The Brush-Off (32 page)

But that didn't mean I couldn't make some discreet enquiries of my own in the meantime. The problem was where to start. This needed some nutting out. I drove back to my new office, nutting all the way.

Trish thrust a wad of telephone message slips into my paw as I came in the door. Mendicant terpsichoreans and lobbyist librarians. String quartet convenors and craft marketers. Festival creators and design innovators. People whose calls I was paid to return. ‘Thought you'd taken the day off,' she said.

I went into my calm new office, sat at my new desk, looked out my big window and I asked myself the same question I'd been asking myself all the way from the Trades Hall. The inescapable one.

Was Lloyd Eastlake knowingly involved in the faking of the CUSS art collection? And if so, did that mean he was implicated in the death of Marcus Taylor?

Realities were at work here that experience had ill-equipped me to deal with, but that I would very swiftly have to learn to manage if I wanted to keep my head above water. Back in Ethnic Affairs, I'd encountered my fair share of wealthy men. Some of the richest men in the state were migrants. Not that you'd often find them snoozing in the library at the Melbourne Club. Their own communities knew them as employers and entrepreneurs, as the patrons of social clubs and the doers of good works, and perhaps as other things I made it a point never to inquire about. I'd known them as pleaders for community projects, as genial hosts at national day celebrations, as abstract factors in predictable electoral equations.

But in a very real—meaning political—sense, their transactions and their reputations, their associations and ambitions, were fundamentally a matter of indifference to me. Apart from the one or two who had scaled the Olympian heights of industry, they were generally at a remove from the real centre of power. For all their money and their sectional influence, they were ultimately on the outside looking in. No transgression, error or lapse on their part could really hurt the government.

But not so Eastlake. Eastlake was on the team, one of the boys, a man publicly identifiable with the standards by which we ran the state. A man with a finger in every pie. The party pie, the money pie, the union pie, the culture pie. And some of these pies, unfortunately, now also contained Angelo Agnelli's finger.

I found Lloyd Eastlake's card and laid it flat in front of me on my desk. I built a hedge of yellow phone message slips around it. I tapped its cardboard edge against the blond timber. I buzzed Phillip Veale, two glass partitions away. ‘Hypothetically speaking,' I said. ‘What's the score on the director of a public art gallery also operating as a consultant to private clients?'

‘Hypothetically speaking,' said Veale. ‘Probably legal. Possibly unethical. Definitely unwise.' He didn't ask who and I didn't tell him. I couldn't help but feel that our relationship was on the mend.

Then I called a contact at the Corporate Affairs Commission and asked him to look up the company registration information on Austral Fine Art, Pty Ltd. He promised to get back to me within an hour.

Finally, I called Eastlake. Not the mobile number. If he was in his car or on the hoof, Spider might overhear the call. I rang the number that looked like it might be his direct office line. It was. He picked it up after the first ring. ‘Where the fuck are you?' he said. ‘I've been frantic.'

‘It's Murray Whelan.'

‘Oh, hello.' He dropped his voice an octave and changed down to cruising speed. ‘I thought it was someone else.'

‘Are you speaking hands-free?' I like to know exactly who is listening to my conversations. ‘Is there anyone else in the office with you?'

‘No. I'm alone. Why?'

‘Regarding that matter we discussed yesterday at the Deli. I need to talk to you again.'

Eastlake didn't mind indulging my penchant for the melodramatic at the weekend. But, come the working week, he was a busy man. ‘Not more of Giles Aubrey's tall tales, I hope.'

‘Aubrey's dead,' I said.

‘Dead? How?'

‘That's what I want to talk to you about. Among other things. Face-to-face and as soon as possible.'

A couple of long seconds went by. ‘The soonest I can see you is six.'

Not the most convenient of times, Red-wise, but I was the one doing the asking. ‘Fine,' I said. Eastlake gave me Obelisk's address, a downtown office block, and rang off.

Three other people could help me shed light on what was happening. One of them was lying low. One would keep. The other, I decided, might best be caught on the hop.

‘Don't worry,' I told Trish's disapproving look as I headed out the door. ‘I'm not going far.'

Just across the road and into the trees.

Fiona Lambert was wearing a fire-engine-red, thigh-length tunic that emphasised the paleness of her skin and the indelible-ink blackness of her hair. She was standing at the front door of the Centre for Modern Art watching two men in company work-wear drag a flat wooden crate out of a van parked in the driveway.

I sat across the road in my car, watching her watch them.

A young woman in harem pants and a beehive flitted about, getting in the way. I remembered her from Friday night. Janelle Something. Fiona's assistant. The delivery guys negotiated the crate through the door and Fiona and Janelle followed them inside.

Our Home
had a new home.

And Ms Lambert, at a guess, would be far too preoccupied for the next little while to participate in the kind of consultative process I had in mind.
Our Home
would have to be uncrated, examined, gloated over, stored away. Slipping the Charade back into gear, I pulled out from the kerb. I had an idea. Not the best idea I'd ever had. But, at the time, it had a compelling sort of logic.

I drove through pools of shade cast by elms and pines, turned into Domain Road and found a parking spot in a quiet residential side street. Hope Street, said the sign. I left my jacket in the car and walked around the corner.

Domain Road, with its two-storey terrace houses and small apartment buildings, was quiet. A solitary jogger panted along the footpath. I leaned against a parked car and cased Fiona Lambert's pink stucco block of flats. After a couple of minutes, the dowager with the miniature mutt came out the front entrance and carried her schnauzer across the road. She clipped a lead to the benighted animal's collar and led it into the park. Doo-doo time for Dagobert.

When the pair of them had moved out of sight, I went into the flats and walked briskly up the stairs to the landing outside Fiona Lambert's door. I rapped confidently with the little brass knocker, listening for any sound in the flat opposite. There was none. I rapped again, Justin Case. Justin wasn't home, so I angled up the Ming Dynasty pot-plant holder, slid the key from underneath, opened the door and put the key back in place. It wasn't breaking and entering. That would never have occurred to me. I was just dropping around when there was nobody home.

Not that I let myself into people's places on a regular basis. Usually it was the other way around. I'd given a spare key to my place to Faye in case Red ever needed to get in while I was at work and occasionally I'd come home to find she'd left something exotic in the fridge. But this was something new. Just thought I should make the point.

The flat was exactly as I had last seen it. Same Bauhaus chairs, same boxy sofa, same honey-coloured dining table, same pornographic portrait. Out the uncurtained window, the roof of the CMA was just visible between the trees. If Fiona decided to pop home across the greensward, I'd see her coming through the trees.

The object of my search was vague. Anything to corroborate Lambert's association with the bogus CUSS collection. Anything to connect her with Marcus Taylor, to help clarify the mutually contradictory information I had about their relationship. Had Taylor hated her as the woman who stole his birthright? Or was he providing fake artworks for her Austral Fine Art operation? Was it possible that she had the missing version of
Our Home
? Given what I now knew, Eastlake's line about it being a student copy of a masterwork had taken on a decidedly hollow ring.

The small study opening off the lounge room was the logical place to start. A strictly utilitarian space. Walls bare except for a row of tiny canvases, each no more than four inches square, each a different shade of blue. A ladder-frame bookcase filled with art magazines. A chrome-inlaid Aero desk, tres chic, with matching stainless-steel waste paper basket, empty. A cardboard box containing several dozen brand-new copies of
A Fierce Vision
. A two-drawer filing cabinet. Bottom drawer, stationery supplies. Top drawer, domestic appliance warranties.

On the desk, an Apple computer with a plastic cover. Must learn to use. Postcards. Someone called Vicki saying Budapest was fab. Invitations to exhibition openings. Bills. Gas, electricity, phone. Very ordinary. Visa, Mastercard, Amex. Denting the plastic to the tune of about twenty-two hundred a month. Clothes and restaurants mainly. Mortgage statement. Nine hundred a month, $86,000 left to pay.

On a salary of, what, sixty grand? Fiona Lambert was living beyond her means. Extravagant but, so far, nothing illegal. Nothing relating to Austral Fine Art. Not so much as a sheet of letterhead. Must keep all that over at the CMA.

Scanning the view out the window on my way, I went up the hall to the bedroom.

Heavy drapes, open a chink. Window overlooking a small courtyard. Enough light to see by. Big contrast to the
Vogue
casualness of the living room. Queen-size bed, black sheets smoothed tight. Cotton. Satin would be tacky. Many big plush pillows, red. Pale carpet, low nap, soft like felt. On the wall above the bed was one huge painting. Not Szabo. Thickly laid-on acrylic paint, high texture, chopped like the waves of a starlit sea. Abstract, tactile, sensual. I could smell clean linen and Oil of Ulan. Red lacquer chest of drawers, antique Japanese. Rice-paper lamps. The whole room reflected back on itself from a mirrored wardrobe occupying entire side wall.

An intensely private atmosphere, redolent of the mysterious feminine. Then again, maybe it was just that I hadn't been in a woman's bedroom for quite some time.

I slid open the mirror-fronted wardrobe and saw a great quantity of clothes, all of them either red, white or black. Enough shoes to make Imelda Marcos's mouth water. About a dozen men's business shirts. Top brands. Ironed. No half million dollars. No Certificate of Incorporation for Austral Fine Art.

Nothing for me on the rack. I looked in the Japanese chest. For a moment longer than absolutely necessary, I stood staring down at a girl called Fiona's collection of investment-quality lingerie. Nothing tarty. No reds or blacks here. Shell-pink, ivory, cream. Resisting the temptation to touch, I knelt on the floor and looked under the bed. Nothing, not even dust.

Straight across the hall was the bathroom. The chunky vanity basin was littered with toning lotions and night creams. Princess Marcella Borghese Face Mud. A cupboard held thick towels, folded and stacked. A cane laundry basket contained damp towels and a white t-shirt with two interlocked Cs in gold on the front.

The kitchen was expensively spartan: Alessi kettle, Moulinex, crystal wineglasses, stainless steel Poggenpohl appliances. Japanese crackers on an empty bench-top.

By now I was hyperventilating. ‘Right,' I said, out loud. Time to go. If Fiona Lambert was up to no good, the evidence of it wasn't here.

One last getaway glance out the window. Fiona Lambert was crossing a sunlit patch of lawn between two pines, headed for home. She was, perhaps, two minutes away. At the far side of the courtyard were rubbish bins, a rear exit to the flats. I opened the door a notch to reconnoitre my getaway and heard footfalls coming briskly up the stairs towards me, a heavy male tread.

Whoever he was, he'd be on the landing in a matter of seconds. His destination must be the flat opposite. Fiona was still ninety seconds away. It would be close, but an undetected departure was still possible. Closing the door and pressing my back to it, I listened for the man to go into the other flat.

The footsteps came closer. My hearing, all my senses, felt preternaturally heightened. A radio somewhere was broadcasting talkback. Out on Domain Road, a tram clattered by. Somebody's muffler was due for replacement. The footsteps reached the landing. I waited for the jingle of keys or a rapping on the knocker opposite. All I heard was breathing, the wheezing of an unfit man who had just climbed a flight of stairs on a summer day and was pausing to catch his breath. I strained to hear movement, my heart drumming in my ears.

Distantly, the rhythmic click of a woman's heels rapidly ascended the concrete stairs.

The tattoo beat of my pulse became a surf-roar of panic.

The door was about to fly open. My idiotic spur-of-the-moment impulse was about to backfire horribly, to result in my discovery and disgrace. What possible pretext could I find for being in a woman's flat in this way? What would it look like? I'd be taken for a panty sniffer or a petty thief. A pervert, a psycho. How had I got myself into this position? To what idiot impulse had I surrendered my common sense? What outlandish excuse could I invent? I had to think of something and think of it fast.

I did. I hid.