Chapter Sixteen #2
“Miss Walker? We’re sorry to disturb you, but I see you are already up,” the tall one said without too much sarcasm, which was admirable in the circumstances. “I’m afraid we’ll need you to show us your flat.”
“It’s Ms.,” Billie said, sliding past him and unlocking her door.
“Pardon?”
“Ms. Walker. Never mind.” Billie stepped into her flat and slid the fox fur off her bare shoulders, noting the way the movement drew their eyes. “May I see your identification please?” she asked, poker-faced. She put one hand out, the other resting on her curved hip.
“Lady, we could have busted your door down if we wanted to,” Hatchet Face piped up impatiently.
“Well, I see you did not. I’m most grateful to you,” Billie replied and smiled again. “Identification, please.”
Both men seemed taken aback, and then the tall one flashed her his wallet without a fuss. She took it, held it, and read. Detective Inspector Hank Cooper. She looked him over, head cocked.
“Hank. Is that American?” she asked.
“My mother was American,” he replied with a crease in his brow, retrieving his wallet. His pale eyes had grown a touch larger. Were they green? Hazel, with shots of green and yellow, Billie decided.
She took her eyes off his and looked at the constable’s ID casually, then handed it back. Constable Dick Dennison. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit, Detective Inspector?” she asked the tall one. She considered slipping those blasted tight shoes off but resisted.
“If you could not touch anything, we shouldn’t take too much of your time,” the inspector said. He was all hard and professional now, as if remembering what he was there for.
“Tea? Coffee?” she offered.
They ignored her and began to look around. The constable walked into her bedroom. She heard wardrobe doors opening and closing. After a minute he walked back out.
“What brought you here, exactly?” she asked.
“You’ve been out all night?” It was the tall one asking the question.
“I’m afraid so,” she said. It wouldn’t be great for her reputation, but the alternative was less appealing, so to hell with appearances.
“I don’t make a habit of it, but I closed an important case last week and it’s taken till now to get the time to celebrate.
I was out with my secretary—or I guess you could call him my assistant. ”
He absorbed that. It was hard to gauge what he thought of it, now that he’d recovered his professional veneer.
“Perhaps you’ve met him? Samuel Baker. He was one of the Rats of Tobruk: 2/23rd Battalion, 26th Brigade, 9th Division. Where did you serve?”
He sidestepped her question. “You’re a private inquiry agent, I take it,” he said.
She nodded. Hatchet Face continued his bumbling around in the background. He was in her bathroom now.
“An anonymous call about something, was it?” she pressed.
“Yeah,” Hatchet Face replied, emerging. His jaw was pushed out, his eyes small. He wasn’t as good at veneers.
“It must have been a trusted source to bring a detective inspector out so early,” Billie added casually.
“Yeah,” the constable grunted.
“Anonymity isn’t what it used to be, I guess,” Billie commented.
Silence hung heavy in the air. The inspector stood by the closed front windows, observing the exchange, his hands in his pockets and those pale eyes of his not missing a thing.
Hatchet Face began bustling around again, now with even less grace, opening and closing cupboards in the kitchen and making a show of things, as if he hadn’t already failed to see what was supposed to be there waiting for them, clear as day.
Billie walked to the large front windows and peered down at the street.
Her flat was at the farthest northeastern corner of the building, providing a good vantage point for watching the passing traffic on Edgecliff Road below.
A block or so back from the driveway of Cliffside Flats was the parked Vauxhall.
Yes, there was someone in that car, she sensed.
Perhaps the same person who’d tailed her that day to the Browns’ fur shop in the Strand Arcade.
How did that fit into the picture? “The Vauxhall down there. He one of yours?” she asked the detective inspector casually.
“The Vauxhall?”
“Yes. I think there’s someone watching the building.”
“Not one of ours,” the inspector said with ease, but she sensed Hatchet Face, who’d returned to the living room, stiffen.
Billie turned a dining room chair around and sat down. “The offer of tea still stands,” she said to the inspector. “Or coffee.”
“No, thank you, miss,” he replied, folding his arms.
“Are you a recent transfer?” she ventured. “I don’t believe I’ve heard your name before. Do you know Special Sergeant Lillian Armfield? Please pass on my regards if you see her. I owe her a call.”
Detective Inspector Cooper wasn’t biting. He’d closed up like a clam. A polite clam, but a clam nonetheless.
Hatchet Face was scowling and looking flushed. “Didn’t you call in a stiff last night?” he asked gruffly.
“That I did, Officer.” She threw one arm over the back of the chair and looked at him, wondering where he’d go with it. “At the People’s Palace.”
“Then you went out on the town after that? Geez, you dames are wacky. Seeing a stiff makes ’em all excited,” he said to the other man, as if he needed an audience, all the while laughing at his own joke.
“Don’t tell me you never take a drink after coming face-to-face with a stiff?
” Billie queried with a level gaze, and the grin dropped from his face like a lead bubble.
The inspector exhaled suddenly from his position by the window.
She didn’t look at him. She kept her gaze on Hatchet Face, but he wouldn’t look at her now.
His skin had turned beet red and he was clenching his fists harder than a pauper grips a coin.
Given different company, one of those fists might have tried landing on her.
“There wasn’t anyone there, anyhow,” the constable managed after a moment of recovery, his repartee delivered with less confidence now.
“This one just dreams of stiffs,” he announced.
That got him chortling to himself again.
He was a regular one-man show, and his own audience. The inspector kept watching.
“I did not imagine it, Officer. He was there in his room at the Palace,” Billie said earnestly. Her sincerity was wasted on the constable, though the inspector was watching her carefully, in silence. “A dead person is not something one imagines.”
“What were you doing there, in some man’s room, anyway?” It was Hatchet Face again. He really had it in for her. She’d like to know why.
“His name was Zervos,” she explained in a professional tone. “Con Zervos. He worked as a doorman at The Dancers on George Street, off Victory Lane, and he wanted to talk with me, just like I told you coppers last night. It was late because it was after he got off work. The Dancers closes at one.”
“You accept a lot of invitations up to men’s rooms in the middle of the night?”
Billie let that ride. “Are you finished here, or do you want to go through my panty drawer?” she asked him.
“I think we’re finished,” the inspector said, seeming to have seen and heard quite enough. “Thank you for your time, miss. Sorry to have bothered you.”
She stood and handed the inspector her business card. “If you need to ask me any questions, you know where to find me. I’ll be here or at my office in Daking House. I was not making up what I saw last night, Inspector. I don’t know what brought you here today, but I’d surely like to know.”
He turned her card over in long, elegant fingers.
“Helluva thing, a pretty dame like you mixed up in a business like this,” Hatchet Face said.
He just couldn’t shut up. Billie’s patience had worn thin.
He turned to the inspector and added, “Her pop was a private dick, you know. Barry Walker. He was a copper once, too. Poor bastard would be turning over in his grave right about now,” he said, looking at her with small, glinting eyes. “His own little girl . . .”
Billie felt her temper rise, nearly get the better of her.
Her face felt warm. A few seconds ticked over while she resisted his bait, resisted her fury.
Bringing her late father into it was low.
“Well, if you’re finished with me, I could use some beauty sleep,” she said with an effort, using that professional smile again.
She walked to the front door and put her hand on the knob. “Good day.”
Once the men were in the hallway she closed her door unceremoniously.
The constable knew who’d called the police.
Maybe the inspector did, too. She found herself at the window, catching sight of the pair as they made their way down the sloping drive to the road and back to their motorcar.
She’d have to pay a visit to that detective inspector, she thought, watching him.
To her surprise, he broke away from his partner and approached the Vauxhall parked down the curved street.
Before she knew it he was leaning over the driver’s side, talking to someone, while Dennison hung back.
The constable shook his head and kicked at the footpath, as transparent as a child.
After a short exchange, the car door opened and a man got out, reluctantly, it seemed.
Well, well, what do we have here?
Billie Walker recognized him. It was another private inquiry agent.
Vincenzo Moretti was his name. He was rumored to be involved with the Black Hand or the Camorra, secretive Italian-Australian criminal gangs known for extortion rackets and violence, a rumor Billie had always found convincing.
He had hated Billie’s father with a passion and her father had warned her about him.
Something about his days as a cop, but she didn’t know the details.
He had given Moretti some trouble and Moretti never stopped giving it back, it seemed.
Rival PIs didn’t always get on, naturally enough, but it wasn’t as if there was so much dough in the biz that it was worth trying to make trouble for other agencies.
No, his hatred for Billie was different, inherited.
Something personal. And now here Moretti was, parked outside her flat at eight on a Sunday morning.
And what an interesting morning to be there.
Down on the street the conversation had finished. Moretti was getting back into his Vauxhall, his shoulders sloped, and the tall inspector had made his way back to Dennison. Before they slipped out of sight, Inspector Cooper looked up and caught Billie at her window. She couldn’t read his face.
It was two hours later when Sam came around in a Ford Prefect with a luggage rack, perfectly suited to the task.
As instructed, he was wearing a suit, a pair of round glasses, and a tan cap low on his head, not for all the world the man who had been at the same address just a short time earlier.
He disappeared into Cliffside Flats and emerged with a late-middle-aged woman in a cloche and a loose-fitting, drop-waisted light tweed coat.
He held her gently at the elbow and helped her into the waiting car before loading her many suitcases. One was a large, heavy trunk.
Twenty-five minutes later, interested onlookers would have noticed Alma McGuire, lady’s maid to Baroness von Hooft, entering Cliffside Flats, seemingly returning from a Sunday morning stroll.
Only the keenest of observers would have spotted that her walking shoes looked remarkably similar to those worn by the woman with the cloche.