Death on Demand

by Paul Thomas

  Disobeying orders, Ihaka took his cup and plate – he’d eaten only one of the two Tim Tams, which pleased him as much as it displeased his hostess – through to the kitchen.

  On the way out, he asked if there was anyone who might have held a grudge against Eve or the family.

  “Her ex-husband.” She spat the words out, as if trying to get rid of a bad taste in the mouth.

  “Why?”

  “She walked out on him; he swore he’d make her pay. He’s just an animal.”

  Ihaka had been here many times. “What did he do to her?”

  Mrs Duckmanton wasn’t quite all cried out. Tears flooded her faded blue eyes. “He beat her up. My sweet little girl, he beat her black and blue.”

  10

  Ihaka spent that afternoon and the following day, a Saturday, in Wellington interviewing Eve Diack’s friends and neighbours and her colleagues at Land Information NZ, where she worked as an administrator.

  Most of them were aware she had a brother but not even her close friends, the ones who thought of themselves as confidantes, knew the real story. In fact, the Eve who emerged from this process was, among other things, a prolific fabulist. She had a different version of where Warren was and what he was doing for every audience.

  Some were under the impression he was an entrepreneur in Eastern Europe. Her best friend, who was sworn to secrecy, got the juicy details: he was in Budapest, running a porno mini-empire. She told the women in her social netball team that he managed an exclusive resort/detox facility in Hawaii, and was a personal friend of pretty much every fucked-up famous person you could think of. She told her book club he was earning big bucks working on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. When they asked how he’d fared in the oil spill, she said he’d quit not long beforehand – the implication being that he’d seen where things were heading – and was now in Cuba, living like a king on his stack of greenbacks.

  She was less creative with her colleagues, telling them her brother was in Hamilton, married with kids and selling cars. After that, none of them took any further interest in him. She told her most recent boyfriend a similar story, except in this version he was in Waipukurau selling farm equipment. She had as little as possible to do with him because he’d found Jesus, joined some batshit religious outfit, and become a total pain in the arse.

  None of them knew about her trips to Auckland. They thought she’d been in Greytown, seeing her mother.

  Her friends never got the Ray Diack thing. They picked him as a dropkick from day one and were gobsmacked when the wedding invitation arrived. Within weeks of saying “I do”, Eve started to come around to their way of thinking, and it was all downhill from there. As someone put it, it went from love-hate to tolerate-hate to hate-hate.

  There were screaming matches and some violence, but it wasn’t as clear-cut as her mother made out. Towards the end Eve sported a deep purple shiner which she wore as a badge of honour, telling people, “You should see the other guy.” One friend did just that, bumping into Ray in town. He had angry scratches on his face caused, he said, by going over the handlebars of his mountain bike up on the town belt. When the friend mentioned it to Eve, she said “Yeah, right,” and made claws with her hands.

  They all said she’d walked out on him, not vice versa. In fact, even though the marriage had degenerated into an undeclared war, Ray took the break-up quite hard. No one remembered Eve saying he’d threatened her physically, but she did tell a couple of people that he’d vowed to post a sex video from their love-love period on the Internet. She claimed she’d called his bluff, warning it wouldn’t do much for him but she’d be spoilt for choice.

  She did tell a couple of guys she went out with that Ray had whacked her now and again. One of them wanted a piece of Ray but she talked him out of it. In the first place, Ray was bigger than he was; secondly, she gave as good as she got; thirdly, she wouldn’t go so far as to say she asked for it, but she did give him a lot of shit. “Put it this way,” she said, “I wouldn’t want to be married to me.”

  It wasn’t as black and white as Sheila Duckmanton thought, or wanted Ihaka to think. In a way, thought Ihaka, the fact that Eve had treated Diack worse than he’d let on made him more of a suspect.

  On the way to the airport to get the last flight to Auckland, Ihaka stopped off in town for a quick beer with Johan Van Roon.

  They talked about the old days. Van Roon talked about life in Wellington and being a detective inspector and how well his kids were doing. When they’d got that out of the way, Ihaka asked about Blair Corvine.

  “Come on, Tito,” sighed Van Roon. “You’ve heard the story from people who were much closer to it than me.”

  “Yeah, but you’ll tell me the truth.”

  Van Roon laughed. “I’d almost forgotten what an insidious bastard you can be.”

  “I keep hearing Blair was doing too many drugs,” said Ihaka. “Christ, they were saying that ten years ago.”

  “Well, exactly,” said Van Roon. “It’s a cumulative process. You keep putting that crap in your system, it’s going to catch up with you. The fact that people were saying ‘Fucking Corvine, if he doesn’t ease off, he’s going to come unstuck’ for a while before it actually happened doesn’t mean their analysis was wrong. It just means they underestimated his capacity. As I heard it, he was taking too many drugs and too many risks and telling too many lies. Something had to give. I guess you could say the fact he got away with it for so long shows how good he was.”

  “So you don’t believe there was a leak?”

  “Mate, I’m saying you could see it coming,” said Van Roon. “Shit, I can remember telling McGrail it was time to pull him out.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “‘Don’t think I haven’t tried.’”

  “So basically he’d gone rogue?”

  “Look, you know Corvine wasn’t a team player. Okay, not many of those guys are, but the longer he was in, the less inclined he was to follow procedure. He pissed a lot of people off. Not to the point they were going to drop him in the shit or anything, but you know when it happened people just shrugged their shoulders.”

  As Ihaka’s taxi pulled up, Van Roon grabbed his arm. “Mate, watch your step, all right? I know you think you can trust McGrail, but he’s a different animal these days. And I know what you think of Charlton, but don’t underestimate the bloke.”

  “Firkitt was on the plane coming down,” said Ihaka. “He was almost civil. They want me to give them a hand.”

  Van Roon shrugged. “They’ve got something going on, Tito. Whatever they tell you it is, work on the assumption it’s really something else.”

  Ihaka attached a fair amount of significance to a suspect’s reaction to his unheralded appearance. They didn’t have to shit themselves, but blithe unconcern was a downer.

  Thus it was gratifying that Ray Diack, who answered the doorbell in a dressing gown even though the sun was squatting over the western ranges, gawked for a few seconds, then went red in the face, then started talking very fast.

  “This is an incredibly inconvenient time,” he babbled. “Besides, I’ve already told you what little I know. I really can’t help you.” He began to close the door. “So if you don’t mind…”

  Ihaka took a quick step and slammed the flat of his hand against the door, pushing back. “A word of advice, Mr Diack: if you’re going to say bugger all, make sure it’s true.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  With his other hand, Ihaka pulled the search warrant from his hip pocket and waved it in front of Diack, the signal to the search team in the unmarked van parked across the road. Diack’s eyes bulged as the van door slid open and Detective Constable Joel Pringle and a couple of constables in plain clothes emerged.

  “We’re coming through,” said Ihaka. “Just think of it as an open home. If we use the dunny, promise we won’t do number twos.”

  Diack’s face was a mask of nausea. He came out of the house, yanking the do
or shut behind him. “Listen, you can’t do that.”

  Ihaka frowned at the warrant. “Really? That’s not what the magistrate said.”

  “Jesus Christ, look, just hang on a minute.” Diack’s flush had drained away, taking his tan with it. “I’ve got someone here. She’s married. To a mate of mine. They’ve got three little kids.” He was jabbering like a racing commentator calling a photo finish. “This could cause no end of strife. Couldn’t you just come back in half an hour? Please?”

  “I’m afraid that would defeat the whole purpose of the exercise,” said Ihaka urbanely. There was a murmur of assent from the search team, now poised at their boss’s elbow and champing at the bit after hearing Diack’s confession.

  Having had his fun, Ihaka shifted gears. “Now are you going to get out of the way or do we have to go through you?”

  “What’s the basis for this?” demanded Diack, his tone veering from supplication to bluster. “I haven’t done anything wrong. What the fuck gives you the right to barge into my house? I’ve got a right to privacy.”

  “You want reasons?” said Ihaka. “Okay. One, you belted Eve. Two, you lied about it. Three, she dumped you. Four, you lied about that too. Five, you don’t have an alibi. Six, I’ve got a warrant. How many fucking reasons do you need?” Shouldering Diack aside, he threw the door open, hollering, “Coming, ready or not.” He glanced over his shoulder at the search team, an appreciative audience. “I bet she’s heard that before.”

  Diack’s playmate had taken refuge in the bathroom. Maybe he’d told her to stay in there until she reached the age of consent. Diack had taken his last peek into the girls’ changing rooms, but every cloud has a silver lining: in among the lurid detail of his pupil’s statement was an alibi for the night his ex-wife was murdered.

  Whenever a member of the public comes into a metropolitan police station like Auckland Central claiming to have vital information relating to a high-profile investigation but insisting they will only divulge it to the officer in charge, experienced cops exchange knowing looks. If said member of the public, on being advised that the officer in charge is currently unavailable, says he or she is prepared to wait and does so, uncomplainingly, for over an hour, that settles it: said member of the public is a crank. In this querulous day and age only cranks or perhaps saints don’t resent being put on hold, and Ihaka knew full well how hard it was to be a saint in the City of Sails.

  Not that the guy looked deranged. His outfit was smart casual – a style Ihaka had never quite got the hang of – and he had the solid, moulded build of a man who spent his lunch hours pumping iron. He would have been in his mid-thirties, although the receding hairline might have added a year or two.

  But cranks – as opposed to out-and-out crazies – are cunning. They understand the importance of first impressions. They know that when it comes to gaining access, it’s all about how you present. So Ihaka faced the prospect of having to listen to this fruitcake insist that Eve Diack was a human sacrifice in a satanic ritual attended by some of the most powerful people in the land. Or that she’d stumbled across a vast financial scam masterminded by the international Jewish conspiracy. Or that he’d seen her lifeless body tossed out of a flying saucer piloted by Elvis Presley.

  Steeling himself, Ihaka went into the interview room. A minute later Pringle brought in the crank, who was stuffing a thousand-page paperback into his backpack. Ihaka would have put money on it being about UFOs or Stonehenge or the Third Reich. Grant Hayes had a crunching handshake, another sign of mania in Ihaka’s book. He didn’t like limp, sticky or ambiguous handshakes any more than the next man, but there was a happy medium, for Christ’s sake.

  “Thanks for your time, Detective Sergeant,” said Hayes. Ihaka thought he detected a trace of an Australian accent. “Sorry for not coming in sooner. I’ve been down in the South Island tramping and only just caught up with the news. I’m a private investigator. Eve Diack was, briefly, a client of mine.”

  After his parents’ divorce, Hayes’s mother had taken him to Australia, hence the accent. He’d come back to Auckland and set himself up as a private investigator, positioning himself in the Yellow Pages as a people-finder specializing in tracking down Kiwis who’d crossed the Tasman and disappeared off the radar. He assumed that was why Eve had picked him.

  “She came to see me about five weeks ago wanting me to find her brother. Someone had seen him in Sydney with Vanessa Kelly.”

  Ihaka nodded.

  “You knew about that?”

  “I went to see Eve’s mother.”

  Hayes’s eyebrows merged as it occurred to him that he might have spent an hour and a quarter in the waiting room for nothing. “Oh, well, then you probably know the rest of it?”

  Ihaka shook his head. “Eve kept her mother in the dark.”

  Hayes’s expression lifted. “I told Eve that if I managed to find her brother I’d ask him if he wanted to be reunited. If the answer was no, that would be the end of it as far as I was concerned. I learned pretty early on that sometimes the runaway has a bloody good reason for clearing off and the client has pretty dubious motives for wanting them found. If the runaway’s safe and sound and capable of making the choice, I go with their call.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “She asked if everyone in the industry operates on that basis.” Hayes smiled grimly. “I had to tell her that they don’t.”

  “So you found him?”

  Hayes shrugged. “It wasn’t hard. I followed Kelly around and she led me right to him. I explained the situation and told him what I’d told Eve. He said his family hadn’t been part of his life for umpteen years and that was the way he wanted it. When I reported back to Eve, she asked me to find out his address. I gave her the same speech. Well, started to anyway. She said if I wouldn’t do it, she’d find someone who would, and hung up.”

  “How long did all that take?”

  “From hired to fired, just under a week. She rang me a couple of times after that, trying to get me to change my mind, and when that didn’t happen, wanting me to put her on to another private investigator. I told her I could only recommend people who operate on the same basis. You can imagine how that went down.”

  “Her mother warned Eve he wouldn’t want to know,” said Ihaka. “That’s why Eve kept her in the dark. She didn’t want to hear ‘I told you so’. Then she came back up here to hire another finder.”

  “I’d be amazed if she didn’t,” said Hayes. “As you can imagine, I see quite a few obsessive people, but Eve was up there.”

  “I bet Warren wanted to know how you found him.”

  “They always do, but I never tell. We’re like magicians – if the punters ever learn the tricks of the trade, we’ll be out of business.”

  “Did you warn him Eve would get someone else?”

  “Yeah, I thought it might persuade him to meet with her. He could say his piece and she’d get it from the horse’s mouth. At least she would’ve set eyes on him and that might have got it out of her system. But he wasn’t bothered, said he’d just have to be more careful.”

  “You can add them to your list of famous last words.”

  When Hayes left, Ihaka summoned Pringle. “We’re going to have to check out every private investigator in town: the legit, the dubious, and the sleazy. That’s the royal we, by the way.”

  Vanessa Kelly lived in one of the mock-brownstone apartment blocks which have sprouted along the harbour side of Remuera Road, providing views out to Rangitoto and down into the sleepy hollows populated by middle-class toilers who can afford the postcode but not the outlook. Ihaka turned up unannounced around dinner time. He pressed the buzzer and presented an unblinking stare to the security camera.

  “Yes?” The familiar voice crackled with static and suspicion.

  “Detective Sergeant Ihaka to see Vanessa Kelly.” He held his ID up to the camera.

  There was a silence lasting perhaps thirty seconds. “With regard to what?”

&nbs
p; “Arden Black.”

  Another silence. “What about him?”

  “Well, I thought we’d start with his murder and then just play it by ear.”

  There was a click which Ihaka interpreted as the sound of negotiations being broken off. He quite enjoyed it when people who, for whatever reason, thought they were special tried to treat him the way they invariably treated others. To put it another way, he enjoyed acquainting them with the reality that in a murder investigation people fell into one of two categories: cops and others. He was a cop; Vanessa Kelly was an other.

  The lift door opened and Kelly strode into the foyer. She wore white capri pants, high heels and a tight black T-shirt with the words “Handle With Care”. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she had glasses with narrow black rectangular frames, a look Ihaka vaguely associated with dominatrix school mistresses in S&M magazines. Up close she verged on mutton dressed as lamb, and lacked the cloistered aura of someone who’d sworn off sex.

  She examined Ihaka through the glass doors, tapping her chin with her cellphone. “You don’t look like a policeman,” she said.

  “This isn’t television, Ms Kelly. I didn’t have to audition for the part.”

  “Who’s your superior officer?”

  “Superintendent McGrail.” This was so predictable that Ihaka had memorized McGrail’s direct line. Kelly turned her back and walked away, punching the numbers into her phone. The conversation lasted ninety seconds and, as Ihaka could have told her, didn’t make her feel any better about the situation.

  She pressed a button on the wall to open the glass doors. Ihaka went inside.

  “I don’t suppose you see many brown faces around here?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it,” she said with a toss of the head. “I’m just security-conscious. I would’ve thought you’d approve.”

  “Too right,” he said. “Always assume the worst. You’ll never be disappointed.”