Clothing manufacturers use sweatshop labour. Multinationals pollute, corrupt local officials, put democracy in their back pockets. Governments lie to us, then lie again. All these things have happened on my watch. Call myself a tort lawyer? A decent ambulance chaser? An upholder of justice? I should have been disbarred years ago. And with a lot of company.
I kept sitting at the communal table after seeing Laurie Egan, thinking all these things. And thinking about South Pacific. Would it really kill people? If an insurer was run by the people I have let lie, steal, exploit and corrupt, would it kill plaintiffs for profit? I have done almost nothing I should have, but my brain hasn’t been liposuctioned yet. Of course it would. Laurie Egan is a pathetic little man, but he hasn’t killed anyone. Unlike some others.
Eighteen
‘Your car here?’ I asked Gabby when I walked into her office later that night.
‘What now?’
‘Can you spare an hour?’ She sighed, but smiled. ‘I want you to help me interview someone,’ I said. ‘A former South Pacific claims officer. Two dead plaintiffs. The boating accident?’
‘You’re meeting him now?’
‘He lives at Lindfield. We’ll be there before nine thirty if we leave straight away. I only need half an hour with him.’
‘He’s expecting you?’
‘I thought it might be best if I just showed up. I was thinking of saying I need his help on a few matters I’ve inherited that used to be his. Say I live in the area and thought I’d drop by.’
‘Drop by?’
‘I don’t want to risk ringing him. And he might be more comfortable if I turn up with a woman.’ Perhaps not a socialist–feminist–lesbian, but . . .
‘What on earth makes you think that?’
What made me think that? ‘I’d be more comfortable, then,’ I said, holding up my hands. ‘Especially if he’s one of them.’
‘Them?’
‘Well, it’s possible he was in on it. If there’s an “it” to be in on. Which won’t make me or my questions go down too well.’
‘So what am I? Your muscle?’
I nodded. ‘Bankruptcy is brutal,’ I said. ‘I lost my butler and both my bodyguards. Can we go?’
I made Gabby drive over the Harbour Bridge rather than take the tunnel. More view for your toll money. The tunnel made me claustrophobic too, and I was already on edge, and not just because I was about to crash in on Gary Parson’s night. I’m always fearful heading to the other side. The west, south and east of Sydney are politically diverse. The north is leafy, green, and rabid Tory Heartland. Venturing north into the part of town dedicated to right-wing voters since the convict days is like being exposed to a deadly virus. I broke out in a sweat as soon as we passed the north pylon of the Bridge. A few kilometres further, even before Crows Nest, I was having chest pains. By Willoughby I had self-diagnosed supraventricular tachycardia. Shit, I thought, I’m turning as right wing as Tony Blair. When we drove off the freeway and into Lindfield, I checked my face in the mirror under the sun-visor. Boils had broken out all over my skin, and from my complexion I guessed I had three, maybe four red corpuscles left.
Just as I was about to flatline, Gabby pulled the car over. ‘This is it,’ she said. ‘Number 24.’
I nodded, checked my wrist for a pulse, found none, but still managed to get out of the car.
‘You know what you’re going to ask him about yet?’ she said as we approached Parsons’ front door.
‘The truth,’ I said.
‘Which is?’
‘How the hell would I know that?’ I said. Lawyers never do. Only judges.
The truth didn’t involve telling Gary Parsons, when he appeared at the door, that I was on an amateur murder investigation. Half-truths, however, are always entirely appropriate if your motives are sound. Ask any good plaintiff’s lawyer.
I told him I was from South Pacific and showed him my security pass and driver’s licence. The licence was overkill, but broke the ice. The word ‘Cancelled’ grabbed his attention. He held it up and raised his thick grey eyebrows, like a headmaster who’d caught me out.
‘Drink-driving,’ I explained. ‘Last year. Random breath test on Anzac Parade. I had a few financial troubles.’
‘Coming home from a pub?’
‘Going to the pub, actually.’ He looked at me again. ‘They were fairly big financial troubles,’ I said.
He handed back my pass and licence and shook his head. ‘Same thing happened to me last year,’ he said. ‘Although I was at least coming home from the pub.’
I looked at his eyes. Bloodshot blue, but less suspicious now. A bond of sorts had been forged between two pissheads who had lost the drink-drive lottery. ‘We were just wondering if we could have a few moments of your time,’ I said. I explained that I hadn’t been at South Pacific long, and that I wanted to ask him a few questions about some of his files that I had inherited. ‘They haven’t sent me,’ I said. ‘I just need some help.’
I could see Parsons needed to think about it, and he rubbed at the deep red dents in his nose that his glasses had made through the day. He was older than I expected, about sixty, although I couldn’t tell you why I had expected a younger man. ‘It’s nearly nine thirty. My wife’s already in bed,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you call? What file?’ he then asked.
‘Dobson,’ I said quickly. What the hell, I thought, he looks trustworthy enough. Us drunks have great insight into each other.
‘What about it?’
I looked at Gabby. I hadn’t explained her presence, hoping he’d assume that she was South Pacific too. I didn’t feel the need to complicate things further by bringing the RSLC into it. She gave me a very clear, well, go on look, so I got straight to it. ‘I’ve had a similar experience with a claim I was handling,’ I said. ‘I was hoping to ask you about company protocols. Confidentially, of course.’
Parsons gave me a perplexed look, like I sounded as though I was still well over the limit from my DUI on Anzac Parade, but he didn’t ask what I meant. That was a relief, because I had no idea myself. He paused for a moment, and stroked his nose again. He didn’t look like he was going to pull out a gun. ‘Come in,’ he finally said.
Stepping into Parsons’ lounge room was like stepping back to 1983. The pastel pink flowers of the couch picked up the salmon in the curtains, which ran seamlessly into the rose, grey and neutral flecked carpet. The reddish-brown teak coffee table carried a few battle scars from TV dinners and hot mugs. He asked us if we wanted a drink. I said sure. ‘Hot or cold?’ he asked. ‘I’m having one of these.’ He held up a tumbler with a splash of scotch in it. Tempting I thought, but not on duty.
‘Coffee is fine,’ we both said.
Parsons came back from his kitchen with two coffees. He then replenished the tumbler with scotch. Holy cow, I thought after he had poured himself a slug that would have had me and half of AA fighting for turns on the chandelier. He took his medicine in one hit, then sucked back on his teeth in relief. The broken capillaries in his nose throbbed with anticipation.
He asked me how long I had been at SP. I gave him the edited-highlights version of my sorry recent past. As I did I nearly reached for the scotch more than once. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, relaxing back into a pink-hued cushion, ‘I knew the name was familiar.’
I’d had at least forty-five minutes of fame, I swear.
‘I was forty years exactly in the business,’ he said, ‘if you count twelve months when I was looking for work.’ He told us he had worked for the one company for thirty-four years, starting when he was seventeen. ‘I was Head of Claims at that stage,’ he said. ‘Then they merged with that other mob, and I was retrenched within a week. Their people took over.’ He still sounded bitter. Bitter and drunk.
‘Did you get a fair package?’ Gabby couldn’t help herself.
‘I was fifty-two,’ he said, not listening. ‘We hadn’t finished paying this place off. I applied for seventeen jobs in the first nine months. I thought I
’d get used to rejection, but you don’t. Fortunately, after about a year, when I’d almost given up, South Pacific got started.’
‘You were there from the beginning?’
‘Day one. I helped write the claims-handling manual and run the tenders for the lawyers.’
‘And you left . . . ?’ I wasn’t sure whether he had retired or departed under some sort of cloud. Like, because he figured out they were killing people.
‘Just on twelve months ago. When I turned fifty-eight.’
‘You retired?’
He paused. ‘More or less,’ he said, smiling vaguely before downing more scotch. ‘When I was retrenched,’ he continued, ‘all I needed was a few more years to pay this place off and top up my super. South Pacific gave that to me. Five years there set me up for retirement. And forty years is long enough, don’t you think?’
I thought it was. ‘Was the Dobson case finalised when you left?’
Parsons shook his head. ‘I left during the Coronial,’ he said. ‘I heard De Luca settled with the executors of the estates not long after.’
‘There was a Coronial Inquiry?’
He nodded. ‘There always is in a matter like that.’
‘What was the . . . ?’
‘Boating accident,’ he said quickly. ‘Freak wave, probably. The boat had a lot of water in it, but was still upright. They drowned.’ He poured another scotch that a jockey could have taken a bath in.
‘Were the bodies recovered?’
‘Yes.’
‘Anything suspicious?’ I asked.
‘They drowned,’ he said. ‘Does that surprise you?’ He looked up at me over his scotch glass, lids drooping down on bloodshot baby blues.
‘Did they have any wounds, find any contusions?’ Gabby asked. Parsons laughed, the laugh of a drunk, and I put on the best pained expression I could. Without words, I tried to convey to her that the Dobsons were unlikely to have been found with ‘Killed by South Pacific’ stamped on their foreheads.
‘Not that I read,’ he said. ‘They may have been injured in the accident. What do you say happened?’
‘Well, Chris . . . Chris is worried about this matter . . . and others . . . having certain similarities. Like the similarity, which is at least troubling me, despite the stupid face Chris is pulling, of all the plaintiffs dying, not to put too fine a point on it.’
‘What other matter?’
‘A claim from Melbourne,’ I said. ‘A negligent investment involving –’
‘Oh,’ he said, nodding.
‘You know that one?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said, putting his empty glass back on the table. ‘I thought you were talking about another file of mine.’
‘Another? Where the plaintiff died?’
‘Yes,’ he said, leaning back and taking off his glasses.
Apart from the Dobsons, Parsons had handled a file involving a claim by a Vietnamese man called Pho Nguyen who had lost his arm in an accident at an amusement park. ‘The Cha-Cha,’ he explained. ‘The hinges gave way at the height of the ride. The carriage smashed into a tin roof. Someone was killed, and he lost an arm.’
Ngyuen was a chef in a Vietnamese restaurant. According to an outline for damages, he was planning to open his own restaurant and was going to make squillions. ‘His eco loss claim was top of the range. A one-armed chef’s like a one-legged Tarzan,’ he said. ‘You can’t exactly chop much bok choy.’ Pho Nguyen’s other hand was badly cut in the accident. Expensive domestic and personal care was going to be necessary.
‘What happened to this guy?’
‘Shot.’
‘Shot?’
‘A drive-by in Cabramatta. Naturally, he didn’t shoot back,’ he said drolly.
‘Did the police investigate?’
‘Of course.’
‘Was someone caught?’
‘No.’
‘So . . . it . . .’
‘Was another drive-by shooting in Cabramatta. It’s a dangerous suburb.’
‘What about the link with your other case?’
‘What link? That they died?’
‘Did the police look into that? Then there’s the other two cases,’ Gabby said.
‘I don’t know if they knew. Nguyen hadn’t even filed a Statement of Claim. We’d just received a letter from his lawyer putting us on notice and providing us with some damages details. I doubt if South Pacific ever came up. Why would it? It’s a drive-by shooting and a boating accident.’
‘Where the common denominator is that the people who are dead all had big claims against South Pacific,’ Gabby said, starting to get excited. ‘Then you’ve got Chris’s matter, and this Melbourne one. All in a relatively short period of time. I mean, what do you think?’
Personally I was convinced. Arrest the bastards, from Hardcastle down.
Parsons rubbed his nose again, and then got up from the lounge. He picked up the empty scotch bottle and looked at it sadly. ‘What do I think?’ he asked. ‘I think that, fortunately, I’m retired.’
We were both silent in the car for thirty seconds or so as we sat outside Gary Parsons’ house. It started to rain. It was after ten, and we were in a foreign land.
‘What are we going to do?’ Gabby asked.
‘Do?’
‘Are you going to tell the police?’
‘Tell them what exactly?’
‘That all of these matters have one suspicious thing in common,’ she said.
‘What do you think they’ll do? Raid South Pacific and look for the documents that contain the instructions about which plaintiffs to kill?’
‘Chris, I thought this was all a bit crazy when you started talking to me about it, and maybe it is, but now I really do think we should at least –’
‘We can’t just roll up to a police station saying a Cabramatta drive-by shooting, a boating accident, a hit and run, and a suicide in another state are the obvious work of the one killer. They’ll think we’re nuts. Besides, in this city, how do you know some cops aren’t in on it as well?’ Or the politicians. I decided not to run my Personal-Responsibility-Tort-Reform-Gate scandal theory by her for the time being. She seemed worked up enough.
‘Do you think he knows more than he told us?’ Gabby asked.
‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘He might suspect more. The one claims manager losing three plaintiffs like that is careless. Maybe they knew he suspected and bought him off. Although you’d think he’d update the lounge room if they did.’
‘Be serious.’
‘I am. I’m starting to think I should be seriously worried about myself. And some of the people in my bordereau.’
‘You don’t think he’ll call them? Tell them you were here asking questions?’
I shrugged. Paying a visit to Gary Parsons was always going to involve some risk. ‘If he does, then either they’ll think I’m obsessively diligent,’ I said, ‘or I need to be very careful leaving train stations.’
She sat silently, glaring at me now. ‘Then what do you propose?’
‘I propose we go to Penrith tomorrow and see what we find.’
‘And?’
‘And we go home now. It’s late. We have an early start. And I’m not feeling well.’
When we had nearly reached North Sydney my mobile rang. Harry. ‘Been trying to get you at home,’ he said. ‘You’re out, obviously.’
‘Just a drink after the centre.’
‘The lesbian?’ I didn’t respond. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Has Ed called you? About Laura?’
‘What about her?’
‘She’s back in town,’ he said. ‘In the old house. Heather’s back too.’
‘Heather?’ My first love. Maybe one hundred and twenty minutes of dialogue. Spread over ten years. Pinter, though. Profound silences.
‘She’s looking after Laura. Ed went to see them last week. They’ve asked us over to the house on Sunday. Eleven-ish. Bill’s going to be there too. The garden needs a bit of cleaning up and we’ve decided to
all pitch in.’
‘How is Laura? Any news?’
‘Not great,’ he said.
I told him I’d be there and hung up.
‘Who’s Heather?’ Gabby asked as we approached the Bridge and the lights of the city towers again.
‘Old girlfriend,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘No reason,’ she said. ‘Just the way you said her name. Like you were really pleased.’
‘Jealous?’ I said. She didn’t respond. Not a flicker.
‘Who’s Laura?’ she asked.
‘An artist.’
‘What kind?’
‘Painter. She lived in a big place opposite Centennial Park when we were children. She painted in her garden.’
‘And she’s not well?’
‘No. You like art?’ I said, changing the subject.
Gabby shot a glance at me as she headed into the Eastern Distributor. She smiled tightly. ‘That would have to be the most general question I’ve ever been asked,’ she said, ‘but, yeah, I like art. And films. Books. Ice cream. Sunsets, too.’ She left out women, I noticed.
‘Sorry. Long day,’ I said. ‘I was in love with her daughter – Heather,’ I added.
‘When was this?’
‘We first met when I was five. I haven’t seen her for quite a few years.’
‘You went out with her until then?’
‘Hell, no,’ I laughed. ‘We went out for about three weeks.’
‘Three weeks?’
‘On an official basis. We hovered around each other for ten years, though,’ I said. ‘We must have had at least a dozen heavy conversations in that time.’
‘This was love? You could tell from those twelve conversations?’
‘You can tell from one,’ I said. ‘Can’t you?’
She smiled and shrugged. ‘Sometimes. Was it the first conversation with Heather?’
‘Yep. The first adolescent one, anyway.’
‘Do you remember?’
‘Like yesterday.’
‘What was it about?’
‘Her lipstick.’
The Ambulance Chaser Page 16
