by Nick Spill
Henry went outside and returned with the afternoon paper, the Auckland Star.
They’re still there, pretending to be asleep.” He turned to Mel.
“Must be waiting for me to return.”
“MAN BURNT TO DEATH IN HOUSE,” Henry read the headline. There was a picture of the remains of Clovis’s house underneath. He read the lead article whilst Mel and Clovis crowded around him.
“Firemen early this morning dragged from a blazing house in Ponsonby the charred remains of a man. The fire was brought under control by 4:00 A.M. in a five-fire tender alarm that kept the residents of Summer Street nervously awake all night as firemen fought to stop the flames from spreading to the nearby wooden houses.
“The tenant of the house, Mr. C Tibet, was not in the house at the time, although the Auckland Star has ascertained that he had no insurance.
“‘This whole area of Ponsonby is like a tinderbox,’ Fire Chief Brian Fitzpatrick said at the scene of the tragedy. ‘One spark and the whole neighborhood could have burnt down. We got here just in time.’
“Police later identified the remains of the burnt body from dental records as Hone Wilson, a well-known Maori Land rights activist.
“Jesus shit! That’s Wiremu’s brother. We saw him at the pub! Christ!” Henry interrupted himself.
Mel felt a taut wire in her stomach snap. She was as white as a sheet. She collapsed into a seat with her hands over her face.
“Then they did switch bodies,” Henry muttered.
Mel was the first to sit up. She took out a lace handkerchief from her trouser pocket and wiped her face then blew her nose so loudly she laughed nervously whilst stealing a look at Henry.
“I’m so relieved it wasn’t that man. But, I feel terrible for Wiremu. He must be devastated.”
“We need a lawyer. I know just the man. We should have involved him sooner.” Henry flung down the paper and stood up. “You two have to talk to the police, but only after you’ve met with my lawyer. We’re going to find Wiremu’ then we’re going to smoke out this Turk and find Plum. Okay?”
Henry turned to Clovis who was trying to mouth air. Eventually Clovis spoke in a low whisper.
“If they did this to Hone, what would they do to Plum?”
• • •
“Perfect! I love SPIBBIES!” declared Alan Crispfeldt, who was dressed in a traditional three-piece pin-striped suit, shiny black Bostons and a red striped tie with a gold pin and a gold watch chain. Mr. Crispfeldt was an expert in the currency export laws that the New Zealand government had devised to stop money leaving the country. SPIBBIES stood for South Pacific Investment Bank that had branches in Auckland, Nauru, Hong Kong and Panama. He represented the Maori Land Rights Council and an odd mixture of wealthy investors and poor Maori activists.
“I understand entirely. You needn’t say more,” Alan Crispfeldt declared on Henry’s first visit to Crispfeldt’s chambers. “I have clients who want to send money out of the country, and you have money you want to get in. They are restricted to taking out $6,000 a year, each. You can bring in as much money as you like, but you will be taxed by the New Zealand government. You’ve already paid enough tax over there, so why be victimized with double taxation?”
He adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses and measured the effect of his words on his new client.
“Please be aware that as your lawyer I aim to obey all relevant laws. There is a huge difference between tax avoidance and tax fraud. The process I have developed is both elegant and legal. Although, with all the shell companies we set up and the shifting of money from New York to Nauru, Hong Kong or wherever, it becomes hopelessly complicated for a little government clerk to understand. So, through a shell company here, we assign your money, which is still in New York, to my client in Hong Kong. We do the transfers through SPIBBIES. They’re very cooperative. My client gives you, through another shell company we set up here, his original money. It’s really magic. So he hasn’t exported any money and you haven’t imported money. He has already paid taxes on that company’s earnings, or should I say losses. So no ones been naughty and you both get what you want. It’s like a shell game with no pea!
“Of course, we take a 2 percent administrative fee off the top, and we get the best currency exchange rates. And there’s my 3 percent fee from the original sum.” Crispfeldt slipped this in. One cabinet minister and the other politicians he dealt with always objected to these fees. How could they complain? Crispfeldt thought to himself. They were robbing the country anyway. Why couldn’t he rob them? Henry Lotus seemed to be taking this all in good humor. He was not haggling at all. He must have stolen it.
“Then we can arrange for your money to be put into a money market fund here that’s lent out at twenty-five to twenty-six percent interest. So it’s quite profitable. You almost double your money when it comes down here, and you double it again in three years. It’s almost as good as printing it!” He laughed at his own joke. Henry kept a straight face.
“I was thinking of keeping it liquid so I could buy some property.”
“Oh yes, yes. Of course. We can arrange that too. Anything you like. Short-term loans can fetch even higher rates. Twenty-eight percent is no problem. At the moment.”
Henry sighed. Crispfeldt was his kind of lawyer. Ultra respectable on the outside and completely unscrupulous on the inside. What you would call, in New York, a total sleazebag. Or was it scumbag?
• • •
“Should’ve done this sooner,” Henry muttered.
“You’ve a lawyer?” Clovis tried not to be surprised.
“Of course.” Henry noticed Mel was rereading the article on the fire.
Henry was unsure how much experience Crispfeldt had in arson and homicide cases, but he knew the lawyer had a shrewd mind and the right connections. He dialed the number.
“Crispfeldt speaking.”
“This is Henry Lotus.”
“Oh yes, yes. How are you Henry old boy?”
“Fucked, Alan. Fucked. Have you read the Star?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m involved in that fire.”
“Do you know the Wilsons?”
“Yes.”
“Say no more. Come over right away.” Crispfeldt hung up. He had lost one client today. Hone’s photo was on the front page of the afternoon paper. It was a bad sign.
• • •
Tony Look drove to Bruce’s house. Chuck opened the door. Bruce sat upright in his rocking chair, his face immobile. Chuck paced up and down the shag pile carpet. Tony stood in the middle of the living room with his tongue out and his tie loosened. He watched Chuck’s feet wear down the pile.
“No. You’re wrong, Tony. We can’t burn it now. If we back down we’ll never be free!” Chuck reasoned.
“Chuck’s right.” Bruce spoke at last. “They’ll force us to grow their dope on our land on their terms. We can’t give in. And aren’t we forgetting Plum? Her name was on the car? It’s no coincidence that she disappeared and Sam’s been visited by the police.”
“My wife says Plum is a whore and she will only bring misfortune on our family,” Tony muttered.
Chuck remembered catching Tony and Plum behind a shed after school. Plum was barely thirteen and Tony had her knickers down and his hand up her skirt.
“Remember Plum’s parents? How they died?” Bruce glared at Chuck and Tony.
“What do you mean?” Tony shot back. He jumped as the phone rang.
• • •
Terry Turner washed his hands in the back of the workshop, a dirty concrete building behind his large used car lot on Ellerslie Road. He flung the blue rubber gloves into a plastic crate next to some auto spray equipment and turned to John Eustace.
“You can’t say I don’t have an acidic sense of humor.” Terry spoke in his soft high-pitched voice. John allowed himself a grin. He did not have to answer. He had heard the same pun twice on the drive back from Pukekohe.
“I hope they got the message on the
hood.” Terry wiped his hands on a towel. “They can read backwards. I only hope it sunk in.”
John’s grin broke into a wide smile.
“They’re trying to be hoods, anyway. And they’ll get burned! Clean up that car and we’ll get outta here. Don’t leave a speck of dust on it. It’s gotta look like it never left the lot.”
Terry the Turk gained a couple of inches in his Frye cowboy boots tucked over his black trousers. He wore a black cotton shirt open at the neck to show a Kruggerand gleaming from a thick gold chain.
Terry waited by the Lincoln. He watched John change the license plates back. John drove Terry to a phone booth off a side street in Panmure. He never made any important phone calls from his car lot or the Flamingo or his home. He even assumed the nearby payphones were tapped.
Terry dialed the number he had memorized and fed enough coins into the phone box for his call to Pukekohe.
Bruce pressed the receiver to his ear but did not speak. Terry, in a Maori voice, spoke slowly, as if addressing a child.
“We cleaned your car today, boy. We’ll clean up your crop too if you’se don’t listen carefully. You’re to load it up in a truck. We know you’se have harvested it and it’s ready to be bagged. Put it all in big plastic bags. We’ll call you’se on Sunday evening to tell ya where to deliver it. No Kung Fu stuff.”
“Who are you?!” Bruce demanded. “I want your name!” Bruce stood up, his eyes half closed.
“Wilson,” Terry spat out. “That’s all you’re getting, boy. Call you Sunday, at five, when the sun sets over your cabbages!” Terry hung up and let out a high-pitched chuckle.
• • •
Bruce replaced the receiver. He recounted the exact words of the Maori to Tony and Chuck then collapsed into his chair covering his face with his hands. Chuck paced across the shag pile carpet while Tony stood in front of the painting entitled Stag at Bay.
“It’s not possible. It’s just not possible.”
“Perhaps it’s a trick,” Chuck stopped in front of Bruce.
“It’s not business, it’s extortion, and he didn’t even mention Plum. Right?” Tony added.
“I didn’t want to mention her name to him. So where is she, if she’s involved in this?”
“How many Wilsons are there?” Tony was trying to think rationally.
“Hundreds. And we don’t know where to look first. Auckland? Otahuhu? Here? It’s Tuesday night. We have less than five days to do as he says, or,” Bruce took a deep breath, “or something.”
“Four, and we’ve got to find Plum. She must be behind this,” Tony insisted.
“She doesn’t even know we’ve been growing this,” Chuck retorted. “She could have walked out on her boyfriend and gone off with someone else.”
“I don’t know, Chuck. If the police are so interested in talking to her, we should be too. It’s too much of a coincidence she’s missing.”
“I agree,” Tony added.
“OK. How?” Chuck gave in. He had forgotten how forgiving his two brothers had been when they checked him out of Oakley Hospital after his heroin overdose. How they took him back to the farm and supported him whilst he went through another nerve-racking withdrawal. They had never mentioned it to him. “We have to save the crop as well.”
“Or destroy it.” Tony was thinking the unthinkable. It would be better to see it burn than hand it over to someone else who could come back next year and force them to repeat the process.
“Remember we used to dream of having a gang?” Bruce looked at his two brothers. He wanted their full attention.
“As kids we used to go charging down to the milk bar in Pukekohe on our 100 cc farm bikes.”
“You only had a 50 cc,” Tony reminded Chuck.
“Well, we should put that together now, tonight.”
“Most of our relatives are too stick-in-the-mud. Besides, we can’t tell them about our crop.” Chuck dampened Bruce’s enthusiasm.
“Martin and Rick know about it,” Tony added.
“Yeah.” Bruce began to smile. “We only have to tell them Plum is kidnapped, and they’ll move heaven and earth to find her. You know how they really like her.”
“I don’t think ‘like’ is the right word,” Chuck added.
“They can help dig out this Wilson and find Plum.”
“Okay. I’ll go to see the Wongs.” Chuck went to get his helmet and leather jacket.
“We’re in this now till the end. I said we’d bitten off more than we could chew when Chuck planted the seedlings. Well, we have. We’re in this all the way.” Tony stood up and embraced Chuck who already had his black helmet on. Bruce stood up and hugged them both, knocking his head on Chuck’s visor. They were silent as they held each other.
• • •
“Henry Lotus and Clovis Tibet. Sounds like something out of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera.” He begun to hum a melody from one of their operas but stopped when he noticed his guests were not amused.
They sat on red leather chairs and looked at the oak paneled walls with watercolors of 19th century sailing ships. Henry tried to explain the series of events that brought them to Alan Crispfeldt’s office, but Mel and Clovis interrupted him. Alan sat behind his large kauri desk and eyed his cocktail cabinet opposite.
“You have to start from the beginning. I’m lost,” Alan said as he chewed on his gold-rimmed glasses.
Henry excused himself to use the bathroom. He had spotted a tall wooden filing cabinet where Alan’s secretary sat, and he now tried the first cabinet but it was locked. He opened a desk drawer and found a set of keys. He opened the cabinets one by one until he came to the client files marked “W.” He took a scrap of paper from the desk and wrote down Wiremu Wilson’s addresses, one in Parnell and one in Northland.
Henry walked into the office and closed the heavy wooden doors behind him then ran his wet hands through his hair as Mel gave him a quick questioning look.
“Well, the only thing to do is go and see them, then we’ll clear this up. You’ve done nothing wrong. And Plum Blossom might be a clue to this entire regrettable episode.” Alan sighed. He hated going to Police Headquarters. “I’ll go with them and see that everything goes right, and we’ll settle up later?”
• • •
The black Rover 90 crawled out of its parking space in the basement of the Albert Street garage. Alan Crispfeldt tried to cheer up his three morbid-faced passengers. Henry turned from the front seat to give Mel a quick wink.
“Drop me off here, Alan. I’ll get a cab home. Bye, love. Clovis, just be cool and let Alan do all the talking.” He turned in his seat to shake hands with his lawyer before slamming the door too hard. Alan winced and drove to Cook Street.
The first thing Clovis saw when he stepped up to the main counter were a stack of 8 x 10 black and white photographs of Plum Blossom on the counter, reproductions of her University of Auckland ID photograph.
Crispfeldt had phoned ahead and the duty sergeant expected him. Mel and Clovis stared at the photograph. The three visitors were escorted to an unmarked office on the fifth floor. It was a small room painted pale blue.
Alan Crispfeldt felt like a regular at an exclusive restaurant who had been made to wait too long for a table. He hoped Inspector Bernard Grimble would not be heading this investigation. Clovis had not remembered the name of the detective who had questioned him. Alan knew Inspector Grimble had a vendetta against the Wilson brothers, and Crispfeldt, because he represented the Wilsons.
The door flew open. A tall man with thick eyebrows entered and stared hard at Mel and Clovis. Clovis not only recognized him from earlier, but also felt he was back in school, about to be interrogated by the headmaster.
“Evening. I’m Inspector Grimble. Glad you came in. I want to take statements from both of you,” he said in a soft deep voice, smiling at his captive audience. The inspector ignored Crispfeldt. The lawyer stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets and puffed up his chest.
“Ah! Mr. Crispfeldt. Forg
ot about you there.” Grimble wore a light grey suit, a little worn around the elbows and knees, but presentable for a senior policeman.
• • •
“What did Plum Blossom actually do at the Flamingo Paradise?” The inspector rephrased a question he had asked earlier. They were not telling everything, which was very common in his line of work, but for two well-dressed professionals, it was annoying.
“She was a masseuse.”
“Come, come, Clovis. Do you expect me to believe that? Our men routinely raid the place. Vice is always prosecuting girls there who’ll do anything for a price.”
“Well, Plum didn’t! Okay?”
“Did she say that to you?”
“Yes.”
“What were her exact words?”
“Inspector, I must protest. The man’s already told you this twice. She’s missing. Give him some room, will you? Can’t you see he’s disturbed about her disappearance? You’re treating him like a common criminal, yet he wants to help you.” Crispfeldt stared down the inspector.
“Thank you, Mr. Crispfeldt. Point well taken.” The policeman turned to Clovis and changed his tone. “Excuse my curiosity, but I have to know everything. There might be a clue, a hint of something you might have forgotten, something that could be vital to me. It’s painful but necessary. I trust you understand?”
Clovis nodded. The last two sentences were identical to what he heard at the airport before he got the gloved hand treatment. How much understanding did he need?
“Now, Clovis, did Plum Blossom ever mention anything about a Terry Turner?”
“No. She never said that name to me. Who is he?” He was not lying. Wiremu had been the one to tell him about Turner, and he could not mention Wiremu’s name.
Crispfeldt silently fumed. He would have something to say to Commissioner Thompson, when they met at the next Governor General’s garden party, in two Sundays. The inspector had pioneered the use of the “no search warrant-forced entry” tactic on known anti-apartheid organizers on the basis that all such dissidents were drug users. “It stands to reason that these people who do not respect the rights of others to enjoy sport without politics are also the same people who indulge in illegal narcotics.” Crispfeldt still remembered the inspector’s quote from an interview in New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. He hoped one day to throw the quote back in the cop’s face before a hostile jury. But he had other matters to take care of now, including the abuse of his client, Mr. Tibet.
