Dark Summer

by Jon Cleary

  Tuesday flashed him a look of hatred; the temporary harmony was gone, it was you and us again. “You really are shits, ain’t you?”

  “I guess so,” said Clements, looking unoffended; he had heard it so many times before. “But so’s Leroy. Now where can we find him?”

  Tuesday looked at Ava, who said, “You better tell ’em, honey, otherwise they’ll never get off our backs.”

  Tuesday hesitated, then she gave Clements an address in Bondi, ten minutes’ drive away. “His name’s Leroy Lugos. But don’t tell him who gave you the address.”

  Malone stood up. “If any feller comes here asking for Mrs. Kissen, don’t let him in. Try and remember what he looks like, then phone us. Here’s my card.”

  “If he murdered Sally,” said Ava, “why would he come back?”

  “To do the same to you,” said Malone and picked up the last Iced Vo-Vo from the plate on the brass coffee table. “Mind if I have this? They’re my favourite bickie.”

  “Shove it up your arse,” said Tuesday.

  There was a crude retort to that, but Malone let it go. He alternated between anger and pity for girls like these two; he had decided there was nothing to be done for them. They supplied a commodity that had been in demand since Adam got the first erection. Most cops no longer took any notice of the soliciting laws and left the girls alone; the few who had hang-ups about commercial sex, the poofter-bashers, now got their work-out grabbing homosexuals in public toilets.

  The two detectives drove out to Bondi Beach. Clements parked the car and they got out, turning their faces to the nor’easter that had suddenly sprung up and was coming in across the sea. They left their jackets in the car and walked across to the promenade. Malone had put on his hat, a grey-green pork-pie that, if elderly crims had walked by, or even his father, would have identified him as a plainclothes man of the late 1940s; the Ds of those days had all worn pork-pie hats, like a uniform. But Malone had just been born then, didn’t know what even a uniformed cop was.

  Far out sea and sky seemed to merge; the horizon was just a faint pencil-mark. The surf was rising, shark-toothed waves rolling in. Though it was Tuesday, a supposed working day and the annual summer holidays over, the long white beach was crowded. The recession had been creeping, like salt erosion, over the country since the middle of last year; lately, its bite had increased and thousands more had been thrown out of work. In the good times that had lasted for so long, the Bumper Years, as sentimental economists, a contradiction in terms, were now calling them, the beaches had been populated only by waiters, night-shift workers and the dole-bludgers who worked harder at polishing their surf-board technique than they did at looking for a job. Today, Malone guessed, more than half the beach’s population would be on the dole, though not as bludgers. They lay on the hot sand being eaten into my melanoma and hopelessness. There were two generations of voters who had to learn that “tighten your belt” was not something you did after a course of aerobics.

  “The Lucky Country,” said Clements sourly. “You reckon any of them are thinking about the Gulf war?”

  “Are you?” He had looked at the headlines this morning, but had already forgotten them. “Let’s go and talk to Lee-roy.”

  The address they had been given was a coffee lounge and café across from the promenade, the Larissa. It was clean and attractive and cool inside; and popular, too, judging by the number of customers at the tables. Malone and Clements walked down to the rear of the long marble serving counter and told the girl who came to take their order that they would like to talk to the owner. She went back up the counter to the man on the cash register, who frowned, then came down to the two detectives.

  “We’re looking for Leroy Lugos,” said Malone.

  “You police? Ah.” He was middle-aged, fleshily handsome; he might have been on his way to being a Greek god when young, but indulgence had got in the way. There was just a trace of accent in his thick voice, but otherwise he was all-Aussie: he was suspicious of police. Or maybe he had been suspicious of police back in Athens or Larissa or wherever. “I ain’t seen him today. He could be over on the beach.”

  “He could be,” Clements agreed. “Would you like to close up the shop for ten minutes and come over to the beach and pick him out for us?”

  “You wouldn’t expect me to do that! Close up the place?”

  “I think he would,” said Malone. “He’s a real bastard on hot days.”

  The café owner looked at them; then he sighed and nodded. “That’s him in the back booth. The one in the blue T-shirt.”

  “Thanks,” said Malone. “Could we have two iced coffees down there?”

  “On the house?”

  “Why not? We’re both corrupt.”

  They moved down to the back booth, where Leroy Lugos sat with two youths both younger than he. Clements told them he and Inspector Malone would like to talk to Mr. Lugos alone and, after a worried glance at Lugos, they got up and moved up to the front of the café. The two detectives slid into the booth opposite Lugos.

  “What’s this about?” It was a polite question, no belligerence.

  “You’re Leroy Lugos. Lee-roy—that your real name?” Clements had taken out his notebook.

  “Leroy is an American name,” said Malone. “You don’t hear it much out here. Your mother or father American?”

  “No, I chose it myself.” He was still polite, if strained.

  “You didn’t like the name your parents chose?” This was fencing stuff, but Malone was prepared to take his time.

  “Ulysses? Would you like it?”

  Malone grinned and shook his head; and Clements said, “Did you choose Lugos, too? It wouldn’t have been Lugopolous, would it? I saw it over the door when we came in.”

  Lugos hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. Ulysses Lugopolous. Who’d believe it and how far would I get with it, a wog moniker like that? Are you sympathetic to wogs?”

  “All the time,” said Malone.

  He wondered if Lugos really was Tuesday’s boyfriend besides being her pimp; he seemed too intelligent, too particular. He was in his early twenties, good-looking, black hair expensively cut, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans that would have cost more than Malone’s polyester suit. He had an amiable look to his thin, handsome face; but it was a mask, there was a sharpness behind the easy smile and the amused eyes. He would never be a Greek god, there was no money to be made on Mount Olympus.

  “You know Mrs. Kissen is dead?”

  “Who’s she?”

  Malone patiently told him. “You mean your girlfriend Tuesday didn’t ring you to tell you what happened? You didn’t see her last night and she told you then?”

  Lugos sipped on a Coke, waiting while the two detectives took their iced coffees from the girl who brought them. One hand went to the gold chain and cross round his neck; one wrist wore a thick gold bracelet and the other a gold-banded watch. Malone wondered if he ran not just Ava and Tuesday but a stable of girls.

  “Yeah,” he said at last, “she told me.”

  “It doesn’t upset you?”

  “Why should it?” He was less polite now. “I hardly knew her.”

  “The same thing could happen to one of your girls.”

  Before he spoke Clements had made a sucking noise through his drinking-straw, an angry gasp. Malone recognized the symptoms: the big man was ready to get rough with Lugos. Malone leaned back, glanced under the table: Lugos wore Reeboks with no socks. Malone was willing to bet that, when they stood up, Clements would tread on one of the Reeboks, accidentally of course, and Lugos would suffer a badly bruised instep or even a broken toe. Clements, who had played rugby when he was a youth, knew the use of a heavy boot in a ruck.

  “What do you do for a living?” Malone asked.

  “I’m unemployed. Isn’t everyone?” He was becoming cheeky now. “There’s a recession on, but I don’t suppose you cops notice the difference. You’re never made redundant, right?”

  “It’s part of the perks,”
said Malone coolly, while beside him he could feel Clements shifting like a water buffalo getting ready to charge. “So you’re on the dole?”

  “No, I’m living on capital. I’m independent, I don’t believe in the welfare state.”

  “Does Tuesday contribute towards your independence?”

  Lugos finished his Coke, pushed the glass away from him and sat back. Above his head was a poster inviting you to the Greek isles; they belonged to the past, which is becoming increasingly like everyone’s idea of heaven. But Lugos didn’t belong there, he belonged here in Sydney, in the present of the quick buck for sex and anything else that could be traded. Malone decided that he would check as soon as they got back to Homicide on whether Lugos had a record. Whether he had one or not, he was not an honest citizen, independent or otherwise.

  “Look, what’s the point of all this? Are you trying to pick me up for pimping? No way, mate. I’m just a friend of Tuesday’s and that’s all.”

  “Were you a friend of Mrs. Kissen’s?” said Clements, voice thick with iced coffee and suppressed anger. “You offer her protection or anything?”

  Lugos succeeded in looking bored; he ran the hand with the gold manacle over his thick hair. “Look, you’re wasting your time. I know nothing and I got nothing to hide. Now excuse me, I gotta go.”

  “Just another question or two,” said Malone. “Do you supply Tuesday and Ava with heroin?”

  Lugos looked at him with feigned amusement; but his acting wasn’t quite good enough. “You don’t expect me to answer that, do you?”

  “You just have.”

  The feigned amusement turned to real anger; abruptly he said, “Get stuffed!”

  He slid out of the booth, but he was a little slow; Clements stood on his instep as he, too, got up. “Geez, I’m sorry. My feet are always getting me into trouble.”

  Lugos winced and his face darkened; he kept his temper, but only just. “What’s next? Your fist gunna slip into my face?”

  “We’re subtler than that,” said Malone. “We’d like your home address.”

  “You can always find me here. That’s my uncle, the owner.”

  “Some time, we might like to see you in private. If we had to arrest you, you wouldn’t want us to do it in public, would you?”

  “Arrest me? What for?” Lugos’ voice cracked.

  “Murder. How’d you like that one?” It was bluff, but that is not a legal offence.

  “You’re fucking crazy!” Then Lugos became aware that the crowded café was an interested audience. In the next booth were four rock musicians; they turned their dark glasses towards Lugos and the two detectives, like four fake blind men who’d heard coins rolling down the aisle. Lugos dropped his voice and gave an address, a block of flats at the southern end of the beach. “I tell you, you’re picking on me because I’m a wog, right? You’re all the fucking same—”

  “Try your luck with the Discrimination Board,” said Malone. “Here’s my card.”

  Lugos snatched the card, turned abruptly and went limping up through the café and out into the bright glare of the street. Clements looked at the black stare of the four pairs of dark glasses.

  “Who’s your lead singer? A seeing-eye dog?”

  He was in a mood to wreck the place. He followed Malone out of the café in time to see Lugos get into a bright red Porsche and screech away from the kerb.

  “You think he might drive off a cliff?” said Clements hopefully.

  3

  I

  THE KELLER flat was the upper half of a two-storeyed Edwardian house in Glebe. The area had once been called The Glebe: a year after the establishment of the colony of Sydney four hundred acres of harbourside land had been granted to a clergyman as part of his benefice. Now it was mostly populated by academics and students from the nearby university, a godless lot; long neglected and run-down, it had over the past twenty years become gentrified. Its narrow main street was lined with tiny art galleries, bookshops, health stores and cafés where it was possible to order everything but a good old Aussie pie or sausage roll. The locals sat in the cafés and discussed the latest Almodovar or Bertolucci film, then donned dark glasses and turned up their coat collars and drove out to the suburbs to see fluff like Pretty Woman. It took courage, or to have been born there, to be a low-brow in Glebe.

  The Kellers’ street was pleasant and tree-lined. The house was decorated with ornate brickwork and iron lace; a jacaranda stood to one side, a green carport for Romy’s Toyota. The front lawn was neatly trimmed and hydrangeas were a purple wave breaking against the base of the house.

  “I look after the garden,” said Peter Keller. “The owner thinks grass cuts itself. Knows nothing of Nature, doesn’t care.”

  “He teaches history at Sydney,” said Romy from the kitchen doorway.

  “An associate professor of Australian history,” said Keller. “A joke. How much history has Australia had?”

  “More than enough for me,” said Clements, wondering if the older man had a sense of humour but doubting it. “I never got better than fifty per cent in exams in history.”

  “I wanted to go to university to study history, but I never had the opportunity.” Keller’s English was good but stilted; which was surprising, since he had told Clements he had first learned it from US Occupation troops in Germany after World War Two. He never used any of the slang, no matter how dated, that Clements had expected. “I was very happy when Romy went to university. Even though it was here in Sydney.” He made it sound as if she had studied in Addis Ababa.

  Clements, a generous man, had brought lobster and king prawns and Romy was preparing them and a salad while he and her father sat in the high-ceilinged living room and drank German pilsner. The walls were decorated with steel engravings of nineteenth-century villages and landscapes, with operatic clouds boiling up in the grey skies and giving the impression that if a gramophone needle were applied to the scratchings, a Wagnerian piece would boom out. The furniture was heavy and dark and seemed to be sprouting wooden grapes at every corner. There was no wall-to-wall carpet, but a huge thick rug was laid on polished floorboards, a rug decorated with a lush pastoral scene; Clements’ heel rested in the ample navel of a dryad. The Kellers had brought all their furniture with them when they had emigrated to Australia ten years ago and it seemed that Romy had had no opportunity to add any decorative notes of her own. Unless she, too, was homesick for Bavaria.

  “It was Romy’s mother’s idea we should come to Australia. She was Austrian, not German, from the Tyrol. She wanted sunshine all the time. She went once to Spain for a holiday and fell in love with sunshine. She read about Australia, sunshine all the time, so we came. She died two years after we got here. Heat stroke.” He said it without irony or bitterness. Clements didn’t know how to respond, so sat silent. “I wanted to go back to Germany, but Romy was at university, she insisted we stay. I was cursed with strong-willed women.”

  “Aren’t we all?” said Clements, who had managed to avoid them all his life but felt he had to say something.

  Keller didn’t smile: Clements could only imagine that Romy had inherited her sense of humour from her mother. “Do you like women?”

  “Yes.” Clements saw, through the kitchen doorway, that Romy had paused to listen to his answer. Then she smiled and went back to slicing a red pepper into the salad.

  “What do you feel when you have to arrest a woman for a crime?”

  Out of the corner of his eye Clements saw that Romy had paused again; he took his time before saying, “I don’t enjoy it. How did you feel?”

  Keller, too, took his time, “I once arrested a woman who killed her three children. I did not sleep for three nights.” He abruptly stood up. “I think it is time to eat.”

  The dining table was at the end of the big living room. Keller opened a bottle of German Riesling, which Clements found too sweet for his taste but at which he smacked his lips and nodded in approval. “Romy tells me you are working together on two murders
?”

  “Father, do we have to talk shop at dinner?”

  “Do you mind talking shop, Sergeant?”

  “Not so long as we don’t go into details,” said Clements, mouth full of lobster, memory full of dead humans. “And call me Russ, I’m off-duty.”

  “I grew up talking shop, as you call it. I was ten years old when the war, our war, ended. Too young to be in the Hitler Youth, thank God.” It came out as Gott, as if his tongue had slipped back all those years. His voice had a defensive note to it, but Clements wasn’t sure if he had picked it correctly; Keller had his head bent over his plate, “I ran messages for the Americans. I was born in Garmisch- Partenkirchen and we were in the American Occupation zone.”

  He had told all this to Clements before; but those years were a blank in history’s pages for the Australian. He had been born in the Dark Ages, the late 1940s, and nobody he knew, not even his parents in the country, ever seemed to talk about those years.

  “I ran messages mostly for an MP, a military policeman. He came from Chicago, he had been a police sergeant before the war. He knew all the gangsters, Al Capone, all of them. I wanted to be a policeman from the day I met Sergeant Lemke. But I never met any gangsters.” He looked up and smiled, the first time he had smiled all evening. “Just ordinary people.”

  Clements wondered how ordinary the woman had been who had murdered her three children.

  “Who do you think committed the murders you are investigating? Ordinary people or gangsters?”

  Clements drank some of the too-fruity wine. “I dunno. I don’t think it was an ordinary person.”

  “The lab has established it was alcuronium chloride,” said Romy. “I was going to tell you officially tomorrow.”

  “What’s that?” said her father.

  “An artificial derivative of curare.”

  “Very clever. Or are you looking for an Amazonian Indian who has emigrated to Australia?” Keller smiled again. “You see? I know where it comes from. They use a blowpipe to shoot darts—” He pursed his lips and blew out. “I saw it in a movie. We learn so much about killing from movies and television. Sometimes I think film directors are frustrated murderers.”