The Regal Hotel is in the middle of the city and it dominates the scene on the skyline and at ground level. The building is a tower with black and white facades alternating each storey so that it looks like a giant pile of draughts. I parked outside and made my usual mistake of trying to push open the self-opening doors. This leaves you with a hand held out impotently in front of you and gives the desk staff an initial advantage. Under the lobby lights my boots looked more scuffed and my denims more wrinkled than they did normally. The girl behind the desk was lacquered and painted like a Barbie doll; her fingernails were purple talons and her mouth was a moist, ripe plum. I marched up to the desk and looked straight and hard into her eyes. She blinked and lost a fraction of the sartorial advantage. Her greeting was an incline of the head. No “Yes sir”. That would have been a total defeat. I took out my licence card and the photograph of Noni and held them at her eye level, one in each hand.
“I’m a private detective on a missing persons case. Nothing sordid. I want to know if this woman is registered here.”
Her eyes moved lazily across my offerings. She might have been short of sleep or her lids might have been tired from heaving the enormous false lashes up and down. Her lips parted and tiny fissures appeared in the make-up beside her mouth. She was got-up to be looked at, not to talk.
“I can’t disclose any information about our guests.” She spoke as if she was reading the words off an idiot card pasted to my forehead.
“I’m not asking for any information. Just yes or no. If you say yes I’ll ask the manager and go through all the proper channels. If you say no I’ll be on my way.”
The impossible lashes fluttered up and she looked at the picture.
“No, then.”
“Thanks.” I put the card and the photograph away. Her face fell back into its fixed repose as if I had never caused it to move. I bounced away across the carpet and remembered not to try to open the door. Along to the left of the entrance a concrete ramp sloped down under the building. I went down into a dimly lit half-acre car park; there were a few score cars parked in rows. I walked quickly up and down the aisles between the cars – no Chev Biscayne.
I had a map of Newcastle in the car and checked it for Fourth Street. It runs through a housing estate near the northern edges of the suburbs up into the coastal ranges. It was a thirty-minute drive from the Regal to Lorraine’s boarding house but in terms of class and cash they were a million miles apart. The boarding house was a two-storey wooden job with peeling paint and a collapsed front balcony on the top level. There was about two acres of land around it and, as far as I could judge in the moonlight, what wasn’t covered by blackberries and bracken was serving as a motor car cemetery. A driveway at the side of the house was a shadowless black hole. The road ran steeply past the building and there were empty paddocks opposite it. Lorraine’s was flanked by cheap brick bungalows on either side, but there were vacant lots up and down the street as if parts of it had been blighted and made unfit for human habitation.
I cruised up the street and parked at the top of the hill about fifty yards beyond the house. The steel works was belching out white smoke and laying down a background hum a couple of miles away towards the water. A few headlights flicked along the roads below but Fourth Street was empty and silent. I checked the Smith amp; Wesson. The drizzle started again as I eased open the passenger side door and slipped out onto the road.
The gravel road was slushy under my feet as I moved up to the black tunnel beside the house. Bushes overgrew the driveway, their straggling ends whipped clean by cars brushing past them. The ground’s surface changed abruptly and I bent down to examine it. Deep fresh ruts were etched into the earth in an arc that curved around to a clear patch in front of the house. The ruts ended in a shallow ditch where the wheels of a vehicle had spun before getting a grip on the damp ground. Someone had left here in a hurry not so long ago. I moved up into the tunnel; blackness closed around me like a cloak and I bumped into the rear end of a car when I was about half way along the side of the house. I ran my hand across its boot which seemed to be about as wide as a bus. I put out a hand for the tail fin and the cold chrome rose up just where it should – a Chev Biscayne if ever I felt one.
I unshipped the pistol and held it stiffly in front of me like a divining rod. I skirted the car and felt my way along the weatherboards to the back of the house. A dim yellow light seeped out through a window and another thin block of it outlined a partly opened door. I kept my back pressed against the rippled wooden walls and scraped along to the door. I couldn’t hear anything except the droning of the steelworks and the tight hiss of my own breathing. A fly wire screen that looked as if a large dog had gone through it flapped open. I eased it away with the toe of my boot and pushed the door in. It swung easily, creaking a little, and gave me a view of several square feet of greasy green lino. I stepped into the room and my foot skidded in a dark patch just inside the doorway.
A woman was sitting on the floor with her back against a set of built-in cupboards. Her head lolled crazily to one side and a dark trickle of blood had seeped down from her mouth over her chin and onto the bodice of her cheap chain store dress. She was a thin, yellow woman with lank black hair and a scraggy neck with dirt in the creases. A vein in her forehead was throbbing and her flat chest was rising and falling in millimetres. I opened a door which let on to a long passage running towards the front of the house. The light barely penetrated six feet of its length but it seemed to be empty. I closed the door and bent over the woman. Her breath, what there was of it, was coming out in little erratic gasps and each one smelled more of stale gin than the last. I looked around the room. The bench tops were littered with bottles of sauce, food-encrusted plates and empty beer bottles. An electric toaster had one of its sides down like a drawbridge; crumbs were scattered around it and a fly was trapped in a smear of butter across its top. The mess – jars of jam, brimful ashtrays and slimy cutlery – flowed across the benches and into the sink. The detritus leaped across to the laminex kitchen table which carried a number of grimy glasses, pools of liquid and a two-thirds empty bottle of Gilbeys gin.
I put the gun on the table and hooked my hands under the woman’s shoulders. She was a dead weight like a sack of grain. I dragged her across the room, kicked one of the chairs out from under the table and dumped her into it. She didn’t move except that her head slumped across the other side. I pushed her hair aside. There was a long jagged tear near her ear and a deep oozing cut on her mouth, the sort of wound the foresight and backsight of a pistol make across a face. There was a lot of blood on her face and on the floor but there didn’t seem to be any other injury to her and this one wasn’t fatal. The dishtowel on the sink gave off a stomach-turning smell but I ran water on it, screwed it out and dabbed at the blood. She flinched as the water went into the cuts and her eyes flickered open. I pressed the wet cloth against her forehead. Her head tried to slide away to the right but I held it steady. Her eyes opened into dark slits and stared fixedly at the bottle on the table.
“Are you Lorraine?” I asked.
She nodded. The action must have sent waves of pain through her because she shuddered and slid lower on the chair. I hoisted her up.
“Water?”
She made a sound that could have meant yes, so I rinsed one of the dirty glasses, half filled it and held it to her lips. She sipped a thimbleful then shook her head. On a close look her Chinese ancestry was apparent. Her eyes were jet black and sloped a bit and although there was practically no flesh on her face the bone structure was broad and oriental. She picked up the damp dishcloth from where I’d dropped it in her lap and mopped at the slash beside her mouth.
“Did Noni do this to you?”
Her mouth twisted into a grin, the movement brought flesh blood out of the cut and she checked it.
“Not likely,” she croaked. “I can handle Noni any day.”
“Who then?”
“Guy with her. Dunno his name.”
“What happened?”
“They got here late this arvo – no, a bit later. Noni said she wanted to stay the night, her and him. I said alright and gave them the room. Then they went out for a while, came back with the booze.”
She nodded at the bottle on the table and immediately regretted it. I gave her another sip of water. She held on to the glass and some colour came back into her face making it grey like old, stained china. I waited.
“I made them something to eat, we had a few drinks, friendly like. Then the bloke started to talk about him and me swapping cars. I’ve got a Holden ute – bomb, but it goes. I said alright. I thought he was joking. I asked him to throw in the rest of the gin. He said OK and to give him the keys. I thought he was joking. When I wouldn’t he smashed me.”
“With a pistol.”
“Yeah. Big bastard.”
“The man?”
“No, the gun.”
“What did he look like? What did the girl call him?”
She handed me the glass. “Get me a drink and a smoke and tell me who the hell you are and I might say some more.”
I tipped the rest of the water in the glass into the sink and poured in a slug of gin. I looked around for something to put in it but she snapped her fingers and held out her hand.
“Put that much in again and give it here.”
I did and rolled her a cigarette. I lit it and she drew it down half an inch and pulled the smoke deep into her lungs.
“Thanks, that’s better. Now, who’re you?”
I told her the story quickly, suggesting that the man travelling with Noni had probably killed Ricky Simmonds.
“Jesus,” she said when I’d finished, “I was lucky; he might’ve done me.
“That’s right. Will you answer my questions?”
“Yeah, what were they?”
I repeated them and she drank some gin and smoked while she thought it over.
“I can’t remember that she called him anything,” she said at last. “They weren’t getting on too well seemed to me. You know Noni?”
I shook my head and produced the photograph.
“That’s her, the slut. Well, the bloke’s not big, about five foot six or seven, not more. He’s thin but sort of flabby thin, you know?”
I said I didn’t know.
“Well, there’s not much meat on him but what there is looks sort of soft. His chest’s sort of slid down to his gut. Can’t make it no clearer. Gimme another smoke.”
I got out the makings and started to roll one but she reached over impatiently and took the packet away. Her fingernails were black-rimmed and the thin skin on her hands was stretched tight like the fabric on a model plane. She made a fat cigarette and twisted the ends.
“Anything else about him?”
“You mean clothes and that?”
“Anything.”
“He had an old suit on, blue with a sort of checked shirt under it, like tartan. Looked a bit funny with the suit. He was real pale, like he’s been in hospital. Oh, and his ears stuck out, like this.” She fanned her ears out from under her lank, greasy hair.
“What did they talk about? Did they say where they were going?”
“Let’s think.” She put a black fingernail through the black hair and scratched. “He didn’t say much but Noni blabbed a bit. She was pissed and I reckon she was taking something else as well. You know?”
“I know. What did she say?”
“Well, I went out to do somethin’ and I heard her say, when I was coming back, that it was a long time ago and he should forget it and it was only money.”
“What did he say?”
“Told her to shut up. Then she said something about Macleay and he told her to shut up again. Listen, did they take the car?”
“Was it parked out front?”
“Yes.”
“They took it.”
“Fuck ‘em. They leave the big one?”
“The Chev? Yes.”
Her thin, ratty eyebrows went up. “Is that a fact? Reckon I can keep it?”
I thought of Ricky Simmonds, slumped down dead in a ditch around a fort built to repel invaders of an already invaded land. Crouched over like an Aboriginal warrior buried with all ceremony as in the time before horses and guns and arsenic and venereal disease.
His car had been his shield and his weapon and now it was discarded beside a house where black men were banned by a yellow woman. Australia.
A man in a dressing gown and three days of stubble came through the passage door before I could answer about the car. He shuffled into the kitchen and stopped short when he saw the gin.
“Piss off, Darby,” Lorraine said sharply.
The man looked at her with bleary eyes that sagged down into deep pouches about his cheekbones. With the eyes and the stubble and the grizzled grey hair poking through the top of the dressing gown he looked like a tired old owl who’d lost his way.
“Go on Lorraine,” he whined. “Just a small one.”
She shrugged and nodded at me. I poured some gin and handed him the glass; he didn’t seem to notice me, just lifted his hand and let the liquor slide down his throat. His neck convulsed once and he set the glass down carefully on the table. He let it sit for a few seconds, then tilted it again and got a few drops on his tongue.
“Right, piss off,” Lorraine snapped.
He pulled the dressing gown around him and dragged himself out of the room. I looked at the woman.
“A bum,” she said. “Probably came out to piss in the sink. Now, about that car?”
“Not up to me. Give me the details on the ute.”
She did, the number and colour and a description of the frame mounted over the tray. I picked up my gun from the bench and tucked it away. I nodded to her and headed for the door. She ignored me, her hand snaked out for the gin bottle and she wasn’t worried about her glass.
Outside the drizzle was steady and the ground was slippery underfoot. I walked slowly along the side of the house and pulled open the driver’s side of the Chevy. The interior light came on. A profusion of wires and fuses spilled out over the floor like a heap of multi-coloured guts.