Death by the Book

by Lenny Bartulin

  Traffic loosened up a little once they were on the highway, but MacAllister still strained along at seventy kilometres an hour. His car of choice was a white, 1988 automatic Volvo. In terms of distance, it had been around the world two hundred times and probably had one more noisy lap in it. In terms of style, it was always going nowhere at Mach 2.

  It began to rain again. The water on the road peeled off the tyres like glue, curling in small perfect waves.

  ‘See the paper this morning?’ said MacAllister. His tone was cool, on the serious side. He nodded towards the back seat. ‘Take a look. Page three.’

  Jack stretched around for a copy of the Daily Telegraph. He knew what it was going to be about even before he picked it up.

  Poet shot in home invasion

  by John Ecclestone

  AN ACCLAIMED POET was shot dead in his Potts Point apartment yesterday after an attempted burglary, say local police. Edward Kass, 72, was found slumped over his kitchen table at approximately 4.30 p.m. with a bullet wound to the head. The intruder, whose name has not been released by police, was also found dead at the scene. Ian Douglas Durst, 43, arrived at the Kass apartment during the attempted burglary and surprised the intruder, wherein a struggle ensued and another shot was fired, fatally wounding the gunman. The murdered poet’s daughter, Ms Celia Mitten, 46, arrived home with a friend soon after and discovered the gruesome scene.

  Police held Mr Durst for questioning but released him a short time later. No charges have been laid. Last year, Mr Durst, a former gynaecologist, was involved in a drug and insider-trading scandal that saw him struck from the medical register.

  Edward Kass was the recipient of numerous literary awards for his poetry. His brother, well-known Sydney business entrepreneur Hammond Kasprowicz, was unavailable for comment yesterday.

  Jack folded the newspaper and tossed it onto the rear seat.

  ‘Did you know?’ asked MacAllister.

  ‘I was there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m the friend. I walked in with Celia Mitten.’

  ‘Jesus. What were you doing there?’

  ‘Meeting Kass.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To get some ideas. Celia came to the shop a few days ago and told me somebody had burnt her father’s books and sent them to him in the mail. A note said more would follow. Something like and soon it’ll be as if you never wrote any books at all.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘I’ve seen the note but not the ashes.’

  MacAllister thought for a moment. ‘And you’re getting hold of the same books for Kasprowicz?’

  ‘You got it. She thinks it’s him.’

  ‘Have you asked Kasprowicz about it?’

  ‘He denies it, says I’m crazy, but won’t tell me why he wants them.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Not sure. But even his own daughter wouldn’t put it past him. Apparently Kass didn’t mind a bit of Mrs Kasprowicz on the side, once upon a time. I suppose that kind of thing can put a strain on sibling relations.’

  ‘Jesus, these people! You don’t know who’s paying and who’s drinking!’

  ‘I’m sure there’s something else, something I don’t know. Why would he suddenly decide to burn his brother’s books for something that happened so long ago?’

  MacAllister shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe he’s one of those guys who bottles things up.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Kasprowicz had already taken his brother to the cleaners over the family money, you told me that. And that was years ago. I was hoping Kass was going to give me a hint about where things stood with rich brother Hammond now.’

  Roadwork machinery stood abandoned beside the highway, parked unevenly near newly laid asphalt and between large sections of concrete pipe. Loose gravel bounced up into the wheel arches.

  MacAllister slowed and leaned forward in his seat, concentrating like a pensioner. ‘You think the shooting’s got something to do with the whole book burning thing?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said MacAllister, doubtfully. ‘This is a big city. All sorts of things happen.’

  Jack stretched a little in his seat, felt an itchiness around his stitches. He wondered if he should tell MacAllister. ‘Yeah, but think about it. Kass was at the kitchen table working on his couplets when he got it in the head. From behind. Then Durst is suddenly there and he shoots the killer almost immediately after Kass gets it. Sound like a burglary gone terribly wrong?’

  ‘I’ve heard stranger things.’ MacAllister watched a car pass them. ‘What did the police say?’

  ‘Nothing. They’re too busy following wrong leads.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Jack sucked in a deep breath. ‘One of the detectives found out I used to work for Ziggy Brandt.’ It was a touchy subject: he had left MacAllister’s to work for Brandt.

  ‘I told you not to take that fucking job!’

  ‘Doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘It always matters with the cops.’ MacAllister rubbed his beard vigorously. ‘Always will. Permanently on the books now. I told you that. Suspicious by association.’

  ‘Not that old record. You’re worse than the fucking cops.’ Jack had not meant it to sound like that. He loved the guy, but the truth was different engines drove them. MacAllister stuck to the straight line and Jack liked to change lanes.

  ‘How old are you?’ MacAllister frowned. ‘Fifteen?’

  Jack ignored him.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot. The police are probably talking to Kasprowicz about the burnt books right now. Then they’ll be back to talk to you again ’cause they’ll want to know why you withheld stuff. Why, what, when, over and over, because they won’t believe anything you say until you’ve said it fifty times. And then they’ll arrest you for being a smart-arse. Just like last time. You already know the drill.’

  ‘Yeah, I know it.’

  Brendan MacAllister raised his voice. ‘Why the hell did you have to visit Kass? What’s it got to do with you if Kasprowicz is burning the books? The whole thing is none of your business. Soon as you found out you should have quit. Kasprowicz probably is burning the fucking books!’

  Jack stared out of the window.

  MacAllister glanced at him. ‘Listen, you might want to start using that grey pulpy shit in your head. Don’t get involved with these people. No matter what you think, you’ve got no idea what’s going on. Like you said, Durst was at the fucking apartment and shot the guy. He was probably there because he’s fucking Kass’s daughter. Who knows what else? And what if the shooting wasn’t a coincidence, like you said? All the possible scenarios look crap to me.’ MacAllister eased off the accelerator a little. ‘They live in another world, Jack. You should know that after working for Ziggy Brandt. I’m not helping you out of another fucking mess.’

  Jack pulled out a cigarette and played with it. Outside, cars streamed through heavier rain — their rear lights blurred and dimmed, then were swallowed by the downpour.

  ‘The guy who shot Kass was the same guy who stabbed me.’

  MacAllister grimaced as though somebody had twisted his arm.

  ‘Last Monday night somebody broke into the shop,’ continued Jack. ‘I walked in on the guy and he pulled a knife. Same guy. Not bad, huh?’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘He tried to light a little bonfire of Kass’s books in my rubbish bin.’

  MacAllister gripped the steering wheel tighter. ‘What did the cops say when you told them?’

  ‘I didn’t tell them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to find out who the fuck is trying to set me up.’

  ‘Don’t you think the cops would be better at that?’

  Jack paused. ‘I’m seeing Annabelle Kasprowicz.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Calm down or you’ll drive us off the road.’ Jack wiped at his foggy window with a sleeve, the unlit cigarette in his fingertips. ‘I want to keep
seeing her.’

  ‘Okay, no more,’ said MacAllister, shaking his head. ‘Don’t tell me any fucking more, I don’t want to know about it.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  ‘Yep, that’s what I say. Enough.’ MacAllister straightened up behind the wheel. ‘Soon you’ll be having a fucking menage à trois with Durst. Or maybe you already are? A big, all-in fuck festival at the Kasprowicz house!’

  ‘Every Saturday night.’

  ‘Yep, every Saturday night. I should have guessed.’

  MacAllister leaned into the windscreen. Jack sank into his seat. The windows began to fog with their brooding.

  They stopped to piss at a roadside truck stop, holding their breath against the stench of the chemical toilets. They drove on. Here and there a smoky mist lay through clusters of trees and hovered over low corners of the paddocks around them. Even with the drenching, the land looked brown and useless.

  Half an hour later they turned off the Hume and drove through the town of Mittagong. The sky was still bloated with clouds. The place was almost empty. Jack saw a skinny woman with stringy blonde hair, smoking a cigarette under the post-office awning and ignoring the toddler crying into her leg. She looked up as they drove past. Her face was too long for so early in the day.

  ‘How far to Clifford’s place?’ asked Jack. He wound the window down to let a little air in.

  ‘Not far.’

  A few kilometres later, the town of Bowral. Half-a-dozen more and they turned left onto a narrow sealed road, edged with gravel and shallow muddy gutters. Then another forty minutes with not much to see but a lot of silent land getting wet.

  Eventually they drove into a stand of eucalyptus trees and tall pines and what looked like cedar, black with rain. Waist-high bushes and ferns, swaying in the wind. The car rumbled over a small timber bridge with a creek rushing underneath. They passed a gatehouse and drove under a thin metal arch with creepers twisted around it. There were letters welded there, too. They spelled Kininmonth in long curly script. Jack looked at MacAllister.

  ‘It means rich bastard.’

  They came into the open again and followed a curved carriage driveway up a gentle rise. Gravel crunched pleasantly as they came over the low hill. Kininmonth. After the Great Wall of China, it was probably the next thing you could see from the moon.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Jack. ‘Monarch of the fucking Glen.’

  The driveway bisected perfect lawns, rows of white and yellow rose bushes, and thick green hedges at least ten feet high. The house was grey granite, streaked with rain. Gabled roofs, crow-stepped and castellated parapets, and six chimney stacks in case it got cold during a siege. Jack could only imagine how many rooms it had. There was probably a spare ballroom somewhere to keep the dustpan and broom in.

  They got out of the car. MacAllister heaved a doorknocker the size of a church bell. They waited in the vaulted alcove, looking around. After a while, the front door opened.

  MacAllister smiled broadly. ‘Morning, Mr Harris.’

  Clifford Harris looked fifty, with longish straw-blonde hair and not-quite-ironed-out wrinkles around his eyes. He was tall and paunchy, no chin, small grey eyes and a buttery complexion. Whatever he had that might have appealed to women was mostly in his wallet. He was wearing jeans, polished black leather boots and a tight white shirt with military style lapels. There was a silver watch on his wrist that was probably no good for his posture. He seemed annoyed.

  ‘Brendan. I wasn’t expecting you until the afternoon.’

  MacAllister gave him a perplexed look. ‘I thought you said any time was fine?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now.’ Clifford Harris turned to Jack.

  ‘This is Jack Susko,’ said MacAllister. ‘He works for me.’

  Harris nodded but did not offer his hand. ‘Fine.’ He walked back into the house. ‘Wipe your shoes.’

  Jack had a strong feeling that no brunch would be forthcoming.

  The entrance foyer echoed with their footsteps. It was about the size of a Masonic hall. The walls were covered in wood-and-gilt-framed paintings of plump, naked nymphs lying around pools of crystal water in the forest, or reclined on luxurious floor cushions with Negro attendants offering ripe fruit in baskets. Plants rested on elaborate steel stands. Large, empty vases and an array of chairs too valuable to sit on posed here and there against the walls, some tables and sideboards between them. There was a gold-edged mirror, big enough for twenty people to look at themselves — or for one person to be the centre of a lot of their own attention.

  Harris led them down a wide hallway of smooth pale stone under a patterned maroon runner. After about a hundred metres he stopped. ‘In there,’ he said, pointing. They walked into a long rectangular room with high ceilings and a window at one end covered with drawn white blinds. There was a parquet floor, a couple of armchairs, some lamps and a small purple-upholstered couch. The bookshelves were painted white.

  ‘Can you be quick?’ said Harris. ‘I have guests.’

  ‘No problem,’ replied MacAllister, already scanning the shelves. ‘We’ll leave the keys in the letterbox.’

  Harris frowned. He placed a hand on one of the bookshelves. He had a vaguely effeminate manner. Jack wondered if maybe his aunts had raised him.

  MacAllister angled his head and squinted at the book spines. Halfway along the shelf he stopped, pulled out one of the books and inspected it. He glanced over at Jack. ‘I didn’t know you collected poetry, Mr Harris.’

  Clifford squinted at the book in MacAllister’s hands. ‘I don’t. That was a gift from a friend. He knew the poet.’

  ‘Not for sale, then?’

  ‘Oh no. It’s for sale. It’s all for sale.’

  Jack walked over and MacAllister passed him the book. A slim, brown leather volume with gilt stamping. He flipped to the cover plate. Selected Poems. Privately bound. Signed and numbered by the author. This was number three. The author was Edward Kass.

  MacAllister ran his eyes over a few more spines. ‘Looks like a complete collection.’

  Harris half shrugged, half nodded, as if to say of course. ‘I’ve never looked at them,’ he said nonchalantly.

  ‘Don’t tell your friend,’ said Jack. ‘He might get offended.’

  Clifford Harris scoffed. ‘He wouldn’t mind at all. You can ask him if you like, he’s one of my guests. Doctor Ian Durst.’

  Jack’s head snapped up.

  Harris noticed the look on his face. ‘Do you know him?’

  It took a couple of pulses of Jack’s synapses for the information to fully register in his brain. He frowned with the effort. Then his head started to hurt.

  Clifford Harris repeated the question. ‘Do you know him?’

  Jack pulled himself together. ‘I know he’s not a doctor anymore.’

  Harris passed a soft, pink hand across his fringe of soft, dyed hair. His voice was tight with offence. ‘Then you don’t know a thing. And I’d prefer you leave gossip and lies outside where you wiped your feet.’

  Jack grinned.

  Harris puffed himself up, indignant, as though a valet had put a scratch in his Range Rover. ‘I’ve known Ian for fifteen years,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘What the media did to that man’s life is an absolute disgrace.’ His doughy cheeks glowed pink for a moment. ‘My wife still sees him regularly,’ he added in a defiant tone.

  ‘No, you’re right, it was terrible.’ Jack tuned a little flattery into his voice. ‘So you’d know the Kasprowicz family, too?’

  ‘Of course. I first met Ian through his father-in-law, Hammond Kasprowicz. He was a business partner of mine.’

  Jack nodded, pursing his lips slightly, his face a polite, standard Oh right, yes I see kind of face. What he was thinking was how beautifully neat everything was. How unbelievable, even. Durst was here? Now? What surprised Jack, though, was that he was not surprised at all.

  ‘So you knew the brother, Edward?’

  ‘I only ever met him once. Many years ago. We e
xchanged pleasantries.’

  Jack watched Harris’ face closely. Clifford shifted his eyes for an instant to MacAllister and then cleared his throat. ‘I suppose you’ve heard?’ he said. ‘He was murdered two days ago. Horrible news.’

  ‘Shocking,’ said Jack. He held up the book in his hands. ‘Anybody ever approached you about these, offering to buy?’

  Harris seemed uncomfortable for a moment. But then it passed and he went back to exuding his effeminate arrogance. ‘As a matter of fact, yes. Hammond Kasprowicz made an offer on them only a few weeks ago.’

  It was getting better by the minute. ‘But you said no?’

  ‘I’d rather lose a testicle than help Hammond Kasprowicz in any way whatsoever.’

  ‘Your business together didn’t go too well?’

  ‘He’s a cunt.’

  ‘Seems a popular opinion.’

  Harris moved towards the door of the library. ‘Even his daughter thinks so.’

  Jack felt a little sting. ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘Annabelle? Well, of course. She’s Ian’s wife.’

  Jack felt another sting. It took its time passing. ‘Aren’t they divorced?’

  Harris smirked. ‘Appearances are necessary sometimes,’ he replied, preening. He pointed his little chin and stretched the wrinkles in his creamy neck. He obviously enjoyed knowing things. ‘Let’s just say there are certain legal technicalities that need to be taken care of. And I am assisting. Everybody needs help against pricks like Kasprowicz.’

  Jack lowered his eyes for a moment. Thoughts were coming fast now. Unpleasant ones.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ Harris headed for the door. ‘Be quick.’

  MacAllister stood for a moment, listening to Clifford Harris’ footsteps fade away down the hall. Then he turned around. He placed his big hairy hands on his hips and pointed his big hairy chin at Jack. His big placating grin was gone. ‘So what do you think now?’ he said, in an angry whisper.

  ‘What’s there to think?’

  MacAllister blew a hard breath through his nostrils. ‘Yeah, that’s it, you’re right. There’s nothing to think. Nothing at all. Because you already know everything.’