Shane Maloney: The Brush-Off

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.