Taking Care of Business ch-28

by Peter Corris

  ‘I’m beginning to think you’re right. I thought… You and Stefan’re mates, right?’

  ‘Yeah. So what?’

  ‘I’ve got to talk to him. I’ve got to know what he thinks of Marriott. What does Amie think of him, for that matter?’

  ‘Shit, I can tell you that. Stefan reckons he’s the most brilliant fuckin’ IT man in the country and that he’s completely nuts. Amie can’t stand him. He came on to her, offered her a million dollars, and she knocked him back. He hates her and Stefan. Whatever he’s got you doin, arsehole, it’s to screw them. That’s for sure.’

  What did he have me doing? I realised that I had no idea. Rudi pulled himself upright, and if he’d had a go just then he might have done some damage because I was dumbfounded, but he just stood there and brushed himself off.

  ‘You hit hard,’ he said.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. I’ve got the wrong end of the stick here. I’ve got to talk to Stefan and Mark.’

  ‘Stefan’s in Brisbane with Amie. They’re tryin’ to stay out of Marriott’s way. He’s been at them. Threatening to get himself committed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know much about it. It’s beyond me. Stefan says it’s to do with their fuckin’ partnership. If Marriott’s in the bin they can’t go ahead with

  ‘The float of the company?’

  ‘Yeah, the float, and Stefan’s borrowed a hell of a lot against the money he expects to make from the float. He wants to start his own company with Mark and get clear of Marriott.’

  ‘He told me Mark was a useless junkie.’

  ‘Mark? No way. I just seen him. He’s workin’ his arse off on somethin’.’

  ‘Does Marriott know about Stefan’s plans?’

  ‘Christ, I hope not.’

  ‘Why did you go along with that charade about shooting him?’

  Rudi shrugged. ‘Seemed harmless. Bit of fun. He’s not a bloke to say no to. Plus he promised to buy me a Harley.’

  I was trying to work it out. If what Rudi said was true, Marriott’s motive in hiring me was to do with his plan to stop the float. I could be evidence of his paranoia. If he knew about Stefan’s plans, that would give him a reason to stop the float. Was it reason enough to risk being committed as insane? Didn’t seem like it.

  Rudi untied the bandanna around his neck and wiped his gritty, oil-stained mouth. ‘He’s dangerous,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what Rog told me in Melbourne. Where’s Mark now?’

  ‘In his office.’

  ‘Is it near Marriott’s?’

  ‘No, other end.’

  ‘I’m going up there. Look, I’ll make this up to you somehow.’

  ‘I really just do odd jobs for these blokes, but Stefan’s treated me okay… You’re not workin’ for Marriott anymore?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll come up with you. Maybe we can sort it out. I know Mark’s been slavin’ away at something to do with what’s buggin’ Stefan and Amie.’

  Rudi wasn’t the brightest, but I was glad to have him along. He parked his bike, I moved the car into a slot, and we entered the building. ‘He calls himself Charlie now,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah-like Charlie Manson.’

  When we got up to the Solomon Solutions floor, the place was humming along as per usual. No one took any notice of Rudi in his leathers as we strode towards Mark’s office. There was an unoccupied desk outside it.

  ‘Funny,’ Rudi said. ‘Sarah should be there. She’s Mark’s secretary.’

  ‘Coffee break.’

  He shook his head. ‘Something’s wrong.’

  We went to the door. I knocked.

  ‘Come in.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Rudi said. ‘That’s Marriott.’

  I opened the door.

  ‘Come in and shut it,’ Marriott said. He was standing behind a man who was sitting at a desk. Marriott was holding something to his head-a sawn-off. 22 rifle, cut down small enough to fit in the big briefcase he’d carried that morning.

  I motioned for Rudi to look at the woman who was lying on the floor. I took a few steps towards the desk. ‘Charlie…’

  ‘Stop there! I saw you talking to him in the car park. You’ve spoiled everything, Rudi, you dumb bastard.’

  I edged a bit closer as his eyes swung towards Rudi. ‘How is she?’ I said.

  Rudi looked up and I gained another inch or two. ‘All right. I think she just fainted.’

  ‘No harm done then. Give it up, Charlie. It’s a single shot job, you can’t shoot all three of us.’

  Marriott smiled and his eyes were mad. ‘That’s what you think. I showed you the single shot, but this is a semi-automatic. I can kill you both and her and myself if I want to.’

  I squinted at the weapon, but with his big hands wrapped around it I couldn’t tell whether or not it was the rifle I’d seen at his place. Truth or good bluff?

  ‘Why would you want to do that?’ I said.

  The man with the gun to his head said, ‘I know why. I’m Mark Metropolis, who are you?’

  ‘He’s no one,’ Marriott said. ‘You’re all nobodies. Go on, Mark. Tell them about who’s really got the brains around here.’

  Mark’s eyes were red-rimmed and two days’ growth showed blue-black against his pale skin. With his shoulder-length hair and earrings and the haggard face, if I’d passed him in the street I might have taken him for a bombed-out junkie but he wasn’t-the man was exhausted. He moved his head a little to ease away from the rifle. ‘I’ve been trying to find out what Charles has been working on. I hacked into his files and got the gist of it. He’s doing a deal with Backup. He’s developed better monitoring, forecasting and accounting systems than the ones we have. He’s selling it to Backup who’ll demonstrate it and we’ll be down the toilet. He’ll be rich. It’s his revenge for being rejected by Stefan and Amie.’

  Marriott jabbed him hard with the raw metal and blood flowed from a slash above his ear. ‘Shut up, wog! You didn’t tell them the whole of it.’

  Mark drooped towards the desk as the blood dropped on his shoulder and the front of his shirt. ‘Tell them yourself, you lunatic’

  ‘Ha! Mark thought he was so smart getting into my stuff but he was always mediocre, right from the start. I had a built-in tracking program that picked him up as soon as he got to where he didn’t ought to go.’

  ‘What’s the idea of the gun?’ I said.

  ‘I was going to throw a loony act to stop the float. Hey, Cliff, I was going to take a shot at you maybe. Completely nuts, right? Paranoid. I didn’t think Mark would get as close in as he did, but lo and behold, the dummy did, right this morning. Jesus! Then I saw you and Rudi talking and…’

  I was close to the desk; I could almost make a grab for the rifle. ‘And now you know it’s over. Your plan’s buggered. We’d better all sit down and talk about it, work something out. Put the gun down, Charlie. You’re sick, you need help.’

  ‘Sick! I’m brilliant! I’m the most brilliant-’

  Just then the woman on the floor came to and let out a scream. Mark jerked his head away from the rifle and I made a swipe at it, touched it, but couldn’t get a grip. Marriott responded with a roar that was half fear and half rage. His mad eyes popped as he saw Mark throw himself onto the floor behind the desk and Rudi and I moving towards him. He staggered back, thrust the rifle up under his chin and pulled the trigger. The shot and the woman’s second scream filled the room as Marriott crumpled to the floor.

  I went around the desk and crouched beside him, feeling for a pulse but there was nothing. For a rank amateur, he’d done a fully professional job in putting a. 22 bullet through his brain.

  The whole business took a lot of explaining to the police and to Stefan Sweig and others. I didn’t come out of it well. I’d been used and duped and out of my depth the whole time. Marriott had cried wolf a couple of times and he’d evidently thought he needed a big show, like shooting the private detective he’d hired, to get the effect he needed. His
brilliant system died with him because he’d encrypted the essential elements so thoroughly that no one could use it. Eventually the smoke settled and the float went ahead.

  Stefan and Mark offered to compensate me for my time and reward me for the outcome but I refused. I paid for my own dry-cleaning and bought Rudi a slab.

  ‘So you got nothing out of it?’ Viv Garner, my lawyer, said over a drink after I’d told him the story.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. I got a free trip to Melbourne.’

  COCKTAILS FOR TWO

  Jordan Elliott started talking as soon as he sat down. ‘I want to hire you to investigate a murder.’

  ‘The police do that sort of thing,’ I said. ‘I find lost stuff, or look for it; do bodyguarding and money-guarding…’

  ‘The police say it wasn’t a murder, or if it was they don’t give a shit.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’

  Elliott was in his late twenties or early thirties, a slim, elegant figure in designer clothes with what I took to be an expensive haircut. Ditto the wristwatch. He told me that he was gay, HIV positive but asymptomatic for more than ten years.

  ‘One of the lucky ones,’ he said.

  I nodded. Having an office in Darlinghurst, not far from Kings Cross, I’d seen a good many of the unlucky ones.

  ‘My partner of nine years was named Simon Townsley. A lovely man. We… we were married in all but name, you know?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘Simon was a bit older than me and he contracted HIV earlier and didn’t have the test for quite a while. So he was positive and untreated for longer than he should have been.’ He spread his hands in a theatrical gesture. ‘So, AIDS of course. But he was very strong and fit…’

  ‘I didn’t think that mattered.’

  ‘They’re starting to find out that it does. Anyway, he responded very well to the drugs, the cocktail. He’d had a few infections early on but once he was on the treatment, that stopped and he put on the weight he’d lost and it looked like he was going to make it, or at least get another ten good years. He was forty-six and ten years seemed like a lifetime after what was happening all around us. We considered ourselves lucky.’

  ‘But,’ I said.

  ‘But he went away on a tour for ten weeks and when he came back he wasn’t the same. The drugs didn’t seem to be working. He got sick again, one thing after another, but he still insisted on working. Then

  … there was an outdoor gig and it rained and it was freezing and he got pneumonia. He died. There was no inquest or autopsy or anything. They called it “an AIDS related illness” and that was that.’

  ‘Are you sure it wasn’t?’

  He hammered his fist on the desk-nothing theatrical about him now. ‘I know it wasn’t. Something happened on that tour.’

  ‘What sort of tour?’

  ‘Simon was in a band, a gay band-the Stonewallers. You never heard of them?’

  ‘No. I left off at Dire Straits.’

  ‘They were big a few years ago. Their CDs sold well and they were getting good fees for gigs. They went into a bit of a slump when Simon first got sick. He is-was-the lead guitarist. The heart of the band. But they were on the way back. A new record deal was in the works. He knew I loved him and he had everything to live for, but he just seemed to give up.’

  ‘What did the doctors say?’

  Elliott shrugged. ‘That the cocktail sometimes doesn’t work, or only works for a while.’

  It didn’t sound promising. I knew virtually nothing about AIDS apart from what I read in the papers and saw on television. I’d heard of AZT but didn’t know what the letters stood for. I knew it worked for some and not for others, depending on a variety of factors. On the other hand, Elliott was an impressive type and it looked as if anger was fuelling him rather than hysteria. In my book, anger’s a valid emotion.

  ‘I’m not sure about this, Mr Elliott,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you could tell me a bit more about yourself

  ‘Well, I own some property around the city. My family was well off. I trained as a lawyer but I don’t practise. I run a small record company-Chippendale Classics. I don’t imagine you’ve heard of it.’

  ‘I know less about classical music than I do about contemporary stuff. Isn’t that a little unusual, a classics buff teaming up with a rocker?’

  He smiled. ‘Yes, but it worked for us.’

  It was impossible not to like him and to admire the way he conducted himself. Still, I played it cautious.

  ‘What did you have in mind for me to do?’

  ‘There are three other members of the band, plus the manager and a roadie. They were on the tour. They, or one of them, must know something about what happened to Simon.’

  ‘Have you asked them?’

  ‘Of course. They say they don’t know anything. But I’m not exactly forceful and I don’t have the resources to investigate them. I thought that if you looked at them thoroughly, you might come up with something and could use it to get the truth.’

  ‘And if I find nothing?’

  ‘You’ll do it then?’

  I said I would and got out a contract form and started in on it. I waited for an answer to my question but it never came. He gave me the names of the Stonewallers and the manager and roadie and the addresses and phone numbers he had for them. We agreed on a retainer. I took down his details and he wrote me a cheque. Before he left he took a CD from his jacket pocket and handed it across.

  ‘They’re not unlike Dire Straits in certain moods.’

  That night I played the CD which was entitled ‘Glad to be Gay’. The lineup was Carl Reiss on drums, Seb Jones, rhythm guitar, Craig Pappas, bass guitar and Simon Townsley, lead guitar and vocals. The tracks were a mixture of gay anthems and middle of the road rock. They had something and Elliott was right, there was a touch of Mark Knopfler in Townsley s lyrical guitar and breathy singing. I liked it.

  Elliott had told me that the group’s manager was Manny Roche and the roadie for the tour had been Don Berry. I put through a call to Steve Cook, a rock journalist I sometimes drank with at the Toxteth Hotel and, more rarely, played squash with in Leichhardt. He used to be junior squash champion of South Australia and, although cigarettes have taken a toll of his wind, he could still beat me just by taking a few steps backwards, forwards and sideways.

  ‘Steve, I need to tap your encyclopedic knowledge of the rock scene.’

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘The Stonewallers.’

  ‘Aha.’

  ‘Why aren’t I getting your usual bored cynicism?’

  ‘They’ve got a new singer and a new record deal. They’re hot. Make that warming up. Do you know something I should know?’

  ‘No. What can you tell me about them?’

  He gave me a potted history of the band, which lasted through three of his cigarettes. According to Steve they’d been remarkable for their compatibility as a group. There’d been no bust-ups or financial or creative ructions. Simon Townsley’s death had come as a surprise because, as Elliott had said, he appeared to be winning his battle with AIDS.

  ‘They had a song called “T-count” all about it. Pretty good stuff. Then he was gone. What’s your interest?’

  ‘I can’t tell you now. If there’s anything in it for you I’ll let you know. What about the manager, this Manny Roche?’

  ‘No worse than the run of them.’

  ‘Hardly a ringing endorsement.’

  ‘Rock managers aren’t among the more attractive forms of life on the planet, mate. I’d rate them below private eyes and journalists. Most people would.’

  ‘Have you heard of a roadie named Don Berry?’

  ‘Do roadies have names? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Who’s this new singer?’

  ‘Dyke called Jo-Jo Moon. She’s been around. Great singer who never found her niche.’

  ‘Is this it?’

  ‘That’s the word. They’re putting down an album and preparing to go on the road. Al
l very hush-hush, which means everyone’s talking about it.’

  He said he’d fax me what he had on the band and we agreed to meet for a drink soon.

  I played the CD again and still liked it. The next day I phoned Roche Management Inc and made an appointment to see Manny Roche. My spiel to his secretary was that I was a security consultant and wanted to talk about the possibility of providing security for his artists.

  The office was in Edgecliff, part of a complex just off New South Head Road. Manny was in suite 3, next to a literary agent and across the bricked courtyard from a firm representing actors and models. A couple of wraith-thin women, looking as if a stiff wind would blow them away, were smoking in the courtyard and admiring the city view. An overweight man wearing a beige safari suit with epaulettes and badges on the sleeves was pretending not to watch them.

  I was ushered into Manny’s presence by a young Asian woman who looked as if she belonged with the models. He was sitting down, but at a guess Manny was about 170 centimetres and must have weighed 120 kilos. He watched the slender back of the Asian woman as she retreated across the expanse of white carpet to the door.

  ‘Not bad, eh?’ he said when the door was closed. Without waiting for a reply he went on, ‘I can give you a couple of minutes only. Make your pitch.’

  I took my time sitting down in a chair near his desk without being invited. I looked him over before I spoke. He wore a blue shirt with a red tie and red braces. His suit jacket hung on a valet hanger behind him next to the bar fridge. His desk held a phone and a computer, no blotter, no paper. A shelf against one wall was filled with videos and CDs, no books. Here, the paperless office had arrived.

  ‘I’m investigating the death of Simon Townsley,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you…’ He half rose from his chair, but getting up for Manny would be a major operation, so he sank back down. ‘Get out of here.’

  ‘Not yet. Why so angry? Something to hide?’

  He would have been a good-looking man before fat overwhelmed his features and his hairline retreated towards the top of his head. The fat reduced his eyes to slits and the jowls crowded his mouth. A difficult face to read. He shook his head slightly and the jowls and chins bounced. ‘What would I have to hide? It’s just that I’m a busy man.’