The Brush-Off mw-1

by Shane Maloney

  Eastlake had already figured this out. ‘Call his bluff. Make him put up or shut up. If he took Karlin’s money knowing that Our Home wasn’t authentic, that’s criminal fraud. Mention the prospect of prosecution and I bet he’ll fall over himself to sign a statement confirming the picture’s authenticity.’

  A more informed discussion with Giles Aubrey was certainly on the agenda. ‘I’ll go and see him tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘You do what you think advisable, Murray.’

  Business done, I accepted a second cup of coffee and eased back into my surroundings. The Deli’s cafeteria decor was obviously not its prime attraction, no more so than the quality of its profiteroles or the freshness of its juices. The customers were there for each other. As we were talking, Eastlake had been fielding social signals from the other booths. Spotting his opportunity, the beetroot-faced realtor table-hopped over, cup in hand. ‘Hey, Eastie,’ he said, wagging his tail. ‘How’s that new Merc of yours running?’

  Eastlake introduced us, first names only. Malcolm was wearing a Gucci shirt that might have done something for a man twenty years younger. ‘Seen Lloyd’s new car?’ He jerked his head back towards the street. ‘High performance automobile like that and he gets a chauffeur to drive it. That’s like having the butler fuck your mistress. What do you drive, Murray?’

  ‘Something smaller,’ I said. Then, since the subject had come up, ‘Good drivers easy to find, Lloyd?’

  ‘Noel?’ Eastlake was back at ease, expansive. ‘I didn’t find him,’ he said. ‘He found me. You know the Members’ carpark at Flemington?’

  Malcolm squeezed in beside me, ready to catch any gems of wit and wisdom Lloyd Eastlake might care to drop. The Members’ carpark was where the silvertails held their chicken and champers picnics on Cup Day. Not a place you needed to be a regular race-goer to know about. I nodded. Go on.

  ‘Last spring racing carnival, it was. I was out there with your predecessor, Ken Sproule. Terrible man for the gee-gees, Ken is. We’ve had a pretty good day and we’re both well over the limit. So we get to the car and Ken decides he’s not going to let me drive, not in my condition. It’s starting to rain and there we are, standing next to the car…’

  ‘That was the 450 SLC, right?’ chipped in Malcolm. ‘The two-door coupe.’

  ‘…arguing the toss about whether I’m in a fit state to drive. Anyway, this bloke comes along, he’s doing the rounds, working for some car-detailing firm. They go around during the afternoon, checking for dents, rust spots, that sort of thing. They put their card under the wiper-flaking chrome, cracked light, whatever-and a quote for the job.’

  I could just see it. Spider Webb prowling the toffs’ carpark with a twenty-cent piece in one hand and an eye to the main chance.

  ‘So Ken gets an idea. This bloke can drive us into the city, take the car overnight, cut and polish it, drop it off at my place in the morning. It’s either that or walk through the rain to the main gate, get a cab, come back the next day for the car. So I said okay. Next morning, there’s the Merc in my driveway, spic and span, never looked better. It hadn’t been running at its best, and he had a few ideas about that. Ended up looking after my wife’s car as well. When I moved up to the SEL, I needed a driver and put him on full-time.’

  Malcolm loved it, the adventures of the cavalier millionaire. ‘Hundred and fifty grand’s worth of vehicle and you handed the keys to a complete stranger?’

  Not a bad story, but it sounded like pub talk to me. And a funny way to hire a bodyguard. Through the Deli’s plate-glass front window, Spider was visible across the road. He was sipping from a polystyrene cup and lazily chewing gum at the same time. Blank-eyed, bored, watchful. Drip dry. ‘This is the guy with the ears, right?’ I pushed mine forward by way of example. The wound was healing nicely. ‘Thought I saw him down near the Arts Centre yesterday morning.’

  A pair of social lions prowled over, her in an Alice band, him in a track suit, faces from the CMA opening. Eastlake tossed me their names. ‘You remember…’ I remembered I had someone better to spend my time with. Offering my seat, I said hello, made my excuses and went to find Red.

  His ten dollars had bought a roll of mints and a small electronic game in the shape of a spaceship. The mints weren’t bad. I was trying to wheedle a couple more out of Red when we crested the Punt Road hill and hit the tail end of a string of traffic that ran all the way to the river.

  Throwing a hasty left at Domain Road, I cut past the Botanic Gardens and through to St Kilda Road. The traffic was lighter there, although the Arts Centre had attracted quite a crowd. Had Marcus Taylor’s famous death, I wondered, prompted a renewed interest in the Old Masters? The gelati vans were back in force and delinquents on skateboards were surfing the steel waves of the sculpture on the lawn next to the Concert Hall. Red was drawn like a magnet to the sight. On impulse, I pulled into a vacant parking space.

  A juggler had set up shop beside the sculpture in front of the State Theatre, a hideously ugly brown lump. The sculpture, not the juggler. The juggler was dressed as King Neptune and had three carving knives and a flaming firebrand aloft simultaneously. I thought I knew how he felt. Just as he finished, an octopus on stilts appeared through the crowd. ‘Check this out,’ I told Red. ‘It’s harder than it looks.’ Especially since one of the stilts had a bend in it. Red wasn’t interested in some promenading fish. His interest lay with the skateboarders. I told him to run ahead, that I’d join him in a few minutes.

  Jumping up onto the parapet of the moat, I threaded my way past parked backsides and headed towards the entrance of the National Gallery. The parapet was a little less than a metre across, about the width of a standard table. Not exactly an acrobatic challenge. But then Marcus Taylor didn’t have a great track record when it came to tables. It would, I could see, have been quite easy for someone with a few drinks under his belt to slip and knock himself out on the hard grey basalt. But what was Taylor doing walking along the parapet? He was coming from the other direction and the most direct way to the YMCA did not lie along the front of the building.

  I went the way I’d have gone if I was Taylor, skirting around the back. At the stage door of the Concert Hall, I found the same guy on duty who’d let me into the Arts Ministry the previous morning, and got him to unlock the YMCA. The same air of scrofulous melancholy pervaded the place, but not the same silence. As the lift juddered open at the third floor, Lou Reed advanced down the corridor to meet me.

  He was coming from one of the formerly locked rooms. A woman in bib-and-brace overalls stuck her head through the open door and watched me advance, her eyes narrowing. ‘If you’re a journalist,’ she said, ‘you’re a bit late. I already told that lot who were here yesterday everything I know. Which is nothing. The guy was a hermit.’ She had a stick of charcoal in her hand. Behind her I could see big sheets of parchment paper taped to the walls. They were covered in black squiggles that might, given a couple of million years, have eventually evolved into horses. Or dogs. Or giraffes.

  ‘If I look like a journalist, I can assure you it’s not intentional.’ I nodded towards Taylor’s end of the corridor. ‘I’m a sort of friend.’ Well, Taylor was in no position to contradict me.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, scowling. ‘I didn’t…’ She was going to say she didn’t know he had any, but stopped herself in time. ‘Didn’t have a lot to do with him. Like I said, he kept to himself.’

  ‘There was a painting he was working on last time I was here,’ I said. ‘I was sort of interested in it.’

  ‘Help yourself,’ she said, turning her back in disgust. ‘Everyone else has.’

  When I opened Taylor’s door I discovered what she meant. Taylor’s rooms had been plundered of almost anything of value. The camp stove had been nicked, the microwave oven, the desk lamp, even jars of used paintbrushes. Most of the books had gone from the brick-and-board case. A half-dozen back copies of Veneer remained, a thin tome entitled The Necessity of Australian Art and a dog-eared copy of A Fierce
Vision. I thumbed through it. A sheet of tracing paper marked the plate of Our Home, the principal details precisely transferred to a pencil-drawn grid. Using such a template, a competent draughtsman could easily have enlarged the image to actual size and transferred it onto canvas. It told me nothing I didn’t already know, that Marcus Taylor had whipped up a pretty fair version of Our Home. Whether it was his first or second attempt, why he’d done it, and where it had gone, were all questions that remained unanswered.

  Taylor’s dog-eared little collection of photographs was still in the desk drawer. When I compared them with the sketch in Fiona’s book, there wasn’t much doubt that Victor Szabo’s life-drawing model was the woman in the photo. The young hippy that could have been Taylor could still have been Taylor. Szabo was still definitely Szabo. I put the snaps in my pocket.

  The cheap plastic-covered stamp album was still there, too, with its paltry contents of low-denomination recent releases. Stamp collecting was a hobby that had never captured my imagination. But waste not, want not. If Red didn’t fancy the album, some other child might. That little girl, Grace, for example. Philately might not get me everywhere, but it would give me an excuse to go calling on her mother.

  The bankbook was still slotted into the crevasse between the desk and the wall where I’d dropped it in my haste to flee. I hooked it out with a bent coat-hanger and found myself looking at the most interesting thing I’d seen all day.

  Critically unappreciated he might have been, but Marcus Taylor was clearly finding a market for something he was doing. Over the previous six months, he’d made a number of deposits. The sums varied from twelve hundred to four thousand dollars, totalling nearly twenty thousand. Not a bad little nest egg for a man whose grant application form said that his sole income was unemployment benefits.

  I pondered its meaning. But not for long. Red would be wondering what had become of me. I dropped the bankbook back behind the desk. It felt like evidence. Of what, I didn’t know. Sticking the stamp album under my arm, I headed back along the side of the National Gallery. A gang of young hoons was stampeding down the footpath, pushing a shopping trolley full pelt. One of them was crouched inside the cart, gripping the sides for dear life, screaming insanely at the kid doing the steering.

  ‘Help!’ he was screaming. ‘Murder! Murder!’

  There was only one S. Fleet in the White Pages with a CBD address. Little Lonsdale Street. The western end, down towards the railway yards. Funky. Low rent. About the right place for a loft. Fifteen minutes walk from the Arts Centre. A five-minute drive.

  ‘Wait here,’ I told Red, parking around the corner. ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Shoosh,’ he said. His head was bent and his thumbs were furiously manipulating the liquid crystal blips of his handheld electronic game. ‘I’m going for the record.’ The stamp album, understandably, had failed to impress. It lay discarded on the back seat.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll go have some fun, just you and me.’ He didn’t look up.

  The Aldershot Building was six floors of faded glory, a Beaux Arts chocolate box dating from the boom of the 1880s. Barristers from the nearby law courts might once have had their chambers here, wool merchants, pastoral companies, shipping agents, stockbrokers. Then the boom had gone bust. The mercantile bourgeoisie moved out and the wholesale jewellers and sheet-music publishers moved in. In time, as the pigeon shit mounted on the curlicued plinths of the facade, these became two-man tailor shops and fishy photographers, doll doctors and dental technicians. Eventually, the strict prescriptions of the fire department had driven away even these modest entrepreneurs.

  But the Law of Unintended Consequences supersedes even the Prevention of Fire Act and the tenants squeezed out by the prohibitive cost of overhead sprinklers and CO2 extinguishers had been replaced by bootleg gayboy hairdressers, speakeasy desktop publishers and loft dwellers-all of them on handshake leases with blind-eye clauses. At the Aldershot, no-one was really there and if they were they were just visiting.

  Flyers for dance clubs were taped to the wall of the small ground-floor vestibule. Among them, beside the lift, was a much-amended hand-written list of tenants. Salina Fleet was on the sixth floor. I took the lift, a modern job not more than forty years old with cylindrical bakelite buttons that stuck out like the dugs on a black sow. It opened straight onto the corridor. Salina’s was the first door along.

  She didn’t answer at first. I knocked, waited, knocked again. A reggae beat was coming from somewhere, emanating from the very bones of the building, dreams of Jamaica. I knocked again and was about to turn away when the door opened a chink and Sal peered tentatively through the gap.

  ‘Oh, it’s you.’ Her mouth gave me a jumpy, automatic smile and her eyes tried to find their way around me into the hall. They were cold and glistening like she’d just been polishing them and had to put them back in to answer the door and they weren’t warmed up yet. Her once-fruited lips were thin and pasty. Unconsciously raising a little finger to them, she tore off a half moon of nail.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, harmlessly. ‘I haven’t come to take you up on your offer.’

  The skin was drawn tight across the bridge of her nose, accentuating the bird-like cast of her face. It was a face about five years older than when I’d first seen it. She didn’t open the door any further and she didn’t invite me in.

  ‘Sorry to drop by out of the blue,’ I said. ‘But I’ve heard that they’re pretty well decided that Marcus’s death wasn’t suicide. Thought I should let you know.’

  She accepted the news as though already reconciled to the possibility. Her neck flexed in a tiny bob, pecking an invisible grain of wheat. ‘Part of me hoped so, in a way. I can’t blame myself for an accident, can I?’

  ‘I was a bit abrupt yesterday,’ I said. ‘If you’d like to talk about it.’ I looked at the floor. ‘As a friend.’

  She reached out through the gap in the door and put her hand softly on my chest. ‘You’re a sweet guy, Murray. Really, you are. But I’d rather be alone.’ She gave me the most bathos-drenched look ever practised in front of a mirror, sighed heavily and stepped back.

  She’d tried that one before. Last time, it had nearly worked. Before the door could shut, I had my foot in it. Through the crack, I could see a bed. On the bed was a suitcase. ‘Going somewhere, Sal?’

  ‘How dare you!’ she spat through the gap, putting her shoulder to the door. ‘You can’t just force your way in.’

  My thirty-kilo advantage sat inert against the door. ‘Talk to me,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  The pressure on the door diminished somewhat. ‘This official, or what?’

  ‘Or what,’ I said.

  She backed away silently, letting the door fall open. Her lack of pretence at hospitality was refreshingly unrehearsed.

  What Salina called her loft was a large high-ceilinged room that might have once been a typing college classroom or the workshop of a manufacturing milliner. Chipboard partitions had been installed to create separate kitchen and bathroom areas, the floor had been sanded back and the place stocked with oddments of retro furniture of the Zsa Zsa Gabor On Safari variety. The wardrobe was a metal shop-display rack on castors, half empty. The bed took up the rest of the space, unmade beneath a scattering of clothes and a small, half-packed suitcase. The ashtray contained about five thousand half-smoked green-tinged butts.

  ‘Nice,’ I said.

  My opinion was a matter of supreme indifference to Salina Fleet. ‘What’s this all about?’ she demanded.

  A little of the old Sal had returned. She was wearing Capri pants with a pink gingham shirt knotted at the midriff and hoop earrings. She was still in mourning, though. The Capri pants were black. A bit of bluff might have got me through the door, but it wouldn’t get me any further. She’d backed herself against a window sill and folded her arms tight. She wasn’t going to take any bullying.

  I wasn’t going to give her any. By way of emphasising that my intentions
were honourable, I turned my back to the bed and perched on the arm of a zebra-patterned sofa. ‘Suicide or accident, Marcus Taylor’s death is a hot story. You’re not the only one the press have been talking to. All sorts of stories are flying around. My job involves keeping one step ahead of the pack.’

  That was only part of it, of course. In the final analysis, it wasn’t the Protestant work ethic that was gunning my engine. It was my frail ego. I had the distinct impression that my string was being jerked. By whom and to what end was not yet apparent. But I didn’t like it. Not one little bit. ‘You being on the Visual Arts Advisory Panel, I thought you might be able to advise me.’

  ‘Stories?’ Feigning nonchalance, she put a cigarette in her mouth and flicked a disposable lighter. ‘What stories?’

  ‘Let’s start with yesterday first. You went to the YMCA to get a picture, right? But someone had beaten you to it.’ Her lighter wouldn’t fire. She kept flicking the wheel with her thumb. I got out mine, walked over to the window and lit both of us up. ‘Right?’

  ‘I told you.’ She exhaled Kooly. ‘I went to get some personal things.’

  ‘Toothbrush? IUD? Little things that slip easily into a folio case.’

  ‘And to make my private goodbyes to Marcus.’

  ‘By coming on to me?’

  ‘I was upset. Vulnerable.’

  We wouldn’t get far heading down this track. I took myself back to the zebra. ‘Tell me about Marcus. How did you get involved with him?’

  She shrugged. ‘How does anybody? We met last winter. At an exhibition. He tried to lobby me for a grant. He was hopeless-insecure and arrogant at the same time.’ All the things that women can’t resist. ‘I was on the rebound. We ended up in bed. You know how it is.’

  I nearly did. ‘And so he got his grant.’

  That was below the belt. ‘It was a committee decision, based on artistic merit.’

  Now we were getting somewhere. ‘Good artist, was he? As good as his father, Victor Szabo?’