Murder in Montparnasse (22 page)

‘You have five minutes, Bintha,’ said the Manageress, ostentatiously consulting the large brass clock.

Cec hustled the girl into a corner under a very sad aspidistra.

‘Bintha, I gotta ask you to do something for me.’

‘Course,’ said Bintha, pressing her hands to her starched bosom.

‘It might cost you your job,’ warned Bert.

‘I’m sick of it anyway,’ declared Bintha stoutly. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Can you get at the register?’ asked Bert.

‘If we can distract her. What do you need?’

‘We’re looking for a René Dupont or Dubois who came off the
Stranraer
on the fifth. Can you look it up for us?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good girl.’

‘Mrs Jones, my Uncle Cec knows all about aspidistras,’ said Bintha, moving to the counter. ‘I’ll mind the desk if you want to talk to him.’

Mrs Jones did not like the look of Bert or Cec, but she had been very worried about the droopiness of her aspidistras. She slapped open the flap and allowed Bintha inside.

‘Just for a moment, then,’ she snapped. Cec took her arm very courteously, turning her so that her back was to the counter. Bintha leafed frantically through the register and pencilled details on a small piece of card, which she flicked across to Bert, who trousered it quickly.

‘You oughta clean aspidistras with salad oil, not milk. You’re gonna kill ’em all if you keep on cleaning ’em with milk. And water ’em only once a week, and only when they’re dry,’ instructed Cec. ‘Bit of a wash and dry and a lick of oil and they’ll be fine. They’ll come up right as ninepence in a month, you’ll see,’ he assured her.

Mrs Jones unbent sufficiently to thank him.

‘Will you come on, Gardening Tips,’ snarled Bert.

They left as Bintha informed the Manageress that one of her relatives had died, but there was no immediate need for Bintha to cut short her work and go home. This pleased the Manageress so much—she still had fifteen rooms to clean— that she resolved to accept Cec’s advice about the aspidistras. Salad oil might cheer them up, at that.

‘In on the fifth, out on the seventh,’ Cec read the note. ‘No forwarding address.’

‘She’s a beaut girl, your niece Bintha,’ said Bert.

‘Too right,’ said Cec.

The Sailor’s Rest was not about-to-be-shabby genteel, it was downright shabby. Even when it had been first port of call for men off the deep-sea ships with money to spend and six months sobriety and celibacy to undo, it had never bothered much with appearances. Or legalities. Bert walked in and the first person he saw was his Auntie Joan.

‘Bertie!’ she exclaimed. ‘Come in and have a drink!’

‘That’s a nice welcome, Auntie, don’t mind if we do,’ said Bert thirstily, sitting down beside her at the desk. ‘You remember Cec?’

Auntie Joan hitched up her bosom and yelled, ‘Three beers, Wally, and don’t you go supping them on the way! So, Bertie, tell me all the family news.’

‘There ain’t much that you don’t know already, Auntie Joan,’ said Bert, embarrassed. Not even his mother called him ‘Bertie’. The beer came, cold and fresh, and he sipped for a while.

‘You don’t just drop in to say hello,’ said Auntie Joan. ‘What can I do for you, Bertie?’

‘I need to know if a bloke came in here from the Maritime on the seventh,’ said Bert.

‘Take a look,’ said Joan. Her hair was a startling shade of henna red and she was wearing far too much make-up, but Cec decided that she was a kind old body, except possibly to defaulting sailors. Bert examined the register, which was considerably blotted.

‘You look,’ he said, passing it over to Cec. Not to anyone was Bert going to admit that he needed glasses. Cec turned over a couple of pages.

‘Bingo,’ he said. ‘Came here on the seventh, out on the ninth. René Dupont. And Mrs Dupont.’

‘Good-o. You remember this bloke, Auntie?’

‘Him?’ Joan’s mouth pursed. ‘Yair. You after him, Bertie? Then you keep your wits around yer. He was a charmer, that one. You remember your Uncle Jim?’

‘Yair,’ said Bert. ‘He was a charmer, too.’

‘He was a snake,’ said Joan vehemently enough to blow the froth off her beer. ‘And since he passed away I’ve got a nose for snakes. This was a snake. I was so sorry for his poor wife. He had her right under his thumb. Not a word could I get out of her. They left on the ninth and I was glad to get rid of him. Making eyes at my housemaids . . .’

‘Auntie, your housemaids ain’t gonna run screaming if someone looks at ’em cross-eyed,’ said Bert, knowing that some of the Sailor’s Rest young women had professions which might involve beds but did not involve making them.

‘Even so,’ Joan’s face was coldly wrathful. ‘He’s a bad one, you mark my words.’

‘All right, Auntie, I mark them. Do you know where he went from here?’

‘No. No forwarding address. But he asked me about a letting agent. I sent him on to Slyme, and good riddance.’

‘He’s a local?’ asked Bert.

‘Just down the street. Handles houses, flats and rooms, too. Bastard. Even for a letting agent. Mean, greedy, a slimy toad, a pumped-up little despot. I reckon he and Dupont deserved each other. You going after this Dupont bloke, Bertie?’

‘Probably, Auntie Joan. Thanks for the beer,’ said Bert, leaning down and kissing the rouged cheek.

‘Then you be careful, Bertie,’ she said, patting his face. ‘You be real careful.’

Bert assured his auntie that he would be really, really careful, and left the Sailor’s Rest. Just out of habit, they walked the wrong way for a few streets, ducked down an alley, crossed a main road and caught a tram for the city. Bert needed to telephone Miss Fisher, and only the GPO offered any privacy in making telephone calls.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I stood in the street looking in the windows and
happy with the spring evening and the people
going past. There were always people . . . hurrying
to some place to drink together, to eat together
and then to make love.

Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast

Phryne stood on a street corner and waited. Waiting had never been her strong suit.

She had already experienced some of the difficulties inherent in being a personable female loitering in Acland Street after dark. These could, of course, be dealt with, but they were not the sort of encounters which she really felt in the mood for at this moment.

After sending a couple of sailors on their way with some useful advice about the location of their mother’s house, she walked up the street to the corner and back. A woman in a fuji dress of the pink known as cyclamen hissed at her from the shadows of an awning. She was forty at least, overpainted, with weary eyes and brassy hair.

‘Where you fucking come from, bitch? Fucking get out of it! This is my fucking beat!’

‘I’m not working,’ said Phryne calmly. ‘I’m waiting. Why didn’t you grab either of those sailors? I sent them your way.’

‘Too fucking drunk,’ said the woman. ‘To get that drunk, they’d have already fucking spent their pay. One of them social workers, are yer?’ She scanned Phryne’s clothes and her air of sophistication. ‘Nah, not in that hat. Got a fucking smoke on yer for a working girl?’

Phryne produced a cigarette case, and lit both their cigarettes. It was dark now, with a hot, uncomfortable wind that carried dust into their eyes and caked on the prostitute’s makeup, which looked to be an inferior form of whitewash.

‘There has to be a better way to make a living,’ muttered the woman. ‘What you waiting for?’

‘How much do you make in a night?’ asked Phryne.

‘Fucking what’s it to yer?’ the woman snarled. Then she seemed to shrink. ‘About a pound. I can’t go home without a pound or me old man’ll go fucking crook. And I only made seven bob and a deener tonight. And I found the fucking deener.’

‘Here’s a pound,’ said Phryne, producing it from the recesses of her costume. ‘Take a night off.’

The whore’s face cracked in a disbelieving grin. She suddenly seemed much younger, a ghost of the vigorous, lusty young woman she had once been.

‘I ain’t had a night off since . . .’ The woman grabbed the note and tucked it into her bosom. ‘I’ll—I’ll go home early— nah, that won’t do. Me old man’d just send me out again, he’s a fucking mean bastard. I’ll go over the caff and swank about me generous Jack. Ta ra, miss,’ she said, and walked off quickly, her high heels tapping the pavement.

Having cleared the decks, Phryne peeped into as much of the cake shop window as she could see through the shutters and listened to the St Kilda night: wailing ships’ sirens summoning missing crews from the fleshpots with a weary ‘Oh, come
on
, you blokes’ persistence, a police whistle, the smash of a bottle, the shout of a drunken man and, somewhere quite close, the chanting of children playing skippy. What were they doing out at this time of night? Shouldn’t they be home in bed?

Possibly they had no beds. The economic forecasts were bad, especially from America. Phryne reviewed her investments: beer, food, land, jewellery, gold, art works. Should yield some income as long as Australians continued to drink, which she thought a reasonably safe bet. She had three houses now, apart from the one she lived in, all in good suburbs. They ought to retain at least some of their value if the whole world fell apart. But what would happen to the poor?

What usually happened to them. They would pinch and scrimp and starve if they had to, in the hope that they would eventually see better times. Which was unlikely. The future, she thought pessimistically, was bleak.

She was distracted from her gloomy meditation by the unmistakable noise of a police officer applying the nine pound key to a door. Nothing else in the world sounded like a sledgehammer.

The smash–thud seemed to echo. Someone yelled, a noise abruptly cut off. Phryne heard feet pounding, and a man came around the corner at speeds of Mach number. He had the lead and he was going to keep it and once he got into another maze of lanes he would escape like a rat up a drainpipe. If he had information which Phryne needed, she would have to stop him. He was a big, solid man with muscles on his muscles, and he must have weighed sixteen stone. A bit much to tackle unassisted.

Well, there was always good old reliable gravity.

Phryne extended a delicate ankle and he performed a neat half somersault, slamming face-down on the ground with force enough to jar out all his remaining wits, as well as teeth. She placed a thoughtful foot on his neck as the other set of pounding feet were revealed to be a pursuing policeman.

‘Er,’ he said, skidding to a stop. This was the Mystery Woman who visited Jack Robinson. The entire station was dying to know who she was and what she wanted with him. Especially since it was well known that he loved his nice, calm, plump wife Rosie even more than he loved a good pinch or his cattaleya orchids. Now did not seem to be a good time to ask the Mystery Woman for any personal details. His malefactor was reposing under her dainty foot and didn’t look like he was going anywhere until his head stopped spinning. How had such a small thin woman done that to a big solid bruiser like Jimmy the Hook? She mightn’t like answering personal questions. It would be the act of a nitwit to irritate a woman with such remarkable martial arts skills.

‘Thanks, miss,’ he said politely, hauling the recumbent man to his feet and applying handcuffs. ‘I’m Constable Davis. I’ll take him off your hands.’

‘Who is he?’ asked Phryne, inspecting the groaning man as though he was an anatomical specimen. Of a particularly nasty disease.

‘Jimmy the Hook,’ said Constable Davis, eager to please.

‘He seems to have both hands.’

‘They call him that because of this,’ explained Davis, pulling a wharfie’s hand tool, a long sharp metal hook set in a wooden handle, from his prisoner’s belt. ‘He always fights with a hook. Lucky he didn’t gut himself when you . . . did whatever you did to him.’

‘You’re from Detective Inspector Robinson’s raid, aren’t you? And so is this . . . person. Anyone else in the house?’ asked Phryne.

‘Dunno, miss. Jimmy came haring out of the back door as though devils was after him and I thought I’d better collect him, or the boss’d go crook. So come along with me, Jimmy,’ said the constable. ‘You’re in big trouble this time,’ he added affably as they turned the corner. ‘Car theft. How much d’ye reckon that Bentley was worth? Ten years in jail, I reckon, when the magistrate reads through your priors.’

Jimmy replied briefly but pungently on the subject of cops and sheilas in league with cops. ‘I would’a got away if she hadn’t tripped me,’ he snarled.

‘Where is the girl?’ asked Phryne in a sub-zero voice.

‘What girl?’ asked Jimmy. ‘I never saw no girl. What’re you on about?’ He looked at Phryne and added, ‘Lady?’

‘Who was in the house?’ asked Phryne.

‘You asking me to dob in me own mates?’ demanded Jimmy angrily.

‘Yes,’ agreed Phryne. ‘If you want any mercy from me.’

Jimmy the Hook had never been wise, but he had elements of self-preservation. This thin little female had not only brought him down but kept him down, and that much strength required respect. Not many people could say that they’d brought Jimmy the Hook down. He thought he might be in love.

‘I dunno!’ he wailed. ‘There was just Dusty and old Almonds and Blue. Never was no girl. I don’t know anything about any girl.’

‘Dusty is Miller, the car thief,’ said the policeman. ‘Almonds is Terence Bailey. They call him Almonds because he eats almonds all the time. And Blue is John Pollack, who had red hair, when he had hair. Plus Jimmy the Hook. That was everyone, Jimmy?’

‘Yair.’ Jimmy subsided when they came round the corner into the lane. A police van was there, into which three other men were being loaded.

‘Bugger,’ Jimmy spat. ‘They got all of us.’

‘In you go.’ The police officer shoved him up the steps and into the dank interior.

‘Hello, Miss Fisher,’ said Jack Robinson. He was almost dancing with joy. ‘You’ve done me a bit of a good turn by making me look for that car.’

‘Oh? How?’

‘We got all of the makings for a fine little prosecution,’ enthused Jack, rubbing his hands together. ‘We got the names and addresses. We got the car numbers. We got a fine collection of naughty persons and we’ve got three cars. They gutted the bottom storey of the house and just drove ’em inside. One of which is, as you see, your missing Bentley.’