Death on Demand (22 page)

Ihaka started dealing from a thick wad of twenties. Addiction is a fire that never goes out. Addicts who lead a hand-to-mouth scrounger's existence live in dread of running out of fuel, knowing that if they don't feed the fire inside, it will feed on them. With each note that Ihaka flipped across the table, Willie's anxieties receded further into the distance until they were just a speck on his mental horizon.

“Something else I'd like your feedback on, Willie,” said Ihaka, still holding a few notes. “What do you know about the undercover cop who got shot up and left for dead out this way a few years back?”

Willie's expression froze. If Ihaka hadn't seen it, he wouldn't have believed that someone so florid could go so pale so quickly. Willie scooped up the money and tried to stand up, but Ihaka put a clamp on his upper arm, a bone wrapped in loose skin, and forced him back down. “Hold your horses, pal. We're not done yet.”

“I've got to go. I just remembered something.”

“Like what? You promised to call your stockbroker back?”

“Give us a break, Sarge.” Willie was whimpering, on the verge of tears. “I'm already in deep shit. Isn't that enough for you? I don't know fuck all.”

“So why the panic?”

“All I can tell you is it's something you just don't talk about, not if you know what's good for you. It's like a fucking taboo subject.”

“Who decided that? Who enforces it?”

“Honest to Christ, Sarge, I don't know and I don't want to know. A guy brings the subject up, right? Not that he knows anything the rest of us don't, he's just talking shit. Anyway, someone will give him this one” – Willie dragged his thumb across his throat – “and he'll just clam up. The word came down. I don't know who from, but it was loud and fucking clear.”

Ihaka handed over the rest of the notes. “Okay, Willie, here's what you do. You find yourself a deep hole and stay down there. And I promise you this, if anyone fucks you up, I'll fuck them up like you wouldn't believe.”

 

Blair Corvine rubbed his chin, puzzled. “You know what?” he said to Ihaka eventually. “There are only two people who haven't moved on here, and the victim's not one of them. There's Sheree, which is kind of understandable. If anyone's got the right to be all bitter and twisted – apart from me, of course – it's her. And there's you, Chief, and I don't get that.”

“Two things, Blair,” said Ihaka. “If everyone else has moved on, why is it still such a big deal out west? This old prick I talked to last night bloody near shat himself when I dropped you into the conversation. He says every lowlife out there knows it's a subject you avoid like the plague. Now why would that be?”

Corvine shrugged. “They probably haven't forgotten what happened to Jerry Spragg.”

“Yeah, could be,” said Ihaka. “I heard that was random prison shit but, given the source, chances are that was a lie. The other reason I'm curious is that there's a bloody big gap between your version and everybody else's. You say you didn't fuck up, you were on top of it; everyone else says the opposite. You fucked up, you got careless, you were off your face the whole time. Christ, I even heard you left your cellphone lying around, they checked call history and saw all these Blair-to-base calls.”

“Fucking what?” They were in a little café in Panmure. Corvine muttered an apology to the pensioners at the next table and leaned forward, lowering his voice. “What the fuck do they take me for?”

“Well, now do you see where I'm coming from? If you'd said, ‘Look, fuck it, okay, I was burnt out, I was losing it, I could've stuffed up without even knowing,' that would be one thing. And if everyone from McGrail down wasn't so keen to blame the victim and move on, as you put it, that would be another. I would've thought fair enough, shit happens, and gone back to worrying about global warming.”

“You raised it with McGrail?”

Ihaka nodded.

“Did he tell you what I told him?”

“McGrail ran the party line,” said Ihaka. “Coming from him it sounded good, but that's all it was.”

Corvine's forehead was a grid of perplexity.

“What did you tell him, Blair?”

“This would've been two, maybe three weeks before it happened. The bikers were getting jumpy. There was a crew going round ripping off crims. Like guys would pull a job, they'd be divvying up, next thing these dudes in ski masks with sawn-off shotties would kick the door in and bag the lot. Or if it was a dope deal, they'd take the dope and next week it'd be on the street.”

“That sort of stuff's been going on since the dawn of time. No honour among thieves and all that shit.”

“True, but what I heard, and what I passed on to McGrail, was that there was a cop involved.”

“Why the fuck,” said Ihaka in his most reasonable tone, “didn't you tell me this last time?”

Corvine looked a bit bashful. “I assumed you were just being polite. You know, you pay a visit to the great survivor, what else do you talk about? I didn't expect you to give a shit. No one else did.”

“Was anyone else there when you told him?”

“Mate, something like that, it's for the boss's ears only. What happens after that is his call. I went round to McGrail's place one night, told him face to face.” Corvine paused. “I can understand why it wasn't in the report, but I would've thought McGrail might've mentioned it to you.”

“I would've thought so too.”

 

Ihaka took the softly, softly approach, sidling up to Helen Conroy at the supermarket, where she was stocking up on toilet paper as if she knew something the rest of Auckland didn't. He introduced himself in a murmur, holding his ID close to his chest.

“I'd like to talk to you about Arden Black,” he said. “I can't give you any guarantees, but it mightn't have to go any further.”

She stared at him, trying to blink away her fear and confusion. “But if you catch him, I'll have to testify in court, won't I?”

“Catch who?”

“The blackmailer.” She mimicked Ihaka's frown. “Isn't that what this is all about?”

They went to a café deep in the adjoining mall. Helen Conroy had a round, pleasant face and was holding the line in the struggle with her weight. Ihaka imagined her, in happier times, as an eager social animal and energetic supporter of campaigns to make life in her part of the city even more agreeable. But she was pale and fretful now, distractedly fiddling with the cluster of gems on her wedding-ring finger as she contemplated the loss of her good name and enviable circumstances.

She'd been introduced to Arden by a woman with whom she'd lost touch, an acquaintance rather than a friend. She had an idea the woman was living in the South Island these days. Her account of her dealings with Arden coincided with what she'd told Vanessa Kelly. Like Kelly, she had no knowledge of his secret life beyond her own experience.

The blackmailer made contact on the morning Arden's body was IDed. She was home alone. The phone rang and a man speaking with a distorted voice told her to look in the letterbox. There was an A4 envelope containing photographs of her entering and leaving Arden's apartment building. The camera's automatic time and date function timed her visit at a fortnight earlier and an hour long. There was also a shot of her framed in the living-room window, eyes closed and head thrown back as Arden nuzzled her neck.

The phone rang again. The blackmailer told her she had till Friday afternoon to get her hands on $9500 in cash. She was to put it in a zip-up bag, go to the Langham Hotel on the corner of Symonds Street and Karangahape Road at 6 p.m. and have a drink in the lobby bar. At 6.15 she was to take the bag into the toilet off the lobby, go into the middle cubicle, wait there for five minutes, and then exit the toilet, leaving the bag in the cubicle, on the floor. If that cubicle was occupied, she was to go back to the bar, have
another drink and try again at 6.30. When it was done, she was to go straight from the toilet to her car or a taxi and get the hell out of there. She was to burn the photos and envelope. She would be under surveillance: if she didn't follow instructions to the letter or departed from the script in any way, shape or form, her husband would get a set of even more damning photos. Sets of photos would also find their way to the
New Zealand Herald
's gossip columnist and various individuals and organizations, including the Baradene College Old Girls' Association.

She did as she was told. The blackmailer called again to tell her she was a sensible woman, and as long as she carried on being sensible she had nothing to worry about. He wasn't greedy; he'd give her time to smooth out the finances before he came back for the second of five payments.

“Did you see anyone you knew or who looked familiar at the hotel?” asked Ihaka.

“No.”

“Did you notice anyone looking at you?”

“Not that I can remember. I was so anxious not to do anything wrong that I really just kept my head down.”

“Was there anyone in the toilet when you went in?”

She gestured, hands fluttering vaguely. “I think someone came out as I went in. I didn't really look at her, I just went straight to the cubicle.”

“What about when you came out of the cubicle? Was there anyone in the toilets, or did anyone come in as you went out?”

“I think there was but, as I said, I wasn't making eye contact. I just wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.” She was daring to hope, peering into Ihaka's face as if he was the saviour. “What happens now?”

He said he'd do his best to fix it.

Jackie Vlukovich, better known as Jackie Vee, had always been an early riser, but with each day he spent holed up in the bush, the longer he slept in. His business associates had decided it would be in everybody's best interests if he dropped out of sight for a while. They'd made it sound like a holiday, but it was more like doing time, just sitting around staring at the wall, so the longer he slept the less time there was to kill.

The cottage overlooked a west coast beach where the waves thundered in like a cavalry charge, petering out in a splatter of white foam on black sand. Urban to the tips of his crocodile-skin cowboy boots, Jackie had taken a few days to get used to the sound of the wilderness – waves, birdsong, insect buzz – and the sudden, ominous silences. Now that he could sleep through all that stuff, it had taken something else to wake him up: the sound of other people. There was someone in the kitchen. In fact, unless his hearing had gone haywire, there was someone in the kitchen making breakfast.

About bloody time. Some of his associates had thought about someone other than themselves for a change and dropped in to see how he was bearing up. Jackie rolled out of bed and pulled on tracksuit pants. Confident that his bladder could tough it out for a little longer, he padded down the corridor to the kitchen.

Neither of his visitors qualified as an associate. One of them was the guy who'd brought in the Alfa Romeo, the stiff's car, the reason he was stuck out there in hippy-dippy land sleeping in like a welfare bludger. Even if there hadn't been a pump-action shotgun on the table, Jackie would have surmised that he'd walked into a situation which had the potential to go very bad.

Like many rogues and fly-by-nighters, Jackie was a fantasist. He thought of himself as a tough guy, among other things,
but his toughness was skin-deep, a flimsy veneer made of rough language and callous attitudes. The fact was that his career in violence had peaked around the time he was expelled from Kelston Boys' High. His uninvited visitors, on the other hand, looked like the real thing: graduates of the mean streets, professionals who measured their productivity in stitches and broken bones.