Free Deal Me Out by Peter Corris Page B

Mr Hardy?’
    ‘Bentleigh.’
    ‘Just look in the glove box.’ Her manner became slightly distant; I was beginning to get bad feelings about Bentleigh.
    The detective’s friend turned up trumps with just one Mountain, initial C., listed for Bentleigh. I located the address, Brewers Road, in the street directory and headed off. The Laser was responsive and toey in ways that were just a memory to my Falcon; for the first mile I felt like a rodeo rider getting a frisky mount under control. After that, the drive out to Bentleigh was a lesson in the differences between two cities. The Melburnians seemed to have flattened large sections of the city I remembered from my last visit, more than ten years ago, and swept freeways through the clearances. That sort of thing had met more resistance in Sydney, which was just as well for me or else my living room would have been a traffic island. Also, the traffic lights were advertised as carrying concealed cameras to catch sneakers-through-on-the-red, an Inquisitional touch Sydney lacks. The camera business reminded me of the time when Melburnians would turn pale at the ‘tow-away zone’ signs in Sydney and our stories about retrieving cars from great distances at monstrous expense.
    It was after three when I reached Brewers Road. Kids were straggling home from school, battling a wind that whipped at the tails of their raincoats and shook the trees and shrubs in the well-tended gardens. Bentleigh was one of those flat Melbourne suburbs, with the odd suggestion of a rise and fall in the landscape, which made it just possible to imagine it as a pleasant place before 1835. Now it had a solid, comfortable post-war look of brick veneer and mortgages paid on time.
    I cruised down quiet Brewers Road squinting at the numbers. The woodwork on the houses looked as if it got an annual coat of paint; the road was a polite half mile from the vulgar shopping centre; there was a big Catholic church on a rise at the end of the road and not a pub in sight.
    Number thirteen was a model of the sort of place that predominated in the area: broad grass strip then a low wooden fence, freshly painted, with black wrought iron gates. Neither the gates nor the fence would keep anything out or in—the rose bushes were clipped back to prevent any suggestion of them climbing on the wood—but in that neighbourhood they were de rigeur. Inside the fence was a concrete driveway and strips of concrete ran all around the edges of the lawn and the garden beds to make the whole thing easy to mow. The house was a double fronted red brick veneer set squarely on the block. The wide Australian country verandah of yesteryear had withered away to a mean little cement porch.
    I parked across the road from the conventional, respectable house, and mused on the differences between siblings. In this place wild William Mountain would stand out like boxing gloves on a ballerina, but his sister evidently fitted into the environment perfectly, like the gladioli or the shaven blades of buffalo grass.
    The perfect orderliness of the street was somewhat disturbed by the rubbish bins which stood in front of the houses awaiting collection. Metal and plastic with lids neatly clipped on, they were very unlike the split, battered jobs in Glebe. But there were a few plastic garbage bags and even the odd cardboard box. As I watched number thirteen, a woman came from the back of the house carrying her rubbish bin. She rested the bin on the fence and opened the gate. A couple of steps across the footpath and she put the bin down on the grass near the gutter. This put it about a metre away from her neighbour’s bin which had a cardboard box next to it. The box might havebeen sitting on the boundary line between the two properties as it appeared on the surveyor’s plan. The woman looked quickly back at the houses, bent over and moved the box so that it clearly belonged in front of number eleven. I could hear the chink of bottles as she moved the