I found Horrie weeding a garden bed. I’m no gardener, but the green things sticking up out of the ground looked like the tops of vegetables. He was on his hands and knees, bending forward and back easily. I wondered if I’d be able to move like that when I was his age. Maybe if I ate more vegetables? The sun was high and hot. Horrie wore a stylish wide-brimmed hat and, despite my thick head of hair, I felt the need for a hat, too. I showed him the keys.
‘That looks like a key to Oscar’s van,’ he said, fingering the larger key. ‘Don’t recognise the other one.’
‘There was no trunk in the house? Tool box, sea chest, nothing like that?’
‘No.’
‘What’s this van? You didn’t mention that before.’
‘Must’ve forgot. Oscar had an old Bedford van for his work. Real wreck, but he kept it running. He must’ve been a pretty good mechanic. The young feller who’s doing the work now’s got it. Mark Roper. Leastways, he did have it a couple of weeks ago. I saw him in town. Said it was running all right. Is it important?’
I said I didn’t know what was important yet, which was true. I got Roper’s address in Lambton from him and told him I was off to pay a few visits.
He brushed dirt off his hands and stood up. ‘You feeling all right? Need any help?’
I said I felt fine which was half-true and that I didn’t need help. That disappointed him. He looked down at the garden bed as if he didn’t care whether the things grew or not. It brought home to me again how important this matter was to him. I asked him to thank May for her hospitality and reassured him that I’d stay regularly in touch.
‘If you need money…’
‘I’ll ask for it. Don’t worry. No need yet.’
He took off his hat and wiped sweat from his forehead with his hand. ‘Can you tell me this? Do you think I’m crazy or is there really some sort of mystery here?’
I still had a slight headache; I had a broken car window, a hostile son and a man who left fewer traces behind him than a bird flying across the sky. ‘There’s a mystery, Horrie,’ I said.
Glenys Withers took one look at me and said, ‘I knew you were trouble the minute I laid eyes on you.’
‘That’s not a very compassionate attitude, Senior. I’m the innocent victim, not the vile perpetrator.’
‘Attacked, were you? Did you report it to the police? I thought not.’
She took two steps down towards me, better than backing away, but I still felt I was losing ground. I’m no more of a fetishist than most men, but there was something about her strong, shapely body in the crisp uniform that was doing things to me. If I’d been forced to describe it, I’d have called it pre-sexual. First off, I wanted this good-looking woman to like me. Right then, I wasn’t sure that she’d have a cup of coffee with me. I hadn’t counted on kindliness. She stood a step above me which made her only a couple of inches shorter and looked at my face. ‘My god,’ she said, ‘you have taken a battering over the years, haven’t you? What happened to the nose?’
‘Boxing,’ I said, ‘mostly’
‘That’d be right. What have you been doing, apart from being bashed?’
‘Talking to Horrie Jacobs and looking through Oscar Bach’s things.’
‘Find anything interesting?’
I’d recovered my balance and had the half-truth ready. ‘His old house’s being renovated as of yesterday after years of neglect. Seems a bit coincidental. Did you find anything interesting?’
She touched my arm and shrugged her shoulder bag into place. The gun on her hip jumped a few inches. ‘Come and have something to eat and we can talk about it.’
She took me to a semi-outdoors restaurant, part of the re-vamped waterfront. We sat under a pergola covered with a vine that grew out of a tub. It was that sort of a place-almost natural. She ordered a light beer and calamari and I opted for the same drink and whitebait. We made small talk over the beer while we waited for the food. I reflected that this semi-profession had changed: once, you had to be an ex-cop or something equally heavy and be ready to put in the boot, now, there’s a TAFE course leading to qualification for a PEA licence and we lunch al fresco with gun-toting female cops.
She speared up some calamari, ate it and nodded. ‘It can have the texture of a bicycle tube, ever found that?’
‘Yes.’ I crunched the bones and skin of some whitebait, chewed briefly and swallowed the lot. ‘This is great.’
‘Good, since it’s all on you. The police force is feeling the pinch.’
I groaned at the joke and suddenly we were on better terms. She told me that Oscar Bach fell very definitely into the category of ‘nothing known’. No convictions, no fines, no violations, no infringements, no complaints.
I said, ‘Isn’t that a bit unusual?’
She ate some of the side salad that had come without being ordered. It seemed to be fresh and crisp, but was it free? ‘Yes, but not unique. In theory, all citizens should have a clean bill of health.’
‘You’d be out of a job if they did.’
‘So would you.’
‘True. I have to tell you that I got the same result when I looked through his stuff. Too good to be true. No, worse than that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Not true at all.’
‘You’re being fanciful now. You’re trying to promote something. That’s the trouble with people in your business, always looking for angles.’
The tasty whitebait turned to ashes in my mouth. Suddenly I was angry. Where did she get off? Going from office to courthouse, attending the odd disaster… ‘That’s your old man talking,’ I said. ‘How many private detectives have you dealt with, Senior? In your smooth ride towards the top?’
‘What d’you mean by that?’
I started eating again and the food tasted better. I crunched the skin and bones, took a forkful of the salad and a solid swig of the light. I wished it was Newcastle Brown.
‘You think I made this rank because of my father,’ she snapped. ‘I’m a better bloody police… ‘
It was getting out of hand. Her voice had risen and people were starting to look at us. I resisted the impulse to complete her sentence with ‘person’, and poured her some more beer. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘we shouldn’t be fighting.’
‘Why are we, then?’
I looked at her over the plates and glasses and bowls. The light bouncing off the water made her eyes look even bluer than before.
You’re not interested in blue eyes, I said to myself, you like dark eyes. Think of Anne Bancroft. But I liked what I was seeing much more than I wanted to. I tried to think of Helen Broadway. I needed help.
“What’s wrong?’ she said.
I shook my head and a laser of pain shot through my skull. I blessed it. Something to blame. I touched one of the cuts and winced. ‘My head hurts. Crowbar.’
‘Jesus. You should be in hospital or something.’
‘I’ll be all right. Not as young as I was. You don’t bounce back from these things as quickly. We seem to have rubbed each other up the wrong way. I apologise. I need your help.’ The words were not coming from the part of my brain that was thinking and feeling things.
She ate a little more calamari, drank some beer and lit a cigarette. ‘D’you mind?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘blow some over here.’ Not much of a line but better than telling her to put it out. Maybe someone else would do that. It was a pretty clean-looking place and I didn’t see any ashtrays.
‘Let’s get back on the point,’ she said. ‘Nothing known on Mr Bach. An autopsy was done, of course. If we find someone squashed flat with a refrigerator lying on top of him we still have to determine the cause of death.’
I nodded. Maybe tough talking was her way out of emotional confusion, the way excessive formality was mine.
‘There is something slightly unusual about the autopsy, but I wouldn’t get excited about it if I was you.’
‘What was unusual?’
‘It was done here at the forensic unit of the Central Hospital, like most of them…’
‘Most? Not all?’
‘No. The workload must’ve got too heavy or something, because a couple of the bodies were shipped to Sydney. Mr Bach’s autopsy was done here but the doctor who did it died of a heart attack himself a few weeks later. This was the only autopsy he did and, compared with the others, I’d have to say his report is perfunctory.’
‘Can I see it?’
She opened her shoulder bag and took out some papers. She’d balanced the cigarette on the edge of a plate and it had burned away, forgotten. I resisted the impulse to reach over and stub it out before it burnt down to the filter. ‘I couldn’t photocopy reams of the stuff or someone might have asked me what I was doing. But here’s a sample-a page of the Bach report and one of the others. And I still don’t know why I’m doing this.’
‘Your cigarette’s going to smell of plastic soon,’ I said. ‘Can I see the papers, please?’
She dealt with the cigarette and I took the papers and it would have been hard to say whether she’d intended to surrender them or not. The waitress arrived just then asking if we wanted coffee. We both did. Another agreement, another diversion. I scanned the papers quickly. Dr… (signature scrawled in haste, indecipherable) had some talent as a writer. His notes on the injuries to his subject and their clinical consequences leading to death had a dramatic and convincing ring. Not so with the work of Dr Keifer McCausland, who wrote his name in a bold, round hand. It was all ‘apparents’ and ‘evidents’ and ‘obviouslys’. Dr McCausland concluded that Oscar Bach had died from ‘contusion and trauma’ resulting from ‘falling objects’.
The coffee arrived and we both took it black without sugar. I handed the papers back. ‘I see your point,’ I said, ‘it looks a bit sloppy, but you couldn’t promote anything on that basis.’
‘Don’t start,’ she said. ‘All you can take away from this is that you’d have had more confidence if Dr Thingummy had done the job. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘That’s not much.’
‘No.’
‘Who bashed you?’
‘I don’t know for sure. Why’re you interested?’
‘You think I’m interested in you?’
‘Again, I don’t know. No reason to think so. Maybe you’re tired of being in personnel and liaison or whatever. Maybe you want to do some policing.’
‘You’re right there. I do. Is there anything in this, really?’
‘I’m sick of being asked the same thing. Another minute and you’ll have me saying it’s a clear case of suicide, just for the variation. I simply don’t know, and I have to admit I’m a bit thrown. I’m not accustomed to dealing with policewomen.’
‘What’s the difference? You’re lying to me just as you’d lie to a man.’
I sipped some of the thin, bitter coffee. ‘That’s not true. I mean, it’s been known, but…’
‘This is getting tricky,’ she said. ‘I assume you’ve got a few things to follow up?’
‘One, at least.’
‘Why don’t you do that and get in touch with me again? I might have something more to add myself.’
That suited me. Her tone was neutral, not unfriendly. I fished out my Mastercard and waved it at the waitress. ‘You wouldn’t like to tell me what that something more might be?’
She smiled. ‘I don’t think so. Thank you for the lunch.’