Death on Demand

by Paul Thomas

  “It’s not over. I’m being a cop now.”

  Her voice went flat. “So what do you want?”

  “That list you sent me. Would Lorna Bell have been on it if she was still alive?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just answer the question. This is important.”

  “Jesus, all right. Yes, she would have.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “She came into the café when I was there. Pure coincidence. I introduced her to Warren and it was like, okay, thanks Denise, we’ll take it from here. I mean, let’s face it, they were made for each other.”

  “How so in her case?”

  “She was bored out of her tree. Had been for years.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then nothing. That was the last time I saw her. And as I told you, with Warren and his women, I didn’t ask and he didn’t tell.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “It’s almost the end of the season. Billy’s only got two more games.”

  “Summer’s gone, winter’s in your eyes.”

  “What?”

  “It’s another song.”

  She said, “What is it with these lyrics? Do you collect them?”

  “No, some just stick in your head.”

  “I’m surprised there’s any room.”

  “Should I take that as a compliment?”

  “That’s up to you,” she said. “Like everything else.”

  Ihaka rang the superintendent of Paremoremo. “You keep a record of every visitor, right? Who they visit and when?”

  “Yep, it’s all here on the computer. What do you want to know?”

  “Has Jonathon Bell ever been to see John Scholes?”

  “You mean the Jonathon Bell?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  “Why would he have anything to do with Scholes?”

  “Just a thought.”

  “Bell’s been here, but not to see Scholes. We’ve got his mate Mark Wills.”

  Mark Wills was a wheeler-dealer who got badly burnt in the global financial meltdown. Taking a leaf from John DeLorean’s book, he tried to restore his fortunes with a monster drug deal, but he fucked that up too and now he was doing time in Paremoremo medium.

  “I don’t know if you ever saw that piece on 60 Minutes,” said the superintendent, “about how Wills’s friends had rallied around to keep the family in the family home and his kids in private schools? I suppose writing a cheque’s the easy part – Bell’s the only one who’s ever been to see him.”

  “How’s Wills doing?”

  “Oh, he’s all right. These guys can relate to someone who had a fortune and lost it, and of course he got brownie points for the drug deal if not the execution. Having said that, he does have someone watching over him.”

  “And who might that be?” said Ihaka.

  “Let me put it this way. If Scholes didn’t give a damn what happened to Mark Wills, he would’ve had a bumpier ride.”

  “I thought Wills was on the bones of his arse.”

  “People like Wills are never broke, are they. Don’t they always have cash tucked away in trusts or offshore bank accounts? But you’re quite right: Scholes isn’t doing it out of the goodness of his heart.”

  Ihaka borrowed Firkitt’s best surveillance guy, Detective Constable Jack Booth. What made Booth so good was that he was twenty-five but could pass for fifteen with his baby face and scrawny build. In baggy shorts and an extra-large T-shirt, with a back-to-front baseball cap and a skateboard under his arm, you’d pick him as just another zoned-out juvenile cluttering up the streets. Put him in a sharp suit and an Audi, and you’d pick him as just another amoral young opportunist. Either way, he didn’t set off alarm bells, even in the most paranoid heads.

  After a couple of days, Booth brought in some photos of the target with a young woman. They’d had lunch together, they’d had dinner together, they’d gone home together. Ihaka sent Beth Greendale over to the Langham Hotel to go through CCTV footage from the evenings on which Helen Conroy and the other blackmail victim had made the handovers. When Beth called to say the target’s girlfriend turned up both times, Ihaka decided it was time to make his move.

  Jonathon Bell sat behind the antique desk in the darkened study of his Paritai Drive mansion, half-illuminated by the light from a desktop lamp. He was wearing a Lacoste polo shirt and shorts, having just come off the tennis court. Ihaka could smell the exertion from across the room.

  He tried to visualize Bell before his wife’s self-destruction: a rich man’s year-round tan and the sleek, in-the-pink appearance that comes from avoiding the workaday chores and money worries and penny-pinching that grind down ordinary folk, leaving them dull-eyed and grey-skinned, always on the verge of a creaking yawn. Now there were grooves in his face, but they weren’t evidence of character or self-denial. They were symptoms of torment, like corrugations in the landscape caused by subterranean turmoil. Cops often see men put on a brave face out of old-fashioned notions of propriety or manliness, and are good at sensing when the grieving is for appearances’ sake. According to Firkitt, who’d seen him in the immediate aftermath, Bell hadn’t stood on his dignity and hadn’t needed to pretend. His grief had been raw and unrestrained.

  “This had better be good,” said Bell. “The chaps weren’t too thrilled at having to call it off at one set all.”

  “Pass on my apologies,” said Ihaka unapologetically.

  Bell gestured with his sports-drink bottle to the dark-suited figure hovering in the background, barely visible in the gloom. “My lawyer. Well, one of them anyway.”

  “You and I should have a private chat,” said Ihaka. “No lawyer, no notes.”

  Bell glanced at the lawyer, inviting his input.

  “I don’t think so,” said the lawyer.

  Bell’s gaze switched back to Ihaka. “You heard the man.”

  “This isn’t an official contact,” said Ihaka. “No one at my end knows I’m here. I thought you might be interested in hearing what I know, as opposed to what we’re saying.”

  “About what?” asked the lawyer.

  “What do you think?” said Ihaka, looking straight at Bell. “It’s a nice night. We could go for a stroll around the estate.”

  “I suppose there’s no harm in that,” said Bell, getting to his feet. “David, help yourself to a drink. If I’m not back in twenty minutes, send out a search party. Sergeant, if you’ll follow me.”

  Bell led Ihaka out through a side door, around an immense swimming pool and onto an all-weather tennis court. The floodlights were still on and unflatteringly bright, turning their faces into riots of blemish and discolouration.

  “Private enough for you?” asked Bell, with a wary half-smile.

  Ihaka looked around. Everything beyond the bubble of harsh light had been swallowed up by the night. It felt as though they were in the middle of nowhere. “This is fine.”

  “Must be some secret you’ve got there.”

  “It’s not my secret,” said Ihaka. “It’s our secret.”

  Bell’s smile expanded. “Really? That seems pretty unlikely.”

  “I’m investigating a couple of murders, a guy named Arden Black and his sister…”

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” said Bell. “What the hell’s it got to do with me?”

  “Nothing,” said Ihaka. “Nothing at all. I just came out here to see how the other half lives.” He stared at Bell until his gaze slid away. “Shall I continue?”

  Bell shrugged: if you must.

  “Fourteen years ago, just finished school, Arden left Greytown and never came back. There was a phone call home to say don’t come looking for me, then silence. They didn’t have a clue where he was. He came to Auckland and hustled around, as guys like that do. He was a handsome rascal with a thing for older women, and found he could have his cake and eat it too because some older women were prepared to pay for his company, if you know what I mean.

  “A couple of mo
nths ago his sister Eve, who’d never given up hope of a family reunion, ran into someone who’d seen her brother in Sydney, wrapped around an Auckland-based TV star. She hired a private investigator to track her brother down, which he did, but Arden still didn’t want anything to do with her. By this stage the investigator’s worked out why all these middle-aged women in headscarves and dark glasses are trooping in and out of Arden’s apartment. After he’d told Eve about it, he realized he’s sitting on a goldmine because some of these women would far rather fork out hush money than have their husbands find out they’re getting a seeing-to from a male prostitute every second Thursday afternoon. So he put the hard word on a couple, one of whom went and killed herself.”

  Bell groaned and turned away. Ihaka talked to his back.

  “Her husband finds the body with a note and some incriminating photos. He jumps to the conclusion that the guy in the photos, the gigolo, is the blackmailer, and wants to make him suffer. Fortunately, he’s got a mate in Paremoremo who owes him big-time. Among other things, he’s paying for protection so his mate doesn’t end up as some big boy’s fuck-toy. So he slips his mate a photo of Arden and asks him to get his gang buddies on the job. Maybe they weren’t meant to go all the way, but these guys are animals – overkill’s their standard operating procedure. Whatever, they get hold of Arden and bash him to death.

  “The PI sees all this. He’s been tailing Arden, hoping to add a few more frisky wives to his portfolio. He shoots over to Arden’s apartment to grab his laptop in case he kept records of his clients. Then he realizes there’s a giant fly in the ointment: the sister. When she finds out what’s happened to her brother, she’ll tell the cops everything. There goes the goldmine, not to mention his freedom. So he lures Eve up here, probably by saying her brother’s agreed to a meeting, and does to her pretty much what the animals did to Arden, figuring we’d be only too happy to pin both murders on them, and they’d be too dumb to talk their way out of the one they didn’t commit.”

  Bell turned back to face Ihaka. He was moist-eyed, stunned and afraid.

  “You set the dogs on the wrong man, Mr Bell.” Ihaka turned and walked away. “The blackmailer’s name is Grant Hayes,” he said over his shoulder. “He’s in the Yellow Pages.”

  Grant Hayes had an office above a chemist on Karangahape Road. Ihaka walked in at 9.05, too early for his secretary, a hotted-up peroxide blonde. She was the woman in Booth’s photos, the face Beth Greendale had spotted in the Langham’s CCTV footage.

  “Mr Hayes is busy right now,” she said.

  Ihaka showed his ID. “He’ll see me.” He made a show of tilting his head and peering at her. “You look very familiar. Have we met?”

  The secretary giggled. “Some people think I look like Christina Aguilera.”

  “That can’t be it,” said Ihaka. “I wouldn’t know Christina Aguilera if I ran over her. I’m sure it’ll come to me. I never forget a face.”

  Her artificial half-smile blinked on and off. She pressed the intercom button. “Grant, there’s a guy from the police here. A Mr…?”

  “Ihaka.” He was already in Hayes’s office, closing the door behind him.

  Hayes was at a kitset desk, drinking coffee from a paper cup and doing the crossword. He didn’t seem surprised or ruffled by Ihaka’s appearance. “Detective Sergeant Ihaka,” he said with a salesman’s smile. “What brings you to my humble workplace?”

  Ihaka examined him, searching for a sign. There wasn’t one. Hayes looked like a normal, well-adjusted guy. After he’d beaten Eve to death, he probably went home and watched a wildlife documentary.

  “I’m here to do you a favour,” said Ihaka.

  “Then you’re doubly welcome. It’s been a while since anyone did.”

  “This is a biggie. It’ll save your life.”

  Hayes shuffled his masks, settling on good-natured puzzlement. “Excuse me?”

  “Jonathon Bell knows you tried to blackmail his wife, which of course was what made her kill herself. He knows he sent those cavemen after the wrong guy. If you want to die of old age, you’d better come with me. We’re the only ones who can protect you now.”

  The frown lines on Hayes’s forehead deepened, but his expression didn’t waver. “I’m sorry, Sergeant,” he said, half-suppressing a snort of amusement at the sheer zaniness of it all. “I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Ihaka. “But I’ll spell it out one more time anyway, because it’s important you understand just how deep in the shit you are. Bell knows you sent his wife over the edge. Pretty soon The Firm is going to know you copycatted them so their guys would get pinned for Eve. How do you think they’ll react? Shrug their shoulders? Say something like ‘Hey, smart play, dude. Respect’? Or hunt you down and nail your dick to your forehead? I know what my money’s on. You’re not going to last on the outside, so if you want to stay alive, you better come down to Central and lay it all out – Eve, the blackmail, the works.”

  Hayes chuckled ruefully, shaking his head, like someone trying to extricate himself from a social ambush without resorting to rudeness. “This is just so out there, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Okay,” said Ihaka briskly. “You want to tell me who’s your next of kin?”

  “You know, that’s not particularly funny,” said Hayes. “If there’s nothing else, perhaps you should leave.”

  “There’s just no helping some people,” said Ihaka. “But you know what? I’m kind of glad you didn’t take me up on it. It’ll save us a lot of frigging around, that’s for sure.”

  As Ihaka reached for the door handle, Hayes said, “Just as a matter of interest, what would give Bell the idea I’m the blackmailer?”

  Ihaka retraced his steps. He leaned forward, planting his hands on the desk. “Bell knows,” he said softly, “because I told him.”

  17

  This time John Scholes didn’t bother pretending that he was pleased to see Tito Ihaka.

  He rounded on the guards who’d escorted him to the superintendent’s office. “What the fuck’s all this then?” he said, more like a high-handed employer than a convict. “I’ve got nothing to say to this bloke. Where’s my lawyer? We’re meant to be having a meeting.”

  Ihaka sat down at the meeting table. “Thanks, fellas,” he said to the guards. “You can leave us to it.” As the door closed, he told Scholes to sit down.

  “Fuck you,” said Scholes. “I don’t want to talk to you. I’m up before the parole board tomorrow, and I need to have a run-through with my lawyer.”

  “As we speak,” said Ihaka, “your chances of getting in front of the parole board are somewhere between fuck all and zero. If you don’t sit the fuck down, they’ll be less than zero.”

  Scholes advanced in sullen silence. He sat down opposite Ihaka, tilted the chair back, clasped his hands behind his head, and began whistling softly. Ihaka recognized it as the theme song from the old TV comedy Dad’s Army, ‘Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler?’

  “Why all the drama?” asked Ihaka. “I thought parole was going to be a rollover, you being a model prisoner and all.”

  Scholes’s look got dirtier. “Apparently your colleagues out West Auckland, being a right bunch of cunts, have muddied the waters. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

  “You know, the funny thing is, a few days ago I was thinking about intervening on your behalf, maybe even having West Auckland’s submission taken off the table. It just goes to show, timing is everything. Now we know why your boys killed Arden Black and we know who killed Black’s sister, so you don’t have a lot of leverage.”

  “Is that right?” said Scholes, the habitual half-smile back in place.

  “It was a hit, wasn’t it? And a well-paid one, I bet. Set up by Mark Wills.”

  The half-smile didn’t waver; the eyebrows didn’t twitch.

  “Not quite the perfect crime, you’d have to say,” said Ihaka. “We know who made the approach
, we know who paid for it, the guys who did it are behind bars and, to top it all off, they smashed up the wrong bloke. I believe the technical term is a goat-fuck.”

  He leaned back, grinning. “Is that your poker face, Johnny, or have you just shat your pants?”

  Scholes’s eyes widened fractionally. “Look, this is all very interesting, not that I’ve got a fucking clue what you’re on about, but if it’s all the same to you I really would like some time with my lawyer.”

  “Let me ask you a question. What do you reckon the parole board’s view will be if we tell them beforehand that you’re about to be charged with conspiracy to commit murder? I know they sometimes get a bit of stick for being a soft touch, but I think they’d baulk at that, don’t you? In fact, coming on top of Waitemata’s submission, I’d say it’d be a bit of a game-changer.”

  “Conspiracy to commit murder?” Scholes rolled his eyes. “Do me a favour. That one ain’t going to fly, Sergeant. You know it. I know it.”

  “Admittedly it wouldn’t be a walk in the park—”

  “Ah. Is that the voice of common sense I hear?”

  “—but it looks like we’ll have to go down that route to make sure we nail Cropper and Parks. We don’t have a motive otherwise.”

  Scholes sat up straight, folding his arms over his belly. “That wouldn’t be an issue if they pleaded guilty.”

  “Now there’s a thought.”

  “Consider it done. So I take it I can rely on your positive input at the parole hearing, Sergeant?”

  “Shit no.”

  Scholes flushed crimson, snarling unintelligibly.

  “Time to get real, Johnny. Getting those apes to plead guilty would be helpful, but it’s also in your interests. If I’m going to take the heat for springing you, I’m going to need a shitload more than that. Here’s the deal and it’s non-negotiable. You tell me exactly what happened to Blair Corvine, and I’ll get you out of here.”

  “What about the conspiracy charge?”

  “Well, if we’re going to go after you, we’ll also have to go after your client. That won’t be my decision.”