Cyanide Games: A Peter Tanner Thriller

by Richard Beasley

  Tanner glared at Alvares. ‘Pull the car over.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Pull the car over.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Pull the fucking car over.’

  They were next to St Mary’s Cathedral on the way to William Street.

  ‘Peter, I’m sure I don’t know why you’re –’

  ‘Can I tell you something about the criminal justice system, Alejandro?’ Tanner said.

  ‘You’re going to no matter what my wishes.’

  ‘Occasionally it screws things up. Like giving your nephew less than five years when he should have got ten. But I don’t want to be a knowing party to screwing the system myself. Do you get that?’

  ‘You should calm down, Peter.’

  ‘I told that judge last year that Tomas had no idea he’d be getting so much coke.’

  ‘Keep your voice down, Peter.’

  ‘And I told Tomas at the time, and I told you, that I found his story very hard to believe. But I ran with it, because he swore it was true. And you insisted it was too, Alejandro. Remember?’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘I know a lot of my clients are a pack of liars, Alejandro, but I don’t need you confirming it.’

  ‘You should get out, Peter.’

  ‘If you’re going to make me a vehicle for perjury Alejandro, don’t fucking tell me about it after. Given that it’s not fanciful to think the drug squad or the Feds might be bugging your car, can we agree on that?’

  ‘What I was telling you –’

  ‘The reason I’m getting out of your car, Alejandro,’ Tanner said, opening the glove box and taking out the hairbrush, ‘is that if I stay here, and you say one more word about lenient judges, or about how clever your nephew was in getting half the sentence he should have, I’ll take this fucking hairbrush and hit you with it. Do you understand?’

  Alvares gave him a patrician look of deep offence. Then it slipped from his face and was replaced by something darker. ‘I would not recommend you doing that,’ he said slowly.

  Tanner smashed the hairbrush into the dashboard of the car. The brush cracked down the middle and three or four decorations flew off in various directions.

  Tanner got out of the car carrying the brush. He threw it into the first bin he saw, like he was ridding himself of a murder weapon.

  2

  Tanner walked in his front door just after four. School was finished, and his son was home. Maria, their part-time housekeeper, was too. The house smelt of garlic. It always smelt of garlic. They went through three litres of milk a week and, it sometimes seemed, four litres of olive oil. The olive oil was from Andalusia. He suspected Maria was frugal satisfying her own needs, but not those of his son.

  He found Dan in his bedroom, sitting in a red chair that folded out as a single bed for when he had a friend home for a sleep over. He was shoeless, in shorts and a T-shirt. His school clothes were littered around the room. Tanner often told Dan to put his clothes in the laundry basket. The boy would say yes, then wait for Maria to do it for him. Tanner would tell Maria not to pick up the clothes. She too would say ‘Si, yes, si.’ Later, she would pick them up. The cycle would repeat.

  Dan had his laptop open, resting on his thighs, and headphones on. Tanner walked over to the boy and pulled the headphones gently from his ears.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi, Dad.’ Cool, but friendly enough.

  ‘How was school?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Anything interesting happen?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What did you do today?’

  ‘The usual stuff.’

  ‘How did you go?’

  ‘Normal.’

  He looked down at the boy, who was staring again at his screen, punching keys. ‘Done your homework?’

  ‘Most.’

  ‘Walked the dog?’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘What are you doing on that thing?’

  ‘Mathletics.’

  ‘Looks like a game.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Finish your homework.’

  ‘Sure,’ the boy said, not listening. He looked up. ‘Been in court?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Murder?’

  Tanner smiled. ‘People who retain me for murder don’t usually plead guilty.’

  ‘They expect you to get them off.’

  ‘It’s what I’m paid for.’

  The boy nodded, and went back to his mathletics.

  ‘I came close to needing my own lawyer this afternoon.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I considered killing my client’s uncle.’

  The boy looked up again, narrowed his eyes.

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I wasn’t told the truth, so neither was the court.’

  ‘Can’t you just dob them in?’

  ‘That’s not great for business.’

  ‘How were you going to do it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kill the guy?’

  ‘With a hairbrush.’

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘I was going to beat him to death with it.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He had a strong desire to protect the boy’s innocence, keep him young for as long as possible. He wondered sometimes why this was, and whether it meant anything. What was he clinging to himself, in wanting the boy to cling to his own youth, to defy puberty, adolescence, manhood? He wondered if it was something to do with Karen, her early death when Dan was just six. He didn’t know, thought he should, but guessed such precision about himself was beyond him. He knew that other boys in Dan’s class were allowed to watch MA movies, and play MA games on PlayStation or Xbox. They shot people, with terrifying guns. They blew them up. Tanner saw enough of the end results of real violence in court. When Dan was an adult, he could play those games, if that’s how he caught his tricks.

  He turned to leave the room.

  ‘Why’d you let him live?’

  Tanner shrugged. ‘He’s a good source of work.’

  • • •

  Tanner lay across his couch, a glass of red wine in one hand. He was thinking about the ways he could measure his ageing. His face had resisted most of the usual signs of reaching forty. The nervous energy he spent defending felons had stymied middle-aged spread. There was the odd grey hair now though amongst the dark, and some fine lines around his eyes. And he was becoming more and more conscious of the increasing speed of time.

  The wine was a pinot. Karen had liked shiraz.

  He had a small cellar under his kitchen full of shiraz that would never be drunk.

  She’d been getting headaches for weeks. She had some nausea one morning, and the next. He was in the middle of a trial, and had paid little attention to her complaints. Then she told him, from a hospital bed, that she’d been looking at a patient’s MRI earlier that day and had realised she didn’t know what she was looking at, or looking for. She no longer knew what the differing shapes or contrasts meant. And, they told her later, that’s when she’d had her first seizure.

  The strangest thing, she’d told him, was that when she saw her own MRI, only hours after the seizure, she knew exactly what she was looking at. Glioblastoma multiforme. Left parietal lobe, almost certainly inoperable.

  In the middle of their first discussion with her neurosurgeon, about radiotherapy and chemo, about time and its limits, about all the years that would not be left, Tanner’s phone rang. He looked at the Caller ID. It was his clerk, no doubt ringing to check his availability for a trial for another malefactor who was proclaiming his innocence. He put the phone on silent.

  ‘I hope you use earphones,’ the surgeon said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Electromagnetic radiation.’

  ‘I didn’t think there was any proof about a link,’ Tanner said.

  The surgeon shook his head. ‘Trust me,’ he said, ‘heavy mobile phone use and brain tumours. Always on th
e side that the patient uses their phone. One day you guys are going to have a field day with a class action against the telecoms and phone makers.’

  ‘I’m not that kind of lawyer.’

  The surgeon nodded. ‘What do you do?’

  Tanner started to answer, stopped, looked at his wife. ‘I help keep people out of government accommodation,’ he said. ‘For a fee.’

  The surgeon smiled. ‘Sounds lucrative.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Tanner said. ‘It’s called capitalism. I think the medical profession understands how it works.’ He felt his wife squeeze his hand. ‘What caused Karen’s cancer?’

  The surgeon shook his head. ‘I’d like to be able to tell you, but I can’t.’

  When the consultation was over, and they got back in their car, he read a text he’d been sent.

  Can you do a bail application tomorrow week?

  ‘What is it?’ Karen asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It’s not nothing.’

  ‘Nothing important,’ he said.

  She smiled at him softly. ‘You’re not going to be able to do that forever.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Treat nothing as important unless it’s my tumour.’

  He pushed the ignition button. Karen turned the volume of the radio down, and kept looking at him.

  ‘It’s – I see now that it’s not important,’ he said.

  She held her hand to his mouth, put her fingers over his lips. She was so damn calm. ‘It could come quickly, Pete,’ she said.

  Before he could say anything, a horn sounded behind them. The car park was full, and someone was waiting for the space. The male driver looked ready to explode, his female passenger embarrassed. He opened his mouth to say something, then stopped himself.

  ‘Don’t get angry,’ she said.

  He looked at her, took a deep breath.

  It did come quickly.

  Another tumour grew. It was removed, but she developed an infection in her blood. It had to be treated intravenously in hospital, and her mind and body started to fail simultaneously. In the final week, the hospital staff put a foldaway bed in her room for him, but he often felt that part of him wasn’t there. In the day, her room was full of people – family, friends, colleagues, old high school and med school classmates. Some were even strangers to him. Her sister put photos of Karen’s life around the room. And most of the day, Tanner rarely spoke. He sat in a chair, or stood in a corner, like he was a ghost, removed from the others, watching the scene but not within it. Some of the time he felt numb, paralysed. Then he’d feel something like pity, but wasn’t sure whom he was feeling it most for.

  And when he wasn’t feeling pity, or numb, his other state, which came in brief, occasional waves, was anger – rage so intense that he had to clench his jaws, grind his teeth to suppress it.

  On the night before Karen died, Joe Cheung and his wife Melissa were among the last visitors to leave. Tanner and Cheung were the same age, and had been friends since law school. ‘I’m not going to get to tell her I’m sorry,’ Tanner whispered to his friend that night in the corridor outside Karen’s room.

  She’d had to forgive the way his mind wandered from their lives to clients, to the next trial, the next verdict. She’d had to forgive the way that he, the alpha lawyer, wore her down with clever argument, cut across her at dinner parties, finished her sentences, completed her stories, restricted her world to what she could see on an MRI or CT scan. He was so sorry for all that.

  ‘Go back in the room, Pete, and hold her hand,’ Joe Cheung had said. ‘Tell her you’re sorry now.’

  At about midday on the day she died, Tanner’s father came to the hospital. He was reluctant to go in her room first, and Tanner was reminded of his mother’s death several years before. His father had loitered in the hospital corridor that day too, leaning against a wall, looking down at his feet. His parents had been divorced for many years, and rarely spoke.

  ‘You can go in,’ he said. ‘Standing out here doesn’t – just go in.’

  He didn’t stay long. Brief hellos to Karen’s parents, short words of sympathy. He stood by the bed for a minute or two, and ran his hand lightly up and down Karen’s forearm, before retreating again to the corridor.

  ‘If you need a hand with Dan,’ he said to Tanner when he joined him. ‘Any time.’

  Tanner nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said softly.

  ‘What about you?’ his father said.

  ‘What about me?’

  His father looked at him, but didn’t say more.

  ‘I’m okay,’ Tanner said.

  Three days after Karen died, he opened a wardrobe door in their bedroom, and was almost shocked to see it was full of her clothes.

  3

  As he considered whether to have another glass of wine, Tanner’s phone began to vibrate. He didn’t look at the screen. A late call sometimes meant another lawyer hoping to get him to go to a police station for some very important client whose son had just been caught selling the latest party pill, or who was beginning to regret some alcohol-fuelled act of violence. But when it rang again he looked at the screen, and then answered quickly.

  ‘Melissa?’

  ‘Pete. I’m so sorry to call this late – I don’t know who else to call.’ She was fighting back tears, swallowing words.

  Tanner sat up and put his wine glass on the coffee table. ‘Take a deep breath,’ he said. ‘What’s happened?’

  In the silence as she composed herself, he wondered how long it had been since he’d seen her. Three months? Cheung was busy, or away half the time.

  Tanner and Joe Cheung had met in law school. Cheung’s parents were Chinese-Malaysian migrants. He and his father liked to gamble, and Tanner discovered he had that in common with them. They spent a lot of study time at racetracks and various betting parlours. Cheung still got first-class honours, and the University Medal. As a law student, Tanner was a handicapper, but Cheung was a Derby winner.

  Cheung had similar success once he joined the firm that would soon become part of the Bloomberg Butler Kelly global network. He was a prodigious worker in a firm of workaholics. In his second year, he worked so hard on one transaction that he collapsed at his desk and spent the night in a ward in a public hospital. By then Tanner had started at the criminal bar. He visited Cheung the next morning after a mutual friend had told him what had happened. ‘Having associates die from overwork is something all these big firms want to tell their clients,’ were the first words Tanner said to him. ‘I’m all for it, but I’d prefer it not to be you.’

  They kept in touch throughout their careers, and after they married, although they moved in vastly different legal worlds. As the years passed, the demands of work and young children meant the times they caught up had gradually widened. When Karen became ill, Melissa brought around food she’d cooked for him and Dan. Eventually she helped Tanner’s sister-in-law take care of Karen’s clothes.

  ‘It’s Joe,’ Melissa said, when she was composed enough to talk again. ‘He’s in China. He should have been back four days ago.’

  ‘He’s missing?’

  ‘The consulate in Shanghai called me today.’

  ‘And told you what?’

  ‘They said he’d been detained. That’s what they said they were told. I don’t – we went to the airport to collect him. All of us – It’s Tom’s birthday. Joe was meant to be back for his birthday.’ She started to cry, and Tanner waited while she regained control.

  ‘What do you mean “detained”?’

  ‘They said he’s in custody. They’re investigating him.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘They don’t know.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘They don’t know – somewhere in Shanghai. The Chinese won’t tell them.’

  ‘Melissa, stop for a moment,’ he said. ‘I’m going to ask you some questions, Okay? Because this sounds crazy.’ He paused to collect his own thoughts as much as to allow her to compose her
self. Joe Cheung getting caught up in any kind of trouble seemed insane. A mistake must have been made; some misunderstanding had to have occurred. ‘When did he leave?’ he asked.

  ‘A week ago.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For work.’

  ‘What work?’

  ‘I don’t know. We didn’t discuss it.’

  ‘He must have said something about why he was going?’

  ‘I don’t know the details, Pete. He said he had to explain something – a client was being difficult. They wanted to meet face to face, something like that.’

  ‘A Chinese client?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What does this client do? Did he say?’

  ‘I really don’t know. I didn’t . . .’

  Tanner thought quickly about the conversations they’d had about Cheung’s work. When they talked shop it was usually about one of Tanner’s trials, which Cheung said sounded far more interesting than his boring corporate work.

  ‘Most of his clients are banks or mining companies, right?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Was he there for one of them?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she insisted.

  ‘When did you last talk to him?’

  ‘Wednesday. He called before the kids went to bed.’

  ‘In Shanghai?’

  ‘Yes. It should have been his last night there. He was going to the office on Thursday, flying home Thursday evening. We were all at the airport to meet him Friday morning. I was going to drop the boys at school after we’d surprised him. He didn’t come through customs. He hadn’t rung me.’

  ‘Go back to when he last called. Did he sound all right?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Did he say he was in any trouble?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he say anything unusual had happened?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Most of the call was talking to the kids anyway. I got about thirty seconds. He was in a taxi going back to his hotel. He’d been shopping.’

  ‘Does he usually call before he catches a long flight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he didn’t this time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you try and get him?’