The Ambulance Chaser

by Richard Beasley

  I thought again. It was Wednesday evening when I had rung and hung up on him. About seventy-two hours. That put the time of death somewhere between one and seventy-two hours, I was sure. I looked around the room. ‘The fire,’ I said.

  We walked over to the chimney. Mainly ash in the grate, plus the remnants of a charred log. I reached down and touched it. ‘This hasn’t burned today,’ I said. ‘No real warmth at all.’

  ‘Last night?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m not that good without my DNA kit and electron microscope. Maybe.’

  ‘What about the food?’

  I went back to the lemon chicken and rice. ‘Cold,’ I said. ‘Definitely last night’s dinner.’

  ‘Could it be . . . do you think . . . ?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said, picking up the takeaway home delivery menu that was lying on top of the cigarette table. ‘Still, I won’t be ordering from there, just in case.’

  We stood and stared at each other for a few more moments. Clarrie remained transfixed by the television. Fair enough. Along with right-wing talkback radio, the television was the device from which many hard-working Australian politicians and advisers appeared to get their research material. Old habits die hard, I guess.

  ‘I think it was last night,’ Gabby said. I nodded. She was probably right. Most of the evidence pointed that way. I picked up the Semillon and sniffed. Yep, opened twenty-four hours ago. I know the smell of a Hunter Valley Semillon that’s been open twenty-four hours. I’m the guy the CIA calls when they need that kind of help.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Gabby asked. ‘Call the cops?’

  I nearly baptised Clarrie with the Semillon. ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Am I? You’re looking at a dead body here, Chris. This has suddenly gotten very real and very serious.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and you are looking at a disbarred lawyer here, Gabby. One who has been struck off. Convicted of various breaches of directors’ duties. Nearly charged with assault occasioning grievous bodily harm. I have a drink-driving conviction. I am now employed by an insurance company. The insurance company that the deceased here has his lawyers threatening to sue if he doesn’t get a cheque for several million dollars. I was caught looking at his file the other day. We have just broken into his home. Would you like to call the cops and explain that? Would you like to explain our presence here in the corpse’s lounge room?’

  ‘Anonymously, then. Tell them everything.’

  ‘Let’s just go,’ I said. ‘We can’t help him now. They’ll find him eventually. We need to leave now.’

  I started furiously rubbing my prints off everything I had touched with the bottom of my shirt. The bottle. The plate. The door handle. I’m not entirely sure why. I’ve watched a lot of television and I was sure that at some stage the joint would be dusted.

  We stepped out into the backyard just as it started to rain. The rain became torrential within seconds. We moved quickly along the side of the house, the wind howling, the rain spearing down at us. I lost my grip on the side gate and the wind slammed it shut. It made a racket, but with the noise of the storm I didn’t think the neighbours would have heard. We ran to the car, got in, and drove off quickly, both saturated.

  About a kilometre or so from Gerton’s house, on Marine Parade on the ocean front, I told Gabby to stop. I needed to think.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stop,’ I said. ‘Pull over.’ She did. I sat there, thinking. Dripping.

  ‘What is it, Chris?’

  I looked at her, drops of rain running down the side of her face, dripping off her chin, her hair plastered over her cheek. ‘You think they . . . they killed him?’ she asked. I turned away, looked out of the windscreen, and then turned towards the ocean. It was dark now, but the rain had eased off, and I could see the waves foaming and swelling, crashing black and fiercely on the beach just below us. ‘Maybe he just had a heart attack?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe his liver exploded. He’s early seventies. I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I do know that he had an $8 million claim that depended entirely on his word against South Pacific’s insured. His estate will now settle that claim for a good bit less than that, I guarantee it.’

  We sat in silence for a while, both looking at the rain run down the windscreen. ‘What do we do now?’ Gabby finally said.

  ‘We talk to someone sensible tonight who doesn’t know anything about this. Tell them about my theory and see what their reaction is. And tell them about Clarrie.’

  She looked at me blankly. ‘You’re talking about . . . ?’

  ‘The only person you can trust when the world’s against you and murder’s in the air.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your lawyer.’

  Twenty-Four

  I told Harry it was an emergency.

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Life and death. I want to emphasise death.’

  He was having a couple of his law partners over for dinner, but he told me to come around, anyway. I told him to expect two of us, and to have some drinks ready.

  Harry lived in Annandale in the inner-west over the other side of town, so we drove in Gabby’s car and took the long, wide route of Anzac Parade into the CBD. The city was thick with Saturday night traffic, and the going was slow until we reached the soaring overpass that split the plastic world of Darling Harbour. It was quicker then as we swept along the freeway towards the giant concrete A of the Anzac Bridge and its spider-web span between Johnstons and Blackwattle bays and the yachts and motor craft that inhabit them.

  Captain Cook had a splendid eye for where to build a jail. If only certain developers, politicians and town planners were still locked in it we’d still have the most beautiful city in the world. C’est la vie, as a famous Australian once said, apparently in an Irish accent.

  We took a left down past the western end of the bridge, around the arc of Blackwattle, and soon found our way to chez Harry, in Nelson Street, Annandale.

  There were only four partners in Harry’s firm, and they had dinner at each other’s homes on a roughly quarterly basis. I had attended one of these gatherings early in the year, at the invitation of Harry’s law partner, Jane, some kind of Intellectual Property, Copyright, Internet specialist, I think. Lawyers create new specialties every day, so it’s hard to keep up. The legal profession still appears to be four or five major corporate collapses and one socialist worldwide revolution short of making business ethics one of them.

  Harry and his wife, Rachel, had also insisted that I come, trying desperately to keep me within a social circle, however limited. I succumbed, only to find that Jane had tried to set me up with one of her divorced friends. The divorcee was clearly eager during early exchanges. Our repartee at first was full of batting eyelids and flirtatious pouts, and her dialogue was scripted by Samantha from Sex and the City. The sauciness of our raunchy confabulation became somewhat curdled when I was forced to confess that I was currently a gardener, although I believe I may have used the term horticulturalist. She didn’t slide off her seat in excitement after hearing that. By dessert we were at opposite ends of the table.

  Pre-dinner drinks and canapés were well underway by the time Gabby and I arrived. I told Harry that we needed to talk to him urgently, but he insisted that we have that drink.

  Drinks were awkward. I had just found a dead body. I couldn’t think of anything else to talk about. The others had a different problem, induced by me. Anyone with the vaguest telepathic talent would have been deafened by the cacophony of well-intentioned censorship. Don’t mention money. Don’t mention Sam. Don’t mention lawyers. Don’t mention naturopathic cures. The sensitivity to any rawness I might still have left on these topics was almost touching, but the clacking sound of mental teledexes crossing off all the things they shouldn’t mention in front of me was ultimately unsettling. Usually this leads to me stepping into the void with something breathtakingly gauche. Or, to everyone’s acute embarrassment, the weather
might be raised. Last dinner party it was raised twice after my arrival. Discussed in detail. The week of many shades of humidity.

  Jane Sanders, she of IP-copyright-Internet fame, stepped into the breach by asking some questions of Gabby. What she did, where she worked, that kind of thing. Gabby’s deputy stewardship of the Randwick South Legal Centre greatly impressed Jane, who whimsically recalled that the choice between private practice ‘and the sort of thing you do’ had been a tough one for her at the start of her career. Of course. The decision between intellectual property and poverty law is a tough one for anyone. It must have torn Jane and her Collette Dinnigan dress in half. I mentally kicked myself. Stop being mean.

  Acting purely out of desperation, I think, Tom Clinton, Harry’s fellow tax partner, suddenly brought up the subject of his cats. I recoiled in horror at the mention of a cat, and my scalp started to itch, until he told us that one of them had just died. Cancer. Only after months and months of feline chemo.

  ‘There’s such a thing?’ Gabby asked.

  Tom nodded. ‘Two grand a course. Hermione went into remission, though, after the first lot, before relapse, so I ended up getting slugged for another load,’ he said.

  I knew what Gabby was thinking when I saw her horrified look. This is what the bourgeoisie in this town spend money on? Cat chemo? Keeping some poor tumour-riddled member of the Felis catus species alive for two more miserable months than nature intended?

  ‘We had to get the drugs flown out from the States,’ Tom continued as his wife, Sally, a devoted cat lover since birth, nodded sadly in the background. ‘Cost me four and a half grand with shipping and insurance. The bloody vet kept saying she was getting better.’

  Everyone shifted around awkwardly, looking at their shoes. I asked the obvious. ‘Did its hair fall out?’

  ‘She looked like Dr Evil’s cat at the end,’ Tom conceded. ‘I’d just paid for the final session of chemo when I found the thing draped over a mantelpiece as stiff as a board with one eyelash left.’

  ‘Deary me,’ Jane said.

  The news of the cat’s demise hardly cheered the air, but it improved my mood immeasurably. I wanted to take Gabby aside, tell her that Jane and Tom, Harry and the rest, these weren’t bad people. They were good people. They weren’t insider traders, they didn’t invent bank fees or foreclosures on farmers. They hadn’t salted up the Murray or spilt shit in the ocean or dioxins in the harbour. It’s just that they had more money than us. So Collette Dinnigan’s a possibility. As is a seven-figure terrace in Nelson Street, Annandale, with a view of the dog track. And if your cat is sick, and your wife is devoted to it, well, then you get the chemo and don’t spare the radiation. I mentally kicked myself again. Don’t start getting forbearing.

  I looked at Tom Clinton. Flying in experimental wonder drugs for domestic pets. Counting the falling eyelashes like green bottles. Still, he had a partner he loved enough to do these things for. By contrast, I was now reading ‘Meeting Point’ in the Telegraph. ‘Female seeks Male’ ads only, of course. I was waiting for just the right one:

  30-ish, brunette, intelligent, attractive, sense of humour like Dawn French, further left than Susan Sarandon, seeks tall, thin, depressed ex-lawyer with pathological fear of fruit bats. Must like Dusty Springfield.

  I was dreaming, of course. I mean, further left than Susan Sarandon? What are my chances?

  I finally coaxed Harry away to his upstairs study with Gabby. I gave him the edited highlights of the whole box and dice, being the whole four claims for five dead bodies, once you added Gary Parsons’ Cabramatta drive-by to the South Pacific mass grave. I decided to save up Clarrie Gerton, Greg Stewart and the Penrith discoveries for later.

  He reacted exactly the way any good corporate lawyer or accountant in this town should towards a client. With a near paranoid level of scepticism. He also had a series of questions. Were the matters even statistically significant? Who precisely would be behind such a thing? And why, exactly?

  ‘Money,’ I said. ‘What else?’

  ‘We are talking about . . . ?’

  ‘These four claims? Thirty mil,’ I said. ‘Maybe thirty-five.’

  Harry nodded his head and sipped on a whisky. You don’t get many under-sixties drinking whisky at dinner parties these days. Harry had inherited this practice from his father. His dad knew all about the stuff. Not much about wine, but port and whisky, those things he knew. Those things and country and western music, for some inexplicable reason. A few whiskies in Jock McCartney and he’d roll out the Scottish brogue and go from Glenlivet to Glenfarclas to Glen Campbell in quick succession.

  Jock had been a cop, honest and true, until one day he was involved in a shooting, and ended up becoming a counsellor. He showed us his gun once, when we were about ten. He unwrapped it in the sitting room from an oily-looking cloth. It looked small for a thing of such power, but we still observed it like it had thermonuclear capability. Jock wouldn’t let us touch it, and imbued in us a fear that the bloody thing could go off even if it wasn’t loaded. He only showed it to us that once.

  Whenever I thought of Jock McCartney and Harry when I was a child, I thought of them as the father and son from Skippy. Ranger Matt Hammond and his son Sonny. Of late, whenever I had spoken to Harry about my own emergencies, I felt a bit like that kangaroo, clicking away in my own language, hoping he would miraculously understand.

  ‘In a company of what size?’ Harry said.

  I decided just to explain my theory. There might have been other prematurely aborted claims we didn’t know about. ‘Take fifty to seventy million out of claims,’ I said, ‘add that to the bottom line, you’ve got a disappointing profit turned into a healthy one. You pay a higher dividend. You attract investors, raise your share price, raise funds to grow, stave off a takeover, or get taken over but at a premium to shareholders.’ Harry looked at me like I was a kangaroo. A profoundly retarded one. ‘I know financial analysis by me is a bit rich,’ I confessed, ‘but if there’s money in it – real money – and they can get away with it . . .’

  ‘And seven dead people with claims against the one insurer seems very suspicious to me,’ Gabby said.

  ‘But all that would have been investigated, wouldn’t it? If there was some kind of . . . foul play, then something would have shown up. Something in forensics.’ Spoken like a true ex-cop’s son. Or someone who watches CSI in a mildly dazed state after putting the kids to bed.

  ‘It’s just a theory, Harry,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think it warrants further enquiry? What would you do?’

  He shook his head, then looked at Gabby. ‘Did you say seven?’ He turned to me. ‘Didn’t you say four claims and . . .’

  ‘It’s eight.’

  ‘Claims?’

  ‘Dead bodies.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I found out not long after I started that the guy I replaced was killed.’

  ‘Yes, but wasn’t that some robbery . . . ?’

  ‘He was handling a claim in the country where a quad plaintiff committed suicide. We found that out when we went to Penrith.’

  ‘Penrith?’

  I told him about our visit to the storage facility. He didn’t approve. ‘You could’ve gone to jail last year,’ he said. ‘Now, with all that’s happened, your first job back and you’re sending forged faxes? With the CEO’s signature?’

  Sonny would have understood, but Sonny had grown up into Ranger Hammond II. ‘We won’t get caught,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, please. You and every crim in Long Bay.’

  ‘What if Chris is right?’ Gabby said.

  No one said anything for a moment, and Harry drained the last of his whisky. ‘It’s preposterous,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘The odds that –’

  ‘You haven’t heard about tonight yet.’

  The room fell silent after I explained my theory that I doubted Clarrie Gerton had died as a result of poor hygiene in the kitchen of the Glistening Spitoon restaurant at Coogee. Before the silence was broke
n, Harry picked up a pad and pen from his desk, then started writing.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Opening a file.’

  Sonny was nearly as quick as Skippy. If he spoke to us as our lawyer, the conversation was privileged. He looked remarkably calm as he composed his notes. These tax attorneys. When he finished scribbling he looked up at me and said, ‘You sure he’s dead?’ I nodded. ‘And you didn’t notice anything . . . ?’

  I shrugged. ‘He maintained a loyal appreciation for Hunter Valley wine until he shuffled off, that’s all I can say.’

  Harry screwed the lid of his pen back on, then flicked his pad onto his desk. ‘You have to speak to the police,’ he said. ‘I have to advise you that is your best option right now.’

  ‘Stick to fucking tax, Harry,’ I said. ‘Not a fucking chance. I’ll get crucified. They’ll probably kick-start the neg assault thing and –’

  ‘Did you touch anything? I don’t think you’ve committed a crime yet,’ Harry said.

  ‘Oh no. Try section 398 of the Crimes Act. Leaving the scene of death of a right-wing arsehole. There is no fucking way –’

  ‘Shut up, Chris,’ Harry said. ‘You will go to the police. I’ll make an appointment for you to see someone. Off the record at first.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Col Dixon. He’s now with Eastern Suburbs Area Command. Just got promoted. I’ll call him for you, arrange a meeting so . . . so you can have a chat. Explain your theories to him. And hypothetically explore what you should do if you break into a house and find a dead body.’

  The idea of speaking with Colin Dixon didn’t thrill me. Colin had grown up a few streets away from us, and had risen rapidly in the force. He was Harry’s best friend when I wasn’t around. He was not Harry’s best friend when I was. Col never forgave me. I hadn’t seen him in years. ‘What am I supposed to say to him?’