How Not To Commit Murder - comedy crime - humorous mystery (3 page)

‘But it’s difficult when selling is the only thing I’m good at, and I’m not allowed to do it.’

This was only partly true. Fraud was the only thing he was good at, the only business he’d ever been in. And that involved selling yourself – if you could do that, you could sell anything.

‘I realise this, Reuben,’ Lucy said. Not for the first time he wished his mother had not been so given to flights of fancy. A solid name like Jake or Michael would have made his life so much easier. As Jake, he would have been a different person – solid, reliable, law-abiding. As Jake, he could have married Lucy. Or at least slept with her.

‘But you have to accept this as a consequence of your offending. I’m sure if you talked to all those people you defrauded of their life savings, they’d have a different slant on it.’

He didn’t defraud anyone of their life savings. Not intentionally. Not only were his customers all filthy rich, the funds they invested were undeclared income they wanted to hide from the tax office. He and Derek were strict on those two criteria. Three, if you counted the rule of no drug money. It was too dangerous associating with thugs and there was always the risk of the drug runners being under police surveillance. It was surprising how many ordinary people with normal lives and careers had money they had come by illegally, or ‘cash in hand’ they didn’t want to declare. Conning the conmen – when they lost their money they didn’t dare go to the police. It was beautiful. And foolproof, until Derek became greedy and started reeling in people with legitimate money. It was all his fault.

But he didn’t say it because he knew Lucy wouldn’t be impressed. He’d done the Making Choices Program in jail and passed Victim Empathy with flying colours. But it was hard to change your thinking. When you’d witnessed your mother struggling to pay the bills despite slaving her guts out, and heard her sobbing in her bedroom when she thought you were asleep, it was natural to grow up resentful of the rich.

He looked Lucy in the eye and flashed a smile. ‘I know.’

‘You’re well-presented and you seem intelligent. I’m sure you’ll find something.’

She paused, reading something on her computer. He’d give his eye teeth to see what the old bat had written about him.

‘I see you got married recently. That must present some challenges, coping with life on the outside and a new marriage at the same time.’

‘It has its moments,’ Reuben admitted. Moments made up of Nancy and Alec, Carlene’s sister Jolene; her husband Wayne and their bratty kids. ‘But so far, so good, we’re still in our honeymoon phase.’

He was gratified to see a faint colour rise in her cheeks. A little demureness in a woman was a great turn-on. He felt a stirring in his jeans again. Steady on, he’d have to walk out of there very demurely himself if he wasn’t careful.

‘No doubt Merle talked to you about your management plan,’ Lucy said, briskly changing the subject. ‘Can you remember what was in it?’

Reuben looked at her blankly. He couldn’t remember Merle mentioning a management plan – it made him sound like a natural disaster. But his mind had wandered during the interviews and for all he knew, she could have recommended cold showers and a ten kilometre run every day. She should have been a screw instead of a parole officer.

‘Sorry, I don’t.’

Lucy gave him a faint look of disapproval. ‘It’s not too onerous. In fact, you should consider yourself lucky. For some reason, the Parole Board didn’t make a condition on your order to attend psychological counselling, which they usually do for people convicted of fraud. So Merle, as your assessment officer, had to decide whether or not to make it part of your management plan. She noted you’d done a lot of counselling in prison and passed all your programs with glowing reports, so she decided not to include it.’

So the old bag wasn’t so bad after all. He could almost kiss her fat, smelly, bunioned feet.

‘But I still have the option of sending you to a psychologist if I think you aren’t coping,’ Lucy added.

Reuben nodded.
I’ll cope, no worries.

‘So, as you’ve stated that financial need was the reason for your offending, the only intervention on your plan is to obtain employment. I see you’re registered with Employment Initiatives, so I’ll be making sure you attend that and are doing everything in your power to get a job.’

She paused. ‘How are you managing financially?’

He shifted in his chair. ‘Okay. Carlene has a job as an admin officer for an overseas aid charity, and her parents are helping out with the bills until I get a job.’

‘That’s good of them. You’ve really fallen on your feet, haven’t you?’

She looked hard at him. It suddenly occurred to him that maybe she thought he’d conned Carlene into marrying him because of her wealthy family, so he could have an easy ride. He couldn’t blame her, given his history. But in reality, it had been Carlene who’d forced the issue.

Reuben had avoided marriage until meeting her and wasn’t keen on the idea, particularly after such a whirlwind courtship – if you could call meeting once a week in the prison visiting room and indulging in a chaste hug at the end of it, a courtship. Carlene was a friend of Warren’s girlfriend, Liz, who visited him regularly. Warren had told Liz about his cellmate – ‘a good-looking dude, smart, the sort women wet their knickers over’, and Liz had suggested to Carlene that she write to Reuben. As an act of compassion, to help ease his loneliness.

After receiving a long, rambling letter from Carlene describing in extravagant detail the saga of her life so far, Reuben wrote back, inviting her to visit. Carlene got permission from the prison authorities and accompanied Liz one Saturday afternoon. Reuben was fascinated by her, despite, or perhaps because she was nothing like his ideal woman. He watched frizzy tendrils of hair escaping from her ponytail as she spoke in her low, slightly breathless tone; and the way she hunched her shoulders when she giggled and played tantalisingly with the top button of her blouse when she was thinking. The two of them, along with Warren and Liz, became a regular double date on Saturday afternoons. When Carlene brought up the subject of marriage, two months before his release, his first instinct was to run, figuratively speaking; and he laughed it off.

But Carlene was persistent in a ruthlessly seductive way. When you’re behind bars, a raised eyebrow and wiggle of the backside from a female visitor can be very persuasive, and he’d finally surrendered. He’d already made up his mind that once out this time, he was never going back. He was thirty-five and it was time he settled down. With Carlene’s support, he could make a new life for himself. Would he have married her if her family wasn’t wealthy? Probably not. But it was turning out to be not as much of a bonus as he’d thought.

‘It’s not as cushy as it sounds,’ he said. ‘Carlene’s parents are very suspicious of me, and they don’t cut me any slack.’

And please don’t say it’s a consequence of my offending again.
Mercifully, she didn’t – she was busy writing out his next appointment slip. She handed it to him and he signed it below her name. Lucy Prentice. A perfect name. Compact, with a lyrical beauty – like its owner.

She handed him back his copy of the appointment slip. ‘I’ll see you in a fortnight, Reuben.’

She stood up. He wasn’t going to let her go that easily. He stood up and put out his hand. ‘Nice to meet you, Lucy.’

After a moment’s hesitation, she placed her hand in his. It was warm and soft, like a fragile bird, but her handshake was firm. Reuben fought an urge to tighten his grasp and trap her hand in his, the two of them locked in a handshake over the desk. As he left the room, his hand tingled where it had touched hers.

CHAPTER 2

His interview at Employment Initiatives was even less stimulating. For a start, his case manager Dave was not the type to inspire confidence. Reuben thought of him as ‘Droopy Dave’ because he resembled a basset hound with his long face and mournful eyes. Even his ears were droopy – large and elongated, with fleshy earlobes.

Droopy Dave looked at Reuben’s file on the desk in front of him and clicked his teeth. ‘You’re making it very difficult.’

Reuben burned with indignation. It wasn’t his fault he’d been sacked from two jobs. Okay, it was, but he didn’t do it on purpose.

‘There must be something I can do.’

Dave shook his head. ‘Nothing that doesn’t involve handling money. You’ve really narrowed your options.’

His face rumpled in concentration. ‘Perhaps I can get you assigned to a course. Can you think of any you’d like to do?’

‘What about photography?’

Dave looked up, a glimmer of hope in his eyes.

‘Are you interested in that?’

‘As long as I can do nude models.’

The corners of Dave’s mouth sagged. ‘I suggest you go home and have a long, hard think. Brainstorm. Write a list of every occupation that interests you. I’ll give you a hint – think about what you liked doing as a child, what your talents were. That’s your homework for next time.’

***

Reuben stared unseeingly out the bus window. Bloody homework. He didn’t have to brainstorm or make a list. He knew what the outcome would be. Zilch. As for what he liked doing as a child – watching TV while waiting for Mum to come home from her cleaning job, daydreaming and thinking up schemes to make money from the kids at school. Nothing you could make a career out of, or at least, a law-abiding career.

And as for things he was good at – the same. He’d excelled at Swindling for the Under-Sixes, from the time in Year One when he stole a packet of his mother’s digestive biscuits, re-wrapped them singly, and sold them to his classmates as Apollo Space Cookies. Not only did he make a four-dollar profit, he became the coolest kid in the class.

As he grew older and more experienced, he progressed to more daring schemes, such as running a bookie’s tote. Albert, the old man in the apartment next door who smelled of mothballs and rum, had shown him the principles of being a bookie. In sixth grade, he ran a book on whether he could get Poppy Andronicus, the hottest girl in the class, to take her knickers off during school. The odds were 10 to 1 against.

While the class was tending the vegetable plot they’d started as part of their science studies, Reuben, who was on watering duties, lost control of the hose. The result was that Poppy and a couple of her friends were drenched and had to go up to the principal’s office to change into clean clothes from the spare clothes box. When those who had bet ‘no’ demanded their money back, Reuben put his hands in his pockets bulging with coins, and smirked. ‘I won fair and square, I didn’t say she had to take them off when we were watching. Read the fine print.’

There was no fine print, of course, the premise of the bet having been nutted out in the boys’ change room after swimming. But the scheme backfired when Billy ‘Boofhead’ Barker bailed him up behind the toilets, put him in a headlock and refused to let him go until he’d promised to refund everyone their money. It taught him a valuable lesson – you can’t afford to be too smart.

In high school, he ran totes on anything his classmates were prepared to bet on, from who was going to win the cross country to who would be the first to make Peabrain (Mr Peabody the maths teacher), swear in class. He targeted the students from well-off families who had wads of disposable cash and threw large amounts of money on the tote to impress their friends. Sometimes the tote lost to keep his customers coming back, but as he usually had insider knowledge of the likely outcome, the overall result was a healthy profit for Reuben. In between his bookie’s activities, he sold false swap cards and fake IDs for buying alcohol. He had a fair idea these credentials would not impress Droopy Dave; might cause him to become even droopier.

He considered Dave’s idea of doing a course, but could think of nothing he wanted to study. Besides, he didn’t have the dedication or perseverance. After school, at his mother’s insistence, he’d started a Bachelor of Business degree at the University of Queensland, having just scraped in on the second intake. He found he was more taken with the idea of being a student than actually being one. He hung around the library chatting up the girls, was a regular fixture in the university bar and lounged around on the lawn with a thick tome open on his lap, smoking roll-your-own cigarettes. For authenticity, he even attended a few rallies – save the green tree frog, violence against women, whatever was the topic of the moment.

But by the end of his first year at university, he knew it wasn’t for him and left before the final exams. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do the work – his school reports had all said the same thing. ‘Reuben is an intelligent boy who is not living up to his full potential.’ In other words, bone-lazy.

He glanced around at the other passengers on the bus. Mostly shoppers, as it was too early in the afternoon for office commuters. Two men were sitting across the aisle. Overalls, work boots, duffle bag at their feet; staring vacantly ahead, fatigue etched on their faces. Factory workers, probably. Took this same route every day, there and back, to earn barely the basic wage; only enough left after paying the bills for a couple of beers. Nights spent watching the telly, anything for an escape from the here and now, weekends mowing the lawn and cleaning the barbecue.

If that’s straight life, shoot me now.
Scamming was hard work and you needed brainpower, creativity and nerves of steel. But the rewards were high – the adrenalin rush when it all came together and the money flowed and the satisfaction of seeing a well-planned scheme come to fruition – as long as he didn’t think about the people whose trust in him had afforded him that success.

Of course, as in all careers, you started out on the bottom rung. After leaving uni, he started up a mail-order company selling bogus products. As a sideline, he did door-to-door touting for non-existent charities, and started up a variety of internet-based scams. Brisbane soon became too small for him and as he was beginning to be recognised, he moved to Sydney. He kept on the hop from state to state – when the police started showing interest, he’d move on. Even so, he was arrested and charged on a few occasions and did a couple of short stints in prison.