Fallout Page 8
‘First of all, she’s not a bitch.’ That was probably the last thing Denise wanted to hear, but Ihaka was approaching the point of not giving a shit. ‘Secondly, I didn’t make this up. Third, while I have no plans or any great desire to see Miriam again, I’m not going to promise I won’t because she has information and knowledge I might need to access.’
Having mentally scripted the encounter to ensure the happy ending she knew they both desired, Denise was flabbergasted by Ihaka’s improvisation. She went to Plan B: ‘I can’t believe you could do this to Billy.’
‘Denise, I’m not doing anything to Billy.’
‘He’s desperate to see you. All I’ve heard from him the past few days is, “Mum, when’s Tito coming?”’
‘My relationship with Billy is a by-product of my relationship with you. Billy understands that. Right now we’re struggling, and it’s not going to make Billy happy if we’re struggling in front of him.’
‘So how do we fix it if we’re not seeing each other?’
‘I didn’t say we shouldn’t see each other,’ he said. ‘But I guess we need to think about what’s got us here, and what needs to change to get us back to where we were before.’
Denise looked away, saying something under her breath.
‘What was that?’
She turned back, giving him a look that made Charlton’s parting stare seem tender. ‘But we know what needs to happen for us to get back to where we were,’ she said hotly, ‘and you’ve just made it crystal fucking clear you’re not prepared to do that.’ She reached for her handbag. ‘Why don’t you just drop the bullshit and come right out and say it’s over?’
‘Because I don’t want it to be over.’
She stood up. ‘Is that right? So if neither of us wants it to be over, how come it is?’
Ihaka watched her leave, vaguely aware that a waiter was placing several dishes on the table. He ordered a carafe of the house pinot noir and turned his attention to the food. There was a lot to get through and no one to help him.
Seven
Having wasted time he didn’t have procrastinating, Johan Van Roon rang a former police colleague who could trace the owner of the Honda Civic which had transported Eddie Brightside — or a lookalike — away from the Hawke’s Bay winery. Assuming he was so inclined.
In his previous life Van Roon had helped the ex-colleague in ways big and small, but now he was a pariah, and one of the first things a pariah loses is the ability to call in favours. As far as those who owe him are concerned, his disgrace cancels out their obligation.
But whether out of pity or conscience the ex-colleague didn’t hang up. He complained all right, but that was a good sign. If he hadn’t bitched and moaned, Van Roon would have known it was a futile exercise.
‘Jesus Christ, talk about a one-armed paperhanger, I’m up to my eyeballs. You’ve got no idea.’
Van Roon didn’t bother pointing out he actually had a pretty good idea. ‘Not a good time?’
‘That’s the understatement of the year. Plus I could get myself in the shit.’
‘I know,’ said Van Roon. ‘Believe me, I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important.’
‘Important how?’
‘It’s my livelihood. There’s bugger-all work around, and there’ll be even less if I can’t deliver.’ The silence stretched out. ‘You still there?’
‘Leave it with me. It won’t happen today, though. As I said, this place is a fucking madhouse. You’re sure the number’s right?’
‘It came from a civilian.’
‘Well, you know how it works: shit in, shit out. Give us a couple of days.’
‘Thanks a lot, mate.’
‘Then we’ll be all square, right? Don’t ask me again. Don’t make me say no.’
That afternoon Van Roon drove up to Raumati Beach to see the retired journalist Barry McCormick.
As he came out of Pukerua Bay onto the coast road, the cloud thickened and sagged and the anaemic winter sun faded like a dying light bulb. Within the grey dome the only daubs of colour were the breaking waves foaming amidst the driftwood and the dark-green scrub on Kapiti Island. The base from which Te Rauparaha and his warriors set out like Vikings on their campaigns of plunder and utu looked desolate and bereft of value, strategic or otherwise.
McCormick had given detailed instructions: park on the street, walk down the drive, then follow the pedestrian thoroughfare snaking between the properties jostling for proximity to the beach; when you reach the sand, double back across the patch of rough lawn and up through the rock garden and Norfolk pines to the deck.
His place was an old bach, a do-it-yourself job that was never quite finished, full of scavenged furniture and anachronisms, where once kids with caramel skin and bleached hair bolted food before careering back to the beach whooping like Apaches. Or, when the weather drove them inside, played cards and board games that ended, often prematurely, in a crossfire of triumphalism and accusation.
McCormick himself was a leftover from the era of filterless cigarettes and long socks: crew-cut and darkly weathered, his spindly arms and legs out of kilter with a wobbling paunch. Only his unblinking magpie scrutiny and crammed bookshelves hinted at an existence beyond cold beer, lawn bowls and the TAB.
They examined each other across a lino-topped table. McCormick asked, ‘How do you sleep?’
Van Roon shrugged. ‘Not as well as I used to.’
‘The sound of the sea, son,’ said McCormick. ‘Nothing like falling asleep to the sound of waves. You sleep like a baby.’
‘Beachfront property’s a bit out of my league,’ said Van Roon. ‘Besides, I bet your rates would buy a heap of sleeping pills.’
‘Christ, you’re a romantic soul, aren’t you? You’re the ex-cop, right?’
Van Roon nodded. ‘I retired.’
‘Course you did, son. You gave up being a Detective Inspector to run errands for Caspar Quedley.’
‘I didn’t come up here to talk about my career.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you did,’ said McCormick. ‘But you want my help and neither of us has got anything better to do.’ He tilted his head interrogatively. ‘I heard you were corrupt. I heard you drilled someone in cold blood, just to shut him up.’ McCormick sat back looking pleased with himself.
Not as clever as he thinks he is, thought Van Roon; not many are. His gaze drifted away over McCormick’s shoulder. It was raining heavily now, sheeting in off the sea, pelting the sliding glass doors. ‘Say for the sake of argument you heard right, you’d be silly to get on the wrong side of me, wouldn’t you?’
‘That’s a point,’ said McCormick with a satisfied chuckle, as if he’d managed to extract valuable information without Van Roon even being aware of it. ‘So what can I do for you?’
‘Are you absolutely sure it was Eddie Brightside?’
McCormick folded his arms, an assertion of authority. ‘Let me tell you something, son. You hear people say they never forget a face. What they mean is they have a pretty good memory for faces. Not me. I literally never forget a face. If I see a face that rings a bell, I’ll go talk to the person to find out if I’m right. I’ve been doing it for fucking years and I’ve never struck out. A few weeks ago I saw this woman on Lambton Quay: career woman in her forties, tidy enough but no show-stopper. I knew I’d seen her before, but couldn’t place her at all. Turns out when she was a student, she did a bit of waitressing at this restaurant in Thorndon I went to a couple of times.’
‘So what?’
‘So what? She took my order for fancy-pants beef stew twenty-odd years ago and I remembered her face, that’s fucking what.’
‘Doesn’t necessarily follow. The fact that you thought you’d seen her before and the fact you went to that restaurant around the time she worked there doesn’t prove anything. It just establishes the possibility.’
‘I introduced myself ten minutes ago. Memory not what it used to be?’
‘Don’t you worry about my memory, sonny boy,’ growled McCormick. ‘I remember stuff that happened before you were born like it was yesterday.’
‘Then you’d remember Brightside’s girlfriend.’
‘Louise Fraser? Course I bloody remember her. I worked with her in the Gallery.’
‘Obviously that wasn’t her at the winery?’
‘Obviously.’
‘What happened to Louise?’
‘She’s still around, far as I know,’ said McCormick. ‘Last I heard she was a policy analyst at the Human Rights Commission.’
‘Did you recognise the other one? Maybe you sat behind her at a Charlie Chaplin film in Lower Hutt once upon a time.’
McCormick squinted, his eyes hostile slits beneath what was left of his eyebrows. ‘You’ve got a bloody funny way of trying to get people to give you a hand. As it happens, I had seen her before — I never forget a face, see? But I’ve no idea who she is or where I saw her.’
‘Was it recent?’
McCormick shook his head. ‘Back in the good old days.’
‘So she was probably in the political-slash-journalism world?’
‘Doesn’t necessarily follow,’ said McCormick with passable mimicry. ‘It was pretty social back then, and there was more overlap. Things weren’t so — what’s that word? — compart-mentalised. Let me ask you a question: why do you think you’re doing this? I mean, what did Quedley actually tell you?’
‘That he’s got a client who wants to track down Brightside.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Brightside talked him into a bad investment.’
McCormick’s laugh rose to a cackle. ‘Jesus wept, in those days every bastard was giving every other bastard dud share tips.’
‘Well, you know Quedley, you tell me: why does he want me to find Brightside?’
McCormick tried to look clueless, but came across as shifty. ‘Shit, don’t ask me. All I know is Caspar operates on the iceberg principle: you only get to see the tip.’
Tele-marketers who ring in the middle of dinner get a warmer reception than Van Roon got from Louise Fraser. It took some fast and earnest talking to convince her that his Eddie Brightside update would be worth hearing. He offered to buy her a drink at the venue of her choice, but she wanted to get home to her cat. If it was all that urgent, he could drop by.
Fraser’s apartment building was off Vivian Street, a neighbourhood of backstreets and inner-city disorderliness, terraced houses and hopeful boutiques sandwiched between offices and workshops. After the inevitable peephole scrutiny and much clicking and clanking, the door was opened by a middle-aged woman in yoga pants and a sweatshirt cradling a ginger cat. Van Roon’s instant impression was that the woman had once been pretty, and had always been complicated. The cat looked as supercilious as every other pampered, overweight feline he’d come across.
She invited him in. The apartment was tiny — real estate agents would have debated the merits of ‘compact’ and ‘cosy’ before going with both — but managed to be stylish without being clinical.
‘What’s it called?’ he asked, feigning interest in the cat.
‘His name is Simon.’
‘Named after?’
‘Why should he be named after anyone?’
‘When people give pets proper names, as opposed to Rover or Fluffy or whatever, they usually have someone in mind. In my experience.’
‘Do you remember Monty Python?’
‘I’ve seen clips on YouTube,’ he said. ‘Seemed a bit dated.’
‘You’re too old to patronise my generation,’ said Fraser. She and the cat sat down on a retro two-seater sofa. ‘Simon’s named after an electric elk mentioned in passing in one of their less crowd-pleasing skits, in which an absurdly pretentious theatre critic reviews a play that explores the human condition via the British Rail timetable.’ She gave him a receptionist’s smile, the sort that comes and goes in the blink of an eye. ‘Sorry you asked?’
‘It went over my head,’ said Van Roon. ‘But it didn’t take long.’
‘Well, anyway, life’s too short to fritter away in idle chit-chat. I gather you’re going to tell me a ghost story.’
‘Your former colleague Barry McCormick is certain — like one hundred per cent certain — he saw Brightside in Hawke’s Bay a few days ago.’ He told her McCormick’s story. ‘Do you believe it?’
‘Let me say first of all that one hundred per cent certain is a tautology.’ She said it with a faint smile, as if to let him know it was more for her amusement than his discomfort. ‘As for what Mac saw or didn’t see, I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. Knowing Mac I’ve no doubt he believes the person he saw at that winery was E.F. Brightside. And that’s about all I can say.’
‘OK, assuming McCormick’s right, what do you make of it?’
The question seemed to bemuse her. ‘I don’t know what to make of it. Actually that’s not true: I don’t make anything of it. I haven’t seen, heard from or heard of Eddie for almost thirty years and, as far as I know, nor has anyone else. He stopped cropping up in my thoughts and feelings a long, long time ago. Anyway, why do you care? What’s it to you whether it was him or not?’
‘Personally, not a thing. It’s a job: I’m being paid to find out.’
‘Surely you jest?’
Van Roon shook his head. ‘I’m just the hired help. I don’t know who the client is, but apparently back in the eighties Brightside advised him to invest in some shares that tanked big-time. Seems he’s still pissed off about it.’
‘Oh, for crying out loud.’ Fraser offloaded Simon so that she could use more expressive body language; he left the room without a backward glance. ‘Of course Eddie dabbled in the stock market — practically everybody did. It was a crazy time and proof, if any were needed, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. No one personified that more than Eddie: he’d buy shares on the say-so of some deadbeat he met in a bar. But I never heard him dispensing investment advice, for the very good reason that no one who knew him would’ve paid any attention to it.’
‘Well, maybe the client didn’t know him well enough. You must have a theory on why he took off. Everybody else did.’
‘You mean those hysterical spy scenarios? My theory’s much more mundane. I think Eddie was impaled on the horns of a dilemma and while he was trying to decide what to do, an opportunity came up overseas. It was a win-win situation: by grabbing the opportunity, he extricated himself from an uncomfortable and perhaps impossible situation.’
‘And what might that have been?’
Fraser sighed. ‘There was another woman. Well, I did warn you it was mundane. I went through a brief phase of thinking there are worse fates in life than getting married and having children. Some of Eddie’s friends inflated that into me scheming day and night to drag him to the altar. It was nothing of the sort, but given his other girlfriend was probably at him to dump me, you can understand why he might have felt trapped.’
‘You know for a fact he was seeing someone else?’
‘You mean am I one hundred per cent certain? No.’ She stood up. ‘If I’m going to talk about this and you’re going to listen, we’ll need some recreational drugs. In this apartment that means alcohol.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Van Roon. ‘I’m driving.’
Fraser pulled a stage frown. ‘Are you a teetotaller?’
‘Well, no but —.’
‘If one glass of pinot gris puts you over the limit, you’re not the grown man you give every appearance of being
.’
She came back from the kitchenette with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. She filled the glasses, passed one to Van Roon and took a grateful gulp from the other. He got the feeling it wasn’t her first of the evening, and that the bottle wouldn’t go back in the fridge when he left.
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome. I think he had another girlfriend because that’s the sort of guy he was. Based on what I’ve observed over time, men who, for whatever reason, attract women like moths to a flame aren’t inclined to look gift horses in the mouth — if you’ll pardon the metaphorical mishmash. Secondly, the very last thing you’d say about Eddie was that his life was an open book. Not only was he cryptic, if not downright evasive, about what he’d done overseas, he was often cryptic about what he’d done that afternoon. Bear in mind this was back in the dark ages before mobile phones, when you could drop off the radar for a few hours here and a night there, which he tended to do. The fact that I was in the Press Gallery and he was working for the government meant we couldn’t really live in each other’s pockets even if we’d wanted to, which I didn’t.’ She paused. ‘I don’t suppose the name Gerry Waitz means anything to you?’
‘Mega-rich American,’ said Van Roon, ‘who Brightside got to know when he worked in the States. Owns a property in the Wairarapa.’
‘My, my,’ said Fraser arching her eyebrows, this time without irony. ‘We have done our homework. I can see the search for Eddie Brightside isn’t a whim.’
Van Roon shrugged. ‘It’s not the hunt for Osama bin Laden either. What about Waitz?’
‘Soon after Eddie and I became a couple, we had a weekend at Waitz Manor. It’s a lovely place — great big country house with rolling lawns and rose gardens. Even has a maze. Waitz turned out to be a generous host and, somewhat to my surprise, quite sophisticated. I suppose I was expecting a born-again evangelical in cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat who smoked a ten-inch cigar at breakfast and kept red wine in the fridge, but he wasn’t like that at all. He was, however, incredibly right-wing. The nuclear ships row was hotting up and Waitz couldn’t make up his mind whether David Lange was a commie fifth-columnist conspiring to undermine everything we hold dear or simply the biggest fucking fool under the sun, although he was tilting towards the former. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been interested in discussing the issue, but he wasn’t; not remotely. He seemed to think that putting us up for the weekend and plying us with food and wine gave him the right to rant ad infinitum and obliged us to listen in respectful silence.