Good Money (30 page)

I could tell from his frown that he was trying to think.

‘It's only about four blocks from here. You've seen the traffic. It's crazy to drive.'

His frown deepened. ‘Yeah.'

I set off out of the laneway to Little Lonsdale Street. He lumbered after me in his thongs, the yellow envelope in his hand.

‘This way,' I said, and bolted in a stiff-legged power walk down the hill, west, towards Spencer Street. It was getting on to knock-off time and the nearby offices were expelling their workforce. Crowds in suits took over the narrow street, marching like defeated soldiers to Flagstaff Station. I strode against the flow, elbows up when necessary, ducking and weaving. All that walking along the Maribyrnong had paid off — I was not out of breath. On the contrary, adrenalin kicked in and I gazelled on my toes. I glanced around and saw Maurangi fifteen metres back. I kept going, staying close to the buildings. Ahead on the left was a narrow lane and from it a police car nosed out. I stopped. Constable Ross was out of the car and sprinting. I turned and started to run back up the hill. There was a chance both of us could take Maurangi down. Instead a hand grabbed my arm and pulled me around. ‘No! Ross! Stop!'

‘Shut up, you,' she said. She joined my hands behind me and cuffed them.

‘You don't understand. It's him. Maurangi. He's just up there.'

Ross slammed me against the wall. ‘You're under arrest, Monte.'

‘No, stop,' I hissed. ‘Listen. Maurangi is right behind me. If you let me go —'

‘As if,' Ross said in a loud voice.

Maurangi, who had been thundering down the hill to catch up to me, stopped dead.

Ross cleared her throat. ‘Galvanina Monte, I'm arresting you for solicitation.'

Maurangi backed up and slowly turned around. He walked back towards Prices's chambers, very nonchalant — and I groaned in disgust as Ross shoved me in the car. It would have been the arrest of her career. Not to mention justice for Tania and getting a dangerous psychopath off the streets. But she was playing her part too well and wouldn't listen. At least, I was grateful for one thing: I was alive. ‘Thanks, Raewyn,' I said. ‘I owe you one.'

‘Nah,' Ross said with determined good humour. ‘I'm always up for a prank. Think we fooled your lawyer friend?'

‘Definitely. You're the best.'

‘Drop you off somewhere?'

‘Footscray.'

I found him in the Slacker. He was on his haunches, attaching wire with pliers to the back of a canvas. I coughed and he stood, looking wonderfully bereft.

‘You look different. Don't tell me — the hair, nice haircut. And those clothes … wow. Looking good.'

I let him gush. I felt I owed him that. ‘I had an appointment,' I said.

‘I don't know what you said, but that Mathilde from the Veldt Art Prize wants to offer me a bursary or something. I have to meet with them, work it through.'

I'd forgotten dropping his name to Van Zyl that night at the Dragon Bar. Who knew that it would have actually worked?

‘I was hoping you'd get in touch, so I could thank you. I don't want to hassle you. I'm sorry about everything and I understand if you can't be with me, but at least let me say thank you.'

Okay. That was enough gushing. ‘You've been a bit selective with some details about yourself,' I said.

He closed his eyes. ‘I was going to tell you. In time.'

I believed him. Oh God. I was liquefying, and my words came out as a whisper. ‘When you said it's too hard sometimes, you were right.' I started to laugh but it slipped, to my horror, into weeping. He moved to embrace me but I pushed him back. I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my blazer. ‘I look at you and I see someone who —'

He shook his head. ‘Stella, I —'

My palm out, in front of his face, stopped him. ‘— Is basically a decent person. But you need help to get through.'

‘I'm going to cut down, bit by bit, honestly.'

‘Don't make any stupid promises. It doesn't matter. Take the damn methadone.'

With a rush he came forward, before I could step back. Our embrace was like two boxers at the end of round one. The scrape of bristles on my face was abrasive. We kissed. My hand found his waistband and slipped under it. He found his way under my jumper. We kissed, and the horrible things of the world went back into the shadows. I fell with him to the floor. His jeans were unzipped, peeled back. We were laughing. And I took him by the hand and led him to his room. ‘Say goodbye to me properly. I'm going to Western Australia for a while.'

32

MEN WITH
stop signs impeded my progress. A haphazard scattering of witches hats squeezed the morning peak into a single lane convoy that inched and tooted and raged. The taxi driver was not one to chat, preferring the radio so that only the business report, relayed in a low monotone, intruded upon my thoughts — gold up, iron down, crude oil down. I knew of at least three people in the country to whom that information mattered. Outside, Perth's industrial outer limits crawled by. The newsreader recapped the top stories: the murder of Nina Brodtmann, describing her as
enigmatic
and
reclusive
; and police had identified the body of an adult male found dead in an apparent suicide in a car in the Mount Percy Sutton region. His name would be released once his next of kin had been notified.

Eventually a skyscraper reared up, and another — city towers funded by the trade in expensive dirt. Then I was treated to the sight of a vast body of sapphire water and my pity for the locals, their isolation and the near irrelevance of their capital, gave way to sudden envy. While Melbourne's two main waterways were junk-strewn, oily sumps, Perth convened around an actual river. To my malnourished eyes, such splendour was almost painful to behold.

The taxi turned inland and stopped at a row of austerity-era houses, plain little dwellings immune to the disease of the dream bathroom and the national obsession with price. Vince's quarter-acre was overgrown with tea-tree and oleander. The house, built from cinder blocks, resembled a public convenience.

I knocked. Nothing stirred.

The garage door was up and I saw a battered Toyota HiLux, holiday stickers on the back window. I walked around the house, trying to see through the curtains; someone shambled past. The old bloke opened the door, panting.

‘Jeez, Vince, you look like —'

‘I know. Shut up. Come down here.'

He hunched his shoulders, and walked down the hall to the kitchen at the back of the house. I followed and leaned against a bench as he filled a kettle and put it on the gas burner. The kitchen table clearly doubled as his desk, with piles of newspapers and folders and books, even an in-tray.

‘They feed you? Cheapo airlines now, no food.'

‘I'm right.' I didn't fly cheapo. I looked at the many cupboards, that 1950s green, with odd press-button mechanisms. ‘Did you speak to the hospital?'

He winced, irritated. ‘Comfortable. That's all they tell you. Could mean anything.'

I thought he intended to say more, but he busied himself with mugs and a two-kilo packet of brand-less sugar, and opening and closing the cupboards. Maybe the kitchen was older than the house. Do they do that? Build a new house around an old kitchen? Vince scratched his neck, realising he lacked a teaspoon. I opened a drawer, found a few items of cutlery; some were clean. Apparently the act of feeding himself was too complex but investigating corporate malfeasance, biting on and not letting go,
that
he could do. I handed him a spoon. ‘Getting support from the paper for your inquiries?'

‘Not as much as I'd like.'

‘Let me guess, they want to focus on celebrity stories for the online edition. Use dodgy Photoshop visuals and misleading headlines to suck people in. More clicks, more revenue. Typical.'

‘Revenue pays my wages.'

‘But Vince, this is how people get away with things for so long. There's no proper investigation. The WA police are not going to touch Brodtmann. For obvious reasons.'

He winced again. ‘Of course there are proper investigations. The paper submits FOIs every day of the bloody week. Don't go all conspiracy on me. I thought you were the practical type.'

‘I'm practical.'

Vince shrugged. ‘Drink your tea and we'll head off. I've a secret lunch meeting with a fellow from the Department of Mines and Petroleum. It's not far, I'll drop you off at the hospital on me way. You can join us after.'

My mug, now that I looked, was a highly unsanitary thing, cracked, stained, never having had the benefit of detergent or a scourer. The boiling water, I reasoned, would kill most bacteria. I sipped obediently, hoping the meeting was at a pub.

The hospital was in a posh neighbourhood. I spotted a private school nearby, with several sprawling playing fields. He parked the Toyota outside a brown brick, single-storey building. I hopped out and slammed the door. Vince yelled out something about seeing me later at the restaurant as he motored away.

The hospital looked more like a motel, long and plain, with no emergency department or ambulance bays that I could see. It was surrounded by a low brick fence, and beyond that a garden of lawn. The occasional clipped bougainvillea and frangipani grew up the side of the brickwork. There were large windows at the front and I could see some patients sitting in the rooms, mainly elderly patients sitting up in bed or in armchairs, looking out the window. At the entrance, the automatic doors parted. I stepped forward, through a second pair of doors, and breathed in the warm, ailing air.

A woman in a pink cardigan smiled at me from behind a counter.

‘Jemima Slattery, please.'

She looked startled, as though she'd misheard. ‘Room seventeen. That way, all the way to the end. On the right.'

The door was ajar. I looked in and found the room empty. I put the magazines I brought on the table and sat on the bed. A fridge hummed somewhere. The room was overheated and smelled of fish cakes.

A shadow filled the doorway — a young woman, somehow elegant in grey trackpants and a T-shirt, came in pushing a mobile IV-drip stand.

‘Jimmy. I'm Stella. I'm a friend of Nina's.'

She blinked. ‘Tania, you mean.'

I smiled. ‘Yes. Tania.'

She had an exotic beauty, with killer cheekbones and perfectly arched brows, her dark hair was long and swept up in a careless bun. Her hand came out to me and I went to shake but she nodded to the armchair. I held her by the arm as she sat.

‘I wanted to ask you about Tania, if that's okay with you?'

She nodded.

‘You heard she died?'

She closed her eyes, nodded again.

‘When did you last speak to her? Before she left WA?'

‘Yeah.' Her voice was breathy. ‘Tania wanted to — she'd already changed her name — catch up for drinks one last time before her move to Melbourne.'

‘Why did she move there? Was she trying to get away from someone?'

She shook her head, sad, resigned. ‘She said she wanted a change. I think she wanted to get away from the mining business, switch career to beauty therapy.'

Her accent was refined, the white sugar of Australian English. I had heard the same elongated vowels squealed by trust-fund-enabled youths across the campuses of Melbourne University.

‘Was Tania very involved?'

She gave me a look. ‘She was seriously into it. The business. Doing all the testing, the science stuff. And when she needed to be there for some reason, she drove. That's a nine-hour one-way trip.'

‘Really?'

‘Yep. I went with her sometimes. There were some cute guys too. Not that she cared about that.' Jimmy gave me a sheepish grin.

I hesitated. ‘Just you and Tania?'

‘Sure. We drove nonstop from Perth, but it's fun too, you know? We used to sing, stupid songs — Dolly Parton, Simon and Garfunkel.' She looked down at her hands.

‘Do you remember where you went, which mine?'

She looked tired. I thought I might have to leave, but she gathered herself and lifted her head. ‘I don't know, sorry. I didn't keep up with all that.'

I was starting to think it had been a waste of time coming all the way here. It seemed that Tania hadn't confided in Jimmy.

‘You're telling me that one minute she loved the business, lives and breathes ore samples, and the next she changes her name, moves interstate, and starts from scratch as a beauty therapist. What the hell happened, Jimmy? You must know!'

The girl shrank back into the chair, tears in her eyes. She started to tremble. ‘I don't get it either.'

There was a plastic jug on the tray table. I handed her a cup and poured in some water. She took a couple of small sips. ‘Sometimes I wondered if she put so much into the job because she was trying to impress
Daddy
.'