He turned back to me.
‘The impossible question,’ I said. ‘It would help our thinking.’
‘This is a headkicking industry, Mr Irish,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t heard of many developers murdered just for being developers. Is that an answer?’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘What kind of work did Mickey do when he was with you?’
‘Anything my father gave him to do. For a year or so. Then it was dealing with the contractors, mostly. That’s more than a full-time job, it’s actually more than a job, it’s a preparation for hell. That can lead people into doing silly things.’
‘Such as?’
He was looking at his fingernails. ‘Well, I suppose you know this royal commission into the building industry has heard some allegations about cash payments, that sort of thing, that go back to Mickey’s day.’
‘Mickey was involved?’
‘Involved? If he was involved, we were involved. And we weren’t. No, I’m saying it’s possible he knew more about what the contractors were doing than he ever told us. Told my dad, that is. I had nothing to do with Mickey, he didn’t report to me.’
His phone rang. He said a few polite words, replaced the tiny handset.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry Mickey’s not available to tell the commission what he knew about those days. Needless to say, the contractors won’t share that view.’
‘The commission was going to call Mickey?’
A shrug. ‘No idea. Probably not. I’m just saying that we’d have been happy to have Mickey alive to testify if required. Anyway, I’m not bagging Mickey. He could get things done. He was good with people then.’
‘He lost that gift?’
‘Some people are good intermediaries, good at negotiating on behalf of others. When they represent themselves, they’re less good.’
‘Have you heard anything about his behaviour in the weeks before his death?’
‘Only that he’d been acting… erratically.’
‘Why would that be?’
A shrug. ‘The problems with the project, I suppose. Possibly added to by a bit of chemical dependence. That’s what I heard.’
‘Before he joined you, what did he do?’
A look of thought. ‘I don’t know. My father took him on, someone recommended him. He had part of an engineering degree, he dropped out of uni. Queensland. He came from Brisbane.’
‘The crown’s case is that Mickey owned the weapon that killed him,’ I said. ‘Does it surprise you that he would have a gun?’
Massiani waved a hand. ‘People have guns,’ he said. ‘Some people feel a need to have something to protect themselves with.’
‘Did he marry Corin Sleeman while he was working for MassiBild?’
‘After he left.’
I had run out of questions. I got up. ‘I’m grateful for your time.’
‘I hope the Longmore woman gets off,’ he said. ‘If she didn’t do it. One of Australia’s finest families.’
An edge revealed, the micro-bevel on a blade.
Without consideration I said, ‘Mickey’s talent with people, that seems to have extended to his sex life.’
I thought I saw something in Massiani’s eyes, as one registers the faintest cloud shadow on a bright day. He rose, shorter than I’d expected, and came around the desk.
‘My father had a saying,’ he said, ‘to the effect that when it comes to men, some women have a connection missing between the head and the body.’
‘That sounds like a piece of ancient wisdom,’ I said. ‘Where did the Massianis come from?’
He offered his thin, unworked hand. ‘Corsica. We’re wogs. You’ll know the term.’
Steve Massiani opened the door for me. I said goodbye and walked down the corridor. The woman behind the desk said, Goodbye, Mr Irish. The lift slid me to the ground floor, a slick, silent, hurtling passage.
I put on my raincoat and went into Collins Street, thought about how to get to the office. I’d take a cab, this was business. But first, coffee. In a slanting rain, I walked down to Exhibition Street and along to Bourke and up to Pellegrini’s, where nothing changes and the staff appear to know several hundred people by name and preference.
‘Hey, Jack, where you been?’ said the man making coffee. ‘Short, right? My mum saw Andrew on television. Tell him I want him when I murder this bastard here.’
‘When you kill him,’ I said. ‘The jury will decide whether it’s murder.’
I drank my coffee and thought about Mickey Franklin and the Massianis. Not much warmth there. Why then had they backed him when he started out as a developer? Was there a falling-out later? Business or personal? There was something personal if I read Steve correctly. Did it matter? All I was doing was trying to justify whatever horrendous daily rate Wootton was charging Drew for my services.
Wootton. The prelim scan in forty-eight. Whatever that was, he hadn’t received it. I waved to the men behind the counter and left, caught a cab with a taciturn driver.
13
At the office, I rang the last number I had for D. J. Olivier in Sydney. He was capable of reaching the places Simone Bendsten couldn’t reach. A voice said, ‘You have called a number that is no longer connected.’
I sat in the chair and did some drowsing, looking at the ceiling. No cobwebs. In a room dusted once in six years? I got up and inspected the room. Nothing. Spiders hung out their nets in air currents, they fished where there was life, where the air moved, where there were living things. In this room, there were no flows, nothing could live here except me.
The phone rang. It was D. J.’s assistant with the ruling-class voice. I wished I could think of a way to get her to say fuck, she gave the word an extra vowel. She put me onto the man.
‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Turning into a regular.’
‘Given the last bill,’ I said, ‘you don’t need many regulars to keep afloat.’
D. J. Olivier laughed, a man comfortable in the knowledge that he owned the only pub in town. ‘The labourer is worthy of his hire,’ he said. ‘My late dad used to say that.’
‘Your late dad and the late St Luke. I’ve got a name.’
‘Spell.’
I gave him Mickey.
‘And ramifications?’
‘Ramify,’ I said. ‘Ramify to buggery.’
I shut up shop and walked around to Taub’s Joinery, let myself in with my key and felt, as I had from the beginning, that this was my proper place of work.
Charlie was at one of the massive redgum benches, his back to me.
‘So, Mr Busy,’ he said, not looking around. He claimed that his hearing was bad. If this was true, another sense, unknown to medical science, had developed to compensate.
I walked across and stood beside him. ‘Just mucking around?’ I said. ‘No work to do?’
He said nothing, chiselled with precision and economy, a thumb the size of a doorknob guiding the blade. I knew what he was doing. He was making dovetail blocks to attach the big desk’s top to its frame.
‘No one will see those, you know,’ I said. ‘And if they do, they won’t understand. And if they do understand, they won’t care.’
How best to attach tops to bottoms. The crude use screws. But wood moves — it shrinks as it dries, and it also moves with the humidity levels. The wider the surface, the bigger the movement. Something has to give. Since the screws won’t, the tabletop cracks. Less crude woodworkers use metal fasteners that allow for movement. Not Charlie. Charlie scorned metal. He solved the problem in the most difficult way: dovetail-shaped pieces attached to the top slid into dovetail blocks on the rails.
Charlie pushed half-a-dozen blocks my way, a sweep of a hand. ‘I can hear on the wireless nonsense,’ he said. ‘You want to be useful or talk rubbish?’
‘Oh, all right,’ I said. ‘You should be a talkback host on the ABC, drawing things out of people, sympathetic.’
I went to the chisel cupboard and chose one. All the tools were sharp. In this workshop, following some ancient European work discipline, blades were sharpened after use, wiped with oil and put away. Those chisels prone to rust had their little oily socks to wear.