Death on Demand

by Paul Thomas

  Ihaka nodded. “I shouldn’t have just turned up like that.”

  Corvine chuckled. “Run silent, run deep – that’s always been the Ihaka way. Glad to see you haven’t changed. Every other fucking thing has.”

  “What happened, Blair?”

  “I got inside this Westie biker gang that was moving a ton of P. One night I got a call from the boss man, Jerry Spragg, to say he needed a hand. Standard stuff, didn’t think anything of it. But when I turned up, they kicked the shit out of me, chucked me in the back of a ute, and took me into the bush where Spragg put five fucking rounds in me.”

  “Yeah, I heard all that,” said Ihaka. “I meant, how did they know?”

  Corvine shook his head slowly. “Beats me. I don’t think I fucked up, though. When I first went under, I took that many risks and made that many fuck-ups, I could’ve been dealt to ten times over, but by then I knew what I was doing. You get a pretty good feel for when you’re sweet, when you have to watch your step, and when it’s time to get the fuck out of Dodge. Right up till the hammer came down, I was tight with these dudes. I’m telling you, man, it came out of nowhere.”

  “So if you didn’t fuck up…”

  Corvine shrugged. “Two possibilities: P paranoia – there’s a lot of it about – or I was ratted out. But they kicked up an unholy shitstorm at Central, turned the place upside down, without finding anything that pointed to a leak. Sheree didn’t buy it. Still doesn’t. Hence the short fuse.”

  “What did Spragg have to say for himself?”

  “Not a word – staunch as. Fat lot of good it did him. He’s in Paremoremo for all of three weeks and whammo – they did him over, big-time. Now he’s a fucking basketcase who sits in a wheelchair shitting his pants and singing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’.”

  “Friends of yours?”

  “Nothing to do with me, mate,” said Corvine. “Routine gang shit slash prison madness, from what I heard. But yeah, I wasn’t exactly inconsolable.” He brightened up. “Hey, you know that scene in Pulp Fiction when the guy bursts out of the bathroom with a .44 Mag and unloads on Travolta and the black dude?”

  “Vaguely. It was a while ago.”

  “Definition of a classic, Chief: it stands the test of time. He doesn’t hit squat, remember? They don’t have a fucking scratch, so the black guy’s convinced it’s a miracle and vows to renounce his evil ways. I always thought that scene was bullshit: how could you possibly fire six rounds at a couple of guys standing a few feet away and not even graze either of them?” Corvine threw up his hands, flashing the crazy grin Ihaka hadn’t expected to see again. “Look what happened to me.”

  “Slight difference,” said Ihaka. “Spragg didn’t miss.”

  “He missed the vital organs, though – five times. I’m not saying it’s a miracle, but it’s certainly a freakish occurrence.”

  “You were just fucking lucky. A pro would’ve put one in your swede.”

  At 8.58 the following morning Superintendent McGrail got out of the lift on the eighth floor of a downtown serviced apartment building. He went down the corridor, stopping at apartment 8F. All being well, Detective Sergeant Ihaka would be on the other side of the door, in a presentable state and prepared for their 9 a.m. meeting.

  But Ihaka hadn’t responded to McGrail’s secretary’s voice messages and texts confirming the time of the meeting. And McGrail couldn’t help but remember some of the disturbing sights and scenes witnessed by a young Johan Van Roon when he’d turned up to collect Ihaka from his place first thing in the morning. There was the blow-up sex doll in a deckchair on the front porch, with a cucumber in its mouth slot and a sign around its neck saying “I claim this house in the name of Satan”. (An anti-Mormon device, apparently.) There were various distressed or angry women whose names Ihaka professed not to know and whose distress or anger he professed not to understand.

  McGrail shook his head, as if deleting these unwelcome scenes from his memory bank. This wasn’t Ihaka’s house, it was a serviced apartment in which he’d spent a single night. Even the Ihaka of old at his oafish, anarchic worst couldn’t wreak too much havoc in one night. And this wasn’t the Ihaka of old. He’d changed during his years in exile. He’d matured.

  Oh well, thought McGrail. If he’s in a drunken stupor, at least I’ll have the consolation of waking him up. He knocked. Ihaka opened the door. He was fully dressed, hair damp from the shower. He hadn’t shaved, but then he often didn’t. A box of cereal and a carton of orange juice sat on the counter separating the kitchenette from the living area.

  “Good morning, Sergeant,” said McGrail. “You got the message, then?”

  “Yep.”

  “It didn’t occur to you that a reply would’ve been helpful?”

  “Silence means consent, doesn’t it?”

  “Ah, the Roman principle ‘Qui tacet consentire videtur’.”

  “That’s the bugger,” said Ihaka. “Cup of tea?”

  As Ihaka went through the cupboards looking for cups and saucers, McGrail mounted a bar stool. “Seeing you’re still here,” he said, “I’m assuming your session with Lilywhite was worthwhile.”

  Ihaka waited for the jug to boil. “He had his wife knocked off,” he said eventually. When McGrail didn’t respond, he added, “That’s your cue to say ‘Well, Sergeant, it looks like you were right and me and all those other fucking geniuses were wrong.’”

  McGrail produced a small moleskin notebook and fountain pen. “Before I shower you with plaudits, perhaps you could brief me on it.”

  Ihaka delivered a highly condensed version of Lilywhite’s confession.

  “You obviously believe him?”

  “Well, fuck,” said Ihaka, “if anyone’s entitled to think they can tell when this guy’s lying and when he’s not, it’d be me, wouldn’t you say?”

  “That’s as may be, but to apply another of your Roman legal principles, ‘Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus’.”

  “Once a liar, always a liar?”

  “Well done, Sergeant.”

  Ihaka shook his head. “Why would he?”

  “I tend to agree. The only point of a false confession would be to protect someone else, but seeing the case was basically closed, there was no need to do that. I owe you an apology, Sergeant. You were right, and the rest of us were wrong. I should’ve had more faith in your instincts.”

  Ihaka shrugged. “What’s one ruined career in the grand scheme of things?”

  McGrail nodded. “You’re entitled to feel aggrieved.”

  “I already did.”

  McGrail didn’t take these remarks seriously. Ihaka had his weaknesses, but self-pity wasn’t one of them.

  “So what’s in the folder?”

  Ihaka passed it over. “Contact details for his three mates and some background on those two cases he reckons we should have another look at: a stabbing in Ponsonby and an old lady who fell down the stairs and broke her neck.”

  McGrail flipped the folder open. “Oh my goodness.”

  “What?”

  “Jonathon Bell. That name didn’t, well, ring a bell?”

  “He’s rich, isn’t he?”

  “That’s like saying George Best was a fair footballer. He’ll require careful handling.”

  “Why are you telling me?” asked Ihaka.

  “Don’t you want to follow this through?”

  “Not if it means going back to square one. Fuck that.”

  “This would be a secondment, a special project. You’d report directly to me.”

  Ihaka stared. “Are you serious?”

  McGrail gestured with the folder. “This is serious, don’t you think? Serious matters demand a serious response.”

  “Charlton’s not going to like it.”

  “He doesn’t have to.”

  Ihaka’s face creased happily. “Well, when you put it like that…”

  McGrail nodded. “Good.” He gestured with the folder. “I’m classifying this as a cold-case investigation. Apart from anyt
hing else, that should go some way towards appeasing our friend Charlton, but let’s keep the hired killer element between ourselves for the time being. You’re going to need some help.” He waited for Ihaka’s groan to peter out. “This could involve a lot of time on the computer and, as I recall, that wasn’t your forte.”

  “I don’t want one of Charlton’s pet weasels spying on me.”

  “What about Beth Greendale?” said McGrail. “She’s done a few part-time research projects for me.”

  “Beth’d be great.”

  “There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Now I’ve organized an office and a car, and I’ll square your secondment with the Wellington district…”

  “And I’ll bet you’ve already got Beth teed up,” said Ihaka accusingly. “You had it all worked out, didn’t you?”

  “I anticipated an outcome and put some arrangements in place accordingly. Don’t look so suspicious, Sergeant: I do that sort of thing all the time. As a matter of fact, I did quite a lot of it when we worked together – you just didn’t notice.”

  “But you were pretty bloody sure I’d fall into line.”

  McGrail resisted the temptation to break into one of his wintry smiles: if Ihaka decided he was being manipulated, all bets were off. “I thought that if Lilywhite turned out to be unfinished business, you’d want to be involved – providing we could put an acceptable structure in place.” He stood up. “There’s just the matter of your living arrangements.”

  “I’ll sort that out,” said Ihaka. “I’ve got some cousins living at my place. They’ll be gone by lunchtime.”

  “Won’t they expect some notice?”

  Ihaka chuckled ominously. “I don’t think they’re that stupid, but who knows?”

  He saw McGrail to the door. “I dropped in on Blair Corvine last night.”

  “Did you now? I won’t bother asking how you managed to find him.”

  “The investigation: was it fair dinkum?”

  McGrail cocked his head. “I’d say so. As you know, Corvine always operated perilously close to the edge. In the months before he was shot, his handlers expressed concern about his state of mind and health. His drug intake, in other words.”

  “So you’re saying?”

  “He probably gave himself away without even realizing it.”

  “Blame the victim, eh?” said Ihaka. “That’s convenient.”

  There was a twitch of impatience at the corner of McGrail’s mouth. “The fact that the conclusion was the desirable one from the organization’s point of view doesn’t ipso facto – as we classicists say – invalidate it.”

  5

  The shoulder-length hair was silver and lifeless and the jawline had lost its battle with middle-aged sag, but not much else had changed. Same outfit: black Levi’s, raucous Hawaiian shirt. Same back corner table in the same Herne Bay café. Same paraphernalia: the Herald, a highbrow paperback, a laptop computer, and the red soft-pack, made-in-the-US Marlboros he went through at the rate of one every half-hour. Same air of suppressed amusement, same contemptuous glint in the pale blue eyes, just in case you hadn’t realized he was way smarter than you.

  His name was Doug Yallop, but most people called him Prof. After doing a Ph.D. at Sydney’s Macquarie University – the subject of his thesis was the life and works of the unfashionable English novelist Henry Green – he became a junior lecturer at the University of Auckland. It was the late seventies and, as was the case with a lot of university types at that time, Yallop’s main priority was ensuring he never ran out of marijuana.

  Like the man who admired the product so much he bought the company, Yallop went into the dope business. He quickly became the biggest weed dealer on campus, but while word of mouth was good for business, it was bad for security. As critics of incarceration often point out, prisons are where criminals go to meet like-minded people, swap ideas and become better criminals. During his seven years in Mount Eden, Yallop got to know a lot of career criminals. He was struck by how many of them possessed all the attributes needed to be successful in their chosen field bar one: intelligence.

  When he got out of jail, Yallop set himself up as a consultant in and facilitator of crime. He advised crooks how to carry out specific crimes and organize their ongoing operations; he put together crews; he acted as a go-between and mediator when competition escalated into conflict, or when rival groups could see the benefits of cooperation but didn’t know how to go about it. He even researched and planned jobs and sold the blueprints to the highest bidder. Because he was careful and smart and had a good lawyer, it proved so difficult to convict him of anything that eventually the police stopped trying very hard.

  Ihaka sat down at his table. “Hey, Prof. How’s it going?”

  Yallop looked up from his book, removing his reading glasses. “Well, I’ll be fucked,” he said in an accent as dinky-di as the day he crossed the Tasman. “I thought you’d been put out to pasture.”

  “Think of it as a journey of self-discovery.”

  Yallop snorted, shoulders shaking. “I could’ve saved you the trouble.”

  “How’s that?”

  Yallop bookmarked the paperback and put it aside. “Why are you a cop, Ihaka? We both know it’s not for the money.”

  Ihaka shrugged. “A bloke’s got to do something.”

  “That’s it?”

  “And I’m good at it.”

  “Yeah, but you’d be just as good playing for the other team – and much better rewarded.”

  “Well, Prof, I’m not a materialistic person. And let’s face it, the other team are a bunch of cunts, present company excepted.”

  Even though he knew Ihaka didn’t mean it, Yallop ducked his head as if acknowledging a compliment. “Whereas your mob are top blokes, to a man?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, but the cunt count’s definitely lower. Now a brainbox like you doesn’t ask a question without knowing the answer, so you tell me: why am I a cop?”

  Yallop leaned back, pink with admiration for his own perceptiveness. “Becoming a cop was the only way to stop yourself becoming a crim. As you’re well aware, you’ve got deep-seated antisocial tendencies. If you weren’t a cop, sooner or later they would’ve come to the fore. So the answer to the question is: self-awareness.”

  “It’s one thing to be aware you’ve got antisocial tendencies, it’s another to want to keep a lid on them.”

  “Ah, that always goes back to the same thing: upbringing; family background; parental example.”

  “Is that your excuse?”

  “Shit, no, my folks were the salt of the earth. They scrimped and saved so that little Dougie, the apple of their four eyes, could go to a private school. No, mate, I’m the exception that proves the rule. So what brings you back?”

  “Just tidying up a few loose ends.”

  “None of my fucking business, in other words. Fair enough. But seeing you obviously want something from me, a little give-and-take wouldn’t go amiss.”

  “I don’t see it that way, Prof. You’ve had a pretty good run.”

  Yallop reopened his paperback. “Thank you linesmen, thank you ball boys, fuck you.”

  Ihaka frowned like someone stuck on a crossword clue. “You know, I could lean over and smack you in the mouth, or I could pretend I didn’t hear that. You have a preference?”

  Yallop held Ihaka’s stare, stretching it out, although they both knew how it was going to end.

  “What the hell,” said Yallop eventually. “I’m sixty-five next month, I’m virtually retired. I just want to be everyone’s mate. Of course, sometimes being matey with one bloke means being very un-fucking-matey with another, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. What’s up?”

  “Three cases spread over six years. A woman run over in Kohimarama, a bloke stabbed on his way home from the pub just around here, and an old lady in Remuera who went arse over elbow down the stairs. Current status is unsolved hit-and-run, unsolved robbery-murder and accident, but we’ve picked up a whis
per there’s a hitman out there.”

  Yallop’s expression gave nothing away. “Well, we can both think of a few guys who’d take out their grannies in a heartbeat if the price was right, but this doesn’t sound like them. First off, they’re shooters. They don’t fuck around trying to make it look like an accident. Secondly, apart from the odd grudge, hits are usually a tactical measure or countermeasure in an ongoing blue between professional criminals over territory or supply or market share. What we have here, if I’m not mistaken, is a bunch of dead people with no connection to what’s melodramatically referred to as the underworld.”

  “As far as we know.”

  “This is amateur hour, Sergeant – I’m assuming that’s still your rank.” Ihaka nodded, noting the sparkle of malice in Yallop’s eyes. “Something rotten in the leafy suburbs, fear and loathing in Labrador land. Not my scene – I’m fussy about the company I keep. Can’t help you, I’m afraid.”

  Yallop was a skilled liar, but Ihaka tended to believe him. The reason he didn’t know anything was the reason he might have coughed up if he did: it wasn’t his world, therefore no skin off his nose.

  “So someone walks in here tomorrow wanting a hitter, what would you tell them?”

  “If I didn’t know them,” said Yallop slowly, “or know of them, I’d tell them to fuck off. If I did know them or they came with a reference, I’d tell them two things: one, don’t say another word to me; two, go and see the heavy mob. You know who they are as well as I do. You also know bloody well that the stuff you’re talking about – clipping eastern suburbs dowagers – isn’t their bag. They’d regard that sort of shit as beneath them.”

  Ihaka nodded gloomily. “Changing the subject, what about Blair Corvine?”

  Yallop’s guffaw sounded forced. “You’re asking me? Your lot were all over that like a cheap suit.”

  Ihaka shrugged. “No harm in getting a second opinion.”

  Yallop scooped up his cigarettes and lighter. “Smoko.” They went out to the courtyard. Before they’d even sat down, Yallop had lit up and was exhaling with the gratified, drawn-out sigh of a man who counted the minutes till his next cigarette.