The Brush-Off

by Shane Maloney

  But nothing the cops said was as demoralising as the look on my father’s face. After an hour’s solitary in the lockup, I was ready for anger. What I got was silent, unanswerable disappointment. It wasn’t the brawling. That was bad but not unprecedented for a boy my age. It was the liquor. The bourbon could only have come from one place. And that meant guile and deceit.

  ‘I ought to give you a hiding,’ Dad said when we got home. I wished he had. There was no getting out of the Brothers, though. I was back at St Joey’s before you could say muscular discipline. It was either that or boarding school, so I considered myself lucky. From then on, my rebellious instincts were channelled into joining Young Labor and handing out how-to-vote cards at council elections. The police, needless to say, were never heard from again. This was less out of mercy for me, I concluded, than consideration for the tribulations of a recently bereaved publican. Either that or Geordie Fletcher—guided by some sharpie code of omerta—had refused to make a formal complaint. I never saw him or his brothers again.

  Spider Webb’s mind must have been turning over similar ground. He sat there for a while, chewing his cud and practising his thousand-yard stare. Then, as we passed the Arts Centre, he spoke. ‘So,’ he said, as if making a commonplace observation for no other purpose than to break the silence. ‘Still a fuckwit after all these years.’

  The money was sticking into my bottom rib. I straightened up a little and hoped that it didn’t look like a summoning of my dignity.

  ‘Remember that night in the park when you tore that Fletcher kid’s pants with a piece of broken glass?’ said Spider, smiling to himself at the memory. ‘Him and his brothers were just fooling around, having a bit of fun, stirring you. All of a sudden, you went ballistic. Tried to take them all on. I’ll never forget the look on Geordie Fletcher’s face when you ripped his precious strides. If they hadn’t been so baggy, you’d probably have cut him.’

  You’d think a detective sergeant would have more highly developed powers of recall. ‘I did cut him,’ I said. ‘There was blood everywhere.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Spider. ‘Yours. You gave yourself a blood nose when you fell on the ground. You always were a loose cannon.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I jerked my thumb back over my shoulder, back the way we’d come. I didn’t remember any blood nose. ‘I suppose all that was my fault? I suppose it was my fault that Eastlake tried to push me off a balcony?’ Actually, it was. I’d practically begged him to do it. But Noel Webb wasn’t to know that.

  ‘If you hadn’t stopped me talking to the Fleet woman yesterday,’ he said, ‘there’s a fair chance that we’d have questioned Eastlake by today. Possibly even charged him. I doubt if he’d have tried anything under those circumstances. Even if you’d given him the chance.’

  Now I was being taken to task for my gallantry. ‘How was I supposed to know you were a cop? The way you were coming the heavy, flashing that gun of yours. I thought you were up to no good.’

  ‘If I remember correctly,’ said Spider, remembering correctly, ‘you were the one throwing your weight about. I merely suggested that you refrain from involving yourself in matters outside your authority. When you refused to take the hint, I emphasised my point by showing you Eastlake’s gun.’

  ‘I thought it was your gun.’

  ‘What would a chauffeur be doing with a pistol?’

  ‘Why would I assume it was Eastlake’s gun? I thought you were his bodyguard.’

  ‘It’s not all that uncommon for rich men to own a weapon,’ said Spider, like he was stating a self-evident truth. ‘Eastlake had three. All licensed, of course. But he always kept them at home. When I found that one in the Mercedes on Saturday morning, it was unusual enough to make me think he might be getting unstable.’

  We were crossing Princes Bridge. A pair of sculls came gliding out from beneath the pilings and raced each other upstream in the direction of the Botanic Gardens, the water flashing at every dip of the oars. I turned my head and followed the rowers’ progress until a truck in the next lane blocked my view. ‘I thought you were working some sort of scam on Eastlake,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah?’ Spider shifted his gum from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘What gave you that idea?’

  ‘That,’ I admitted, ‘is a very good question.’

  We rode the rest of the way in silence. It was preferable to having Noel Webb tell me how many ways wrong I’d been. As the car pulled up in front of police headquarters, Salina Fleet was coming down the steps. She was back in her serious costume. Beside her was a balding middle-aged man in a dark suit carrying a briefcase. They didn’t look like they’d just won Tattslotto.

  I got out of the police car, fluffed up my kaftan and wondered what Salina and I might say to each other this time around. We didn’t say anything. Salina’s mouth was just starting to open when Noel Webb stepped onto the footpath behind me. Salina’s jaw snapped shut like a trap. She and her companion executed an almost perfect left turn and the two of them wheeled off down the footpath together.

  ‘You were always wasting your time there,’ said Webb. ‘I could have told you that all along.’

  If I hadn’t been standing in front of police headquarters, I might have made some appropriate reply. As we entered the building, Spider stuck his sunglasses in his shirt pocket, screwed off his pinky ring and spat his gum into a fire bucket. His ears seemed less prominent.

  ‘Wait here for the present,’ I was told. The present was a long time coming. I waited ten minutes. I waited fifteen minutes. Seven-thirty came and went and it still hadn’t arrived. I began to entertain serious doubts that I’d get Red to the airport in time, even with a force-nine gale behind me.

  ‘Here’ was an interview room on the fifth floor. It had a little window in the door, a narrow laminex table fixed to the wall, a tape recorder and two plastic chairs. For some reason, I half-expected the door to be locked. Maybe all that padding around my waist was weighing on my conscience.

  Next to the interview room was a sort of open-plan office. The sign on the door said Fraud Squad. It was deserted. Except for the tireless DSS Webb and his Hellenic sidekick, the bunco team was clearly a nine-to-five sort of outfit. I picked up a phone. Nobody jumped out of a waste paper basket and demanded to know what I thought I was doing.

  Faye answered, home from work. Fresh from chasing her big story on Max Karlin. ‘I’m at the cop shop,’ I announced. As quickly as I could, I told her that Lloyd Eastlake had committed suicide and that I’d been with him when it happened.

  ‘How awful,’ said Faye. ‘Can I use this information?’

  ‘Possibly,’ I told her. ‘But I can’t discuss it right now.’

  She took that to mean I couldn’t speak freely, so she changed the subject. ‘The boys tell me you paid a visit to Artemis Prints this afternoon,’ she said. ‘You sly dog.’

  This was not an ideal time for a gossip session. ‘Did the boys tell you why I was there?’

  ‘No. But I can guess.’

  ‘I bet you can’t,’ I said.

  ‘Speaking of Claire,’ she said. ‘Wendy rang. She tried to call you at Ethnic Affairs and they referred her to Arts. Arts said they didn’t know where you were. And you weren’t at home. So she called here. Anyway, she said to remind you to make sure to get Red to the airport on time.’

  That was thoughtful of Wendy.

  At least the subject was back where I wanted it. ‘Listen, Faye,’ I said. ‘Can you do me a favour? If I’m not there by 8.30, do you mind driving Red to the airport?’ That way, at least he’d get back to school on schedule, even if it meant that next time I wanted to see him I’d probably have to appeal to the full bench of the Family Court.

  ‘Sure,’ said Faye. ‘You poor dear.’

  I’d just hung up when Ken Sproule arrived. I’d been wondering when he’d turn up. His transition from Arts had been a smooth one. Ken’s short-sleeved business shirt and polyester tie were clearly in their element in the hugger-mugger world of the gendarmerie.
He was bouncing about on the balls of his feet like a champion full forward angling for a mark.

  ‘Been in the wars, I hear, Murray,’ he said. ‘Thought I told you to watch out for them cognoscenti.’

  He gave me a good looking over, as though appraising my bloodlines for stud purposes. ‘You’re okay, though, aren’t you? No missing limbs? No internal bleeding?’ He didn’t look in my mouth, but he was only half joking. Clearly, he’d been thoroughly briefed.

  ‘Shaken but not stirred,’ I assured him. ‘But your mates the rozzers are keeping me on tenterhooks. Eastlake didn’t succeed in killing me, but the suspense of hanging around here just might.’

  Ken took me back into the interview room and shut the door. ‘You got the big picture, right?’ He was bouncing around so much the room felt like a squash court. ‘Paper-shuffling at Obelisk Trust. Eastlake suspected of knocking off the bloke in the moat.’

  I had that much of it, I agreed. ‘Plus the Combined Unions Super Scheme art fraud.’ I didn’t want him thinking I was a complete slouch.

  ‘How’d you hear about that?’ He was impressed.

  ‘Buy me lunch one day,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you all about it.’

  He didn’t press the point. ‘As you can well imagine,’ he said. ‘The manure has really hit the ventilator. Major construction project goes bust. Mutual fund chief executive dead on the floor. The business community is going to have kittens.’ He beamed at the sheer horror of it.

  He straddled a chair, folded his arms over the backrest and dropped his voice a notch. ‘And to cap it off, the city’s finest now find themselves in the embarrassing situation of having left a homicidal maniac on the loose for three days longer than absolutely necessary. They had grounds for questioning Eastlake on Saturday. If they had, most of this shit could have been avoided. They didn’t because the fraud squad guys decided their undercover investigation into the Obelisk fiddle took precedence over the Taylor homicide investigation.’

  The implications of what he was saying were clear. People were dead because of a police fuck-up. ‘If this gets out,’ he said. ‘The boys in blue will have very red faces.’ The fixer’s fixer had at last found something worthy of his mettle. If Ken Sproule could square this one away, the Chief Commissioner would be eating out of Gil Methven’s lap for years to come.

  Sproule jumped up and gave another display of shadow boxing. ‘It’s going to take some fancy footwork to get our ducks in a row on this little baby,’ he said. ‘You with me?’

  ‘I don’t see why I should be.’ Spider Webb might have saved my life but, if what Ken said was true, only after he’d put it at risk in the first place. I had no reason to want to let the cops off the hook. And Ken hadn’t exactly been 100 per cent frank with me last time I’d spoken to him, so I was in no big rush to do him any favours.

  Sproule didn’t smoke but he had some cigarettes. Was this standard interview-room procedure, I wondered? The informant smoked a hearty cigarette and agreed to co-operate with the authorities. I drew the smoke into my lungs and waited for the phone book around the head.

  He straddled the chair again like he was doing the bad cop/good cop routine as a one-man show. ‘What’s the first rule of government, Murray? The one that precedes and supersedes all others. The sine qua non of political power.’

  I didn’t know Ken could speak Latin. And he was a philosopher as well. It was a surprise-packed day.

  ‘Keep the cops happy,’ he said. ‘That’s the paramount rule of political survival. Cause if the cops are unhappy, life just ain’t worth living. Doesn’t matter if you’re Joseph Stalin or Mahatma Gandhi. It’s a universal truth.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I said. Ken’s logic had an unarguability to it that I just couldn’t argue with. And I might, at least, find out what he had in mind.

  ‘Good boy.’ He got up and started pacing again. If this kept up much longer, I’d get dizzy and pass out. And then Ken would start to go through my pockets and find what I had in my Reg Grundys. ‘Everybody wants the lid put on this thing as fast as possible. The Chief Commissioner has okayed it for you and me to sit down with the cops involved and see if we can’t come up with a result that everyone can live with.’

  ‘Two conditions,’ I said.

  Ken was ready for that. He would have thought less of me if I hadn’t asked. ‘Gil Methven is prepared to say that Eastlake resigned from all his official Arts positions as of the end of last year,’ he said, correctly anticipating my first demand. ‘That way, none of this will reflect on Angelo Agnelli as current minister. What’s your other condition?’

  ‘That depends on how long this little pow-wow takes,’ I said. ‘And it’s more of a favour than a condition. I might not even need it. But it’s well within your power, if I’m any judge. I’ll tell you what it is at the end of the meeting.’

  As a matter of principle, Ken Sproule didn’t like dealing in the dark. But he didn’t have much time to manoeuvre. The press would already be making a beeline for the Domain Road flat. ‘Okay,’ he scowled. ‘Let’s go. And try not to give too much cheek. The cops have long memories, you know. Mind your manners.’

  It wasn’t my manners I was worried about. It was the spondulicks in my dank underdaks. They were beginning to itch. If I didn’t get them out of there soon, I’d have a very nasty rash.

  We went upstairs to a conference room with venetian blinds on the windows and rings from coffee cups on the tabletop. Webb was already there and two other cops I’d never seen before, both in their fifties, one in a suit, the other in uniform. You could tell the one in the suit was a senior officer by the cast of his face and way Noel Webb approached him on all fours. The one in uniform was an Assistant Commissioner. I knew that because his epaulette insignia consisted of crossed silver batons in a laurel wreath surround. Also because he was wearing a name tag that said Eric Worrall, Assistant Commissioner—Crime. Eric was a gaunt, expressionless man who could have got a job walking behind the hearse in a Charles Dickens novel.

  The guy in the suit was introduced as Chief Inspector Brian Buchanan. He was all neck and looked like he’d gladly bust Santa Claus for driving an unregistered sleigh.

  None of the cops were delirious with joy about me and Sproule being there and they didn’t go to a lot of trouble to conceal the fact. Having to share trade secrets with a couple of political flacks was bad enough, never mind that one of them had his shirt hanging out and smelt like he should have been in the care of the Salvation Army. I tried to take up as little space as possible and resist the urge to scratch.

  Micaelis arrived just as we’d finished the introductions. Assistant Commissioner Worrall waved us into our seats. ‘This is strictly informal,’ he said. ‘And strictly confidential. The objective is to pool our information and determine a course of action. Agreed?’ Ken Sproule and I nodded. Worrall handed the running of the meeting to Buchanan.

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ said Buchanan. He had a pencil in his hand and pointed at Micaelis with it. ‘What did the Lambert woman have to say?’

  ‘She’s on pain-killers, sir, but reasonably lucid.’ Micaelis’ hitherto pally demeanour was no longer in evidence. ‘She says she has no idea why Eastlake attacked her. Claims they’d been lovers for about a year but never quarrelled. She says she’d seen him earlier today and he was agitated about business matters, but otherwise normal towards her.’

  Which meant, as I had hoped, that she had enough cunning not to mention the money. She probably wondered why Micaelis didn’t ask her about it.

  ‘What about the other one?’ said Buchanan. ‘Fleet.’

  Micaelis had a sheaf of paper in front of him. ‘She contacted us this afternoon and came in with her solicitor while I was in attendance at the Lambert residence. She had a statement already prepared.’ He shuffled the papers around until he found what he wanted, referring to it as he spoke. ‘She and Eastlake were both on the committee that recommends arts grants. Last August, about the time that applications wer
e being considered, she was having a relationship with Marcus Taylor. She recommended him for a grant and spoke highly of his technical skills and his’—Micaelis’ finger found the exact phrase—‘his post-modernist sensibility in relation to the validity of quotation and appropriation.’

  ‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’ Buchanan pointed his pencil at me. He seemed to think I was an art expert.

  ‘It means he could do good fakes,’ I said.

  ‘You can get a grant for that?’ For a man who thought he was an orchestra conductor, Buchanan was harbouring some deep cultural insecurities.

  ‘Only a small one, sir,’ said Micaelis. ‘And Fleet thinks that was only to keep her happy. But, a few weeks later, Eastlake approached her wanting to know more about Taylor. In particular, he wanted to know if she thought Taylor could paint him some pictures in the manner of certain well-known artists. He even produced a list.’

  Sproule spoke, addressing himself to the Assistant Commissioner. ‘The background here relates to the Combined Unions Superannuation Scheme. Eastlake had persuaded the CUSS to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in an art collection, using a front called Austral Fine Art. The collection was a fiction. It existed only on paper. He used the money to keep his Obelisk round-robin going. He probably had in mind that when the Karlcraft project eventually paid off, Austral could recommend liquidating the collection. He got away with it for nearly a year, pretending to buy and sell artworks. But then the CUSS board decided it wanted to have an exhibition. Got all excited about the idea. Eastlake had no option but to play along. Suddenly he needed real paintings.’

  Micaelis resumed. ‘Fleet approached Taylor on Eastlake’s behalf. She claims she was never party to any deception he may have subsequently engaged in, but she clearly knew what was going on. Taylor began producing paintings of the kind Eastlake required. The pictures were painted in his studio at the old YMCA building. Fleet informed Eastlake when they were ready. They were then picked up by Senior Sergeant Webb.’