White Dog (Jack Irish Thriller 4)

by Peter Temple

  The sounds again, the pre-electronic sound of cat’s whisker scraping on crystal. It began to rain, I was looking at big tropical drops hitting a car outside, wet explosions, watched them become freezing spaghettini.

  Across the way, a light came on upstairs in McCoy’s premises. I said nothing, felt the cold in the room, in the heart, in the stomach, in the bone.

  ‘Jack?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’

  ‘She said she was feeling cheerful for the first time in weeks and it was because of a man.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘didn’t hear that, you’re breaking up. So I’ll say goodbye.’

  I sat in the gloom, my mind wandering around in the tall maze that was the whole business. I didn’t intend to. I didn’t want to think about it at all, but that wasn’t possible. I had to accept that I couldn’t leave it alone.

  Janene Ballich, table dancer. Why had the man in the car given me her name that night? Who was he? What part did Janene Ballich play in the story of Mickey Franklin? I’d been to Gippsland, I’d talked to Popeye Costello, all I got were more names: Wayne Dilthey, Katelyn Feehan aka Mandy Randy, Donna Filipovic. Janene was missing, probably dead. Wayne was definitely dead, shot in some country town. Where was Katelyn?

  Time for a beer. No Charlie tonight, he was playing bowls, handing out another thrashing to the youngsters in Brunswick.

  It couldn’t be coincidence that I’d hear Donna’s name in Popeye’s office and then find that she was the witness against Sarah who could place her near the scene of the crime. I remembered Popeye’s whistle when he saw Katelyn Feehan in the photograph with Wayne Dilthey.

  The cunt. Pinched her off me. Probably snaffled fucking Donna … Snaffled Donna from table dancing and giving personals? To join Wayne’s pleasure-service business? Donna, who just happened to be spending three weeks in a corporate apartment owned by a company in Monaco when she saw Sarah. Where had she been living when she first saw Sarah, during the altercation with the parking-space thief?

  Was Donna lying, prepared to commit perjury in a murder trial? What could induce her to do that? How could she know about the argument with the driver unless she’d seen it?

  I got up, stretched, put on my overcoat. I was at the front door when I remembered. That was the night Sarah said she’d met Anthony Haig. She was on her way to dinner with Mickey and Anthony Haig on the night of the parking fight.

  You’d talk about something like that. You left your car standing in the street and held a driver captive in his own car. You’d still be full of adrenalin and indignation when you arrived at your destination, the story would spill out, it would be remarkable if it didn’t.

  So Donna could have been given the story by someone Sarah had told it to. Or by someone who heard it from that person. Sarah might have told the story to dozens of people. She would certainly have told it to Sophie, and Sophie … make that hundreds of people.

  Monaco? A company in Monaco. I went back to the table, found my file, the stuff from D. J. Olivier, skimmed down the pages.

  Subject’s company Saint Charles involved in hundreds of property dealings. Finance generally offshore. Frequent provider is First Crusader Finance, Monaco. This entity run by Charles Robert Hartfield, once partner in Melbourne solicitors Alan Duchard, Gaitelband …

  The Melbourne address of the company that owned the apartment Donna stayed in was Alan Duchard, Gaitelband, barristers and solicitors of Prahran.

  I rang Telstra inquiries, was rejected as incomprehensible by the voice recognition software, gave the name Saint Charles to a grumpy human, got a number, declined the exorbitantly priced direct connection.

  It was picked up on the third ring. ‘Saint Charles.’ A man.

  ‘I’d like to speak to Anthony Haig.’

  ‘I can try to raise him. Your name?’

  ‘Jack Irish. I’m a solicitor.’

  ‘Hold on.’

  Silence. I held, looking at the bare walls, just the framed professional certificates. A painting or two would be nice. Why had I never done that? Why had I kept this place looking like the abode of a lawyer monk?

  ‘Mr Irish. Tony Haig.’ A rough voice.

  ‘Mr Haig, I’d like to talk to you about matters concerning Mickey Franklin,’ I said. ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, no hesitation. ‘I’m edge-to-fucking-edge this week though … listen, why don’t you come around to my place tomorrow night, evening, it’s early, a little gathering, we’ll go off and have a chat? How does that fit?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, not showing my surprise.

  ‘It’s a building called Marengo in …’

  ‘I know it.’ Everyone knew the Marengo, designed by an architect with popstar status.

  ‘Around six, they’ll have your name at the desk. See you.’

  I drove to the Prince, squeezed the Stud into a half-occupied loading zone. The men were at battle stations, bickering.

  ‘Well, you’re a bloody stranger,’ said Norm O’Neill. ‘Put us into these Sainters, bloody poisoned chalice, then we never see hide nor hair of ya.’

  ‘I was thinking we might go on Sunday,’ I said. ‘Carlton again, at Docklands.’

  ‘The tent,’ said Eric Tanner. ‘Bloody disgrace a great outdoor game now gets played in a circus tent.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Norm O’Neill, ‘no shortage of clowns in the tent when the Saints play. Young and old, the big fella can’t clap hands, misses. Needs a damn good lookin over by the eye, feet and hand specialist.’

  ‘Eye, feet and hand?’ said Wilbur. ‘What kind of specialist is that?’

  ‘Jesus, I don’t know,’ said Norm. ‘Ever heard of coordination? Sometimes I wonder about the ignorance in the world.’

  On the twenty-fifth floor, the lift stopped and allowed me into a room in the building’s core, a box of reinforced concrete, but not claustrophobic, lights in four deep alcoves and spots in the ceiling. The effect was of a small Moorish courtyard.

  I crossed to a steel door pretending to be made of wood. An electronic keypad glowed. Above it was a button with the camera symbol. I knew about this. The entrant was required to put in a code number, press the button that switched on the video cameras to give security a full view of the lift and the anteroom. If this didn’t happen quickly, it triggered a security alert. Inserting or adding a number was an alarm signal and armed people would arrive inside a minute.

  I pressed the button marked Ring. The electronic sentry went green with approval, I was being watched from the foyer, where I’d given my name.

  The door slid open, revealing a short passage. I went down it into a double-height panelled foyer with a staircase rising to a landing. At left and right were sets of double doors, eight panels each, no doubt salvaged from some nineteenth-century boom-time building long fallen to the breaker’s ball.

  A man appeared on the landing. Medium height, medium age, full head of crisp greying hair, medium length, brushed back and to the side with a parting.

  ‘Jack,’ he said, warmth in the single word, and started down the stairs, treading lightly.

  I waited.

  ‘Tony Haig,’ he said. ‘I told them to ring me when you got here.’

  A perfect dark suit, white shirt, grey tie, regular features, the nose a trifle truncated – he could have been the life model for a dummy in Myer’s window in 1965.

  We shook hands. He showed the strength in his hand but he didn’t overdo it. ‘Come up,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you rang, thought about ringing you. More than once.’

  We climbed the staircase side by side. I felt his arm behind me, just touching my jacket, as one might escort an elderly relative up a staircase, taking care but not wishing to suggest the need for it.

  ‘There’s a bit of symmetry about you being here tonight,’ he said.

  You and explosions. There’s a fearful fucking symmetry.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We’re celebrating the resurrection of Seaton Square,
Mickey’s Brunswick project. That closes a chapter, not so?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m never sure whether anything’s finished or just lying in wait.’

  Haig laughed, it was a genuine sound, good-humoured. ‘Spoken like an old-world pessimist,’ he said.

  The hand behind me touched me in the small of the back, a gesture of intimacy and affection. It was a European touch, not what someone did casually to another man going into the pub in Tingaboora or Rainbow.

  ‘Glad you could come, Jack,’ he said.

  I reached the landing and he opened a door and ushered me through. We stood above a big room, longer than it was wide. Two or three dozen people were standing with drinks, a small bar set up in a corner, white-shirted waiters with trays moving in the crowd.

  Beyond a wall of glass lay a vast scape of lights, horizontal and vertical, moving and still, pinpricks, strings, clusters, pillars, silver, pinks, yellows, blues, reds. At this height, everything was calmed by distance and rain.

  ‘I don’t know who you’ll know,’ said Haig.

  I saw Steven Massiani near the window with two men and a woman.

  ‘Probably no one,’ I said.

  We went down the two steps to the room. A waiter offered champagne in expensive flutes, the wine with a minute silver bead.

  ‘The Billecart Salmon,’ said Haig. ‘Know the stuff?’

  ‘Only by name,’ I said, drinking some.

  ‘Good fizz,’ he said. ‘Too good for some of this lot.’

  He took me around, introduced me to people. He didn’t say what I did for a living and he didn’t say what they did. Most of them were youngish, in black or grey, jackets worn over collarless shirts, the full range of hair, from nothing to plenty. Many of the men needed a shave, some could have done with a swift kick up the arse. One woman had hair like a monk’s cap and wore a silken sleeveless top slit to the belly, olive-skinned bulges showing. I knew the names of a few of them: restaurant owners, fashionable architects, a gallery owner, a photographer, two artists. We stopped briefly at the small court of an ageing film director – two women and a youth I thought I’d seen on television, mostly cheekbones and big brown eyes, all absorbing cinematic genius through their pores. The director paid close attention to Tony Haig, ignoring his own acolytes while we were there. It was a food chain.

  Haig left me with two men who soon returned to talking money. I thought it was money, I registered only the term ‘capacity to service’. They could well have been talking about stud horses.

  I walked across to the window, uneasy, knowing that I shouldn’t have accepted the invitation, should have met Haig at another time, perhaps not at all. There was no reason to be in this place, with these people.

  The view was dazzling but the canvas was too big. Like all views, it needed to be painted to be appreciated properly. When I turned, I saw the paintings on the long gallery wall, well spaced, all sizes. I went up the stairs and had a look. Modern paintings, no artist I recognised, all oils, lots of landscapes and seascapes – cliffs, promontories, bays, coves, water, light. There was also a sequence of dark paintings by the same artist, views of snow-topped peaks, icy lakes, forests and plunging rivers that conveyed a loneliness and a sadness.

  And there were portraits, marked differences in style but all striking because the subjects, men and women, had faces of character. At the end of the line was one of Tony Haig. He was in a collarless white shirt, tanned face half in shadow. Behind him was a blank wall, white, rough-plastered, with a single aperture, like a gun-slit. One tendril of a creeping plant was stealing through the slit, invading, a thin green snake, a leaf at its tip.

  It was a fine painting, the Haig portrait. They were all worth looking at, paintings of merit as far as I could judge. There was not one that you would pass by with a single glance.

  A man of taste and means, Anthony Haig. Or possibly just of means – taste was something the rich could buy.

  ‘Interesting, aren’t they?’

  I turned. Behind me was the woman I’d seen across the room in the group with Steven Massiani.

  ‘You’re Jack,’ she said. ‘Tony pointed you out. I’m Corin Sleeman. I was married to Mickey.’

  She had her hand out, close to her body. I took it. It was small, a child’s hand, my hand felt inflated, I felt like an enfolder.

  ‘It’s been horrible,’ she said. ‘A really bad dream.’

  She had the face of a girl in a pre-Raphaelite painting, not the hair, which was blonded and careless, but the nose, the brow, the poreless skin, the innocent and expectant mouth. The pre-Raphaelite child in middle age, a face no less arresting for the signs of time.

  ‘At least we’ve woken up,’ I said. ‘Who are these painters?’

  ‘Corsicans,’ she said. ‘Tony collects Corsican art.’

  ‘He would have a corner on the market then,’ I said.

  ‘I liked Sarah’s work,’ she said. ‘I had her do a piece for a building in South Melbourne. The client’s wife hated it, loathed it, a Frankston girl, her father was a smash repairer.’

  ‘She’d know crumpled metal,’ I said. ‘It might have brought back memories of the days when her father started work by hosing off the blood.’

  She started to smile, had pause. ‘Come and join us. You know Steven, I understand.’

  ‘We’ve met,’ I said.

  We went down and to Steven Massiani, Haig and another man, his back to us. As we approached, he turned. He was overweight, balding, with round glasses on a small nose. I’d seen him before, in a photograph, walking down a street with Mickey Franklin. Bernard Paech, once a director of Mickey’s company, Yardlive.

  ‘Hello, Jack,’ said Massiani, hand out. ‘Good to see you looking well.’

  ‘You don’t know Bern,’ said Haig, ‘Bernard Paech. He works with me. With me but not always for me.’

  I shook hands with Paech. He was smoking a cigar. ‘The co-director of Yardlive,’ I said.

  ‘Briefly,’ Paech said.

  A waiter appeared. Everyone except Massiani took new glasses of champagne.

  Haig raised his flute. ‘Health and happiness,’ he said.

  We drank.

  ‘Steven’s joined me in the Seaton Square project,’ said Haig. ‘Corin’s done the redesign.’

  I looked at Massiani. ‘Do I remember you saying you’d learned your lesson in the suburbs?’

  He smiled, a shrug. I now saw in his face someone who had known unhappiness early, perhaps beginning in the preschool playground. ‘A good memory,’ he said. ‘Tony’s the great persuader. Plus we’ve saddled him with the risk.’

  ‘I’m not the great persuader,’ said Haig. ‘Bern’s the persuader.’

  ‘What happened to the objectors?’ I said.

  ‘Allayer of concerns,’ said Paech. ‘That’s what I am.’

  ‘Was that easy for Seaton Square?’ I said.

  ‘No more difficult than putting condoms on a bucketful of snakes,’ said Paech. ‘Well, marginally easier. New proposal. Scaled down. A good package. Subsidised childcare centre, public park, that sort of thing.’

  He drew on his cigar, blew smoke at the ceiling. ‘Also the three main objectors changed their minds, a big help that was.’

  Haig laughed. Corin Sleeman didn’t laugh, looked away. Massiani didn’t laugh either. He was looking down, holding his empty glass by the base and running his flat hand, the fingers, around the rim. Through the noise of talk, the soft music playing, I heard the thin, hollow high sound he was creating.

  ‘The important thing,’ he said, looking up, at Paech, ‘is that it’ll get built.’

  Paech was about to speak but he didn’t.

  ‘And if it’s well done,’ said Massiani, ‘in a few years no one will remember the objections.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Paech. ‘Exactly.’

  He’d received the message.

  Haig scratched his head. He had an amused look. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘you haven’t had the tour.�
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  He took my arm and we crossed the room, went through a door into a passage. There was a glimpse of a kitchen on the left, three men and a woman standing at a counter, one man’s head down, close to the granite countertop.

  ‘The idiots,’ said Haig. ‘Like movies? I love movies. I watch one every day, that’s the minimum, I’ve watched five in a day, what kind of habit is that?’

  He showed me into the first room off the passage to the right. It had two couches and a soft armchair facing a huge television screen, two smaller ones beside it. There seemed to be a dozen speakers on the electronic wall, and hundreds of tapes and CDs in racks.

  ‘I’m an insomniac,’ he said. ‘Also I can’t fucking get to sleep. I wake up on this couch, clothes on, the first thing I see is Grace Kelly kissing Cary Grant, the lucky bastard.’

  We left the room, went down the corridor, Haig in front. He opened a door, found a switch, lights came on, not bright.

  ‘This is my special room,’ he said. ‘My special interest.’

  It was a large space, a combination of library and museum, with tall bookshelves, glass cases, paintings and other framed objects in alcoves. There was a devotional feeling, the shadows, the way the light lay in soft pools and skewed rectangles, hung down the walls, the glow of colour in the paintings, the lustrous gilt of the frames.

  ‘My collection,’ he said.

  I looked around the room. It was a museum and a shrine to Napoleon Bonaparte and it spoke of obsession and deep pockets.

  ‘You didn’t put this together by getting to French flea-markets before the crowds,’ I said.

  Haig smiled, pleased, a boy’s smile. ‘You won’t believe the junk. After they brought his bits back from St Helena in 1840, Napoleonic memorabilia became an industry. Nothing like it again until Elvis.’

  We toured, Haig pointing and explaining, not lecturing. There were hundreds of books on Bonaparte and his times, dozens of oil paintings and drawings of Bonaparte, five or six busts, bas-relief profiles and figures, statuettes, battlefield maps, a pistol, a sword, signed notes, letters and documents, a silver cup in a leather holder, a horse’s hoof on an ebony base, a lock of hair, a pair of boots, a telescope with gold inlay, a quill pen beside a silver inkpot, an ivory letter-opener, an ebony and silver baton, a fragment of a flag.