She was leaning against the peeling plaster wall outside my office and looking only fifty per cent likely to knock on the door. I hurried down the passage towards her, glad that I’d had a shave and that my clothes were more or less clean-business in the private enquiries game was slow; I understand it’s the same in imported limousines and oil shares.
‘Did you want to see me? I’m Cliff Hardy.’ I put a hand out which she shook as she told me her name and then I used it to open the door. Like me, the office was neater than usual; I’d used some of the idle hours I’d had lately to clean things up a bit and I’d even put a bunch of flowers in a vase on top of the filing cabinet. They were starting to droop a bit but still had a few days left in them. She sat in the chair in front of the desk and crossed her legs; they were long, thin legs and the knees jutted up high. She was a long, thin woman in fact, around thirty-five with nice, brown eyes. She wore a plain linen dress and a light beige jacket; like her they were nice, not flashy, maybe even a bit severe.
She shook her head at the cigarettes I offered and came to the point. ‘How honest are you, Mr Hardy?’
‘Moderately’, I said. ‘I believe in moderation in all things.’
She thought that over for a minute and looked at me like a horse buyer inspecting yearlings. As I say, I was clean and a bit tanned from being under-employed; I was also a bit under-weight but that was a plus, surely. ‘What do you charge for being moderately honest?’
It was my turn to inspect the goods. Her clothes and leather shoulder bag weren’t cheap, her short brown hair had been well cut and her teeth were good. ‘A hundred and twenty dollars a day and expenses’, I said. ‘I need a retainer, but that’s negotiable.’
She smiled, her lips were thin, but not too thin. ‘If Lang Hancock walked in you’d charge five hundred a day.’
‘If he walked in I’d walk out. I can’t stand hornrimmed glasses.’
She laughed and I saw a few more good teeth. ‘I hope we can do business. I want to recover something that belongs to me.’
‘What is it?’
‘A painting.’
‘Aha, go on, Miss Woods.’
‘I don’t think you’re taking me seriously.’
‘Maybe I don’t take painting seriously. Please go on.’
She drew in an exasperated breath. ‘All right. I recently split up with a man I’d been living with for a few years. We divided possessions, you know how it is?’
I did; I’d divided everything with Cyn my ex-wife, then she’d divided my share again seventy-five twenty-five. ‘Yeah’, I said.
‘It wasn’t a very friendly parting. Leo took this painting and refuses to give it up. It has a sentimental value for me, and I’ve heard he’s planning to sell it.’
‘Why don’t you buy it, then?’
‘It’s a matter of principle; it’s mine.’ I suppose it was then that I decided that I didn’t like her. There was something frozen and emotionless in her face and maybe the lips were too thin. But life is a struggle, and sometimes you have to prise the jaws apart and say the words that will make people put your name on cheques.
‘I see. What action do you have in mind?’
She mistook my attitude for complicity and leaned forward a bit over the desk. ‘I want you to break into his house and take the painting.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘It means nothing to Leo. He probably wouldn’t even know it had gone.’
‘No.’
She looked at me for a minute and then she shrugged and got up. Suddenly the flowers seemed to be drooping a bit more, and the dust motes in the air swarmed thick in the beams of light that came through the clouded windows. She adjusted the strap of her bag and walked out leaving the door open. I got up, closed the door, and tried to sit the flowers a little more proudly in the vase.
Three days later, as I read in The News, she was dead. She’d been found in her house in Paddington with her head caved in. She was thirty-four and described as an ‘art dealer’. I read the report, and felt vaguely sorry for her, the way you do, and vaguely pleased that I hadn’t taken her on as a client and then I forgot about it. The next day I got a phone call from Detective-Inspector Grant Evans, who manages to be both an old cop and old friend. He told me that my card had been found in Susannah Woods’ bag and asked if I knew anything about her.
‘Yeah’, I said. ‘She came to my office and asked me to look for a painting she’d lost.’
‘What d’you know about painting?’
‘A bit, Cyn was keen on it.’
He grunted. ‘You take the job?’
‘No, out of my depth. Any ideas on who killed her?’
‘Not really, she had this boyfriend, ah… Leo Porter, but he’s in the clear time-wise.’ He read out Porter’s address and number, and I wrote them down. There was a pause in the conversation.
‘Why are you telling me this, Grant?’
I could imagine him sucking in his belly against his belt and poking the flab; Grant tried to balance his moral rectitude against his physical decay and the effort left him unhappy. ‘Well, I haven’t got the time or the manpower for this one, Cliff. She hung around with artists and queers; no one cares. The Commissioner hates artists and queers. I thought I might just throw this to you-apparently this Woods woman had a valuable painting, insured for God knows how much. It’s not over the fireplace just now and the company would like it back. I gather they’re willing to spend a little money. Interested?’
I said I was, and he gave me the name of the man at Hawker Insurance Company-Quentin James.
‘Quentin?’ I said. ‘I bet the Commissioner just loves names like Quentin.’ Grant hung up on me, and since I had the phone in my hand I used it to make an appointment that afternoon to see Mr James.
The insurance company was housed in one of those buildings which make you wonder where the world is going: the floors were made of some substance which was hard, cold and foreign, and it was too dark in the lobby to read the signboards. I got in a lift and found that Hawkers was on the third floor, but by then the lift had shot up to the tenth and I had to ride up to the sixteenth before it came down again. Inside a smoked glass door a woman was sitting perfectly still at a desk. I walked up, and she kept her hands in her lap and only moved the minimum number of muscles for speech. It was a short speech.
‘Yes?’
‘Hardy, to see Mr James.’
She kept her left hand where it was and lifted her right to flick a switch. She repeated what I’d said, adding another Mr. Then she put her hands together again.
‘Down the corridor to your right, Mr Hardy.’ Her head inclined an inch to the right.
I wandered down the passage between the pot plants and the paintings to where a door with a laminate aping cedar bore the words ‘Q de V C James-Claims Investigation’. I knocked and went in. A secretary had her back to me as she delved into a filing cabinet. She waved a hand at a door off to one side, and I gathered that Mr Q de V C James was available. The door came open as I moved towards it and a tall, elegant character stepped out. He had a swathe of papers in his hand which he tossed on to the desk.
‘Tania’, he said breezily. ‘Here’s the report, do your best. Hello, who’re you?’
‘Hardy.’
‘Oh, yes.’ He did something that used to be called beaming, I don’t know what they call it now, you don’t see it often. ‘Hardy!’ he bellowed. ‘Private eye. Come in! Come in!’
The hearty manner and the pin-stripe, three-piece suit gave an impression of amiable idiocy, but he soon dispelled that.
‘Sit down, Mr Hardy.’ He waved me into a comfortable chair in his comfortable office. ‘Inspector Evans speaks well of you. Good man, Evans; honest cop, rare breed.’
‘That’s right’, I said.
‘This is a strange case, bad smell to it. Miss Susannah Woods; shady lady I’m afraid.’ He picked up a folder on the desk, opened it and read: ‘Susannah Catherine Woods, divorced, thirty-six years, childless, journalist, art critic, artists’ agent, art dealer.’ He gave the last word an emphasis, looked up at me and said: ‘And crook.’
I clicked my tongue. ‘Maybe she’s doing her time in a room full of Botticellis. What was her crime here on earth?’
‘You don’t like Botticelli?’
Hypocrite, I said, ‘Loved little bums and tits and put in haloes to say he was sorry.’
‘Hmm. Well, Miss Woods insured paintings and lost them, sometimes.’
‘And other times?’
‘She sold them; sometimes she sold the ones she lost if you follow me.’
‘Yeah’, I said. ‘Why’d you take her on if you knew all this?’
‘We didn’t know, Mr Hardy. This’, he tapped the folder, ‘is the result of forty-eight hours of phoning around. She spread her business and hurt a few people.’
‘What’s your problem?’
He looked through the folder. ‘Some idiot wrote a policy on a Castleton…’ He looked up at me.
I shrugged.
He let out the bellow again, and it came to me that all this heartiness was defence and-in a word, shrewdness. ‘Charles Castleton’, he said. ‘Painter, mid-nineteenth century, Australia. He’s said to have perfected the colonial fence.’ I snorted and he laughed more normally. ‘It’s all such incredible nonsense. Castleton was a drunk who daubed this and that. His oeuvre is uncertain; experts disagree. As I say, he painted fences in a particular way and this is almost his trademark. Now, Miss Woods had an authenticated Castleton; there are a few fakes about, and she insured it with us for $30,000.’
I whistled. ‘It’d fetch that much?’
‘Hard to say. Art insurance is a specialised field and the man who wrote this policy was good on motor vehicles. Anyway, her executors can claim the thirty thousand from us, although the whole thing is very fishy.’
‘In what way?’
He looked at the papers. ‘There’s a very curious point here. Normally we insist on security arrangements in such cases; hers were acceptable, but she also informed us that she had a copy of the painting on display in her house ordinarily. She only brought out the original for knowledgeable guests and suchlike.’
‘Bloody confusing’, I said. ‘Where’s the copy now?’
‘Still in her house, but there’s no sign of the original.’
‘Are you sure she ever had it?’ I was thinking of my conversation with her on the third last day of her life but I didn’t tell him anything about that.
‘Oh yes, the authentication was done by a reputable man-Dr Bruno Ernst, an expert in the field.’
I asked for and got Dr Ernst’s address and a retainer from the company. The deal was that I’d be entitled to five per cent of the claim if I recovered the painting-$1500 was three to four weeks work in my league, a nice round sum that brought out my enthusiasm and optimism.
I used the cheque I’d got from Quentin to buy myself a phone call at the desk of the frozen lady. She was still there, like a fragile, prehistoric bird trapped in the ice. I dialled Leo Porter’s number and a rich, masculine voice came on the line.
‘Mr Porter? My name’s Hardy, I’m working for the Hawker Insurance Company on a matter connected with the estate of Miss Susannah Woods.’
‘Yes.’ Guarded was the word for it, Horatius at the gate would have seemed relaxed by comparison.
‘A small matter, Mr Porter, I understand you have a painting which had been in the joint possession of yourself and Miss Woods.’
‘Yes.’ Loquaciousness was not his middle name.
‘I’m told you’ve offered this painting for sale, Mr Porter; is that right?’
He gave a short laugh. ‘Wrong, it’s worthless, it’s a copy, very crude. I found it amusing.’
‘Could I see it?’
‘Anytime Mr… Hardy except now. I’m busy. Call me later. Goodbye.’
He sounded assured and hostile, and now I had more to think about. That made three Castletons, two fakes and a dinkum. It was all a bit much and I decided to bank the Hawker cheque, draw out lunch and travelling money, and do a bit of research. I had the lunch in Glebe at Lionel’s crepes-one savoury and one sweet-and I put down a good bottle of hock with them. Two short black coffees fought the good fight with the wine as I walked up to the university to tap the resources of the Fisher Library.
There were three books on Castleton, all of which seemed to be based on the same slim supply of facts. He was a remittance man of sorts, good family, good with horses, and with a weakness for booze and opium which got him in the end. Falling off horses helped. Two of the books had colour reproductions of some of his paintings which looked undistinguished to me — all hazy blues and greens with an occasional streak of brown. I could see what they meant about the fences though; they wavered up hills and petered out among trees under harsh suns. Good fences. This all took a few hours; I took notes on the titles of his authenticated pictures and I browsed through a couple of books which mentioned Castleton in unimportant ways. It was mid-winter and the shadows were long on the lawns when I got
out of the library. A student pushed a pamphlet into my hand. It read: LOOK AROUND YOU. THREE OUT OF FIVE OF US WILL BE UNEMPLOYED IN FIVE YEARS! VOTE RADICAL SOCIALIST FOR A FUTURE!
I walked back down Glebe Point Road to my car and sat in it wishing I’d talked to Miss Woods just a little more when I had the chance. If her racket was losing paintings and selling them, she’d have to have mates-dealers, proxies, go-betweens. I needed names, and since Grant hadn’t given me any, I concluded that the cops hadn’t found anything interesting in her house. But then, as Grant had said, cops had better things to do. I drove home and had a drink and a sandwich before putting on the dark clothes and the rubber-soled shoes, and taking out the wallet which contains a few useful housebreaking tools.
I like Paddington; I’ve been to a few good parties there and spent a couple of those nights of sexual excess that everyone should have before they die. Miss Woods’ place was a tiny cottage in a row of four in a narrow street. All four houses would have gone for a song in the 1950’s and were worth more than a hundred thousand each now. There was a lane wide enough for a skinny cat behind them, and I slipped down there and over the back fence. AC-DC were playing a number on the stereo in the house next door so I didn’t have to worry too much about the clink of milk bottles or the rasp of metal on metal. Her security was lousy. I was inside the place in two minutes and could have taken every Van Gogh in sight with no one the wiser. I used a narrow-beam torch to snoop around the place but the results were disappointing. Her bureau contained only a few papers, all innocuous, and if there were any hidden safes in the house they were well hidden. The imputed Castleton was on a wall in the tiny bedroom which was occupied by a big, well-used bed. I was looking at the painting when I heard the noise outside. The music next door had stopped, and I heard the glass tinkle into the sink. Then everything went very quiet before there was a scraping and rasping and the back door opened. I went down the stairs quietly, but he must have heard me. It was moonless dark and I had trouble adjusting after the torch light upstairs. I had my foot on the bottom step when he turned on the lights. I got a glimpse of him, pale and dark-haired, and then he hit me. It wasn’t much, a clumsy poke in the stomach, but I was off balance, I lurched forward, grabbed him but missed, and in that cramped little house a big, hard piece of furniture leaped up and crashed into the side of my head. I went down, hard, and the lights went out.
I heard myself swearing, using some exceedingly nasty language, and then it hurt to swear or to do anything except lie very still. After a bit of that I got up slowly and took hold of the stair rail; everything seemed to work reasonably well and I dragged myself upstairs. The painting was gone. I stared at the empty space for a while and when I reached up to touch my head I found I had a piece of cloth in my hand; it was cotton, looked like part of a shirt, and it was smeared and crusty with dried paint.
I put the cloth in my pocket and sat on the bed to do some thinking but my head hurt too much. Downstairs Miss Woods kept a nice supply of liquor with the fixings. I made a strong Scotch and oiled my brain with it. The treatment worked to the extent of making clear to me that we now had two missing Castletons and one still at large. I used Miss Woods’ phone to call Leo Porter’s number but there was no reply. Why should there be? It was Tuesday night, just right for a quiet dinner somewhere, a drink or two afterwards and all that might lead to. It was what any sensible, unattached, professional man would be doing with his time, but then I was only a semi-professional myself.
I went out through the front door and slammed it closed-King Kong could have been sitting on the balcony and no one in the street would have known. Leo Porter lived a half mile away in one of the curvy, leafy iron-lace-filled streets Paddington is famous for. His front gate was open and his front door was open; I walked into the house and closed the door behind me. Leo lived in style-everything was of the best, carpets, furniture, TV, the lot. There were no paintings on the walls and that was a lot of walls, upstairs and down, six big rooms in all. My head was still hurting, so I put together some of Leo’s Scotch and ice and even lit myself one of his thin panatellas. It tasted like sea-grass matting and I stubbed it out; the Scotch was good, though. After the drink I snooped through the house again but didn’t find anything interesting; there was nowhere for the painting to have hung but it could have stood on the ledge above the living-room fireplace. Bad spot for a painting, though.
Leo got home about an hour later and he was very displeased to see me on his sofa with another drink in my hand. His companion was a dark, slim elegant woman who fitted cigarettes into a long holder and smoked while we talked. Leo didn’t introduce us. I told him how I’d got into the house and he poked around out the back and found what I’d found-this guy’s trademark, the broken glass in the kitchen.
‘I could have got in another way, gone out the back and done that just for show’, I said.
He grunted.
‘I’m surprised you’re not dashing about checking on your valuables.’
‘My dear fellow’, he said as he made himself and the woman a drink, ‘I don’t have any valuables. I’m one of those lease it people, rent’em and wreck’em, you know?’
‘Yeah. What business are you in?’
‘Tax consulting. I’m the expert, I pay no tax myself.’
‘Lucky you. Did Susannah Woods pay much?’
He smiled. ‘Only what she had to; shrewd woman, Susannah.’
The clothes horse in the armchair raised an eyebrow at that but decided to sip her drink rather than speak.
Porter looked at his slim, digital watch. ‘Just why are you here, Mr Hardy?’
One good question deserves another. ‘Is anything missing, Mr Porter?’
‘I told you, I simply don’t care, nothing here is mine.’
‘What about the painting?’
He spun around, nearly spilling his drink and looked through the arch into the living room. ‘Christ’, he said. ‘It’s gone.’
‘Tell me about it’, I said.
‘It was worthless. Who’d want to steal that?’ He walked through the arch and looked at the blank space. ‘I used to spend some time at Susannah’s place and she was often here. A civilized arrangement, you understand?’
‘Yeah’, I said.
‘Well, we each left things in one place or another, moved things back and forth. I took a liking to this painting; don’t know why, it was hardly finished really.’
‘Where did it come from?’
‘I don’t know, it just turned up in the house. She was always hanging around artists, I assumed it was just something one of them knocked up. I don’t know anything about art, but this had something I liked… call it spontaneity.’
‘Was it signed?’
‘Oh yes, something illegible, Castlemaine, something like that. Now what’s all this about? I suppose it connects with Susannah’s death?’
‘Yeah, what do you know about that?’
‘Nothing, except what I read and was told. I was upset of course, a horrible thing to happen. But I hadn’t seen her for over a month, we were finished.’
‘What finished you?’
He shrugged. His dark clothes were well cut and expensive; so were the shoes with lifts in them that brought him up to about five foot eight. The woman in the chair was taller, tall enough to see the bald spot near the crown of his head. He looked at his watch again, he seemed anxious to get into a position where bald spots wouldn’t show and didn’t matter. ‘Susannah wanted me to help finance an art gallery, a crazy idea.’ He opened his hands and spread them shoulder-high. ‘Besides, I don’t have any money.’
I nodded and got up. ‘Forgive the intrusion. You were lucky, the guy who busted in here took a swing at me earlier in the night.’ I touched my head.
‘Good God! Do you think he’ll be back here?’
‘Thanks for the sympathy. No, I think he’s got what he wants.’ I finished the drink and said goodnight to Porter whose colour wasn’t so good. He looked a bit unsure of himself for the first time. The tall woman in the chair held out her glass for a refill and I gave her one of my wicked smiles and left.
I cleaned up the head wound, took some aspirin and went to bed. In the morning the head was still tender, but I’d had worse, and was anxious to try to bring about a meeting with the guy who’d given it to me. I used the telephone, and at ten o’clock I was inside Dr Bruno Ernst’s study. He lived in a little sandstone cottage in Balmain down near the wharf. The house looked small because it was full of books and paintings, without them there would have been enough room in it for people, but apart from Ernst himself the only other thing that appeared to live there was a cat. There would probably have been some silverfish. Ernst was a short, squat guy with a fringe of white hair around a bald head, and a spade-shaped white beard. He pushed a typewriter aside on his desk and started to pack a curved pipe with tobacco. Outside a cold wind was rippling the water and flapping the ropes on boats tied up at the wharf. I sat and waited until he’d puffed enough smoke into the air.
‘I understand you’re an expert on Charles Castleton, Dr Ernst.’
‘Bruno’, he said. ‘Not strictly true, no-one is an expert on him, in a way there is nothing to be expert on. I have some knowledge and an interest, yes.’
‘You authenticated a Castleton belonging to a Miss Woods a few weeks back.’
‘That’s right.’ He puffed smoke and looked a little uncomfortable. ‘I was never happy about it.’
‘Why not?’
‘It was unusual. There are lost Castletons, of course. He led an erratic life, gave pictures away, paid debts and liquor bills with them. In 1884 Castleton held an exhibition in Sydney, a little tin-pot affair, but it was reported in the papers of the time and some of the paintings were described. Do you know about this?’
‘Not in detail.’
‘The newspaper report only came to light fairly recently, and it is now taken as the best guide to Castleton’s later period. Most of the paintings mentioned can be accounted for, two cannot.’
‘And Miss Woods had one of them?’
‘Hmm, she had the painting which is called “Stockyards at Jerilderie”.’
‘Fences’, I said.
‘Indeed, a great many fences. This confers value on the work, a puzzling notion.’
‘You’re sure it was genuine?’
He shrugged. ‘I gave my opinion that it was, no-one could be sure. But the woman had another painting of the same subject which was obviously a fraud. The materials were modern, and the technique was crude. She said she had come upon the painting by accident and averted an attempt to produce a fake version. I found this commendable, you see?’
‘Yes, and this helped you to decide that the painting was genuine?’
He scratched at the squared-off beard, disturbing its symmetry. ‘It played a part in my judgement, yes.’
‘I see. Tell me, Dr Ernst, once you’ve inspected and okayed a painting is there any way for anyone to know that you’ve given it the thumbs up?’
‘Bruno. I’m sorry, I do not understand.’
‘Do you mark the painting in any way, Bruno?’
‘Yes, indeed, with a stamp which can only be seen under ultra-violet light. The stamp carried my initials inside an octagon-I marked the Castleton with it.’
I thanked him, and he insisted I have a glass of sherry with him while he showed me his paintings, books and the view. Too many paintings at once numb me, most of the books were in German, but I liked the view. The sherry was okay. As I moved towards the door, he gently suggested that he was due a consultation fee. I wrote him a cheque for fifty bucks and he waved me goodbye with it from his doorway.
I’d left my car in Darling Street, near the police station for safety, but I took a long walk through the Balmain streets trying to order the facts I had. The Woods woman’s story to Ernst sounded phoney, but could possibly be the truth. The only trouble was that there was a third painting in the works. ‘Stockyards at Jerilderie’ would have fitted the picture I’d seen in the Paddington house and I had to assume that Leo Porter’s lost painting was of the same scene. But which one carried Ernst’s mark? That seemed like the vital question, but was it? I worked up a sweat on the uphill stretch from the water and reached into my pocket for something to wipe my face with. I came up with the bit of paint-stained shirt. I looked at it and remembered what Porter had said about his former ladyfriend knocking around with artists. I also remembered the face of the man who’d hit me in the stomach. I hoofed it back to the car and drove through the ill-tempered traffic to the Cross.
Three years’ friendship with Primo Tomasetti seems like a lifetime; I park my car out behind his tattooing parlour for a modest fee and he bombards me with his ideas on the good life- they involve considerable strain on the liver and prostate. Besides tattooing and mural painting, both of which he has brought to a high and erotic pitch, Primo is a bloody good man with a pencil. I stuck the Falcon on the little concrete patch at the back and came up the rear steps into the dark den where Primo plies his trade.
He was tattooing a Kiss-type design on the face of a young girl and he winked at me as I came in.
‘What’s her mother going to think of that?’ I said.
‘She never hadda mudder; she was too poor, right sweetheart?’
The girl didn’t move a muscle. I watched it for as long as I could bear and then I went through to the kitchen and made coffee. Primo keeps an interesting collection of magazines back there, and I browsed through them while waiting for the coffee to perk. I made two long, strong blacks and took them back into the workshop. The girl was gone and Primo was holding his hands in front of his face and staring at them.
‘I hate what I do, Cliff, he said. ‘It’s a crime.’
‘Rubbish, you love it. And I know you, you put in that stuff you can wash out in six months. She was free, white and seventeen anyway.’
‘I suppose you’re right. Thanks.’ He took the coffee and I arranged some cartridge paper and pencils on his work desk while we sipped.
‘You want a new name-plate designed?’ he said. ‘A black falcon, maybe?’
‘I haven’t got a name plate. When I need the name freshly written on an envelope to pin to my door I’ll let you know.’
He blew steam off the surface of the drink. ‘You got no class, Cliff.’
‘True. How d’you reckon you’d go at one of those identikit jobs? I describe the face, you do the drawing?’
‘Sensational! It’s what I’ve always wanted to do.’
‘Drink your coffee and let’s have a go at it.’
The floor was half-covered with crumpled paper when we finished a bit over an hour later. We got it right in the end-Primo prompted me and I abused him, and between us we caught the essence of the man I’d seen in Susannah Woods’ house-his thin, peaked face, cupid bow mouth and dark, low-growing hair. I’d have known him from the drawing and I had to hope others would too. I thanked Primo and paid him a week in advance for the parking spot. He looked hurt.
After that I tramped the art galleries of the inner city for a couple of hours getting hostile headshakes, propositions and indifferent shrugs. I couldn’t tell whether or not they were lying, and by the end of the day I felt like a visitor from Mars. They were a strange lot; most of them expressed indifference to Susannah Woods and I began to wonder what they did care about but they gave me no clues.
I decided that I did care who’d killed the woman and why; I wanted a drink badly and a lead nearly as badly, and gave it one last try by calling Harry Tickener. Harry is a reporter on The News and ten years of snooping around Sydney haven’t dimmed his enthusiasm for his job. He sees a hell of a lot, hears a lot more and remembers almost all of it. I asked him to bring along the paper’s art critic and promised to pay for the drinks. That made it a must for Harry, who is just a bit on the short-armed side.
We met at a pub on Broadway just across from the newspaper office. I fended off a few journos who wanted to talk about boxing-of which there isn’t any anymore. Harry came in half an hour late with a paperweight sort of woman who he introduced as Renee Beale. Harry had a double Scotch of course and Renee had a Campari and ginger ale. We talked about nothing much over the drinks while Harry and the woman smoked and pushed back their hair and gave good impressions of tired workers; maybe they were. Harry lit his third Camel and squinted at me through the smoke.
‘Renee’s got an opening to go to, Cliff, he said.
She held up her glass. ‘I’ll have to write it up tonight. I’ll have two glasses of flagon plonk at the show and work till midnight.’
‘Okay’, I said. ‘I’d like to know if you recognise this man.’ I pulled out Primo’s drawing and handed it across to her.
She put on gold-rimmed glasses and peered at the paper. ‘Hey, this is good!’
‘You know him?’
‘Sure, this is Paul Steele, him to the life.’
‘What does he do?’
‘Well, he…’ She stalled by putting her glasses back in their case and sipping her drink. Then she looked across to Tickener.
‘It’s okay, Renee’, Tickener said. ‘Cliffs a gentleman-he won’t throw him down any stairs or anything.’
I had reservations about that, but tried not to let them show in my face. Renee looked at her watch, drew smoke into her lungs, blew it out and sipped Campari.
‘Paul’s a painter, or was’, she said. ‘He had a bit of a following for a while, did some very nice things. But the money and the junk got to him, and he hasn’t done anything good for a long time.’
‘Has he done anything?’ I asked.
‘Well, he does some restoring…’
‘And copying?’ I said.
‘A bit.’
‘Right, can you tell me where to find him?’
She gave me three possible addresses in Surry Hills and Darlinghurst, finished her drink and went off to her opening. I had another drink with Tickener and told him about the case while he blew Camel smoke around, looked at the women who came and went and scratched at his thinning fair hair.
‘You reckon this Steel character killed her to get the genuine painting, Cliff?’
‘That’s the way it looks.’
‘Why did she want the original copied?’
‘This Castleton’s a bit dodgy I gather, hard to prove if something’s his or not. My guess is she wanted the copy to impress Ernst, help to confirm that she had the real thing- it worked too.’
‘Okay, but why would there be two copies?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t figure that at all.’
Harry grinned, he liked to out-sleuth me. ‘There’s another thing, this is all pretty coldblooded stuff-knocking the woman off, pinching the paintings, this Steele didn’t sound like that sort of a bloke from Renee’s story.’
That was worrying me too although I didn’t like to admit it. I felt I almost had the thing wrapped up but that there were some loose ends that could unravel the whole rug. There was also something else worrying me which I couldn’t quite grab. I looked at the addresses and I looked at Primo’s drawing and Harry and Renee’s dead cigarette butts and I still couldn’t get it. I said goodbye to Harry and went off indecisively to work at it.
The first address was a wash-out, no-one living in the blighted old house at all; at the second place I was offered grass but no information. The third house was in a tall, crumbling terrace wedged between rusty, graffiti-daubed factories. The street light was broken and two youths were working by torchbeam to strip a newish Commodore in the alley across from the house. One of them straightened up when I got out of my car and looked across. He picked up something from the ground.
I held up my hand. ‘These modern cars are so unreliable; hope you get it going again. Anyone at home in 88?’
He relaxed and spoke to his mate. The torch beam came up and hit me in the face. I let it hit.
‘Junkies’, one of them said. ‘You a narc?’
‘No.’
‘I think they’re there, why don’t you take a look.’
‘There’s no lights.’
He laughed and spat into the gutter. ‘Squatters mate, they use candles.’
I went back to my car and got the. 38 from under the dash. I let the mechanics see it as I closed the door.
‘Not interested in Falcons, are you?’ I said.
I walked over to the house; the front door was a ruin with some of the panels replaced by cardboard. I pushed one in and put a hand through to undo the catch. In the passage way the floorboards were rotten and the walls smelled of damp. There was a chink of light under the second door along and I pushed it open with the gun held high. There were mattresses around the walls, some clothes scattered about and a candle burning crookedly in the middle of the floor. Two men were lying together on one of the mattresses. One of them turned his head to look at me, the other’s eyes were closed.
‘Trouble?’ The accent was southern US, with a lot of illness and heroin in it.
‘No trouble. Paul Steele here?’
‘Upstairs. I’m glad there’s no trouble.’
I closed the door and felt my way up the stairs. The front room was showing a faint light and I could hear soft, slow voices. I crept up close and listened. There was only one voice, a woman’s, and it was saying, ‘Pauli, c’mon Pauli, Pauli?’ over and over again.
I pushed the door open and the woman gave a scream and jumped off the floor and straight at me. She was big and fat, and she swung a fist into my face and followed that up with a fingernail attack. Both did some damage, and it was hard to counter while holding the gun. I gasped ‘Easy’, and tried to duck the next swing and get at her feet, but she was quick, despite her weight. Her hand hit me again and I forgot my manners; I clipped her smartly under the chin, her knees sagged and I rushed her back against the wall which pushed all the breath out of her. I held her there while she struggled for breath.
‘I’m not going to hurt you’, I rasped. ‘Now behave, or I’ll shove something in your mouth to shut you up. Understand?’
She nodded and I let her go keeping a cautious eye on her hands and feet. But all the fight had gone out of her and she slipped down to the floor beside the mattress on which Paul Steele lay. He’d been watching us but there was no interest in his eyes.
I bent down. ‘Remember me, Paul?’
There was no reaction and I reached into my pocket for the piece of cloth. He was wearing the same shirt and I dropped the torn piece onto his narrow, heaving chest.
‘He’s OD’d’, the woman said. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s a murder investigation’, I said. ‘A woman named Susannah Woods got killed. What’s your name?’
‘Morgan Lindsay’, she said. ‘Have you got a cigarette?’
‘No. Where are the paintings?’
‘Over there.’ She pointed to the far corner of the dark room. I picked up a box of matches from the floor and went across to the corner. The three canvases were stacked carelessly against the damp wall. I struck a couple of matches and peered at them but under those conditions it was impossible to tell which version of ’Stockyards at Jerilderie’ was which. The woman was sitting listlessly by the ragged mattress listening to Steele’s breathing which was harsh but even.
‘Where’d he get the money for the heroin?’ I said.
‘Pinched something from that bitch’s house and flogged it. It must be bad stuff though, never seen him like this before. God, I wish I had a smoke.’
I looked at Steele and thought that his colour was bad, he had a sort of nineteenth century opium-den pallor and then one of the things that had been jangling around loose in my mind clicked into place. I had a short talk to Morgan Lindsay and then Steele’s breathing broke up into erratic gusts and we went out to look for a phone.
I talked to her some more in the street while the ambulance was coming. But when we got back to the room, Steele and his torn shirt and the ragged mattress were covered with blood and vomit, and he was dead.
I handed the three paintings over and Quentin de V C James pushed the buttons to get a cheque made out for me-promptly. He took the canvas with Dr Ernst’s mark on it over to the window and let the expensive light flood over it. He put it down and shook his head.
‘Not my idea of $30,000 worth’, he said.
I grinned. ‘Nobody’s idea, it’s a fake.’
‘Then they’re all fakes.’
‘That’s right, Steele did them all; the first one was a dry run which he wasn’t happy with. Woods left it lying around and Leo Porter got hold of it. Then there was the deliberate fake to help authenticate the first-class fake. Steele killed her when she said she was going to burn that one and collect the insurance.’
‘But why? He’d have got his cut surely?’
I shook my head. ‘He was past that. Have a look at these.’ I took out Primo’s picture and laid it on the desk, then I opened up one of the books on Castleton. It had as a frontispiece a photograph of Castleton taken at a time when he was ill. The hair, the face, the lines of suffering were almost identical.
‘Remarkable’, James said.
‘Yeah, the woman filled most of it in for me. Steele was pretty nutty to begin with and the dope didn’t help. He did a deep study of Castleton when he took on this commission for Woods. In the end he came to believe that he was Castleton or was his son or grandson-the Lindsay woman said he shifted around a bit on that point.’
‘And he cracked when she said she was going to burn the painting?’
‘That’s right. By then he believed it was real and that he’d painted it as a real artist.’
‘Is that why he went after the other pictures?’
‘Probably, but I think the girl might have helped a bit there. The rough jobs probably looked more like Steele’s own work, if they turned up and someone saw Steele’s style in them that would lead directly to him. The Woods woman wanted to get the rough copy back so as not to confuse the issue when she made her claim. That’s why she came to me.’
James was nodding sagaciously when a secretary came in and handed him an envelope. He passed it over to me and did some more beaming.
‘A brilliant piece of work, Mr Hardy, my congratulations.’
‘Thanks.’
‘One would have expected you to look a little more pleased.’
I said: ‘Would one?’, and got up and left. I was thinking of the pictures of Charles Castleton with his life sucked away by the booze and opium and Paul Steele, eaten down to the bone by smack.
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