Bleak Spring

by Jon Cleary

  “One of the tellers remembered giving it to her—that’s a large withdrawal in cash by an individual. The usual withdrawals were for four or five hundred weekly—I guess they were for housekeeping. There were cheques made out to stores, electricity accounts, things like that.”

  “Mrs. Rockne told me she knew nothing about that five thousand.” He did not ask why the bank had been so cooperative in revealing the details of the Rockne account. He never queried how his men worked, unless there was a complaint from outside; he knew that Kagal was not bent nor was he a stand-over man. Kagal, like every cop, knew that the proper channels too often led to a delta of silt. So if you had to detour round the rules or crash through them, you did so. “That’s a couple of lies she’s put to me. Why?”

  “Is she the killer?” Kagal was always direct, a real arrow always on target. It was one of his few handicaps, if he wanted to make Commissioner. He was sitting opposite a man who had fired too many direct hits for his own good. The politicians swore with their hands on their hearts that the State would have no more corrupt Commissioners; they kept their hands on their breasts so that no straight-arrow appointee might pierce them with too much honesty. “If she knew of that other money, the five-and-a-bit million . . .?”

  Malone nodded. “She’s starting to look more and more like Number One suspect. But it’s a bit early yet . . . You know Bernie Bezrow, the bookie? Find out what you can about him.”

  “Scobie, I don’t know anyone at all in the racing game, it’s not my scene.” It obviously hurt Kagal to confess that he did not know everyone and everything. “Russ would do better than me there.”

  Malone had known that all along; he wondered at the mean streak in himself that had made him show Kagal to be less than perfect. Had he started to protect his own back, was he like some old lion (well, a young middle-aged one) intent on holding his own against the young one? He had never really been competitive, or ambitious, but now it struck him that he was going to suffer no competition from Kagal, not if he could prevent it.

  “Righto, I’ll let Russ handle it. In the meantime—”

  Then his phone rang. “Scobie? It’s Don Cheshire.”

  Sergeant Cheshire ran the Fingerprints Section out at Parramatta. He was one of the old school, suggesting he was more of a knuckle-man than a specialist in fingerprints, but there was no one in his job better than he. He had started thirty years ago when there had been two basic powders used to develop a fingerprint; now there were over a hundred chemicals that could do the job. He had first used a bellows camera; now there were a computer and the latest high-definition camera. Gruff and lumbering, he resembled a bull in a laboratory, but he had built and kept his reputation as the best.

  “We been all over the Volvo in the Rockne case. Prints everywhere on it, but they’d be the family’s, too many of ’em and some of ’em are old. But we come up with a single print on the door, the door on the driver’s side, same side’s the body was. Nice and clear, couldn’t have been better if I’d ordered it. We know who it belongs to, too, I’ve checked. A villain named Garry Dunne, got a record from here back to the First Fleet.”

  “Garry Dunne? Kelpie Dunne?”

  “That’s him. I tried to get an address on him, but all the computer shows is the Gold Coast, but that was back in eighty-nine. He’d just been acquitted of doing a security guard. He must of pissed off up north soon’s they let him outa court.”

  “Thanks, Don.” Malone hung up, looking across his desk at Kagal. “As I was saying, in the meantime you can try and find a crim named Garry Dunne, Kelpie Dunne. You heard of him?”

  “Vaguely.” Kagal had been in Homicide only six months, had come from the detective squad in one of the southern stations.

  “He used to be a bouncer for a gambling club out in Rozelle, the Lay Down Misère, I think it was called. I dunno if it’s still going, but try it. If there’s no luck there, try all the other gambling joints around the suburbs, just leave out the Asian ones. They don’t employ whitey bouncers.”

  “What about the Cross?”

  “He never hung around the Cross. He was persona non grata up there, I dunno why.”

  “Persona non grata? I’ve never heard that about a crim before.” Kagal made the mistake of letting his smile slip into a smirk.

  “You will when you get to inspector,” said Malone and felt better: a little malice occasionally flavours the soul. “Ring me at home if you come up with something on him.”

  Kagal looked at his watch. “You want me to start looking now?”

  “Gambling clubs do most of their business at night. Have an early dinner and then get to work. Good luck.”

  Kagal straightened his Macquarie University tie; he would have preferred it to be a Sydney Uni tie, but one couldn’t have everything. “Does it matter what time I ring you?”

  “Any time. There’s a phone right beside my bed. On my wife’s side.”

  Kagal smiled; he wasn’t all smugness. “You win, Inspector.”

  Malone, too, smiled; the young lion had had pointed out to him his place in the pride. “Good luck, John. Don’t try to bring Kelpie in on your own. He’s a bad bugger.”

  Half an hour later he went home, driving through rain, the first good downpour for weeks. By the time he reached home, however, the rain had stopped and the clouds had climbed high again and were disappearing. A weather expert on the car radio told him that the dry spell was expected to continue, that the rain had been an aberration, a leak in the sky. Malone put the Commodore into the garage, noting that there was a leak in the rubber round one of the windows of the car; perhaps it was time to start thinking of a new car. He closed the garage door and stood for a moment smelling the moisture on the flowers and shrubs in the front garden. The world, occasionally, smelt fresh.

  He went into the house, kissed Lisa, then kissed the children, something that, though he never made a big thing of it, gave him more pleasure than the children knew. Brigid, his mother, had never kissed him again after he had made his first communion; Con, his father, would have looked at him queerly if he had put up his cheek to be pecked. Claire, Maureen and Tom, when they kissed their father in return, made his day.

  “I think I’ll have a swim,” he told Lisa.

  “The water’s still freezing, it’ll make you impotent.”

  “I’ll leave my balls in the bedroom.”

  “Did you say you’re gunna leave your balls in the bedroom?” Tom, the nine-year-old, stood in the kitchen doorway.

  “You want to clean the wax out of your ears.”

  “What did you say then?”

  Kids weren’t always kissable. “Never mind. You want to come for a swim with me?”

  “Not if I gotta leave my balls in the bedroom.”

  Malone looked at his wife. “You’ve raised one of those cute kids out of TV.”

  “Blame me. Hurry up and have your swim. Russ and Romy will be here at seven thirty. You know that she sees they’re always on time.”

  “I’d forgotten they were coming.”

  He had his swim, not diving in but going carefully into the water; his genitals went up into his belly and his breath disappeared altogether. But gradually he became adjusted to the chill and after a few minutes he was stroking slowly up and down the pool and the stiffness of the day slid out of him. As he dried himself he was glad to find everything returning to normal, all things in their proper place.

  Russ Clements and Romy Keller arrived on time. The children swarmed all over Clements; he was their favourite and only uncle, adopted. They were as affectionate towards Romy, if a little inhibited; they were still getting used to the idea that, if all went well and Lisa the matchmaker’s prayer were answered, she could be their one and only aunt. As the children, already having eaten, went off to their rooms and Lisa went out to begin serving dinner, Romy said to Malone, “We finished the autopsy on Will Rockne today. The cause of death was straightforward, you’ll get my report tomorrow. The irony is, he was going t
o die anyway.”

  Malone, leading the way into the dining room, looked at Clements, who shrugged, then back at Romy. “Going to die, anyway?”

  “He had a brain tumour. He’d have had six months at the most to live, maybe less. I’d say it was totally inoperable.”

  “You never know, do you?” said Clements, sounding enigmatic.

  “The killer certainly couldn’t have,” said Malone, pouring the wine. It was a 1975 Grange Hermitage, the last bottle of Lisa’s parents’ Christmas present last year; even after seventeen years of marriage, it still prickled when Jan and Elisabeth Pretorious gave him and Lisa presents that cost so much. But it didn’t sour the wine; his palate was less sensitive than his pride. “But if his wife knew . . .”

  “Yes?” said Clements.

  “If anyone knew, it would be her. In which case, why would she want to have him killed?”

  Romy widened her heavy-lidded eyes. “You suspect the wife?”

  “I was beginning to. But now . . . Unless, of course, she didn’t know and neither did Will Rockne. Can someone be unaware of having a brain tumour?”

  “Yes. There’d be symptoms, headaches, maybe some vomiting, but too often people ignore those sort of things till it’s too late.”

  Clements tasted the wine Malone had poured for him. “Don’t let’s spoil this. Grange Hermitage?” He whistled. “Did it fall off the back of a truck?”

  “I wish it had,” said Malone, being enigmatic, and went out to help Lisa bring in the first course.

  They had reached the coffee and florentines stage when the phone rang. Malone went out into the hall to take the call; it was Kagal. “Scobie? I’ve traced Kelpie Dunne. He’s here in Sydney, though I can’t get a home address on him. But he works as a mechanic for a garage workshop out in Newtown, a place called Hamill’s, in Brumby Street. I can be there first thing in the morning.”

  “No, leave him to me, John.” He wasn’t sure that Kagal was the right man to send after a thug like Dunne. “Russ and I’ll handle him.”

  He went back to the dinner table, all at once feeling pessimistic, though not sure why. The Grange Hermitage tasted like something that actually had fallen off the back of a truck, been scooped up and rebottled.

  4

  I

  “COURSE THERE’D be my prints on the car! I serviced the fucking thing, didn’t I? You checked the engine block? My dabs would be all over that. Jesus, you guys gimme the shits!”

  Kelpie Dunne had no respect for the law or those who tried to enforce it. For a thug, he was a small man; but he was an artist at fighting dirty. He was thin-featured, with a widow’s peak to his reddish-brown hair; there was a resemblance to the dog after which he was nicknamed. Though short and lean, he was muscular and had hands that looked more comfortable, or anyway natural, as fists. His voice had the right rasp to it; he had a de facto wife, but nothing sweet had ever been poured into her ear. At the moment he wore overalls and a T-shirt and was covered in grease stains, like tribal marks. But Malone knew he belonged to no tribe, he was a loner.

  “How long had Mr. Rockne been bringing his car here for service?”

  “Just the once, about a month ago. He said he wasn’t happy about who’d been doing it before.”

  “This is a bit out of the way, isn’t it, for someone who lived at Coogee?”

  “Easy seen you ain’t a car man. This place’s got a reputation. Look around you, all quality cars, no shit.”

  Hamill’s workshop itself had no look of quality. In a back street of Newtown, it was a plain one-storeyed brick building with a corrugated-iron roof and a front wall covered with graffiti, not the artistic kind; pigs, nigs and wogs were told to Fuck Off! and there was a large swastika that someone had tried to scrub out. The workshop was long and narrow, running from the street through to a back lane. The street had two rows of narrow-fronted cottages facing each other, drab as the banks of a dry gully; gentrification had not yet washed into this part of Newtown. But within the long clangorous tunnel of Hamill’s there were a dozen or more of the gentry’s carriages: Jaguars, BMWs, Porsches, a Ferrari.

  “Who recommended that Rockne come here?” said Clements.

  Dunne cleaned his big teeth with the inside of his lips. “I was a client of his, once.”

  “That was several years ago,” said Malone. “Did he come looking for you, all the way out here? Come on, Kelpie, don’t bullshit us.”

  He cleaned his teeth again. “Then I dunno who recommended him.”

  “Would your boss know?”

  “He might. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Okay, we’ll do that. Where is he?”

  “He’s on holiday, up at Kakadu.”

  Three thousand kilometres away, Crocodile Dundee country. “You’re a real smart-arse, Kelpie,” said Clements. “Where did you learn to be a mechanic? I thought you went in for other ways of earning a crust.”

  “I did a course while I was in Bathurst. I was doing three years.”

  “What were you in for?”

  “A guy got in me way. I didn’t see him till he was unconscious.” The big teeth made an ugly smile, like a dog’s. “But they rehabilitated me in Bathurst. Made me into a mechanical engineer, I’m part of the Clever Country.”

  The Clever Country had been one of the catch-cries out of Canberra, another piece of rhetoric aimed at solving the nation’s problems. “I don’t think the government had you in mind to show us the way, Kelpie. You’ve been up before the beak twice since Bathurst. I looked up your record. Did Mrs. Bodalle recommend Rockne to bring his car in here?”

  “Mrs. Bodalle?” Dunne’s look of innocent puzzlement was as ugly as his smile.

  “That’s her Ferrari over there, isn’t it?” Clements pointed to the red car standing in a corner, its bonnet raised. “I saw it Sunday morning. I made a note of the number plate. QC-LAW. Bit fancy, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, that Mrs. Bodalle!” He made it sound as if Sydney were a Bodalle breeding ground. “That come in yesterday morning. Beautiful bit of machinery. Yeah, she could of recommended him. Like I said, you’d have to ask the boss. I don’t do none of the booking in.”

  “Who’s the foreman?” said Malone. He had seen the Ferrari without recognizing it; good old Russ had come good again. “Or is he up at Kakadu, too?”

  “He’s off with the flu. You’re outa luck, looks like.”

  “Could we have your home address?”

  “You can always find me here.”

  “I know, but we’d like to know where you live. Put you on our mailing list for police Christmas cards.”

  “You’re a real card, ain’t you? Okay, it’s—” He gave an address in Penrith, one of the outer western suburbs. “But you’re wasting your time, you gunna get nothing on me. I’m clean.” He held out his grease-stained hands, then grinned. “Well, almost.”

  “Yeah,” said Malone. “Almost.”

  Malone and Clements went out to the unmarked police Commodore, which Clements had had to park on the footpath. Two women, surrounded by a shoal of toddlers, stood beside the car. “Are you two coppers? Don’t you know it’s against the law to park on the footpath? One law for the law and another for us mugs, right? We oughta report you, only we dunno who’d take any notice, you’re all up each other’s jack.”

  “Is that any way to talk in front of the children,” said Clements.

  The woman who had spoken, in her thirties, worn thin with battling, looked at her companion, a plumper, younger woman who looked as if she could be happy, given the opportunity. “You hear that, Cheryl? I was wrong. He ain’t a cop, he’s a parson.”

  “Does that workshop park cars on the footpath?” said Malone.

  “All the time.” She broke off for a moment to snap at the toddlers, who were relieving their boredom by punching each other. “We’re always complaining, but they just give us the middle finger, you know? My hubby complained once and they just give him a hiding. They’re all crims in there, every one of ’em.
But then you know that, right?”

  “That’s why we’re here. Just checking. Would you notice if the cars come and go pretty quickly?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Would you, Cheryl?”

  Cheryl shrugged, leaning sideways against the weight of the baby on her hip. “I wouldn’t know, either. But most nights of the week, they work right through the night. They shut the doors, but you can still hear ’em banging away, especially if you live next door, like I do.”

  “Thanks, ladies. And we apologize for leaving our car on the footpath. It won’t happen again. If you have any more trouble with Hamill’s, if they beat up your husband again, let the local police know. They’ll straighten ’em out.”

  “Are you kidding? The cops come down here, everything would be quiet for a day or two, right, Cheryl? Then one day we’d come home to find our house had been burned down. They’re real bad buggers, I tell you. Stop it!” She swept her hands round, clipping the fighting toddlers, not missing a head. “You wouldn’t like to run this lot in, would you?”

  “Hardened crims like them? No way.”

  The two detectives got into their car, drove along the footpath to the corner and bumped down over the kerb into the road. As they waited at a traffic light Malone said, “I’d say Hamill’s run a stolen car racket. They do some servicing, a few legitimate clients as a front, but I’d bet half those cars we saw in there were stolen.”

  “Do we mention them to the Motor Squad?”

  “Not yet, but we will. Give us a day or two, we want to keep tabs on Kelpie. So long as he doesn’t pinch my car, he’s more use to us where he is. I don’t think he’s going to disappear, he’s too shrewd to give us any suspicions.”

  “There’s a lot today who have Ferraris and Porsches who’d be glad to have them pinched, have ’em written off for the insurance.”

  “Not Mrs. Bodalle, though. I’d say she and Will Rockne were two of the legitimate clients.”

  Clements looked sideways. “But?”

  Malone looked sideways in return. “Like you say. But . . .”

  II

  Jason and Claire sat in a booth in Brick’s milk bar and coffee lounge, the meeting place before and after school for the boys from Marcellin College and the girls from Holy Spirit. Jason wore jeans and a blue and white striped shirt and Reeboks. Claire was in her school uniform: green and blue plaid skirt, blue shirt and blue blazer with the school emblem on the breast pocket; her felt hat, to be replaced for summer with a straw one, was on top of her schoolbag on the seat beside her. Holy Spirit did not believe in self-expression, at least not in wardrobe.