Death on Demand

by Paul Thomas

  “As I said before, you and I both know what that decision’s going to be, seeing as who the client is.” Ihaka’s reaction prompted a fat man’s chuckle. “Oh yes, Mr Ihaka. See, I insist on knowing who I’m dealing with, and that Wills geezer – well, put it this way, he’s neither strong nor silent.”

  “You might be hearing from the client again.”

  “Oh, why’s that?”

  “Cropper and Parks actually got the right bloke,” said Ihaka. “It was your client who got it wrong. He knows that now. And he knows who he should’ve had taken out.”

  “How come?”

  Ihaka shrugged. “Maybe a little bird told him.”

  Scholes whistled. “My, my, you’re playing for keeps, aren’t you?”

  “Now this will interest you, Johnny. The reason we thought Cropper and Parks killed Black’s sister is that the guy we’re talking about, the guy who did kill her, saw them do Black and tried to copy it. You see what I’m saying? He went out of his way to make us think your boys killed her.”

  “Fucking cheek.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be too thrilled. So do we have a deal?”

  “Well, that depends,” said Scholes. “I can’t tell you who ratted out Corvine because I don’t know. But I can certainly tell you a thing or two about Doug Yallop.”

  “The Prof? What’s he got to do with it?”

  “Oh, quite a lot, I think you’ll find. But I can’t do it all for you. After all, only one of us is a trained detective, and it ain’t me.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “It was Yallop who got Jerry Spragg duffed up. He called it, he paid for it. Spragg came in here like he was fucking Al Capone, going on about how he’d rumbled Corvine and turned him into Swiss cheese and bragging about his connections, which I took to mean he had one of your lot in his pocket. I guess word got around that he was talking too much because next thing I’ve got the Prof come to see me.”

  “He wanted Spragg put away?”

  “Oh yeah, he wanted him put away all right, but I drew the line at that. Someone gets topped, all hell breaks loose. Everything tightens up, the screws start going by the book.” Scholes’s eyes twinkled. “I mean, it’s bad enough being in here without getting treated like some kind of criminal. So we settled on giving Spragg a hiding. A proper fucking hiding, mind, not a touch-up, a very clear message that he should keep his gob shut. Now Spragg wasn’t the full quid to begin with, but he was fucking sixpence in the pound after the lads were finished with him. So Yallop got what he wanted after all – and on the cheap, which pissed me off more than somewhat, I can tell you.”

  “You’re sure Yallop was acting for a cop?”

  “As sure as eggs are eggs,” said Scholes. “And in return for you getting me out of here, I’ll tell you why.”

  “Go on.”

  “If I tell you now, what’s to stop you welshing on the deal?”

  “I don’t work that way, Johnny.”

  “There’s always a first time.”

  “I’m looking at the big picture here,” said Ihaka. “In the long run I don’t gain anything by shafting you.”

  “The big picture, eh?” Scholes nodded approvingly. “I like that. People who look at the big picture are few and far between, as I’m sure you know, Mr Ihaka. All right, I’ll take you at your word, one big-picture man to another. I never liked that fucking Yallop – all the bollocks about being some kind of criminal mastermind – so when he was planning and packaging jobs and selling them to the highest bidder, I didn’t want a bar of it. A few years ago I began to detect a pattern: all Yallop’s jobs, the lads who pulled them ended up either getting collared or ripped off.”

  “You reckon Yallop and the cop were planning jobs, selling the blueprints, then robbing their own customers?”

  “Well, if they weren’t robbed, they were nabbed red-handed. A nifty little scam, you’d have to say.”

  “But you kept that to yourself because it thinned out the competition?”

  Scholes shrugged. “It was no skin off my nose. If blokes were too fucking dim to see what was going on, it served them bloody well right.”

  “Corvine got a sniff of it, although he didn’t know it was Yallop. He tipped off Central a couple of weeks before he was shot.”

  “Well, there you are. The bent copper killed two birds with one stone. He stopped Corvine getting any closer and no doubt got a pay-off from Spragg. You know why I’m in here, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, fixing up Spragg was a barter arrangement – no money changed hands. In return for us kicking Spragg’s head in, Yallop told me where I could find that piece of shit who put me in here.”

  Ihaka stared. “He was in the witness protection programme.”

  “Precisely, old son. If you needed actual proof you’ve got a rotten apple, that’s it.”

  “What did you do to the guy?”

  “Nothing yet. I’ve been in here, haven’t I? It’s not the sort of task you delegate.”

  “That was a while ago. He could be anywhere by now.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry about that,” said Scholes happily. “I’ve been keeping tabs on him.”

  “This puts me in a kind of tricky position.”

  “Forget about it. Not your problem. A, he’s scum. B, you’re looking at the big picture. Don’t sweat the small stuff, Mr Ihaka.”

  “I can’t let you kill him, Johnny.”

  “Don’t be fucking daft, I’m not going to kill the poxy little bitch. Apart from anything else, he’s not worth it. But he’s bought and paid for and by Christ I’m going to have him.”

  Ihaka nodded. “I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it.”

  Scholes’s smile stretched. “Fair’s fair.”

  “I need you to make a list of every one of Yallop’s jobs you can think of.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Well, I’ll need to wrack the old brain,” said Scholes. “And I’m a great believer that if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Come back tomorrow morning. I should have something for you by then.”

  “Okay.” Ihaka stood up. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  “You know,” said Scholes reflectively, “it’s a bit rich you getting on your high horse about what I might do to the filth who put me in here. What about the way you’ve set that bloke up?”

  “Your guy didn’t kill anyone. This one did. He beat a woman to death. Besides, I warned him.”

  “You did what?”

  “I explained the situation to him and pointed out that his best chance, maybe his only chance, of staying in one piece was to come into Central and own up.”

  Scholes shook his head. “You’re a fucking piece of work, you are.”

  Ihaka looked back at Scholes from the doorway. “Everyone gets called to account, Johnny. One way or another, everybody pays. Don’t you forget it.”

  Scholes’s notes ran to half a dozen A4 pages, an orderly exercise set down in a riotous scrawl. He’d listed fifteen crimes, arranged in three categories: those he knew for sure were Yallop’s work, those he had reason to believe were Yallop’s work, and those he assumed were Yallop’s work because the guys who pulled the job were way too dumb to have planned it themselves.

  With one exception, the perpetrators were either swiftly arrested or themselves robbed. The exception was the theft of a private collection of rare Chinese snuffboxes that was about to go on public display. Scholes picked Yallop himself for this one because it wasn’t really the Asian gangs’ style, plus it would be just like the Prof to have known the value of a load of old Chinese porcelain and a fence somewhere in the world who could shift it.

  Ihaka was impressed. Scholes had an organized mind, impressive powers of recall and an intimate knowledge of the workings of the Auckland underworld. That didn’t make him regret his decision to let Scholes loose. Yes, there might be blowback, but you made these deals because they
delivered here and now. There was no point losing sleep over whether they’d come back to haunt you down the track. Some did; some didn’t. There was no telling.

  Scholes was a bad man, but in the dark places there are degrees of bad, and bad was better than evil. He was a parasite, but a rational parasite who operated within a set of rough rules. He adhered to the protocols in the cold war with the police, and accepted that there were limits to how ruthlessly he could prey on the community. He would be brutal, even murderous, when he calculated that the benefits outweighed the risks, but there was a residual humanity keeping him in check. Some day, greed or hubris or even boredom might drive him to cross the line, and then those who’d made murky, unauthorized accommodations with him would be tainted.

  The alternative was to stick to the rules and not think about the price others paid for your clean hands. Ihaka had never been able to do that. It had set his career back and would do so again. In the end it would probably be his undoing.

  He set the alarm for 3.30 a.m. so he could pore over computer files in a near-empty Auckland Central. What he found didn’t make sense, so he went through the whole process again looking for innocent explanations, reasons not to believe, an inconvenient fact that undermined an otherwise obvious conclusion, even complexities and uncertainties that would take him into a grey area where there was no way forward and therefore no choice but to abandon the quest.

  But there weren’t any. Each time one of Yallop’s jobs resulted in a quick arrest, it was the same arresting officer. Each time the breakthrough came from information supplied to the arresting officer by an unnamed informant. And each time the perpetrators were themselves robbed immediately after committing the crime, that same officer was off-duty.

  Ihaka was stuck in traffic on the airport motorway when Scholes rang.

  “How did you get this number?” he asked.

  Scholes laughed. “What sort of question is that? I wanted you to be the first to know that I’m sitting in McDonald’s waiting for my Big Mac and fries. It’s not quite what I would’ve chosen for my first meal as a free man, but I was outvoted.”

  “That must be a new experience for you.”

  “Not at home it’s not, it’s par for the fucking course. So did you find what you were looking for?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did it make you happy?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think it would.”

  “Did you know?”

  “I had an inkling. Good word that, inkling. We should use it more often. I fucking warned you, didn’t I? I told you to leave it alone. So everybody pays, do they, Mr Ihaka?” This time there was a harsh edge to Scholes’s laugh. “Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we.”

  Before Ihaka could reply, the line went dead.

  They met in the St Johns Bar on the Wellington waterfront, Johan Van Roon bustling in with his cellphone clamped to his ear. He was still on the phone five minutes after shaking hands, his body language evoking an overburdened boss surrounded by mediocrities.

  “Mate,” he said when he got off the phone, “if you’d given us some warning, we would’ve had you round for dinner. Yvonne and the kids would’ve loved to see you. But you know what she’s like when it comes to entertaining. She doesn’t do spontaneous. Two days’ notice, minimum.”

  “It was very last-minute.”

  “So what are you down for?”

  Ihaka was tempted to make something up – that he was tidying up the Duckmanton case or some domestic issues in Wairarapa – just to salvage a few precious minutes of how it used to be.

  They went all the way back to the day Van Roon arrived at Auckland Central fresh out of police college – a shy, pale, lanky first-generation Kiwi, the son of Dutch immigrants. Ihaka told the crowded station room that Van Roon was the whitest white man he’d ever seen and dubbed him the Milky Bar Kid, a label that took a few years to shake off.

  Ihaka soon realized that Van Roon’s choirboy Nordic features and diffident manner were misleading. He was intelligent, hard-working, loyal, eager to learn and appreciative of guidance. Without making a conscious decision and certainly without fanfare, Ihaka became his mentor. He helped Van Roon grow up and toughen up, sometimes putting an arm around his shoulders, sometimes a rod up his back. They stopped calling him the Milky Bar Kid.

  When Van Roon made detective sergeant, Ihaka lost his right-hand man. He’d seen it coming, though, and had helped make it happen because he wanted Van Roon to fulfil his potential and go on to bigger things, things that were probably already out of his own reach. And being on an equal footing meant they could be mates. Ihaka had many a meal at the Van Roons’ and was godfather to their oldest child, even though he’d warned them he wouldn’t be a role model, wouldn’t remember the kid’s birthday and had a philosophical problem with the God aspect.

  They’d seen very little of each other since Ihaka’s banishment from Auckland. Despite the proximity, that didn’t change when Van Roon was promoted and transferred to Wellington. He was flat out, Ihaka had his routine, and perhaps neither was in a hurry to find out how their respective rise and fall had reconfigured their relationship. But there was no point in having a few beers and a catch-up, pretending nothing had changed. All that there was between them, the sum total of their friendship, was back in the past, slipping out of reach.

  It was a Sunday night; they had one end of the bar to themselves. Ihaka still leaned in, lowering his voice. “I came to tell you that I know what you did up there, you and Doug Yallop.”

  Van Roon had the beer bottle halfway to his mouth. He put it down carefully and pushed his chair back, frowning at Ihaka as if he’d expressed some ratbag opinion.

  “I’m not wired up,” said Ihaka. “You can pat me down if you want.”

  “What, here?”

  “We can go into the loo.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Van Roon, standing up. “I think I’ll just call it a night.”

  Ihaka shrugged. “If you walk out of here, I ring McGrail. After that, it’s out of our control.”

  “You’ve got this all wrong.”

  “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  Van Roon grimaced, running his fingers through his hair, once corn-yellow, now grey/white. “Tito, I don’t know where you’re coming from, mate. I mean, this is crazy. It could sink both of us. We should be sticking together.”

  “Are we going to the shithouse,” said Ihaka, “or are you going home?”

  “Okay,” said Van Roon with a heavy sigh. “Let’s go.”

  They went into the toilet. Van Roon checked the stalls were empty, then stood with his back against the door.

  “Strip.”

  Ihaka took off his shirt and dropped his jeans.

  “Keep going.”

  Ihaka stepped out of his jeans.

  “Throw them over here. And the shirt.”

  Ihaka did as he was told. Van Roon patted the clothes down and went through the pockets.

  “Let’s see the shoes.”

  “You’ve been watching way too much TV,” said Ihaka, tossing over his shoes. He put his thumbs in the waistband of his boxers. “You want the full frontal?”

  “Why not?” said Van Roon. “We’ve got this far.”

  Ihaka stepped out of his boxers, naked now. “It goes without saying,” he said, “but I’ll say it anyway: we wouldn’t be doing this if you were clean.”

  Van Roon nodded distractedly, as if he was thinking about something else altogether. Then he pulled the door open and disappeared.

  Ihaka threw on his clothes and hurried back into the bar, half-expecting to find Van Roon gone. But he was sitting at the table, head bowed over his beer.

  “I suppose you want to know why,” said Van Roon without looking up. “You won’t like the answer. It was because of you. You remember what I was like when I joined: Billy Brighteyes, a real fucking Boy Scout. It didn’t take me long to realize I’d been sucked in. We’re just another governmen
t department, full of clock-watchers and brown-nosers and guys who’d trample over their grandmothers to get one notch up the pecking order. Half the guys at the top end have forgotten why they ever wanted to be a cop in the first place, half the ones coming in at the other end are second-rate people who’ll be second-rate cops, if we’re lucky. But at the end of the day, I still thought we were about serving and protecting, and that we valued people who stood up for those things. But when I saw what they did to you, I stopped believing.

  “I know you’re high-maintenance and two of you would probably be one too many for any district, but you’re a hell of a cop. You’ve got a real talent for it. Everybody knew that. You’d earned the right to be taken seriously about Lilywhite, but because he was in the eastern suburbs’ money set, they didn’t want to know. And when you wouldn’t let go, they cut you off at the knees. McGrail, who for bloody years had been only too happy to gather brownie points off the back of your work, dropped you like a hot potato. Look at him now in his tailor-made suits and his BMW. Look who got his job instead of you: that slimy prick Charlton, a prime example of everything that’s wrong with the organization. If you’d got that job, none of it would’ve happened.”

  Van Roon’s voice wobbled and he looked away. “All I wanted was to work for you again, the old team. I’d have swapped that for coming down here as a DI any day. But I got the message. You can be the best cop in the building, but unless you play the political game and do the networking you’ll end up mediating white-trash domestics out in the sticks. I made up my mind that wasn’t going to happen to me.”

  “So you got cosy with Yallop?”

  “You introduced us, remember?”

  “I didn’t expect you to get into bed with him. How did it start?”

  “I heard Yallop had shopped a payroll job around, so I had him on about it.” Van Roon’s gaze slid off into a faraway stare, his tone flattening into indifference. “You know what he was like, slippery as an eel. Anyway, the idea just popped into my head. I suggested next time he sold a job, he should let me know. He’d make money, I’d get the collar. Of course he came straight back with ‘What’s in it for me?’ I said something vague about doing favours. You know what was going through my head? This is what Tito would do, this is how he operates. Get your hands dirty, do what you have to do. Yallop said he’d think about it. A few months later, out of the blue, I got the call. Then I got another one. I wrapped up a couple of cases double-quick and suddenly I was the blue-eyed boy.”