Death on Demand

by Paul Thomas

  She became a fitness fiend. She’d always kept herself in reasonable shape by walking the dog and irregular jogs, but now the early-morning run was as entrenched in her routine as the bedtime cup of peppermint tea. Her hair appointments now swallowed whole afternoons and cost more than a gold tooth. She would emerge from her walk-in wardrobe in outfits he hadn’t seen before, and for which his seal of approval wasn’t sought. It crossed Lilywhite’s mind that she might be having an affair with one of the lawyers or accountants or financial advisers she was always in meetings with. After all, she hadn’t been half as particular about her appearance during the twenty years that her life had revolved around him. Now that it no longer did, she spent twice as much time in front of the mirror.

  So it was suspicion and curiosity, rather than a desire to make himself useful or reinvigorate their relationship, that led him to take up her offer. Two or three times a week he’d go into the open-plan office in a tinted-glass, low-rise box on Great South Road which was the nerve centre of Joyce’s mini-empire. He’d sit in on meetings with the bullshit artists – as he regarded them – from the advertising agency, or liaise with retailers. No one, least of all Joyce, treated him as just another employee. He was the boss’s husband, which made him, in the eyes of some of the people he dealt with, the boss’s boss. He played along with this misapprehension, but the knowledge that it was an inversion of reality and believed only by rubes, people of alarming ignorance, burned his insides like peasant firewater.

  Once he was satisfied that Joyce wasn’t having an affair, and had seen enough to know that her success was no happy accident (she was more alert to opportunity, harder-working and better at managing people than he’d ever been), he maintained his involvement for one reason and one reason only: his wife’s personal assistant, Denise Hadlow.

  Denise was a single mother in her mid-thirties. She was clued-up and competent, even though the job was really her third priority after her little boy and the ongoing dirty war with her ex over child support. She had one of those faces most people would call pretty and some would wonder what all the fuss is about but no one, least of all Lilywhite, a leg man from way back, could quibble with what lay south of the jawline. He reckoned she could have made a fortune in Hollywood as a body double.

  The other thing Lilywhite noticed about Denise was that she was the only employee who didn’t take their cue from Joyce and adopt a demeanour of bulldozing cheerfulness. He put her detachment down to the fact that she was sexier than the other women and smarter than the men and wielded a certain amount of obstructive power by virtue of her position. But there was another dimension to it: she was the only person who worked for or with Joyce who didn’t think she was wonderful. In fact, he was pretty sure Denise didn’t actually like his wife very much at all. Joyce wasn’t entirely oblivious to this, but typically it just made her more determined to draw Denise into the fold. Lilywhite thought she was wasting her time. Denise’s alienation went deep; it wouldn’t be charmed away by lunch at the French Café or bribed away by a bonus and an extravagant birthday present for her son.

  And when Denise began making protracted, almost brazen eye contact, he realized, with a jolt of lust and a vengeful thrill whose intensity surprised him, that he’d found someone who would willingly join him in ensuring that Joyce’s ascendancy came at a cost. Or maybe it was the other way around, and she’d found him.

  Lilywhite’s daughter Sandy made an unheralded entrance.

  “All right, Dad?” she asked. “Maybe you should get some rest. You’ve been at it for ages.”

  “I’m fine, thank you, my dear,” said Lilywhite. “How about you, Sergeant? Something to eat, perhaps?”

  Before Ihaka could reply, Sandy said, “Okay, I’ll leave you to it.” She exited, closing the door behind her with a pointed thud.

  Lilywhite raised his eyebrows. “Looks like room service isn’t available just at the moment.”

  “I’m right,” said Ihaka.

  “You’ve been very patient,” said Lilywhite.

  Ihaka shrugged. “I’m not in any rush to get to the serviced apartment.”

  “Where is home these days, if I may ask?”

  “Wairarapa. A cottage down a country road.”

  “Sounds delightful. Do you share it with anyone?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Ihaka neutrally.

  Lilywhite nodded. “No, you didn’t come here to exchange chit-chat, did you? If you’re wondering why I’m being so long-winded, it’s because I’m only doing this once.” He paused. “And I want you to understand what happened to me, as well as to Joyce.”

  “I got that.”

  “Ah, but do you realize what it means? It means you’re my de facto father confessor.”

  “You’re in the shit, then,” said Ihaka. “I can’t help you there.”

  “On the contrary, you’re perfect. I don’t want absolution; I don’t deserve it. What I want is to make amends. You can help me do that.”

  Lilywhite was aware there was another dimension to sex. He’d heard the stories, although you obviously had to take some with a grain of salt. Being aware was one thing; experiencing it was something else. Denise Hadlow was the closest thing he’d ever come across to the wanton angels splayed across the centrefold. If her body wasn’t proof enough, her casual sensuality was emphatic confirmation that he’d somehow stumbled into the hot zone.

  Why had Denise latched onto him rather than a man in her own image, a hard body she could thrash under all night long? Lilywhite assumed she saw their affair as psychic sabotage: she could watch Joyce being the Woman Who Had It All and think, look at her – she thinks she’s so onto it, but she can’t even see her husband’s left the building. He further assumed that since Joyce was oblivious, Denise’s private satisfaction would soon wane. But an illicit affair suited Denise. Her little boy was the man in her life, and she didn’t want a would-be partner competing for her time and attention.

  She went along with his subterfuges because she didn’t want to wreck his marriage or lose her job. He would have spoiled her, even kept her, if she’d let him, but she wouldn’t have it. “What would that make me?” she’d ask. She often asked if he’d thought it through. Did it really make sense to risk so much upheaval for a once- or twice-weekly blast of high-end sex? There was no false modesty on that score. Occasionally she taunted him, suggesting that when the affair had run its course, he should quit while he was ahead and retire from sex altogether.

  He wondered if the idea was to get him hooked, to ruin him for Joyce. If so, it was working. He stopped fretting about being found out and began inventing scenarios in which Joyce didn’t figure, imagining an existence from which she’d been purged. Then he would be free to have as much of Denise as she’d allow him. He’d be so rich she might let him have all of her.

  His craving for Denise took away his appetite and made his stomach flutter with nausea. He could barely bring himself to be civil to Joyce. She assumed his brusque disengagement was payback for her vetoing a return to property development, and softened her position, agreeing to consider any reasonable proposal. But Lilywhite had reached the point of twisting everything she said or did, however placatory or well-intentioned, to stoke his obsessions. Thus this olive branch was actually a trap: she was pretending to be open to persuasion, getting his hopes up so that the inevitable knock-back would be even more deflating.

  The annual boys’ weekend couldn’t have been better timed, although Lilywhite found himself in a strange position. When the conversation turned to wives and girlfriends, as it always did because two of the group had effectively given up marriage and taken up adultery, he was still cast as one of the lucky buggers – great wife, dream marriage. But later on, when the unlucky buggers began talking up the invigorating thrill of spontaneous fellatio or desktop fornication, he became poor old Chris, missing out on the fun because he was too married for his own good.

  Lilywhite was tempted to trump them with the Denise card. Ma
ybe next year? Next year, my arse, he thought. I’ll be struggling to hold it together till the end of the month. But he held his tongue and stayed in character, restricting himself to a cryptic grumble and a throwaway line about finding a hitman in the Yellow Pages.

  The following week a man rang him up offering to kill Joyce for $25,000.

  “What did he say?” said Ihaka. “Exactly.”

  “He said, ‘A little bird tells me you might be interested in changing your domestic arrangements. I can make that happen.’ I said, ‘Who is this? What the hell are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Listen, I’m not fucking around here. It’ll cost twenty-five grand and no one will be any the wiser – it’ll look like an accident.’ I was so stunned I don’t think I said another word. He told me to think about it and he’d call back in a couple of days. If I said no, that would be the end of it, he wouldn’t ask a third time. That’s it, pretty much word for word.”

  “You didn’t recognize the voice?”

  Lilywhite shook his head. “It wasn’t his normal voice. I don’t know if he had a handkerchief over his mouth or something, but it was a bit distorted. Regardless of that, it didn’t have a familiar ring, if you know what I mean.”

  “Then what?”

  “He rang back three days later…”

  “Definitely the same guy?”

  “Yes.”

  “By which time you’d had a chance to think about it?”

  “I’d thought of little else. I took the ‘just out of curiosity’ tack. It was very simple, he said: it would happen within thirty days of me paying a ten-grand deposit. I’d then have two or three months to pay the balance. The time frame was to enable me to get the money together in dribs and drabs, thereby avoiding suspicious transactions. There’d be no face-to-face meetings; communication would be restricted to arranging the handovers. As long as I kept my end of the deal, I’d never hear from him again.”

  “So you agreed?”

  “No, I asked for more time. He said maybe, maybe not, and hung up. A fortnight later he rang again: ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘No ifs or buts or maybes.’ I said yes. He told me to start getting the money together, he’d be in touch. The money wasn’t an issue: I had some cash that Joyce didn’t know about squirrelled away in a safety deposit box. It started out as a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary surprise fund.”

  Lilywhite grunted as if he’d been hit, and reached for his pills. Ihaka saw tears in his eyes and looked away. He wasn’t sure why.

  “A few weeks later I was at the Eastridge supermarket. When I got back to my car there was a typewritten note under the windscreen wiper instructing me to wrap the ten grand in newspaper, put it in a shopping bag, and take it to St Mark’s Church in Remuera at five the following afternoon. I was to sit for a while in the third row from the back on the right-hand side of the aisle, then clear off, leaving the bag under the pew. Once I’d memorized the instructions, I was to rip up the note and throw it in a rubbish bin. I did what I was told and you know the rest.”

  “You never heard from him again?”

  Lilywhite shook his head.

  “And the balance?”

  “Another note under the windscreen wiper. Different church this time, St Aidan’s in Ascot Avenue.”

  “So you suspect one of your mates from the boys’ weekend put him onto you?”

  Lilywhite nodded. “For want of a better idea.”

  “On the basis of a joke about finding a hitman in the Yellow Pages?”

  “That and the timing. It’d be a bit of a coincidence otherwise, wouldn’t it. And maybe I wasn’t as good an actor as I thought – bear in mind, those guys know me better than anyone.”

  “Except your wife, and she didn’t see it coming.”

  “She wasn’t looking.”

  “So do you have a theory on which one?”

  “I don’t,” said Lilywhite. “Not for want of trying. I’ve given it a lot of thought, believe me. There’s just nothing much to go on, and what there is doesn’t point one way. For instance, one of them really loathes his wife but she’s still alive. For that matter, she’s still his wife. So what does that tell you?” He pointed to a manila folder on the sideboard. “The details are in there.”

  Lilywhite subsided into the pillows, closing his eyes. Ihaka watched the colour that had come back into his cheeks drain away. Without opening his eyes, Lilywhite said, “Does it seem likely to you that Joyce is his only victim?”

  “No, that doesn’t seem very likely at all.”

  Lilywhite gestured towards the folder. “That’s what I thought. I actually became a bit obsessed with the subject – quite the amateur sleuth I was. I came across a couple of interesting ones. Might be worth a look.”

  4

  Ihaka made two calls before he drove away from Lilywhite’s house, the first to set up a meeting with Finbar McGrail, the second to see if Johan Van Roon had been able to do him a favour. He had. It came in the form of an address.

  Ihaka drove east, past Panmure Basin, across the Tamaki Estuary, out through Pakuranga and Howick to Cockle Bay. It was rush hour, which meant a stop-start journey, the stops lasting longer than the starts. He thought of his drive home from work, a twenty-minute dawdle through countryside where man and nature had reached a pleasing accommodation. He station-surfed but the airwaves had been monopolized by jerk-offs with that oily radio voice which reminded him of perverts he’d arrested.

  The address was a town house two blocks back from the water. It was 5.45 p.m.; the carport was empty. Ihaka parked on the other side of the road, tilted the seat back as far as it would go, and closed his eyes.

  At 6.05 a Mitsubishi Pajero, the model before the model before last, swung into the carport. Ihaka got out of the car and crossed the road. The Pajero’s driver’s door opened. A balding middle-aged man swung his right leg out of the car and looked over his shoulder at Ihaka, keeping his hands out of sight. Ihaka stopped on the footpath, a few metres away. They examined one another.

  “Is that a pistol in your pocket,” said Ihaka, “or are you just pleased to see me?”

  “Jesus, Chief,” said the other man, “I was that close to giving myself permission to fire at will. Just as well I can tell you fucking Maoris apart.”

  “I was counting on that,” said Ihaka. “How’re you doing, Blair?”

  The man was Blair Corvine, a former undercover policeman who’d been forced to retire after being shot five times at point-blank range. Last time Ihaka had seen him, he was quite a lot skinnier and had ear-studs, a ponytail and a wedge of fluff hanging off his lower lip. Back then his usual outfit was too-tight jeans, T-shirts with slogans intended to cause offence like ‘So many Christians, so few lions’, and cowboy boots. Now he looked like just another suburban joe who wore whatever his wife bought him at Farmers.

  Corvine got out of the Pajero, slipping the semi-automatic pistol into a backpack. “Can’t complain,” he said. “It only hurts when I eat, drink, piss, shit, fart, root, sit down, stand up or water the plants. I take it you’re still partial to a cold beer on a warm day?”

  Ihaka shrugged. “I wouldn’t want you to drink alone.”

  As they approached the front door, it was opened by a woman with short grey-blonde hair, dressed for the gym. She had the body of a forty-year-old but the face of a fifty-year-old. Ihaka wondered if exercise was penance for years of hard living. She stood in the doorway, hands on hips, her face clamped in a grim shape, itching for a fight. It was just a question of who she picked on.

  “Hey, baby,” said Corvine, bending down to kiss her on the thin white line where her lips used to be. “I know what you’re thinking, but he’s a cop. Tito, meet Sheree.”

  Ihaka put a lot of sincerity into his greeting. He might as well have spat on her cross-trainers.

  “You want to take Tito out the back, babe?” said Corvine. “We’re having a beer. Can I get you a glass of wine?”

  “I’m going to Pilates,” she said, making it sound like “I’m sl
eeping in the spare room.”

  The rear courtyard was a riot of colour: marigolds, petunias and pansies overflowed tubs and ceramic pots, and white and crimson roses swarmed over a trellis. Ihaka carefully lowered himself onto one of the flimsy-looking chairs around a metal café table.

  Sheree remained standing, arms folded. “How did you find us?”

  “A guy owed me one,” said Ihaka as Corvine appeared with a couple of Peronis.

  “Oh, cool.” She trained her eyes on Corvine. “This place is supposed to be top fucking secret, right, and they’re handing it out to anyone who’s owed a favour?”

  “Take it easy, Sheree,” said Corvine. “Tito’s not just anyone.”

  Her eyebrows arched. “Oh, really? So why’s he here – to talk you into a comeback?” She snorted disgustedly. As she walked away, she tossed a “Fucking hell, Blair” over her shoulder.

  Corvine sat down. “Sorry about that, mate.”

  “Not your fault,” said Ihaka. “I have this effect on women.”

  “It was fucking hard on her, man, not knowing whether I was going to make it, then all that fucking rehab and a year down south when we just sort of sat around going slowly out of our minds. Now we’re back here, which is great, but you live with the knowledge that there’s some real bad bastards in this town who’d be round in a fucking flash if they knew where to find me.”