Deadline

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Deadline Page 29

by Terence J. Quinn


  Unfortunately, it was the most incredible feeling I’d ever experienced. As well as the initial euphoric rush, my diffidence quickly disappeared and I became almost as loud and brash as my American hosts. The white powder was freely available at the party in Beverly Hills – inside the palatial house, in the toilets, bedrooms and even out in the pool area. Wes pointed out film directors, studio bosses and Hollywood stars as well as ‘big- ass lawyers’ and businessmen. Most were high as kites.

  Despite being a Grammy Award- winning producer, Wes dressed like a trucker. Even at that glossy cocktail party, he wore a dirty, scuffed baseball cap with a green John Deere logo; his oily hair curled down under it and over the back of his blue- chequered shirt collar. Jeans and two- tone lizard- skin boots completed the ensemble. He had a lazy, wicked sense of humour and he – with the help of his friend Charlie – made me feel like I was the toast of LA. Wes was a good guy really, but I’ll curse him for the rest of my life. And if I could go back now to that moment, knowing where that first seductive high would lead, I’d run a mile.

  I had jacked in my job as a journo in London to come to LA for the movie project. A few years before, I had broken a big news story about the sordid sex life of a Conservative government minister and his wife. Turns out the avowedly Christian couple were enthusiastic participants in sleazy suburban orgies, some of which involved drugs, underage girls and rent boys. The scandal escalated when the pair embroiled other politicians, including two cabinet members, in their tawdry adventures. That scoop ultimately led to the downfall of the UK government. It also changed my life. For better. For worse. A whole lot worse.

  The movie studio party with Wes and a galaxy of screen stars set the scene for the rest of my lengthy stay in LA and the downward trajectory of my life. My partner in crime was Estevo ‘Chilli’ Gomez, the professional screenwriter assigned to me by the movie studio who did most of the work. Chilli was both highly skilled and highly sexed. After long days of hard work honing and polishing the film script, he would take me to Tinseltown’s top nightspots for some serious R&R. The Jesuit priests at St Jude’s, my old school in Sydney, would have had a fit if they could have seen me. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. And sinned. And sinned again. In those quickfire fifteen months in Hollywood I made up for the restrained, rather solitary life I’d enjoyed for the previous fifteen years.

  But the gods must have been laughing their dicks off because I finally got my comeuppance. On the night our screenplay for the film adaptation of Hard News won an Oscar, I had partied until dawn, sharing a cocktail of cocaine, ecstasy and margaritas with an anorexic actress who had been nominated for her work in a Quentin Tarantino bloodfest. A few hours later, lying semi- comatose on a crumpled bed in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel with one hand clasping the little gold statuette and the other cupping the starlet’s bony buttock, my phone beeped on the bedside table. The message shocked me out of my stupor. A disembodied Aussie voice told me that Percy was dead.

  Ah, shit. It was time to go home.

  2

  ANNIE GREENWOOD put down her glass, taking care not to lose a drop. ‘You want me to go on a sailing trip to some island in the back of beyond? For Christmas? With people I’ve never met?’ She laughed. ‘You are kidding, right?’

  Her husband Martin smiled. ‘Hardly the back of beyond, my love. Langkawi is where we had our honeymoon. You loved it, remember?’

  ‘But sailing? With me? I get seasick in a jacuzzi.’

  He gave her a strange smile: ‘This could be our last opportunity.’

  Annie’s dark eyebrows arched in confusion. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re the one who wants kids. We might never get the chance to do something this crazy again.’

  She pursed her lips and gave him a sceptical look.

  ‘Oh, come on, love, say yes. It will be awesome,’ Martin said with the rakish smile that Annie remembered from the first time he had asked her out. ‘Gary and Dani are fun people Imagine it: soaking up the sun, eating exotic food, anchoring in clear blue waters next to beautiful beaches. And we can stop off in Singapore for some serious shopping.’ He was on his third glass of red and his cheeks were flushed. His left leg, crossed over the other, bobbed rhythmically.

  They were sitting on the balcony of their tenth-floor corner apartment in Glebe Point, looking north to Anzac Bridge and east over Darling Harbour to the CBD beyond. It was dusk and the lights of traffic on the motorway far below were starting to twinkle. A warm autumn breeze riffled Annie’s shoulder- length chestnut hair. It was rare that they were both home at this time; she had assumed there was some motive for him being back so early. This sailing malarkey was clearly the reason. She took a sip of her pinot gris and pondered.

  They had moved from London the year before, after Martin had drunkenly groped his CEO’s secretary at the bank’s Christmas party. Annie had forgiven but not forgotten. In her mid- thirties, she worked as a copywriter at an advertising agency. She was still wearing her office ‘uniform’ – block print silk blouse, black tailored skirt and black heels. Discreet but expensive jewellery. Her face was open and friendly: a wide, generous mouth framed white, even teeth. With diamond- cut cheekbones, a delicate nose and large green eyes, she seemed to glow with health. Only a sharp observer would spot the ghostly mesh of fine lines around her eyes that hinted at sadness.

  Martin shifted in his seat and tried again. ‘You’re always saying we should try new things. What could be more exciting than sailing a luxury yacht in South East Asia? It will be a dream trip.’

  Annie laughed. ‘More like a bloody nightmare, if you ask me.’ But he’s right, she scolded herself. I’m not usually so negative, but the idea of being trapped in a small boat with total strangers for a couple of weeks sounds daunting. And dangerous. Yet perhaps something crazy like this could bring us back together, make or break us. She looked at her husband and sighed inwardly. He was such a lovely amusing man when I met him. When did he lose that boyish charm?

  ‘So, Captain Pugwash, when were you thinking of embarking on this voyage of discovery?’

  ‘I thought we could go in December. Fly to Singapore, pick up a boat there and sail up to Langkawi. We can celebrate our wedding anniversary and spend Christmas there.’

  She took another sip of wine. ‘Let me think about it,’ she said.

  3

  THE MEMORY of my last conversation with Percy still haunts me to this day. I said terrible things, things that can now never be taken back.

  Percy Mimms had been my mentor, Chief of Staff of the Sunday World, Australia’s biggest, baddest tabloid. I’d first met him in Sydney when I was twenty- one, following a cadetship at my local paper in Sans Souci, just south of the city.

  He was a Scottish veteran with a formidable reputation in the newspaper business. In the flesh, he was different to how I had imagined him: short, spare, with slicked- back, thinning hair; mid- fifties; extremely dapper in a dark blue suit and smart red tie. His small face had a firm jaw. He looked like Fred Astaire apart from the fact that his skin was sallow and wrinkled. A smoker’s face, I thought. Intense eyes grabbed my attention: two dark pebbles reflecting a mix of menace and mischief. Another surprise – despite his effete name, his voice was pure Glasgow gravel. I introduced myself: ‘Jonno Bligh, sir. Pleased to meet you.’

  He squinted at me through thick, black- framed glasses. ‘I turn my back for one bloody day and they go hire some beach bum from the back of beyond,’ he said, his face two inches from mine. He spent the next expletive- filled minutes making it clear how completely ill- equipped I was to meet the high journalistic standards on his beloved paper. ‘Look laddie, your slim chance of survival here is down to one thing – stories. A Sunday World hack lives or dies by the number of tales he brings in. Exclusives. Page leads. Front- page splashes. Scoops. Anything that beats the crap out of the competition.’ The diatribe was meant to cow me but strangely it had the opposite effect … I felt energised. This is it, I thought. This is the Big
Time.

  On my second day, the steely Scot strode over to my desk and stuck a yellow Post- it note on my forehead. There was an address scrawled on it.

  ‘A young lad was killed last night at Kings Cross,’ he said. ‘A king hit. One punch and he’s fucking dead. Get your useless arse over there and talk to the rellies. They’ll more likely speak to a wee boy like you than one of our real reporters.’

  Then he told me that if I didn’t get a ‘fucking top photo’ of the victim, I needn’t come back. Fucking. Ever. An hour later I arrived at the door of a Victorian terrace house on a quiet street in Paddo. The victim’s mother took one look at me and swept me through the door before I could say who I was. It transpired she thought I was one of her son’s friends. When she went off to make some tea, I called Percy. ‘I’m in,’ I whispered. Percy merely said: ‘Don’t forget—’

  ‘—the fucking picture,’ I finished.

  More than an hour later, I staggered into the newsroom with a large parcel wrapped in brown paper. Percy looked up and peered at me over his specs as I put the parcel on his desk. ‘And what the fuck is that?’ he asked. Loudly, so everyone in the newsroom could hear, I replied: ‘It’s your picture, Mr Mimms.’ Old Percy’s thin lips tightened and his big scarred knuckles whitened. I braced myself.

  ‘Better be good,’ he rasped.

  The picture of the boy had been on the living room wall in a large, ornate gilt frame and the mother had agreed to let me have it only after I told her (with a real tear in my eye) that I’d be sacked if I returned without it. Mimms unwrapped the parcel and looked at the photo. To my astonishment, he laughed out loud and clapped his hands. ‘Well, well, young Jonno Bligh, we might just make a reporter out of you after all. Miracles do happen!’

  Ironically, most of the little miracles that happened in my life after that were down to that man. He turned a shy cadet reporter into a top gun professional. After seven years working for him, I was fully proficient in the black arts of journalism and it was clear to both of us that I had to move on. Percy still had good contacts in the UK and so, with his blessing, I took a punt and headed for London. That led to the scoop, my book … and Hollywood.

  I had called him the moment the Oscar nominations were posted on the LA Times website. Never mind that it was the middle of the night in Sydney, I was high on pride and premium coke and all I wanted to do was brag about my triumph.

  Percy was unimpressed. ‘Look, laddie, I’ll call you back tomorrow. Hopefully you’ll be a wee bit more sober.’

  I wish to God now that Percy had just put the phone down right then. But he didn’t and I put him down instead.

  ‘You can bloody talk!’ I said.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  I had heard a few wild tales about Percy during my time in London. Most were about his love affair with grog. The most famous story was the reason he had emigrated to Australia. One night when he had been the night editor on a national tabloid, he’d taken a call from the pompous owner, who had ordered him to put his picture on Page One. A pissed Percy told him to take a flying fuck to himself. He was fired the next day. Yet, in all the time I knew him, I had never seen him take a drink.

  ‘Your old Fleet Street mates told me that you were a bloody alky! How you screwed up your career. Now you look down your nose at me.’

  There was a brief silence at the other end followed by a sigh. ‘Everybody in our trade drank in those days. Just part of the culture. Long lunches. Unlimited expenses. The stress and the pressure. Competition. Deadlines. So yes, I was an alcoholic. Still am. Do you have a problem with that?’

  I did and I told him why in garbled detail. All my bitterness and resentment over my mother’s love affair with the bottle must have surfaced in my addled brain and I directed it at the man I loved and respected more than any other. Eventually, Percy ended the call without saying another word.

  I still feel nothing but shame and self- disgust when I think back to that episode. Why did I not call him back the next day and apologise? He would have understood. Pride is such a terrible thing.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Terence J. Quinn grew up in Scotland. He had a successful international career as a newspaper journalist, editor and publisher in the UK, US, Canada, NZ and Australia. He now lives in Noosa where he is working on the latest novel in the Jonno Bligh series. His first, Dead in the Water, was published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster Australia.

  For more, visit: www.terencejquinn.com.au

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  Also by Terence J. Quinn

  Dead in the Water

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  DEADLINE

  First published in Australia in 2020 by

  Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty Limited

  Suite 19A, Level 1, Building C, 450 Miller Street, Cammeray, NSW 2062

  A CBS Company

  Sydney New York London Toronto New Delhi

  Visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com.au

  © Terence J. Quinn 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover design: Luke Causby, Blue Cork

  Cover images: © picsfive/Adobe Stock

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

 

 

 


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