‘Well,’ I said, ‘three into however many millions you’re making goes very nicely.’
Talking about success had excited him, but now he was sobered. ‘For a while it was four,’ he said. ‘We brought in this marketing man. The money side of it was getting a bit hard to handle. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? We were helping move billions around the shop and we started to get into tax and business troubles ourselves. Weird. We brought Stefan Sweig in as a full partner, even though he hardly had any capital. We’d known him at UTS. Bloody economics genius and no slouch with computers either. Bit younger than us.’
‘And you are how old?’
‘Twenty-six, shit, no, twenty-seven. I’m losing track. Mark and Steve… uh, much the same. Stefan’s maybe twenty-three. Looks younger, acts older.’
I was starting to become interested in Charles Marriott. He had some idea of how to tell a story and I could sense the relief he was experiencing at letting it all out. Cliff Hardy-private enquiries and narrative therapist.
‘Stefan got us into the big time. He knew the buttons to push. The trouble to avoid. Got us out of our tax hole like magic. We thought we were going to go under at one point and we just… bobbed up, better than ever. Advertising revenue, more clients…’
‘Sounds like I should hire him,’ I said.
Marriott shook his head almost violently. ‘No. He’s poison. I wish we’d never… No, I can’t say that. But we should’ve, I don’t know, drawn up a better partnership agreement when we brought Stefan in, one that protected us somehow. We were bad at that all along.’
‘Who drew up the agreement?’
Marriott suddenly looked angry and older than twenty-seven, much older. ‘Stefan did, with a lawyer mate of his. Can you believe it?’
I didn’t want to do myself out of a job, but I had to say it. ‘Get another lawyer.’
‘I did, or tried to. No way to change it. Watertight.’
I shrugged. ‘I still can’t see the problem. If you’re going gangbusters with this thing, four into even more millions goes even more nicely.’
‘Three, or two.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Steve’s dead. I think Stefan had him killed. And I reckon I’m next. Or it could be something worse.’
With me having virtually no understanding of big business, it took a bit more explaining. But Marriott was patient and seemed to be drawing some comfort just from talking. There were certain clauses in the original partnership agreement that plotted the future of the company. One was that when business reached a certain level, the company should be floated.
‘That’s not as rigid as it sounds,’ Marriott said. ‘We had ways of keeping below that level because none of us wanted to float the company. Rog made sure we all understood about that-writing things off, tax dodges really.’
‘Rog?’
‘The lawyer, well, paralegal guy who helped us set up in the first place.’
‘And he’s not in the picture now?’
‘No. He hated Stefan after a while and wouldn’t work with us anymore. Anyway, since Stefan moved in all that’s gone by the board and we have to float now. Stefan’s enforcing the terms of the original agreement.’
‘And what’s involved in that-floating?’
Marriott shrugged, an odd gesture to go with what he said. ‘Millions for us of course as the original partners, and the way Stefan’s drawn up the prospectus and company plan, not that much loss of control. Accountability and all that, but there’s ways around such things and Stefan knows them all.’
‘And you think he wants you out of the way so he can divide up the millions more… equitably?’
‘No. Worse than that. So that after the float he can sell out to someone big. With the stock I’m going to hold, I could veto that.’
I’d been scribbling a few notes while he talked and I looked at them now. ‘What does… Mark think about all this?’
The shrug again. ‘Mark’s brain is so fried with coke and ecstasy and Christ knows what else, he just does whatever Stefan wants. It was Stefan who got him hooked in the first place and he supplies him now with the drugs and the women.’
I’d been sitting down too long and felt restless. I stood and stretched and went to the window. It was late on a winter afternoon and the light was dimming fast. There’d been some rain and the roads and footpaths were dark. I could feel Marriott watching my back. There was a kind of energy in him despite his commonplace appearance. Naivety as well. He was focused and concise, and I could believe that he’d helped to develop some brilliant money-making scheme but had difficulty in coping with life’s realities. I traced a meaningless figure in the dust on the window. ‘How did Steve die?’
‘He fell under a train at Strathfield station.’
I rubbed out the scribble and turned around. ‘Why wasn’t he driving his BMW?’
‘Steve was like me; he wasn’t interested in all that yuppie crap. He lived in a flat in Strathfield. He wore jeans to the office every day.’
‘Nice suit you’ve got on, Mr Marriott.’
He forced a smile, or that’s the way it looked. Smiling didn’t come easily to him. He had bad teeth and I was beginning to think that he might also have a breath problem. ‘We’ve got this far,’ he said. ‘Call me Charlie. Have you got anything to drink? Don’t private eyes keep a bottle in the desk drawer?’
I slid open the top drawer of the filing cabinet. ‘I’ve got a cask of red and some plastic cups.’
‘Do you know what Bob Dylan said to John Lennon in the Beatles’ hotel suite when John asked him what he’d like to drink?’
‘No.’
He said, ‘Cheap wine.’
I hauled out the cask and the cups. ‘Bob’d be right at home, then.’
The cups were small and we knocked back a couple without saying much as the light died outside. Charlie fiddled with one of the buttons on his gunmetal-grey, single-breasted suit jacket. ‘I used to get around in jeans too, but Stefan wore me down.’
‘Have you got any evidence of his involvement in Steve’s death?’
‘Not really. I know he’s got a mate who’s been in jail for all sorts of things and would do anything Stefan asked him if the price was right. Guy named Rudi. Scary guy-tattoos and all that.’
I took a slug of the red; the third drink tastes better than the first. ‘Might be enough to interest the police, Charlie, along with everything else you’ve told me.’
‘No, I can’t go to the police. Not ever. That’s one of the reasons I’ve come to you.’
He explained, hesitantly and haltingly, that he’d had the pressure of studying and holding down part-time jobs got to him and put him into what he described as a ‘fugue’.
He was well into his third cup of plonk by this stage and showing the signs. He loosened his tie, undid the top button on his shirt and suddenly looked a lot younger and even more vulnerable. ‘I was smoking a lot of dope and I went paranoid, really nuts. There’s a name for it.’
‘Marijuana psychosis,’ I said.
‘Yeah. That. Well, I got this idea in my head that one of our lecturers was out to kill me because I was so much smarter than him and could take his job any day, and he knew it, and so he…’
He finished his drink and held out the cup for more.
‘You driving, Charlie?’
‘No, I don’t drive. I’ll get a cab. That’s if… um…’
I poured him some more red.
‘I… went to the cops, made a fucking nuisance of myself. Abused them… got locked up… got worse. It went on for a while until Steve found me a good therapist and I got clear of it. I still got a First-came equal top with Steve.’
‘What about Mark?’
‘He got a top Second. Mark did other things-read novels and played golf. You know.’
Normal, I thought.
‘We were sharing a grotty flat in Ultimo, Mark, Steve and me, and they had to put up with all the shit I was getting into. I got busted for dope. They didn’t, but it was a near thing. They got very pissed off. Mark especially, not so much Steve. But they knew they needed me when we were developing Solomon. It was my baby, really. But Steve’s, too.’