‘Charleys a wimp,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t have the guts to come down hard.’
‘What about getting someone to do the business for him?’
‘Nah. He’s afraid of the law. That’s one of the three things he’s afraid of.’
I had to play along. ‘The other two are…?’
‘His missus. A real dragon. Keeps him on a very tight leash. She’d be afraid of what might happen if he got into bad company like that Rivkin. Charley’s wife likes to move in respectable circles. The other thing he’s afraid of is going broke.’
‘Any risk of that?’
Tim looked around the room, at the wood panelling, teak bookcases, chromium and glass bar-signs of wealth too solid ever to be lost, you’d think, but he said, ‘It can all go down the gurgler really quick if things go wrong.’
‘That’s interesting. Not that this business my client’s pissed off about is that big a deal, but what would Sanderson do if his finances collapsed?’
Tim swilled his brandy and took a sip. ‘He’d wriggle out of it somehow.’
I finished my beer and got up. ‘Thanks, Tim. This is all between us, of course.’
Thinking about the old days and getting a sniff of a competitor’s problems had restored Tim’s good mood. He got to his feet and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘I remember how you played things so sweetly when I had that trouble with Kirsty. You protected all our arses. Whatever you say’s okay with me.’
I was flying by the seat of my pants, but I had to start somewhere. I could have trawled through some of Jerry Fowler’s mates, or people I knew in what they’ll probably soon call the criminal industry, to try to get a line on who might’ve knocked over Charley Sanderson’s stash. That would have taken time and expense. An approach through Charley Sanderson himself, stamped by Tim Turnbull as unlikely to have anyone killed, seemed the better option.
Big bookmakers are on the web with office phone numbers supplied. I made contact and arranged a meeting with Sanderson by posing as a journalist wanting a story. My mate Harry Tickener, who runs the Searchlight web newsletter, would cover for me. Searchlight operates on a shoestring and its motto is ‘We name the guilty men’. It does, too, and Harry has all his minimal assets protected from libel suits.
Important people, or people who think they’re important, don’t make same-day appointments, even if they’re publicity prone like Sanderson. My appointment was for late morning the following day.
I’m not a keen or constant punter and I couldn’t have named more than one or two horses then in the news. I bought a couple of papers just to acquaint myself with something of the racing scene and went in to the office. No assailants lurking.
I looked through the papers and then picked up the baton I’d left on my desk. It was about 70 centimetres long and retractable, the top half sliding into the bottom section which had a rubberised handle. Portable. It was ceramic and weighed about two kilos. It had four or five notches filed into it near the top. I slapped it against my palm quite softly and it hurt. I looked forward to returning it to its owner-the hard way.
For two men in the same profession, Tim Turnbull and Charles Sanderson couldn’t have been more unalike. Where Tim’s lifestyle fitted the image of the ‘colourful racing identity’, Sanderson’s was more like that of a chartered accountant. Tim’s operational centre was somewhere in his grand pile, Sanderson’s was in a Randwick office complex. Sterile was too warm a word for it. I was shown by a neatly dressed and scrubbed female secretary into a room that had all the personality of an empty stubbie. No books, no bar, just a desk and filing cabinets. It only lacked an eye chart on the wall to feel like a medical office.
Sanderson was a grey man in a grey room. He wore a grey suit and he barely acknowledged me as I walked in. Then he surprised me.
‘You’re not a journalist,’ he said.
‘How d’you know that?’
‘I’ve met too many of them over the years. I never saw one who looked like you. You’ve got the half-decent clothes but not the look or the manner.’
“What’s the manner?’
‘Stealthy. You don’t look stealthy. Have a seat and tell me quickly what you want before I have the security people up here.’
I sat in a well-worn chair and looked at him more closely. He was bald and freckled; he wore rimless glasses and his shoulders were narrow in the padded suit jacket. He looked as though he’d made a decision to remove colour from his person, his surroundings and his life. Except for his eyes behind the lenses. There was something alert, almost predatory about them. No red glow like in those of Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter, but not dissimilar. This wasn’t a man to fool with and I wondered how Tim T had got it so wrong.
‘I’m a private detective,’ I said.
‘Why am I not surprised? I’m a busy man, Mr Private Detective. What do you want?’
He had me on the retreat, feeling for the ropes. I could take it on the arms like Ali against Foreman, or come in swinging. I decided against the Ali option.
‘I’m wondering if you had anything to do with Jerry Fowler’s murder.’
‘Who’s Jerry Fowler?’
I studied him. It was a critical moment. If he genuinely didn’t know who Jerry was I’d eliminated one of the ‘possibles’. He’d put the question neither too quickly nor too slowly. Delivered it flat, with all the appearance of ignorance mixed with indifference. I had to make a decision and I made it.
‘Jerry Fowler was a small-time crim of my acquaintance. He came to me a few days back with a story about you having been robbed of a certain amount of money and offering a reward for the identity of the people who robbed you.’
I was watching him closely and he didn’t react beyond a blink and a slight tightening of the jaw, which could have meant something or nothing. ‘Story’s not right,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been robbed of anything.’
‘Haifa million, hidden from the ATO.’
‘No.’
‘I’m not sure I believe you.’
He tried to hold my gaze, couldn’t, and looked down at his empty desk as if he thought something useful might appear there. ‘Believe what you please. I’d like you to leave. I’m busy.’
After a pause I shook my head. ‘You’ve overplayed your hand. Do you know the meaning of the word disinterested?’
That caught his vanity. ‘Yeah, I’m disinterested in everything you have to say.’
I stood. ‘You’ve got it wrong. Look it up. It means uninvolved, having no stake in something. You’re not disinterested in this, Charley. You’re up to your balls in it.’ I dropped a card on his desk. ‘I couldn’t care less about you or your stash or any reward. I cared about Jerry. Get in touch when you’ve thought it over.’
I walked out, nodded to the secretary and left the building. I thought I’d accomplished something, but I wasn’t sure what.
The answer came before I reached my car. My mobile rang.
‘This is Sanderson. We have things to talk about. Come back.’
I wasn’t going to let him get away with that. I told him I had other matters to attend to and that if he wanted to talk he could see me in my office that afternoon. He didn’t like it but he agreed.
I’d left the Falcon in a multi-storey car park-the kind where bad things happen in movies. I was watchful and I had my pistol and the baton in a light satchel that I kept unzipped. Quick-draw Hardy.
A man stepped down from a huge fire-engine red 4WD parked next to my car. Big guy, dark suit. I dropped the satchel and took the baton in one hand and the pistol in the other. He threw his hands in the air.
‘Hey, hey, what’s the problem?’
His pale, flabby face was a mask of innocence. His car keys dropped from his hand and I could see that he was shivering. But you never know. I kept the pistol pointed at him and put the baton on the ground as I picked up his keys.
‘If you want the car, take it. Just don’t hurt me.’