I looked at the card he’d laid on my desk after he’d finished shaking my hand. He was Oscar Cartwright and he was evidently the director of Sydney Casinos Ltd.

‘What do you know about casinos, Mr Hardy?’

The man now sitting in the client chair in my office looked as if he could buy the whole building. If he did he’d certainly junk the chair. He’d told me to call him O.C., but so far I hadn’t done it.

‘Not much,’ I said. ‘I’ve been in a few-Monte Carlo, Hobart, Port Douglas, places like that.’

‘I gather you don’t like ‘em much. This one’s different.’

I shrugged. Thousand-dollar suits, gold watches and silk ties tend to bring up my levels of resistance. ‘I was in one in Las Vegas a few years back. It had a tiger in a cage in the lobby. I still didn’t like it.’

He laughed, showing expensive teeth. Everything about him was expensive-the blow-waved hair, the aftershave, the tan, the facelift. Oscar Cartwright had fifty-year-old eyes in the thirty-year-old face, which made him a hard man to read and not an easy one to like. Still, he was sitting there, breathing the stale, cheap air in my office, and obviously about to make me a proposition. The three other little jobs I had on hand were from a small payer, a slow payer and a probable non-payer-I couldn’t afford to take too strong a dislike to Oscar’s grooming. And he had laughed, that was something.

‘They told me you were a comic. I like that. They also tell me you’re tough and honest. I like that even more.’

Oscar was the sort who liked to anticipate the next question. He told me who ‘they’ were- several satisfied clients over the past couple of years. One of the jobs had sent a man to hospital, hence the reputation for toughness. I guess the honesty tag comes with my low prices. The shabby office two floors up from St Peters Lane in Darlinghurst, and the fact that my new Hong Kong linen suit cost about as much as Oscar’s shampoo and trim probably helped reinforce the image.