20

TEDDY

Outside Choker’s office, as Art took a moment for a fortifying smoke in an alley, Teddy called Alice. ‘We’re at Choker’s,’ she said. ‘Case solved.’

‘Case solved?’

‘We found a guy who had a text from our boy. He’s skipped town, messaged this guy yesterday.’

‘Well, fuck me,’ Alice said. ‘I guess that’s good news.’

‘Sure,’ Teddy said.

Alice waited a moment, then said, ‘Ted?’

‘I feel unfinished.’

‘That’s because you’re a workaholic.’

‘I’m just saying,’ Teddy said, kicking at the pavement, ‘it felt like something else was going to happen.’

‘I know what you mean.’ Alice said. ‘My case feels strange, too. Something happened at the last place I was at. I don’t have the energy to tell you about it now, plus I haven’t figured out the most entertaining way to explain it. But it’s hard, not knowing what happened to the body.’

‘Oh shit, did you lose Darwin?’

‘No! God, no. I mean, I don’t know why he died.’ She paused. ‘I was just at his grandmother’s house.’

‘Did she kill him?’

‘Teddy! No.’

‘Well, then, if he’s rich, he definitely overdosed on prescription meds he takes for the insomnia and the chronic pain and the stuff he’s taking to wean himself off cocaine or whatever he was on in the first place.’

Alice said, ‘Well, we won’t know, because the coffin lid was nailed down.’

‘Huh. Is that usual?’

‘I’m not sure. I think yes.’

‘You’re not being paid to worry about that anyway,’ Teddy said. ‘Who cares? I know you knew him, and he comes across as a delight, but you don’t get to be a billionaire without ripping off a million thousandaires like us. Anyway, Art’s coming back. I’ll see you later. You’re nearly done, baby.’

Choker’s office was the middle building in a five-unit industrial estate, and he owned all of the other businesses there, too: a panel beater, a vaguely defined import/export business, a rare animal vet clinic, and a childcare centre. Keep your staff happy with low child-minding rates and, he thought, they’ll never leave. Said children loved it, thanks to Choker calling in very small favours every now and again to enable an ever-rotating series of visitors: reptile keepers with illegal pets, award-winning children’s authors who needed loans after drinking their advances without finishing their manuscripts, magicians who made too many Rolexes disappear.

Choker’s office was upstairs, with floor-to-ceiling bullet-proof windows and expansive views over the flourishing green golf course just on the other side of the car park. He didn’t play, and sometimes during school holidays he paid his staff’s kids to go steal people’s balls for kicks. ‘I could buy it,’ he’d told Teddy once, ‘just so I could raze it to the fucking ground and build something useful. A playground. A community centre.’

Choker saw himself entirely as a good man, and had just about everyone else around him convinced, too. Nobody had ever died on his watch who didn’t, he said, deserve it. As for the drugs, well, they would just be sold by someone else if he stopped, someone more likely to cut them with bad shit, and then people would be more likely to die. He even included details for nearby injection clinics with every delivery of heroin. He stole only from companies with good insurance and a shrinkage budget. Only paid his employees to kick the shit out of Nazis and the like. You listened to enough people talk about him, and you couldn’t believe he wasn’t nominated for an Order of Australia already.

Teddy had lived in that grey area with Choker her whole life, and had seen him look after her family for all those years. He’d stumped up rental payments for her father more times than she could count. He’d dressed up as Santa Claus and dropped by one Christmas when her father was in hospital with concussion and she and Rusty were home on their own. When Brendon Hawk started stalking Teddy in her final year of high school, it took one phone call to Choker before he stopped loitering around her house all the time, or looking at her, or looking at any girl at all during classes.

By the end of high school, she already had longstanding work with Choker and the promise he’d help her get any university degree she wanted, if she decided to. But she was already too good at her job by then, after years of watching her father do something like what she did now. After years of stealing cigarettes from other people’s parents during sleepovers, after years of learning how to fight and how to figure out who was bad and who was good and where people went when they vanished.

When Choker let Art and Teddy into his rooms, Teddy said, ‘I don’t like telling you this.’

‘Bad news?’ he asked, sympathetically. He led them to the polite chairs, the soft, round ones, like clouds, and sat them down. ‘Do you need me to get you an appointment with Rania?’

Rania was the company psychologist, there to help people through traumatic events. She had a second job that Teddy was not exactly clear on, but somebody had told her once it was as an interior designer for all Choker’s business ventures, and Alice thought it was just ‘mistress’.

‘No appointment,’ Teddy said. ‘It’s good news, I guess.’

‘I think Teddy was gunning for a dead body,’ Art said.

Teddy shook her head. ‘The last person we spoke to said that he’d given Cole two hundred dollars because he was about to skip out on everyone.’

‘Isn’t that interesting,’ Choker said. ‘You think he killed Cole?’

‘Not really,’ Art said.

Teddy shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, either. He had a text from Cole just yesterday, saying he’d see him around.’

‘Well, shit.’ Choker leaned back on his chair. ‘You got a copy of that text?’

Teddy sent him the picture she’d taken. ‘We checked the contact number. It was the one you gave us. We rang it again, left a message that he needs to return Adrian’s car.’

‘What a little prick,’ Choker said. ‘And now I have to tell Adrian he’s not dead or anything.’

‘Seems a bit like good riddance,’ Art said. ‘Nobody seemed to like him.’

‘Are we chasing him?’ Teddy asked. ‘Trying to find out where he went, get Adrian’s money and car back?’

‘There is no way that tight-ass father of his gave me enough cash – and it was cash – to pursue this any further, and there’s definitely no hotel budget for you to chase some prick around Australia. He’s not nearby, and he’s not dead.’ Choker shrugged. ‘Sometimes you choose a case from the pile on my desk and that outcome is all we can give to people.’

Teddy and Art found an empty office and set about writing up their notes for the case. Teddy typed hers out; Art dictated a bunch of random thoughts into his phone, converted it to text, then got AI to review it for him into an almost readable document. Teddy was only up to the meeting with Adrian when Art started spinning on his office chair.

‘Maybe I can head off and you can just Uber back to mine, get your car?’ he said.

‘Art,’ Teddy said sternly, ‘you better wait for me. Just go ask if anyone needs help with anything.’

‘Boring,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll go up to the bottle shop, get a few beers for tonight. Want anything?’

‘Get me some of that peanut butter stout they have.’

‘Nah, I’m not going to the Visitor’s Tavern – heading further away.’

‘Why not?’

‘Might have stolen a few dollars out of the register last time I was there.’

Teddy sat up. ‘Are you fucking joking?’

‘What?’

‘You know Choker has a stake in that place,’ she hissed. ‘He’s got a stake in everything around here. What the hell is wrong with you? And they know it was you?’

‘Of course they don’t. I just needed a few dollars, and the key was in the register, and the camera aims above waist level, so I crawled in and out, nobody’s the wiser. I’m just laying low for a week or two so they don’t remember I was there that day, all right?’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t look at me with that face, like you’ve never done a thing wrong in your life. I’ve seen you steal a goddamn car.’

She leaned in. ‘You know how Choker feels about rolling small businesses. And surely you know how I feel about stealing from your goddamn boss? One who has a series of detectives he could hire to find you?’

‘All right, all right.’ Art held up his hands. ‘I’m sorry. I get it. I won’t do it again. I’ll be Robin Hood: steal only from the rich and give to the poor, like Choker.’

‘Fuck off,’ Teddy said. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.’

‘I’ll pay him back,’ Art said.

‘Just don’t do it again. Jesus.’ She glared. ‘In fact, you’re in detention. Don’t even go out and get any beer. Just wait patiently until I’m finished and think about what you’ve done.’

‘Fine,’ he said, getting out of the chair and lying on the ground. ‘A nap it is.’

Teddy looked down at him on the carpet, jacket draped over his eyes, his breath already evening out as she watched. Sleeping an untroubled sleep, while she finished up the notes for a man who was so troubled he left without a word to his own family. It was almost too much. But at least it was over.