Read Online The Greenwich Apartments by Peter Corris - Free Book Online Page A

Police Special from the kitchen drawer and checked it for load and action. A quick wash, a fresh shirt, holster harness on, gun away and I was ready. Images from the film floated in my mind as I drove through the quiet streets. A long shot of the beach at night, two cigarettes glowing in the dark, occupied me along Glebe Point Road and I thought about the love-making between the teacher and the student as I drove up William Street. Then I thought about Helen in my bed and her flat and other beds. As I looked for a parking place I wrenched my mind back to the job. It shouldn’t be too hard. Chat to one nightclub owner about some old pals. He’d probably be only too pleased to help, probably give me a free drink and introduce me to some nice girls.
    The streetwalkers were at their posts on Darlinghurst Road, behaving themselves as the cops walked past, and then laughing and giving their blue-shirted backs the finger. The eating and drinking and game-playing places were open and doing business. The Champagne Cabaret was a few doors from Woolworths which was closed. There were people squatting in the long, deep recess in front of the store—some jewellery sellers, a pavement artist and a man just standing there, doing nothing.
    The man outside the joint was working hard. ‘Come on gents,’ he called, ‘come on ladies, come on all you folks in between. Something for everyone at the Champagne Cabaret. They sing, they dance, they make romance. Come in, sir. Hey, sailor!’ He was about 21 in the body and twice that in the face. He wore a draped jacket with shoulder pads andskin-tight pants, something like the outfit I used to wear myself in Maroubra around 1956. I stopped to look at the photographs mounted in glass cases beside the narrow doorway. Sequinned women clutched microphones suggestively; too-sleek men clutched sequinned women.
    He waved his cigarette in my face. ‘Come right in, sir. Ten dollars an’ you’re through the door an’ in another world. You look like a good sport. Do yourself a good turn.’
    â€˜I want to talk to the boss,’ I said. ‘Big blonde guy, isn’t he? Darcy, is that right?’
    He kept waving the cigarette and spoke to the passers-by. ‘Come right in, ten dollars to make your dreams come true.’
    â€˜No trouble,’ I said. ‘Just a talk.’
    He looked directly at me for a split second. ‘Twenty dollars to make your dreams come true.’
    â€˜You said ten before.’
    â€˜That was then, this is now.’
    â€˜I could walk right through you.’
    â€˜Into a locked door,’ he said. ‘Come on, gents, come on, girls …’
    I gave him the twenty and he almost made a bow. ‘Pay at the door,’ he said.
    Past the photographs, with my foot on the first step, I spun around. ‘What?’
    â€˜Pay at the door, arsehole. Ten dollars to make your dreams come true.’
    Smoke and noise drifted towards me as I went down the stairs. There was hardly room to stand between the bottom stair and the door and a man was already standing there. I gave him ten dollars and he pushed the door open. The Champagne Cabaret had taken its decor ideas from a variety of sources; there were Arabian and Chinese touches in the lighting and the wall paintings, a Broadway effect to the stage which was decorated in black andwhite like a piano keyboard and even a Hollywood western look to the bar and tables. I saw this through the smoky gloom as I pushed towards the bar. Pushed, because the joint was full; people were dancing on a small floor in the middle of the room, spilling over into the area occupied by tables and even putting the people standing at the bar under pressure.
    I eased out of the way of a tightly embraced couple and managed to get to the bar. The music, which had been a sort of pseudo-Glenn Miller swing, petered out. The dancing stopped; a drum rolled and a man in a white dinner jacket came out