I put the files under my arm and left the office. I could hear a soft clicking coming from behind Vita Drewe’s door. I approached it cautiously. I had met her a couple of times and felt I’d lost ground and credibility with each meeting. She was a tall, cranelike creature who favoured collarless shirts, weskits, jeans and Doc Martens. Gina Galvani had nothing to fear from her-she had a large framed photograph of a very soulful Virginia Woolf on her office wall-a certain sign of sexual orientation. The first time I met her, introduced by Scott when she delivered him some typing, she told me that working part-time for a PEA was amusing but sharing a room with two of them was oppressive. I thought she was joking.
‘She’s not,’ Scott told me. ‘She believes men deliberately contrive situations to outnumber women. Especially macho men like you and me.’
‘You, macho?’
‘Laugh if you will. It gets tricky.’
It got tricky the next time I was there. She had another woman with her in Scott’s office, making it pretty crowded. She was trying to persuade Scott to do something for this woman, gratis. Scott was resistant. My arrival broke up the gathering although as far as I could see the numbers were even. I made a remark to this effect and got a visual broadside from Vita that I could still remember. That was months ago. I tapped at her door, cautiously, as I say.
‘Come.’
Interesting choice of word. I opened the door and stepped in. She was staring at a screen as her fingers flicked over the keys. Normal enough, except that she was standing up, and the remote control keyboard was sitting on top of a bookcase at waist height. She inclined her long, narrow head at a chair that just fitted into the available space. Somehow it seemed wrong to sit and I closed the door behind me and leaned back against it. She looked annoyed. Her fingers became a blur and she completed whatever she was doing. The screen froze.
‘Yes?’
‘Do you remember me, Miss Drewe?’
‘Ms. The face, yes. The name, no.’
‘I’m Cliff Hardy, a friend of Scott’s and in the same line of work. I’d like to talk to you about him if you have a minute.’
‘Oh, yes. God, that poor man. Come in. Shit, you’re already in. Typical.’
‘You asked me in. Would you mind… why are you standing up to work like that?’
‘Woman are constantly being put in subservient situations. I do this to remind myself of that fact. I may be working for men, but I don’t have to be bowing my head to do it. I notice you elect not to sit, Mr Hardy. How come?’
I could hear an American twang in her voice, making it harder to judge whether or not she was serious. ‘I’m not staying long, that’s why. I just wanted to ask you whether you saw Scott very much around the time he was killed.’
‘Why?’
‘For God’s sake, he was my friend and…’
‘Don’t get abusive. Stop threatening me.’
‘I’m not threatening you, Ms Drewe.’
‘You’re lying to me. That’s a kind of threat.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You wouldn’t just turn up here out of the blue, throwing your weight around and asking me questions. There must be a reason.’
I stared at her; her brown hair was strained back like a ballerina’s; her eyes were dark and searching and her nose was slightly beaky. She was attractive in an off-beat style, and she wasn’t stupid. I slid sideways, sat in the chair and shuffled, trying to find room for my feet. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. Let’s start this again. Scott’s wife wants me to investigate his death. She isn’t satisfied with what the police have done and she feels a need to do something herself. I understand that and I want to help her as far as I can. I hope you’ll be willing to talk to me for a while about Scott. I believe you liked him.’
She smiled and the effect on her face was dramatic, opening it up, making her features more generous and seeming to dissipate the pent-up reproachfulness. ‘Well, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Telling the truth and treating me like a fully fledged human being? I like Gina. What happened must be terrible for her. I’ll be happy to help you.’
‘Thank you.’
I was off-balance now and tipped further by her getting up and lifting her drawstring bag from the floor. She wore a cluster of bracelets on her right arm, pushed up beyond her wrist. She released them, one by one. ‘You can take me out for a coffee. I can work without coffee and cigarettes, but I can’t talk without them.’
By agreement, we walked down Norton Street to the Bar Napoli, one of my favourite places. In her Doc Martens, she wasn’t much shorter than me, and she had a long, loping stride. She was dressed exactly right for the weather in jeans, singlet and unbuttoned, loose cotton shirt. As usual, I was hot inside my lightweight suit. I juggled the folders and peeled off the jacket. She ordered a caffe latte and lit up a Kent. ‘This is one of the few places where you can smoke and not feel as if you’re giving everybody AIDS or something. OK, now, Gina’s right when she criticises the police. One of them talked to me for about, like, half a minute, and his questions were so dumb I didn’t give them memory space.’
I sipped my long black, wished passionately for a cigarette, fought it down and pulled out my notebook. ‘Who was that?’
She was a serious smoker. The Kent was half gone in a few drags and she pulled it all down into her lungs before letting some of it go. She tapped off a long ash and stared at the travel posters on the wall as if seeking inspiration in scenes of Tuscany. She shook her head. ‘Forget the name, if he gave it. Sorry. Not the boss. There were two of them. Sergeant something-biggish, about your size and build but with darker hair, less grey. The one who talked to me was much younger, fair and slim, well-combed, smelled good, no doubt suppressing his femininity like mad.’
I scribbled that down. ‘Much younger’ and the reference to the grey hair was a bitter pill to swallow, but she hadn’t meant it maliciously. I felt very much on my mettle, keen not to make my questions as dumb as the coppers’ had been. “What did you think about Scott taking the job at the casino?’
She drank some coffee, snuffed out the cigarette and immediately lit another. ‘Hey, you’ve surprised me. Congratulations. I’m thinking, like, he’s just another walking prick with slightly better manners than most, and you come up with a real question.’
I was careful not to preen. ‘So, what’s the answer, Ms Drewe?’
‘Vita, OK? I thought it was right for him. A one-year contract, what’s the harm? I’m all for change and variety-in everything. Like, you might think I’m just this typewriter dyke, two hundred words a minute, right? But I’ve white-watered the Colorado River and been a mountain guide in New Zealand and culled deer in Tasmania.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Impressed? Good. People underestimate people all the time. It’s one of the world’s biggest problems. I don’t think I can help you very much. The police were schmucks, not interested. Scott was real pleased about the casino job. He was getting a little pissed at working out of that office and making peanuts, well, mostly.’
‘Did he confide in you?’
‘Sure. Faithful-to-his-wife kinda guy, he felt safe with me. Couple of times he had trouble paying me on time. He was embarrassed, you know? A power situation that was running against him. Scott loosened up some when I explained to him what was happening.’
‘OK, Vita. Good. Did the police take anything away from Scott’s office?’
‘Not unless they’re sleight of hand experts. I watched real close. They just searched through the stuff, kinda uninterestedly. You know the difference between uninterested and disinterested?’
‘I… I think so.’
‘Shoot, then. Say, you’re on expenses, right?’
I nodded, rehearsing my answer to the question.
‘Make sure you get a receipt for the coffees. I’ll have a cappuccino now.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘Let’s hear it.’
I went to the counter and ordered. Her mannerisms and attitude were beginning to annoy me. I sat down and fanned her smoke out of my face. ‘Disinterested means you haven’t got a personal investment in the outcome, uninterested means you don’t give a shit. Do you know where Scott kept his notebook?’
She squashed out her cigarette, pushed the ashtray away and dropped the packet and lighter into her bag. Then she gave me the face-transforming smile again. ‘That’s enough of that for now. Don’t want you to think I’m an addict. I really think we could get along, you know? But you’d have to show a whole lot more confidence in me.’
I was off-balance again. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You’re nice, but slow. I want to help you. I feel guilty, too. I advised him to take the job, for Chrissakes. I fucking sold it to him. I like casinos, did I mention that? No? Well, I have more going on in here than I can get out. I like to dress up in the sequins and silk and throw money away. It’s a buzz. I told him to go for it, and now he’s dead. Dead at thirty-one’s the pits. I’m thirty, how old’re you, Cliff?’
‘Older, where’s this going?’
‘I’m not sure. Where do you want it to go?’
‘Towards finding out why Scott died. I wouldn’t expect to get much further with it than that.’
‘A pragmatist. OK. I can buy that. I don’t know where his notebook is. Hey, have you got a card?’
I decided then that she was seriously unstable, someone to be humoured. I took out a card and put it on the table. She flicked it up with her long, slender fingers and replaced it with one of her own. I hadn’t seen where her card had come from.
‘Thanks. Surprised, huh? Conjuring’s another one of my talents. Take the card.’
I picked it up and put it in my shirt pocket. Despite the fans cooling the heated air in the cafe and keeping it moving, the shirt was sticking to me. I was suddenly aware of a nervous sweating and an urgent need for some alcohol. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Thank you, and I think that’s all I need for now.’
‘You’re full of it,’ she said. She reached out a long, thin, lightly tanned arm and rapped her knuckles on the file folders I’d put on the table. ‘Tell me about these.’
For all the irritation I felt, for some reason I didn’t want to part company with her. I pushed the files across. ‘Preliminary stuff. Do you happen to remember the clients?’
She flipped through the files. ‘Nope. I very rarely saw any. Mostly I just typed up his reports.’
‘I saw them. Terrific typing, better expression than I’d have expected from Scott, too.’
She smiled. ‘Yeah, well, I finessed them a little. Sometimes. He was no John Updike. You read Updike?’
‘I’m not up to date.’
‘The Rabbit books are the great American novel, I’m telling you. Fun name isn’t it-Updike? Hah! Weird you can’t find his notebook. It wasn’t on him when he got shot?’
‘I haven’t checked but I don’t think so. He was in a different job, after all.’
‘Not necessarily. He came in to the office a few times after he got the casino job, and it wasn’t just to pick up mail. He had that redirected I think. Hey, I remember now. He came in one night as I was quitting. I tried to get him to buy me a drink but he wouldn’t.’ She banged the side of her head, quite hard. ‘How could you forget that, dummy?’
‘Was he alone? What did he do?’
She held up a hand and the bracelets slid back over her bony wrist onto her forearm. ‘Hold on. I’m like trying to recall it scene by scene. I was coming out of the building and he was going in. Hurrying. He was carrying something. Papers, no, a folio, something like that.’
‘You didn’t tell the police about this?’
‘I didn’t tell myself. I was tired, plus it was my fasting day. You move into some strange spaces at times like that. It’s only just coming back now.’
‘How did he seem?’
‘I smelled his sweat. He was a clean guy. He was definitely upset. I was flirting with him a bit, the way we did, but he didn’t put anything out. Real cold. I remember thinking that his wife might be around so I glanced at the car… Shit!’
‘Yes?’
She kept her eyes focused on a point somewhere above my head and moved like an automaton, dipping into her bag and coming up with the packet of Kent and the lighter. She lit a cigarette. I moved my head slightly so that the cloud of smoke wouldn’t envelope me. Her head was rigid and she blew the smoke straight at that focus point. ‘I can see him,’ she said. ‘He was sitting in the car. Real still.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. Some guy. Small, dark, maybe. There wasn’t much light’
It was like talking to a medium, trying to get in contact with the dead. Quite unconsciously I spoke in a hushed, sepulchral tone, aware that some of the other patrons were beginning to stare at us. ‘Would you recognise him again?’
‘I sure would!’
The emphatic words seemed to jerk her from the trance. She laughed nervously, drew on the cigarette and missed the ashtray as she tried to flick off the inch of ash. ‘How about that? Vita the woman of mystery-I actually hypnotised myself. First time. You’re a restful man, Cliff, in your uptight way.’
‘When was this, Vita?’
‘It was just two nights before he died.’