seen her, but if Noni’s back in Newcastle she’s at one of two places.”

  I waited.

  “If she’s flush she’ll be at the Regal in the city.”

  I thought about it. “I don’t think she’s flush but I’ll check it out anyway. What if she’s not?”

  “She’ll be at Lorraine’s boarding house, Fourth Street. It’s a brothel.”

  “Literally?”

  She looked puzzled.

  “I mean is it really a brothel?”

  “Oh no, not strictly speaking, not any more. Probably was once. I mean it’s a dump, you can flop there for a dollar a night, single or double.”

  “Sounds choice.”

  She chuckled. “Right. Lorraine’s got one rule.”

  “What’s that?”

  “No blacks.”

  I grunted and asked to use her phone. She pushed it across the desk to me and I reached into my jacket pocket, took out a pen knife and sawed through the cable.

  “Hey!” she yelped and banged one of her big red hands down on the desk.

  “You can splice it,” I said, “Give you something to do in the wee small hours.”

  “You bastard. I could go out and phone.”

  “You won’t. You don’t care that much.”

  She grinned and picked up the cut ends of the cord. “You’re right. Give Noni a belting for me.” She rubbed the ends together. “Hey, there’s no electricity in this is there?” I told her there wasn’t.

  Outside the Falcon was clicking and squeaking as it cooled down after the long drive. It started under protest and I had to coax it out onto the road. I joined in the thin stream of traffic, mostly trucks, heading for the city. The drizzle had stopped and the clouds had peeled back leaving Newcastle squatting sullenly in a pool of moonlight. It opened its mouth and sucked me in.

  9

  The Regal Hotel is in the middle of the city and it dominates the scene on the skyline and at ground level. The building is a tower with black and white facades alternating each storey so that it looks like a giant pile of draughts. I parked outside and made my usual mistake of trying to push open the self-opening doors. This leaves you with a hand held out impotently in front of you and gives the desk staff an initial advantage. Under the lobby lights my boots looked more scuffed and my denims more wrinkled than they did normally. The girl behind the desk was lacquered and painted like a Barbie doll; her fingernails were purple talons and her mouth was a moist, ripe plum. I marched up to the desk and looked straight and hard into her eyes. She blinked and lost a fraction of the sartorial advantage. Her greeting was an incline of the head. No “Yes sir”. That would have been a total defeat. I took out my licence card and the photograph of Noni and held them at her eye level, one in each hand.

  “I’m a private detective on a missing persons case. Nothing sordid. I want to know if this woman is registered here.”

  Her eyes moved lazily across my offerings. She might have been short of sleep or her lids might have been tired from heaving the enormous false lashes up and down. Her lips parted and tiny fissures appeared in the make-up beside her mouth. She was got-up to be looked at, not to talk.

  “I can’t disclose any information about our guests.” She spoke as if she was reading the words off an idiot card pasted to my forehead.

  “I’m not asking for any information. Just yes or no. If you say yes I’ll ask the manager and go through all the proper channels. If you say no I’ll be on my way.”

  The impossible lashes fluttered up and she looked at the picture.

  “No, then.”

  “Thanks.” I put the card and the photograph away. Her face fell back into its fixed repose as if I had never caused it to move. I bounced away across the carpet and remembered not to try to open the door. Along to the left of the entrance a concrete ramp sloped down under the building. I went down into a dimly lit half-acre car park; there were a few score cars parked in rows. I walked quickly up and down the aisles between the cars — no Chev Biscayne.

  I had a map of Newcastle in the car and checked it for Fourth Street. It runs through a housing estate near the northern edges of the suburbs up into the coastal ranges. It was a thirty-minute drive from the Regal to Lorraine’s boarding house but in terms of class and cash they were a million miles apart. The boarding house was a two-storey wooden job with peeling paint and a collapsed front balcony on the top level. There was about two acres of land around it and, as far as I could judge in the moonlight, what wasn’t covered by blackberries and bracken was serving as a motor car cemetery. A driveway at the side of the house was a shadowless black hole. The road ran steeply past the building and there were empty paddocks opposite it. Lorraine’s was flanked by cheap brick bungalows on either side, but there were vacant lots up and down the street as if parts of it had been blighted and made unfit for human habitation.

  I cruised up the street and parked at the top of the hill about fifty yards beyond the house. The steel works was belching out white smoke and laying down a background hum a couple of miles away towards the water. A few headlights flicked along the roads below but Fourth Street was empty and silent. I checked the Smith & Wesson. The drizzle started again as I eased open the passenger side door and slipped out onto the road.

  The gravel road was slushy under my feet as I moved up to the black tunnel beside the house. Bushes overgrew the driveway, their straggling ends whipped clean by cars brushing past them. The ground’s surface changed abruptly and I bent down to examine it. Deep fresh ruts were etched into the earth in an arc that curved around to a clear patch in front of the house. The ruts ended in a shallow ditch where the wheels of a vehicle had spun before getting a grip on the damp ground. Someone had left here in a hurry not so long ago. I moved up into the tunnel; blackness closed around me like a cloak and I bumped into the rear end of a car when I was about half way along the side of the house. I ran my hand across its boot which seemed to be about as wide as a bus. I put out a hand for the tail fin and the cold chrome rose up just where it should — a Chev Biscayne if ever I felt one.

  I unshipped the pistol and held it stiffly in front of me like a divining rod. I skirted the car and felt my way along the weatherboards to the back of the house. A dim yellow light seeped out through a window and another thin block of it outlined a partly opened door. I kept my back pressed against the rippled wooden walls and scraped along to the door. I couldn
’t hear anything except the droning of the steelworks and the tight hiss of my own breathing. A fly wire screen that looked as if a large dog had gone through it flapped open. I eased it away with the toe of my boot and pushed the door in. It swung easily, creaking a little, and gave me a view of several square feet of greasy green lino. I stepped into the room and my foot skidded in a dark patch just inside the doorway.

  A woman was sitting on the floor with her back against a set of built-in cupboards. Her head lolled crazily to one side and a dark trickle of blood had seeped down from her mouth over her chin and onto the bodice of her cheap chain store dress. She was a thin, yellow woman with lank black hair and a scraggy neck with dirt in the creases. A vein in her forehead was throbbing and her flat chest was rising and falling in millimetres. I opened a door which let on to a long passage running towards the front of the house. The light barely penetrated six feet of its length but it seemed to be empty. I closed the door and bent over the woman. Her breath, what there was of it, was coming out in little erratic gasps and each one smelled more of stale gin than the last. I looked around the room. The bench tops were littered with bottles of sauce, food-encrusted plates and empty beer bottles. An electric toaster had one of its sides down like a drawbridge; crumbs were scattered around it and a fly was trapped in a smear of butter across its top. The mess — jars of jam, brimful ashtrays and slimy cutlery — flowed across the benches and into the sink. The detritus leaped across to the laminex kitchen table which carried a number of grimy glasses, pools of liquid and a two-thirds empty bottle of Gilbeys gin.

  I put the gun on the table and hooked my hands under the woman’s shoulders. She was a dead weight like a sack of grain. I dragged her across the room, kicked one of the chairs out from under the table and dumped her into it. She didn’t move except that her head slumped across the other side. I pushed her hair aside. There was a long jagged tear near her ear and a deep oozing cut on her mouth, the sort of wound the foresight and backsight of a pistol make across a face. There was a lot of blood on her face and on the floor but there didn’t seem to be any other injury to her and this one wasn’t fatal. The dishtowel on the sink gave off a stomach-turning smell but I ran water on it, screwed it out and dabbed at the blood. She flinched as the water went into the cuts and her eyes flickered open. I pressed the wet cloth against her forehead. Her head tried to slide away to the right but I held it steady. Her eyes opened into dark slits and stared fixedly at the bottle on the table.