The Big Ask (15 page)

He didn't push his luck. ‘Can we go to Tark's place now, before anyone sees me dressed like this?'

Tarquin and Chloe had just arrived home from school. Tarquin was grudgingly babysitting his little sister until Faye finished work. The two boys greeted each other as long-lost soul mates, exchanging high-fives in the time-honoured Australian manner. ‘Hey, man, lookin' like a bogan,' declared Tarquin.

‘It's the look, man,' said Red. ‘It's the happening look.'

They immediately retreated to Tarquin's room to conduct secret boys' business, while Chloe remained, watching television: a ‘Wonder World' segment about guinea-pig care. I pulled up a beanbag beside her and rested my eyes for a moment.

‘Use plenty of straw,' said a voice. ‘So the little feller is all snuggly-wuggly.'

Snuggly-wuggly, I thought. A snoozy-woozy on the couchy-wouchy, that's what I need. Not a kicky-wicky in the heady-weady or a rumpy-pumpy in a trucky-wucky or a squishy-wishy on the roady-woady. Just an incy-wincy nappywappy.

The sound sting for the six o'clock news hauled me back into consciousness. The guinea pigs had been replaced by tanks in the streets of Moscow. Gorbachev was still incommunicado. There was no news from the Crimea. Faye came in from the kitchen to catch the headlines, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel. ‘You'll stay for dinner?' she asked.

My attention was back on the television screen. A reporter was standing in front of the wholesale vegetable market, an umbrella in one hand and a microphone in the other. It was broad daylight, a light rain was falling and the parking apron was deserted except for a couple of police cars, Donny's truck and fluttering yellow ribbons of crimescene tape.

‘The victim, son of prominent business identity, Mr Bob Stuhl, was discovered just before six this morning,' the reporter was saying. ‘The notoriously close-lipped market community is reported to be mystified by his death. At this stage, police have refused to rule out foul play.'

Faye noticed my interest. Her journalistic beat lay in the territory of interest-rate fluctuations and the impact of exchange rates on the balance of trade but she was not unacquainted with the nation's premier trucking dynasty. ‘Apart from the coup in Russia, the Stuhl family was the hot topic at the
Weekly
today,' she said as the news went into a commercial and I followed her into the kitchen. ‘Apparently this Darren was quite a handful. Not that Bob's any angel. The rumours have been around for years that he isn't as legitimate as he'd have us believe. You don't parlay a couple of clapped-out old trucks into a business empire worth millions without cutting a few legal corners.'

I decided to wait for a more opportune time to reveal that my interest in the story was based on more than idle curiosity. This was an occasion to celebrate Red's deliverance from perils real and imagined, not for revelations about bareknuckle brawling and visits from a dick called Spider. Leo burst though the front door, bellowing his hellos and extracting the cork from a bottle of Hunter Valley red.

While pasta percolated and sauce seethed, I sat at the kitchen table, recounted Red's saga and declared my resolve to fight his mother for custody, if necessary.

‘Wendy's not just going to roll over and take it,' said Leo.

‘She never did,' I said. ‘But that's another story.'

‘This will mean a lot of changes, Murray,' warned Faye.

‘I've already started to make them,' I said. ‘Can't talk about it yet, but I've had an offer.'

‘Headhunted?' asked Leo.

‘Cannibalised would be a better word. In any case, I'll be able to spend more time with Red.'

‘And so you should,' said Faye, ever the moralist. She dumped a writhing mass of spaghetti into a colander, tilted her head back and bellowed at the ceiling. ‘Dinner!'

An avalanche of children fell down the stairs and onto the food. ‘Can Red stay here tonight?' slurped Tarquin.

‘Wait your turn,' I told him. ‘There'll be plenty of time for that sort of thing from now on.'

‘Look what I can do,' giggled Chloe, siphoning a strand of spaghetti through the gap in her smile.

‘You must be the grossest little girl I have ever met,' I said. She beamed at the compliment, bolognaised from chin to cheekbones.

This was the life. Happy families. Here in Fitzroy at least. Not so joyous in French provincial Toorak, I mused. Poor old Bob Stuhl. Rich as Croesus and tough as nails. But what did it profit him? One son was parsnip puree, the other tomato concasse.

As the kids cleared the dishes, Faye reached into the freezer. ‘Strawberry crush or tutti-frutti?'

The phone jerked me from an uneasy sleep soon after eight the next morning. It was a woman. Unfortunately, it wasn't Lyndal Luscombe.

‘You can't do this to me, Murray,' she started in.

I swung my bare feet onto the floor, wondering if it was too early for a cigarette. ‘This isn't about you, Wendy,' I sighed.

The ability to relinquish control had never been my exwife's strongest suit. And when it came to custody of her flesh and blood, she had no compunction in unleashing her inner pit bull. ‘You clearly haven't given any thought to Red's future,' she accused. ‘Knowing you, you'll send him to a government school. He'll miss out on his chance to sit the International Baccalaureate and end up at some third-rate university. There goes his MBA. God, you are so selfish.'

Red's decision to vote with his feet had put Wendy in an untenable position. Short of kidnapping him, she couldn't force the boy to return to Sydney. And it wasn't as if I didn't have previous experience in the prime parenting role, I reminded her, back when it was me who kept the home fires burning, made the playlunch, ran the bath, applied the band-aids, read the bedtime stories. We finally reached a compromise. Red would remain in my care, subject to review at the end of the year. In the meantime, I was to make sure that he rang his mother regularly.

‘He'll turn out like you,' she warned. ‘And we don't want that, do we?'

I rang off and stood in the doorway of his room, watching him sleep and contemplating our new life together. My little boy was beyond storybooks now. Beyond bathtime and peanut-butter sandwiches, folded not cut. He'd become a streetwise bus-fare hustler. An illicit crosser of state borders. A fugitive from boarding school. His will was his own. He could be guided but not constrained, enlisted but not compelled. And, whatever Wendy might say to the contrary, I could be a good father to him. I could love him and feed him and watch over him while he slept. And enrol him in a government school.

I proceeded into the kitchen, phoned Fitzroy High and made an appointment with the principal. Then I togged up, put a note on the refrigerator and nipped into Transport House to make sure Angelo had countersigned my revised job contract.

‘It's still on his desk,' said Trish. ‘He's been too busy selling his budget cuts to the public transport unions to sign it.'

My trip was not entirely wasted, however. The papershufflers in accounts had set a new benchmark for efficiency. The check for the Maitland consultancy job was waiting in my in-tray. Since I hadn't yet heard from Donny, I gave him a call.

‘Are you awake?' I said, phone in the crook of my shoulder, staring out my twelfth-floor window at a sky that was now the colour of dirty bandages.

‘I ought to be,' he said. ‘I've just had a visit. A copper, and not nearly as civil as yesterday's lot. Bloke named Webb. Head like a garden tap, personality like a duodenal ulcer. Accused me of obstructing the course of justice. To wit, concealing the fact that you were present when I ran over Darren Stuhl.'

‘Sorry if I dropped you in the shit,' I said. ‘Webb came to see me yesterday, knew I'd been at the market. I assumed you'd told the cops, didn't realise otherwise until Heather told me.'

Donny wasn't fussed, said he'd explained to Webb that he thought I'd gone to Sydney to look for my lost kid, that he didn't think my momentary presence in the truck was relevant to the accident report. ‘Good thing Jacinta's at work. She'd freak if she knew I'd had a house call from a member of the homicide squad.'

‘Homicide?' I said. ‘Webb didn't tell me he was from homicide.'

‘Very interested in you, he was,' said Donny. ‘Wanted to know if I'd ever seen you with Darren Stuhl. Implied you're involved in some way and I was covering for you.'

‘He suggested the same to me about you.'

‘Standard procedure,' said Donny. ‘In my experience, the best thing with coppers is to say as little as possible.'

‘A man in my position can hardly refuse to talk to the police,' I said.

‘And what position is that, Murray?'

Good question. ‘We need to talk,' I said. And the telephone, by implication, was not the place to do it.

‘Come on over. I'm not going anywhere. They've impounded the truck, pending forensic tests. They've probably got it down the watch-house, belting a confession out of it with a telephone book.'

I told him I'd be there in a couple of hours, after I'd attended to some pressing domestic issues. The first of these was a visit to the supermarket for fresh supplies of cereal. The second was to return home, rouse Red and inform him of our imminent appointment at his new school. ‘If you're serious about wanting to live here, then the sooner we get into a settled routine the better. Deal?'

‘Deal.'

A box of Nutri-grain later, we set out for the tram stop at the end of the street. ‘We could save quite a bit on fares if I had a bike,' Red remarked casually. ‘Tarquin rides to school and he hasn't been killed yet.'

‘We'll see,' I said, thinking we'd be needing a car, too. A little second-hand runabout, easy to park, fuel-efficient. In a couple of weeks, the departmental taxi account would be a thing of the past. In the meantime, we trammed the kilometre to the Edinburgh Gardens, then walked between skeletal elm trees to the red-brick high school with its cluster of portable classrooms, its asphalt basketball court and peeling community mural.

The principal, Ms Henderson, was an ample woman with a Sapphic haircut, her daunting demeanour somewhat moderated by the laugh lines at the corners of her caftan. It may have been my first day at high school, but Red was an old hand, well versed in the jargon. By the time the lunch bell rang, we'd completed the paperwork and taken the tour. ‘Is it okay if I stay for the rest of the afternoon, Ms Henderson?' Red pleaded, ear cocked to the burble of voices in the yard.

‘If it's all right with your father.'

The student prince extended an upturned palm. ‘I can catch the tram home with Tarquin, Dad.'

‘Thought you said he rides his bike?' I coughed up five dollars. ‘Make it last.'

‘Keen, isn't he?' remarked Ms Henderson dryly as Red disappeared into the throng.

So was I. To see Donny, to find out what was going on. I trotted back to Brunswick Street and hailed a cab.

Reservoir was two suburbs beyond the Northern Region Performing Arts Centre, an undulating expanse of creambrick working-class suburbia. The sort of place, it was said, where old greyhounds go to die. Donny's place was typical, a low-fenced double-fronted bungalow with a patch of lawn at the front and driveway leading down the side to a backyard garage. An off-white Commodore with a dinged rear tail-light stood in the drive.

A chink creased the venetians as I stepped from the cab and the front door was open by the time I reached it. Donny looked like he'd been through the wringer. He was shoeless and unshaven, his flannelette shirt hanging loose over saggy track pants, the bottoms tucked into a pair of thick socks. ‘Heather told me about the kid,' he said. ‘Must be a weight off your mind.'

‘If it wasn't for this shit, I'd be the happiest man in the world,' I said.

Donny led me down a short hallway lined with overstuffed plank-and-brick bookcases and we emerged into a combined kitchen–living room warmed by a wood-fired heater. The furniture was mix-n-match. Filipino folk art hung haphazardly on the walls. Donny's drum kit stood in the corner and a geriatric labrador snoozed in front of the fire. Sliding glass doors overlooked a redwood deck with hanging plants and a Webber barbecue. We were in absolutely no danger of being interrupted by a photographer from
Vogue Interiors
.

‘What a mess,' I said, meaning the general situation.

‘You should've seen Darren Stuhl. That's what I call a mess. Nearly lost my lunch, and I hadn't even had breakfast yet. You want a beer?'

‘Bit early for me,' I said. ‘Cup of tea'd go down well. If homicide's involved, they must've made their minds up pretty quick that it wasn't an accident.'

Donny lit the gas under the kettle and unhooked a couple of mugs. ‘You'd have to wonder how he got so far under the wheels.'

‘So what do you think happened?' I said. ‘Any ideas?'

‘I leave the theorising to you intellectuals.'

I sat at the table and stared at my hands. ‘You tell the cops he pulled a gun on you?'

Donny cocked a worldly-wise eye. ‘Yeah, sure. And volunteer myself a motive for killing him? Not bloody likely. Besides which, I'm trying to present myself as a credible union leader. If I go bleating to the constabulary every time some twerp tries it on, I might as well toss in the election right now.'

‘So the campaign's still on?'

‘My oath,' he said. ‘I'm not going to let this distract me.'

‘Don't take this the wrong way,' I said. ‘But what about Roscoe or Len? Maybe one of them decided to engage in a little hand-to-hand class warfare.'

‘Believe me, if either of them were responsible, they'd be lining up to tell me all about it. Whatever happened back there, it wasn't down to us. You can take my word for it.'

‘Well it wasn't me,' I said. ‘I swear.'