Death on Demand

by Paul Thomas

  “Convince me otherwise.”

  “Do you really want to be convinced?”

  “I want the truth.”

  “Okay. Have a glass of wine, take a chill pill and I’ll tell you the truth.”

  “Got any red?”

  Denise was a country girl, believe it or not. Grew up on a farm in South Canterbury, just outside Pleasant Point. When she was thirteen, her parents sent her to an Anglican boarding school in Timaru. She went in an ardent believer who said her prayers every night, kneeling by her bed talking to God for ten minutes, halting, one-sided conversations a bit like the phone calls to her remote, uncommunicative grandfather up in the Mackenzie Country. Even when her parents no longer hung around to make sure she didn’t just pay lip service or bug God with frivolous requests; even in the middle of winter, with her arms and legs cobbled with goosebumps and hot-water bottle cosiness two seconds away.

  She came out an atheist who knew whole chunks of the Book of Common Prayer by heart and could recite them while imagining herself in a very different setting, or thinking about things good little Christian misses weren’t supposed to think about, least of all in church.

  The summer she left school she and two friends chipped in to buy an old bomb and toured the North Island party venues – Gisborne, Mount Maunganui, Waihi Beach, Whangamata – cancelling out five years of moral force-feeding in five weeks of stoned abandon.

  Everyone said Dunedin was Fun City so she went down to Otago University, even though she had no great urge to do an arts degree, nor much idea of what she’d do with it. After waking up in another freezing student hovel next to another guy whose name she couldn’t remember and whose attraction, in the cold light of day, wasn’t evident, she decided life was too short to waste three years living like this. She borrowed a friend’s car, saying her mother was sick, drove to Christchurch and bought a one-way ticket to Sydney. She arrived with an overnight bag, a few hundred dollars and the names and addresses of two friends of friends who possibly wouldn’t mind her crashing on their couch for a few nights.

  She tried pretending to be a secretary, but couldn’t keep up the pretence for long enough to cut it as a temp. She waitressed, she pole-danced and eventually she stripped. That was where she drew the line, although there were various incentives to proceed further down that track. She often thanked the God she no longer believed in that there was at least one temptation she could resist: hard drugs.

  She bummed around Asia, sleeping on beaches, getting really skinny and so bronzed people assumed she was Latin, living on her wits and looks, flitting from guy to guy. The trick was to pick the ones with a financial lifeline back to mom and pop in San Diego or Düsseldorf or Stockholm. She didn’t overdo it, always being the one to pull the plug, always leaving them wanting more of her. That way she felt less of a user. You had to have rules: don’t get emotionally involved; don’t stay in one place or with one guy for more than a month; don’t look back.

  There was bad news from home: some glib little shit from the bank had talked her parents into getting a foreign-exchange loan to buy those paddocks down the road her father had always coveted. There’d never be a better time, he said, so max out – do up the house, upgrade the farm equipment, take that European holiday you’ve been promising yourselves.

  The exchange rate flipped and suddenly they owed a lot more than they’d signed up for. Her father had health issues: he wasn’t up to the years of hard slog needed to get out of hock. They sold the farm in a buyer’s market and moved into Timaru. Now her father felt like a failure, on top of everything else.

  She came home, moved in with her parents and took a waitressing job. Within three months she was managing the place. She was efficient, a hard worker when she put her mind to it, and could read situations and manage/ manipulate people. And it was Timaru, after all.

  One night Craig came into the restaurant. Halfway through his meal, he left the table and his date and came over to ask her out. A cool operator. They took off together, working their way north – Christchurch, Kaikoura, Blenheim, Nelson, Wellington. Craig had a cavalier attitude to money, especially other people’s: run up debt, run out on debt, change towns, change names, do it all over again. If you keep moving, they’ll never catch up with you.

  The good folk of Greytown were suckers for Donna’s and Craig’s ingratiating liveliness – we like this place, we like you guys, we like to have fun. There was just one complication when it was time to go. Warren, this cute young guy who worked at the café and had a heavy crush on her, even though the local schoolies were queuing up to spread for him.

  They’d had enough of small towns, so they bypassed the heartland. After they’d been in Auckland a few weeks, she wrote to Warren encouraging him to come up. She didn’t mention it to Craig. In Greytown he’d had this running joke – although they both knew it wasn’t entirely a joke – about her relationship with “the toyboy”.

  To tell the truth, she was a bit thrown when Warren turned up so soon and adamant there was no going back. It made her responsible. Having enticed him to run away, she couldn’t let him become another of the lost angels, the dreamy kids who flock to the big smoke entranced by a glossy magazine narrative of instant acceptance and overnight success. You saw them sometimes teetering along Karangahape Road on hookers’ heels late at night, or glassy-eyed in the needle parks.

  She’d hoped Craig would put up with Warren, that they could be a couple plus one, but the way he carried on, veering from sullen withdrawal to simmering aggression, knocked that on the head. So she compartmentalized, seeing Warren on her own and not telling Craig. What was the point? He’d only get shitty. Besides, she didn’t tell him who he could and couldn’t hang out with.

  Lying beside Craig after yet another row, face turned to the wall, the atmosphere too toxic to permit an exchange of good-nights, she’d sometimes think about Warren. The boy was becoming a man; he just needed someone to provide the finishing touches.

  Inevitably someone saw them together and told tales, putting a suggestive slant on their flirtatious interaction. It wouldn’t have been too hard for Craig to have believed her when she insisted nothing had changed, because he’d seen it with his own eyes often enough. But he’d reached the point of wanting to believe the worst because it provided a convenient explanation for the unravelling of their relationship. His parting words were, “Now you can fuck the little faggot to your heart’s content.”

  “Maybe I will,” she said. “No reason not to any more.”

  On Warren’s nineteenth birthday she took him to bed. Next morning she told him it wouldn’t happen again. They could be friends or lovers but not both, and friendships lasted.

  But when she hit thirty and decided she wanted a child, Warren was the obvious sperm donor. He was the nicest man she knew and the best-looking, so genes-wise he had a lot going for him. He wouldn’t complicate things; he’d let her decide how much or how little contact he had with the child. Plus, getting started would be fun. What she’d discovered, on the long night of his nineteenth birthday, was that he wasn’t too far off being the finished article.

  Hadlow got refills. Ihaka’s cellphone message alert went off. It was Miriam Lovell. They’d talked earlier about meeting for a drink. Was he was still up for it? He texted back, saying definitely, he’d be in touch as soon as he finished, probably half an hour or so.

  “Anyone I know?” asked Hadlow. Ihaka ignored her. “Well, now you know the whole story.”

  “I doubt that, somehow. So you knew from the start Warren was making money off these women?”

  She held his gaze. “No. He fessed up at some stage, I don’t remember exactly when. I told him I didn’t want to know – consenting adults and all that.”

  “It didn’t stop you introducing women to him.”

  “You make it sound like a crime. It’s called social intercourse.”

  “You got that half-right.”

  “Look, if I was meeting someone for coffee, I’d usually s
uggest Warren’s place, not because I was thinking ‘Oh, you look like you could do with a decent fuck, dear’, but because I wanted to support his business. Okay, there might’ve been a few times I hoped something would happen, like if I felt sorry for them because they were married to an arsewipe who I happened to know was screwing around, or I liked the thought of some stuck-up bitch screeching at the ceiling then going home to hubby and pretending she’d been at her book club. But if the question is how many of his clients found their way to him via me, the answer is I have no idea. I didn’t ask and he didn’t tell.”

  “But you were okay with it?”

  She shrugged. “They were all grown-ups. Knowing Warren, he would’ve delivered on his side of the bargain, and I’m not just talking about pressing the right buttons. He would’ve made them feel special, put some excitement and intrigue in their lives. As for the money, well, most of them would’ve spent a lot more on clothes and beauty treatments, and I bet they didn’t make them feel half as good as he did.”

  “One of his clients is being blackmailed. I bet she’s not the only one.”

  Once again her eyes didn’t slide away from Ihaka’s hard stare. “I’d put this house on him having nothing to do with it. Look, no one would accuse me of being naïve. I knew Warren, I knew his weaknesses, better probably than anyone. But he didn’t shit on people. Being a good person was important to him.”

  “I wasn’t necessarily thinking of him.”

  This time she did look away, but slowly, disdainfully. “Oh, thanks a lot. You don’t expect me to respond to that, do you?”

  “You might have to at some stage.”

  “I can do it right now. Go fuck yourself.”

  Ihaka nodded. “I’ll put you down as refusing to answer on the grounds it might incriminate you. So if Warren was Mr Nice Guy, why was he murdered?”

  “Hey, you’re the detective. I’ll tell you this, though: he wasn’t someone who made enemies. You could accuse him of being vain and superficial, possibly even a bit emotionally retarded, but he didn’t treat people badly. I don’t know, maybe they just got the wrong guy. Maybe it was as fucked-up as that.”

  “Drugs is the popular choice.”

  She shook her head decisively. “No way. You obviously think you’re dealing with some kind of sleazebag here, but you’re way off. Here’s an example. Warren and Chris, no contest. Warren had a much stronger sense of right and wrong.”

  “Seeing Lilywhite had his wife killed, that’s not saying a hell of a lot.”

  “Except everybody but you thought he was such a pillar of society it was outrageous to suggest he might’ve had something to do with it. But all those fine, upstanding people, Chris’s friends, would probably believe the worst of Warren, just because he was different.”

  “And because he was fucking their wives.”

  “They didn’t know that,” said Hadlow. “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

  “What happened to Craig?”

  “He kept moving,” she said with a dismissive gesture. “Someone was saying they saw him in Phuket.”

  “Okay,” said Ihaka, “I need you to write down the names and contact details if you have them of every married woman you know or think or suspect Warren was knocking off. Err on the side of the opposite of caution. Start with the most recent and work back.”

  “Promise you’ll be gentle with them?”

  “I’ll get one of my colleagues on it. She’s a good operator.” He stood up. “I’ll be in touch.”

  She sat there, legs crossed, idly swinging a foot, looking up at him. “You don’t have to go.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “Are you offering me your spare room?”

  “I don’t have a spare room,” she said.

  “What brought this on?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You just can’t resist my charm, is that it?”

  She laughed, throwing her head back. “You’re not completely without charm,” she said, “but those little bursts tend to be cancelled out by bigger bursts of anti-charm. But charm’s overrated.”

  “Warren’s clientele obviously didn’t think so. Sounds like he had charm coming out his arse.”

  “Oh, he did,” she said, “which kind of proves my point. If I’d wanted to, I could’ve had him all to myself.”

  “So what have I got that he didn’t have?”

  “So many questions,” she murmured. “It’s like a job interview. Warren was a sweet guy, but he lacked… substance, I suppose you’d call it. He was pretty self-absorbed, just floated through life looking terrific, pleasing himself, having a good time, being everybody’s friend. But if you’re everybody’s friend, chances are you’re nobody’s best friend, you know what I mean? You, on the other hand, you’re a bit of a driven man, aren’t you? So what drives you? Do you see yourself as a knight in shining armour, riding to the rescue, or do you just hate people getting away with it?”

  “You’re telling the story.”

  “I remember when you were hounding Chris – well, that’s how I saw it at the time, I thought you were just out of control – he’d have these rants: ‘That fucking Ihaka, he’s messing with the wrong man, I’m going to have his balls for breakfast, blah, blah.’ He’d go on about all his friends in high places he had lined up to cut you off at the knees. One time I said something like, ‘Is Ihaka too thick to realize what’s going to happen?’ And Chris said, ‘Oh, he’s not thick, he knows he’s sticking his neck out, big-time.’ ‘So why’s he doing it?’ I said. He kind of shrugged and said, ‘Well, I guess he must really believe I killed Joyce.’”

  She paused, emphasizing what was coming next. “I admire people who go out on a limb – especially when they’re right.”

  “So all these years,” said Ihaka, “you’ve been burning a candle for me?”

  Hadlow laughed again, perfect teeth lighting up her face. “Hey, buddy, I don’t want a sympathy fuck.”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  The glow of amusement faded from her eyes. She got up and stood right in front of him, their faces centimetres apart. “What’s the matter, Tito?” she asked, teasing but a little curious.

  “I’m a cop and you’re a—”

  “Suspect?”

  “You’re involved. And this is serious shit.”

  “Not so keen on going out on a limb these days?”

  “It’s got to be worth it.”

  She grinned lazily. “Oh, you have no idea.”

  “I’ll see myself out.”

  Ihaka sat in his car staring at himself in the rear-vision mirror. He said out loud, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  He got out of the car and retraced his steps. Hadlow answered the door, trying to keep a straight face, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Forget something?”

  “There’s just one other thing.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. She pulled him inside, pushed him against the wall and fitted her body against his. An arm slithered around his neck, pulling him down into a kiss from which there was no escape. Not that he tried.

  15

  Tito Ihaka sat in a commandeered office at Auckland Central deciphering Miriam Lovell’s text: “Gess u gt tyd up lst nite. Say la v bt a heds up wdve bn nice.”

  Last night was a bit of a blur, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t been tied up. He would’ve remembered that. He couldn’t argue with the rest of it, though.

  It wasn’t in Ihaka’s nature to dwell on what-might-have-beens or wallow in regret. He knew that the correct, proper, professional thing to do was walk away from Denise Hadlow, so that’s what he did. But on giving it further thought, he decided he didn’t give a shit what was correct, proper and professional, because there were only so many Denise Hadlows in a man’s life. That’s how it worked: you made a choice, you went in with your eyes open, and then you lived with the consequences. You didn’t blame it on her feminine wiles or a m
oment of weakness, because you weren’t Joe Vanilla from the suburbs who should’ve been at home watching some wankathon on TV with the wife and kids.

  Even so, it was an uneasy morning after, partly because he hadn’t played fair with Miriam, partly because he was sailing close to the wind. Even if he believed every word Denise had said – which he didn’t – she was a person of interest in two murder cases.

  Partly too because Denise wasn’t quite what he’d expected: not better or worse, different. He was expecting a serious sack-artist with lots of energy and very few inhibitions. She was certainly accomplished, but her lovemaking was leisurely and affectionate, almost tender, rather than theatrical. As he slipped into unconsciousness, having set his phone alarm for 6 a.m. so that he’d be up and away before her son awoke, she’d burrowed into him. “Billy’s playing cricket on Saturday,” she’d murmured. “Why don’t you come along? He’d be really stoked.”

  But it was mostly because he knew he was missing something. Talking to her, he’d had the feeling that an answer, maybe even the answer, was there in his head, in among the jumble of information, intuition and suspicion. But his mind wouldn’t give it up. Now he could feel it sitting there, taunting him, the way a cat sits on a fence taunting a dog. You want a piece of me? Well, come and get it. But when you get there, it’s gone.

  If he hadn’t gone back, he might’ve had it; it was that close. If he’d gone home, sat out on the veranda with a glass of wine and methodically thought his way through it, it probably would have come to him. But once Denise Hadlow got her hands on him, it went the way of everything else.

  Glen Smith rang, sounding pleased with himself. “I’ve tracked down a photo of Donna.”

  “Well, thanks for that,” said Ihaka, “but I’ve tracked down the woman herself.”

  “Shit, really? Where?”

  “Here in Auckland.”

  “How’s she looking these days?”

  You’re asking me, thought Ihaka. “Not too bad at all.”