The Brush-Off (24 page)

Taylor's dog-eared little collection of photographs was still in the desk drawer. When I compared them with the sketch in Fiona's book, there wasn't much doubt that Victor Szabo's life-drawing model was the woman in the photo. The young hippy that could have been Taylor could still have been Taylor. Szabo was still definitely Szabo. I put the snaps in my pocket.

The cheap plastic-covered stamp album was still there, too, with its paltry contents of low-denomination recent releases. Stamp collecting was a hobby that had never captured my imagination. But waste not, want not. If Red didn't fancy the album, some other child might. That little girl, Grace, for example. Philately might not get me everywhere, but it would give me an excuse to go calling on her mother.

The bankbook was still slotted into the crevasse between the desk and the wall where I'd dropped it in my haste to flee. I hooked it out with a bent coat-hanger and found myself looking at the most interesting thing I'd seen all day.

Critically unappreciated he might have been, but Marcus Taylor was clearly finding a market for something he was doing. Over the previous six months, he'd made a number of deposits. The sums varied from twelve hundred to four thousand dollars, totalling nearly twenty thousand. Not a bad little nest egg for a man whose grant application form said that his sole income was unemployment benefits.

I pondered its meaning. But not for long. Red would be wondering what had become of me. I dropped the bankbook back behind the desk. It felt like evidence. Of what, I didn't know. Sticking the stamp album under my arm, I headed back along the side of the National Gallery. A gang of young hoons was stampeding down the footpath, pushing a shopping trolley full pelt. One of them was crouched inside the cart, gripping the sides for dear life, screaming insanely at the kid doing the steering.

‘Help!' he was screaming. ‘Murder! Murder!'

There was only one S. Fleet in the White Pages with a CBD address. Little Lonsdale Street. The western end, down towards the railway yards. Funky. Low rent. About the right place for a loft. Fifteen minutes walk from the Arts Centre. A five-minute drive.

‘Wait here,' I told Red, parking around the corner. ‘I won't be long.'

‘Shoosh,' he said. His head was bent and his thumbs were furiously manipulating the liquid crystal blips of his handheld electronic game. ‘I'm going for the record.' The stamp album, understandably, had failed to impress. It lay discarded on the back seat.

‘Ten minutes,' I said. ‘Then we'll go have some fun, just you and me.' He didn't look up.

The Aldershot Building was six floors of faded glory, a Beaux Arts chocolate box dating from the boom of the 1880s. Barristers from the nearby law courts might once have had their chambers here, wool merchants, pastoral companies, shipping agents, stockbrokers. Then the boom had gone bust. The mercantile bourgeoisie moved out and the wholesale jewellers and sheet-music publishers moved in. In time, as the pigeon shit mounted on the curlicued plinths of the facade, these became two-man tailor shops and fishy photographers, doll doctors and dental technicians. Eventually, the strict prescriptions of the fire department had driven away even these modest entrepreneurs.

But the Law of Unintended Consequences supersedes even the Prevention of Fire Act and the tenants squeezed out by the prohibitive cost of overhead sprinklers and CO2 extinguishers had been replaced by bootleg gayboy hairdressers, speakeasy desktop publishers and loft dwellers—all of them on handshake leases with blind-eye clauses. At the Aldershot, no-one was really there and if they were they were just visiting.

Flyers for dance clubs were taped to the wall of the small ground-floor vestibule. Among them, beside the lift, was a much-amended hand-written list of tenants. Salina Fleet was on the sixth floor. I took the lift, a modern job not more than forty years old with cylindrical bakelite buttons that stuck out like the dugs on a black sow. It opened straight onto the corridor. Salina's was the first door along.

She didn't answer at first. I knocked, waited, knocked again. A reggae beat was coming from somewhere, emanating from the very bones of the building, dreams of Jamaica. I knocked again and was about to turn away when the door opened a chink and Sal peered tentatively through the gap.

‘Oh, it's you.' Her mouth gave me a jumpy, automatic smile and her eyes tried to find their way around me into the hall. They were cold and glistening like she'd just been polishing them and had to put them back in to answer the door and they weren't warmed up yet. Her once-fruited lips were thin and pasty. Unconsciously raising a little finger to them, she tore off a half moon of nail.

‘Don't worry,' I said, harmlessly. ‘I haven't come to take you up on your offer.'

The skin was drawn tight across the bridge of her nose, accentuating the bird-like cast of her face. It was a face about five years older than when I'd first seen it. She didn't open the door any further and she didn't invite me in.

‘Sorry to drop by out of the blue,' I said. ‘But I've heard that they're pretty well decided that Marcus's death wasn't suicide. Thought I should let you know.'

She accepted the news as though already reconciled to the possibility. Her neck flexed in a tiny bob, pecking an invisible grain of wheat. ‘Part of me hoped so, in a way. I can't blame myself for an accident, can I?'

‘I was a bit abrupt yesterday,' I said. ‘If you'd like to talk about it.' I looked at the floor. ‘As a friend.'

She reached out through the gap in the door and put her hand softly on my chest. ‘You're a sweet guy, Murray. Really, you are. But I'd rather be alone.' She gave me the most bathos-drenched look ever practised in front of a mirror, sighed heavily and stepped back.

She'd tried that one before. Last time, it had nearly worked. Before the door could shut, I had my foot in it. Through the crack, I could see a bed. On the bed was a suitcase. ‘Going somewhere, Sal?'

‘How dare you!' she spat through the gap, putting her shoulder to the door. ‘You can't just force your way in.'

My thirty-kilo advantage sat inert against the door. ‘Talk to me,' I said. ‘Please.'

The pressure on the door diminished somewhat. ‘This official, or what?'

‘Or what,' I said.

She backed away silently, letting the door fall open. Her lack of pretence at hospitality was refreshingly unrehearsed.

What Salina called her loft was a large high-ceilinged room that might have once been a typing college classroom or the workshop of a manufacturing milliner. Chipboard partitions had been installed to create separate kitchen and bathroom areas, the floor had been sanded back and the place stocked with oddments of retro furniture of the Zsa Zsa Gabor On Safari variety. The wardrobe was a metal shop-display rack on castors, half empty. The bed took up the rest of the space, unmade beneath a scattering of clothes and a small, half-packed suitcase. The ashtray contained about five thousand half-smoked green-tinged butts.

‘Nice,' I said.

My opinion was a matter of supreme indifference to Salina Fleet. ‘What's this all about?' she demanded.

A little of the old Sal had returned. She was wearing Capri pants with a pink gingham shirt knotted at the midriff and hoop earrings. She was still in mourning, though. The Capri pants were black. A bit of bluff might have got me through the door, but it wouldn't get me any further. She'd backed herself against a window sill and folded her arms tight. She wasn't going to take any bullying.

I wasn't going to give her any. By way of emphasising that my intentions were honourable, I turned my back to the bed and perched on the arm of a zebra-patterned sofa. ‘Suicide or accident, Marcus Taylor's death is a hot story. You're not the only one the press have been talking to. All sorts of stories are flying around. My job involves keeping one step ahead of the pack.'

That was only part of it, of course. In the final analysis, it wasn't the Protestant work ethic that was gunning my engine. It was my frail ego. I had the distinct impression that my string was being jerked. By whom and to what end was not yet apparent. But I didn't like it. Not one little bit. ‘You being on the Visual Arts Advisory Panel, I thought you might be able to advise me.'

‘Stories?' Feigning nonchalance, she put a cigarette in her mouth and flicked a disposable lighter. ‘What stories?'

‘Let's start with yesterday first. You went to the YMCA to get a picture, right? But someone had beaten you to it.' Her lighter wouldn't fire. She kept flicking the wheel with her thumb. I got out mine, walked over to the window and lit both of us up. ‘Right?'

‘I told you.' She exhaled Kooly. ‘I went to get some personal things.'

‘Toothbrush? IUD? Little things that slip easily into a folio case.'

‘And to make my private goodbyes to Marcus.'

‘By coming on to me?'

‘I was upset. Vulnerable.'

We wouldn't get far heading down this track. I took myself back to the zebra. ‘Tell me about Marcus. How did you get involved with him?'

She shrugged. ‘How does anybody? We met last winter. At an exhibition. He tried to lobby me for a grant. He was hopeless—insecure and arrogant at the same time.' All the things that women can't resist. ‘I was on the rebound. We ended up in bed. You know how it is.'

I nearly did. ‘And so he got his grant.'

That was below the belt. ‘It was a committee decision, based on artistic merit.'

Now we were getting somewhere. ‘Good artist, was he? As good as his father, Victor Szabo?'

‘Where on earth did you get that idea?' Apparently the suggestion was ludicrous.

‘Like I said. Stories are flying around.' I took the photos out of my pocket and showed her the snap of Szabo with the kid that might have been Taylor. ‘Like father, like son. And from what I've heard, there wasn't just a taste for the booze in old man Szabo's genes. Marcus inherited a dab hand for the brush. He could knock out a passable version of almost anything, I understand. Not that I'm any judge, but what I've seen of his work certainly confirms that view.'

Her eyes widened. ‘You've seen it?'

‘It?'

She didn't say anything for a while. She was too busy giving me the slow burn. It could have popped corn at five paces. Lucky I was wearing my asbestos skin.

When that didn't work, she tossed her head back and studied the way her cigarette smoke rose in a lazy coil towards the ceiling. I studied it, too. Ascending effortlessly in a solid unbroken column, it reached higher and higher, an ever lengthening filament of spun wire, stretching up towards the embossed tin panels far above. Then, just as its destination seemed within reach, it wavered, broke into an ephemeral mass of swirling spirals, and dissipated.

‘There was never any misrepresentation on my part,' she said abruptly. ‘I want that clearly understood.'

‘Absolutely.'

She started pacing then, stalking the right approach. ‘If this thing gets taken any further, I want protection.'

Protection? From whom? What the hell was she talking about? ‘I understand,' I said. ‘You don't want to be the one that takes the fall?'

Her point taken, Salina moved into negotiating mode. ‘Damn right,' she said. ‘Marcus's image production was a perfectly valid form of post-modern discourse, right out there on the cutting edge. His pastiche–parodies of actual artworks effectively deconstructed the commonly held notions of value, authenticity and signature. They were a critical response to the pre-eminence of the so-called famous artist.' She paced, delivering a dissertation. ‘His pictures were never mere copies. If his images were subsequently misread as such by others, that's not my problem. It was not my role to impose a monopoly on meaning. Legitimate appropriations, that's what they were. There was never any attempt on my part to pass them off as originals.'

Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, it's as simple as that.
Eek and ye shall find
. Unless my grasp of art-speak was even more tenuous than I feared, Salina Fleet had just told me that Marcus Taylor had been knocking up fakes and that she'd been marketing them for him.

‘And these “appropriations” '—I hooked my fingers around the word and rolled it over my palate, savouring its supple resonance—‘included a “pastiche” of Victor Szabo? A “parody” of
Our Home
, perfect right down to the engine number on the motor-mower?' She nodded. I was on the right track. ‘Like you say, a perfectly valid form of artistic practice. So where is it now?'

That pulled her up short. ‘Christ!' she gasped. ‘You mean you don't know. I thought…'

‘You thought what?'

But the shutters had come down. She'd been trading on the assumption that I knew something I didn't, that I knew who had the duplicate Szabo. Her hands were shaking. She crossed to the door and flung it open. ‘Get out,' she hissed. ‘You bastard.' It came to me that she was very much afraid. When she wasn't acting she was quite convincing. ‘Out. Out.'

‘Who do you want protection from? I can help.'