I hadn’t liked finding the body. It was under the house in a spot which the foundations and the hot water pipes had made as dry as the desert. It was shrunken and mummified by the dryness, and when I pulled her out the woman looked more like a leather, laboratory specimen than someone who had laughed and drunk and made love.
Rosa Torielli had done all of those things in good measure, and there were still some faded shreds of the clothing she’d done them in clinging to the corpse. A crumbling fragment of lilac silk, a silver thread.
The house was one of a hundred in a street in Lilyfield-weatherboard up on high, brick foundations-and I’d traced Rosa there through a series of interviews with landlords and boarders and drinkers that seemed to stretch on without end. But it had ended, and the de facto husband who’d put her under the house had ended his life in prison. All neat and tidy-a Cliff Hardy Investigations special.
Tony Torielli had hired me to find his mother, and as he’d especially applied for the job in the US Consulate in Sydney to look for her and had saved money for the work, I was glad I’d found her. Torrielli had been taken back to the States by his father, who was Rosa’s third or fourth husband, and he was as American as cherry pie.
‘That was fine work, Mr Hardy. I sure am obliged to you.’ We were in a pub near my office in the Cross and he was holding his glass carefully so as not to spill anything on his light grey three piece suit.
‘I’m sorry it turned out so grim’, I said. It hadn’t, for me. I had his cheque in my pocket covering my modest daily rates and the expenses racked up on the road and in the boozers.
‘Fine work.’ He bought another round, drank half of his Scotch and left. I finished his drink along with mine, and wondered what he’d do with the knowledge that his mother was a good-time girl who probably hadn’t given him a second’s thought since his dad took off home.
My next two jobs flowed from the Torrielli case by recommendation. The first was a simple bodyguarding of a very rich and very nervous visitor to Sydney from Las Vegas. The second started when the biggest man I’d ever seen knocked on my office door on the hottest day in Sydney since they started keeping records. The temperature hit thirty around 9 o’clock in the morning, and kept climbing. His knock shook the door so hard I thought the heat might be expanding the old building and splitting it like a paper bag.
I bellowed ‘Come in’, to show that I was half an inch over six feet, 170 pounds and used to having sledge hammers hit my door.
He opened the door very gently and ducked his head the way he must have been doing since he was fourteen. If he said he was six ten you wouldn’t have argued with him, and if he was lighter than 240 pounds it would only have been by a glass of beer or two. I stood slowly as if the size of him had pushed me up on a beam balance.
‘Nice to see you’, I said. ‘Take whatever you want, say whatever you like, spit on the floor.’
‘Tony Torrielli said you were tougher than’, he said. ‘Said you had to be heavy with some people when you were lookin’ for his mom.’
‘I write my own reports’, I said. ‘Sometimes I use poetic licence.’
‘I’m interested in your licence to investigate. Mind if I sit down?’
‘Try it.’ I waved expressively at the only other chair and sat back down myself. His chair held, but he might have been doing complicated isometrics.
‘I’m Wesley Holt’, he said, ‘engineer’. It came out in a voice that rumbled like a big train in a small tunnel. He used that upward inflection that makes Americans sound uncertain, but I was pretty sure he was Wesley Holt, and if he said he was an engineer that was good enough for me. I nodded intelligently.
‘Came down here to a job in Queensland because I wanted to see my daughter. She came back here after her mother and I split up.’
He told me he’d graduated in 1956 and taken jobs all over the world including the Pacific. He’d met Coralie Burnett from Wahroonga in New Guinea. He lit a cigar, maybe in honour of Coralie. I refused one and opened a window, being a clean-air person these days, but good-mannered about it.
‘Didn’t last’, he said blowing smoke at the windows. ‘Year and a half and she was back here in Sydney with the kid.’
‘Didn’t like the tropics?’ My ex-wife Cyn hadn’t cared for them: I’d taken her to Fiji on a half-business, half-pleasure trip, and it had been a full-time hell: one mosquito bite and she turned red, two and patches of her hide developed the texture of half-cooked porridge.
‘Loved New Guinea’, he said. ‘Hated me. I was a wild guy in those days-booze, broads and work, that was me. Coralie was smart, I don’t blame her.’
‘This is about the daughter then?’
‘Yup. Diane. I’ve only seen her a couple of times and not for the last five years. I’ve got a whole bunch of pictures though.’ He pulled out a fat wallet that had compartments and divisions like a brief case. He rifled for a minute then pushed a photograph across the desk.
‘Bright kid’, he said. ‘Cleaned up everything in school here last year. She was supposed to go to university in Sydney this year.’
The photograph distracted me from what he was saying; the image was of a big, young woman who looked fully endowed with brains, good looks and life itself. A blond with a face that was all eyes, cheekbones and mouth: it was a candid shot, she was sitting in a chair, waving her hands and talking. It would be hard to imagine anyone within view not looking and listening.
‘Which one?’ I said. ‘Which university?’
‘There’s more than one?’
‘Three’, I said, but I knew which one he meant; the old one, the one with ivy and tradition, the one I hadn’t dropped out of.
‘Law school’, he said. ‘Going straight into law school. Sounds funny to me, but I was looking forward to talking to her about it. We wrote each other plenty, I felt like I knew her, sort of…’
‘What happened?’
He squashed out his half-smoked cigar in the little ashtray on my desk, and sighed. Just for an instant, with the breath leaving him, he seemed oddly vulnerable. ‘Her mother died last year, cancer. Di was real cut up when she sat those exams. I wanted to come out for the funeral and all, but I couldn’t get away. I wrote that I’d get work here so that I’d be around, she seemed real pleased.’
‘Did your wife marry again?’
He shook his head emphatically. ‘Never got divorced, one of those things. Di moved in with a girlfriend after Coralie died. She was going to live in college she said-a scholarship, that right?’
I nodded. ‘You keep saying what was going to happen-what did happen?’
‘I got here early December, soon as I could. She’d been gone a week when I arrived.’
‘Gone where?’
‘To the States, would you believe it? She took off with some kid to California and here I am stuck, just locked in up there in Queensland for the first eight weeks solid.’
He’d used his American connections to make the initial trace. Diane Holt had US citizenship and a passport from a trip to New Caledonia she’d made with her mother. She left Australia on Pan Am bound for San Francisco on 27 November at half past five in the afternoon. She had a cabin bag and a light suitcase which had been carried for her by one Vincent Harvey.
‘He’s Australian’, Holt said. ‘Graduate student at Stanford, that’s…’
‘I know, university in California. Felix Keesing, anthropology, Roscoe Tanner and McEnroe, tennis. Does Di play tennis?’
‘Sure, plays everything.’ He pulled a sheaf of papers from the pocket that hadn’t held the wallet. ‘All I know about him and some stuff about her is right here.’ He gave me the papers and wiped a hairy arm across his face. ‘Shit, it’s hot.’
We coped with that in the saloon bar of the big hotel down the street where Holt was staying. He said he was a retired drinker but he must have been title-holder in his day: I drank light beer and he had beer with whisky chasers.
Holt had used Raymond Evans’ agency to do the basic digging on Diane, her mother and Harvey, and I was impressed with the results. We had a straight teenager with the usual tastes and habits and no shadows, until the six months of her mother’s illness came along. Raymond’s report said: ‘Ms Holt appears to have moved into a kind of top gear when she learned of her mother’s cancer. By all reports she worked extremely hard at her studies and alternated periods of intense nursing with heavy socialising. Drink amp; drugs-moderate amp; experimental; sex probable (see Harvey, V.); politics-radical; criminality-negative.’
Harvey had taken a B A in history and psychology and an MA in sociology at the University of Sydney. He’d done his course work for his Stanford PhD on ‘Advertising, the media and opinion formation in Australia’ and when he carried Di Holt’s suitcase at Mascot he was going back to write up his fieldwork for the dissertation. Raymond reported that Harvey had met Diane Holt when he was interviewing the father of one of her school friends who owned an advertising agency.
I tapped the papers and forced down some more beer. ‘This is good work’, I said. ‘But I think you might need a California man on it now.’
‘Tried that’. Holt said. ‘San Francisco private eye found out Harvey had dropped out of Stanford. Big deal. Said he couldn’t find Australians, charged me high.’
‘Jesus. Did he call himself a private eye?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Must be the fog. Still…’
He broke in impatiently. ‘I’m a Stanford man myself, got a friend on the faculty there. He tells me this Harvey has gone political-makes speeches on the campus time to time.’
‘Radical polities’, I said tapping the papers again.
‘Yeah, beats me. I just figure it might be best for an Aussie to talk to them and find out what the hell’s going on.’
‘Why didn’t Raymond handle it?’
‘He recommended you.’
And that was how I came to be on Flight 532 out of Sydney for San Francisco via Honolulu. I had a visa which would allow me to go in and out of the US as often as I liked for the next five years. It sounded like a threat. I watched ‘Chariots of Fire’ for the third time and admired the way they gave you two of the cute little bottles when you ordered a gin and tonic. I didn’t eat any of the food which was all the colour of raw liver. I read The White Hotel on the second leg of the flight, and couldn’t sleep afterwards.
It was raining in San Francisco and the cable cars were out of operation being overhauled, but it was Sunday and a lot of the city was working, and that was novel. I checked into a Fisherman’s Wharf motel and caught up on some of the lost sleep. After a shave and shower I went out and bought some of the Gallo Chablis I’d been reading about for years in American novels. I also bought a turkey and avocado sandwich big enough to choke Phar Lap and went back to the motel to review the case. The wine was fine, a bit fruity; the label said it was 12 per cent alcohol and I confirmed that with a few solid belts. The sandwich was excellent-survival in these foreign parts was assured. The thinking didn’t take long; the only lead I had was to Stanford University in Palo Alto. Twelve per cent is an assertive wine-I had another nap.
It was well into Monday when I presented my international driving permit and American Express card at Hertz and took possession of a red Pinto. The freeway to Palo Alto wasn’t any worse than the Sydney versions and the low, exhaust-blasted structures along the road looked like Haberfield with a dash of Barcelona. Since the energy crisis hit they’ve dropped the speed limit and everyone drives slowly to save petrol. They were forgiving about my hesitations and sudden surges of doubt about the automatic transmission and which side of the road to travel on.
I put on dark sunglasses and blinked a lot and told myself that Palo Alto with its gum trees and ordered streets was nothing like Canberra. I drove cautiously onto the Stanford campus, learning that here joggers and cyclists rule.
At Students’ Records a bored woman with a lot of gold chains round her neck told me that Vin Harvey had not enrolled for the new quarter. When I asked why not, she got sly and started demanding ID. I left after getting a squint at the address on the VDT screen-72 Manzanita Park. I located it on a campus map. and walked there dodging the bikes. It was an eye-opener amidst the affluence. Low cost student housing covering an acre or so. The buildings, box-like, pale cream corrugated iron jobs were like beached whales. I felt a wall and judged it to be more tin than iron. The layout reminded me of the army and the atmosphere reminded me of caravan parks at home where I’d gone looking for people who couldn’t afford to hide anywhere else.
Number 72 was no different from the others except that it had a poster on the outside advertising the delights of the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Pasted to the rippled surface the picture of the boardwalk and the sea had a disjointed, chaotic look. There was also a poster for a recent on-campus Grateful Dead concert, but there were plenty of those around.
A tall, stringy black youth answered my knock. He wore a light grey track suit and sneakers and he bounced just standing there in the doorway.
‘I, ah, was hoping you might know something about Vincent Harvey.’
‘Who was hoping?’
‘Name’s Hardy, from Australia.’ I pulled out the investigator’s licence and was just balanced and quick enough to avoid the kick he aimed at my head. I stepped back and he came after me, leaping with the hands out ready to smash me down. The leap took him through the doorway but left him a bit close to the wall; I used the space I had to push him into it, hard. He hadn’t learned coming-off-walls and I showed him lesson one which is to avoid going-into-the-same-wall-again. Lesson two is much the same and it can go on until someone gets tired. He did.
‘All right’, he gasped, ‘you’re bruising me.’
‘Truce’, I said. ‘Parley.’
‘Okay.’ He got to his feet and I watched all of him carefully.
‘Why did you do that?’
‘For practice. You guys are supposed to be on guard at all times aren’t you? It’s hard to find anyone on guard.’
‘Shit.’ I stuffed my hands down tight into the pockets of my jeans. ‘I am officially off guard-all right?’
‘Sure. You’re good man, what was that you wanted to know?’
‘About Vin, my compatriot.’
He nodded and ushered me straight into a room which was like a good-sized motel room, except that it had a bookcase, which I’ve never seen in a motel.
‘Beer?’ He bent to the door of a compact fridge which fitted in between the bookcase and the stereo system.
‘Thanks.’ He handed me a can which had more pictures on it than a Walton’s catalogue. Coors didn’t seem like much of a name for a beer, but it was good. He watched me as I took the first sip.
‘Terrific’, I said.
‘That’s what Vin thought.’
‘Good man is he?’
‘Was.’
‘And you are…?’
‘Percy Holmes.’ He flexed a bicep and jutted his jaw. ‘More Holmes than Percy, if you take my meaning.’
‘I do. You know Vin well?’
He scratched his chin and stayed in the squatting position, giving the thighs a work-out. ‘Just because you whipped me doesn’t mean I’ll spill my guts to you. What’s the problem?’
‘I’m not sure.’ I drank some more of the beer and decided it was very good. ‘Diane Holt’s father hired me to find her. You know her?’
He nodded. ‘Sure, a young fox. She was around when Vin came back and pulled outa here. And gave up beer. He was different, like weird.’
I’d seen a photograph of Harvey, courtesy of Raymond Evans. He had dark hair, a short beard and what you might call brooding eyes, but he didn’t look weird.
‘This is nothing heavy’, I said. I waved the nearly empty beer can and tried a smile. ‘Di’s dad seems like a man of the world to me, know what I mean?’
His dark brown brow furrowed. ‘No’, he said.
‘I want to find out if the girl’s okay and what’s happening. I won’t touch Vin or even speak to him in a loud voice unless he’s making her do what she doesn’t want to do.’
He seemed to find that very funny. He let out a short laugh and then a longer one. He reached into the fridge, got out two cans of Coors, tossed one to me and popped the other himself.
‘You got it round the wrong way man. That Di, she’s got him here.’ He gripped his crotch.
We both drank some beer and I started to put together an easy scenario for myself: Australian-raised girl with fantasies about America grabs the first chance she gets to take the trip, rages for a while, gets sick of it and is happy to come back to good old Sydney University with dinkum detective. Then he had to go and complicate it.
‘She wanted to go to Santa Cruz’, Holmes said. ‘That was the place for her, “dreamland”, she called it. They had the biggest fight right here.’
‘Santa Cruz-what’s that?’
‘UC campus-south of here, funky place.’
‘Harvey can’t transfer his PhD there can he?’
He shook his head. ‘No way. Look, I roomed a while with Vin, he’s okay. You sure that’s all straight-just findin’ the chick and all?’
‘Yes.’ I finished the beer to prove it.
‘Okay. Vin, he’s through with the PhD, he says. He says it’s meaningless, I’m not sure why. He’s pretty freaked out, that’s why he put Santa Cruz down so hard. A cop-out he says. He’s into, like anarchy, you know? And the chick wants to hang out in Santa Cruz, shit.’
He seemed to remember that he wasn’t exercising anything at the moment while sitting on the floor. He did some squats, it was time to go before he started shadow-boxing in the confined space.
‘So where did they go?’ I said.
‘San Francisco-where else?’
‘Driving what, Percy? Living where?’
He grinned. ‘Drives a Volkswagen van. Ah’m sorry suh, ah don’t know the number.’
‘Okay, okay, sorry. Do you happen to know where he lives in San Francisco, Mr Holmes?’
‘No, Mr Hardy, I don’t; but you’re in luck, he’s going to be right here tonight.’ He got up and rummaged among papers on top of the bookcase. He handed me a roughly printed notice which said that Harvey would be giving a lecture entitled ‘Owning the Air’ on the subject of the media and politics. The lecture was sponsored by the Stanford Committee for Responsible Social Science and was scheduled for that evening at eight p.m.
‘Will you be there?’
‘Not me. I’ll be playing basketball.’
‘Are you tall enough for basketball?’
‘No, I play for fun.’
I drove back to Palo Alto and found a place called a Creamery in which you could eat and drink and read. I ate a salad, drank a beer and read the San Francisco Chronicle. The food and drink were better than the paper but I did learn that Michael Spinks was defending his cruiserweight title against nobody that afternoon on TV. I asked the kid behind the counter if I could watch it and he nodded and turned on the set mounted high on the wall.
‘Who’s Michael Spinks?’ he said.
‘Brother of Leon.’
I let him bring me another beer while I watched the fight. The beer was fine but Spinks wasn’t so good. His opponent was a dark, chunky guy who looked like a blown-up middleweight and Spinks took about three rounds longer than he should to put him away.
I did the crossword in the paper, had another beer, walked around for a while and filled up with gas. I drove very cautiously; all the cops I’d seen so far wore black uniforms with big guns tucked up high, wicked-looking nightsticks and discontented expressions. Cops have a way of spotting men who are in a similar line of work, and of being nasty to them. I wasn’t licenced to blow my nose in California and I knew what one of those nightsticks in sweaty hands could do to a sensitive man like me.
I gave a boy and his girlfriend a ride to the campus because they looked so forlorn walking. Everyone else was in a car or on a ten-speed cycle. I asked the kid if he was going to the media lecture.
‘Naw’, he said.
‘Freaks’, the girl said
A campus patrol car came alongside and the boy waved insolently at the driver. I swore silently at him but the cop just gunned his motor and cruised past.
‘Pigs’, the girl said. I wondered if they limited themselves to one-word statements. I dropped them near one of the student dormitories; the boy waved, he was a good waver; the girl said ‘Thanks.’
I was a bit late finding the lecture room and I wasn’t ready for Vin Harvey. Evans’ photograph was the sort that would let you recognise someone in the street and not much more. Harvey appeared a dark-haired young man with a heavyish face and a short beard; his eyes were said to be blue and his build was said to be light, but all that did was distinguish him from brown-eyed truck drivers. The man addressing the crowd in the room might have been dark with blue eyes and slight build, but why hadn’t anyone said anything about charisma? He had it. He was tall unless he was standing on a high box and his beard-framed face didn’t look heavy.
He worked at talking-his voice was pleasing with a mid-Pacific accent and he moved his shoulders a little for emphasis. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt and his arms and hands moved like an orchestra conductor’s. I took a seat up at the back of the steeply sloped room and listened.
‘They are not faceless’, Harvey said, ‘never think that. You can see their faces in the business magazines and newspapers they own. Their faces are on the screens, coming at you from the TV stations they own. Then there are the faces of the men and women they own-the lawyers, politicians and newsreaders.’ He suddenly stood quite still and the movement dramatically underlined his words. ‘But more important than the faces are the words.’ His voice went a bit deeper as if concern were forcing it down. ‘Last year, there was a meeting. It was held in Sydney, Australia. All the media corporations had representatives there, the political people, a few of the union people. You’d recognise some of the names if I mentioned them. For public consumption the meeting was to organise aid for the under-privileged of the Pacific. That’s a hell of a lot of people and for all I know they might get some water to villages in the Philippines. But the real talks, the ones the journalists didn’t get in on, weren’t about water-they were about direct access to your minds.’
The room was very quiet and still, everyone was listening and I had to jerk my attention away to check the audience. When I’d been bored rigid in my law lectures twenty years before I used to count all the people in the room. That’s why I’d sit up the back with the widest view I could command. Then I’d split them up into groups: sex, rebels, conformists. It passed the time, and I sometimes did bad sketches of people who took my eye. The old habit re-surfaced and, as Harvey went on, I found myself sketching.
‘At that meeting they agreed to experiment with subliminal advertising and propaganda through TV. A couple of scientists there had been researching it for years.’ He paused. ‘They can make you believe things and disbelieve things, they can make you angry or passive.’ For the first time he lifted the volume. ‘They can tune you like a TV set, and they’re doing it right now.’
One sketch showed two men sitting together near the front. They had an air of forced casualness as if the denim shirt of one and the T-shirt of the other weren’t their normal dress.
The T-shirt one made a tie-straightening movement twice and the other plucked at the hair which sat on top of his ears. The T-shirt was taking shorthand notes.
My second drawing was of a young woman with blonde hair pulled back into a frizzy pony tail. She was in the front row and stared up at Harvey as if she was trying to count the pores in his nose. I caught the glint of a gold chain around her neck above the creased and stained collar of the shirt that had DO IT printed on it in big red letters on dirty grey. End of the road, I thought, but it didn’t feel like that, not with her looking at Harvey like that and the other two keeping a record and with him saying what he was saying.
‘I have tapes from that meeting and photographs of the participants.’ He held up his hands, palms out. ‘Not here, not any one place for very long. It moves, like the rockets in the silos, or did they decide not to move them? Or did they decide not to decide? Or not to tell you whether they decided? One thing’s sure, they won’t tell you the truth.’
He had them all now-the blacks and the whites, the students and the faculty. He went on spelling out the details of the nastiness and I surveyed the audience again. Sitting next to Diane Holt were three guys who looked a little like cleaned-up Hell’s Angels. They had that same air of being there for the beer, and ready for trouble. One was prematurely bald, the other two were fair, they looked middling-tough. Next to them was a dark Hispanic character I dubbed the Dark Stranger. He wore dark blue clothes, was slim and looked very tough indeed.
‘You can do something’, Harvey was saying, ‘you can refuse to read their papers, you can turn off the tube and tell them so at ratings time. You can stop putting classifieds in the papers and you can protest against people who do advertise. There are lots of ways to do that. But there’s a bigger and better protest you can mount, a protest that can be immediately and massively effective. If you’ve been convinced by what I’ve said tonight you’ll want to be part of it; and I’m sorry for this, but you’re going to have to wait. I’ll tell you soon about it, real soon, and I’ll tell you in San Francisco where it’s going to happen. Be there! Goodnight.’
The muscle moved fast, they were up and blanketing Harvey before anyone else moved. The T-shirt put away his shorthand pad and sat still. I moved as fast as I could but Harvey and Diane Holt and the minders were getting into a Volkswagen van by the time I got out. I couldn’t walk up to him and say I was taking his sheila back to Bondi, I couldn’t do anything. My car was a mile away. One of the boys handed a bundle of paper down to someone in the crowd and then the van groaned and choked itself into life. As it churned away I saw the two men in disguise follow it in a dark Buick that made hardly any noise at all.
The bundle turned out to be a roughly printed handbill for an ‘event’ in San Francisco in three days time. The message was a little vague but the faithful were urged to be at Golden Gate Park at noon. I took one of the sheets back to a motel in Palo Alto where I drank most of a six-pack of Coors and watched ‘Guns of the Magnificent Seven’ which had none of the panache of the original.
I started early the next day, driving back to San Francisco, checking into a cheap hotel on Sutter Street and surrendering the Pinto because I knew I’d be spending money and wanted to make it stretch. I bought a. 38 Smith amp; Wesson at a place I’d been told about, where the only credentials they care about have numbers on them and fold easily. Then I bought an imitation leather holder and a star that looked so real I felt like going out and eating a couple of steaks and drinking a lot of beer.
Instead, I went to the Goldwasser Printing Shop, the name of which had been stamped in small letters on the handbill. I found it on my tourist map and walked there-more economising. The print shop was jammed in at the back of a supermarket and accessible only from the lane behind. It had a furtive air, but that might have been because it still used ink and moving machinery instead of fancy photography. As I went up the narrow wooden stairs I could hear the thin sound of a pinched cough from the printshop-that was good. I wasn’t feeling at all physical and the morning fog had brought me close to coughing myself.
He was dark, small and stooped from bending over his work. He straightened up as far as he could and peered at me over his half-glasses.
‘Yeah?’
I put the handbill down on the cluttered bench where it became about the millionth piece of paper.
‘So?’
‘I want to know who you did it for.’
‘Who wants to know?’
I let him see the gun in its holster when I got out the shield which I flapped open and shut in front of him. It made a flip-flop sound like thong sandals on cement.
‘Trouble?’
‘Not for you. No dirty words, no pictures. Who was the customer?’
‘You talk funny.’
‘I used to be a tennis player, we pick this talk up from the Aussies.’
He reached for a rag he had hanging out his back pocket, wiped his hands and took a few shuffling steps across to an old grey filing cabinet under the dusty window. The boards creaked under his hundred and ten pounds or so, and I wondered how safe it was to have the heavy old press in the room-I was doing fine at feeling like an official.
‘I got it here.’ He held up a docket and I got further into the role by pulling out my notebook and getting set to write.
‘Give me the name and address.’
‘Enquiry fee ten dollars.’
I looked at him for a minute and then got out a ten; he reached and I let him take it while I grabbed the docket. He said ‘Shit’, but the cough started and shut him up. I wrote Pedro Moreno and the address. There was no phone number. I handed the docket back.
‘Thanks.’
‘I think that shield’s a fake’, he said.
I turned back on my way to the door. ‘Do you care?’
He shook his head. ‘Get you a better one.’
The address was in the district up behind the University of San Francisco; I gave it to the taxi driver and asked him what kind of neighbourhood it was.
‘Bo-ho’, he said.
‘Huh?’
‘Kinda slummy but not a jungle. I’ll take you right there. Some places I’d just drop you close.’
We went over some hills and I got glimpses of the water before the next dip snatched it away. The street was a mixture of residential-apartments dating I guessed from the 1920’s, when they re-built after the earthquake-and shops and blank, anonymous buildings whose functions I couldn’t guess at. The number I had was one of the apartment blocks; stucco with grey peeping through the white paint and water-stained from the rusted guttering. I told the cabbie to go on a little.
‘Undercover huh?’ he said as he made change.
‘Mafia.’
He struck his forehead lightly. ‘I shoulda known. Spread to South Africa, eh?’
I didn’t tip him.
Brave men march up to the front door; men in their forties who think it might be interesting to live into their fifties go around the back first. Along the street and down the lane, and we weren’t bo-ho anymore. The back part of the apartment building had been scarred and broken by a fire. Windows were boarded up, woodwork was scorched and charred; and the wooden handrail that had run beside the metal fire escape was gone, leaving the steps naked and dangerous.
I stood behind a car in the lane and looked at the ruin and let the bad feeling creep over me. There was no VW van, but sticking out of an open window on the top floor was a hand. The hand wasn’t stuck out to feel for rain, it wasn’t doing anything.
I went up the fire escape feeling like a tight rope walker without his pole. I had the gun but you use a gun for ballast rather than balance. The back door to the top apartment was half-open and I listened at it for what seemed like an hour. There was nothing to listen to there and nothing down below where the building had been gutted. Up here there were signs of life of a sort, if you count an ashtray brim full of butts on a window ledge inside.
I pushed open the door and walked down the short passageway on broken boards laid like a walkway on top of charred bearers and between water-streaked walls. In the kitchen the water came in through a hose and went out through a hole. The floor was a sea of wine jugs, newspapers and take-away food containers.
In the room at the back I got my first sight of American flies in any number. They had four bodies to swarm over. Two men lay on their faces along one wall. Big pieces of their backs were missing and their T-shirts were gory ruins. The hand sticking out the window belonged to the Dark Stranger; his dark clothes were darker and glistened where the blood had soaked in. He d taken two in the body but had still made it to the window. He and the other pair were neat compared with Vin Harvey: he was lying naked on his back in the middle of the room. He’d been worked on with cigarettes and razor blades. One eye was a black ruin. Thin and bearded he looked like something El Greco might have dreamed up on a bad afternoon. All the fingernails were missing on one hand, and I recognised the object nestling in the congealed blood of his left nostril as a front tooth.
I went over to the window for some air; and after I’d got some and was trying for some more, I heard the dark man speak.
‘Muerto’, he whispered, or something like that.
I bent down, it seemed impossible that he could still be alive.
‘English’, I said, ‘no Spanish’.
‘Ozzie’, he said, like in the Nelsons.
‘That’s right, where’s the girl?’
‘Away. Afortunado.’
‘Harvey told them?’
The movement he made was slight but it looked like a nod. Some blood seeped out of his mouth to join all the blood from everywhere else. The flies buzzed so loudly I had to put my ear down near his mouth.
‘Agua’, he whispered. I knew that much and went out to the kitchen to the hose. I brought it in a throwaway cup that should have been thrown away. His lips were nearly black and the glint in his slitted eyes was from pain. I wet the lips but he couldn’t swallow.
‘Priest?’ I said.
‘Shoot me. I beg you.’
I realised I still had the. 38 in my hand, although I could have been holding it by the barrel for all I knew.
‘Where’s the girl, where did she go?’
‘Shoot.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Shoot’, he breathed.
‘The girl?’ I didn’t mean to make it sound like a condition but maybe it did.
‘Dreamland.’ He’d echoed Percy Holmes. His voice was just a touch stronger, as if it had synched with the last beat of his pulse. There was no need to shoot him.
The smell of the guns was still faintly in the air, the dead were still warm and the vomit around Vin Harvey’s body was fresh. The killing and torturing had happened a few hours ago at most. There was a light dusting of something on the floor near the wall where the two dead men lay. I didn’t touch it and haven’t seen enough of it to be sure, but it looked like heroin. Insurance. The thing could look like a drug dispute, a little extreme maybe.
There wasn’t much else in the place. Every possible hiding place had been ripped apart. Books, notes and manuscripts were torn and there were a couple of piles of ashes. There were student clothes, student food and a little grass. There was a. 22 handgun in the kitchen in a drawer that stuck. Vin Harvey had seriously overmatched himself.
Two things worried me: the poster on the wall in the passageway was the same one I’d seen at Stanford, singing the praises of the Santa Cruz boardwalk. The hit men might make something of that. The second thing was the absence of the third muscle man I’d seen at the lecture. That could mean a lot.
I felt like Bony examining the road and car marks in the dimming light. It wasn’t hard to read: a big oil stain showed where the van usually stood and fresh oil drops showed where it had stood briefly. These led away over the rubber laid down by a car leaving in a hurry.
No one saw me in the apartment or the lane; if they did they decided not to make it their business. I got a taxi back to my hotel, picked up some money and hired another Pinto. I bought a jug of wine with a narrow, drinkable-from neck and a box of oatmeal cookies and set them up carefully on the passenger seat. I studied the map carefully and set out for Dreamland.
After some false turns around Daly City I picked up the Cabrillo Highway which hugs the coast all the way south to Santa Cruz. Along the way Moss Beach and Half Moon Bay were nice names to roll off the tongue and the road had that hopeful, optimistic feel coast roads have. I drove just above the speed limit and drank wine from time to time. I felt more at home when I passed the greyhound track and had some wine and a cookie on the strength of that. A signpost to Bonny Doon amused me more than it should have, and I laid off the wine.
Santa Cruz was quiet; it was after eleven and everyone was inside watching the news about the poisonings and muggings and the fires in the trailer parks. I drove fast along Pacific Avenue down past the back of the Greyhound depot. The town shops were mostly new and or newly appointed and half of them seemed to sell things made of leather. Beach Street was at the end of Front, past the used car yards and the tyre repair place that had been in business since 1937.
It was a wide, palm tree lined boulevard swinging around in front of three quarters of a mile of beach. I drove slowly south past closed cafes, a big parking lot and several motels. The VW van was parked just short of where the road followed a narrow bridge across a creek. I stopped on the other side of the street a block away, and watched. There were a couple of other cars in the street under a high, half-moon and some desultory street lights; but nothing moved. I took the gun out of the glove box, put it in my jacket pocket and walked up to the van. It smelled of oil and food and age but there were no bodies in it.
At this end the boardwalk was given over to a roller coaster and other rides and it was locked up. I went down on to the sand and walked along parallel to the boardwalk wall, looking for a way up. Two men with torches and two dogs were running a metal detector over the sand. It beeped and hummed and they paid me no attention. A set of wooden steps took me up on to the boardwalk where there wasn’t a board in sight; it was a concrete walkway about twenty-five yards wide with the sand on one side and a long row of amusement places on the other-shooting galleries, ice cream parlours, a haunted castle. All closed, all deserted except for the castle which had a drunk sleeping with his back up against the portcullis and a wind bottle clutched to his chest.
I moved quickly, checking the dark recesses. The ferris wheel cast a giant shadow like a spiderweb across the cement and I could hear rats rustling in concealment. The boardwalk ended at a vast amusement parlour which was locked. I jumped down on to the sand and skirted the building which had a high Moorish dome topped by a Gothic turret with a flagpole on top of that. The stars and stripes hung limply in the still air.
Up ahead the pier was like a dark finger against the moonlit sea and sky. I squinted and saw movement on it. I sprinted across the sand dodging the volleyball posts and took the steps up to the wharf three at a time. It was about fifty yards wide with a solid white fence running along both sides. A crane loomed up about halfway out and I saw a public works sign. Then there was a flat, no-cover stretch with patches of light and shade formed by the wharf lights, of which about one in four was burning. I ran, crouched and ducking out of the light. Past a low line of fish cafes and anglers’ needs shops the wharf narrowed to its last stretch which was about seventy-five yards long by twenty-five wide. The water slapped against the pylons and I could hear a strange barking sound further on.
A woman with blonde hair was bending over the end rail looking out west over the dark Pacific. The barking was louder as I got nearer and there was splashing with it. There were some openings in the tarred surface of the pier about ten feet square with waist high post and rail fences around them. At the first opening I found out about the noise: seals were jumping on and off the pylons twenty feet below. At the second opening a man was crouched with a gun resting on the rail; he was sighting along it at the blonde woman’s back.
I moved quickly up behind him and tried to slam the side of his head with my gun butt. He heard me, very late; he fired but the flash went high, he ducked a little and my blow hit him high and glancing. He went ‘oomph’, bent over and shot himself up through the chin. I already had another punch travelling; I pulled it and it turned into a push and he went over the rail. He bounced once on a cross beam and a seal barked and jumped into the water, and then he went in too.
She was standing with her back to the rail, facing America with Australia over her shoulder. I put my gun away and walked forward.
‘Diane Holt?’
She nodded. ‘Are you going to kill me?’
‘No’, I said. I pointed down to the water. ‘But he was.’
The seals which had gone quiet after the big splash, started barking again. Closer up I saw that she had a lot of blood on her face and that she was rigid with fright.
‘Your father sent me. It’s all right.’
‘My father’, she said.
‘Are you hurt?’
She touched her face and looked at the blood. ‘No, I get blood noses when I’m upset.’
I took her arm and brought her away from the rail, we passed the opening and she pointed.
‘What’s that?’
I looked down and saw his gun lying on the tar. I kicked it into the water and a seal barked.
We got back to the van and I told her to take off her blouse and a shoe. She did it like an automaton. I wiped blood from her face with the blouse and her nose started up again and the cotton got well soaked. I put the shoe and the blouse in the VW, muffled up my. 38 and fired a shot into the passenger seat.
She came out of her trance at the sound of the shot. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘We need a mystery here’, I said. ‘We want some people to stop worrying about you. I hope it works.’
She grabbed a bag out of the van and we left Santa Cruz in a hurry.
She filled me in on the drive to San Francisco. Harvey was getting together a big show for his day in the park. He was going to put some of his films on a big screen and play some of his tapes. He was going to name names.
‘Some of the biggest people’, she said. ‘Top people.’
‘Don’t tell me’, I said. ‘Forget them’,
‘I got scared, and I didn’t trust Ramsay. He’s the one… back there. Vin and me had a fight and I split.’
When she came back to the apartment she saw what I’d seen.
‘Pedro was still alive’, I said.
‘I just ran.’
‘It was too late anyway, but he helped me to find you.’
She cried then, deep and long, most of the way to San Francisco airport. She stopped crying and wiped her face.
‘Why did you go to Santa Cruz? That boardwalk looked pretty tacky to me.’
‘It’s innocent’, she said.
She had some clothes in the bag and she cleaned up while I bought her a ticket to Los Angeles where she had an aunt. She was in some kind of shock but there was a strength in her that kept her functioning. She phoned the aunt.
‘Go straight home’, I said. ‘Tomorrow, today, whatever. I’ll cable your dad.’
She nodded, said ‘Thanks’, in broad Australian, and caught the flight.
I sent a wire to Wesley Holt from the hotel and worried about the untidy ends. I worried about things like the muscle man’s car, the clean slug in the VW seat and the tides off the Santa Cruz beach. But there was nothing I could do about any of them.