The Big Ask (30 page)

‘A bit bush-lawyerish,' I nodded. ‘But it'll do.'

Not that I gave a stuff what it said. It was just a stage prop. A rubbery little tentacle designed to conceal the hook. What I needed now was a tongue-loosener, something to get the dialogue flowing.

‘Pity you killed Darren before I filed my dental-damage compensation claim,' I said. ‘Maybe I'm selling myself short here.'

Farrell jerked the statement back and scowled. ‘You want money, too?'

‘The thought occurred to me,' I said. ‘But things tend to get messy when money's involved. So I'll settle for a bit of personal satisfaction. Like you said, Darren Stuhl had it coming. Tell me what it was like when you killed the prick.'

Farrell raked me with a look of disgust. ‘It didn't feel like anything,' he said. ‘He wouldn't put his gun away, so I hit him. He went down. End of story.'

Beautiful, I thought. Come in spinner. Gimme more. ‘You think there was any chance he was still alive when you shoved him under Maitland's truck?'

‘He was stone dead, you sick fuck.' He nodded down at my feet. ‘Are we going to do this or not?'

I had what I wanted. All that remained was to finish the charade, bring down the curtain and see him off. ‘Okay,' I said. ‘Slide the statement under the door.'

He crouched, reaching out with his free hand as he fed the paper through the gap. As it disappeared, I kicked the mobile forward. Farrell grabbed it and came back upright.

Now that the evidence was in his grasp, he wasn't taking any more chances. He whipped a can of lighter fluid from his hip pocket, doused the phone and set it alight with his slim gold cigarette lighter.

Grab, squirt, flick, whoomph.

He dropped it to the ground and squirted it again as it burned between his feet, a smokeless ball of blue flame. Frank was a man who liked a fire.

‘What about Maitland?' I said. ‘No remorse about feeding him to Bob Stuhl's wolves?'

The phone was shrinking to a molten blob. Farrell prodded it with the scuffed toe of his elastic-sided boot, hurrying it along. ‘You just don't get it, do you?' he said.

‘Get what?'

He put a hand to his groin, made a hissing noise through his teeth and pretended to piss on the fire. Then he directed the stream from his invisible dick in my direction.

The scales fell from my eyes, washed away by a blast of imaginary urine. ‘You were the guy who pissed on me?' I said. ‘But why?'

Not just the pissing. I meant the entire exercise.

Farrell shrugged. No skin off his nose if I knew the truth. He had what he wanted. I prayed the tape was picking this up.

‘Things weren't moving along quite as briskly as I hoped,' he said. ‘The cops were taking their time buying the Maitland frame-up. So I thought I'd give the process a nudge. Rounded up an old army mate, told him we were doing a favour for Bob Stuhl. Coached him on his lines, of course. Didn't want you recognising my voice. That was a very busy night, believe me. We'd just finished winding you up when I got the call about the cars being vandalised. Had to rush off and attend to union matters, put Maitland out of the election business.'

‘So Bob Stuhl was just a smokescreen?'

‘And you bought it,' said Farrell. ‘Lock, stock and shotgun barrel.'

Holy Christ, I thought. I am a fucking moron. If Stuhl hadn't sent the pantyhose twins, did that mean he hadn't had Donny killed either? A band of steel closed around my chest. Farrell smirked and twisted the knife.

‘If you'd done as you were told,' he said, ‘Maitland would currently be awaiting trial on a murder charge. Manslaughter, even. Improper disposal of a body. Six or seven years, tops. But you had to get all hairy-arsed and start waving that gun around, didn't you? Forced my hand. After that, the only way I could be sure the fix would stick was to kill him. The pig-headed bastard. It took some considerable effort to get him to write that suicide note.'

I felt sick to my soul. Farrell had wound me up, all right. He'd played me like a Stradivarius. But that was nothing compared with what he'd done to Donny. I wished I had a gun so I could shoot him on the spot like the mad dog that he was. My eye darted to the cassette recorder.

Farrell didn't notice. He was stomping the remains of the phone beneath his boot. When he'd pulverised it, he kicked it aside. Then he turned and slammed his heel into the door of Room 23. As it flew back on its hinges, he reached down and snatched up his statement. ‘You didn't really think I was going to let you keep it, did you?' he sneered. It flared briefly, then disintegrated into ashes.

A startled yelp came from inside the room. Our heads turned.

A woman was kneeling on the bed. She wore nothing but a studded dog collar and a leather harness. She held a riding crop in one hand and was straddling an albino sea-lion.

For a bizarre moment I thought it was a Helmut Newton photo-shoot. Except Helmut's people hadn't been in touch to ask if he could use my motel room. And the woman wasn't a model but the press secretary of the deputy leader of the opposition, the driver of the black BMW. She stared back at us in alarm, her arm shooting up to cover her naked breasts. They were okay but her legs were better.

‘Very juicy,' said Farrell. ‘Nothing like a bit of bondage.'

Golden showers were more his preference, I thought. Along with bashing, torture and cold-blooded murder.

‘No way,' cried the woman, leaping off the sea-lion and scooping an armful of clothes off the floor. ‘I'll go along with dress-ups and a little light spanking, but I draw the line at groups. This is too weird for me.'

Farrell's palm slammed into my chest and I reeled backwards. ‘So long, sucker,' he crowed, and took off across the quadrangle.

‘Baby doll,' gasped the sea-lion. ‘Where are you going?'

Grabbing the tape recorder off the ice machine, I dashed into the stairwell. As I hit the rewind button, Madame Lash erupted from Room 23, a loose bundle of clothing pressed to her bosom. Her other attractions were now swathed in the voluminous folds of a man's shirt. It flapped around her knees as she wrenched open the door of her BMW.

I hit the play button and heard Farrell's voice: ‘…sexual misbehaviour on the part of…'

Angelo Agnelli burst out onto the walkway tucking a towel around his expansive waist. The black beamer roared into life and backed away, tyres screeching. ‘Wait,' begged Ange. ‘You've got my pants.'

‘You sick fuck,' said the tape recorder.

The desk clerk emerged from the reception area and started along the walkway, preceded by his out-thrust jaw. I ejected the tape, slipped it into my pants pocket and backed deeper into the obscurity of the stairwell.

Angelo hurled himself at the BMW, signalling wildly and pleading for his daks. But the dominatrix was a woman without pity. She spun the wheel, laid rubber and sped away. Propelled by his own desperate momentum, Angelo lurched after her for a dozen futile steps. Then he pulled up short and abandoned the chase.

He stood there in the middle of the floodlit quadrangle, clad in nothing but a bath towel and a gorilla mat of chest hair. Suddenly a screech of brakes resounded through the archway from the direction of the street. This was followed by the loud crump of an automotive collision. Then another, then another, then another. Then came the blare of a horn. The insistent, unremitting wail of a jammed horn.

Doors flew open all around the quadrangle. Inquisitive faces appeared on the balconies and peered downwards. Angelo was centre stage. Firming his towel around his midriff, he adopted the insouciant air of a man who had lost his way while looking for the swimming pool. There was no swimming pool.

‘Hey, you,' shouted the desk clerk. He bounded towards Angelo, blocking his way back to the room. ‘What have you done to my door?'

The horn continued to shred the air. More people emerged. The manager advanced. Panic swept the face of the Minister for Transport. Clearly baffled by the sudden turn of events, he knew only one thing for sure. Explicability-wise, he was in a very vulnerable situation. Casting about for an escape route, he spied the only one available. Taking a firm hold of his loincloth, he beat a hasty retreat through the archway to the street.

It was a popular destination. Others were also headed that way, drawn by the incessant bleat of the horn. I joined them.

The pile-up was impressive. A six-vehicle fender-bender. Drivers, passengers and busybody onlookers were milling around, surveying the damage, yelling and gesticulating. The driver of the lead car, a dark grey Mercedes, was remonstrating with a cluster of people. Occupants of vehicles further down the line, judging by the way they were rounding on him.

‘A black BMW,' he said, gesturing helplessly up the street. ‘It shot out in front of me, so I hit the brakes. What else could I do?'

‘You should've been paying attention,' accused a bystander. ‘Instead of yapping on your mobile phone.'

The blaring horn was coming from the last vehicle, an orange transit van with the words ‘Stuhl Couriers' along the side. It hadn't connected with the other cars. Swerving to avoid the pile-up, it had mounted the kerb and slammed into a wall. A young man in a long ponytail and a Stuhl Holdings shirt was standing at the point of impact. He was wringing his hands and staring with stricken disbelief at a body which was pinned between the wall and the front bumper of his van.

‘Somebody call an ambulance, man,' he kept repeating. ‘For Chrissake, man, somebody call an ambulance.'

It was too late for an ambulance. You didn't need to be a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons to see that much. The eyes of the hapless pedestrian were wide open, staring lifelessly ahead. Blood trickled from the corners of his mouth. One minute he was walking along the footpath, the next he was winging his way to eternity.

It was Frank Farrell. He didn't look quite so pleased with himself any more.

Traffic was building up. Cars in the southbound lane were slowing to a crawl as the occupants craned for a look. Spectators were converging from all directions. Across the road in the gardens, a pale ghost was flitting from tree to tree, thighs flapping, disappearing into the night.

The ride was coming to an end. Three men were dead. One good, one bad and one capable of very nasty behaviour while drunk in a nightclub. It was time to hang up the Superman costume, crawl back down the limb and renew my trust in the due process of the law.

I went back into the motel, retrieved my jacket from behind the ice machine and ducked into Room 23. The bed was ravaged, smalls lay scattered across the floor and the atmosphere was pungent with the tang of body fluids and leather-care products.

Clearly, Farrell wasn't the only one who thought I belonged in a sheltered workshop. Ange had been playing me for a sucker, too. Our hush-hush pow-wows were simply a cover for his surreptitious rumpy-pumpy. To add insult to injury, he'd contrived to have me pay for the room. And his behaviour was even more scandalous than alleged in the shit-letter. Fooling around might be forgivable. Kinky is a matter of taste. But doing it with a member of the Liberal Party was beyond the pale.

I slumped on the edge of the bed, rang the Curnows' place and fixed it so Red could spend the night. ‘I had a meeting and things got out of hand,' I told Faye. ‘You know what it's like.'

Back out in the street, barriers were going up, ambulance and police lights flashing. I stood in the red-blue stroboscopic flare and watched as Farrell's body was strapped onto a gurney and whoop-whooped away. Then I sidled up to one of the cops and told him I had information pertaining to the deceased pedestrian. And to related matters of probable interest to the Criminal Investigation Branch.

By the time the uniforms passed me up the line and the dicks at headquarters had done listening to the tape it was past midnight. Detective Senior Sergeant Noel Webb joined the team at that point, not pleased to have been summoned from some Friday-night piss-up. ‘If being a fuckwit was an indictable offence, Whelan,' he told me, ‘you would've spent most of your life behind bars.'

The coppers would like to have arrested me, they made it plain, but couldn't think of a charge. Professional jealousy, I decided. Like me, they could hardly be expected to greet with delight the revelation that they'd been given the right royal runaround. With the tape in the hands of the authorities, however, the burden of responsibility at last moved back to where it belonged.

When I was shown the door of the cop shop, it was two in the morning and I was as spent as yesterday's lunchmoney. I hailed a cab, gave the driver my address and sat numbly in the back. As the convent of Mary Immaculate flashed past, I offered up a silent prayer for Donny's repose. Not that there was anyone to hear it. Or that Donny would've looked kindly on such a lapse. At least his killer had not escaped retribution. The dead mightn't care, but the living take consolation from such things. I did, at least.

I stared into the gardens, too, as we drove by, and wondered what had become of Angelo. That question was answered the next morning, after I was dragged from my slumbers by a brief and enigmatic phone call from Lyndal Luscombe.

‘Seen the
Sun
?' she asked eagerly.

‘Huh?' I snuffled. ‘Is there an eclipse or something?'

‘Quick,' she ordered. ‘Take a look.'

I tugged at the curtains, squinted at the cirrus-streaked sky and realised she meant the newspaper not the celestial orb. So I pulled on some track pants, padded down to the corner shop and bought a copy.

Ange was plastered across the front page. The photograph showed him with one hand raised in an unsuccessful attempt to shield his face while the other gripped his trusty Gardenview Mews towel. Flanked by two Parliament House stewards, he looked like a Roman senator being arrested at the baths by a detachment of the Praetorian Guard.