Taking Care of Business ch-28

by Peter Corris

  They held me for three hours, long enough. Viv Garner came and did his stuff but there wasn’t a lot to it. The complainant couldn’t be contacted and the whole thing was obviously a put-up job. Masters didn’t show again. I got a warning from Quist about the use of my pistol, which was returned to me, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  ‘What was all that about?’ Viv asked as we passed the smokers and walked down the steps.

  ‘Harassment,’ I said. ‘Can you give me a lift to the ASIC office in King Street?’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re moving in exalted company.’

  ‘Not really. Just bodyguarding, or trying to.’

  He dropped me off and I charged into the building and up to the level where I’d left Mackenzie and Whitney. Mackenzie was sitting where I’d sat but he wasn’t quietly reading, he was talking into his mobile and looking agitated. When he saw me he cut off the call and looked as if he’d like to cut off my balls.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  I told him. ‘Where’s Whitney?’

  ‘Gone to the toilet. He’s been shitting himself, literally, ever since you didn’t show. Somebody’s got to him, put the fear of God into him.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When we were frigging about waiting for you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. He won’t tell me. He made a couple of phone calls. Calmed him down a bit. But basically he won’t be happy till he sees you. Christ knows why after this fuck-up.’

  ‘Knock it off, Stu. There’s more players in this game than we reckoned on. How’d the meetings here go?’

  ‘Not bad. It’s big. They’re going to look into it.’

  ‘Has he got immunity?’

  Mackenzie shook his head. ‘Not quite yet.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what freaked him.’

  ‘No.’

  Whitney came towards us. From the look of him his confidence level had dropped about four notches. Mackenzie stepped straight in and explained what had happened.

  Whitney just nodded as if this piece of bad news was par for the course. ‘Can we get on with it?’

  We left Mackenzie and went to the York Street car park where I’d left my Falcon. Long overdue. Another item on the expense account along with Viv Garner’s bill.

  ‘What happened?’ I said as we got moving.

  ‘I need a drink. I’ll tell you then.’

  We went into the bar of the Hyatt and Whitney ordered a double scotch. I had a light beer although I could’ve done with something stronger. He bought a packet of cigarillos, lit one and drew on it like a cigarette. I recognised the signs-the ex-smoker telling himself he’s not back on them. The scotch wasn’t going to last long from the way he was getting stuck into it.

  ‘While we were milling about looking for you, a man came up to me. He looked like one of the ASIC investigators and he might’ve been for all I know. All he said was I should think about my wife and children.’

  ‘Shit, what did you do?’

  ‘I got on to Ken Bates. He’s setting up protection for them. What’s wrong?’

  I said, ‘Nothing,’ and started on my beer. What was the point of telling him I thought he’d set the fox to watch the henhouse? It seemed to have put his mind at rest and that’d have to do for now.

  He smoked a couple of cigarillos and had another double while he told me about how the partners in MIA had relayed their skimmings back to themselves through loans that would never have to be repaid from companies that were here today although not yesterday and wouldn’t be here tomorrow.

  He bought a bottle of scotch and started in on it as soon as we got back to the hotel.

  ‘Book us a couple of seats on the first flight to Brisbane,’ he said.

  ‘Flight?’

  He held up his glass. ‘Enough of this and I guess I can do it.’

  It’s worrying when a man starts changing his habits-getting back on the weed, defying a phobia-especially an apparently disciplined guy like Whitney. The next step can be a breakdown and you’re left as not so much a nursemaid as a nurse, period. I’ve had it happen to me. But Whitney held himself pretty well together on the drive to the airport and through the boarding procedure which I expected to freak him. The big load of whisky he had inside him no doubt helped. He gripped the seat arm a bit during take-off but seemed okay about being airborne. It was time for me to have a real drink or two and I ordered a scotch and had one of those little bottles of red wine with the meal. Whitney didn’t have anything. Once we’d levelled out and he’d flicked through the in-flight magazine he nodded off.

  That left me trying not to drop food in my lap and pondering the ins and outs of the case. I didn’t ponder too long; the intricacies of the financial fiddles were beyond me and my only concern was keeping Whitney safe until it was time for him to sing his song. I felt sure there’d be attempts to stop him and it was my job to prevent that, but exactly who was likely to do the stopping didn’t matter. So far the intervention had been both crude, as at Violet Town, and subtle, as with Masters and Quist. With white collar crime you have to expect that. Not all the collars are white.

  Whitney woke up as I was working on the dregs of the red and I asked him why Brisbane.

  ‘I’ve set up a little business there. A sort of sideline. Consulting. I’ve got a hole-in-the-corner office in Eagle Street and a little flat in West End. I’ve taken short breaks up there and done some business. I’d like to build it up a bit while I’m waiting for ASIC to get moving. No one in Melbourne knows about it.’

  A secret life, I thought. Something a lot of men hanker for-most men probably. I wondered if it included a secret woman, usually part of the fantasy.

  By the time we landed in Brisbane Whitney was close to sober. I watched him carefully to see how familiar he was with the airport. If he knew it well I’d know he’d been lying about his flying phobia and that would be interesting. He didn’t; he followed the signs as if he’d never been there before. We collected our bags and went out to the taxi stand. I breathed in some of that warm, scented air and felt good. Some of the scent is petrol and aviation fuel, I guess, but some of it is to do with latitude. One of these days I’ll go north.

  I’ve worked in Brisbane a few times but I’m not really familiar with it. West End, I seemed to remember, was something like Glebe in character, and near the river. Whitney gave the address to the driver and settled down to his own thoughts. He had his laptop with him as well as the briefcase Mackenzie had given him plus an overnight bag, probably from the same source.

  The taxi pulled up outside a big Queenslander that backed onto the river. Whitney opened the front gate and pointed to a path leading around the house.

  ‘Divided up into flats. Mine’s at the back. Good view of the river, particularly from the dunny.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with that,’ I said.

  At the back the block fell away to the river, gleaming under a clear sky. A big catamaran with lights blazing surged by as Whitney put his key in the lock.

  ‘City cat,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Good town, Brisbane. I might move here when all this is over. Jesus Christ!’

  He’d opened the door and turned on the light. I peered around him into a small living room that looked as if the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Sex Pistols had occupied it for a month.

  And that was just about it for a while for Mr Thomas Whitney, Esq., Old Grammarian and stroke of the eight. He fell to pieces and I had to get him settled in a habitable corner, clean the place up and consider what to do next. From the way he behaved I concluded that he’d been under immense strain for some time and all his apparent control had been a facade. When he collapsed he really went down. He wept a bit, chewed his fingernails, muttered to himself and kept saying ‘How? How? How?’ over and over again.

  I couldn’t answer him because I was finding it hard to understand myself. Clearly, Whitney hadn’t kept his secret life nearly as much to himself as he’d imagined and it seemed t
o be terribly important to him. The flat had two small bedrooms, a sitting room, a kitchenette and a bathroom that required you to keep your elbows tucked in. It was too small a space for two large men to occupy and Whitney’s moping made it seem smaller still.

  But after a few days he began to pull himself together. He was still smoking his cigarillos and looking for the whisky pretty early in the day, but he’d begun to tap away at his computer and to take an interest in the business news. Too much of an interest-he bought, or rather sent me out to buy because he slept in until about 10 am-all the papers and business magazines and he went through them minutely, paying particular attention to cases of bankers and brokers and others being caught at embezzlement, money laundering and insider trading. There was plenty to read in that field. I accompanied him the couple of times he went into his office in Eagle Street.

  Brisbane still has a small town feel to me, but the financial district was starting to look like the real thing- high-rise, polished stone, shining steel, tinted glass and the dubious gold tower. We used a Merc he hired to get around and no one followed us. We ate in little below-street-level places off the Queen Street Mall and no one watched us consuming our Moreton Bay bugs.

  He got on the phone to Stuart Mackenzie most days and I didn’t exactly hang around listening but he seemed to be getting no satisfaction. I gathered no action had been taken against his partners in MIA and I wasn’t surprised. You can blow the whistle but you can’t dictate the pace of play. He was in a volatile mood, swinging from relief when he got good news on his computer to depression after a talk with Mackenzie. He got an assurance from Melbourne that his kids were all right but for some reason there were obstacles to his talking to them-they were away for the night, or studying, or the phone was on the blink. This began to worry him. But after we’d been there a week and I was starting to wonder when I might think about cutting loose, the reason for his attachment to his secret life in Brisbane showed up.

  She was about 180 centimetres tall with the body of a stripper and the face of a photographic model. Long dark hair, creamy skin, perfect teeth and a serious expression that made the whole package all the more alluring. She walked into the flat having used her own key and Whitney almost gave himself a hernia getting across the room to grab hold of her.

  ‘Jacqui, thank God you’re all right. I’ve been so worried.’

  ‘Why, darling? What’s wrong?’ Jacqui’s whole attention was riveted on him, even though the place was a mess and there was a strange man in the room. Some women can do that and most men lap it up.

  Whitney went into a long, barely coherent explanation while he fussed over getting her a drink and finding her a chair to sit on that wasn’t covered with newspapers, magazines and dirty clothes. He minimised the seriousness of what he was doing, accelerated the time of the likely outcome and described me as a ‘security consultant’.

  Jacqui let him fuss for a bit but then she took over and before long she was lighting the cigarillos and fetching the drinks. I judged her to be in her early thirties and everything about her-her quiet voice, body language, the looks she shot me when she thought I wasn’t watching-told me that she’d been around and was an expert in the business of manipulating people, especially men. She said she was ‘in PR, working out of Melbourne and Brisbane’.

  Jacqui had been away on a promotional tour with a developer who had plans for a string of coastal golf courses and the arrangement she and Whitney had was that they didn’t contact each other while they were working. When they weren’t working they apparently met up here and in Melbourne and made as much contact with as many body parts as often as they could. I left them to it and did one of my periodic tours of the environs to see if there was anyone taking an undue interest in the flat. It was a pleasant afternoon for the stroll which took me past some handsome houses, down a few side streets and along by the river. I use the words of the Kathy Klein song to guide me in this little bit of business, and the only thing different, the only thing new, was Jacqui’s silver Saab parked outside the house.

  They went out to eat that night and I tailed them in the Merc-no easy thing because Jacqui was a lead-footed driver-and ate some pizza slices in the car while they pigged out at E’cco Bistro in Fortitude Valley. Again, no unwanted interest. The way Jacqui was marching him around I began to think that with a Beretta in her handbag she could do my job.

  I started to worry when I saw how Whitney was behaving when they left the restaurant. He looked distressed. At first I thought he might be drunk, then that someone had got to him with bad news, but after a minute it became clear that his trouble was with Jacqui. She was stiff and keeping her distance, nothing like the compliant handmaiden she’d been. They got into the car and drove through the city and then the Saab stopped. Whitney lurched from the car and was sick in the gutter. I pulled in behind them, got out and approached the retching Whitney. Jacqui was in the driver’s seat with her hands on the wheel.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I said to both of them.

  When Jacqui saw me she reached over, pulled the passenger door shut, gunned the motor and drove off.

  I went to Whitney, who was wiping his mouth with a handkerchief and pulling himself together. He looked up at me and he seemed to have aged ten years.

  ‘She’s dumped me,’ he said.

  We drove back to the flat and Whitney told me how he’d met Jacqui in Melbourne and that she was the reason for him splitting up with his wife. They’d done all the usual things and said all the usual things. Over coffee, Whitney told me that he’d taken Jacqui into his confidence about his problem with the partners and she’d been very supportive of his decision to jump ship.

  ‘She was with me all the way,’ he said.

  I nodded. ‘The thing is, who else was she with?’

  He saw what I meant and he was realistic enough to appreciate it. Someone had assigned Jacqui to him-as good as having him wired up and broadcasting his intentions.

  I added a little scotch to our second cups of coffee. ‘What did you talk about before she gave you the news?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Then what did she do?’

  ‘Went to the ladies.’

  I nodded. ‘Reported in. How was the food?’

  He glared at me. ‘Is that supposed to be funny?’

  ‘Sorry. Let’s get some sleep. We’ll see how it all looks in the morning.’

  But we didn’t get the chance to do that. We both slept late and were in need of coffee when there was a heavy knock on the door. Whitney opened it and backed away in front of two men who produced their credentials and arrested him for embezzlement, tax evasion and money laundering. They were from Victoria and they had an extradition order.

  It was Darren Metcalf aka Kenneth Bates who’d set it all up, of course. Or rather, the true identities were the other way around. The man I’d known in Sydney as Metcalf was in fact born Bates into an establishment family in Melbourne. He was the very black sheep. He’d been sent off to Britain after some youthful indiscretions and resurfaced in Sydney as a louche low-life, exploiting the vulnerable. He’d gone back to Melbourne well-heeled after some successful drug deals, rehabilitated himself as Kenneth Bates in the eyes of the people who mattered and become a partner in MIA.

  I got this information through Stuart Mackenzie, whose firm was going to represent Whitney at his trial. Mackenzie wasn’t a trial lawyer himself, but he’d briefed Cary Michaels QC, who was one of the best, and he also briefed me. We were in his office drinking excellent coffee-encouraging, but I was concerned about my standing. I couldn’t see that I’d failed anywhere, except in not telling Whitney or Mackenzie what I knew about Bates. Whitney wouldn’t have believed me and Mackenzie probably couldn’t have done anything about it. Still, for me, having the person you were supposed to be minding brought back from interstate under arrest wasn’t exactly my finest hour.

  ‘It was a brilliant scheme,’ Stuart said. ‘Bates and the others must’ve planned it in detail well
in advance. They needed a patsy and they had one ready-made in Whitney. Would you say he was less than bright?’

  I spread my hands noncommitally, not feeling that bright myself.

  ‘Anyway,’ Stuart went on. ‘They did everything Whitney said they did and more but they structured the arrangements and the paper trail so that it leads straight to him. The prosecution has him squirrelling away millions in accounts only he can touch.’

  ‘What about Whitney’s documentation and his approach to ASIC?’

  ‘Apparently that can all be made to look like tactics. The solid evidence says Whitney’s got the dough.’

  I’d talked to Whitney while they were waiting to put him on a plane. We were both depressed. Everything I’d done-the exit from Melbourne, the confrontation at Violet Town, the supervision in Brisbane-could be construed as criminally damaging. ‘That’ll be a surprise to Tom,’ I said to Mackenzie. ‘He claims he’s close to broke.’

  Mackenzie nodded. ‘He’ll have to sell his house to pay for his counsel and he won’t get all that much out of it. His wife’s going in strong.’

  ‘Bates again?’

  ‘Right. He got her ear and maybe other parts.’

  ‘Jesus, that poor bastard’s really been screwed. What can we do?’

  Mackenzie shrugged. ‘Not much. MIA is being wound up. They’ve got some kind of insurance and most of the big losers’ll be compensated up to a point. Whitney goes down for the fraud. End of story.’

  I couldn’t cop that. ‘Come on, Stu. We’ve got stuff on Bates that Michaels can use. He can construct an argument that Whitney was a fall guy. He can…’