Last Long Drop

by Mike Safe

  ‘Yeah, for Christ’s sake, we’re all going to be in the bloody papers tomorrow,’ said Harcourt, casting about at the growing collection of phones aimed in their direction.

  The rest of the players in this impromptu drama also looked about as an awkward silence, mixed with a sort of foreboding awareness, settled over all of them, except for Jack, who appeared to have found a streak of black humour in it all. ‘Wow, some homecoming. This is better than any street theatre I’ve ever seen.’

  Two men in uniforms, Australian Federal Police, approached.

  ‘Okay, what’s going on here?’ asked the older one, a big guy who looked as if he’d seen his share of such dramas. ‘All of you, you’ll come with us please.’

  ‘But it’s nothing of any consequence,’ said Kirsten, pulling on her wayward shoe. ‘You can’t arrest us, can you?’

  ‘Ma’am, no one is being arrested,’ the policeman said. ‘You’re on Commonwealth property which is subject to the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act and we’re merely attempting to find out what’s happening here.’

  ‘Criminal Code Act!’ Kirsten blurted.

  ‘For crying out loud, Kirsten, shut up for once,’ said Harcourt.

  His daughter looked at him, blinked several times, but did as he suggested.

  As Harrison and Silas got up from the footpath, the younger still eyeing the older with what looked to be considerable intent, the other police officer moved the loiterers on. ‘All done here, thank you, go about your business now.’

  ‘Hey, you’re the chick from the paper, aren’t you?’ yelled a man from the crowd. ‘The one with the boobs.’

  While the second policeman saw the man on his way, Harcourt looked at his daughter and sighed. ‘The one with the boobs’ – was that how his smart, sassy, impulsive daughter was going to be remembered for the next ten years, or at least until the next tabloid celebrity scandal?

  The police officers took the ragged procession, Harrison and Jack with their trolleys, Kirsten and Harcourt, still carrying the guitar case, and a sullen Silas tagging behind them, across the road and into the terminal. After winding through the crowd, they came to an anonymous white security door where the older cop punched in a code and they filed through an equally anonymous room where another officer was watching a bank of CCTV monitors and into an even more anonymous meeting room – blank white walls, table and chairs of public service issue and not much else.

  After Harrison and Silas were strategically seated on opposite sides of the table, the senior officer left, telling them he would be back in a minute, which turned into ten, before he returned with a duty inspector – or that’s how Harcourt remembered him – who sat down at the head of the table.

  What followed was thirty minutes of back and forth which to Harcourt seemed like a cross between a primary school telling-off by your least favourite teacher and an example of just another piece of stupidity that police had to deal with as part of their everyday duties. No, Harrison told them, he did not want to press an assault charge or any other charge against Silas and no Silas did not want to press an assault charge, with a guitar case, against Harcourt. Any thought of the latter was highly fanciful, or so thought Harcourt, as he had only been reacting to Silas’s attack on Harrison, and Kirsten’s resulting alarm. Maybe the cops were simply canvassing all the possibilities. They appeared to be well aware of the tabloid background leading up to the incident and the one in charge could hardly hide the smirk when he said, ‘We do read the newspapers.’

  There was more back and forth. Silas divulged that he had a mysterious friend in the airline business who’d somehow found out Harrison’s flight number. Knowing he was the instigator of the fracas and in the firing line, he offered an all-round apology – how sincere it was being another matter entirely. Harrison, quick to play the perfect English gentleman, also apologised for any inconvenience caused.

  The cop in charge said the incident would be noted on the day’s running sheet along with all their names and particulars but no charges would be pursued, particularly as Harrison was not keen to do so. Such behaviour would not be tolerated again – this remark seemed aimed particularly at Silas – they were adults with a certain standing in the community who should have known better. And so it concluded.

  Harrison and Kirsten were escorted to departures – apparently she was seeing him off to New York – while the junior cop was summonsed to accompany Silas to his vehicle, wherever it was in the car park. Harcourt and Jack were left to their own devices and they headed towards the car park for a second time.

  ‘What a stuff up,’ said Jack as he pushed his trolley. ‘Kirsto sure knows how to get attention,’ He thought for a moment. ‘Anyway, I always thought Silas was a bit of a tool, but her hitting it off with that old guy … I know he’s supposed to be a great writer and all that, but, bloody hell, he’s older than you …’

  After arriving home with Jack, Harcourt was tipped off by Gordy Stone about what to expect in the morning paper.

  ‘Toxic Tab wanted me to ring you to see if you’d give us a quote about what happened at the airport,’ Gordy said. ‘He thinks our friendship will sway you to do so. Tell me to fuck off and I will.’

  ‘Tell him to fuck off and, you’re right, I won’t give you a quote.’

  Gordy laughed. ‘I’ll quite happily do that for you.’ He went quiet for a second. ‘By the way, they sacked me today. Superfluous to needs apparently. I leave at the end of the month.’

  ‘Tell Toxic to get fucked a second time. Gordy, I’m sorry to hear that.’

  There was a long sigh at the other end of the phone. ‘Well, it’s not like it wasn’t expected. The payout’s more or less reasonable. I’ve been here twenty-five bloody years. At least I won’t have to go on welfare straight away, ha, ha, ha.’

  Harcourt didn’t know what to say – what was there to say?

  After the call, he couldn’t help but feel at least a bit lost … dejected, despondent, downcast … words like that or similar. Despite his crack about going on welfare, Gordy wouldn’t be too far from doing just that. There wouldn’t be much of the payout left after his bills were paid and his ex-wives and brood of needy children were looked after. Harcourt thought of his own family, facing nothing like the same financial difficulties, but with its own circumstances to be met.

  Tess, Jack and Kirsten had their own stuff going on but what about him? No prospect of a fulltime job, just an occasional column to bring in a bit of money. He felt kind of alienated from it all. Still, there was the Mike Vargas book, its potential of a big payday and a place at the centre of it all once again – if it ever happened, of course.

  Despite all this murmuring in his head, it ended up being not too bad an evening. Tess arrived home to embrace her returned son and soon after Kirsten turned up unannounced after seeing Harrison off on his flight across the Pacific to make up with the New York big boys. They ordered in pizzas.

  It had been months, well before Christmas, since they’d been together like this as a family, just the four of them.

  When he mentioned this, Kirsten said, ‘Come on, Dad, you’re going all sentimental on us.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ her brother asked.

  ‘Well, nothing I guess,’ she replied.

  Tess, as was her way, had the right comment for the moment, sort of not too hot, not too cold. ‘Well, isn’t it something that the four of us are able to sit around the kitchen table where you grew up and talk together in a congenial fashion? You think of half the families we know, who you two grew up with … These days they’d never be seen together in the same suburb, let alone the same room.’

  She took a sip from the glass of cheap white Harcourt had poured for her. ‘Yuck, is this the best we can do?’ she asked, screwing up her face. ‘Come on, we’re a family. We’re all here together. Haven’t we got any good stuff?’

  The doorbell rang. While Tess collected the pizzas Harcourt dutifully checked a small second refrigerator kept in the laundry
and came back with three bottles.

  ‘I bought these on special at the bottle shop months ago. From memory, they cost at least ten bucks each.’

  The others laughed, and Tess found the New Zealand sav blanc at least drinkable. They clustered around the table to eat.

  While getting stuck in to the pizza, Kirsten turned confessional, saying her relationship with Silas was all but over. ‘It’s been going downhill for a while. He’s been talking about maybe going overseas, to London to work in the money markets. He seems to think I should conform to whatever he wants when he wants, but, well, that’s not going to happen.’ She’d arranged to stay with a girlfriend, someone she’d known since school, for a few days until she and Silas sorted through the situation. ‘That won’t be fun but it’s got to be done.’

  That led Harcourt to the next obvious question. ‘Okay, so what’s with Harrison? What’s going on there?’

  She looked momentarily uncomfortable, almost bashful. ‘I mean, I like him, I like him enough. He’s funny, he’s intelligent, he’s all of those things you’d expect him to be …’ She shifted about in her chair, as if she was a kid back in school, not her usual confident self. ‘I know I can be a lot of things that a lot of people don’t like, pushy, bossy even and, yeah, too smart for my own good at times, but I just knew the relationship with Silas was running off the rails … and then out of the blue there was Ed, one of my literary heroes and we were in Adelaide and there was a real buzz at the writers’ get-togethers. It was fun, it was exciting, one thing led to another …’ She took a drink from her wine glass as if looking for a pause. ‘And now he’s off to New York and will be tied up on his book tour for what will be weeks, maybe months. He suggested I go along for at least the start of it, but I don’t know … I’ve got all my work to do here – the magazine, where I’m way behind on the next issue, and some radio and TV spots.’

  She smiled mischievously. ‘And talking of TV, there’s something else. Just before getting on the plane to come home today, I had a call from one of the commercial networks, not allowed to say which one as yet. They’re putting together a five nights a week primetime show. Current affairs, opinions, that sort of stuff, from a lighter and younger perspective, and they want me to be one of the presenters, do a lot of the studio interviews, even some of the reporting.’

  ‘Do you get to keep your top on for it?’ her brother asked.

  ‘Don’t be such a smartarse,’ Tess chided while Kirsten poked her tongue out at him.

  ‘I’m meeting a couple of their development people to talk about it.’ She shrugged and continued. ‘I don’t know, the guy who rang me just laughed off the publicity and headlines of the past week. Said it had been given a big run on their news and other shows, like breakfast, and created a buzz of its own. If anything, the whole episode helped spark their interest in me, from what I could gather.’

  “What about what happened at the airport this afternoon?’ asked Harcourt. ‘That’s hardly going to help.’

  She shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ She seemed more than pleased with herself again. ‘I mean, this TV thing could turn out to be really big for me.’

  Harcourt looked at Tess across the table and she rolled her eyes ever so subtly. Welcome to the wild new media world.

  Jack told the kitchen table discussion he’d already phoned Randy Wayne and was off to see him in the morning about arranging an appearance or two at the Sand Bar. Randy Wayne was open to involving the Riders of the Surf and Sage if the ‘old codgers’, meaning Harcourt and Carpark, could get ‘their asses and musical brains in gear’ and manage the necessary rehearsals. Jack said it would give him a project to focus on and not just sit about waiting for the Solar Sons situation to be worked out.

  Harcourt filled them in on the Vargas book, his possible involvement in it, and he retold Flipper’s story.

  ‘Wow, that’s got to be in there,’ said Kirsten. ‘I mean, Vargas is a legend and, anyway, as I’ve just found out, bad publicity doesn’t necessarily have to be bad, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yeah, it has to be in there for sure,’ said Jack. ‘Readers get off on that stuff. They don’t want goody-two-shoes stories. They’re boring.’

  Harcourt, who’d been thinking about Flipper’s claims, told them he’d come to the conclusion that his story was more or less true, even if it couldn’t be verified. ‘I mean, he’s still bitter and he might have taken a few liberties with it, but wild fantasies don’t last decades and at the very least Vargas’s part in Tommy’s drowning is beyond doubt.’

  But, he pointed out, Vargas wanted his story his way – and he’d been told in no uncertain manner that would be enforced in the book contract. ‘Still, I have to score it first.’

  The next day’s page-three headline read ‘Guitar Gotcha’ with an explanatory line, ‘Topless damsel’s dad downs her jilted boyfriend with guitar case in airport bust up.’ The main photo showed Silas and Harrison sprawled on the concrete with a bewildered Kirsten, wearing one stiletto shoe, standing between them. Harcourt with guitar case in hand was looking away from the camera, for which he thanked god. Another shot showed the police officers talking with an animated Kirsten.

  The supposed story gave sketchy details of what had happened while managing to recount the whole Kirsten–Harrison saga. The unidentified source of the photographs had provided a few quotes, which had no doubt been massaged with the right sort of colourful phrases by the paper’s editors. There was a one-sentence statement from the Federal Police at the end saying that no charges had been laid nor were expected to be laid.

  ‘Could have been worse,’ Harcourt said to Tess.

  ‘At least they didn’t use it as an excuse to run a topless shot again,’ she added.

  All considered, it was a bit of a fizzer, although breakfast TV and the internet were giving it a go. With Tess off to the office, he was scrolling through the usual internet sites when his phone rang.

  ‘Montacue Publishing calling. Is that Mr Harcourt? Could you hold for Amanda Peers please?’ Shit, it was the fat and flustered secretary – no, personal assistant – of Tess’s fat and florid publishing rival, the pusher of the Mike Vargas autobiography. A minute later she came on the line. ‘Congratulations, John,’ she said, her formidable voice echoing down the line. ‘After consideration, Montacue Publishing would like to offer you the chance to write the Mike Vargas book.’ She paused for a moment. ‘You seem to have left a stellar impression on our film star client.’

  FIFTEEN

  Harcourt could tell Amanda still didn’t want him writing the Mike Vargas book. She set about telling him in her brusque fashion that the book would be 100,000 to 120,000 words and yes, it would be autobiographical in form – Vargas’s story in his words – without other voices. Any conflicting opinions from outside sources that were on the public record would be explained away by Vargas’s voice. There would be no exceptions to this rule. Although the deadline was yet to be set, the plan was to have the book out at the same time as the release of the film Vargas was now working on. That could be up to two years away.

  ‘As you know, of course, he’s been finalising the script at Noosa and he’s now gone to his place somewhere in Fiji apparently, to show it to several potential investors. Why he’s meeting them there I have no idea,’ she huffed.

  Harcourt’s fee for the project had still to be decided but it would be ‘appropriate’ – whatever that meant in the new publishing environment. It would be half paid on signing the contract with the other half on completion and acceptance of the manuscript. There would be no top ups from copies, paper or digital, sold and the fee would also have to cover his research costs and securing rights to photographs, although many of these would be supplied free of charge by Vargas from his own records. Harcourt would receive a writer’s credit in the book for his efforts – but not on the cover – and Vargas would no doubt acknowledge him in the introduction, the only part of the book the subject would actually write. An editor would be attached to
the project, probably someone from Montacue’s New York office – this was another likely reason Amanda seemed unimpressed as she was being shuffled down the chain of command. It was to be expected on a big international book like this, but still a reality check for her ego. Anyway, the full details and numbers would be confirmed within weeks and then a contract would be drawn up for his signature.

  ‘Do you have a lawyer?’ Amanda barked.

  ‘Well, no, not as such. But I’ve known a few over the years, although they mostly deal with keeping crims out of jail, not vetting book contracts.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure Tess can help you out with that. Congratulations again and we’ll be in touch in due course.’ And with that she was gone.

  Amanda seemed unimpressed by him and what he might have to say, on the book or anything else for that matter. This was one ghost writer who was definitely not to be seen or heard. His job was to shut up and write.

  He rang Tess on her mobile phone and, miraculously, she answered straight away. He told her he had scored the book.

  ‘Well, I guess you’ve now got no option but to raise the whole Woodrell mess with Vargas,’ said Tess after congratulating him. ‘Do you think you can talk him into telling his side of that?’

  Harcourt sighed. ‘Now there’s a question.’

  ‘If you can’t, what will you do?’

  ‘C’mon, Tess, you’re trying to go all righteous on me.’

  ‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘The fact is the more secrets that come out, good or bad, the bigger the book sales. But, of course, even the bad bits can be spun to the subject’s advantage. You know how it goes – poor me, I was just a kid, I was naive, my dad used to beat me every night and that sent me off the rails. Any personal story needs to have a hook, a wow moment, to sell it.’

  Harcourt sighed. ‘Fair enough, but after my brief time with Vargas, I have no doubt he’s seeing this whole exercise – the blockbuster movie that’s taking up his time and the book – as some sort of monument to himself, kind of like a statue in a park.’