Taking Care of Business ch-28

by Peter Corris

  ‘I can keep my job?’

  Normally, it’s sad to see someone’s dreams come crashing down, but not this time. I shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I was in your game for a while,’ he said. ‘But I got on the piss and screwed up.’ He drained his can sloppily and pried another one loose. ‘It’s her-that Miles bitch.’

  It turned out that Tabitha Miles was in association with a couple of the board members of the company controlling the shopping centres. The plan was for her to replace Morgan as CEO and for them to gain control of the board. Sabotaging the Petersham Plaza was a first step in undermining Morgan and disrupting the board. I took the evidence-the photographs of Mason and his taped statement about his dealings with Miles-to Morgan. The deal had been for Mason to head up a new security firm that would have the contract for all the shopping centres. Morgan moved quickly and quietly. The upshot was that Miles departed and the board was restructured.

  I got a hefty bonus on top of my fee, which made for a nice Christmas present. I told Grant all about it in confidence and he could hardly wait to start his TAFE course. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that not all PEA work was like this.

  Braithwaite’s sacked Mason. I took pity on him and organised a temporary job. But I had my revenge-the weeks before Christmas were as hot as any on record, and it must have been hell for him inside that red suit with the fake fur trim.

  ‹‹Contents››

  INSIDER

  Cliff, how d’you feel about Melbourne and Brisbane?’

  ‘They’re great,’ I said, ‘compared, say, to Adelaide and Hobart.’

  The man putting the question was Stuart Mackenzie of Mackenzie, McLaren and Sinclair, a legal firm I occasionally did some work for. My Irish grandmother said never work for a Scotsman, but my Scots grandfather said never work for an Irishman, so there you are.

  ‘You’re so parochial,’ Stuart said. ‘Adelaide has beautiful churches and Hobart has all that convict heritage.’

  ‘We’ve got both in Sydney, plus the harbour and more work for private enquiry agents. What’s up, Stu?’

  Stuart Mackenzie is younger than me but likes to pretend he’s older, wiser and more mature. He’s richer, so mostly I let him pretend, but occasionally I like to take the piss. I’ll bet no one else in those plush Martin Place offices calls him Stu. He adjusted his horn-rimmed half glasses and shuffled the papers on his desk.

  ‘We have a client, one Thomas Whitney, who’s looking to get himself out of a spot of bother.’

  ‘What’s he done? How much? What’s her name? How old is she, or he?’

  ‘Stop it, Cliff. This is serious. Whitney’s a partner in a firm of investment advisers based in Melbourne. Naturally they have branches elsewhere.’

  ‘Like in Sydney and Brisbane?’

  Stuart smiled. He’s a bland-looking man with regular features, thinning blond hair and a Scottish chin. What I like about him, apart from the fact that his cheques don’t bounce, is that he likes to take the piss as well. ‘No,’ he said. ‘In Vanuatu and the Cook Islands.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, which meant I didn’t have to say, ‘ Touche’.

  ‘Yes, it seems that several of his partners have been siphoning off money from their accounts, routing it through Vanuatu arrangements and tucking it away. Mr Whitney suspects that an audit is going to cause the shit to hit the fan. He wants to-’

  ‘Get in first. Blow the whistle.’

  ‘Not exactly. Call it distance himself, get on the record…’

  I put my fingers to my mouth and produced a surprisingly good taxi-calling whistle.

  ‘You’re a hooligan, Hardy’

  ‘I know. What d’you want me to do?’

  Stuart’s door opened and a uniformed security man poked his head inside. ‘Anything wrong, Mr Mackenzie?’

  Stuart flapped his fingers in one of the few gay gestures he ever made. ‘No, Douglas. Everything’s fine.’

  The guard withdrew.

  ‘Douglas,’ I said. ‘Don’t you employ anyone but Scots here? I could report you to the anti-whatever-it-is.’

  ‘We have a Lebanese receptionist, a Cypriot secretary and an Italian junior partner.’

  ‘That’s all right then. So?’

  ‘I know this’ll all sound a bit cloak and dagger, but Mr Whitney wants to, as it were, disappear from Melbourne under suspicious circumstances. He believes this will provoke his partners into making mistakes. He wants to come to Sydney to be, ah, debriefed by ASIC.. ’

  The Australian Securities and Investments Commission was the regulatory body that licensed the operators, investigated the shonks.

  Anyway, they’ll talk to Whitney and we’ll relocate him to Brisbane until such time as he has to give evidence. If it so works out. I want you to facilitate these things.’

  ‘You mean you want me to be a kidnapper, a nursemaid and a witness protection agent?’

  ‘You could put it like that.’

  ‘What’s he like, this Whitney?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I’ve never met him. This was proposed by a friend of Whitney’s in Melbourne. Someone who knows you, apparently. And knows of your reputation for discretion and competence in these matters.’

  ‘And who would that be?’

  ‘I don’t know. Whitney didn’t tell me.’

  I looked around Stuart’s office, noting the paintings, the furniture, the books. Nothing so vulgar as degree certificates or photographs of Stuart with Bob Carr. I thought of my office above St Peter’s Lane in Darlinghurst with its dirty windows and exhausted fittings. A lawyer like Stuart worked for big money, especially on something with the dodgy sound of this. Things were tough in my game and getting tougher. The big agencies hugged the business. I needed a fat fee like a surfer needs a point break. But it never does to look too eager.

  ‘That makes four people who know about this. At a guess, that’s at least one too many. How’ve you and Whitney communicated?’

  ‘By email.’

  ‘Great. Add on a busload.’

  ‘Encrypted email. Totally secure.’

  ‘It’s going to cost a lot, Stuart.’

  He nodded. ‘Mr Whitney has provided adequate funds.’

  Yeah, I thought. Probably from his share of the take.

  ‘Five hundred dollars a day plus expenses until I get him relocated. Negotiable after that.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘With a contract.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘C’mon, Stuart. The story’s got more holes in it than a cyclone fence. I’ll need some protection.’

  ‘We’ll work something out.’

  ‘I’ll need your dossier on Whitney and a couple of grand up front to get American Express off my back.’

  One of his pale eyebrows shot up. ‘How do you know I have a dossier?’

  Well, its sink or swim and we all have to swim in it, so I smarmed him. ‘Because you’d be stupid if you didn’t and I know you’re not stupid, Stu.’

  I left with a cheque, which I deposited immediately, and a folder containing printouts of the emails Mackenzie and Whitney had exchanged, brochures and directors reports from Metropolitan Investment Advisers Ltd and photocopies of items from newspapers and magazines about Whitney and his partners. At a quick glance it looked like the sort of stuff Mackenzie could have accumulated himself without needing to enlist the services of his Lebanese secretary or Cypriot receptionist, so maybe he was telling the truth about how many people were in on the act.

  I took the file back to my office and began to work through it. The emails gave me Whitney’s address, the make and licence number of his car and his domestic details. All essential to the operation. He wrote a nice, terse email, Mr Whitney. The information about Metropolitan Investment Advisers suggested that the company was rock solid with major clients in the insurance business, superannuation funds and ‘off-shore capital placement bodies’. The language was ugly but it all sounded like money making more money.

  The stuff on T
homas Whitney was very thin, limited to a couple of minimalist entries in business directories and a few newspaper clippings. Our Tom was no high-flier, no racehorse owner or champagne sipper. He was born in Melbourne in 1952, educated in the right schools and had an MBA from Stanford University. He was on the board of several companies but his chief position was as senior partner in MIA. The chairmanship of the board circulated among the three senior partners and Tom was due to take his turn again next year.

  The clippings all said more or less the same things but one brought me up short. It included a grainy photograph of Whitney taken at a fundraising function. He was a tall, broad-shouldered type who probably rowed in the eight at his school. It was the image of the skinny, balding man standing next to him that arrested my attention. They were talking, apparently amiably. If this was the friend who’d recommended me I knew him, or thought I did. He looked a lot like Darren Metcalf, who’d run an illegal casino and a brothel and pushed drugs in Sydney quite a few years back before dropping out of sight. I’d thought he was dead.

  I considered my position on the plane to Melbourne. But of course if I’d really been considering my position I wouldn’t have been on the plane. Darren Metcalf had never done an honest act in his life. I’d run up against him when he’d had the idea of hooking a couple of apprentice jockeys on coke. A trainer I knew got wind of it and hired me to step in and discourage Metcalf. I looked into his various operations, got some people talking on tape and then told Metcalf which particular policemen I’d play the tapes to unless he lost interest in the Sport of Kings. He was scum, but he got the point. It was a neat, civilised bit of business, and it must have made an impression on Metcalf, assuming he was Whitney’s ‘friend’.

  But I couldn’t see why Whitney would associate with Metcalf, unless he was even more of a crook than I’d begun to think he was. Stuart Mackenzie was operating within the accepted ethics of the legal profession by advising and providing protection and other services for a whistleblower, I had no doubt of that. It might even be considered performing a public duty until you looked at the amount of the fee and its source. Even then, these matters aren’t precisely laid down. My position was shaky, particularly without a contract, but only if I got caught doing something illegal. So what else was new?

  Since the firm was paying I was travelling business class. I ordered a scotch, stretched my legs and settled into my copy of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I was thinking things could be a lot worse-the job had its tricky elements but it was well paid and interesting, and the presence of Metcalf, if it was Metcalf, added spice.

  I picked up an Avis Nissan Pulsar at the airport and drove in to Melbourne along the freeway that always looks to me to be congratulating itself. Hey, Sydney, it seems to say, bet you wish you’d arranged things like this. Mackenzie had told me to play everything by ear and I’d decided to scout Whitney’s place of business and residence, get a candid camera look at him and then figure out what to do about snatching him. It couldn’t be done completely spontaneously; presumably he had things he’d want to take with him. But I couldn’t just ring him up and tell him we had seats on the three thirty to Sydney either.

  I’d abducted people before-kids from cults, a bride from an arranged marriage, a patient from a fraudulent loony bin. Each case is different in detail but the principles are the same: get out, avoid pursuit, get clear. It was four thirty when I pulled up outside MIA’s offices in South Yarra. An old factory of some kind converted to what they liked to call suites. The sweet life-landscaping, fountain in the forecourt, tinted glass. The factory yard had been converted into a car park, every parking spot with its own little roof. Whitney’s car was a modest white Mercedes, nothing flashy like a personalised numberplate. Just a plain old fifty grand Merc. I walked to a smart coffee shop and bought a takeaway long black as big as a bucket. I sat outside the MIA building waiting for the Mercedes to slide out.

  Tom may have been planning to dump on his mates, but he was still putting in the hours expected of the executive. The Mercedes was one of the last to leave the car park at almost 7 pm. Time was when bosses knocked off at four to get in nine holes before cocktails. No more, apparently.

  I followed the car back to the city and through to Port Melbourne. When I’d last spent any length of time in Melbourne-in the seventies-Port Melbourne wasn’t a place a Thomas Whitney would go near. Now it was. Gentrification had gone on at a great pace and old warehouses, factories and light industrial buildings had been converted to apartments and condominiums. The original terrace houses that would once have been sailors’ flops had been toned up to the half million dollar mark. Whitney lived in one of these; one at the end of a row with some space at the side as well as in front-three-storeyed with enough iron lace to do my Glebe job three times over. It was a big house for a divorced man with two non-resident kids. Maybe he had a lot of stay-over guests.

  The house had a garage with an automatic opening door so I still hadn’t got a look at Whitney. He was inside now with lights going on at ground floor level and then one floor up. Changing into his smoking jacket. Stuart had provided me with a notebook computer and given me Whitney’s home email address and a password I could use. I fired it up, logged on and tapped out the message that I was outside his house and ready to see him. I’m not an emailer myself, but Stuart assured me that those who are check in first thing and constantly thereafter. I logged out, put the computer on the passenger seat and waited. It was one of those classic cigarette moments, but not these days. The anti-smoking brigade should come up with a suggestion as to how to fill in those moments. I’ve never found one. Nowadays a wait is just a wait.

  Another light went on upstairs, stayed on for a while and then went out. Long enough for Tom to have tapped away for a bit in his study. I logged on and the inbox showed a message. Mr Whitney would be at home to his caller. I hoped he’d have a drink and a few snacks laid out. I was starving.

  I went through the gate and up the steps, knocked on the door. Whitney opened it and waved me in. He looked like his photograph-big, solid, reliable right across the board. Just what you’d want in an investment adviser. He showed me into a living room that had been made bigger by the removal of a wall or two.

  ‘Drink, Mr Hardy?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Scotch?’

  The bottle had a label I’d never seen, which only meant that it wasn’t the kind that goes on special in my local bottle shop. He made a generous drink, inclining me to like him, even if he apparently didn’t have any club sandwiches to hand. We raised our glasses and I mentioned Darren Metcalf.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You told Stuart Mackenzie I was recommended by a friend of yours. I thought

  ‘Oh, friend might be putting it a bit strongly. I was referring to a golfing partner, John Jupp. He used to be a policeman in Sydney.’

  I knew Jupp vaguely, an at least semi-honest cop from a time when there weren’t all that many around. I sipped the smooth scotch and tried not to look puzzled but curiosity got the better of me. ‘I saw a press photograph of you talking to a man at a fundraising do. Something for a football club down here, I think it was. Tall, thin bloke, balding. I thought I recognised him as someone I used to know in Sydney.’

  ‘Oh, I know the picture you mean. Yes, a fundraiser for Hawthorn. I played a few games for them before I did my knee. No, that’s Kenneth Bates, Melbourne man through and through. I mean the football team and the city. He’s one of the partners in our firm.’

  Darren Metcalf had always been a slippery type, but to reconstitute himself as an old Melburnian and become a senior partner in a Collins Street financial operation was a stretch even for him. Still, it looked as if that’s what he’d done and it gave me still more to think about. Not now, though. Thomas Whitney and I got down to business.

  ‘Do your partners suspect you of… jumping ship?’

  ‘They’ve no reason to. Not specifically. But what’s been happening is so dangerous, so fragi
le, that they must be nervous. I can explain it to you. They-’

  I held up my glass, partly to stop him, partly to show him it was empty. ‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t understand. The highest finance I deal with is when I go over my Mastercard limit.’

  He looked puzzled in a well-bred way, but he still got smoothly to his feet and gave me a refill. He seemed to have lost interest in his own drink. ‘You’re in a high-risk profession. You mean you don’t have a trust fund, investments?’

  I shook my head. ‘My accountant tells me I have to contribute to my own superannuation fund since I’m incorporated. I send him a blank cheque near the end of the financial year and that’s all I know about funds.’

  Now Whitney reached for his drink as if he needed it. ‘My God, I begin to see how they got away with what they’ve done. If there’s a lot of people like you out there… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to patronise you.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m a financial ignoramus but I know about getting people from point A to point B when either they don’t want to do it or someone else doesn’t want them to. What time do you get to work in the morning?’

  ‘No later than seven forty-five.’

  ‘Jesus, why?’

  Whitney shrugged. ‘There’s the financial press to read, the overseas markets to study.’

  ‘Okay, when would the alarm bells start ringing in the office if you didn’t show?’

  ‘Certainly by eight thirty-there’s always traffic to consider, family crises. You know.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Happily, I didn’t know, at least about family crises. ‘You’ve got a passport?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Can’t leave that behind. I imagine there’s stuff you’d want to take with you, papers, documents.’