White Meat Page 8

  “Where did they go?”

  An impulse to lie and a touch of fear came into his face. The fear won.

  “Gone to see Trixie Baker.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Woman in Macleay. She was in on some trouble Noni had a few years ago. Good few years now.”

  “Tell me about it. Sit down.”

  He sat on the bench and watched me while I made a cigarette. I got it going and put the makings away.

  “You’re a sick man,” I told him. “It’s bad for you. Let’s hear the story.”

  But I’d somehow lost the initiative. Perhaps he saw in my eyes that I wouldn’t push him into a heart attack or maybe he just didn’t care. He swore at me and told me nothing. I raised my voice and then thought of the dog outside the shed but he didn’t give the dog a whistle. He shut up and didn’t do anything, just put up a total defence of silence. Then I took another look at the Holden, it was an FX in the last stages of restoration. Repeated cutting and polishing had brought the duco up to a mirror finish and the chrome gleamed in the dim light like sterling silver. I pulled open a door and glanced at the upholstery; it was leather, flawless and luxuriant. Bert watched me as I circled the car. I came back to him.

  “Just two questions Bert.”

  Silence.

  “Where does Trixie Baker live?”

  Nothing.

  “Tell me about the Abo?”

  More nothing.

  I swooped down and picked up a gallon tin which had fluid of some kind splashing about in it. I smelled it. Petrol. I pulled out my matches, jumped over to the car and held the tin and the matches up near the driver’s window.

  “Hate to do it Bert.” I put the can on the car roof and struck a match. He jumped up and his mottled face was pale and working.

  “No, wait . . .”

  The passion was in his face and the truth would be in his mouth. I dropped the match and scuffed it out. The words came flooding out of him like extinguisher foam.

  “Trixie’s got a farm, ten miles north. Sallygate road, first farm past the bridge, you can’t miss it. I don’t know what the old trouble was, I don’t honest.”

  I believed him.

  “The Abo?”

  “Young bloke, tall, caught him in here early this morning. Scared the living shit out of me.”

  “Was this before or after Noni was here?”

  “After.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Sleeping, back there.” He pointed to a heap of bags half-hidden by the side panel of a car at the back of the shed.

  “Why so scared? Just a drunk or something.”

  “Not him. No fear. Stone sober.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Told him to shoot through and he did, but like he was going anyway, you know?”

  I put the can down and stuck the matches back in my pocket. I couldn’t waste any more time on Bert. Noni and her companion weren’t too far ahead. I asked him how far and he told me they’d left about four hours ago. He didn’t seem to object to the extra question. I rolled him a cigarette and lit it for him. He inhaled gratefully.

  “Thanks Bert,” I said: “You’ve been a great help. Now, you’re going to drive me out to Trixie’s. You drop me there and forget the whole thing. OK?”

  He protested but I overrode him. We went around the FX and out the back door to where an ordinary-looking Valiant was parked. Bert climbed in and started it up and it didn’t sound so ordinary. He’d modified it in ways that I couldn’t understand which had turned it into a high performance car. He explained this to me in taciturn grunts as we drove; cars were at the moral centre of his life and he was prepared to talk about them as about nothing else. I listened to his technical explanations in silence, thinking. Noni and the man had pushed hard to get this far and it seemed logical that it would be the last port of call but I had no idea what it added up to.

  The driving seemed to relax Bert; he looked better somehow at the wheel, more physically in charge of himself and any nervousness he betrayed could easily be put down to uncertainty about my behaviour or that of the man with the gun. I put just one question to him on the drive and the answer was no, he’d never seen the gunman before.

  Ten miles out from Macleay we passed over a wooden bridge and the metal road changed to dirt. Bert drove in second gear for a hundred yards and stopped where the road took a right-hand bend.

  “Trixie’s place is just around this corner.” He jutted his bristled chin in the direction he meant. “If I was you I’d take it easy. That bloke with Noni looked jumpy and mean to me.” His eyes opened as he saw me pull the .38 out of the coat pocket. “Jesus! You too. You said I just had to drop you here.” His hand was on the gear stick, ready to move.

  “That’s right.” I opened the door and stepped out. “You wouldn’t be the sort of man to go to the police telling tales would you Bert?”

  “Not me.”

  “One thing interests me. You don’t seem concerned about the girl. She’s your niece isn’t she?”

  “Not really. I was married to her mother’s sister once. She doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  I nodded and stepped back. He put the car in gear, U-turned neatly and drove off. I held the gun under the coat and moved along the side of the road. She didn’t mean anything to me either, but here I was with a loaded gun going up against another loaded gun and not a friend in sight. I had the negative, defeated feeling that I wouldn’t like to die up here, in all this lush vegetation and so far from home. I fought it down and turned the bend.

  The farmhouse was set back about a hundred yards from the road at the end of a dusty drive. Some straggly gums grew along one side of the track and I came up through these to within spitting distance of the house. It fell short of colonial elegance by a long way, being basically a one-pitch wooden shack that had been added to by side and back skillions. What paint was on it was white. There were wheelmarks on the drive but no car in front of the house where the drive ended. I skirted around the house, keeping under the windows and close to the walls. No car. Behind the house, about fifty yards back was a big iron shed. A road ran up to it from the eastern boundary of the farm. There was no cover between the house and the shed so I dropped the coat, took a grip on the gun and ran, weaving and keeping low.

  I made it in creditable time and circled the shed. Plenty of wheel marks, old and new, but no car. The shed’s sliding door was half open and I went in. There were a couple of long trestle tables and lots of wire netting racks suspended about head high from the roof. Over in one corner there were a dozen or so big green plastic garbage bags, bulging full. I went over and untied the top of one. There was enough grass inside to turn on every head between Bermagui and Byron Bay.

  I worked my way carefully back to the front of the house. There was no bell and to use the knocker I would have had to step inside because the door was standing open inside a fly wire screen. I rattled the screen and waited. A fly battled against the wire trying to get out. I let it out and went in myself. The house had the low hum — made up of refrigerator motor, dripping taps and the ghosts of voices — that all empty houses have. I walked through the nondescript rooms and passages on the way to the kitchen which was poky and dark with blinds drawn and flies buzzing. The buzzing was loudest over in a corner near a walk-in pantry.

  A foot and half of a leg in a pale beige stocking were sticking out of the pantry. I went across and crouched down. A woman was lying with one leg extended and the other tucked up under her. One side of her face was a dark, crumpled ruin. Flies were gathering around the dried blood. Her features were reconstructable from the undamaged side — thin mouth and high forehead. She wore a severe blue linen dress that looked expensive. As I reached for her wrist I heard a noise behind me and I turned bringing the gun up but I was too slow and the business end of a thin-bladed knife was tickling my ear while the gun was still pointing nowhere.

  “Drop the gun.”

  Two men with swarthy co
mplexions, Italianate suits and stockinged feet were standing over me. They looked strange in the neat suits and socks but I didn’t feel like laughing. One of them, the taller, said something in Italian and his mate moved back out of the kitchen. He returned with their shoes and they slipped them on, the taller guy still holding the knife close to my head. My joints were creaking and I made to straighten up and felt the knife go into the ear flesh a fraction. I sank back.

  The Italians had the build of men who knew how to move and what to do when they got there. Ideas of taking them were out of the question. They conferred in Italian and weren’t talking about pasta. I pointed at the woman.

  “She’s dead,” I said stupidly.

  They didn’t even look at her. The knife artist retracted the blade with a click and while I was listening to it the other one stepped forward gracefully and clouted me on the side of the head with something thick and black and hard. I slid down and then he hit me again and a bright flare of pain went through my skull and spread and took away the light.

  11

  I woke up inside a small gloomy room with points of light stabbing in through the roof. The floor was rough planking with heavy metal strips binding it down. The light was about the same as in a cinema just before they start showing the ads. The room was drafty. It was also moving. My head throbbed viciously when I moved and I dropped back down on the pile of sacking and carpet scraps where I’d been thrown. I closed my eyes and let myself adjust slowly to the surroundings. When the headache had settled down into sync with the noise of the engine and the wheels I admitted to myself that I was in the back of a small enclosed truck,. I crawled and lurched about the cabin checking the walls and rear doors. Tight as a drum. Through a chink in the floor I could see the road rushing past at a steady pace, but there’s no way to tell from moving bitumen which way you’re headed. I pounded on the wall near the driving end of the truck and got no response. I was locked in as safe as the crown jewels and nobody was going to do a thing about it. I wadded up the packing, put my head down and drifted off to sleep.

  I dreamed I was crushing rocks on the Long Bay rock pile and then I got over the wall and made it down to La Perouse. The crowd around the snake pit was immense; it flowed over the road and up the grassy slope towards the houses on the hill. I pushed my way through the throng which was mainly made up of blacks until I got to the fence. The pit was full of snakes of all sizes and hues writhing about and rearing up to strike at the audience. Penny was in the middle of the pit with a python coiled about her and she was screaming for help. I was trying to get over the fence and the people around me were laughing because a big black snake was waving its head in front of me, darting at me and holding me back. I yelled something and woke up drenched with sweat and clutching at the empty air.

  I sat in the truck while it cruised along for what seemed like ten hours. My watch had stopped at eleven a.m. and if there’s any way to tell the time from inside a closed truck I don’t know it. The traffic noise picked up at one point indicating that we were passing through a town. I heard the rattle of a train a bit later — that still put us anywhere on the east coast. I was edgy from tobacco withdrawal and almost hallucinating from the effects of two hard blows on the head within twenty-four hours. Also I was scared; there were a few bodies in shallow graves, courtesy of the grass producers and I didn’t want to join them. I tried to quell the fear and kill the time by sorting out the parts of the case so far.

  Noni was on the run, maybe semi-unwilling, with an unidentified man who was prone to violent solutions of his problems. What they were running to was a mystery. A woman named Trixie Baker was involved, fatally as it turned out. There was something in Noni’s past that connected her to the live man and the dead woman and I wouldn’t begin to unravel the affair until that secret was yielded up. I gave it away at that point and concentrated on my thirst. I thought about exactly what sort of drink I’d like to have in what circumstances and settled for a middy of old with a double Teacher’s on the side. The saloon bar of the Imperial Lion with Ailsa along for company would be nice. I went to sleep again.

  The truck stopped suddenly and threw me against the wall. I swore and struggled to get up, then the doors opened and a blaze of electric light flooded and blinded me. I crawled to the edge of the tray and stopped there like a rabbit transfixed by a spotlight. I heard a snigger and then an accented voice told me to get down. I dropped off the end of the truck and my knees buckled when I hit the ground. I heard the snigger again and thought it would make a good target for a fist if I ever felt strong enough again to make one.

  My eyes adjusted to the light and I took in that I was in a warehouse of some sort. The ceiling was high and the floor was hard cement. Two hundred-watt bulbs hung down close to my face like lit-up heads in nooses. Four men were standing near a new green Fiat sedan parked beside the truck. I’d seen three of them before, the two who’d taken me in Macleay and the one in the camelhair overcoat. He’d been in Trueman’s watching the Moody workout. The fourth man was dressed the same way as the others in a suit with highly polished shoes. He had a frizz of dark curly hair around a bald top. I didn’t know him.

  The one in the two-hundred-dollar coat spoke with a guttural voice in an accent that was almost stage Italian.

  “Mr Hardy, you’re putting me to a lotta trouble. Why you sticking your nose in my business?”

  “What business would that be?”

  “You’re smart, an investigator,” he drew the word out ironically, “you think it out.”

  “You’re the olive oil king,” I said “You’re going to rough me up for using peanut oil to fry my chips.”

  One of the Macleay boys stepped forward and slammed me in the gut. I felt the breakfast of God knows how long ago rise in my gorge. I straightened up.

  “I don’t know what your business is Mr . . .?”

  He laughed. “That’s better. No jokes. Coluzzi. You were at the gym watching the black, Moody. You go to see Ted Williams, you see Sunday in La Perouse, then you go to Macleay.”

  “I went to the toilet in between.”

  He struggled to keep his hands and feet still. “I told you no jokes. Why you hanging around these people?”

  “What’s it to you?” I was puzzled that he hadn’t mentioned the marijuana. He was prepared to use muscle on me but not to go all the way. He was talking to me for some reason rather than having me kicked into paraplegia — that gave me some leverage but it was hard to judge how much. I snapped my fingers.

  “I’ve got it, you’re the boomerang king . . .”

  The knuckle man moved again but I was ready for him this time. He swung his foot and I went down, got hold of it, lifted, twisted and flipped. His arms flailed and he went over and belted his head into the bumper of the truck. He groaned, rolled over and lay still. His mate exposed a knife but Coluzzi motioned him to stop.

  “My business is fighters, Mr Hardy . . . one of my businesses. I’m interested in the black fighters. I want to put them in against my boys, the Italian boys. We would get terrific houses no? A lot of money to make.”

  “Honest fights?”

  He spread his hands apologetically. “We see. Maybe. You could do yourself some good.”

  “How?”

  “First, you tell me who you working for and what’s the angle.”

  Some light dawned. Coluzzi figured he had competition and he wanted to know more about it. He was a shrewd guy who wanted to sew the whole thing up neatly before he put any time and money into it. Maybe he did have competition. In any case my skin seemed to depend on him continuing to think so.

  “Did you have me bashed outside a pub in La Perouse?”

  “No.”

  “You had someone watching me in Newcastle?”

  “Sure.”

  The man I’d thrown was on his feet again looking very pale around the edges. The man with the blade was looking anxious to have a go and the priestly character was very quiet and still. If I was going to get out of
this without any more of the physical stuff this was the time to talk.

  “I heard a whisper that something like this could be on,” I said.

  “Yeah? Who from?”

  “Tickener, the reporter. I don’t know his sources.”

  “What you snooping around for — Redfern, Macleay, La Perouse, the black belt?”

  The priest sniggered and Coluzzi spoke sharply to him in Italian. At a guess he was telling him to shut up or he’d do something unpleasant to him that would cramp his style with the ladies. Coluzzi repeated the question angrily.

  “I’m looking into it for Harry,” I improvised. “I haven’t got on to much yet but I’ve got no axes to grind. I could keep you informed. I’ve been in the middle so far, copping it from both sides. Maybe it’s time for me to come off the fence.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I got bashed in La Perouse as I said. My guess is that was your opposition.”

  Coluzzi scratched his jaw and turned aside to talk to the bald man. The bruisers stood flapping their ears and I listened to the flow of Italian, catching a word here and there but not making much sense of it. The bald man did most of the talking and Coluzzi did a lot of nodding. He swung back to me.

  “Adio’s got a good question. If you help me and I get ridda this opposition you talk about and you talk to the reporter, where does that leave me?”

  It was a good question. I looked at Adio with respect and he gave me a tight, sardonic smile. I took out my wallet and showed him the money in it. Twenty-three dollars.

  “I’ve got about twice that much in the bank. I could use some more. You don’t pay tax on money you win on fights.”

  He didn’t look convinced but the money argument was intelligible to him.

  “What about Tickener?”

  “He doesn’t own me. There’d be one condition though.”

  “What?”

  I looked at the two enforcers in their padded shouldered suits and narrow crocodile skin shoes. They Looked well fed, they were probably pampered by their women and generous to a fault with their kids. In Coluzzi’s service, though, they were vicious thugs and their indifference to the dead woman in Macleay suggested that they’d done worse things than hit people on the head. I pointed to the taller man.