The Fix (30 page)

I called directory assistance again. The same operator answered. I gave her Max's name and spelled Visser, and said that he lived at West End.

‘Do you have a street address?' She was already keying letters, searching for him.

‘Just West End.'

She stopped keying. ‘I'm afraid that's a silent number,' she said. ‘The only Visser at West End. And I can't give you the number of anyone nearby either.'

I hung up. I stared at my phone, at the glowing picture of Darius and Aphrodite on the screen. They were covered in paint, and laughing.

I checked our progress in the street directory. We had made it to map 178. I counted the sets of lights ahead of us. There were sixteen.

I scrolled down my contacts. There was one landline number I didn't have to ask for. I called it.

It rang and rang, and then a voice – fuzzily, crankily – said, ‘Hello.'

‘Fran, it's Josh,' I said. ‘I've got to talk to Brett. It's urgent.'

‘Do you know what time –'

‘It's urgent.' People always know what time it is when they're making stupid urgent calls at dawn. When it's all gone to shit and they've got no choice. ‘Just get him, please.'

I heard a sigh, and then her voice, some distance from the phone, saying, ‘Guess.'

There was a clattering sound and Brett said, ‘Yeah? Um, who . . .'

‘It's Josh. It's urgent. Do you have Frank's or Max's home numbers?'

I heard him sniff as he thought about it. ‘Don't think so. Let me check.' Francesca said something in the background and he said, ‘It's urgent. I've got to check something.' He came back to me. ‘Just going to the office. What's up?'

‘There's an issue with Ben and Frank. Ben's on his way to Frank's with a gun.'

‘What? A gun? What the fuck?' There was a thump. He was probably on the stairs.

‘I'll tell you all about it later. I'm on my way there now.'

‘Okay, okay, let me just . . . I'm in the office. I can get into our electronic address book from here. It's a . . .' He stopped explaining it to me, and searched. ‘No. No home number. I've got Frank's mobile.'

‘It's off.'

‘It's Chapel Hill, yeah? Where he lives? Or
Kenmore? I can be there in five minutes. What's the address?' There was a noise in the background, a small unhappy voice. It was Aphrodite. ‘It's okay, darling,' he said. ‘Everything's okay. You just go back to bed.'

‘I'll be there sooner,' I told him. ‘Sooner than you could be. Or the police. And I know Ben. I've got the best chance of fixing this.' I still had no idea how I would fix it. ‘Stay away, please. I'm not waking you up to put you in the line of fire.'

Lights flashed ahead of us, orange lights, roadworks. I told Brett I had to go.

‘There's got to be another way,' he said, and I told him I'd been through them all.

‘It'll be okay,' I said, because it's what you're supposed to say. ‘I'll call you when it's sorted out.'

A burly guy in a sleeveless fluoro jacket stepped out in front of us and planted a ‘stop' sign in the road. I wound the window down as Hayley pulled up.

‘It's an emergency,' I shouted out to him. ‘We've really got to get through.'

‘Yeah, no worries,' he said, but not quickly. He took a look behind him. ‘We've just got to shift the bulldozer round. It'll be off the road in a tick.'

‘But it's an emergency.'

The bulldozer chugged along, spouting blue smoke. It filled the whole road.

‘Yeah, I get that,' the guy said. ‘But he won't hear me anyway unless he turns the engine off, and it'll just take longer then. The quickest way is to let him do it.'

It couldn't have taken more than thirty seconds, but every move looked like it was happening in slow
motion, deliberately slowed down. It was after six o'clock. The sun was rising.

Finally, the bulldozer was almost off the road, and the guy swivelled his sign around to the yellow ‘slow' side and stepped out of our way, ushering us through with a sweep of his arm. Hayley accelerated and the car skidded across the graded surface before getting traction.

I took a look at the street directory. We were a hand span away from Hakea Crescent on the map, but eleven sets of lights. Hayley kept us right on the speed limit, and almost every one was green when we hit it. The streetlights were going out as we reached the Kenmore Tavern and turned right.

I don't know what I expected in Hakea Crescent – roadblocks, police cars parked at angles, mayhem, Frank Ainsworth dead in the road – but as we drove along it, it looked very ordinary. I was counting the house numbers as we closed in on the address. We came around a bend, and I knew the house was ahead of us on the right.

My car was parked outside an opulent two-storey place that I assumed was Frank's. It was facing our way. Hayley slowed down.

‘He must be in the house,' I said. There were flyers in the mailbox, and a brown palm frond had fallen onto the middle of the well-maintained lawn.

Then I saw Ben in the car, slumped forward over the steering wheel. I had never seen a dead person before, never seen someone shot, never even been near a gun.

Hayley pulled up opposite. There was no sign of damage, none of the carnage that the movies show when a gun goes off at close range in a car. I wondered
if he had shot himself through the chest, and hit the seat with enough force to bring him forward again.

I opened the car door, and it creaked loudly. It seemed as if it was the only sound in Chapel Hill. I stepped out onto the dewy, well-kept grass and I looked across to my car again. There was no movement, nothing. I wanted not to go over there. I wanted to drive away, to be anywhere else.

I was about halfway across the road when Ben sat up. The movement stopped me. I had braced myself for something ghastly and forensic. He looked at me as if I might be some unnamed threat, and then worked out who I was.

I took the two steps to the car door, and I opened it. He was sitting with the gun in his right hand and his silver star in his left, its ribbon scrunched up, its seven points pressing hard into his palm.

‘I thought this is what would take courage,' he said. ‘Coming here and finishing it.'

‘I thought you were dead.' I had imagined the siege pictures of Rob Mueller, but with Ben's face, a different wound but just as scrambled.

‘I got into the house. I was going to kill him. Maybe. I got in through a downstairs room. It was a kid's bedroom. There was this four-year-old in Wiggles pyjamas . . . So I couldn't do it then. I just looked at the kid and I . . . Well, fucking Wiggles pyjamas, and now I'm about to . . .?' He stopped, looked down at the steering wheel. His nose started running. It ran into his mouth before he noticed it and sniffed. ‘I don't even know what I was going to do. I only knew how to load this thing from TV.' He wiped his face with his sleeve.

That's when I could see the damage done – the damage Frank had done by enlisting Ben to support his lie, his fraud, cover his tracks. Not a shot had been fired, but it was as though Ben had spilled his brain across that Chapel Hill street anyway, and I didn't know if we could fit the mess back into his head.

I reached in and took the gun carefully from his hand. He relaxed his grip on his Star of Courage and looked at his palm and the uneven star shape pressed into it as the points went from a bloodless white to red.

‘If I'd gone into a different room that bastard might be dead by now,' he said. ‘And nothing would be any better.'

‘Yeah, I know. But you didn't.' I was holding the gun by its butt with my thumb and index finger, as though I was taking it away for prints. We had all watched too many of the same TV shows. It seemed like a safe way to hold it, as if nothing could go wrong.

I turned around to Hayley, who had her window down.

She was about to speak, but something stopped her. She was looking behind me. As I turned, I heard a door shut. Frank Ainsworth was standing at the entrance to his house, in running clothes.

He had a hand up to his eyes to block out the sun, and he was squinting at us, looking down the slope of his lawn at our two cars, and me standing on the street. The sun was directly behind us and just above the trees, casting my shadow across my car and onto the edge of the lawn.

He walked down towards us, his keys in his hand. He was watching where he put his feet on the damp grass,
glancing up at us to see if there was any sign of what we had planned. He knew the secret was out. I heard Hayley get out of her car and shut the door. I stood a little straighter, and changed my grip on the gun, taking the butt of it in my palm and resting my finger near the trigger. I wanted to look as if I had held one before.

Frank saw the gun as he came closer. The look registered on his face before he could stop it. He almost lost his footing but then kept coming. In a few more steps he reached the property line where his driveway crossed the kerbside grass. He looked through the windscreen at Ben, and then at me with the gun.

‘Frank, here's what we're going to do.' I wanted to sound calm. We had all seen the movies where the guy with the gun is calm, and he lays down the terms. I would keep the gun by my side, I decided. It would never be any kind of threat, but it had rattled him to see it and that gave me my chance. ‘Ben and I will come up with a figure that will compensate Miriam Mueller for her loss. It'll be a big figure and you'll pay it. I think we'd all agree no amount of money could be enough, but let's at least make her life a lot easier. I can't say right now that that'll be the end of it for her, but I'm guessing she won't want to be dragged through this in public.'

Frank didn't speak. He looked over his shoulder at the house, where nothing stirred and his family slept on.

‘I'm offering you a risk-management option, Frank,' I said to him. ‘Think of it that way. That's what you called me in for. And you should bear in mind that I know all I need to. I've got it fully documented, you have nothing on me and I have nothing to lose.'

He moved his keys around in his hand. He had stopped looking like someone to fear.

‘Okay,' he said. ‘Okay, that's what we'll do. Who knows about this?'

‘You don't need to know that. What I can tell you is that you maximise your chance of keeping a lid on it if you do exactly what I say.'

‘Right.'

‘So you should run now.' I pointed up the street, with the gun. It wasn't intentional. I hoped it wasn't loaded. ‘Run and don't look back and we'll be gone before you're home.'

‘Okay,' he said, and he ran.

I wanted to see some show of fear in his gait, but he ran like any other jogger. Perhaps, after years of it, it was the only way his body knew to do it. And perhaps I shouldn't have wanted to see fear, just because I had a gun.

He ran up the street and turned at the first corner into a dead end. I figured he stayed up there somewhere, crouched behind someone's bushes or a stand of bamboo, watching for us to drive past and out of Chapel Hill.

* * *

ON THAT MORNING,
I saw the start of the mending of the damage caused by the siege, and by Frank's actions that had preceded and followed it.

I called Brett and told him the crisis had passed. That it was fixed, and it was in his best interests for me to say no more than that.

Hayley and I gave the gun back to Ross, who said it might be time to retire it, at least in a tin, sealed up tight and buried under his roses.

Hayley kept quoting what she regarded as my big line to Frank, and telling me it fell well short of ‘make my day'. ‘I'm offering you a risk-management option, Frank,' she would say, in the most hardcore voice she could put on, and with an index finger aimed right between my eyes. I told her times had been simpler for Dirty Harry, but admitted it was the lamest threat ever made by someone with a gun in their hand.

Frank's feedback to Brett after the job was glowing. I made sure of that. I wrote it. A bonus came my way. I didn't know if it was Brett's money, or Randalls', or Frank's, and I didn't ask.

Ben never went back to Randall Hood Beckett. The lunch in his honour was cancelled. I told them he wasn't well – since I had run out of the energy that better lies take – and Frank backed me up.

I lied to Australian Story too, and got him out of that as well.

The remaining seventy-two holes of the Gold Coast mini-golf tour took a few more days to happen than I had planned. My form never improved, but Hayley's did and in the final round she beat me by three strokes.

I kept Ben involved in the settlement with Miriam Mueller, and it was at my urging that he came with me to give her the cheque. I was surprised by how different she looked from the TV interview after the siege, though I shouldn't have been. It was the first time I had seen her without that dense shock upon her, packed down with loss and awe at the way the world had opened up and
swallowed her husband and spread his blood and tissue everywhere.

She took the cheque out of the envelope, studied it carefully and then slipped it back in and put the envelope in her bag. She shook our hands and thanked us. Ben hardly said a thing. He had pushed the money up. He had made Frank sell a house somewhere to raise it.

I watched her walk off down the street, no sign of her history of crisis or loss, blending perfectly with the crowd. She was taller than most of them in the heels she was wearing, and attractive enough that I saw the less subtle of the passing men pause to take a second look.

Ben took my calls at first after that, and then he started screening me. After only a few weeks I was calling less frequently and I realised it could easily taper off into nothing. In a final attempt to contact him, I went to his flat.

I had things to say about Eloise. They seemed important, though perhaps they weren't to him.