How Not To Commit Murder

Chapter 2-2

Reuben stared unseeingly out the bus window. Bloody homework. He didn’t have to brainstorm or make a list. He knew what the outcome would be. Zilch. As for what he liked doing as a child – watching TV while waiting for Mum to come home from her cleaning job, daydreaming and thinking up schemes to make money from the kids at school. Nothing you could make a career out of, or at least, a law-abiding career.

And as for things he was good at – the same. He’d excelled at Swindling for the Under-Sixes, from the time in Year One when he stole a packet of his mother’s digestive biscuits, re-wrapped them singly, and sold them to his classmates as Apollo Space Cookies. Not only did he make a four-dollar profit, he became the coolest kid in the class.

As he grew older and more experienced, he progressed to more daring schemes, such as running a bookie’s tote. Albert, the old man in the apartment next door who smelled of mothballs and rum, had shown him the principles of being a bookie. In sixth grade, he ran a book on whether he could get Poppy Andronicus, the hottest girl in the class, to take her knickers off during school. The odds were 10 to 1 against.

While the class was tending the vegetable plot they’d started as part of their science studies, Reuben, who was on watering duties, lost control of the hose. The result was that Poppy and a couple of her friends were drenched and had to go up to the principal’s office to change into clean clothes from the spare clothes box. When those who had bet ‘no’ demanded their money back, Reuben put his hands in his pockets bulging with coins, and smirked. ‘I won fair and square, I didn’t say she had to take them off when we were watching. Read the fine print.’

There was no fine print, of course, the premise of the bet having been nutted out in the boys’ change room after swimming. But the scheme backfired when Billy ‘Boofhead’ Barker bailed him up behind the toilets, put him in a headlock and refused to let him go until he’d promised to refund everyone their money. It taught him a valuable lesson – you can’t afford to be too smart.

In high school, he ran totes on anything his classmates were prepared to bet on, from who was going to win the cross country to who would be the first to make Peabrain (Mr Peabody the maths teacher), swear in class. He targeted the students from well-off families who had wads of disposable cash and threw large amounts of money on the tote to impress their friends. Sometimes the tote lost to keep his customers coming back, but as he usually had insider knowledge of the likely outcome, the overall result was a healthy profit for Reuben. In between his bookie’s activities, he sold false swap cards and fake IDs for buying alcohol. He had a fair idea these credentials would not impress Droopy Dave; might cause him to become even droopier.

He considered Dave’s idea of doing a course, but could think of nothing he wanted to study. Besides, he didn’t have the dedication or perseverance. After school, at his mother’s insistence, he’d started a Bachelor of Business degree at the University of Queensland, having just scraped in on the second intake. He found he was more taken with the idea of being a student than actually being one. He hung around the library chatting up the girls, was a regular fixture in the university bar and lounged around on the lawn with a thick tome open on his lap, smoking roll-your-own cigarettes. For authenticity, he even attended a few rallies – save the green tree frog, violence against women, whatever was the topic of the moment.

But by the end of his first year at university, he knew it wasn’t for him and left before the final exams. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do the work – his school reports had all said the same thing. ‘Reuben is an intelligent boy who is not living up to his full potential.’ In other words, bone-lazy.

He glanced around at the other passengers on the bus. Mostly shoppers, as it was too early in the afternoon for office commuters. Two men were sitting across the aisle. Overalls, work boots, duffle bag at their feet; staring vacantly ahead, fatigue etched on their faces. Factory workers, probably. Took this same route every day, there and back, to earn barely the basic wage; only enough left after paying the bills for a couple of beers. Nights spent watching the telly, anything for an escape from the here and now, weekends mowing the lawn and cleaning the barbecue.

If that’s straight life, shoot me now. Scamming was hard work and you needed brainpower, creativity and nerves of steel. But the rewards were high – the adrenalin rush when it all came together and the money flowed and the satisfaction of seeing a well-planned scheme come to fruition – as long as he didn’t think about the people whose trust in him had afforded him that success.

Of course, as in all careers, you started out on the bottom rung. After leaving uni, he started up a mail-order company selling bogus products. As a sideline, he did door-to-door touting for non-existent charities, and started up a variety of internet-based scams. Brisbane soon became too small for him and as he was beginning to be recognised, he moved to Sydney. He kept on the hop from state to state – when the police started showing interest, he’d move on. Even so, he was arrested and charged on a few occasions and did a couple of short stints in prison.

After a while, he became bored with low-level scams and applied himself to studying finance and investment. His university lecturers would have been amazed if they’d seen him hunched over his scratched laminex kitchen table, cracked lampshade glowing, his head buried in a pile of books, and writing pad full of scribbled notes.

Once he’d acquired a working knowledge of the world of finance, he created more complex scams. By now, he’d returned to Brisbane because of his mother’s illness. He found a partner, Derek McMaster, an Oxford graduate in economics, from a wealthy family who’d squandered his inheritance on wild living and was searching for a way to recoup his losses. Derek knew finance as if he’d been born with a fistful of dollar notes, and together he and Reuben set up investment schemes to embezzle money from tax-dodging clients. Reuben was the front man, who, with his charm and enough financial knowledge to sound plausible, got the customers in the front door. Derek did the rest - persuaded them to sign on the dotted line, transferred the money into his and Reuben’s offshore accounts and did some creative accounting to cover their tracks. They had an office in the city, a secretary and a website. Their business, All Purpose Financial Consultants – deliberately named to sound ordinary – had every appearance of being a legitimate business.

Reuben bought himself a modern apartment in trendy Paddington and a new Audi. He could afford much more, but was careful not to be too extravagant because it would cause suspicion. Derek, on the other hand, couldn’t help but indulge himself in a Mercedes sports car, catamaran and a penthouse apartment on the river. A suspicious and embittered ex-girlfriend alerted the Tax Office, the police became involved, and after five years, their dream crashed down around them. Their bank accounts were closed and their homes and possessions confiscated. Derek received a longer sentence as the executor of the fraudulent transactions and was still in prison, not due for parole for another two years.

The bus jerked to a halt and a woman boarded. In her forties, well made-up, hair gelled into submission. Simply dressed but she had money – you could smell it on her. She took the seat beside him. He glanced at her and she caught his eye then looked away. Five years ago, he’d been readily accepted into the social circle of such women and their husbands, flirted with them at cocktail parties and restaurants and was invited into their homes. Now they looked right through him as if he was of no more importance than the street cleaner. Was that contempt he had seen in her eyes? Sometimes he felt as if he had ‘jailbird’ tattooed on his forehead.

One thing was for sure. He wasn’t going back there. The last three years, his longest time in prison, had crawled. Three years lost forever. Besides, he’d promised his mother. He’d visited her in the palliative care hospital six months before he and Derek were arrested. She had lung cancer, was only fifty-five, but looked like an old woman. Her mottled hand rested as light as a leaf in his, her eyes, shrunk within her parchment yellow face, pleading with him.

‘Please tell me this business you’re in with Derek is legal,’ she whispered. She spoke slowly, her breathing laboured. The oxygen machine was next to her bed.

Reuben stroked her hand. It was icy cold. ‘Of course it is, Mum, I promise.’

His deception was a dead weight in the pit of his stomach. He could make up the most convincing lies to tell strangers and not blink an eye, but he hated lying to his mother. But what else could he say when she was dying?

Her face lightened and for a moment he saw the mother he’d known as a child. She moved her mouth into a semblance of a smile. He didn’t know whether she believed him, but she could pretend as well as he.

Her hand gripped his with surprising strength. ‘I want you to promise me something else.’

‘Anything you want, Mum.’

‘Give up the cigarettes.’

‘Okay.’

‘I mean it, Reuben. I’ll come back and haunt you if you don’t.’

All those years he’d pleaded with her to give up smoking and now she was doing the same to him. But he wasn’t addicted; he only smoked on social occasions.

He squeezed her hand gently and grinned. ‘That’s an incentive if ever I heard one. All right, I promise.’

A spasm of coughing wracked her body, bony and fragile with its paper-thin skin. The nurse hurried over and fixed the oxygen mask to her face. Violet Littlejohn picked up the pad and pen she used for communicating when talking became too hard. Her hand moved laboriously across the page. She held it up. On it were written three words. The letters were wobbly, but there was force behind them: ‘AND STAY STRAIGHT’.

She died two days later. True to his word, Reuben gave up smoking. If only the second part were as easy.

The bus pulled up at his stop in Kedron, and he got out. He walked the two blocks to home – a worker’s cottage Carlene had found for rent before he was released from prison. She had fallen in love with it at first sight, while Reuben thought it rather ugly. Squat and plain with the typical gable-shaped roof, it looked like a Lego house. But he couldn’t complain about the inside – fully renovated with polished floors and all the mod cons. It was in keeping with its surroundings, Kedron being an established suburb of older homes – modest low-set timber or high-set gabled Queenslanders. With most people at work, the streets had an air of desertion about them. The afternoon sun was warm on the back of his neck. Winter had been much colder and bleaker in prison, and seemed to last forever.

As he neared the cottage, memories of his mother overwhelmed him. He was a child again, listening for the creak of the rusty front gate, then bounding downstairs and diving into her arms, his cheek against her uniform that smelled of disinfectant, because that made the world right again. Though in reality, he’d got a hiding as often as a hug.

You can’t give me an ultimatum like ‘Stay Straight’ and then die. What the hell am I supposed to do? Give me a sign, a bolt of lightning, a whack on the head – anything!