‘Yeah. And Alberto’s risked being busted and fingered buying the stuff to help her with the cure. D’you think scoring heroin’s fun? It isn’t. And I’ll tell you something else. His family doesn’t want him to have anything to do with her.’
‘They know? About Fiona’s… problem?’
‘Of course not. She’s Australian. She’s not a Catholic. They don’t think she’s good enough for him.’
Fiona took her annual leave and went to Maianbar with Alberto and his friends. Dr Ian Sangster, the medico who helps keep me together, supervised the tapering and the cut-off. He tells me that Fiona’s chances are good because she has love from outside and self-esteem from within. I got a big cheque from Henry Hathaway and an invitation to Fiona and Alberto’s wedding which was a great bash. They went to Portugal for the honeymoon. A happy ending, so far.
‹‹Contents››
Kill Me Someone
‘I’m at my wits’ end, Mr Hardy. I know he’s serious about it. He’s tried twice with pills.’
Gabrielle Walker dropped her head so that I couldn’t see her red-rimmed, frantic eyes. Her thin shoulders heaved and she sighed. She was too tired to weep. I went past her, out of my office and down the hall to what the agent for the building refers to as a ‘kitchenette’. In fact it’s a couple of square metres of dead space beside the toilet fitted out with a sink and a power point. I’ve tried leaving a Birko and instant coffee and long-life milk in there to give the place a homey look, but the stuff always gets stolen. I ran the water until it cleared and took a glass back to Ms Walker. From the way she looked, anything stronger would have laid her out.
She thanked me and sipped the water. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
I said, ‘It’s OK. You’ve obviously had a rough time and you have a big problem. I’m not sure I can help you with it though. It sounds like something for counselling.’
She’d told me almost nothing. Just that her boyfriend was trying to kill himself. I didn’t even have his name. She was a thin, intense type, with a pale face and a mop of curly dark hair. The hair danced around her face now as she shook her head vigorously. ‘No. We’ve been through all that. This is different. I heard about you from Renee Kippax.’
Renee ran a sandwich bar and coffee shop in Palmer Street. I’d had a lot of breakfasts and lunches there, eaten on the run or taken away in paper bags, over the years. When she had a problem with some characters who were trying to persuade her that she needed plate glass, coffee machine and upholstery insurance, I helped her out by persuading them that she didn’t. She was a smart, tough, independent woman whose protective instincts would be brought to a high pitch by this helpless young woman. But she wouldn’t mention me without good reason.
‘Maybe you should tell me what you told her,’ I said.
‘Andrew McPherson’s his name. He’s a couple of years younger than me. I’m twenty-seven. He had a terrible life as a child. His father was a drunk who came back from time to time to bash him and his mother. She went mad. But Andrew battled on. He went to tech and he’s got a good job.’
I was scribbling to get this down. I interrupted her to give me time to catch up. ‘Tell me what you do first, Ms Walker. I gather you work around here?’
She nodded. ‘At the ABC. I’m a researcher and production assistant.’
I was back on the pace by this. ‘And what does Mr McPherson do?’
‘He’s an art designer for magazines. He works at…’
She stopped and looked at me. It’s something you get used to in this business. You’re a problem-solver and people want your help, but their first instinct is to mistrust you.
I said, ‘Ms Walker, if I went around telling people’s employers what I’ve been told in confidence, I’d be out of a job in a month.’
‘I’m sorry. Renee said you were very trustworthy.’
Not quite the point but what the hell. She told me that McPherson was the art director for Bigtime Publications, an outfit that published sporting and technical magazines. ‘It’s a smallish firm, really,’ she said, ‘despite the name. And it struggles sometimes when people don’t pay their bills. But it’s surviving and Andy has a future there. Except that…’
She didn’t have to complete the sentence. I’ve encountered a few suicides in my time, some successful and some near-misses. A version of the old Samuel Goldwyn line applies: if people don’t want to live you can’t stop them.
Desperation or the look on my face or maybe both caused her to blurt the next words out: ‘He’s hired a hit man to kill him!’
After that, we got to the guts of it. McPherson had last tried to kill himself two months ago. After he was released from hospital, he saw a counsellor, took some anti-depressants and seemed steadier. Ten days ago, Gabrielle Walker had heard him talking on the phone, using what she called ‘frightening language’.
‘I tackled him and he admitted what he’d done.’
‘Which was?’
‘He said he’d made an arrangement with this man to kill him some time within the next three years.’
I stared at her. This was a new one. ‘Go on.’
‘It’s terrible. He’s been wonderful ever since- cheerful, funny, happy. He’s done some great layouts and he did a freelance thing, a book cover, that was just brilliant. I’ve never seen him more… alive.’
‘What does he say?’
‘He won’t talk about it. He wants to make love all the time, but he won’t talk. All he’ll say is that he can’t face the idea of living for five or ten or twenty years, but he can face three years. And the knowledge that he might only have to face a week, or less, makes him feel good.’
‘He’s a very disturbed man,’ I said.
‘I know. But I’ve never seen him happier. He’s never been more… passionate. I’m sorry, this is embarrassing.’
It was, a bit. She was a rather proper young woman essentially-restrained, even conventional. As I talked to her, I sensed that she had found McPherson’s suicidal impulses understandable, almost acceptable. She was a little low on self-esteem herself. Maybe that was what had drawn them together initially. But this twist, this variation on the theme, really threw her. She would have coped better with a suicide pact, perhaps. These were very deep and murky waters for a simple boy from Maroubra. I resorted to the oldest gambit of all. “What do you want me to do, Ms Walker?’ I said.
Her head came up defiantly. ‘I want you to find this man and tell him not to kill Andrew. Tell him that you know all about it and if anything happens to Andrew you’ll tell the police. That should stop him.’
I nodded. ‘It would, you’d reckon. But this is a big city and there are a lot of dodgy people in it. Even if Mr McPherson’s not just romancing…’
‘He’s not. I’m sure.’
‘OK. But you can see why I’m doubtful. Maybe the idea of being killed makes him feel better. It doesn’t mean there’s reality behind it.’
‘I know the man’s name,’ she said.
That, of course, put a different complexion on it. She said McPherson talked in his sleep and that she’d heard him say, ‘Do it, Clark. Please do it, Clark,’ over and over.
‘Just Clark? Not Clark somebody or somebody Clark?’
‘Just Clark’
Ms Walker seemed to think that was enough for a halfway decent detective to go on, especially one who’d been recommended by Renee Kippax. I thought it was one notch above nothing at all, but, at least partly, we PEAs are in the reassurance business. I got her address and phone numbers, took a very small amount of her money and promised I’d look into it.
You could say I went through the motions. I talked to a few people — a cop, two other private eyes, a journalist and several drinkers in several places where some of the dodgy people I’d referred to hang out. The
