Death on Demand (19 page)

“You want reasons?” said Ihaka. “Okay. One, you belted Eve. Two, you lied about it. Three, she dumped you. Four, you lied about that too. Five, you don't have an alibi. Six, I've got a warrant. How many fucking reasons do you need?” Shouldering Diack aside, he threw the door open, hollering, “Coming, ready or not.” He glanced over his shoulder at the search team, an appreciative audience. “I bet she's heard that before.”

Diack's playmate had taken refuge in the bathroom. Maybe he'd told her to stay in there until she reached the age of consent. Diack had taken his last peek into the girls' changing rooms, but every cloud has a silver lining: in among the lurid detail of his pupil's statement was an alibi for the night his ex-wife was murdered.

 

Whenever a member of the public comes into a metropolitan police station like Auckland Central claiming to have vital information relating to a high-profile investigation but insisting they will only divulge it to the officer in charge, experienced cops exchange knowing looks. If said member of the public, on being advised that the officer in charge is currently unavailable, says he or she is prepared to wait and does so, uncomplainingly, for over an hour, that settles it: said member of the public is a crank. In this querulous day and age only cranks or perhaps saints don't resent being put on hold, and Ihaka knew full well how hard it was to be a saint in the City of Sails.

Not that the guy looked deranged. His outfit was smart casual – a style Ihaka had never quite got the hang of – and he had the solid, moulded build of a man who spent his
lunch hours pumping iron. He would have been in his mid-thirties, although the receding hairline might have added a year or two.

But cranks – as opposed to out-and-out crazies – are cunning. They understand the importance of first impressions. They know that when it comes to gaining access, it's all about how you present. So Ihaka faced the prospect of having to listen to this fruitcake insist that Eve Diack was a human sacrifice in a satanic ritual attended by some of the most powerful people in the land. Or that she'd stumbled across a vast financial scam masterminded by the international Jewish conspiracy. Or that he'd seen her lifeless body tossed out of a flying saucer piloted by Elvis Presley.

Steeling himself, Ihaka went into the interview room. A minute later Pringle brought in the crank, who was stuffing a thousand-page paperback into his backpack. Ihaka would have put money on it being about UFOs or Stonehenge or the Third Reich. Grant Hayes had a crunching handshake, another sign of mania in Ihaka's book. He didn't like limp, sticky or ambiguous handshakes any more than the next man, but there was a happy medium, for Christ's sake.

“Thanks for your time, Detective Sergeant,” said Hayes. Ihaka thought he detected a trace of an Australian accent. “Sorry for not coming in sooner. I've been down in the South Island tramping and only just caught up with the news. I'm a private investigator. Eve Diack was, briefly, a client of mine.”

After his parents' divorce, Hayes's mother had taken him to Australia, hence the accent. He'd come back to Auckland and set himself up as a private investigator, positioning himself in the Yellow Pages as a people-finder specializing in tracking down Kiwis who'd crossed the Tasman and disappeared off the radar. He assumed that was why Eve had picked him.

“She came to see me about five weeks ago wanting me to find her brother. Someone had seen him in Sydney with Vanessa Kelly.”

Ihaka nodded.

“You knew about that?”

“I went to see Eve's mother.”

Hayes's eyebrows merged as it occurred to him that he might have spent an hour and a quarter in the waiting room for nothing. “Oh, well, then you probably know the rest of it?”

Ihaka shook his head. “Eve kept her mother in the dark.”

Hayes's expression lifted. “I told Eve that if I managed to find her brother I'd ask him if he wanted to be reunited. If the answer was no, that would be the end of it as far as I was concerned. I learned pretty early on that sometimes the runaway has a bloody good reason for clearing off and the client has pretty dubious motives for wanting them found. If the runaway's safe and sound and capable of making the choice, I go with their call.”

“What did she say to that?”

“She asked if everyone in the industry operates on that basis.” Hayes smiled grimly. “I had to tell her that they don't.”

“So you found him?”

Hayes shrugged. “It wasn't hard. I followed Kelly around and she led me right to him. I explained the situation and told him what I'd told Eve. He said his family hadn't been part of his life for umpteen years and that was the way he wanted it. When I reported back to Eve, she asked me to find out his address. I gave her the same speech. Well, started to anyway. She said if I wouldn't do it, she'd find someone who would, and hung up.”

“How long did all that take?”

“From hired to fired, just under a week. She rang me a couple of times after that, trying to get me to change my
mind, and when that didn't happen, wanting me to put her on to another private investigator. I told her I could only recommend people who operate on the same basis. You can imagine how that went down.”

“Her mother warned Eve he wouldn't want to know,” said Ihaka. “That's why Eve kept her in the dark. She didn't want to hear ‘I told you so'. Then she came back up here to hire another finder.”

“I'd be amazed if she didn't,” said Hayes. “As you can imagine, I see quite a few obsessive people, but Eve was up there.”

“I bet Warren wanted to know how you found him.”

“They always do, but I never tell. We're like magicians – if the punters ever learn the tricks of the trade, we'll be out of business.”

“Did you warn him Eve would get someone else?”

“Yeah, I thought it might persuade him to meet with her. He could say his piece and she'd get it from the horse's mouth. At least she would've set eyes on him and that might have got it out of her system. But he wasn't bothered, said he'd just have to be more careful.”

“You can add them to your list of famous last words.”

When Hayes left, Ihaka summoned Pringle. “We're going to have to check out every private investigator in town: the legit, the dubious, and the sleazy. That's the royal we, by the way.”

 

Vanessa Kelly lived in one of the mock-brownstone apartment blocks which have sprouted along the harbour side of Remuera Road, providing views out to Rangitoto and down into the sleepy hollows populated by middle-class toilers who can afford the postcode but not the outlook. Ihaka turned up unannounced around dinner time. He pressed the buzzer and presented an unblinking stare to the security camera.

“Yes?” The familiar voice crackled with static and suspicion.

“Detective Sergeant Ihaka to see Vanessa Kelly.” He held his ID up to the camera.

There was a silence lasting perhaps thirty seconds. “With regard to what?”

“Arden Black.”

Another silence. “What about him?”

“Well, I thought we'd start with his murder and then just play it by ear.”

There was a click which Ihaka interpreted as the sound of negotiations being broken off. He quite enjoyed it when people who, for whatever reason, thought they were special tried to treat him the way they invariably treated others. To put it another way, he enjoyed acquainting them with the reality that in a murder investigation people fell into one of two categories: cops and others. He was a cop; Vanessa Kelly was an other.

The lift door opened and Kelly strode into the foyer. She wore white capri pants, high heels and a tight black T-shirt with the words “Handle With Care”. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she had glasses with narrow black rectangular frames, a look Ihaka vaguely associated with dominatrix school mistresses in S&M magazines. Up close she verged on mutton dressed as lamb, and lacked the cloistered aura of someone who'd sworn off sex.

She examined Ihaka through the glass doors, tapping her chin with her cellphone. “You don't look like a policeman,” she said.

“This isn't television, Ms Kelly. I didn't have to audition for the part.”

“Who's your superior officer?”

“Superintendent McGrail.” This was so predictable that Ihaka had memorized McGrail's direct line. Kelly turned
her back and walked away, punching the numbers into her phone. The conversation lasted ninety seconds and, as Ihaka could have told her, didn't make her feel any better about the situation.

She pressed a button on the wall to open the glass doors. Ihaka went inside.

“I don't suppose you see many brown faces around here?”

“That's got nothing to do with it,” she said with a toss of the head. “I'm just security-conscious. I would've thought you'd approve.”

“Too right,” he said. “Always assume the worst. You'll never be disappointed.”

They rode the lift up to the penthouse apartment in silence and without eye contact.

Like Black, she had a lot of photos of herself on display, mostly standing very close to an international celebrity. Ihaka pointed at one. “Who's he?”

“Bono.”

“Who?”

“Bono from U2. Don't tell me you haven't heard of U2? They're only the most famous rock band in the world.”

Ihaka gave no indication that the most famous rock band in the world had ever come to his attention. “This was taken at night, right?”

“Yes.”

“So why's he wearing sunglasses?”

“I don't know, he just does.” Kelly seemed genuinely perplexed that this left-field irrelevance was all Ihaka could come up with. “I suppose it's kind of a trademark.”

“Or maybe he's a tosser?”

“Gosh, that's profound,” she said. “It might interest you to know Bono's probably done more for the cause of Third World debt than anyone on the planet.”

“Good on him. I guess he can afford to.”

She rolled her eyes. “What's that Oscar Wilde quote? A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

“Remind me, what exactly is cynicism?”

“Always believing the worst of people.”

“Well, seeing is believing, Ms Kelly, and I've been seeing the worst of people for quite a while now.”

There was a bottle of wine in an ice bucket on the dining table. Kelly poured herself a glass.

“Tell me about your relationship with Black,” said Ihaka to her back.

“What relationship? I met him once or twice, end of story.”

“You never went out with him?”

“No.”

“Never went on an overseas trip with him?” She made a face to indicate the question was absurd. “In case you need reminding, this is a murder investigation. These are basic yes-or-no-type questions, and you're obliged to cooperate.”

“I never went anywhere with him, okay?”

Eyes front, she walked past him out onto the balcony. Ihaka followed. He stood at the balcony rail, admiring the view. “To summarize then, you met Black a couple of times. You never went out with him, never slept with him, never went away with him?”

There was no reply. Ihaka looked over his shoulder. Kelly was curled up in a chair, flicking through a magazine, slowly shaking her head.

“We have a witness who says she saw you and Black in Sydney, quote all over each other like a rash unquote. I guess she just made that up.”

“Oh my God,” said Kelly, not raising her eyes from the magazine. “Why don't these losers get a life?”

“You don't get it, do you?” he said. “You think this is just another ‘he said, she said' twenty-four-hour wonder you can palm off to the PR flunkeys at the network.”

She tossed the magazine aside and started jabbing at her cellphone. “What I really think is you should be talking to my lawyer.”

Ihaka put his hands on the arms of her chair and bent down, his big head boring into her personal space. Her eyes widened and she put the phone down like a child told off for texting at the dinner table.

“Let me tell you what we're going to do,” he said conversationally. “We're going to work this thing real hard. We're going to check your phone records, Arden's phone records, credit cards, airline reservations, hotel bookings. We're going to squeeze everyone who knew him and everyone who knows you. We're going to hit every bar and club and restaurant in this city with photos of the pair of you. And when we've established that you've lied and refused to cooperate, not only will I throw the book at you, I'll hang you out to dry in the media. I think you'll find there are a few journos out there who are only too happy to believe the worst of people.”

Denise Hadlow lived in a stylish little townhouse in Point Chevalier. She led Ihaka inside and stood there, arms folded, looking amused, as he gave it the once-over.

“So how long have you been here?”

“Almost six years,” she said. “I know what you're thinking.”

“What's that?”

“You're thinking, how much of this did Lilywhite pay for?”

“And the answer is?”

Hadlow leaned against the kitchen bench, her long, tanned legs crossed at the ankle. “Have a guess.”

“Not all of it, I assume.”

“You assume right.”

“And none would be a stretch.”

She made a face: maybe, maybe not.

“I'd say he paid the deposit and bought you a new bed as a moving-in present, a great, big, knockshop-type bed.”