White Dog (Jack Irish Thriller 4)

by Peter Temple

  We crossed the moat by a short iron bridge. Longmore opened the front door and saw me in: one big square room, the floor of polished pink stone, the slabs butted so tight, the cutting so clean that in places no edges could be seen. In the centre of the room, surrounded on three sides by a horseshoe-shaped bench, a mahogany staircase rose in a tight spiral. I walked to one of the narrow gothic-arched windows on the west wall. A shallow alcove between the windows held a stone cup full of wax. A wick had burnt to the bottom and died.

  ‘Peaceful place,’ said Longmore. He was standing at the single back window, hands in his pockets.

  I joined him. We were looking directly at a long stone rill that fed the moat, a dark line drawn across the paving to the hedge.

  ‘My mother designed this,’ he said. ‘When she was little, Sarah used to sit upstairs for hours reading. You never think at that age they’ll ever bring you pain.’

  ‘The trouble Sarah was in,’ I said.

  ‘They had to take the chap to hospital. Head injuries, collarbone broken, they said he was like someone who’d been in a motor accident.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Damn near killed him. They’d been taking drugs. He said she gave him no warning. Broke a bottle over his head. Full bottle of wine. Hit him with other things.’

  Longmore had a coughing bout, recovered. ‘Her mother was always nervous after that if the phone rang, couldn’t answer the telephone.’

  I gave up on the victim’s identity. ‘How old was Sarah then?’

  He eyed his pipe bowl without pleasure. ‘About eighteen,’ he said. ‘Walked out on school when she was sixteen. We were in the Toorak house. The school was delighted, I can tell you.’

  ‘She was living at home when it happened?’

  ‘No. She’d cleared off, met this crowd in Fitzroy, they called themselves artists, just smeared paint around like babies, took drugs. Of course, the public galleries bought the rubbish, they weren’t actually after paintings. Young bum, that’s what they were buying. Taxpayer-subsidised sodomites.’

  The spaniel plodded around the corner. It walked to the rill, looked at it hopelessly, turned and looked at us, head on one side, sad. Then it sat down, a slow going down, always looking at us, a sinking of an old bum.

  ‘Won’t cross the bridge,’ said Longmore. ‘Doesn’t like bridges. A bit like me.’

  ‘He was one of the artists?’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man Sarah attacked.’

  ‘Oh. Hopeless bugger, not an ounce of talent. Gary Webber. I could have understood beating him up on aesthetic grounds.’

  He got out the lighter and applied it to the pipe, sucking, sucking, his eyes on the bowl. Then they turned on me, thoughtful.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘yes, the point of this.’

  I followed him out of the front door, the only door. He turned right and we went around the building, inside the moat. On the north flank, the dog side, he stopped and pointed at the wall below the window.

  ‘There,’ he said, ‘that’s the point.’

  He moved on, gave me room. I bent and looked. On a bluestone foundation block, a thin strip was polished to tombstone smoothness. Letters and numbers were chiselled into it. Unless pointed out, you would not notice the inscription. It said:

  J. I. Irish. AD 1936.

  ‘Built this,’ said Longmore. ‘Six of them on the job for the masonry, he was the master. I came here every day, got here early, before them most days, stayed all day. I brought my own sandwiches, tried to help. Got in the way, I suppose. They were rough the young ones, said things I didn’t understand until years later. Still, they tolerated me.’

  ‘The employer’s son,’ I said and regretted it.

  He didn’t look at me, chewed his pipe stem. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Be a fool not to consider that. Anyway, they were kind to me and I was happy.’

  The spaniel barked at us, aggrieved, cut off from his friend by a border he could not cross.

  We walked around the building.

  ‘Always happiest here,’ said Longmore. ‘We had all the summer holidays here, my mother and I. My father came up sometimes. She didn’t like the sea, not a sea person. Nor am I.’

  ‘Do you remember him?’ I said.

  ‘My father?’

  ‘No. The stonemason.’

  Longmore took the blunt elbow joint out of his mouth. ‘There’s a photograph my mother took,’ he said. ‘A big man. Big shoulders, big hands.’

  We left the beautiful building anchored in its calm quadrangle and walked back down the avenue of trees, the spaniel holding station behind us. A breeze had come up, it was worrying the poplars, challenging the tenacity of the last leaves.

  ‘Was Sarah charged for the assault?’ I said.

  He took the pipe out of his mouth and spat sideways, not successfully. He wiped a sleeve with the side of a hand. ‘It didn’t come to that. Things you can do.’

  Twenty metres on, he said, ‘I married late, y’know. Well beyond forty when we had Sophie.’ Pause. ‘Seems young enough from here, though. Got any yourself?’

  ‘A daughter.’

  ‘Rather had a boy?’

  I was unprepared. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel I’ve had anything. I didn’t bring her up. Her mother left me when she was tiny.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I didn’t feel I’d had anything till their mother died. Always too busy. And she took care of everything. When I had to deal with them they were almost grown up. Then I wished they were boys.’

  He blinked rapidly, seemed to be trying to expel something from his eyes. ‘Never was any good with girls,’ he said, ‘I suppose that’s why I married so late.’

  ‘Do your daughters depend on you for money?’

  ‘They didn’t for a while after their mother died. She had her own money and she left it to them. They spent it at speed, of course, both of them. Profligate is the term.’

  We walked in silence, just the chewing sound of our feet on the gravel, the scrabbling noise of the dog behind us. Near the house, I said, ‘I’m told you’re on the list of creditors for the Seaton Square project.’

  He didn’t reply, his eyes on the gravel. After a while, I tried again.

  ‘I heard you,’ he said. ‘The backers were calling in six mill. He was battling with objections, the usual mess. I said no but Sophie pestered me.’

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  Longmore raised his eyebrows. ‘Three or four months, I suppose.’

  We walked up the steps to the terrace. On the level, he stopped, gave me a quick look. ‘You’ve seen those metal things she makes?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Clue to her mind there, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘To what’s wrong with her.’

  ‘Apart from the desirability of a QC, is there something else you’d like me to convey to Andrew Greer?’

  He was patting the dog. ‘Get her to plead guilty to manslaughter. She’s not a murderer, she’s not well. She doesn’t remember these episodes. To this day she denies what she did to Gary Webber.’

  The wind was moving the ivy on the facade, the red and yellow leaves trembling, the wall seemed to be alive.

  ‘I’ll pass that on,’ I said. ‘My understanding is that she won’t. I’d like to talk to Sophie. It’s important.’

  ‘I’ll tell her. She’s gone off somewhere.’

  ‘Thank you for showing me the building,’ I said.

  Longmore nodded. ‘Anything to tell me, Greer’s got the number. No, you’ve got it, you rang. Or come out, I’m always here, pretty much. Redundant now.’

  ‘The stonemason,’ I said. ‘J. I. Irish. That’s my grandfather.’

  As I said it, I felt that I should not have completed the circuit to join us across the years.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, not looking at me, no expression in his voice, ‘I knew that when I saw you.’

  ‘Well, goodbye,’ I said. We shook hands.

  I was walking away when h
e said, ‘What school’d you go to, Jack?’

  I turned, reluctant. ‘Melbourne Grammar,’ I said, resenting having to say it.

  He was looking at the bowl of his pipe, raised his arm and wrist-flicked. A yellow stream of tobacco juice caught the light as it laid a stripe in front of the prone spaniel’s nose.

  ‘Happy there?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t blame the school for that.’

  ‘Loathed it, myself,’ said Longmore. ‘Still, funny old world. Not as random as it seems, eh?’

  I nodded, carried on down the path and I felt his eyes on me even after I’d turned the corner.

  Steven Massiani was thin, ascetic-looking, premature lines bracketing his mouth, seated behind an almost bare desktop in a corner office on the sixteenth floor of the old Isaacs Building. He was on the telephone and he waved me to sit with a hand that would be of little use on a MassiBild building site.

  It was a big room, big windows on two walls, panelled in wood painted a warm mustard colour. On the back wall were photographs of sod-turnings, deep pits, concrete pours, groups of men in hardhats celebrating tree-raisings on tower buildings. The right-hand wall held family photographs: weddings, a degree ceremony, parties, many photographs of a big, dark man with two boys, toddlers in some pictures, getting bigger. I could identify Steven Massiani, the smaller of the boys, always a serious face. His brother, David, was plump to begin with, a big open face. In the later pictures, he was his father’s height, the same jaw, the same eyes, the same stance.

  Massiani said goodbye and put down the phone. ‘Mr Irish.’

  We shook. ‘Thank you for seeing me,’ I said.

  He opened his hands, made a small movement of his head, gestures that said: it costs me nothing to see you.

  ‘I like your office,’ I said.

  ‘It was my father’s,’ said Massiani. ‘I haven’t changed anything.’ He had a soft voice, a priest’s voice, a voice for the confessional. ‘It’ll always be his office, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I thought you’d be in one of the towers,’ I said. ‘High up.’

  He shook his head. ‘This is the first building Dad owned. Bought in 1959. People always expected him to knock it down but he loved this building. All he did was fix it up and put in a new lift, that was just before he died. He liked fast lifts. It’s much too fast for the height.’

  ‘He didn’t change the name,’ I said. ‘Call it the Massiani Building.’

  ‘It’s the Isaacs Building while we own it. My dad said people who changed the names of buildings would also desecrate tombstones.’

  ‘Is there a Massiani Building?’

  He smiled. ‘He didn’t like memorials. You wanted to talk about Mickey. We had very little to do with him after he left us.’

  ‘I’m just scratching around,’ I said. ‘Our problem is that Andrew Greer’s client didn’t kill Mickey, so we are forced to ask who did.’

  ‘Of course, that’s your job. He worked for the company for five or six years, we gave him opportunities. Then he left to follow his own course. My father encouraged him in that. Mickey wasn’t a corporate person. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘Yes. We invested in his early projects as a sign of support for him. He had no standing in the financial community.’

  Massiani steepled his hands, pale fingers, small nails, nibbled at.

  ‘You have no investment in Seaton Square?’

  ‘No. We’ve learned our lesson in the suburbs.’

  ‘It seems to have been a disastrous exercise.’

  He unsteepled, steepled again. ‘Scaled down, less ambitious, it may still be viable. Mickey was always shooting for the moon.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Well, he was an ambitious person.’

  ‘May I ask you a hypothetical question?’

  A shake of the head. ‘About Mickey’s death, I’m not the person to ask, Mr Irish.’

  ‘It’s not about what you know,’ I said. ‘Before this, if someone suggested that Mickey was in danger, would you have guessed personal or business reasons?’

  ‘An impossible question,’ he said.

  Behind his head, a helicopter appeared, a long way away, coming from the northwest, moving like a black insect crawling on dirty water. The windows were double-glazed, no sound reached us.

  ‘I understand he was a close friend of your brother,’ I said.

  ‘Close?’ A small frown. ‘I don’t know about close. They went to the races, the beach house, a drink after work, that kind of thing. It was before David was married.’ He scratched a cheek. ‘A long time ago.’

  The small telephone on the desk buzzed. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. He picked it up. ‘Yes.’

  He swivelled his chair. I looked at him in profile, a neat face.

  ‘Bruce,’ he said. ‘Thanks for calling. Yes. Sometime soon, can you do that? Monday would be excellent, fine. Yes, it is that matter. And there’s another small thing. Good. Yes. Wait to hear from you. Thank you, Bruce, I appreciate this.’

  He turned back to me.

  ‘The impossible question,’ I said. ‘It would help our thinking.’

  ‘This is a headkicking industry, Mr Irish,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t heard of many developers murdered just for being developers. Is that an answer?’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘What kind of work did Mickey do when he was with you?’

  ‘Anything my father gave him to do. For a year or so. Then it was dealing with the contractors, mostly. That’s more than a full-time job, it’s actually more than a job, it’s a preparation for hell. That can lead people into doing silly things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  He was looking at his fingernails. ‘Well, I suppose you know this royal commission into the building industry has heard some allegations about cash payments, that sort of thing, that go back to Mickey’s day.’

  ‘Mickey was involved?’

  ‘Involved? If he was involved, we were involved. And we weren’t. No, I’m saying it’s possible he knew more about what the contractors were doing than he ever told us. Told my dad, that is. I had nothing to do with Mickey, he didn’t report to me.’

  His phone rang. He said a few polite words, replaced the tiny handset.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry Mickey’s not available to tell the commission what he knew about those days. Needless to say, the contractors won’t share that view.’

  ‘The commission was going to call Mickey?’

  A shrug. ‘No idea. Probably not. I’m just saying that we’d have been happy to have Mickey alive to testify if required. Anyway, I’m not bagging Mickey. He could get things done. He was good with people then.’

  ‘He lost that gift?’

  ‘Some people are good intermediaries, good at negotiating on behalf of others. When they represent themselves, they’re less good.’

  ‘Have you heard anything about his behaviour in the weeks before his death?’

  ‘Only that he’d been acting … erratically.’

  ‘Why would that be?’

  A shrug. ‘The problems with the project, I suppose. Possibly added to by a bit of chemical dependence. That’s what I heard.’

  ‘Before he joined you, what did he do?’

  A look of thought. ‘I don’t know. My father took him on, someone recommended him. He had part of an engineering degree, he dropped out of uni. Queensland. He came from Brisbane.’

  ‘The crown’s case is that Mickey owned the weapon that killed him,’ I said. ‘Does it surprise you that he would have a gun?’

  Massiani waved a hand. ‘People have guns,’ he said. ‘Some people feel a need to have something to protect themselves with.’

  ‘Did he marry Corin Sleeman while he was working for MassiBild?’

  ‘After he left.’

  I had run out of questions. I got up. ‘I’m grateful for your time.’

  ‘I hope the Longmore woman gets off,’ he said. ‘If she didn’t do
it. One of Australia’s finest families.’

  An edge revealed, the micro-bevel on a blade.

  Without consideration I said, ‘Mickey’s talent with people, that seems to have extended to his sex life.’

  I thought I saw something in Massiani’s eyes, as one registers the faintest cloud shadow on a bright day. He rose, shorter than I’d expected, and came around the desk.

  ‘My father had a saying,’ he said, ‘to the effect that when it comes to men, some women have a connection missing between the head and the body.’

  ‘That sounds like a piece of ancient wisdom,’ I said. ‘Where did the Massianis come from?’

  He offered his thin, unworked hand. ‘Corsica. We’re wogs. You’ll know the term.’

  Steve Massiani opened the door for me. I said goodbye and walked down the corridor. The woman behind the desk said, Goodbye, Mr Irish. The lift slid me to the ground floor, a slick, silent, hurtling passage.

  I put on my raincoat and went into Collins Street, thought about how to get to the office. I’d take a cab, this was business. But first, coffee. In a slanting rain, I walked down to Exhibition Street and along to Bourke and up to Pellegrini’s, where nothing changes and the staff appear to know several hundred people by name and preference.

  ‘Hey, Jack, where you been?’ said the man making coffee. ‘Short, right? My mum saw Andrew on television. Tell him I want him when I murder this bastard here.’

  ‘When you kill him,’ I said. ‘The jury will decide whether it’s murder.’

  I drank my coffee and thought about Mickey Franklin and the Massianis. Not much warmth there. Why then had they backed him when he started out as a developer? Was there a falling-out later? Business or personal? There was something personal if I read Steve correctly. Did it matter? All I was doing was trying to justify whatever horrendous daily rate Wootton was charging Drew for my services.

  Wootton. The prelim scan in forty-eight. Whatever that was, he hadn’t received it. I waved to the men behind the counter and left, caught a cab with a taciturn driver.