by Andres Kabel
Twenty-five years ago, the road to Portsea had wended along the coast line. Now a freeway pushed through the center of the Peninsula for most of the journey. An hour and a half of controlled driving before he finally swung onto the old beach highway at Tootgarook. Sick of Gentle’s nonstop prattling, he found a Powderfinger tape, turned it up loud, the crashing guitars and yearning vocals filling the car.
He kept driving fast when they came off the highway. Gentle navigated, lost them twice. Out of season, Portsea was sedate, a handful of cars parked under the gum trees lining the shopping area.
Finally Tusk cruised down the curve of Shelley Way, switched off the music. High houses behind fences. Blue water through gaps.
The most impressive residence was Number Eight, the last house on the street. Definitely architect-designed, it looked like three adjoining cottages built of gleaming white wood. Tusk stopped the Peugeot at the top of a red gravel driveway.
“Look.” Gentle pointed at a gray Lexus at the bottom of the drive.
Tusk flexed his fingers. The end of the road, in all ways. Even the big shots can’t escape from justice, he thought, as he led the way down the drive. Behind him Gentle clutched a sheaf of papers.
Sun on his face, a tugging breeze. He pressed the front doorbell, heard a chime deep in the bowels of the house. They listened. Nothing but seagulls and sighing trees.
He trotted around the back. Christ, the rich sure can buy themselves a view, he thought. A pristine lawn stretched down to a cliff protected by a fence. The mouth of Port Phillip Bay gaped before them. A ship steamed for the treacherous Heads, waves rolling around it. Gulls wheeled over the beach fronting white-capped blue water under banks of cotton-wool clouds.
From the back, the house looked even more impressive. Grandiose, pristine white, rimmed by a wide veranda. Wisps of smoke rising from a chimney.
And the back door was ajar.
“Okay.” Tusk touched his gun in its shoulder holster but didn’t draw it. Glanced at his partner’s pale face.
Up the steps and through the cane chairs littering the veranda. His boots loud on the floorboards. The door swung back without a sound. A high-roofed entrance area bathed in light. Hats and raincoats on wall pegs.
“Rollo,” he called. Raised a hand and they both stood stock-still. Not a sound over the faint cawing of seagulls.
Around a corner, into a near-circular living room, drenched with light pouring through huge windows. A massive wooden coffee table in the center, strewn with magazines, surrounded by large striped settees and lounge chairs. A model ship hanging above a fireplace in which logs fitfully glowed red. Photos on the mantelpiece. Leaning against a speaker, a large studio photo: Rollo and Bella beaming.
“Well well well,” Rollo Keppel said. “If it isn’t Dick Tracy the actuary. And his faithful hound dog.”
The chief executive sat slumped in a lounge chair. Immobile.
Tusk was staggered at the transformation. Rollo’s patriarchal aura had vanished as if it had never existed. He wore the shirt and suit pants Tusk recollected from last night, the shirt spilling out over a paunch no longer held in. His bare feet rested on the suit jacket strewn on the floor. The bald head was greasy and the tan of his face had turned gray. Puffy, dull eyes stared out the window toward the dark blue horizon.
Tusk’s boots clomped across the wooden floorboards. Three wine bottles on the coffee table, two of them empty. Red stains on the wall by the fireplace, a shattered glass on the floor.
Gentle slapped his bundle of papers on the coffee table.
“You asked for proof, Rollo.” Gentle’s words tumbled out shrilly. “There’s a special program for overriding the computer’s decisions, isn’t there?” That nasty nerd’s smirk Tusk had hated in school, but now relished seeing. “It even contains a database of manual decisions made. I printed out the entry screens and some of the database. Fraud, Rollo, fraud.”
“She left me.” Rollo let out a long sigh. “God help me.”
Tusk could feel no pity at all. Indeed, an inner voice crowed.
“Fraud,” Gentle said.
“Why?” Rollo intoned, shaking his head slowly, as if it was weighed down. “And Willy…”
Rollo looked up at Gentle. The bastard actually wants an answer, Tusk thought. Out of the magnate’s world of networks and contacts, why seek the answer to the question of his life from a private detective? What’s the chemistry here?
Tusk remembered Bella, hard and sly, back at the Keppel apartment. And Willy, the victor in the possession game, lurking, hidden. He decided to pressure the murderer.
“Why?” he said. “Because she’s a rotten bitch who’s sucked your money and life from you.”
“Bugger you.” Rollo heaved out of his seat. He swayed as he glared at Tusk, but his eyes were alive once more. Tusk smelled vomit.
“What the hell do you know?” Rollo turned once more to Gentle. “When I saw Bella for the first time, I could have died and been happy. God, she was beautiful.” His face softened, jowls forming on his chin. “Still is. So beautiful every man wants her. And me the lucky one. You know, I thought she’d stay forever. Gave her everything. Even her freedom, as long as she came back.”
“Is that why you killed Kantor?” Tusk asked.
Rollo refused to look at him. “I’ve made some mistakes but my conscience is clear.”
“And Dancer? What about Brindle?”
The tycoon stared at Gentle, waiting for something.
“What I don’t understand,” Gentle said, “is why you need to make investment decisions manually. Why stuff around with Kantor’s formula?”
That seemed to be the key. “Because it doesn’t work.” Rollo spoke matter-of-factly. “Kantor came to me a year after the launch, when it was already a big success, and told me Benedict had spotted crazy decisions. Under certain conditions, not often but often enough, the formula just fails. Produces gibberish. Kantor told me he had concerns even before the launch. What a time to tell me.”
Confession time, Tusk thought as he pulled out his notebook, the moment all detectives dream about.
“Stan Friedman had major concerns,” Gentle said.
Rollo took a deep breath. “I was bereft. Peter, can you imagine? My whole life in tatters. God, even now I can picture Kantor’s hangdog face. And then I had a bright idea. That’s how it was—me with the ideas. If Kantor had run the company, we’d be an economic think tank with two employees. My idea? Let the formula run and watch daily for aberrant decisions. I formed a committee. Occasionally, just occasionally, we had to make manual choices. That’s why Weiqing set up the research department, we needed to have information for sound decisions.”
Gentle began tapping a foot, visibly stilled himself. “How often?”
Tusk heard something and wheeled. A creak? He strained his ears. Seagulls and in the distance, maybe the sound of the sea. He relaxed.
“Five times a year on average,” Rollo said. “But once we were forced to act twice in one week. Don’t look so shocked, Peter. Our investors have done well. How could anyone complain, with the returns we’ve given them?”
The chief executive walked to a compact stereo unit in the corner. A familiar saxophone sound filled the room.
“I never hated Willy,” Rollo said. “It was the other way around. Look, I even collected his records.”
Tusk wondered if the song was the one Willy had spoken of, “Devil’s Brethren.”
“When did Sergio Scaffidi begin to blackmail you?” Gentle asked. Tusk stared at his partner in amazement.
“Ha!” A sardonic grimace from Rollo. “I knew you were trouble the first time I laid eyes on you, Peter. Brains, that’s what makes the difference in this world.” A glance of contempt at Tusk. “That’s how I got here, could always outthink anyone.”
Rollo took a swig from the third wine bottle, suddenly pivoted and hurled it onto the model ship. Glass and plastic and wine showered the floor. Gentle cried out, but Rollo wasn’t done y
et. He ran past Gentle’s open mouth and kicked the portrait photo with a bare foot. A jagged crack skewered his face in the photo; Bella’s cool smile stayed intact.
“I don’t need to tell you anything.” Rollo panted. “What you’ve got is enough to cause me embarrassment. But God, think what I’ve survived already.”
“But Bella’s gone,” Gentle said.
A stroke of genius, Tusk thought.
Rollo glowered at Gentle, snorted with self-contempt. “Quite right. What’s the point? Yes, I knew Scaffidi years before I met Bella. He fascinated me, that ugly face, but a brain to match mine. In those days I thought he was just a minor wheeler-dealer. He liked me. I had a gambling problem and he persuaded me to quit. Just by using logic. Extraordinary mind really.”
Tusk tried to imagine a younger Rollo Keppel and a younger Sergio Scaffidi, talking on an equal footing, all those years ago.
Rollo paced the floor. “When the problem with the formula came up, I had to put some more capital in, to cover the losses. You probably guessed why Marcia had to become involved, as auditor she’d have spotted something the minute I did that.” His voice was harsh through bloodless lips. “Scaffidi found out, somehow, a couple of years later. He offered me what he called protection, but it was just blackmail. I was disgusted. He was my brother-in-law, for God’s sake. But he just laughed. I paid up. And then he put the screws on Kantor as well.”
Tusk scribbled in his notebook. He longed to ask about Bertoli, but elected to keep quiet, with Gentle doing such a fine job.
“Why not go to the police?” Gentle asked.
Tusk watched them, two brilliant men communing. Deep satisfaction took hold of him. He imagined Vinci congratulating him, Dana’s face when he brought home the check. The newspapers: Gentle & Tusk. His head rang with the fiery end of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” drowning out the jazz crap.
“And lose it all?” Rollo sucked in his gut. “Peter, you don’t know what it’s like to fight as hard as I have all my life. Just throw it all away? No chance.”
The tycoon’s face had hardened. “You know, if you hadn’t stirred Dancer up…”
Rollo seemed to have yet again transformed himself, back to being the executive in charge. He walked up to Gentle, his long nose inches from Gentle’s chin.
To Tusk’s astonishment Gentle’s eyes blazed and he jabbed a finger into Rollo’s chest. “And Kantor? Eh, Rollo?”
Rollo snarled. “What do you know, Peter? What the hell could you know? Of course Kantor didn’t like any of it. It was always like that, since we were kids. He’d take the moral high ground and it was me who’d make things happen.” The blue eyes glowed. “He’d been hard to handle for months. The day before, he was highly agitated. Gave me the strangest look, like we were boys again, told me his conscience was acting up. I persuaded him, like always.”
“Is that when you decided to kill him?” Gentle shouted.
A crack resounded through the room. A shot!
“Down! Down!” Tusk shouted.
He drew his gun, returned fire toward the door. Cursed himself for getting distracted. Switched into the combat zone—mind icy cool, body liquid. Dived behind a chair and fired again, ears ringing.
No more shots. Tusk peered around the edge of the chair. Nothing. The sound of footsteps out on the veranda. He ran thundering in a zigzag hunch, crouched behind the door.
“Stay down!” he ordered.
He looked back. Gentle was flat on his stomach, eyes staring in bewilderment. Rollo was crouched down by the window. Both fully exposed. Christ, another disaster, Tusk thought.
Gun extended, he stood beside the doorway. Spun out, gun sweeping, finger calm on the trigger. Nothing. The back door stood open. Raced out and rolled out onto the veranda. No footsteps on the front gravel, so the shooter had to be on grass. Peered out, saw nothing, sprinted down the steps and threw down a lawn table in front of him. Heard his breath heaving. Sunshine on his cheek.
Crackling far below. Shit—the gunman must have vaulted the fence and made his way down the slope. Tusk raced to the edge and peered down. Nothing disturbed the steep incline of brush and stunted trees. Wind whipped the sweat on his face.
Fuck! Someone had shot at them and escaped, right under his nose. Bertoli!
He sprinted back into the house. Rollo lay on his back. A pool of blood glistened in the dazzling light. Gentle sat nearby, against the window, eyes blinking through hanging hair.
CHAPTER 42
Peter Gentle quivered on the floor. He couldn’t remember diving down when the shot sounded, all he knew was that the terror was back. The floorboards smelled of varnish. He pressed down, willing the ground to swallow him up.
“Stay down!” Mick shouted.
Chin on the warm wood, Peter saw Mick spring behind the door, holding a gun. Mick looked back for an instant. The eyes that met Peter’s were blue frost. Then the big man was gone.
Peter shut his eyes and regretted every decision he’d taken since Bishop rang. His entire body was clenched in a tremble. Please, no bloody more, he thought.
A gurgling moan brought his eyes open. Rollo sat against a window, legs spread, head jammed down on his chest. Peter heard footsteps far away. Otherwise all was quiet except for plaintive gull cries, his own hissing breath, and that continuous call of pain. He wriggled over.
“Rollo.”
The moan filled his ears like a dirge as he approached.
“Are you okay?”
Rollo’s head rose from his chest. A dull eye lifted to Peter’s and then closed. The moaning ceased. Something sticky touched the fingers of Peter’s right hand. He recoiled, lifting his hand up to see blood dripping, dripping off a finger.
“No,” he said, declaring it a logical impossibility.
Blood seeped from under Rollo’s body, and now Peter could see where it came from, a gaping hole in Rollo’s shirt. He leaned closer and saw the entrance wound, ragged and pulsing. He felt ill and afraid and somehow in awe.
It can’t be. That was the thought that came to him, the thought he recalled later with the clarity of a midnight dream. It can’t be. So many deaths.
He tugged the man’s leaden body away from the window and rested the bald head on the floor. Horrific red covered his hands. He slumped against the window, heat on his back. Stickiness invaded his left leg.
Rollo’s face was slack and elastic, as if all the lifeforce that made it shine with such authority had deserted it. An image came to Peter, the one of Rollo preaching his message to the crowd. Rollo moaned again, a deep, burbling sound that brought hairs up on Peter’s neck.
Peter was no doctor, but he sensed death. In his travails with Mick over the last week, he’d encountered many unfamiliar, grim sights. But on the 10th of May, he watched himself watching a man die. And it seemed to him unlike anything he ever expected, this body fading in wretched finality, just an oozing husk in the hush of the sun-soaked room.
He heard footsteps and registered Mick’s chunky frame.
“Christ,” Mick said. “My fault.”
Fault didn’t strike Peter as the issue.
“I’ll check the house.” Mick disappeared.
“Tell.”
Peter twitched in fright at the ghostly voice, at Rollo’s eyes staring at him, blue and burning.
“Take it easy,” Peter said. Hope sparked and he sat up straight. “We’re getting an ambulance.”
“Tell.” Rollo’s voice was a hushed breath, so quiet it seemed to issue from his body rather than his mouth. “Bella… love…”
Peter felt helpless tears well up.
“Yes,” he said.
Rollo’s eyes stayed open but their light vanished as if a switch had been thrown. Peter smelled the stench of blood and shit, and heard himself keen quietly, and knew he could never be the same again.
***
Mick returned and pulled him to his feet. His partner had retreated into the efficient mode Peter had observed after the Marcantonio ep
isode, and Peter dully took in his clipped instructions. Then sirens announced the police, dozens of them. He heard Inspector Vinci shout at Mick but little else seemed to penetrate.
The burly policeman with the pig’s eyes took him aside to question him. As Peter recounted the day’s events, sitting on a chair in the kitchen, a sense of reality returned. The assassinated man could easily have been him, he thought.
Vinci raced past, issuing instructions.
“He confessed then?” Mixton said.
“I’ve told you what he said.” Peter sighed exaggeratedly. “I think I got the sequence right. You can check with Mick’s notes.”
“I want to hear it from you, arsehole.”
Peter looked at the reddish face across the kitchen table. “What makes you think you can talk to me like that?”
His body ached with a deep chill, but his mind was definitely in control. Mick’s right, he thought, it’s a matter of practice. The second time you’re questioned by the police, it’s so much easier. He felt an obscure pride and smiled.
Mixton glared. “What are you smirking at?”
“Look, I’ve told you everything, absolutely everything I know. Can I go home now?”
No, not home, Peter thought. I need a huge plate of pasta and Hector’s easygoing patter. And wine—lots of it.
“You can go when I let you,” Mixton said. “Now tell me. Rollo Keppel killed his brother and Dancer and Brindle. Right? He told you that, didn’t he?”
“Do you have ears?”
Mixton gave him a look of blatant hatred and thumped off. It came to Peter that he’d done it—he’d broken this case.
