Death on Demand (15 page)

In the first twenty-four hours Ihaka and his team made zero progress towards identifying the dead man. On Tuesday morning a young Kiwi Asian woman came into Central with a photograph of her boyfriend, who'd uncharacteristically stood her up on Saturday night and wasn't answering his intercom or his phones. Because the boyfriend, whose name was Arden Black, was a white male aged thirty-one, Tiffany Wong soon found herself face to face with Ihaka.

The photo wasn't much help: Arden Black was extremely good-looking, as the dead man might well have been before his face was pulped. The extent of the damage and disfigurement meant there was little point in putting Tiffany through the ordeal of looking at the body.

She and Arden had been an item for almost two years, but living together wasn't on the agenda because her parents didn't hold with it and Arden liked his space. He had fingers in a few pies: he part-owned a café, did some modelling and photography, dabbled in scriptwriting, and had a meet-and-greet gig at a bar cum late-night supper club, which basically involved setting a benchmark of attractiveness and cool that discouraged unattractive, uncool people from trying to gain entry. Ihaka thought Arden had “drugs” written all over him.

Tiffany had heard about the Cornwall Park corpse on the radio. She was sure it wasn't Arden, but she just couldn't keep those dark thoughts out of her head. This was so unlike him: he was well-organized, punctual, and hated putting people out – you wouldn't meet a more considerate person. In fact, her father had paid him the ultimate compliment, saying that if it wasn't for his round eyes, Arden could have been Chinese.

Ihaka said, “Lots of drugs around that nightclub scene.”

Tiffany snorted, but with amusement rather than indignation. “I guess,” she said, “but it wouldn't matter to Arden
– he's way too health-conscious. I mean, he's got this look he gives me if I have a second glass of wine, like ‘What the hell, Tiff? Do you have any idea what you're doing to yourself?' Here's another thing: his Sunday morning workout was like non-negotiable. Didn't matter what was going on, if I was sick as a dog. Shit, it didn't matter if
he
was sick as a dog, he did a big weights workout on Sunday morning. I checked with his gym: he didn't show.”

She was obviously telling the truth, not that it proved much either way. Men were good at compartmentalizing and some women didn't force the issue, preferring to stay away from the sealed-off areas on the basis that what they didn't know couldn't hurt them. Besides, there were drug dealers who wouldn't dream of using their own product and despised those who did. On the other hand, the medics had said that if the dead man hadn't been in such good physical shape, his torment wouldn't have lasted as long.

“What sort of underpants does Arden wear?”

Tiffany looked almost affronted. “What's that got to do with anything?”

“Every little bit helps,” said Ihaka, gesturing vaguely. “These things are just a process of elimination.”

“Actually, he's got a bit of a thing about jocks,” she said, as if Ihaka could relate to that. “He only wears plain white pure cotton boxers. Moschinos. He's got like fifteen pairs.”

Ihaka restricted his reaction to an expressionless nod, resisting the temptation to glance at the open folder in front of him. He was 99 per cent sure that the dead man shared Arden's thing about jocks.

Pringle knocked and entered. “Quick word, Sarge?”

Ihaka followed him out into the corridor. Pringle's face was tight with excitement or perhaps alarm.

“What's up?”

“There's been another one. A woman dumped in a quarry in Mount Wellington.” Pringle paused for effect. “Wearing nothing but a pair of knickers. Same thing: cigarette burns, broken fingers, smashed to shit.”

Ihaka dragged a meaty hand across his face. “Fuck.”

“You reckon we've got a serial killer on our hands, Sarge?”

“Slow down, son.”

Maybe Auckland really did have a serial killer whose monstrous thrill was to strip his victims down to their briefs and club them to death after some low-tech torture, but Ihaka's money was still on drugs. Just as Jonathon Bell rang his lawyer when he had a problem, the maniacs in the dope business reached for their baseball bats.

They'd know one way or the other soon enough. If there was a psycho out there, two strikes in forty-eight hours suggested he was way gone, totally in thrall to the voice inside his head telling him that he was a higher being, unbound by law, convention or morality, and ordinary humans were fair game, to be hunted down and annihilated for sport and pleasure.

And if that was the case, it wouldn't be long before another near-naked, pulverized corpse turned up.

The murdered woman was in her mid-thirties, medium height, with dark hair and a trim figure. So was a guest who'd checked into an Ellerslie motel over the weekend and promptly disappeared. Ihaka sent Detective Constable Joel Pringle out there.

He rang in an hour later. “Sarge, her name's Eve Diack. She's from Wellington. She checked in early Sunday afternoon, dumped her bag in the room, and called a cab. That was the last anyone here saw of her. The bed wasn't slept in either night. She told the manager she was on a flight home first thing this morning, so when she didn't check out, they knocked on her door. Her gear's still in the room, but it doesn't look like she's been in there since Sunday.”

“The motel's got her details – address, cellphone, credit card?”

“Yep. They tried ringing her, but there was no answer.”

“Okay,” said Ihaka. “I'll send a team out. You get back in here. Wellington cops, phone records, cab company – in that order.”

 

Arden Black's dental records made it official. Now the dead white male had a name. Soon he'd have a home with drawers and cupboards and locked filing cabinets; he'd have a background, a routine, a lifestyle, a call history,
a social circle. And maybe bad habits, dubious friends, murky dealings with people who needed to be handled with extreme care.

Home was on the top floor of a low-rise apartment block on the harbour side of Parnell Rise. One look told you two things: Black was fanatically tidy, and he liked his toys. The kitchen was a design magazine cliché right down to the bowl of lemons: wall-to-wall stainless steel, Italian bar stools, state-of-the-art German appliances. The living room had a Bose sound system and a flat-screen television that occupied most of one wall. Arden stared moodily out of several framed studio portraits. There was a shot of him on a beach, pearly grin splitting a lean, tanned face and abs like brickwork. It made Ihaka feel like a sumo wrestler.

There were no photos of Mum and Dad or freckled, gap-toothed nephews and nieces, no mates-for-life scenes from his twenty-first birthday party or big brother's wedding, no high-school first fifteen, no OE shots of him in front of the Eiffel Tower or trying to get a rise out of a sentry at Buckingham Palace. It was as if the road that led to Cornwall Park began right there, in an apartment that looked and felt like a display home.

Also conspicuous by their absence were the usual trappings of hedonistic bachelorhood: drugs, pornography, a little black book. Having as jaundiced a view of human nature as the next cop, Ihaka took the fact that Tiffany's photo was out of sight in the bedside table drawer to mean that she hadn't been the last woman to enter Arden's bedroom.

Hypothesis: Arden had another woman in his life. Question: why hadn't she come forward?

According to Tiffany, Arden never left home without his iPad. Seeing he hadn't been killed at home, it followed that it had been taken or disposed of by the killer. Ditto his Alfa
Romeo. He backed up the information on his iPad onto his laptop, which he kept in the bedroom in case he woke up during the night with a script idea that was bigger than
Ben-Hur
. The laptop was gone.

Hypothesis: whoever killed Arden used his keys to get into the apartment and remove the laptop. Question: why?

 

Tiffany's parents lived in Epsom, in a two-storey house, whitewashed stone with a grey slate roof, down a long drive.

The doorbell was answered by a middle-aged Asian man with a military crew cut. Ihaka identified himself and was taken through to the kitchen, where Tiffany was perched on a bar stool watching an older woman, presumably her mother, chop vegetables.

They looked at Ihaka expectantly, too unworldly to assume the worst. He'd seen this done and done it himself often enough to know there was no point in trying to break it gently. Only fools believed their hushed euphemisms or watery-eyed empathy made a scrap of difference.

“I'm really sorry, Tiffany,” he said. “Arden's dead. That was him in Cornwall Park.”

Tiffany stared at him, knotting her eyebrows, unable to believe that all the scenarios with happy endings which she'd constructed to account for her boyfriend's disappearance had turned out to be wrong, and the one which she'd persuaded herself was too far-fetched for words had turned out to be right. Her mother dropped the chopping knife with a clatter and hurried to the other side of the bench. Tiffany placed her forehead on her mother's chest and howled like an abandoned puppy.

Her father touched Ihaka's arm. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “We'll take care of Tiffany now.”

At the door Ihaka said, “I'm afraid we're going to have to talk to her again.”

“I'll tell her.”

“She might find out things about Arden she'd rather not know.” The father looked at him unblinkingly. “You understand what I'm saying?”

“You mean he was different to what she thought?”

Ihaka shrugged. “Part of him.”

“Was he a criminal?”

“We don't know yet,” said Ihaka. “We don't know why he was killed – he might have been an innocent victim, or a guy who got out of his depth. But the chances are Tiffany's going to get hurt all over again.”

The father nodded. “Poor Tiffany. I always hoped she would never find out how hard the world can be.”

 

Danny Howard, the owner/manager of the Departure Lounge, the nightclub where Arden had worked, was a fortyish knockabout who made no bones about the fact that he'd lost an asset as well as a mate.

“He was worth his weight in gold, that bloke,” he told Ihaka. “A very classy, professional dude – and, just quietly, an absolute chick magnet. I've seen a chick scrawl her phone number on the back of his hand while her boyfriend was a metre away buying her a fifty-buck cocktail. I've seen another one complain she was feeling crook, get the poor bastard she was with to take her home, then bowl in here solo an hour later sexed up to the max. That sort of shit happened all the time, but he never let it become a situation, you know what I mean? He could handle himself, he could handle these feral women, and if their boyfriends or husbands twigged what was going on, he could handle them too.”

“What was his secret?”

Howard threw up his hands. “He just had a way about him. He'd smile that smile of his and come out with some
line that let the chick know it wasn't a happening thing, but without making her feel like a silly little slut for coming on so strong and getting the big fend. Sometimes he'd say thanks but no thanks and do a swift fade, and they'd be standing there thinking, did that really happen or did I imagine it?”

“Or maybe, is that coke I did in the shithouse fucking with my head?”

“Hey, come on, man,” protested Howard. “I run a clean house.”

“Sure you do,” said Ihaka.

“Damn right,” said Howard, apparently under the impression that Ihaka was being sincere. “And for the record, if there was anyone more anti-drugs than me, it was Arden. He could have a motherfucker of a headache, but he wouldn't even take a Panadol.”

“How did he handle the guys, especially the ones who saw it as him hitting on their girlfriends rather than vice versa?”

“You're not wrong there, mate,” said Howard. “That's how it usually works. He'd just laugh it off, as if they were making a mountain out of a molehill. Put them off balance and walk away. Make them think, if I want to go on with this, I stand a pretty good chance of looking like a real fucking jerk. His fallback, when they just wouldn't let it go, guy or girl, was to tell them he was gay.” He shrugged. “Let's face it, he was pretty enough.”

“So it was his professionalism that stopped him taking up these offers, as opposed to the fact he had a girlfriend?”

“Oh shit no, it was both. Like, Arden was a pro, as I say. He understood you can't have staff hitting on the clientele, even the singles, because that just pisses off other singles who are on the prowl. But Tiffany had a bit to do with it – he was pretty keen on her. He was just a classy dude, and not screwing around was all part of it.”