I’m in the editing room. The title flashes up onto the screen: 56 Days. Mike and Tim sit beside me and I watch their faces watch the images I’ve become accustomed to. The grim-faced police, the dogs, the crouched, dazed woman with blood on her face. The protesters trying to climb fences, trying to rip them down. The singing, the chanting, the placards. The sound of helicopters clap-clap-clappering, the plumes of smoke drifting upwards. All those sad, surreal images moving against the backdrop of our familiar Wellington buildings, roads, bridges. Don Taylor is there. ‘We made history, I suppose, but it was a sad way of making it.’
And here are the lambs. Marching at the edge of the police lines, running, zigzagging in and out of the crowds. The white lamb wags a finger at a police officer. They turn around, wiggle their bums at the line of police, wave up at the crowded stands.
And now they’re dancing, turning into spinning tops, leaping together, rocketing through the air.
The bright blue sky enfolding and framing them as they spin, spin, spin.
As they spin.
Back to the beginning.
Touch wood, cross fingers, my granddad used to say. Hold off those hovering gods eager to upturn buckets of cold, green slime on your head. Just when things are getting good.
Because they were good, maybe, looking back, too damn good. In a matter of days I’d be off on a blissful holiday. Rarotonga. Partially subsidised by the network since it was partially — very partially — work. And* *I had the best of stories to dive back into when I got back. This was going to be a good one.
I knew there was something of the crusader in me and I knew from past, bitter experience I had to curb it but I had a particularly warm glow in the pit of my belly over this one. I was going to expose Denny Graham for the total shit he was.
Denny Graham was an ex-cop from Wellington who’d moved to Auckland in the early eighties, bought motels in Mount Eden and got his start by getting around council by-laws and selling the units off separately as ‘ownership flats’. He now owned and managed an Auckland-based company which dealt in investment properties. YourWay Prime Investments: ‘Your choice, Your properties, Your way.’ His company had spin-offs: short-term loans, nightclubs, massage parlours. All of which were still happily humming away while he was doing time for embezzlement.
Murray Turner, Graham’s long-discarded business partner, was on the phone. Again. He’d got into the habit of phoning me at any old time and venting. Still, even though it took considerable effort, I had to indulge him. I had to be unreservedly tolerant since he was the kind of source journalists usually only dream of. He had clung for years to a virulent resentment of Denny Graham, a resentment which made him itch for Graham to get his comeuppance. He’d worked with him until they’d had the falling out which had left Turner down and broke and Graham blithely moving onwards and upwards.
‘It’s a fucking joke,’ he said, ‘him living in that fucking great castle of his. Get this. He’s allowed out to do his shopping. All he has to do is phone his probation officer and away he goes down to New World to stock up on his bloody wine and pâté.’
At present Graham was on eleven months’ home detention wearing a monitoring electronic bracelet. Turner was right. Denny’s incarceration was far from irksome. For most people, the idea of roaming around the four hundred or so square metres of house, enjoying the pleasant vista from the tower and whiling away time in the gym, the pool, the spa and the entertainment room would be the kind of luxury holiday they could only dream of.
‘It’s a fucking joke,’ Turner repeated, ‘that sentence. Just a tap on the hand. He gets off with a hundred and fifty hours’ community work and he’ll get around that one, you wait and see, and $500,000 reparation. That’s bloody peanuts to Denny.’
Graham, of course, had had a top criminal lawyer acting for him. He would keep his head down, do his time, if you could call it that, and be absolutely OK at the end of it. Unlike the people he’d persuaded to invest their retirement funds into buying chalets in Rarotonga which had failed to materialise.
‘You said you had someone else who might talk to me,’ I said. ‘One of the women who was involved in the seminars.’
‘Dunno about her. Can’t make up her bloody mind.’
‘What if I contacted her?’
‘Not a good idea. If you phoned she’d be scared shitless.’
I laughed. ‘I’m not all that scary, am I?’
‘Not you, darling. It’s Denny she’s frightened of upsetting. Give it a few days, eh? We’ll get him, girl. What Denny’s gone down for’s just the tip of the bloody iceberg. There’s a whole lot more I can tell you. A whole fucking lot more.’
I made grateful noises and hung up. Yep, this was going to be big. And while I didn’t have much sympathy for Turner I was confident he’d give me what I needed.
The couple of times I’d met him I’d come away feeling a bit grubby. His shiny black leather jacket, stringy ponytail, the heavy gold rings on his fingers and the ever-so-chivalrous way he had of addressing my breasts while he talked reminded me of some slimy character straight out of The Sopranos. I was fairly convinced that if Graham hadn’t done the dirty on him, as Turner put it, he’d still be right there alongside him wheeling and dealing and ripping off susceptible people.
But I needed everything I could get on Denny Graham. He still had a few loyal sympathisers about who were vocal in their disagreement with the charges made against him and his conviction. ‘He’s done a lot for Auckland.’ ‘The economic downturn isn’t Denny’s fault.’* *I wanted to shut all that fellow feeling right down, show him for what he was.
Because I had the ordinary, everyday, trusting people who’d been badly hurt by Graham queuing up to talk. They’d never get their money back, money which was supposed to be for their security and for their families, money which had taken whole lifetimes of work to save. I wanted to do my bit towards stopping Graham from surfacing out of his ‘prison’ and bulldozing the next batch of ordinary, everyday people with his next big scheme. If that meant playing nice with the Murray Turners of this world for a few months, I could do it.
Denny had originally made his money out of buying low and selling high in Auckland. He was particularly adept at prising valuable properties from elderly people by offering deals where he would generously swap their sprawling villa for one of his ‘brand-spanking-new townhouses’. Graham believed in the personal approach. He’d turn up at some old pensioner’s door and sweep them off their feet with his ultra-white, wide-snapping grin and sharp suits. Denny was a real charmer.
I’d met Denny. It was in the early days of Saturday Night, the first TV series I was involved with. It was right in the middle of those heady years of the rising property market and YourWay* *had recently expanded into the holiday home market, buying up land and putting up blocks of holiday apartments. I was in Auckland working on a feature about fairly primitive seaside holiday cottages which had turned, almost overnight it seemed, into million-dollar properties. I was invited out for drinks and Denny was there.
We were introduced. He flashed that famous grin at me and that was all there was to it. Except for the feeling which hit me deep down in my belly as he squeezed my hand and his pale, slightly slanted eyes — lizard eyes — scurried up and down my body. My gut instinct was to leap backwards, to thoroughly wash the clammy, cold sensation from my hand. I watched as he moved from person to person, group to group, swooping in on the important people, exhibiting the smile. His hand reached out to pat shoulders. I saw those pitiless eyes flickering, assessing.
There had been whisperings about Denny for years about deals which were questionable if not downright crooked. The retirement apartments that had no soundproofing between the units and, more often than not, had mould growing in the bathrooms and problems with the drains. The holiday cottages that were much smaller than the suggested images in the brochures and had cheap, tacky kitchen and bathroom fittings. And where were the luxurious carpets and tiles? Where were the vast decks? Where was the pool?
‘Artist’s impression only.’* *That was the statement on the glossy brochures which covered all the variations, though how Denny Graham got around building specifications was anybody’s guess. Those were the kinds of questions I intended asking. It seemed Denny Graham might have had friends in rather high places.
Of course there were buyers who complained but they hadn’t read the fine print. Denny was particularly skilled at covering his back — ‘It’s all there in black and white.’ He also tended to build his resorts in places a long, long way from anywhere, the kinds of places where people think they might want to be before they actually are. Seclusion. Tranquillity. Paradise.
The Sunshine Coast, for example: ‘fifty k’s from concern, cares and clatter’.* Which actually meant fifty k’s away from shops, medical care and, in most cases, beaches. Then there were the Far North Chalets, far *being the operative word. For the new owners who might have wanted to protest about substandard building processes, the locations made it difficult to drum up any interest. The media really weren’t keen on trekking off to some remote place in Oz, not just for a few leaks and kitchen cupboards that had fallen off walls, nor did solicitors and building inspectors want to travel miles up the Karikari Peninsula.
It was difficult to work out exactly how he got away with it but buyers generally either sold up at a huge loss or got out their deckchairs and barbies and got on with it. New Zealanders are do-it-yourselfers and there’d always be someone they could count on to give them a hand to fix up the electrics or sort out the plumbing for the exchange of a week or so at the bach. And it was a whole lot easier and cheaper to pick up discounted floor coverings and a Para pool than to try to take it through the courts.
New Zealanders don’t like to be seen as whiners, they don’t like being made fools of and they certainly don’t like anyone else knowing they’ve been taken for fools. Denny Graham knew that. He knew how to exploit it.
Those who did continue to complain eventually fell silent. That was something else Turner had told me.
He likes to get his own way, does Denny. Denny doesn’t like being crossed.
He doesn’t like it at all.
I could tell you stories, my girl. Stories about our Denny that’d make your hair curl.
© Paddy Richardson 2013
Extracted from CROSS FINGERS by Paddy Richardson, published by Hachette NZ, RRP $34.99.
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