The Brush-Off mw-1 Read online

  ‘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.’

  ‘Just leave,’ she commanded icily, her mouth again tearing at a fingernail. ‘I refuse to comment further without a lawyer present. If you don’t get out, I’ll start screaming.’

  She didn’t give me much alternative but to do as she asked.

  ‘Under the circumstances,’ she said, as I stepped past her. ‘I think it best if I resign from the Visual Arts Advisory Panel.’ Since trafficking in dodgy artworks was hardly an ideal qualification for membership, that sounded like a good idea. I didn’t get to tell her so. She’d already shut the door.

  Fifteen minutes had elapsed since I’d abandoned Red to his computer game. A couple more wouldn’t hurt. I called the lift up, pushed the ground floor button and stepped back out. Otis elevator smacked his big rubber lips together, growled and slunk away. I leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette.

  It had burned to the filter when Salina came out her door. She’d put on a pair of gold sling-back sandals and was carrying the small suitcase. She saw me and stopped. She was about to say something unpleasant when the lift arrived. It made a clunking noise and its doors slid open. Standing inside was Spider Webb.

  Old blank face himself, shades and all, flexing his jaw like a punch-drunk pinhead. He registered first me, then Salina, ten metres beyond. I registered her, too. She looked like a trapped animal. I stepped in front of the lift, blocking Spider’s way. He stood there, legs apart, sizing me up. The doors began to close. I stepped inside and the doors slid shut behind me.

  None of the buttons were depressed. He’d been coming to this floor. Where else? I punched the ground floor button with the side of my fist and we began to descend. I turned to face the door, the way you always do in a lift. ‘You really get around, don’t you?’ I said.

  His hand shot past me and hit the red emergency stop button. The lift slammed to an immediate halt, throwing me off balance. Before I could get it back, Spider had his forearm against my chest and my back pressed against the wall. ‘What the fuck you playing at?’ he snarled, breathing Arrowmint all over me.

  Under the circumstance, I assumed the question was essentially rhetorical. I kicked him in the shins. He stepped delicately sideways as though avoiding a spilt drink and rammed the ball of his open hand into my solar plexus. I got a little irrigated in the visual department at that point and would have liked a little sit down, if at all possible. ‘Ummphh,’ I said. ‘Whodja ooatfa?’

  Spider’s face was pushed so far into mine that when he opened his mouth I read the maker’s mark on his silver fillings. Any closer and we’d have to get engaged. All I could see of his eyes, though, was my own reflection in those fucking mirror shades. Five times in three days I’d seen him, and still I hadn’t seen his eyes. A regular Ray Charles, he was. By the look of the reflections staring back at me, he was doing a pretty good job of putting the wind up me. ‘You know what’s wrong with you, Whelan?’ he said.

  By then I knew better than to even attempt an answer. I just stood there, nurturing my inner cry-baby and waiting for the liquidity in my bowels to abate. Spider adopted the softly solicitous tones of a psychotic sergeant major. ‘You get in over your head. That’s what’s wrong with you. You gotta learn to take the hint. Lay off where you’re not wanted.’

  He slammed one of Otis’s buttons and the lift resumed its descent. Spider stepped back then and stood, legs apart, casually waiting for it to reach the ground floor. ‘You fucking ape,’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to be impressed, am I?’

  Actually I was, deeply. In my line of work, it’s reasonably rare to be strong-armed by a gun-toting thug. That sort of thing usually only happens in federal politics. ‘I’ll go to Eastlake. I’ll have your job.’ It sounded pathetic, but it was the best I could do. Fuck the macho shit.

  The lift hit rock-bottom and the doors slid open. ‘You wouldn’t do that,’ said Spider, cheerfully. ‘Not to an old mate.’ He made like a head waiter, ushering me out of the lift ahead of him. ‘And you shouldn’t leave your kid sitting by himself in the car like that. You’ll get done for child neglect.’

  We stood there, looking at each other. Him in the lift, me outside. Then he smiled. The kind of smile that could stop a clock. He was still smiling when lift doors slid shut.

  I turned then and ran. I ran out the front door of the Aldershot Building, down the hill and around the corner. At the intersection up ahead, Salina Fleet was getting into the back of a cab. She must have come down the fire stairs. I hit the Charade at a sprint.

  ‘You should
have been here, Dad,’ accused Red bitterly, his eyes downcast, his little hands twitching ceaselessly. ‘I got 20,000 points.’

  Russell Street Police Headquarters was straight out of Gotham City, a brick wall with a thousand blind windows and an RKO radio mast on the roof. Calling all cars.

  As a functionary of the incumbent government, albeit an insignificant one, I could not but regard the police as my colleagues. Benign and efficient upholders of the rule of law. Our boys in blue. In other parts of our great nation, the rozzers were thick-necked bribe-takers, rugby-playing racist bully-boys, brothel creepers. But nobody said that about the Victoria Police. Defenders of widows and orphans they were. Protectors of the innocent.

  But not necessarily of a ministerial adviser with spiralling suspicions, insufficient grounds for the laying of charges and a child’s safety to think about. Quite a lot to think about, as a matter of fact. We drove past Russell Street and kept going. ‘How about a movie?’ I said. Something we could do together. Somewhere cool and dark where we could hide and I could start drawing some mental maps.

  ‘ Die Hard?’ said Red. ‘ Young Guns?’

  Whatever happened to Pippi Longstocking? Maybe the movies weren’t such a good idea. We kicked around a few other potential game plans. We decided to go exploring again.

  We covered a lot of territory that afternoon. We covered school, friends, holidays. We covered Wendy. My former consort had taken up with a prosecutor from the New South Wales Crown Law Department. His name was Richard. You didn’t need to be Clifford Possum Japaljarri to connect the dots there. ‘What’s he like?’ I asked.

  Wendy was a go-getter. It was her go-getting that had got rid of me. In our marriage of equals, some were more equal than others. We didn’t fight. We weren’t unfaithful-not that I knew about. Wendy was just moving faster than me, aiming elsewhere. It took me nearly ten years to figure that out, her a little less. If this Richard could make her happy, fine. A happy Wendy would be a sight to behold.

  ‘He’s okay, I guess,’ said Red, an endorsement so insipid it brought a smile to my lips and nearly broke my heart. This Richard might be around for years. Wendy could shack up with whoever she liked, but if Dicky Boy started calling himself Red’s stepfather there’d be hell to pay.

  Equipped for high adventure in sandshoes and sunscreen, we followed the same route as the previous afternoon. Out the freeway, past the roadside flower vendors, the orchards and stud farms, the go-cart tracks and vintage car rallies. At the Sugarloaf Reservoir, we bought sandwiches and sodas and ate them in the sausage-scented smoke of the public barbecues. The crowds were out in force, clannish Croats and cacophonous Cambodians and stubby-clutching Ockers. Swimming was prohibited and once we’d walked across the weir, thrown rocks into tomorrow’s drinking water and watched the spillway fishermen not catching trout, we struck out for more challenging terrain.

  The humidity was 110 per cent, the air as thick as Faye’s tapenade, wet as a sauna. The sky oozed over us like a clammy slug, threatening to rain, not delivering. At the Christmas Hills fire station, the sheds sat empty. The brigade was out on a call. A troop of Scouts were filling their water-bottles at the tap. Red disdained them from behind the window of a feebly air conditioned Japanese hatchback.

  A kilometre short of Giles Aubrey’s private road, we parked in a turn-around and skittled on foot down the wooded incline towards the dull sheen of water. A cascade of rocks and leaves dribbled down the slope ahead of us. The river was slow-moving and not much cooler or wetter than the surrounding air. We stripped to our togs and rushed in, thrashing and splashing and laughing.

  Half an hour later, rock-hopping our way upstream, we disturbed a full-grown brown snake. In a single fluid motion, it slithered across our path, long as a broom-handle, flicking its tongue. Watching it go to ground in the fissure between two boulders, Red backed against me. ‘Wow,’ he whispered, awed and not a little afraid. ‘Tark will be pissed he missed this.’

  A tad more respectful of our environment, we pushed on. Red was still keen, if a little less gung-ho. Even when he charged ahead to blaze our trail, he kept me in sight, looking back over his shoulder to make sure I was keeping up. It grew darker. The clouds were engorged eggplants, roiling and stewing, close enough to touch. A dry stick of lightning forked across the sky.

  We waded out of a narrow ravine onto the dry sand-bar downhill from Giles Aubrey’s place. Red, spying the rope where he and Tarquin had played reckless Tarzans, ran ahead.

  Halfway there, he pulled up sharp, eyes riveted to the ground. ‘Dad,’ he called sharply, poised between backward retreat and stark immobility. ‘Come quick. Snake attack.’

  A man lay face-down on the exposed river-bed beside the eroded wall of the bank. One arm was bent behind his torso, the other twisted behind his neck. It was not a natural position and he wasn’t moving.

  I took Giles Aubrey by the shoulder and rolled him over. He was as light as balsa and dead as a dodo. His face had been pressed flat against the dry quartz sand of the river-bed and was flecked with grains of mica, diamond dust against the blotched pink parchment of his skin.

  How long he had been lying there was impossible to tell. He wasn’t warm but neither was he particularly cold. How he had got there was easier to determine. A small avalanche of leaves and pebbles lay scattered around his sandalled feet. He had come tumbling down the near-vertical incline of the riverbank, a drop of perhaps ten metres. The fall had been a nasty one and from the ungainly contortion of the limbs, I guessed that death had come on impact.

  Red had found a stick and mounted guard. ‘Can you see the snake?’

  ‘He fell.’ I pointed up towards the vegetable patch, showing what had happened.

  ‘Yuk,’ said Red, disappointed. ‘Gross.’

  Gross indeed. Leaving Aubrey’s body where it lay in sand scuffed and churned from the boys’ play the previous day, we climbed the embankment and back-tracked to where his descent would have begun. The old man’s duck-headed walking stick lay on the ground at the top of the bank. His prostrate form lay immediately below. Picking up the cane, I silently pointed out the skidmarks that traced a path down the slope. Red nodded gravely, as though absorbing some important moral lesson. This is what happens if you go too close to the edge.

  A crack like a gunshot split the air, the temperature dropped ten degrees and the atmosphere condensed itself into raindrops. One by one they began to fall, so slow you could count them. They were as big as golf balls, so fat and heavy they raised craters in the dust. Then all at once it was pouring. Rain churned the earth, turning it to mud.

  We dashed for the shelter of the house. Red beat me. We were both already saturated. When I came through the door, he was at the phone, offering me the handpiece. I assumed it had been ringing when he burst inside, the sound drowned in the downpour. I put it to my ear. ‘Hello,’ I said.

  There was no-one on the line, just a ringing tone, terminating abruptly in the faint hiss of an answering machine tape. ‘Thank you for calling,’ announced a patrician voice. ‘Regretfully, I am unable to respond personally at this time. Please leave a message.’ Short, to the point, polite, confident. Phillip Veale.

  I hung up slowly, my brow furrowed into a question. ‘Last number re-dial,’ Red explained to the family idiot. ‘They always do it on Murder She Wrote.’

  ‘What makes you think it’s murder?’

  Red shrugged. He didn’t. He was just following correct television procedure. ‘Now dial 911,’ he told me.

  ‘Triple zero in Australia,’ I informed him, dialling. ‘It was an accident. He was very old and he fell over. And don’t touch anything else, okay?’

  As I finished giving the emergency operator the details, I became aware of a noise. A repetitive thunking. A low-pitched pulse, barely audible over the drum beat of the rain on the roof. Hanging up, I cocked my ears and tracked the sound. It was coming from the stereo, one of those Bang amp; Olufsen jobs like an anodised aluminium tea-tray. Aubrey must have
had a thousand records, the edges of their covers squared off in perfect order in a set of custom-built timber shelves. I lifted the stylus arm onto its cradle and picked the record up by its edges. Faure’s Requiem, von Somevun conducting. A little light listening for a sticky Sunday arvo. I slipped the record into its sleeve.

  In Aubrey’s wardrobe, I found a gaberdine overcoat. By the time I’d scrambled down the bank, it seemed like a pointless gesture. His clothes and hair were drenched and little rivulets of rainwater were forking and branching around his twisted limbs. The correct procedure, probably, was to leave him where he lay. Let him lie there, open-mouthed amid the puddles until appropriately qualified people arrived and did what appropriately qualified people do.

  But I’d taken tea with this man, eaten one of his ginger-nut snaps. Not to have picked him up out of the dirt would have felt like a calculated act of disrespect. Of myself as much as of him. Besides which, the river was beginning to rise. Rain-pitted water was inching towards the body. The cause of his death was patently obvious, written in the clearly visible trajectory of his fall down the riverbank. I stood for a moment looking down at the second wet body I had seen in as many days. Then I draped the coat over Aubrey and carried him up to the house. I think the coat weighed more.

  ‘What you told me yesterday,’ I asked, as we trudged together through the smell of wet earth and the drumming of rain on leaves. ‘What was true and what was lies? And what did you talk about with Phillip Veale?’ But Giles Aubrey made no answer.

  If moving the body was a problem, nobody told me. Nobody told me much at all, really. I’d only just finished laying Aubrey out on his bed when the ambulance arrived. The two-man crew ignored the rain which had eased to a steaming drizzle. I didn’t really know the man, I explained. My son had found the body.

  ‘These old people,’ said the driver, not unsympathetically. ‘They do insist on living alone.’

  The label on a bottle of pills on the bedside table bore the name of a local doctor known to the paramedics. She was phoned and agreed to come immediately. She would, I was told, sign as to cause of death. A nearby undertaker was also called. Procedures were in motion. Red and I were superfluous. We’d walked halfway back to the Charade before I realised that they hadn’t even asked my name.