Stiff (16 page)

I didn’t know whether to spit, shit, or go blind. This was a joke, right? How could this broom pusher have killed Bayraktar? He hadn’t even rated a mention in the documentation. Christ, I couldn’t even remember his name. ‘Huh?’ I heard myself say.

I looked across at Ayisha, but she wasn’t laughing. If anything, she had gone a little grey around the gills. I looked back at the guy in the sports coat and searched his face for some clue, some skerrick of explanation as to the meaning of these theatrics. The bland, self-effacing look that had sat so naturally across his features the day before had been replaced with an intensity that was almost incandescent. He pumped his fists forward again, insisting on being handcuffed.

Up the corridor behind me came the wailing of the snotty tot and the background jabber of Sivan’s casework. I stepped around the door to enter the office properly, and the cleaner reeled back before me as though expecting a blow.

‘Go on,’ he challenged. ‘Arrest me, Mr Policeman.’

Well, that got a laugh, thank Christ, I was beginning to think all the oxygen had been hoovered out of the room.

The laugh came from Ayisha, a high nervy snigger. Then she said something in Turkish, a curt little sentence, the immediate upshot of which was that her client suddenly looked like a horse had kicked him. The ominous glow disappeared from his eyes, replaced by a rather touching look of bewilderment. His gaze dropped to his hands, as though he now had serious doubts about their ownership. His fingers were long and fine, the skin that covered them shiny with scar tissue. He stuck them rapidly into his pockets and a single eloquent word that needed no translation escaped his lips. ‘Shit,’ he said.

Too late, pal. ‘You killed Bayraktar?’ I said. ‘How?’

But the fire was dying. The man turned, hauled his chair back upright, sat down with an audible oomph, and covered his face with his hands. Ayisha came out from behind her desk, firing me a questioning look. When I shrugged she went down on one knee at the man’s elbow and began whispering in Turkish. First he just sat there with his shoulders hunched, slowly shaking his head. Eventually she extracted a couple of reluctant monosyllables. She persisted, persuading him to lower his hands. Then began a hushed and insistent tide of explanation.

From the man’s sideways glances I could feel that at least part of the time he was talking about me. Why they were whispering, I didn’t know. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, after all. After a while I began to feel like a bit of a geek, standing there with my back to the door, so I went across and sat down behind Ayisha’s desk. Whatever it was she was saying, it seemed to be doing the trick. The guy looked across at me a couple of times in a half-apologetic sort of way, like we were strangers in a pub and he had just knocked over my beer and we were waiting for the barman to bring me another.

I still hadn’t been able to shave, and my whiskers were at that stage where they itch like nobody’s business. I sat there trying not to scratch, wondering what the hell was going on. Ayisha’s tobacco was sitting on the desk. I opened the packet and rolled myself a cigarette to keep my hands busy. Out of solidarity with Wendy I’d given up smoking when Red was on the way, and my rolling technique was now a bit rusty. The best I could manage was a lumpy little greyhound with lots of brown threads sticking out the end.

By the time I’d finished carefully prodding the loose fibres of tobacco into place, Ayisha and the cleaner—his name was Memo, I remembered, Memo Gezen—had been whispering in front of me forever. I was beginning to feel a little excluded. So I leaned forward on my elbows and struck a match. It flared dramatically, erupting into the tide of Turkish and bringing it to a halt. ‘Don’t mind me,’ I said.

For want of an equally spectacular follow-up, I put the flame to the end of the fag and sucked in. The smoke hit deep—a dirty, forbidden, anarchic, exhilarating taste. My head spun and the tips of my fingers tingled. ‘Feel free to chat amongst yourselves,’ I exhaled.

Ayisha got up and sat on the edge of the desk. ‘It’s all a misunderstanding, Murray,’ she said. ‘Memo here thought you were a cop. I’ve straightened him out. I told him you’re okay, and you wouldn’t dob him in. You won’t, will you?’

If anyone else had asked I might have taken offence. Memo had perked up somewhat by this stage. He was positively cheerful, in fact. Obviously Ayisha had convinced him that she could put the genie back in the bottle. ‘So you didn’t kill Bayraktar at all?’ I asked him.

Convinced that he was safe from immediate arrest, Memo obviously felt some need to explain his weird behaviour. He fished a packet of Winfield out of his jacket pocket, lit one, and gave me a what-the-hell look. ‘I locked him in the freezer and he perished,’ he blurted, half in remorse, half in defiance.

Perished? I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or congratulate him on the improvement in his vocabulary over the preceding twenty-four hours. Terrific word, perished. So apposite. Very Scott of the Antarctic. Gezen’s accent was much lighter, too.

Ayisha was off the mark like a bush lawyer. ‘It was an accident,’ she snapped. ‘Besides, the guy was a thug. He deserved to die.’

I held up one hand. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything, you know that, Memo.’

He nodded, looked to Ayisha for confirmation and nodded again, almost eagerly. He didn’t have to, but he wanted to. Something was bothering his conscience and he wanted to clear the air. He had a dose of the Raskolnikovs real bad, and he wasn’t going to let either me or Ayisha stand in his way. ‘I was angry,’ he said. ‘Bayraktar, he called me a mountain Turk.’

Hardly grounds for homicide, one would think. I raised my eyebrows. ‘Are we losing something in the translation here?’

‘It’s what right-wingers call the Kurds,’ Ayisha explained. ‘Memo here’s a Kurd.’

Naturally. Any more Kurds weighed in around here and you could start a cheese factory.

‘The money,’ she said irritably, as though Gezen was a slow child. ‘Tell him about the money.’

Now that he had stopped hyperventilating, Gezen was practically garrulous. ‘Forty dollars a week. He said I must give him forty dollars a week or he will say I am stealing. I get the sack. Jail maybe.’ He hastened to add, ‘I am not a thief.’ At Pacific Pastoral? Heaven forbid.

‘He should have told us here at the League,’ Ayisha butted in. ‘We’da fixed the prick.’ I waved her into silence, lest she break the spell. This was all just too fascinating. ‘So you locked him in the freezer and he perished?’

‘No,’ said Gezen. ‘I paid. More than two thousand dollars he took from me. Then, last week, he wants more. Fifty dollars a week. Inflation, he says. And all the time he calls me these insults.’ He dragged his chair closer to the desk, going into a kind of confidential huddle as he got to the good part.

‘That is when I think I will lock him in the freezer. But not to kill him. That was not my…’

At last his English faltered. He searched for the right word, vibrating with frustration. He used a Turkish word, glancing again at Ayisha.

‘Intention,’ she said. She’d obviously heard this bit before.

‘I meant only to frighten him. Then I would rescue him. Understand?’

Not really. I didn’t. Well, sort of. It seemed a rather fraught way to win friends and influence people, but I could see a sort of desperate logic at work. ‘But something went wrong?’ I said. The roll-your-own was a greasy brown stub in my fingers. As I butted it out Gezen hurried to offer me a fresh tailor-made. Out of courtesy and not wanting to interrupt his momentum I accepted, but I didn’t light it. It’s not like I was really a smoker.

I could see what Gezen was doing. He was enlisting an ally. The Australian, the government official, on the other side of the desk must be made to understand exactly what had happened, must be won over.

‘What I do is this. From the beginning I watch him. He does not see me, but always I watch. I see everything. What I see is this. Every Friday, just before knock-off time, he goes to Number 3 freezer. He looks to see that nobody watches, then he goes inside, two maybe three minutes. It is very cold inside, you understand. Ten minutes and a man will die.’

Yes, I recalled. A more than usually nippy spot.

‘So last Friday, after lunch, I move a forklift truck so it is parked against the emergency exit. This is not allowed, but it happens all the time. Nobody notices. Then when Bayraktar goes inside.’ He mimed the snapping of a padlock. ‘I lock the door.’

Gezen’s speech had taken on a vivid present-tense intensity. I remembered the cigarette in my hand and lit it. It was insipid, but I drew deep anyway.

Gezen went on. ‘I wait one minute, two, three. Bayraktar will be very frightened. Soon I will open the door. Then the other one comes.’

‘Other one?’

‘The mechanic, Gardening.’

It was hard not to laugh. He was trying so hard. ‘Gardiner?’

‘Yes. I do not think he will come so soon. He unlocks the door and goes inside. Quickly I move the forklift away. Still Gardiner is inside, long time, six or seven minutes. Then he leaves and I look inside. Bayraktar is there, perished. Then Gardiner comes back with the boss. Ambulance comes. Police. They ask if I saw anything. I say nothing.’

Gezen shrugged, laying his offering at my feet. Take it or leave it. Smoke rose from the cigarette folded into the cup of his hand, the filter squeezed between forefinger and thumb. His fingers were fragile, a pianist’s or a surgeon’s. He followed my gaze downwards and rolled his wrist, the better to display the translucent veneer of hardened scar. Was this an appeal for sympathy, I wondered, or somehow part of the story.

Ayisha broke the silence. ‘People’s justice. Self-defence. Whadda ya reckon, Murray?’

What I reckoned was that the sooner I got myself out of there the better. Gezen’s yarn had less internal logic than a Democrat campaign promise. Trying to follow the who did what to whom part had been hard enough, let alone the other questions that sprang to mind. And Gezen himself, hysterical one moment, sucking calmly on a fag the next. Was he telling the truth or weaving some bizarre, self-justifying fable?

Not only was this impromptu confession unintelligible, it was unwelcome. My plans for a strategic withdrawal from all this Pacific Pastoral bullshit were rapidly coming undone. I was already regretting my little chat on the phone with Merricks. He had probably immediately called Agnelli, or even Charlene, to bitch about me. If giving cheek to a captain of industry wasn’t bad enough, here I was involving the office of a minister of the crown in some sort of ethnic criminal extortion revenge murder mystery caper. Shit, the
Sun
would have a field day.

On the other hand, there was Ayisha. She was sitting on the edge of the desk, her eyes blazing conspiratorially. Excited, impatient. Come on, they seemed to say. Impress me with your masterly command of the situation. Let’s fix this together, the two of us.

Come across as some pen-pushing apparatchik and I could cancel forever my hopes of forging a bedroom alliance here. ‘What else do you know about this?’ I asked her.

‘Nothing. Dead set,’ she swore, looking to Gezen to back her up. ‘This is the first time I’ve seen Memo in months.’ Gezen nodded confirmation. ‘He came in out of the blue about twenty minutes ago. Said the cops were after him. Wouldn’t say what for. Said he wanted to give himself up. Then you stuck your head through the door and he chucked a mental and started talking about killing someone. Reckoned you were a cop.’ Gezen was trying his best to look chastened, not entirely succeeding. ‘You gotta help sort this thing out, Murray,’ Ayisha pleaded. ‘Memo can’t go to prison. It’d kill him.’

I helped myself to one of Gezen’s cigarettes and turned the situation over in my mind. For a start, a confession of murder would be welcomed by nobody. The official coronial enquiry was still months away, but if the documents Agnelli had slipped me were accurate, a finding of natural causes was a foregone conclusion. The cops and the Labour Department investigators were unanimous. They’d look like a proper pack of idiots if it turned out to have been murder. The Department of Labour was probably already busy drafting amendments to the legislation on mandatory aisle widths. Pacific Pastoral had just said good riddance, said it with flowers. In short, unless some new evidence turned up, nobody would want Bayraktar’s death to be anything other than it appeared to be.

Maybe Bayraktar deserved what he got, maybe not. The idea that he was conducting a bit of extortion in the workplace wasn’t at all inconsistent with what I already knew about him. Maybe Memo Gezen had meant to kill him, maybe not. He didn’t seem the homicidal type, if there was any such thing. And if he could live with the consequences of his actions, I certainly could, at least until someone better qualified to judge came along. What the guy needed was a bit of decent legal advice. ‘Know any lawyers?’ I asked Ayisha.

‘There’s a firm we refer our compo cases to,’ she said, moving around the desk. ‘You want the number?’

A workers’ compensation specialist wouldn’t be an ideal first choice in a case like this, but she had given me an idea. A lawyer was a lawyer, after all. Client confidentiality and all that. ‘I know someone,’ I said. ‘Top gun. He’ll be keen to help.’ He’d better be, I thought. It was him who got me into this shit in the first place. ‘But first, I need some assurances. For a start, this conversation never took place. Not a word to anyone until you hear back from me. Understood?’ Their heads bobbed, corks on a rising tide. Ayisha was having the time of her life. ‘No more confessing, okay Memo?’ Gezen bowed his head sheepishly. ‘Act normal. Go to work as usual. Do nothing to attract attention to yourself. Sit pat. Do not contact me. Ayisha will be in touch. Understand?’

‘But the poliss.’

‘Don’t worry about the police,’ I said. ‘Right now, I don’t think they suspect anything. Even if they change their minds, they still have to make a case against you. You’ll be okay along as you keep your mouth shut. Presumption of innocence and all that.’

‘Presumption?’ said Gezen. ‘What means “presumption”?’ ‘It means you got away with it, Memo,’ said Ayisha, cheerfully defying me to contradict her.