The Ambulance Chaser

by Richard Beasley

  A waiter walked by with a full tray. Ed nearly tackled him just as he looked like getting away. He gulped a champagne thirstily.

  ‘A little tense?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘A slight hiccup just before the speeches.’ We waited for him to elaborate. ‘I went out the back to get a pen from the office, to write out who to thank. I suddenly thought that I’d forget someone,’ he said. ‘I found – well, I walked in on Helena’s husband.’ He paused and sipped. ‘He was with her assistant, Liz. Kissing. Really kissing.’

  ‘Full tongue penetration? He nodded. ‘Salivary noises?’ He nodded again. ‘That even you could hear?’

  ‘Loud and clear.’

  ‘Was the room lit up with sexual energy?’

  Ed paused. ‘It was fucking blazing,’ he said.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘This sort of thing is becoming an epidemic. Were you seen?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘And of course you apologised and then fled the scene like a bumbling idiot.’

  ‘Like a jack rabbit,’ he said, ‘and I hopped right smack bang into Helena, who was heading back there.’

  ‘Who is her husband?’ I asked.

  Ed pointed to a man in a suit on the other side of the gallery. Looking as bright and chirpy as a celebrity chef who’s just picked up a third Michelin star. ‘That’s him there, the mug. The Merchant Wanker.’

  ‘Oh, that Abbott,’ I said.

  ‘I thought I heard a rumour he was gay,’ Harry said.

  ‘He probably is,’ I replied. ‘I take it you stopped Helena from . . .’

  He nodded. ‘Christ knows what I said to her.’ He paused, then said, ‘I really like Helena. She’s been fantastic to me. Promoting my work, constantly doing everything she can for me with her contacts in New York and London, getting me that flat in Paris for three months, lent me money when I’ve needed it. More than once. That prick . . .’

  ‘Is Helena in the know?’

  ‘Possibly. She was all “what are you doing back here, darling” when he came out of the office.’

  ‘Still,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t really beat my New Year’s Eve story, does it?’

  ‘We can joke about that now, can we?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure that I’m at the stage where I can laugh about it,’ I said, ‘but I’m closing in on wry amusement.’ I lied. I wasn’t anywhere near amusement, wry or unwry.

  Edward scratched his head. ‘Does anyone fuck anyone in private anymore? With their spouse?’ We shrugged and left the question hanging on the wall like one of his paintings.

  I surveyed Helena’s husband, an Oil on Smarm, schmoozing his bank’s clientele having already more than schmoozed the gallery’s deputy. Then my eyes caught it. Briefly at first. Then back to the laughing wanker. Then above him again. ‘I’ll just be a minute,’ I said as I headed off for the far side of the gallery.

  I walked past the group of men in suits. Right up to it, close enough to touch it, to see the texture of the paint. The frozen waves of colour, the hard, almost ceramic gleam. Then I stepped backwards to take it all in. I had seen it before, many years ago. A man and a woman are standing together. A husband and wife. Mr and Mrs Green. Mr Green is wearing nothing but blue bathers. He looks slightly bemused as he juggles more green roast chickens than most men can. Mrs Green is wearing only an orange bikini, and a number. Number 2. In the right-hand corner of the painting the bust of a wise man is whispering to her. ‘Number 2,’ he says faintly. Mrs Green stands on a yellow brick road. The Alto road. She is scared, but she must take it.

  It was a work by Laura Green, painted more than twenty years earlier. We had all seen her paint it. In her backyard, a scarf on her head, a floral one, I think. Long strokes of colour, careful quick dabs of her brush. Mrs Green in her backyard sitting on her stool, on her brilliant green lawn. She smiled at us. Would you boys like lemonade? We would silently watch her paint, just for a while. Then off we would go, leaving Mrs Green to her painting, sometimes while Bill Doyle pottered about in her garden, or cleaned out a gutter.

  The three of us had dinner later that night, and I thought again about Laura Green as we ate. How many years since I had seen her? Five?

  ‘Ed,’ I said while scooping some mash from a bowl, ‘what’s Laura up to now?’

  ‘I saw you looking at that painting.’

  ‘What painting?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Green.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘That’s the painting,’ I said. ‘One that she painted.’

  ‘You can remember a particular painting?’

  ‘You can’t?’ Harry shrugged and sipped his wine.

  ‘Why’s it on sale now?’

  ‘She’s only just released it,’ Edward said. ‘She’s selling a whole raft of paintings that she’s kept for years.’

  ‘The ones he didn’t destroy,’ I said. They both nodded. ‘Where does she live now? Still Byron?’

  ‘She’s coming home soon. To the old place.’

  ‘Lang Road?’

  ‘She’s not well,’ Edward said. ‘She’s dying.’

  ‘Dying?’

  ‘Cancer.’

  ‘Have you . . .’

  ‘I saw her a few months ago at the gallery. She and Helena are close. She looked . . . frail.’

  ‘Did you speak to her? Say hello?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ Edward said. ‘She was pleased I was doing well. She bought me my first paint set, remember?’

  I nodded and smiled. ‘Hard to forget.’ The paint set had been christened on the windscreen of Bob Green’s car. Unambiguous expressions of our dim view of his moral character were recorded in all the colours of the rainbow.

  Edward smiled too. ‘She asked about you two. She’d . . . she’d read about you in the paper, Chris. Said she was very sorry, hoped you were all right. I didn’t really want to raise it with you at the time. She sent me a note a few weeks ago saying she’d love us to visit her when she’s back.’

  I looked down at my wineglass, silent for a moment. I thought about Laura Green and her paintings, and about playing in her garden so long ago.

  ‘Mr Green’s still going from strength to strength,’ Harry said. ‘His face is plastered everywhere now.’

  Robert J Green was the founder and co-owner of Robert J Green and Partners, one of the city’s most successful real-estate firms. He was one of the first agents who had stopped selling houses in the late seventies and had started selling a lifestyle instead. After his separation and divorce from his artist wife, Bob Green’s company had expanded with the same sort of alarming growth that property prices had since the eighties. This growth had been built, as Sam the Spinner could tell anyone, on the back of Robert J Green’s unwavering integrity and personable charm. In the end, Robert J Green had stopped flogging houses decades back, and specialised now in no more or less than helping people achieve their dreams.

  In short, while in the years since her marriage ended Laura Green had continued to be an artist, her ex-husband had perfected himself as an artist too. A bullshit artist. And if they ever hang bullshit in the Louvre or MOMA, Robert J Green would have his own wing.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said after a long moment of silence, ‘that prick’s still around. Fighting fit.’

  Eight

  It’s a long way from the art world to the insurance world. There’s only one thing they have in common. Fraud. Monday morning was my fraud morning at South Pacific, and I had two videotapes to watch.

  The first tape was the kind that makes plaintiffs’ lawyers deeply cynical. Hours and hours spent filming some poor woman in an attempt to prove that her back isn’t as bad as her complaints would lead the world to believe. The sum total of the film disclosed that the plaintiff was still ambulant, but you wouldn’t mistake her for a Romanian gymnast. The pain milled into every line of her face as she got out of her car, so graphically captured by our covert Spielberg, appeared real. Either she’d get the Oscar, or her discs were exploding o
ne at a time.

  We won’t show this in court. It’s an adversarial world we live in, God bless it, so if it doesn’t help us at South Pacific insurance, then the film doesn’t exist. We will say the plaintiff has degenerative changes in her spine, perfectly natural in a woman of her age, and she will say that she has disc damage from the spill that she took at our insured’s premises. Let the chips fall where they may. Or the discs explode.

  Covert operations aren’t always in vain. The next tape I reviewed contained film of Mr Bruer. Mr Bruer slipped and fell in a shopping arcade eighteen months ago. The substance he slipped on? Jam. How it got there? Fuck knows, but Mr Bruer found it, trod on it, came a cropper, and has been an invalid ever since. Can’t bend, can’t lift, can’t put his shoes and socks on without excruciating pain radiating up from his big toenail, through his fibula, then the femur, into his coccyx, up his spine, through every cervical dermatome on the evolutionary map of the vertebrates, around his neck, and ending somewhere around his left eyebrow. An interesting scenario on anatomical grounds. Judy Garland and Joe Cocker got through concert tours on less medication than Mr Bruer now needs for a pain-free fart.

  I popped his tape into the video. It is a grey day on the Central Coast. Rain threatens. It must be winter, for the trees have no leaves. We see shades of charcoal, and ashen sky. It could be a Bergman film, it’s so bleak. A tree comes into the centre of the frame. A tree with Mr Bruer up it.

  It is the general consensus of the legal profession, amongst lawyers for all sides, that plaintiffs who allege they are invalids, with an asserted seventy-five per cent total and permanent disability of both the lumbar and cervical spine, do not assist their claims by being filmed in trees. Not unless they have fallen out of an aircraft.

  Mr Bruer is armed. With a saw. A toothless saw, it appears, for it takes him the length of a Bergman film to get through some of the thicker branches. He’s a persistent man, though, our protagonist. It may be a struggle – against the saw, against the elements, against the solidity of wood – but he hacks those branches off in the end.

  Mr Bruer obtained an award of $600,000 at his arbitration. The rehearing of his case before a judge was listed to commence in three weeks’ time. I hope he likes home movies.

  So this is the way I now spend part of my days. Reviewing surveillance film of plaintiffs.

  That fucking bat.

  By the time Mr Bruer had paved his back patio and started building a brick barbecue, I’d had enough of watching him. He might lose his case, but we could at least offer to send his tape as an audition to Home Improvements or Backyard Blitz. I decided an early lunch was required. There was something at the back of my mind troubling me, anyway.

  Gibbs didn’t eat at the south end of town where South Pacific had its offices. He didn’t trust anything there, except maybe two restaurants in Chinatown. Chinatown was yesterday, he told me, so we had to head downtown. Before I knew it we were at King Street and turning right towards Phillip and the legal district. Scene of my Waterloo.

  ‘I really don’t want to go near there,’ I protested when I saw where we were headed.

  ‘For God’s sake, Chris, grow up. Hold your head high.’

  The café he took us to was opposite Wentworth and Selbourne Barristers’ Chambers and the Supreme Court, and it was full of lawyers. He did it deliberately, of course. He was such a hoot. I nearly didn’t go in, but it seemed childish not to. I’d faced worse in the last twelve months.

  I felt the sting of the glares upon me. When it comes to being judgmental, lawyers have the training to take the cake, the icing, the tin and the recipe too. I knew what they were thinking. He must be on weekend detention now. Maybe that’s his parole officer. Then I heard a noise, a growing, pounding din. The sound of a thousand gavels.

  ‘You really are a prick for taking us here,’ I said as we sat down.

  Gibbs’s sliver of a top lip tightened around his teeth. ‘Now, now,’ he said, ‘don’t talk like that, Chris. The sooner you acclimatise, the better.’

  Acclimatise? I was a man on Venus without a spacesuit or sunblock. The professional equivalent of the black plague had struck me down, my door had been marked, and the guards would never let me back to the Inns of Court again.

  ‘Let’s order,’ I said. I didn’t want to linger any longer than was necessary. I was afraid I might come face to face with those members of the Bar who had signed my professional death warrant. It’s not common for a dead man to meet his executioners after the event. Who knows what such a meeting might do to the space–time continuum of the universe?

  ‘Certainly,’ Gibbs said. ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘what did you want to talk to me about?’

  I came straight to it. ‘Do you know anything about a claim by people called Dobson?’ I’d found the Dobsons at the weekend. An Internet search conducted in the company of a cask of wine. ‘Drownings at Cronulla’ on Google did the trick. I didn’t have much else to do, so the Dobsons and their boat had been filling my thoughts as I emptied the cask. Simon Broun and his mangled wheelchair paid a visit. Whenever things go conveniently right for large corporations, I get suspicious. I call myself a sceptic. Some might call me a cynic. Some a bankrupt binge drinker. I don’t care. I don’t trust the bastards.

  Gibbs’s eyebrows pinched together as he thought. ‘Dobson. Should I?’

  ‘A fire and business interruption claim. About a year or so ago. It may have been handled by someone that’s left – Gary Parsons, I think was his name.’

  Gibbs puckered his lips around his water glass and sipped. God knows how any water got through. ‘It doesn’t ring a bell. Why do you ask?’

  ‘No reason in particular,’ I said. ‘They died in a boating accident, just after their claim was made.’

  ‘How unfortunate.’

  ‘Not for South Pacific. You didn’t see it on TV or in the papers?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Why are you asking me?’

  ‘Clare told me. I was telling her about the Broun file I had.’

  ‘Broun?’

  I told him about Simon Broun’s claim, and the subsequent hit and run. ‘Oh yes, I did read about that,’ Gibbs said. ‘Ghastly,’ he added dramatically.

  ‘You don’t have any similar stories, do you?’ I asked Gibbs as his pasta and my focaccia arrived. ‘Have you ever had a file like Dobson or Broun? Where the punter carked it?’

  Gibbs raised an eyebrow. ‘No, Chris. I’ve never had a file where a punter carked it, as you say. What are you suggesting?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘I’m a very sceptical person, Peter.’

  Gibbs dabbed delicately at the corner of his mouth with his napkin. ‘I hardly think two or three claimants dying is even statistically relevant, let alone suspicious – if that’s the mad direction you’re heading. We have thousands of claims. Mishaps occur, Chris.’

  ‘If they didn’t, people wouldn’t need insurance, would they?’

  He scowled, then found a way in again with a forkful of pasta. He was the only man I knew who looked like he might need a rib spreader to feed himself. I could barely watch.

  We sat in silence for a short while, then Gibbs leaned back in his chair and seemed to be deep in thought. ‘You know,’ he finally said, ‘given you are obviously a conspiracy theorist, I’ll mention this just to taunt you. A peripheral involvement I had last year with a claim handled by our Melbourne office.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A pro neg claim. Some utterly catastrophic balls-up by an investment adviser. A claims manager from Melbourne rang me to ask who they might get to do an expert report. He’d been given my name because I’ve handled similar stockbroker-type matters here.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And, conveniently for us, and our moronic insured, the plaintiff died.’

  ‘How?’ I asked.

  Gibbs shook his head. ‘Calm down, little boy. A tragic suicide, nothing suspicious.’

  ‘Why isn
’t suicide suspicious?’

  ‘Because,’ Gibbs said, leaning forward, ‘the plaintiffs – husband and wife – had lost most of his superannuation, and the wife was gravely ill. Cancer, I believe.’

  ‘Cancer?’

  ‘Yes, cancer,’ Gibbs said. ‘Nothing to do with us, obviously. Or do you think South Pacific gives people diseases and puts tubes in exhausts?’

  ‘He gassed himself in his car?’ Gibbs nodded. ‘What was this claim worth? What was the plaintiff’s name?’

  Gibbs chuckled. ‘I don’t know all that. It was a Melbourne file. It was a negligence claim against a financial adviser. Positioning of stocks. Or . . . no . . . I think it was unauthorised investment that went sour. Our insured’s word against Mr . . . whatever his name was. Why do you care, anyway? Going to do an audit, are you?’

  What was I going to do? What the hell was I thinking? That’s right. That I don’t trust large companies. ‘Who was the claims handler in Melbourne?’

  Gibbs paused before answering and looked me straight in the eyes. ‘Chris, I’m not going to have you harassing someone in the Melbourne office and saying I gave you their name.’

  ‘What do you know about Greg Stewart?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The claims officer that –’

  ‘Why are you asking?’

  ‘No reason. Did you know him well?’

  ‘I knew . . . what’s this got to do with the Melbourne file?’

  ‘Nothing. I just –’

  ‘Chris,’ Gibbs said, ‘are you on any form of medication?’

  ‘That’s between me and my team of psychiatrists.’

  ‘Please keep taking it,’ he said.

  ‘I have a very curious nature, Peter,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know what curiosity did to the cat, don’t you?’

  Cats. Bats. They were a ceaseless cycle in my life. ‘I’ve already been killed, Peter,’ I said. ‘By some of the people who regularly eat in here.’