Harum Scarum (8 page)

‘Terrific,’ Tash sighed.

‘I said it complicates matters, I didn’t say it puts an end to them. I’m going to have to sign up if I want to get further in. What shall I call myself?’

‘How about Peter File?’ Tash suggested.

Clarissa laughed. ‘They’re not paedophiles remember, they merely love children.’ She put on an arch vaudeville accent, in imitation of an elderly rock spider they’d apprehended a few weeks ago. ‘There’s nothing unnatural about what we do. In ancient times it was common practice for older men to go with young girls—and boys. It’s no different to how it was when people got shocked if a woman showed her ankle. Who knows, in one hundred years, it might be considered normal again...’

Tash laughed, ‘Yeah, right, and I’m running off to join a nunnery.’ Stevie laughed too, glad to see that Tash had recovered her humour.

‘What’s the latest on the dead girl from last night?’ Clarissa asked Stevie, back to her normal voice.

‘They traced the rego to a Miro Kusak from Mundaring,’ Stevie told her. ‘When our guys turned up with a warrant for him, all they found was the ex-wife. Separated nearly a year, pending divorce, so she said; claimed she didn’t know where he was living. They pulled the house apart, found enough high tech stuff in his den to launch a space shuttle, but nothing incriminating. His wife said he took his main computer and flash drives with him.’

‘You want me to go and have a talk with her, Stevie?’ Tash asked, jumping down from the desk. Her face clouded when she read the look on Stevie’s face and she pulled her away from Clarissa’s earshot.

‘What’s the matter, don’t you trust me? You think I’m going to take it out on his missus?’

Stevie hesitated. ‘No, of course not. Go on,’ she indicated the door with a tilt of her head. ‘Find out everything you possibly can about Mrs Kusak’s estranged husband.’

People in various stages of physical or emotional distress lined the corridors of Royal Perth Hospital. In fact the casualty department wasn’t much different to Central Police Station on a Saturday night, Monty decided. He sat on a bench next to an old man whose chest rattled and wheezed like the water pipes in Stevie’s kitchen, and watched the parade of walking wounded. A bikie in leathers staggered by with blood streaming from his head, another followed with a bunch of reddened tissues to his nose. A couple were screaming abuse at each other near the automatic doors until a security guard came to escort them from the hospital. A listless child was wheeled past on a trolley, his mother crying and wringing her hands by his side.

God, there was no getting away from it.

For the third time in half an hour he checked his mobile phone for messages. He doubted he’d be hearing back yet from the team he’d dispatched to China Town, but his restless hands needed something to do, some kind of distraction from the misery surrounding him. He yawned, wiped tears of exhaustion from his cheeks and massaged his jaw. An intermittent toothache seemed to be flaring up again.

Izzy had shown him how to work one of the games on his phone and he wondered if he could remember her instructions. Even with his glasses on, he had trouble finding the right keys and hit several in error before he was in. Ah yes. He had to get one of the heads with the gaping mouths to devour...

‘Inspector McGuire?’

He gave a start and quickly turned the phone off. A young nurse stood above him with a look of amusement on her face.

‘Doctor Sutcliffe will see you now. Please come with me,’

she said.

He followed her past several cubicles of quivering curtains to the last one. A middle-aged doctor stooped over a trolley, finishing his notes.

‘Good of you to see me, Doc, I appreciate how busy you are,’ Monty said.

The doctor looked over the rims of his glasses. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Inspector, a hectic day.’ He pointed to the empty trolley. ‘An infarct right here, a man only about your age, your build, stressful job—chronic smoker of course.’

Monty felt himself being examined. He shifted his feet and cleared his throat. ‘You said you had some luck with my query about an Asian man with kidney necro...’ he struggled to remember the rest of it.

The doctor smiled, ‘Nephropathy.’

‘That’s the one.’

‘You suggested the patient might have been an illegal migrant. Well, you were right in assuming he might have presented here for treatment. We get quite a few at Royal Perth—no Medicare cards, just a wad of sweaty cash, and of course we treat them with no questions asked. I spoke to one of my registrars and she remembers seeing just such a man. She’d talk to you herself only she’s just come off a week of nights. I told her I’d handle it.’

‘Okay, you might start with telling me about this disease, keeping it simple, please,’ Monty said with a smile.

‘The common name for IgA nephropathy is Berger’s disease. It affects three times more men than women, with Asian men at the top of the list. It’s a kidney disease characterised by abnormal deposits of the protein IgA in the kidney’s filtering system and one of the symptoms is blood in the urine—that’s what the man presented with when he checked himself in.’

‘Did he speak English?’

‘A bit.’

‘Name?’

The doctor smiled. ‘Bruce Lee.’

Monty smiled wryly. ‘Of course.’

‘As well as the blood in his urine, he had a history of upper respiratory infection and high blood pressure. My registrar made the preliminary diagnosis and arranged tests to confirm. But when she mentioned the possibility of a kidney biopsy, he jumped off the trolley and became quite aggressive, forcing her to press the emergency button for security assistance. He was eventually escorted from the hospital, having refused treatment altogether.’

‘How sick was he exactly?’

‘Still in the early stages of the disease so he would’ve been able to function relatively normally for a while. Left untreated however, the disease would most likely have slowly progressed to acute renal failure and possibly death.’

‘Did he know the dangers do you think?’

‘My registrar explained them. She said he seemed to take them on board because he got more and more agitated with everything she said.’

Monty rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘When you tell something to patients that they don’t want to hear, what do they tend to do?’ he asked.

‘I see your point,’ the doctor nodded. ‘They usually get a second opinion.’

Monty thanked the doctor, stepped into the corridor and phoned Wayne Pickering, asking him to make some enquiries at Northbridge Chinese herbalists and medicine centres. If the guy thought he’d been let down by the western medical system, he might very well have gone down the street to one of these for a second opinion.

He pocketed his phone, about to turn on his heel and leave the hospital when an unsettling thought stopped him in his tracks. He looked back into the examination cubicle where Doctor Sutcliffe was still finishing his notes.

‘Just one more thing, Doc,’ Monty said through the parted curtains.

‘Yes Inspector?’

‘The bloke you had in here before, the one who had the heart attack. What happened to him, where did he go?’

‘He didn’t go anywhere. I’m afraid he died.’

Monty felt the blood drain from his face.

The doctor looked concerned. ‘I’m sorry, did you know him?’

Monty shook his head vigorously. ‘No, I didn’t. No.’

He tried to call Stevie as he was leaving the hospital, but all he got was a message from her answering machine. He told her to ring him.

Later that afternoon Monty caught up with Wayne, Barry and Angus Wong in his office. It seemed his hunch about their mystery victim seeking a second opinion about his diagnosis had proved correct.

‘It was about the third herbalist shop we visited, wasn’t it fellas?’ Barry checked with his colleagues.

Angus nodded, said to Monty, ‘Mr Cheng’s shop—he speaks practically no English.’

‘But he had a pretty dolly of a Chinese interpreter with him,’ Barry added.

‘Angela Nguyen is multilingual Vietnamese,’ Angus answered with a long-suffering sigh.

Barry shrugged, ‘Same diff.’

‘I went into the back room to talk to Cheng,’ Angus told Monty, ‘while Barry and Wayne spoke to Angela in the front, in between serving customers.’

‘It was interesting, Mont,’ Wayne added. ‘When we got together to swap notes, we discovered a discrepancy in their stories.’

‘Yeah, Mr Cheng told me the man’s name was Zhang Li.’ Angus spelled the name for Monty. ‘Cheng had never met him before but had heard on the grapevine that he was a money lender, an illegal who’d only been in the country for a couple of months. He wanted something for the blood in his urine and Mr Cheng mixed him up a herbal concoction...’

‘And Cheng said Zhang Li had a kid with him.’

Angus scowled, ‘Yes, Barry I was getting to that. He had an Asian kid with him of about fourteen or fifteen, a scruffy little bugger who wasn’t introduced to Cheng.’

‘But Angela Nguyen’s version wasn’t nearly as helpful,’ Wayne said. ‘She said she remembered the man with the blood in his urine, but not his name. She also denied seeing a boy.’

‘It’s because you got her all in a fluster,’ said Barry, straightening the collar of his Boss polo shirt. ‘You should have let me do the talking. You just have no idea about handling women, you have no couth.’

‘And I suppose you would have done better?’ Wayne said.

Angus muttered under his breath in Chinese, having little patience with the love-hate relationship between these two. Barry and Wayne went back years and had worked with each other long enough to know exactly which buttons they could press to good effect. Despite their constant bickering, they were a good team though, complementing each other in their differences.

Angus brought a different set of skills to the job: a cool professionalism and an almost obsessive eye for detail. Monty could see Angus being selected to take the reins should he decide to toss the job in. Tossing it in—he had no idea where that thought came from, what else he wanted to do or even what he was capable of doing.

His attention kicked back in when he heard Wayne say, ‘I’m going back to see Angela Nguyen later. Alone. She’s hiding something, I’m sure of it.’

EXCERPT FROM CHAT ROOM TRANSCRIPT 121206

BETTYBO: wanna meet F2F?
HARUM SCARUM: Y?
BETTYBO: I wan 2 rt Katy Enigma stories wit u
HARUM SCARUM: Me 2 but not yet. we cn rite on line 4now

It was Stevie’s turn to cook. She ran through her mental shopping list as she hurried from the lifts in Central. For seafood chowder she’d need prawns, a few snapper pieces, mussels maybe, coconut milk, coriander and crusty bread. With any luck Izzy would be out of school on time and they could pick the ingredients up before Emma came around.

She spotted Monty in the front foyer, standing half a head taller than most of the bustling figures. He held up his hand to stop her, hurrying over before she could pass through the revolving door.

‘Mont, I’ve got to go,’ she said before he could speak. She jumped into the revolving compartment and Monty joined her. ‘I have to collect Izzy then meet the new babysitter.’

They stepped outside into a wall of heat.

‘Just hang on a minute will you?’ Monty took hold of her arm to keep her in the shade.

With so much on her mind, Stevie didn’t have time for his quick words that always became long, but she listened patiently to what he had to say about Wayne’s investigations at the Chinese herbalist. As she listened, part of her brain pondered the suitability of a thirteen year old for a babysitter. She also managed to slide in a thought or two about Tash, wondering what she’d learned from Mrs. Kusak.

Talk about multi-tasking.

It seemed as if Monty just wanted an excuse to linger for a moment, but it was a luxury she didn’t have time for right now. As Monty talked on, she bounced from one bubble soled trainer to the other, scanning the car park. It was chock-a-block with overflow from the cricket ground and she couldn’t see the car she’d borrowed from her mother anywhere.

The crack of leather on willow and the crowd roared. ‘The cheek of it,’ she muttered when she finally got a word in, ‘illegally parking at a police station.’

A youth barged past them carrying a long parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. It didn’t take a genius to work out what was inside it. Monty had just introduced an amnesty on illegal weapons—they could be handed in to the police station without prosecution in exchange for tickets to the test. The scheme had been going well for everyone except the officers in charge of the armoury, who’d been so inundated they’d run out of storage space.

‘Are you listening to me at all?’ Monty asked, slapping his thigh with exasperation.

‘You said you were about to phone me but then you saw me in the lobby and decided to speak to me now. You filled me in on the latest on the floater case, then you said you wanted to arrange a team meeting for the Bianca Webster case.’ She spotted the bonnet of her mother’s white Citroen sticking out from behind a four-wheel drive. ‘Beauty, there it is.’

‘Shit, this is ridiculous,’ Monty grumbled, increasing his pace to keep up with her. ‘We never seem to get any time to talk.’

‘Come with me to collect Izzy and we can talk in the car,’ she said, and as an afterthought added, ‘She’s your daughter too.’

He reddened. ‘Yes, I am aware of that. If I organise a meeting for five this afternoon can you leave Izzy with the girl while you attend?’

‘If I think she’s suitable, yes.’

‘You should look into that after-school centre.’

‘I have. They’ve too many kids and not enough staff.’

‘And call Natasha Hayward, I want her in on the meeting too.’

Stevie looked at her watch. ‘Will do. She’s visiting Mrs Kusak now, but she should be back on time. Okay, I’ve really got to go. See you.’