by Jon Cleary
“Where’ve you two been?” Murder doesn’t take a holiday, but on public holidays Homicide usually operated with a skeleton staff, with certain members on call.
“We’ve been down Palmer Street.” Graham took off his jacket, bounced around his desk as if debating whether to do handstands on it. “You know Sally Kissen, she runs—ran a brothel down there. Half the girls in William Street used her place.”
“We got a call from one of the girls an hour ago,” said Truach, who was already seated rock-like in a chair, as if he knew he and Graham were an act and he had to play up the contrast to his partner’s restlessness. “They found Sally dead in bed. Some of the Crime Scene boys are down there still. I gather they’d just come from your place.”
Malone told them about Scungy Grime; then he said, “For Pete’s sake, Andy, sit down!” Graham dropped into a chair, but then couldn’t make up his mind whether to cross his legs or shove them straight out in front of him. Malone sat on the edge of the desk, turning his back on Graham. “How did the Kissen woman die? Shot, stabbed, what?”
“We don’t know. The GMO, old Joe Gaynor, couldn’t find any wounds or bruises. She took drugs, there were needle-marks on her arms, but it didn’t look as if she’d OD’d. It could of been a heart attack, but I don’t think so. Doc Gaynor didn’t think so, either. He thought she might’ve been poisoned.”
“Where’s the body?”
“It’s gone out to Glebe, to the morgue.”
“Righto, give me copies of your sheets. And Andy—” Graham was a speed typist, bashing at his typewriter with his usual energy. “Keep your typos to a minimum. The last sheet I saw of yours looked like a wallpaper pattern, The same on the computer.”
He went back to his office. Clements was about to hang up, but Malone held up his hand. “You still talking to the doc? I want to speak to her.”
Clements handed him the phone, but first said goodbye to Romy Keller in a voice full of kisses, a tone that raised Malone’s eyebrows. With his hand over the mouthpiece Clements said, “You don’t know my romantic side.”
“Spare me . . . Doc? There’s another body on its way out to Glebe. Ask Doc Gaynor if you can have a look at it. The name is Kissen, Sally Kissen, she was a hooker. I think she may have gone the same way as Grime. Oh, take care. She was a drug-user.”
“Then we’ll have to do the AIDS and hepatitis tests before I can touch her. I don’t think I can give you anything conclusive on either corpse till tomorrow. Can you wait?”
“They’re dead, Doc, and I haven’t a clue what happened to them. How long have you been a GMO?”
“Three months.”
“You’ll learn that here in Homicide we’re patient. Even Russ.”
“You don’t know him,” she said, but he thought she laughed before she hung up.
Malone sat down again at his desk, picked up Grime’s diary. The entries were cryptic; Grime had not been making notes for posterity. Yet, when a man was murdered, posterity had to take over. Most of the entries were the trivia of a person’s life: bills to be paid, a doctor’s appointment, a change in work shift. Initials sprinkled the small pages: Drink with B.H.; Call J.A. (those same initials again); Ran into K.L. Then, on a date three weeks past, there was a query, the only query amongst all the entries, and it was in capital letters: WHAT IS S.W. DOING UP HERE?
Malone handed the small book to Clements. “What do you make of that?”
Clements looked at the entry. “Do we know any S.W.? And what does up here mean?”
Malone shrugged. “If Scungy worked at Darling Harbour or Walsh Bay, maybe they think of Port Botany as down there.” Port Botany was about twelve kilometres south of Port Jackson, the official name for Sydney Harbour; in Malone’s youth it had been known, as it had been for almost two hundred years, as Botany Bay. Now it had been renamed and was a major container port. “What upset him so much, the entry’s in caps?”
“Let’s check with the WLU, see where Scungy worked.”
But the WLU office did not work on national holidays. Clements hung up the phone, “I’m getting naïve in my old age, expecting seven days a week from a union office.”
Malone grinned; Clements spread his prejudices wide. He stood up, picked up his jacket. “I’m going home. Detectives shouldn’t have to work on holidays, either.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Try and trace Scungy’s wife, give her the bad news. Ask Wayne Morrow to send one of his fellers down to Scungy’s flat, go through it with a vacuum cleaner. The point is, we can’t do much till Crime Scene comes up with something and your friend Doc Keller tells us what killed Scungy.”
“You’re spoiling my Australia Day. I was gunna go out and sell flags.”
“Mine was spoiled at seven o’clock this morning when Maureen found Scungy in our pool.”
“Sorry.” For all his rough exterior, his obviousness, Clements was not insensitive. “You want me to drive you home?”
“I’ll get a cab, charge it to petty cash.” He was a tight man with his own money. One of the heroes in his pantheon was J. Paul Getty, the oil billionaire who charged his house-guests for their phone calls. “If Doc Keller has anything interesting to tell you this evening, ring me at home.”
As soon as he stepped out into the street, his jacket over his arm, the heat hit him, threatening to fry him on the pavement. He squinted in the glare, thinking perhaps he should start wearing sunglasses, as Lisa was always insisting he do; then out of the bright yellow furnace appeared a cab, a miracle at this time of day on a holiday. A true-blue Aussie egalitarian, he got into the front seat beside the driver, a young Chinese student.
“You’re a cop?” the driver asked warily, eyes slanting sideways at his passenger.
“Do I look like one?”
He was only six months in from Singapore, but already he had the Australian nose, “It’s not so much what you look like . . .”
“You mean we have a smell to us? Relax—” as the cab wavered “—I’m not going to pinch you for insulting an officer. Where do you come from? Singapore? What are the cops like there? Can you smell them, those in plainclothes?”
The driver was frank, a most un-Chinese habit. “I was a student, you had to learn to recognize them. Otherwise you finished up as a guest of Mr. Lee. At least you police here aren’t political.”
“Thank you,” said Malone, but wondered how many of the native students would agree.
Before he got out of the cab he paid the exact fare, sorting out the change in his pocket; tipping was un-Australian, despite the propaganda of immigrant waiters, and in Malone’s case it was unheard-of. The Chinese driver, studying for an economics degree, was philosophical. “You want a discount for cash?”
“Funny bugger. I’ll get you deported.”
The cab drove off and Malone stood on the pavement and looked at his home, his castle gift-wrapped by Physical Evidence blue-and-white-checked tapes. Somehow, the tapes were an obscenity, like insulting graffiti; countless times he had stepped over them going into other people’s homes and he had not been unaware of how they changed the aspect of a house or an apartment. This, however, was different: it was, as Greg Random had said, too close to home.
A young policeman, in shirt sleeves, put on his cap and came along to Malone from the marked police car standing at the kerb, “I’ve been told to stand by, Inspector. Everyone’s gone.”
“You know if they had any luck with the neighbours? Anyone see anything?”
“Not as far as I know. The lady next door, Mrs.—” he took his notebook from his pocket “—Mrs. Cayburn said she heard a car draw up during the night. She doesn’t know what time it was, but it was still dark.”
Malone looked up and down the street. This was one of the few streets still left in Randwick that had no apartment blocks; two rows of older, solid houses on their sixty-foot lots faced each other across the roadway. The houses had a respectability about them; they had been built in a time when respectabilit
y had a value. Some, like Malone’s, had been built at the time of Federation, at the turn of the century; the rest had been built during or just after World War I. Up till now, as far as Malone knew, none of the houses had known murder or wife-beating or scandal; at least none of them had called for blue and white taping to be stretched around them.
“You’ve got a visitor, sir.” The young officer was obviously a surfie when off-duty; he was all mahogany, in colour and in muscle. On such a day, he should be down amongst the big ones, riding them on his board. Instead, here he was riding herd on a house where all the excitement was finished. “An old guy, said he was your father.”
“You checked him?” Why did he think that the old guy might be Jack Aldwych? He was becoming edgy again, the Crime Scene tapes were binding too tightly.
“He wasn’t much help, sir. Said he’d never had to identify himself before to get into his son’s place. I asked him for his driving licence, but he said he didn’t drive, why’d he want a licence? Finally, I got him to show me his pension card. He’s an obstreperous old coot, isn’t he?” He looked cautiously at Malone as he offered the opinion.
Malone grinned and relaxed. “That’s my old man. He hates cops.”
He left the young cop with raised eyebrows and the unspoken question and went into the house. Con Malone was sitting at the kitchen table, a glass of beer in front of him. The old man lived in the past, pottering around in his bigotry and old habits. He had never learned to appreciate beer from a can, he had always drunk it from the bottle or a glass and he wasn’t going to risk cutting his lip on a flaming piece of tin and spoiling the taste of the beer with blood.
“Why didn’t you ring us?” he demanded as soon as Malone came into the kitchen. “I had to hear it on the wireless, one of my granddaughters finds a dead man in the swimming pool.”
“I was going to ring you, Dad—” He had no excuse, really. He had been too concerned with the assault on his own feelings and those of Lisa and the kids. “How’s Mum?”
“Out of her flaming mind with worry about the kids. About you and Lisa, too,” he added. But Malone knew his mother: she had never learned to show her love for him, her only child, but she shouted her love for her grandchildren like a Catholic Holy Roller. “Lisa rang her and she’s gone out to Vaucluse, to the Pretorius place.”
Malone once again recognized Lisa’s talent for diplomacy. She would have known that Brigid Malone would have resented being left out of the comforting of the children. Brigid was not a mean-spirited woman, but her time was diminishing and any time lost from her grandchildren was time lost forever.
He went to the screen door, looked out at the pool; the tapes were still in place there. He could be thankful that there was no taped outline of Grime’s body: the water was crystal-clear of death.
He turned back into the kitchen, got himself a beer from the fridge, poured it into a glass as a gesture to his father and sat down opposite Con. He looked at the old man, once again seeing the tired wildness in the walnut face and the once-muscular frame; Malone knew that only his mother had kept his father out of jail. Con would never have been a criminal, but the Irish in him had always had a contempt for law and order, especially law and order based on any British model. He had hated authority, police, Masons, any conservative politician, Dagos, reffos; now he hated wogs, Asians and any man with long hair and an earring. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that lesbians did what he’d heard they did and he had no doubts that poofters deserved what AIDS did to them. He was, in his own opinion, an average Aussie, one of the real natives, not the bloody Abos. Malone loved him, but could never tell him.
“Dad, what’s life like on the wharves now? The bloke we found out there in the pool, he could’ve worked as a tally clerk.”
“Tally clerks don’t work, they’re all bludgers.” His net of prejudices was wide. “Why’d he finish up in your pool?”
“He was working for me. Someone must have resented that.”
“Working—? You mean he was an informer, a stoolie? Jesus, ain’t you got any shame? Using a man to dob in someone else.”
Malone said patiently, “Dad, we do it all the time. You think the crims go in for a code of ethics?”
“They don’t dob in their mates. Not the decent ones.”
“How many decent crims do you know? Don’t give me any crap, Dad. I’ve had a bad morning.”
Con Malone gave his form of apology, which was to change the subject: “About the wharves? They’re nothing like they used to be. They’re—” he searched for the right word “—they’re antiseptic. Yeah, antiseptic. Compared to what they used to be.”
“How much skulduggery went on?”
“Oh, it was dirty, real dirty. There was no guaranteed work when I first started on the wharves, there was just the call-up each morning. The stevedore boss played favourites. Or you were in sweet with the union boss and he saw you got work or there’d be trouble. There were stand-over blokes who ran things, some for the stevedore firms, some for particular union bosses who didn’t want any competition at the elections. There were some decent union men at the top, but they had just as hard a battle as the blokes at the bottom.”
“What about smuggling, pillaging, things like that?”
“Oh, that was on for young and old. I did it meself, pillaging, I mean, not smuggling—I never went in for that, that was big-time and too dangerous. Some of the foremen were tied up in the smuggling racket, they were the blokes on site for the big men, the ones who never came near the waterfront, who had nothing to do with the shipping game. Gangsters, big businessmen, there was even one politician in the racket. Drugs, gold, they had it all wrapped up. You must of known all about that?”
“I’d heard about it—Russ Clements was once on the Pillage Squad. But you never mentioned it.”
“Your mum was protecting you. She knew about it, vaguely, and she laid down the law to me that I was never to talk to you about it. By the time you was old enough to talk to, you’d become a copper. How could I talk to you then?” Con Malone asked what he thought was a reasonable question.
Malone agreed with a grin. “Sure, how could you? How did you fellers work under a foreman who was in on the smuggling?”
“We turned a blind eye. We had to, or else. Foremen were different in them days, few of ’em were popular, we looked on ’em as the bosses’ men. We never drank with them after we’d knocked off work, nothing like that.”
“I want to go down to the wharves tomorrow. You know anyone I can see?”
“Roley Bremner.” Con Malone said without hesitation. “He’s been secretary of the New South Wales branch of the WLU for the last ten years and he’s as straight as a die. Him and me worked together when he first started. Tell him I sent you. It’s a pity you’ll have to mention you’re a cop.” But he had the grace to grin.
“I’ll try and keep it out of the conversation as long as I can.”
Then the phone rang. Malone picked it up. “Inspector Malone?”
“Who’s this?” He had an experienced cop’s built-in defence: never identify yourself till you have to or there is some advantage to it.
“Malone,” said the voice, flat but distinct, “stay in your own paddock. Don’t mess around with something that’s none of your business. You’ve had one warning. This is your second and last.”
II
At 7.30 Tuesday morning, while Malone was preparing breakfast for himself, Lisa returned home with the children.
“I see they’ve taken down all the decorations.” The blue and white tapes had been removed last night.
“I was going to bring all the girls down from my class.” Maureen, it seemed, had made a full recovery. “I phoned ’em yesterday from Grandma’s. They were going to bring their cameras.”
“Get ready for school before I get my whip out,” said her mother.
When the children, grumbling, had gone into their bedrooms, Malone looked at Lisa. “You still cranky?”
“Do
you blame me? Well, not cranky. But yes, I’m—I’m on edge. Are you any closer to finding out who dumped that man in our pool?”
“No.” He had had a restless night, hearing there in the darkness the flat threatening voice. He had called Lisa last night with the intention of telling her not to bring the children home, but as soon as she had spoken, before he had had time to ask how she was, she had told him she was coming home and there was to be no argument. Her voice had had the same flat adamancy as the stranger’s: it had had the added adamancy of a wife’s voice.
“There’s still a police car parked outside. Do we have to have that?”
He spread some marmalade on a slice of cold toast; he could have been eating chopped grass spread on cardboard, for all the taste he had in his mouth. Then, forcing the words out of his mouth, he told her about the phone call and the threat. “It’s either police protection or you go back to your parents.”
She took her time about replying. “I’m not going to be driven out of my own home.”
“What about the kids?”
“Darling—” She sat down opposite him, leaned forward. Normally she was one of the coolest, calmest women he had ever met, but when she became intense, there was a passion in her that, he had learned from experience, had to be handled carefully. He was no ladies’ man, but he was a sensible husband, which is more difficult. “Darling, the kids are my home. You and them—not the house. That’s just the shell. When I married you I wasn’t marrying a pig in a poke—”
“Just a pig in plainclothes.” He could have bitten his tongue. Jokes, especially feeble ones, should never be fired on a battlefield as dangerous as a domestic.
“Don’t joke!” She slammed the table with her fist.
He reached across and put his hand on her wrist; he could feel the tension quivering in her. “I’m sorry, darl. That slipped out—I’m as on edge as you are—”
She turned her arm, unclenched her fist and took his hand in hers, “I know. What I was trying to say was, I knew what I was getting into when I married you. I’ve worried myself sick a dozen times since then, wondering if you were all right. All I’ve had to hang on to, my rock, if you like, has been this—She waved her free hand about her, but without taking her gaze from his face. “This house, the children. I can’t explain it, maybe only a woman would understand—”