Oscar must have worded the casino staff up that I was a low-key type who didn’t require the red carpet treatment. Maybe the leather jacket was a bit too low-key for them, but at least I was wearing a clean shirt. I was shown to my office and introduced to Marie, my secretary for the duration. Marie was what you would call a big woman, close to 180 centimetres and heavy with it. She was dark-haired and vivacious, a toey character who looked as if being busy was her main joy in life. I was feeling tired already and I had to pump myself up to match her energy. From what I’d seen of the personnel so far, the casino resembled a TV studio in that every woman had a claim to good looks of one kind or another. The men were a good deal plainer.
Marie watched me try out my chair and desk for size and fiddle with some of the fittings. Then she handed me a printed sheet. ‘I always had a daily schedule drawn up for Mr Galvani and he’d work through it. We were getting to be a team. I was very sorry about what happened to him, Mr Hardy. I liked him a lot.’
‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘Please sit down. What would you consider being a team to be like, Marie? And the name’s Cliff.’
She sat and visibly relaxed into the chair. She was a comfortable kind of woman who liked to be at her ease. OK with me. ‘Generally speaking, I’d give him too much to do in a day and he’d run himself ragged getting through it. Then I’d over-compensate and give him too little and he’d be twiddling his thumbs. Getting the right balance is what I’d call teamwork.’
‘Couldn’t he initiate things himself?’
‘Leaving space for that is good teamwork!’
Bossy, but not overbearing. I grinned. ‘I get it. Well, for me, I think you should start out with the lightest schedule you can imagine and we’ll work up from there.’
‘Beginning tomorrow?’
‘That’s right. I’d like to have a little time to myself just now. No calls, no interruptions. Say, half an hour, and then I’d like to see Messrs Ralston and Carstairs. D’you think you could arrange that?’
She glanced at her watch. ‘They come on at four. I could send them straight up.’
‘That’s would be fine. What’s my title here again?’
‘Security Controller.’
‘Just tell them that the new Security Controller wants to see them. No explanation, no name. OK?’
She smiled, apparently enjoying the notion, and left, no doubt to plan what she considered a light program. I waited until the door was closed before taking off my jacket and draping it over the back of the chair. The air-conditioning kept the room at a comfortable temperature for any kind of dressing. Whether it was any good for thinking I didn’t know. Marie had given me a set of keys and I unlocked the top of the big filing cabinet that stood against the wall opposite my desk. It held a few thin files scattered among the divisions in the first drawer. The other drawers were empty. No problem to shift, even for a man with a crook arm.
I dropped a telephone directory on the floor, rocked the filing cabinet and slid the directory under it. I crouched and slid my hand into the gap. My fingers closed over the spiral binding of a notebook and I pulled it out. I restored things to normal and took the book back to my desk. Scott’s writing wasn’t neat but his notes were legible. The first dozen or so pages dealt with the Cornwall and Roberts cases. As I’d expected- records of interviews and telephone conversations, dates and times, scribbled phone and fax numbers, addresses and tentative conclusions. He kept a running account of his expenses and several receipts and dockets were stapled to the pages. Good work, conscientiously carried out. Full marks.
Two blank leaves followed and then the pages were written on again, more than a dozen of them. The only trouble was that every single word was written in Italian. My Italian is virtually nonexistent-limited to ordering certain items of food and drink and odd phrases picked up from books and the movies. Knowing Scott, these notes were probably filled with Sicilian slang and shorthand expressions and his own brand of abbreviations.
I flicked through the pages and could distinguish only words like ‘casino’, ‘Sydney Casinos’, and names like ‘Cartwright’, ‘Kemp’, ‘Anderson’. There have to be other names, I thought and I looked carefully for them, examining each page as if the meaning of the words might miraculously become clear to me. It didn’t and I had to conclude that if other names were mentioned, they were entered in some kind of code.
The intercom buzzed and I shoved the notebook in a drawer and pressed the button.
‘Mr Carstairs and Mr Ralston are here, sir.’
‘Send them in.’
I was standing when the pair entered, both looking apprehensive. Honest employment in their line of work is hard to come by in a recession. Both did a double-take when they saw me.
‘Jesus,’ Carstairs said.
Ralston groaned. ‘Fuck me. This is the sack, then?’
Both wore neat suits, were well-groomed and bright-eyed. But it’s my belief that most of the evil in the world is perpetrated by men in suits. ‘I don’t think so, boys,’ I said. ‘Have a seat and let’s talk’
Stocky Carstairs unbuttoned his jacket as he sat down. Skinny, balding Ralston looked the more uptight. He sat and fingered his moustache.
‘As far as I’m concerned you two were just doing your job last night. Did it pretty well, too. If I’d known this was coming up,’ I waved at the office, ‘I’d have offered you some money to lay off me. Just to see your reaction.’
Ralston stiffened and I remembered where I’d seen him before. He’d been a Homicide detective back in the days before they split up the special squads. Fatter then and with more hair. I couldn’t remember the case or what our contact had been like. I wondered if he did.
‘We’d have knocked you back,’ Carstairs said. ‘Happens all the time. The job’s too good to risk it for something like that.’
I nodded, swivelled around and opened the bar fridge. I took out three stubbies of Toohey’s Draught and put them on the desk. I opened them and slid two towards Ralston and Carstairs.
‘Let’s have a drink to get this on a friendly footing.’
Carstairs reached for his bottle but Ralston shook his head. ‘Not allowed to drink on duty.’
I said ‘Cheers’ and drank. ‘Like when you were on the force, Mr Ralston.’
He nodded, ‘I remember you, too, Mr Hardy.’
‘We didn’t have any trouble did we?’
‘No.’
‘OK. You don’t have to drink if you don’t want to, but this isn’t any kind of a test. I’m the boss here for a while and if I say you can drink, you can drink.’
‘Right.’ Carstairs took a long swig.
Ralston gazed at the open bottle with burning eyes and I saw his whole history in that look. The lost weight, the precise movements, the raw nerves, the restrained emotions. Poor bastard. He was a dried-out drunk and I felt sorry for putting temptation in his way. I took a bottle of mineral water out and passed it across to him, sliding the beer towards Carstairs.
He took it gratefully and drank.
‘How did you get along with Galvani?’
The bad moment, the worst of moments, having passed for him, Ralston relaxed a little. ‘He was shaping up well. Bright bloke. Bit young for it maybe. Len had his doubts, but I thought he was ok.
‘His mind wasn’t on the job,’ Carstairs said. ‘Simple as that. He did what he had to do and did it pretty well, but he could’ve been a bloody sight better if he’d given it a hundred per cent.’
I drank some more beer and Carstairs did the same. Ralston sipped at his drink. ‘He was still working on a couple of cases from before taking over here. I’m afraid I’ll be doing the same.’
‘More to it than that, I’d say.’ Carstairs drained his stubby.
‘Either of you got any ideas on who killed him, or why?’
‘What is this, Hardy?’ Ralston burst out. ‘Are you really the boss here, or just investigating Galvani’s death?’
‘Easy, Keith,’ Carstairs murmured.
‘Good question,’ I said. “The answer is both, and I want some help from you two. Help me with this and I’ll give you a very big rap to the bloke who takes over from me.’
The two exchanged nods and Carstairs reached for the second bottle while Ralston worked on his moustache and the mineral water.
‘I spotted someone last night-a short, dark guy getting into a silver-grey Mercedes outside. This was when I was leaving. I only got a glimpse of him and I didn’t get a good sight of the licence plate-KI, might have been an F or an E, and there was a zero in the numbers.’
‘Not much to go on,’ Ralston said. ‘You couldn’t run an RTA computer check on that.’
‘I know. But does it ring any bells?’
Carstairs made a movement as if to loosen his tie, but he checked it. It was odds-on he was an ex-cop, too. He had a lot of the moves. ‘Shit, Mercs are like fleas on a dog around here, and dark, stocky guys’re about the same. Still, we can keep an eye out, right, Keith?’
Ralston nodded. He looked worried and I wondered if that was just a facet of his battle with the booze or if another talk with him might pay dividends. A 4 p.m. start was ideal for someone in his condition-it’d get him past the six o’clock horrors and with any luck leave him tired enough to sleep when he knocked off. I thanked them both for their cooperation and they got up and moved towards the door. Carstairs buttoned his jacket and swung around with his hand just touching the knob. Another old cop trick. ‘That woman with the Beretta…’
‘She won’t be around.’
He nodded and I could see that he was looking at the fresh scratch on my face, trying to read something into it. He and Ralston trooped out, looking a lot more comfortable than when they had come in. That was good. They were allies of a kind, and I needed all the support I could get. Carstairs’ appraisal prompted me to consider my quick answer and led to the thought that Vita Drewe could be one of those women who harassed and pursued those who had offended them-made late night phone calls, heaved bricks through car windows, poisoned pets. I might have deserved it, but I didn’t need it, not now.