by Jon Cleary
“What’ve you got?” The senior Customs man was named Radelli; tall, thin and prematurely grey, he had the watchful eye of a well-trained guard dog. Malone, meeting him, had wondered if he did his own sniffing. “That it?”
One of the divers flicked on a narrow-beam flashlight and held up a slim metal container, painted yellow and attached to two long magnets. “We brought up only one—there are another five still down there. We’ve covered the whole of the hull below the waterline. There’s nothing else. But this’d be enough.”
Radelli took the container. It had a screw-on top, like the lid of a Thermos flask; waterproof tape was wrapped round the join. He opened it, tipped it up and six plastic bags filled with white powder slid out. He pierced one of the bags with a penknife, tasted the powder and nodded. “Cocaine.”
“Don’t they know there’s a recession on?” said Dibble. “That’s yuppie stuff. What’re you gunna do, Luke?”
Radelli carefully rewound the binding tape, handed the container back to the head diver, who snapped off his flashlight. “Put it back. We’ll post a watch for the next twenty-four hours—the ship is due to go out on Thursday morning’s tide. If they don’t come for it before then, then we’ll know they’re on to us.”
He looked up at the side of the ship towering above them like a steel wave about to break. “Someone on board could have been keeping an eye on this end, knowing where the stuff was. Chances are one of the crew is part of the set-up.”
“We’ve been pretty invisible,” said the head diver.
“We’ll try and stay that way. Back off over to the CSR wharf. You guys be prepared for twenty-four-hour stand-by.”
“Shit!” said the diver in the water.
“Not in your wet-suit,” said Radelli and for the first time all night smiled, a pale rip in his face.
Dibble eased the launch away from beneath the ship, took it back to the wharf steps. Once up on the wharf again he looked at Malone. “You gunna join ’em in the stake-out?”
“You’re welcome,” said Radelli, making it sound like a get lost dismissal.
“You’re looking for smugglers, I’m looking for a murderer.” Malone felt let down. Against reason, he had hoped that Schultz would have bobbed up out of the water, ready to confess everything as soon as he was nabbed. He had suffered from the lack of enthusiasm that infects any professional who has to work in someone else’s show; Radelli’s indifference to his presence had only increased his own desire to get home as quickly as possible. “You have first choice, since he’s in your territory.” If Radelli caught the mild sarcasm, he didn’t show it. “If you grab anyone, let me know and I’ll be in to see him. The Feds will hold him, I take it?”
Radelli and the other senior Customs man left; Dibble accompanied Malone across to his car parked behind the Customs office. “Thanks for showing me that diving mask, putting me on to this. It’ll look good when the report goes in.”
“I’m glad someone will look good.” Then Malone heard the sourness in his own voice. “Sorry, Bill. I’m cranky from the heat, it’s been a long hot day. And I’m not getting anywhere. I’m pretty sure I know who killed Jimmy Maddux, but why? Did Maddux find out about the stuff being stuck to the bottom of that ship?”
“Who do you suspect? Never mind, don’t tell me, I don’t wanna know. I got enough headaches, without that sorta information. Maybe Jimmy Maddux saw whoever it was swimming around at the stern of the ship? He could’ve made the mistake of letting the guy see him.”
“There’s the matter of the diving mask being in Maddux’s locker—how would he have got that off the swimmer?” Then he stopped, his lethargic mind suddenly slipping into another gear. “Unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless Jimmy Maddux wasn’t as afraid of the water as everyone thought? I wonder if he was the contact man for whoever is bringing the stuff in. but someone, someone from another mob, got to him first?”
II
“Who suggested you come here?” said Janis Eden.
“I—I just heard about it,” said Ava Redgrave. “Everybody on the street knows about this place.”
Janis sat back in her chair, her head brushing against the wall behind her. This cubicle she called her office was designed for one-on-one counselling; another person in the so-called room would have made a truism of three is a crowd. The new State government spent more words than money on drug and alcohol rehabilitation; it believed in “self-help” as a slogan, even though too many of the country’s entrepreneurs had given a new meaning to the term. Janis, a true conservative, had voted for the new government, but she wished it had increased the budget enough to provide decent accommodation at least for herself. She did not care much for her fellow counsellors, most of whom were lefties and suffered from dedication.
“What’s your problem?” But the rolled-down sleeves had already told her what the problem was. “I—well, it’s smack. Heroin.”
“What’s your name?”
“Ava Redgrave.”
She had a good counsellor’s talent for not showing reaction till it was needed; but mentally she rolled her eyeballs at the name. At least it was better than yesterday’s visitor, Jesus Christ Smith. “How long have you been on it?”
“Two years, almost.”
“What do you do, Ava?”
“I—I’m a receptionist.”
Janis sighed. “Ava, if you and I are going to get anywhere, we’ll have to at least show some of the truth. Otherwise you’re wasting my time and yours.”
Ava was sitting straight up in her chair, knees together, hands folded in her lap. Janis wondered if she had been convent-educated, it was the way some schools still taught their girls to sit, as if keeping one’s knees together locked in the libido. Ava looked down at her hands, then she seemed to relax, her shoulders drooping, her knees slipping apart. “Okay, I’m on the street. It’s the only way I’ve been able to pay for my habit.”
Another one, thought Janis: the market out there was unlimited. She sneezed; she hoped a summer cold wasn’t coming on, and took a handkerchief from her pocket. She never brought a handbag with her to a counselling; no matter how much you trusted the client, you never put temptation in their way; it was a standard rule. Twice in her first month as a counsellor she had been relieved of her wallet.
“Do you work for yourself or for someone? I mean, a pimp?”
“I—I work for a guy. He gives me the stuff at cost price.”
No dealer, not even a pimp, was ever that generous. “Do you want to give me his name?”
Ava frowned. “Are you supposed to ask that?”
There were no definite rules on such a question, but most counsellors, as a matter of ethics, did not ask it. With Janis, ethics were like ticks: she kept her head free of them. “No-o. But the dealers are as much a part of our problem as they are for you. If you want to tell me, I promise it will go no further.”
Ava hesitated, then said, “His name’s Leroy Lugos. Do you know him?”
She had come to know the names of most of the dealers here in the King’s Cross area; but she had not heard of Leroy Lugos. “Where does he get the stuff?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never asked. But he’s always got it.”
That meant he was not a part-time dealer, that he had a major source somewhere. “Okay, let’s forget him for the moment. Why do you want to give it up? The heroin, I mean. The determination is yours, we can only support you in it.”
Ava was silent. She looked up and about her, everywhere but at Janis. The tiny room was painted pale pink and held two medium-sized prints, both of them restful landscapes; there were no anti-drug posters, no strident threats or warnings to those who came into this room seeking help. It was doubtful if Ava saw her surroundings at all; she was looking for courage but found none. She looked back at Janis.
“I’m scared, really shit scared. The woman where I live, she was on the game, but not on the street like me, she was murdered on Sunday night. Som
e kinky client killed her with a needle.”
“An overdose?”
“No, it was some poison, one of the cops told me. It killed her almost immediately, he said. They warned us he might come back, do the same to me and my girlfriend. I—I just decided it—it wasn’t worth risking being—murdered. It happens, y’know, I mean to us sometimes. The guys we pick up, most of the time we’ve never seen ’em before.”
“I know,” said Janis, sounding sympathetic, hiding her sudden concern. Had this woman, whoever she was, died the same way as the man Grime? The coincidence chilled her, but Ava would never know that the well-groomed girl opposite her was disturbed. Janis had learned to act, for the best counsellors are good actors, otherwise their audience would never sit still for them. Counsellors have problems of their own; the act is to hide them. “Where do you come from originally?”
“The country. Wagga.”
“Your parents alive?”
“Yes. They don’t know where I am, I think they’ve given up on me.”
“Do you want to go home?”
Ava looked down at her hands again. “Yes, I think so. At least I’d be safe there.”
What from, the murderer’s needle or your own? But Janis did not believe in being cruel to be kind; she had no conscience, but she wasn’t malicious. “The first thing is, well get you introduced into our programme. You’ll see someone downstairs in the clinic, they’ll probably advise methadone—”
“If—when I come again, will I see you or someone else? I—I feel I can trust you.”
“I work here at the Cross only two days a week. I do another day at St. Sebastian’s, with patients there who have your problem. If you come here and I’m not here, they can get me on my beeper and you can come over to the hospital and see me there, okay?” She stopped and looked hard at the girl. “It’s not going to be easy, Ava.”
“I—I know that. But I want to try—” She suddenly shut her eyes, looked as if she wanted to weep. Somewhere in another cubicle someone started to cry. But tears and self-pity were part of the atmosphere in this building.
Then the phone rang. Janis picked it up, recognized the voice at once. “You’re not supposed to ring me here . . .”
“I know that, for Crissake,” said Snow White. “But I thought you’d wanna hear the bad news. We lost the stuff, the whole fucking lot. It’s still there in place, but we got Buckley’s chance of picking it up. They’re watching it. I just thought you’d like to know, you’re so fucking smart.”
“Thank you, Mr. Black,” she said and hung up in his ear. Then she looked across at Ava, who was wiping her eyes. “As I said, Ava, it’s not going to be easy.”
III
That morning, Wednesday, Malone went over to Balmain to see Jimmy Maddux’s widow. He didn’t take Clements: two big cops crowding into her home would be amongst the last things a grieving woman would wish for. A young uniformed officer drove him in a marked car; Malone would have preferred an unmarked one, but he had no choice. Balmain, as he remembered it, had never been an area to welcome mug coppers.
The tiny suburb occupied a peninsula on the south side of the upper harbour. Its narrow streets seemed to meet each other accidentally. On top of the ridge were a few large houses, built by ships’ masters and shipbuilders in the middle of the last century, most of them now occupied by academics and architects and one or two successful writers and artists. Down the slopes were the narrow houses of those who had given Balmain its character over the years: a motley mixture of immigrants, a village that saluted the flag of the Balmain Tigers, the local rugby league team, before it would think of singing the national anthem. Fair Australia advanced only when the Tigers won the premiership.
The Madduxes lived in one of the narrowest houses in one of the narrowest streets. Malone got out of the police car, saw the curtains flick back at windows like the sidelong glances of a dozen eyes, and said to the driver, “Come back for me in twenty minutes. I don’t want them throwing stones at you.”
The young cop grinned. “It’s okay, sir, they know me. I play for the Tigers’ seconds. Reserve grade.”
“You mean they let cops play for the Tigers?”
“We get a dispensation, a sort of annulment for the weekend. It’s like the Catholic Church—so long as we confess our sins on training nights, they pick us for the weekend games.”
He drove away and Malone shook his head at the improving intelligence amongst young cops and especially amongst the Tigers. He went in through the rickety wooden gate and in two strides had reached the peeling front door. Jimmy Maddux, it seemed, had not been a home handyman.
The door was opened by a young woman only a kilo or two ahead of a weight problem. She was not pretty, but there was a suggestion of liveliness about her round face that, before yesterday, might have made her attractive. Now her face was slack, her eyes red-rimmed, her hair uncombed. She had that blank look of shock that Malone had seen before on the faces of young women, those who had not expected to be made widows so early. Behind her, in the small narrow house, there was a subdued babble of voices. This, of course, was a village: he should have known that everyone would have rallied round the grieving Molly Maddux.
He introduced himself, “I’m sorry to intrude, Mrs. Maddux, but I have to ask a few questions—”
“Why?” Her voice was a flat whine.
The door was pulled wider and another young woman, slimmer, more in control of herself in every way, stood there, her arm going round Molly Maddux’s shoulders. “Look, come back some other time. For God’s sake, she’s just lost her husband! Where are your bloody feelings, for God’s sake?”
He kept his tone as gentle as he could; in circumstances like these it was always the outsiders, the family comforters, who were aggressive, who got up his nose. “I don’t want to upset Mrs. Maddux any more than she is. But her husband was murdered—”
“Murdered?” The round plump face seemed to flatten like dough flung against a wall.
“Didn’t you know?”
“Roley Bremner said it was an accident—”
He had told Bremner not to mention the word murder, but since then the media had exposed the accident for what it truly was.
“No, love, it was murder.” The other young woman pressed Molly Maddux’s shoulders. “It was on the news last night and it’s in the papers this morning. But we kept it from you . . .” She looked at Malone. “I’m her sister. She’s taking Jimmy’s death hard enough as it is . . . We’re keeping it from the kids, too. They’re only seven and eight, the eldest, and the twins, they’re three. The older ones’d understand murder is different.”
If they don’t understand, the kids at school will tell them. He often wondered why people tried to protect children from tragic news; inevitably, eventually, they learned it from the wrong sources. “Look, I know this is a bad time, but there’s never a good time for this sort of thing—”
“You’re not gunna go away, are you?” said the sister.
He sighed; the sun was hot on his back, baking him, but it was not the real cause of his discomfort. “No, I’m afraid not. Let’s get it over with.”
The two sisters looked at each other, then Molly Maddux nodded and stepped back from the doorway into the narrow hall. “Come into the bedroom, there’s too many people out the back.”
“The family and neighbours,” her sister explained. “I’ll come in with you. I don’t think she oughta be left alone with you. Nothing personal.”
Malone smiled, but said nothing. He followed the sisters into the front bedroom, a room bursting under the pressure of the double bed, the wardrobe and the dressing-table; a small cheap print of Hans Heysen’s gumtrees hung above the bed, like a tiny window on a larger, uncluttered world. Malone himself had been born in a room like this, though the house in Erskineville, another working-class inner suburb, had been slightly larger than this. But the atmosphere was the same, a hundred years or more of battlers’ hopes that had gone mouldy, never able to escape th
rough the front door to realization. Malone himself had escaped, but Molly Maddux’s fate was written in her dulled eyes. He wondered if the dreams had died only yesterday.
The sisters sat down on the chenille-covered bed and Malone leaned against the wardrobe. It was like conducting an interview, he thought, in a phone booth. “Did your husband ever talk to you about enemies?”
“Enemies? Jimmy?” She shook her head. The whine had gone out of her voice, it was softer, almost a whisper: she had just suffered a second shock, one more devastating than the first. It could happen, Malone knew: most people are prepared, even if only subconsciously, for death; but not for murder. “He got into fights occasionally—he had a pretty touchy temper. But enemies? No, no.”
“Did he talk to you about this election that’s coming up? The union election?”
She was silent for a long moment; she seemed to be having trouble putting her thoughts together. “The union election? Yeah, once or twice, but he never said much about what went on at work. Not lately.”
“Not lately? Why was that?”
Molly Maddux hesitated, looked sideways at her sister, then up at Malone. “We ain’t been getting on too well lately. We used to argue, have fights.”
The sister also looked up at Malone. “Is this necessary? You don’t have to pry, do you, I mean into personal stuff, do you?”
Malone slipped off his jacket; the room was stifling. He wanted to loosen his tie, but restrained himself. Not out of any dress code, but because he felt, somehow, that it would be an insulting comment on how some other people had to live, in these cramped, stuffy hot-boxes. “Look—what’s your name?”
“Sheryl. Sheryl Longman.”
“Sheryl, prying into other people’s business doesn’t make me jump up and down with joy. I hate it, if you want the truth. But yes, it is necessary. We have to find out who killed Jimmy—whoever it was, he isn’t going to come forward and confess it.” He looked back at Molly Maddux. “Why were you having fights, Molly? Did you or he have something on your minds, something that got you short-tempered with each other? You said Jimmy had a pretty touchy temper.”