Salt and Blood Page 9

  I parked in the allotted carport for the flat and went up the stairs. The door was standing open with splintering around the lock. I felt my pulse increase and the adrenalin kick in. My gun was in my bag under the bed and I had to hope whoever had broken in hadn’t found it. I looked along the concrete walkway for a weapon and the only thing in sight was a kid’s skateboard lying wheels up outside a flat further along. Better than nothing. I scuttled along and grabbed it.

  I went in low and fast, shouting and whacking anything in sight with the skateboard. He came out of Rod’s bedroom carrying the iMac. A big guy. Young. He dropped the computer and yelled when he saw me. The adrenalin-pumped momentum drove me forward and I rammed hard at his groin with the skateboard. I missed, caught him on the thigh and didn’t hurt him much. He lashed out and got me on the side of the head. I reeled back and he came on, still yelling, scared and angry. Dangerous as hell. I was slightly dazed but I still had the skateboard. I swung it backhand against his left knee and caught it just right so that it collapsed inwards. He went down but he wasn’t finished. I moved in and he just missed with a lashing kick. I slammed the side of the skateboard against his ear and the wheels bit into the back of his head and that was enough for him. He flopped back on the carpet, panting and bleeding.

  I straddled him, holding the board hard under his jaw, forcing his head back. ‘Now just who the hell are you?’

  ‘What … what d’you mean? I just come along and seen the door busted, and …’

  I’d practically been cutting off his wind but now I eased back. ‘You didn’t break in?’

  ‘No, man. I swear. I just …’

  ‘Okay, okay. When was this? How long’ve you been here?’

  ‘No time. I seen the computer and grabbed it. Then you come in. Fuck, I was scared.’

  ‘You should be. Break and enter, theft, assault. Serious charges.’

  ‘Look. I told you. I never broke in.’

  ‘Hard to prove. The Bondi cops don’t like thieving pricks like you.’

  The look in his eyes told me that he was in complete agreement. For a second he thought about giving it another go but I increased the pressure on his jaw and his head fell back again. The carpet was a bloody mess by now and he was white-faced under his stubble and shaking. He smelled bad.

  ‘You a user?’

  He sniffed and nodded.

  ‘Had your eye on this place did you?’

  ‘Yeah, seen the fuckin’ Pajero and the sheilah … you know. Looked like she had a bit.’

  I wasn’t convinced, not with everything that was going on. Had someone employed him to look for something, maybe to get the computer? ‘I think we need the cops,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus, man, no. Don’t do that. I couldn’t take it. Look, I told you, I didn’t break in and you haven’t lost nothing.’

  ‘Why’d you take the computer?’

  ‘To get money for a fix. Why’d you fuckin’ think?’

  In a strange way the belligerence and mood swing lent him credibility. It seemed unlikely that Rod’s pursuer, who’d played some pretty cunning tricks, would resort to a loser like this as an assistant. I took one hand away, reached for my wallet and showed him my licence. ‘I’m a private investigator and you’ve got yourself into something you don’t want to know about. If you tell me everything you’ve seen here, and I mean everything, I’ll think about letting you go. Otherwise it’s the cops, and it still will be if you bullshit me.’

  ‘Sure. Sure thing.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Craig, Craig Griffiths.’

  ‘Okay, Craig. Where d’you live?’

  ‘Shit, man, why d’you want to know?’

  ‘Two reasons—so I can find you if I need to and so I can check on what you say if I have to.’

  He gave me an address that might or might not have been true. It’s always wise to give someone you’re questioning an easy one first up and it helps to gauge truthfulness. Craig seemed keen to help and I wondered if perhaps I’d encountered him on his second visit and he already had a few things from the flat tucked away.

  ‘When did you start watching the flat?’

  ‘When I first seen the Pajero, like yesterday morning.’

  ‘Kept an eye on it ever since?’

  ‘Sort of, yeah.’

  ‘Anyone else watching?’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Like I say. Was there anyone else showing an interest in the place?’

  I could tell by the flicker in his eyes that he was considering lying. I put the pressure back on his throat. ‘Don’t even think about it, mate. Doesn’t matter how scary he was, I can be worse.’

  ‘There was this bloke today, yeah.’

  ‘The one who broke in?’

  He nodded and hurt himself. ‘Shit! Yeah.’

  ‘Description.’

  ‘Big guy, big as me. Fit like.’

  ‘More. Hair, clothes, age.’

  ‘Shit, not much hair, sort of baldie with it clipped close. Dark suit. Dunno about how old—forty, fifty.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Younger than you.’

  ‘A lot of people are younger than me, but we’ll let that go. Vehicle?’

  ‘Camry. New.’

  ‘Colour?’

  ‘Red.’

  ‘Registration?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Tell me what happened, Craig, and get it right.’

  Craig wasn’t much of a storyteller, but with plenty of prompting I got a disjointed but detailed account of how the man in the Camry had pulled up outside the building, made a call on his mobile, waited, gone up to the flat and returned to his car. He’d opened the boot and taken out a tyre iron. Craig had positioned himself on the level below and heard the door splinter. He said the intruder had been inside for perhaps ten minutes. After he’d left Craig had made his own entry and I’d surprised him almost immediately.

  I’d let him sit up by this time but I positioned myself between him and the doorway and kept the skateboard handy. ‘For a second there I thought this fucker had come back.’

  ‘I’m not bald, Craig, and I’m not wearing a suit.’

  ‘Didn’t mean that, man. I meant the kind of bloke he was.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  Craig wasn’t the brightest and he fumbled for words to express his meaning. After a few moments of struggle he brushed his index finger against his upper lip. ‘Shit, I forgot to say he had this fuckin’ moustache. He looked like a cop. That’s what I meant when I reckoned he was like you, not looked like, like, see?’

  I saw. All in all it was a pretty good description although a worrying one. Craig rubbed at his knee and throat and looked as if he was longing to be somewhere else.

  ‘Stand up,’ I said. ‘See if you can walk.’

  He levered himself up against the wall behind him and stood unsteadily. He took a couple of limping steps forward and grabbed at the edge of the table.

  ‘Those stairs are going to be a problem.’

  ‘I can do it, man.’

  I nodded. ‘You saw the bloke who left with the woman yesterday.’

  He touched his upper lip. ‘Yeah, big bloke with the Elvis T-shirt.’

  ‘That’s him. He owns the computer. If it’s buggered I don’t think you’d want to meet him. He might be back any minute so I think you’d better piss off.’

  He limped towards the door and stopped in the door frame, still rubbing at the skin under his jaw.

  ‘Something?’ I said.

  ‘You’re full of it if you reckon that bloke’s goin’ be back soon.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘They bought petrol at the station down the street. Looked like a full tank. I was watching. Took a while. They’re long gone.’

  I jerked my head at him to leave and then had a thought. ‘Who was driving?’

  ‘Him.’

  Craig limped away leaving me very worried. Somebody knew where Rodney Harkness had
been holing up and, depending on what he might’ve found in the flat, who with. As for Rod and Glen with their full tank in the Pajero and the surfboard on top, Glen didn’t as a rule let anyone drive her precious car, and the man driving it didn’t have a licence and hadn’t driven for seven years.

  15

  I replaced the computer, plugged it in and switched it on. The smiling Macintosh face came up and the desktop screen appeared and it seemed to have survived the fall. I checked my email in the hope that Glen had responded to my message but she hadn’t. I checked my phone messages again with the same result. I made some coffee, considered spiking it with the remainder of the whisky and decided against. I prowled around the flat to see if anything was missing. My gun was where it should be. A relief.

  Junkies these days mostly steal money because you can’t get anything much for second-hand electronic equipment and the hock shops are more tightly regulated than they used to be. Maybe Craig was hoping to acquire some new skills by pinching the iMac. The TV and VCR and the microwave and the transistor radio were all present and correct. There hadn’t been any money lying around that I recalled. I went into each room a couple of times with the vague feeling that something was missing, but I couldn’t pin down what it was.

  The clothes Rod had left and the few in my room would’ve told the intruder that Harkness had a minder, but if he was the same one who’d fired the shots he’d have known that already. I couldn’t see that there was any sign of Glen’s presence—no stockings in the bathroom, no lipstick stains on a cup or a glass. Then it came to me. I’d put the Post-it Rod had left on the bedside table in my room and it had gone.

  So he had a name and if he really was a cop as Craig had suspected he’d have ways and means. Glen could be a man’s name but there was no comfort in that thought. This guy, I suspected, knew Harkness well, knew he was straight and that he was off in the wild blue yonder with a woman named Glen. Put like that it didn’t sound like much of a lead. I realised that the intruder and I were in much the same boat—urgently looking for two people on the basis of very slender information.

  I swore and kicked at the skateboard lying on the living room floor. It skidded across the carpet and crashed into the wall and made me feel foolish. I picked it up and went through the broken door with it in my hand intending to put it back where I’d found it. I was standing there, with the child’s toy dangling from my hand, when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and Warren St John Harkness in all his pinstriped glory came into view.

  He stopped a metre away, removed his sunglasses and stared at me and the splintered door. ‘What in the name of God are you doing?’

  Good question, I thought. I bent, skidded the skateboard along the concrete walkway, and had the satisfaction of seeing it stop near enough to where I’d found it. “You’d better come in, Mr Harkness. We’ve got a few things to talk about.’

  There was no point in holding anything back so I gave it to him, chapter and verse. It was a lot to take in all at once but lawyers are used to processing information and he stayed quiet until I’d finished, mentally filing everything I said. I put the best spin on it I could, letting him know that his holding back information on his brother’s difficulties and character hadn’t helped. From the way he took it he seemed to be registering it as valid, at least in part. But he wasn’t going on the back foot.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard of such incompetence.’

  I let that pass. ‘What brought you here today, Mr Harkness?’

  ‘I’d heard nothing from Ms Withers for two days. She was supposed to make daily reports.’

  ‘That’s news to me. Why didn’t you tell us about Rodney’s belief that he killed his wife and child?’

  ‘It was a delusion.’

  ‘That doesn’t answer the question.’

  ‘And I don’t intend to.’

  ‘Why did you hire a female investigator when you knew about Rodney’s capacity to charm women?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. He’s almost forty, he …’

  ‘He can still do it.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it. It was one of the sources of his trouble.’

  We were standing a metre apart in the living room, which was littered with things I’d knocked down with the skateboard as I launched my attack—books, a broken chair, coffee mugs. There was a dark patch on the carpet where Craig had bled.

  ‘What happened here?’ Harkness said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Why don’t you sit down. Something’s just struck me and I want to try it out on you.’

  He glanced at his gold watch. ‘I haven’t got much time.’

  ‘Won’t take long.’

  He pulled a chair out from the living room table and sat as if it had a nail sticking up. I perched on the edge of the table.

  ‘I’ve got a feeling that you hired a female investigator and an attractive one because you knew your brother would … form an attachment, shall we say?’

  ‘Why would we do that?’

  I registered the ‘we’ but didn’t let it distract me. ‘I think you also knew that Glen Withers has a drinking problem. Rodney has a reputation for violence. That’s a volatile mix. I suspect you hoped to find out whether Rodney really did kill his wife and child and Glen would act as … what’s it called—the Judas goat.’

  ‘That’s fanciful.’

  ‘I was insurance that things wouldn’t go too far.’

  He stroked his clean-shaven jowls. ‘A long bow, Hardy.’

  ‘It makes sense. If you got solid indications that Rodney did kill them you’ve removed an inheritance complication. Rodney’s controllable, you’ve demonstrated that; his daughter’s a very loose end. I’d be interested in the provisions of your father’s will.’

  That reminded me of Frank’s remark about there being something dodgy about old Harkness’s death, but I thought I’d said enough for the moment.

  Harkness looked at me as if I was an alien creature. My hair was a mess, I had blood on my shirt and my pants were through at the knees from when I’d straddled Craig. He wasn’t used to dealing with roughnecks and it worried him.

  ‘Pure speculation,’ he said, but without much conviction.

  I shook my head. ‘Only partly. The question is, where do we go from here? We’ve got two very vulnerable people on the loose and a very dangerous person out after one of them who probably doesn’t give a shit what happens to the other one. So tell me—have you got any idea who might want to kill Rodney? I’m assuming for the moment it isn’t you or your mother.’

  ‘That’s offensive.’

  ‘So is a lot of your behaviour. Glen Withers is my friend. I don’t want to see her come to harm on account of your shitty manipulations.’

  There was a long pause while he worked his way past outrage through calculation to compromise. ‘I have no idea who this person might be. No idea at all. Hardy, I think we’d better call a truce.’

  It took a while to get there. We thrashed it out a bit, both trying to gain the advantage. He claimed that he could sack Glen for incompetence and I countered with my accusations about his motives. He agreed that the important thing was to find Glen and Rodney and then decide what to do next. Privately, I thought he exhibited some unconcern about his brother’s safety, not to mention Glen’s, but I didn’t raise it. If I was going to find the pair I’d need funds and he was the source. I still had a few questions for him though.

  ‘They took the surfboard you bought him,’ I said. ‘Did Rodney have any favourite surfing spots?’

  He shrugged and got off the chair. ‘Don’t ask me. I never took any interest in Rodney’s absurd sporting pursuits. The only games I ever played with him were cards—five hundred, poker and the like—and he cheated.’

  ‘Glen’s a red-hot card player. If he tries that on her she’ll roast him alive.’

  He moved towards the door, uninterested, ‘Really?’

  ‘One more thing. I suppose you provided Glen with a list of his friends. Ma
ybe there’s someone he’d go to at a time like this.’

  He turned back to me. ‘I did no such thing. As far as I know, Rodney had no friends. I have to go.’

  He went. If he’d stayed I’d have been tempted to ask him if he had any friends. I doubted it. What a family.

  What did Gough Whitlam call Billy McMahon? ‘Tiberius with a telephone’? I always liked that. I spent the next few hours phoning everyone I could think of who had any substantial connection with Glen, but I came up empty. I had to hope that she wouldn’t want to miss her AA meetings but I didn’t know where or when they were held. The only contact I had for Rod was his last agent, Barney Nugent.

  He sounded wary. ‘Rod? Yes, I was his agent.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he’s been in touch with you recently?’

  ‘You don’t suppose right. What’s this about? If Rod owes you money forget it, he’s in the loony bin.’

  ‘He’s out, Mr Nugent, and he doesn’t owe me money. In fact, I was wondering if you owed him any.’

  His laugh was genuine and angry. ‘Get off! What gave you that idea?’

  I filled him in a bit then, enough to convince him that I was concerned about Rod and was looking for him. I mentioned the residuals payments and got the harsh, barking laugh again.

  ‘Those residuals ran out years ago and they were on a reducing scale.’

  ‘Still, there was money …’

  ‘Listen, I gave Rod so many advances he’d have to be like Russell Crowe to pay it back. He’s well in the red with me.’

  ‘What did he spend the money on?’

  ‘What they all spend it on—coke, booze, women.’

  My next phone call was to Dr Jerry Weir.

  16

  ‘Dr Weir, this is Cliff Hardy. I’ve learned something about Rodney Harkness I want you to confirm, if you will.’

  ‘Not something to discuss on the telephone. You’d better come over here.’

  She suggested a time a good deal earlier than previously. That and her willingness to see me surprised me, but I put it down to her interest in Rodney. I cleaned myself up and changed my clothes. The shirt would need dry cleaning; the drill pants were a write-off. Jeans now and a cream linen shirt. Shouldn’t be any blood about in Mosman. I had a swelling and an abrasion where Craig had kicked me, which would make the spot tender for a couple of days and make shaving difficult. I heated the rest of the coffee in the microwave and ate some biscuits with tinned tuna and bread and butter cucumbers. Classy, except that I ate standing up at the sink, worrying.