The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender Read online

  When I finally found out the truth about Guy I haunted the deroes’ parks looking for recognition. But those eyes had long since glazed over and recognition did not come.

  THE last customers, or rather ‘clients’, had gone and Otto was closing up shop.

  ‘Two days in a row, Claudia, you are gracing my humble store with your presence. Can I interest you in some merchandise?’

  ‘No, but you can interest me in some information.’

  ‘What kind of information?’

  ‘Electronic.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yes. You know that guy who’s been tailing me? Well I’ve got a pretty good eye for that kind of thing but I never actually see this guy following me. He just happens to turn up wherever I go. What I want to know is this: is there a device you can attach to a car so you can follow its route on a screen without actually having the vehicle in direct view?’

  ‘Of course. The police have started using such a device. They attach a transmitter to the subject’s vehicle then follow his route on a display screen. It’s all very clean and stress-free. They can even do it from the comfort of the police station. All they have to do is watch where the car stops and radio a car in the area to move in if necessary.’

  ‘My tail has a screen in his car.’

  ‘So much the better. No wonder he’s always on the spot.’

  ‘What does this transmitter look like?’

  ‘Oh, it can be quite small—no bigger than a pocket calculator.’

  ‘And where’s the best place to put it?’

  ‘Anywhere. Anywhere on the car that’s not going to get too hot or be subject to electrical interference.’

  ‘Would you recognise it if you saw it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘OK, let’s go.’

  IT was dark by the time we reached Milsons Point. I took the torch out of the Daimler’s glove box.

  ‘What are you doing Claudia?’

  ‘You might be able to see in the dark but I can’t.’

  ‘Put it away, Claudia, I have something in my hot little hand that always finds its target, even in the dark.’

  ‘You put it away, Otto, you don’t know where it’s been.’

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ he moaned. ‘It hasn’t been anywhere lately.’

  He went over the whole body of the Daimler, caressing it with his little gadget, paying particular attention to the smooth round curves of the rear-end.

  ‘Hmm, getting warm,’ he said voluptuously.

  Then he found it. Under the right-hand rear fender.

  ‘All we have to do is remove it and your tail will disappear.’

  ‘Not yet, Otto, I have a better idea.’

  We drove to North Sydney police station, removed the transmitter from the Daimler and whacked it under the door sill of a parked police vehicle.

  ‘There, that should keep the bastard busy for a while.’

  THE Villos villa in Harbord was a white stucco Spanish style one a seagull would have been proud of.

  I’d taken a chance arriving unannounced but I was on this side of the harbour anyway. As for most Sydneysiders, the Bridge, instead of linking the two sides of the harbour, was for me a psychological barrier. Not that Manly was much different to Bondi, syringes were found on both beaches and people got sick from the pollution, but going across the Bridge was like travelling to another country.

  Lights were on in the house with the million steps that led up to a grilled security door.

  I pressed a white button and heard no sound. But someone else did: the door opened as far as the chain would allow and I heard the high pitched voice of Sally.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Claudia Valentine.’

  In a lot of cases just hearing a woman’s voice did the trick. Women opened the door to other women because they trusted them; men for a variety of reasons.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Claudia Valentine. A friend of Mark’s family. I met you at the funeral.’

  The door opened fully and an unmasked Sally appeared with the look of a beautiful but naughty child. I wondered if she’d been playing with matches. If she had, she’d cleverly disguised the sulphurous smell.

  She looked at me cautiously, waiting for me to open service.

  I’d like to talk to you about Mark, you were the person closest to him,’ I said softly, trying to get her guard down. ‘I work for the family solicitor. There are just a few routine questions the family couldn’t answer. Thought you might be able to help.’ I wondered when she was going to remember her etiquette and invite me in. I didn’t mind doing it in doorways but interiors were so much more revealing. ‘Can I come in?’

  She stood aside but those eyes never left me.

  ‘Hmm, nice house,’ I said as I entered a hallway full of mirrors and waded through mushroom pink carpet to finally arrive at a living room the size of a gymnasium.

  She sat on the edge of a lounge chair, obviously knowing the territory and the psychological advantages, because when I leaned back in mine I was almost lying down. I shifted into a position where I could look at her and not the ceiling, while she continued staring at me from under a canopy of eyelashes.

  The eyes were the only part of her staying still. The hands were fidgeting with bracelets and the legs were crossing and uncrossing.

  ‘This is a pretty big house for one person. Do you live here by yourself?’

  ‘No . . . yes, at the moment. My parents are away overseas.’

  ‘Oh yes, your father’s the famous heart surgeon, isn’t he?’

  ‘How did you know that?’ she asked with more suspicion than my question warranted.

  ‘Oh, it’s no big deal. I read it in the . . .’

  ‘Tequila?’ she said, suddenly bouncing up.

  ‘Scotch, if you’ve got it.’

  ‘I’ve got it.’ She opened a cabinet that held enough liquor to start a duty-free store and poured me a Scotch, splashing a little down the sides. This was my first drink of the day but it wasn’t hers.

  ‘No, no ice,’ I said as she dug into the ice bucket with silver tongs.

  ‘It’s not for you, it’s for me,’ she said, piling the cubes up in her glass.

  ‘So,’ I tried again, ‘your father fixes broken hearts.’

  She coughed on her drink and winced. ‘I wouldn’t exactly put it like that,’ she said, damning my crassness. ‘He’s a doctor. A good doctor.’

  ‘I’m sure he is. He was the one who put Mark’s pacemaker in, wasn’t he?’

  She looked at me as if I was trying to undress her against her will. ‘Well, what of it? He did a lot of operations like that, on a lot of patients who are alive and grateful to him,’ she said defiantly.

  The conversation wasn’t supposed to go like this. She was supposed to soften and open up. Maybe her grief was taking a strange form.

  I slowly sipped the Scotch then tried a different tack. ‘It . . . it must be hard for you having your parents away at a time like this.’

  She swallowed then said rather grimly, ‘I get by.’

  She got up suddenly and went to the window. ‘I’m doing all right.’ Then she turned on her searchlight eyes, scanning my face. ‘It’s just that . . . that . . . do you know what it’s like? It’s so . . . so . . . huge.’

  She was biting her lip to stop it quivering.

  ‘Sally . . .’ I offered.

  She was like a child who’d grazed her knee but didn’t want to cry in front of the other kids. ‘It’s OK’, she said in a small voice.

  I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. She was standing up, on home ground, while I was trapped in the luxury of her lounge chair. I got up and poured her another drink, which gave me the excuse to stand beside her and softly say: ‘You were the one that found the body, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. And the outfit. He’d just shot up.’

  . . . it wasn’t the stuff, it was safe . . . heroin in his blood stream but not enough to kill him.

&nb
sp; ‘What about the man?’

  Her reflexes were good. She reeled away as if she’d come in contact with a hot stove.

  ‘What man?’

  ‘The man that came into Mark’s flat while you were there.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Mark had some nosy neighbours. They saw you, then a man wearing driving gloves.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said flatly. ‘I didn’t see who it was. I heard someone at the door and went and hid. I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t even think about it, I just did it!’ Her voice was getting dangerously close to glass breaking pitch. ‘How would you feel?’ Her eyes groped at me trying to pull me down. But as long as she was answering questions I was going to keep on asking them.

  ‘Did you live together?’

  ‘Sort of. I spent a lot of time there.’ She wiped her face with the palm of her hand and drew herself up. ‘That day I had a modelling session. But the sets didn’t arrive so the studio cancelled. I came back to Mark’s place and . . . and . . .’

  She bit her lip and heaved her chest for the final statement. ‘That’s it, OK? That’s all,’ she said, cutting the air with her hands, ‘You’d better go now, I have some things to do.’

  The eyelashes came down like blinds as she retreated to some inner fortress. I’d lost her. For the moment.

  I wrote my number on a piece of paper and handed it to her. ‘If things get too rough and you want someone to talk to . . .’

  ‘I’ve got people to talk to. Thanks.’

  She let me out and I walked the million steps back into the real world.

  ‘CAROL? It’s Claudia.’

  I knew Carol from university days, a bright girl from a dull background. Most of the kids she grew up with were in trouble by the time they were fifteen. But she’d come a long way from those days. She was an achiever, a detective now, one of the first to have come in with a degree. She was in a tough profession—not only did she have to be equal to the men in it, she had to be better. And she was. She was straight and to the point. I liked her a lot.

  She asked me if I was ringing for business or for pleasure. She knew me well.

  ‘Pleasure. Thought you might like a drink, at my place.’

  She was coming over to Balmain the following evening. To look at real estate.

  ‘Yeah? An investment or to live in?’ . . . ‘Well you’ll pay through the nose for harbour views in Balmain. What time will you be finished?’ . . . ‘Good, let’s meet at eight. At the pub. We can have dinner if you like. My shout.’

  Carol graciously accepted.

  ‘Oh, and Carol, I wonder if you could do something for me. Nothing serious, just routine insurance. Young guy by the name of Mark Bannister. Died of a heart attack.’

  I gave her a few details to key into the computer.

  ‘His girlfriend Sally Villos found the body. What I was interested in was her statement.’

  Carol muttered something about there being no such thing as a free dinner. But we had a history, Carol and I, and favours went both ways.

  ‘Yes, well I have spoken to her but I don’t think it’s very pleasant for her to talk about it right now.’ . . . ‘OK, see you then.’

  TODAY THE SEASONS had collided. The unpredictable child had started off sunny, then clouds had frowned across her forehead. She’d sulked all day and finally burst out in a fitful rain. The brightest thing about the day was that Steve had dropped into it. Had some business to do in Balmain and as he was over this way . . .

  We walked through the calm after the storm. Beneath strangler figs, their aerial roots hanging lush like underarm hair. Kookaburras coaxed up their familiar laughter. Kookaburras. Nearly right in the heart of the city.

  The sun was setting behind the few remaining clouds, the apricot light intensifying the green of the park to an unnatural degree.

  ‘I spent six months working on Groote Eylandt once,’ said Steve as we walked down the aisle of elephantine date palms and bat-filled Moreton Bays. ‘It was Christmas, we’d just finished up for the season and a bloke had arrived up with some acid. It was my first and only time.’

  We were now right down to where the park jutted out into the harbour. Across from us was Cockatoo Island with its grey metallic buildings and cranes, its ammunition dumps like stepping stones in a watery duplicate of sunset. Despite the DOGS PROHIBITED sign, dogs cavorted in the park, as animals do after bad weather, whilst owners pretending not to belong to them looked at the ever changing view.

  ‘We dropped it down on the beach, ‘bout eleven o’clock at night. We sat looking at the sky like three wise monkeys. There were these amazing orange swirls, the sky was literally dancing, like some Chinese New Year dragon flashing light at each articulation. And the most amazing thing about it was the three of us all saw the same thing.’

  In America I’d heard enough trip stories to last me a lifetime. But coming from Steve it was like hearing it for the first time. Love, sweet love, the world as new as a baby. To the east, behind the Harbour Bridge and the city outline, dark blue night infiltrated the grey. We turned our backs on it and looked towards the setting sun, at the bright boats that never left their moorings, an orchestra of ropes dinging against aluminium masts like Japanese chimes. I tucked windblown strands of hair behind my ears, a futile gesture, but it gave me something to do: unconscious body language telling him I was all ears.

  The story, like the Chinese dragon, had a coda.

  ‘We slept out on the beach that night and the next morning when we got back into town we heard the news. Darwin had been hit. What we’d been looking at was the tail end of cyclone Tracy.’

  I let out a whistle that was quickly eaten by the wind.

  He laughed. ‘On the beach we thought what good acid it was but the next day we found out from some other blokes it wasn’t acid at all. The things you do to yourself when you’re young. Travelling to places to slog your guts out, then blowing your money and your mind on drugs of one kind or another. Look at me now: same job for the last five years, nine to five almost, home owner and even a landlord!’

  ‘What’s she like, your flatmate?’

  ‘Amanda? She’s quiet, doesn’t make waves. I go for weeks without seeing her sometimes. She works nights. One of those cafes in Glebe Point Road. And,’ he said, sticking his hands in his pockets and hunching up his shoulders, ‘I think during the day she puts in the odd hour at Sydney College of the Arts.’

  ‘She’d know Sally Villos then.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She goes there.’

  ‘Still? I thought she’d become some hotshot model. Anyway, I don’t think she and Amanda move in the same circles. Sally’s a beautiful rich, spoilt kid who doesn’t know what life is about because everything is handed to her on a platter. Probably be in one of those high class health farms by the time she’s thirty, drying out.’

  Under the trees it was dark now, though the sky was still straining out the odd line of colour. We were over by the pool, its old timber walls and grandstands embracing a little section of the harbour that people actually swam in. As long as you didn’t look too closely at the floating thing that could have been anything from a plastic bag to a jellyfish, or put your feet on the bottom, it was OK.

  ‘I love this park,’ I said as we passed under the old peppercorn tree that branched out generously from the side of the cliff. ‘I come down here every morning, well most mornings, at dawn to do a bit of breathing. Same park, same view, but every day it’s different.’

  ‘I’m rather partial to sunrises myself. Pity they’re on so early. They’d be much better at a more civilised hour, like lunchtime. But then I suppose all you Balmain people are up at dawn, jogging or walking your designer dogs. There seems to be a lot of them about judging by the evidence.’

  ‘Don’t knock it. Council elections are lost and won on dog shit. We even have a contingent of concerned citizens who go around picking it up.’

  The city was lit up now, in defiance of the night
.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Five to eight.’

  ‘Already? I’d better start moving. Carol is extremely punctual. One minute past the appointed hour she starts tapping her foot and looking at her Swatch.’

  ‘Claudia, that offer of champagne—it still holds. Any night you like.’

  ‘Keep the glasses chilled.’

  UP the street ahead of me a woman was leaning into a car. As the motor started she stood back and started walking. It was Carol. I caught up with her.

  ‘You look rather windswept. What exciting things have you been up to?’

  ‘Hang gliding. How did the house hunting go?’

  ‘Not bad. You can actually see the harbour from upstairs. It needs a few things doing to it but Noni can take care of that. She’s making more money as a carpenter than she ever did lecturing. And what we can’t do ourselves she’ll get one of her mates to do.’

  Connections. Everyone in Sydney had mates. Beneath the surface of fair prices and justice for all, business went on.

  ‘Aren’t you coming in?’ she said when we got to the pub.

  ‘Yes, but I’m going upstairs first. I’ve got to do something with my hair before it drives me crazy.’

  ‘Does your barperson make a good dry martini?’

  ‘Best this side of the International Dateline. Tell him to put it on my bill.’

  SHE was sitting with her legs twined round the legs of a bar stool about to pop the olive into her mouth when I walked in.

  ‘The table’s ready if you want to eat right away.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said, sliding off the stool.

  The choices we had made in our lives had blown us apart and drawn us together again. At university we’d done some pretty mad stuff. Like everyone else in the mid seventies we were going to change the world. Blow it up. When Carol got recruited everything changed. She was going to chip away at the structure rather than blow it up. Become the first female Commissioner of Police and change the world that way. But nothing had changed.