by Jon Cleary
“What’s your plan?”
“We’ve gone through all the manifests, come up with the consignments that look suspicious. We’ll get the sniffer dogs on to them.”
“There’s just one problem. Our two chief suspects in that murder both work on the wharves—”
“I know that—you told me. They’ll probably cotton on to us, but we have to take that risk. If the stuff was packed in a car, we could take the car away on the pretext of steam-cleaning it for plant health reasons. But the ship’s come out of Antofagasta in Chile and the cargo is a pretty mixed bag. But no cars.”
“Righto, I’ll check where my two suspects are working. I’ll let you know. Where can I get you?” Radelli gave him a number. “I’ll be back to you.”
He hung up, then called the Wharf Labourers Union. Roley Bremner came on the line, sounding short-tempered and aggressive, as if he was expecting the call to be from some media reporter, the bane of union secretaries: “Yeah, what is it? Oh, it’s you, Scobie!” His tone softened, something he seemed to recognize: “Geez, mates with a copper! That’ll lose me votes if ever it gets out. What’s on your mind, mate?”
“First, have you seen Jimmy Maddux’s wife again? How’s she getting on?”
“Yeah, I seen her this morning. So-so. She had a good word to say for you, but. Evidently you treated her pretty kind. Thanks, mate. She told me about Jimmy. What a bastard! And I never knew. Just goes to show . . .” Then his voice dropped almost to a whisper: “Still, he didn’t need to be done in like that. I hope you gunna tell me you’re about to pinch the bugger who did it, are you?”
“Afraid not, Roley, not yet. But we’re close. Can you tell me where Snow White and The Dwarf are working right now?”
“Sure, just a minute.” He was gone for half a minute; then: “They’re both rostered on Number 8, Darling Harbour. Snow White bundied on there this morning. The Dwarf comes on this arvo for the three-till-ten shift. They’re working on a ship called the Golden Horn, in from somewhere in South America, I dunno where, but I can find out. You on to something?”
“No, Roley. Just keeping tabs on them. How’s the election campaign coming along?”
“They tell me I’m holding me own. I dunno. Maybe, maybe not. You could do me a favour and lock up the competition. Like this bloke Saddam. He’s got the right idea. Maybe if I get elected, I’ll be a dictator.”
“It’s fashionable. Good luck, Roley.”
He hung up, called back Radelli, told him where White and Schultz were working. “It’s their mob, all right, that’s expecting the shipment. They’ll spot your undercover men, if they’re strangers.”
“Bugger! Okay, we won’t put them in. That makes it bloody difficult.”
Malone suddenly had an idea: “Luke—” Radelli had thawed enough to be called by his first name. “I think my mate at the WLU might be able to help. Let me try my luck.”
He hung up, once more called Roley Bremner: “Roley, how could you get Snow White off the wharves for, say, an hour, maybe an hour and a half?”
“What’s going on, mate?”
“I can’t tell you right now, Roley, but I want him out of the way for at least an hour. Now. Can you manage it?”
“Geez, I dunno. Let me have a think. I’ll be back to you.”
Malone hung up, sat back in his chair and gazed at the phone.
How did the world work before the telephone was invented? Sometimes it was to be cursed for its interruptions, for the bad news it brought; its drawback was that it couldn’t be shot, as messengers were in simpler, more pragmatic days. Still, on balance, the telephone and its offspring, the fax, had probably contributed to progress. It had, at least, speeded up conspiracy.
His bladder was bursting by the time Roley Bremner rang back. “I just been on to one of me mates out at Port Botany. He’s the delegate there and he’s working for me in the election. He’s gunna do me a favour. He’s calling a stop-work meeting for an hour—it goes from one-thirty to knock-off time for the shift, at two-thirty. I’m going out there to address the meeting. I’ll see Snow White gets the message it’s on. He’ll be over at Port Botany soon’s he hears about it. He’s not gunna let me address a meeting without him being there, not so close to the election.”
“That’s a lucky coincidence, isn’t it, the stop-work meeting being on right when we need it?”
Bremner made a noise somewhere between a scoff and a cough. “Mate, you asked for it, you got it. I haven’t a clue what the stop-work is about, but me mate said no worries, he’ll pull the blokes off at one-thirty. You better hurry.”
“That’s rough on the stevedoring company, isn’t it?”
“Tough titty. You work on the wharves, mate, you never worry about the bosses. You ask your dad.”
“I wouldn’t be game. Thanks, Roley.”
He hung up, glad that he had managed to escape the us-and-them mentality, the workers and the bosses, that his father had tried to drum into him from the moment he had left school. He called Radelli: “If you move quickly, my suspect, a bloke named Dallas White, will be off the wharf between one- thirty and two-thirty. He’ll be out at Port Botany at a stop-work meeting.”
“Jesus, what’s this one about?” Radelli, despite the fact that he was a Customs man, or perhaps because of it, had the usual prejudices about the WLU. “They’re always bloody going out.”
“Micro-economic reform.” That was the government’s present catch-cry, though the voters at large, dead to jargon, hadn’t a clue what it meant. “I’m kidding, Luke. Just grab the opportunity and get your men and your dogs down to Darling Harbour. How will you explain yourselves to the other wharfies?”
“We’ll tell ’em it’s a routine search. They take those in their stride, so long as we don’t bother them. Most of them are dead set against drug smuggling, anyway. They’ve got kids just like the rest of us.”
“I guess so,” said the wharfie’s kid.
He hung up the phone, made it to the toilet just in time, gave himself up to the shivering ecstasy of relieving a full bladder. Then he went back to his office and spent the next hour on paperwork, unwillingly becoming a bureaucrat. Clements came in, said the Bureau of Criminal Intelligence had already contacted Interpol regarding Peter Keller, and went out again without offering any comment. Malone looked up from his papers and gazed after him. He had never seen the big man so stiff and withdrawn. Crumbs, he thought, what have I started? Lisa, if he told her, would nail him to the wall of their bedroom, would argue the merits of love and happiness against crime and punishment. She would always choose her friends’ good against the public good.
At four o’clock Radelli rang. “We’ve found it. It’s cocaine, all right, packed in between the plastic sheets in a consignment of solar panels. The plastic sheets, they’re opaque, so you can’t see the coke, they’re like giant sachets. Very ingenious, except who would import solar panels from Bolivia? It’s amazing how stupid some clever people can be. You want to be there when we make the bust?”
“What’s the drill?”
“We’re going to let ’em collect the cases—the panels are packed in wooden cases. We’ll keep ’em under surveillance, watch where they take the stuff and then we’ll nab them when they open it up.”
“I’ll send one of my sergeants from here, he knows White and Schultz. The Feds will make the arrest, I take it? . . . Righto, my bloke will just be an observer. His name’s Russ Clements.” It would keep Clements occupied, instead of his sitting around worrying about Romy Keller and her father.
He hung up, went out into the main room and sat down in the empty chair opposite Clements. The latter had just made fresh coffee, but he did not offer any to Malone.
“You still cranky on me for what I’m doing about Keller?”
Clements bit his lip, an old habit when he was disturbed. “I’m not shitty on you. It’s just the bloody—well, I dunno, the way things just suddenly go arse-over-tip. Everything’s been sweet between me and Romy. It
’s been a bugger of a summer for most people—the recession, the war, the farmers going broke. But for me it’s been great. And now . . . What if we turn up something on her dad that means we’ve got to bring him in? You think she’s gunna hold my hand and kiss me and tell me she understands? No way is it gunna be like that.”
“Look, I’m not saying any Hail Marys for me to be right about this. If Interpol reports nothing on him, then—”
“Then what?”
Reluctantly he said, “Then we’ll keep an eye on him but not make a big thing of it. We’ll keep it just between you and me and not put it on the computer, just the way we did with some things in the old murder box. In the meantime, to take your mind off him, I want you to go down to the Customs office on Number 8, Darling Harbour—” He outlined what Radelli had told him and what the arrangements were, “It may be a twenty-four-hour job, so get Phil Truach to stand by to take over from you.”
Clements wasn’t looking at him, was staring at his big feet stuck out in front of him. “Do you think Romy suspects anything about her father?”
“Russ, how would I know? You don’t want to sound her out, do you?”
“Christ, no!”
“Righto, then. We play it between you and me till we have something definite on him.”
“What if Interpol clears him? Are we gunna let it go at that?”
Again there was the reluctance: “Not necessarily.”
II
Romy Keller stood back from the cadaver of the six-year-old girl who had been murdered this afternoon by the child’s father. This was the sort of post-mortem that increased her urge to break away from forensic medicine; she could remain relatively objective about the adult victims of murder, but child homicide turned her to anger that sometimes blinded her. She felt that way now, dizzy with emotion that made her stop working, made her unable to touch the bruised and battered body of the child.
“Take over,” she said abruptly to her assistant, taking off her rubber apron.
He was young, this was his first year at the morgue; working on cadavers day after day had proved more traumatic than he had expected. His bony olive-complexioned face had begun to take on the sallow look of the corpses he worked on. “Romy, I don’t know that I can—”
“Do it!” she said and left him, feeling disgust at her unprofessional conduct but unable to deny the urge to get out of the Murder Room before she cracked.
She went down through the long main room, avoiding the eyes of those working there, afraid that one of them might make the comment that would spring the tension in her, and went upstairs to her office. She sat down in the chair behind her desk, closed her eyes and wished all at once for sleep.
It had been a long hard day. She had been called in here at seven this morning and it seemed that bodies had been coming into the morgue in a continuous stream from that hour onwards. It had been one of those days when death, it seemed, had decided to catch up with life. There had been murder victims, including the six-year-old girl; accident victims; men and women who had died of heart or asthma attacks in public places: the waiting line had at one time suggested that there could have been a major disaster in the city. She had worked mechanically but with her usual competence till the body of the little girl had been brought in. Then she had collapsed, inwardly if not outwardly.
She opened her eyes, made herself face the truth. The core of her collapse had nothing to do with the overload of work; it had to do with the phone call she had made at lunch time. She had called Clean Sweep, the contractors her father worked for, to ask where she might find him to tell him she would be late home for supper.
“Is he at the Police Centre?”
“No, Dr. Keller. He’s at St. Sebastian’s Hospital today. He’s been working there three days a week for the past month.”
“Oh. Thank you. I’ll call him there.”
But she hadn’t called him. She had hung up, standing by the phone in the canteen, deaf to the hum of conversation of the other staff as they tucked into their lunch with relish undiminished by their morning’s work. She was beginning to feel tired even then in the middle of the day, but she was not so tired that she did not at once catch the import of what the woman at Clean Sweep had told her. Her father had had access for a month to a supply of alcuronium chloride, Alloferin.
“Oh Father!” She had leaned her head against the wall beside the phone, oblivious for the moment of the sudden stares of those seated at the tables near her.
A young woman, an assistant pathologist, got up and came to her. “Are you all right, Romy?”
Romy straightened up. “Yes, I’m all right, Ginny.” She hated too much attention; she had experienced enough of that ten years ago in Starnheim. “I felt a little dizzy—I’ve been on my feet too long—”
“Take it easy,” said Ginny, a pretty girl who always looked half-asleep even when wide awake. “Where are the corpses going to go, anyway? They’re in no hurry.”
Romy dug up a smile, “I sometimes forget that. Thanks, Ginny. No, I’ll be okay. I’ll do as you say, take it easy.”
But she had not been able to take it easy. All the disgrace, the whispers behind the hand, the effect on her mother, all of it had come flooding back. All afternoon she had worked with the knife on the cadavers, wishing she could work with it on herself to cut out those memories.
She looked up now as Bob Gimbel, the Director, appeared in the doorway of her office. “You okay, Romy? They tell me you looked a bit off. Something upset you?”
She wished she could tell him; but she couldn’t, “I think I’m just overtired, Bob.”
“Overworked, you mean? Who isn’t here?” But he still sounded sympathetic. He was in his mid- forties, always neat and starched, one of those of the last generation to clean their shoes every day, a stickler for protocol, method and routine. Yet, as Romy knew from her first days here at the morgue, he was capable of sympathy and understanding. He knew that all pain didn’t end in death.
“You think you’d better go home? We don’t want you slicing off more than is necessary. Can young Wayne handle what’s left in the Murder Room?”
“There’s that child, the homicide case. I’d better go back and finish off—”
“No, I’ll do it. Go home, Romy. You look like death warmed up, if you’ll forgive the expression.”
So she went home, glad of the release but afraid of what she had to face. She let herself into the flat, stood just inside the front door and called out, as if she had stepped into someone else’s place, “Are you home?” He wasn’t, nor had she expected him to be. She had spoken out of fear.
She stood irresolute for almost a minute, not moving. She was about to step over a cliff; she knew nothing of the abyss beyond. She had dealt in the results of murder for three years now; a dozen times at least she had faced a murderer across a courtroom when she had been called to give evidence. Now she was afraid, was certain, that, once again, she would have to face the murderer she lived with.
At last she forced herself to move. She went to her father’s bedroom, did something she had not done since her mother’s death, entered it without his permission. She went through the drawers of the big dressing-table that he had brought, along with all their other furniture, from Germany. In the bottom drawer, underneath three neatly folded sweaters, she found what she had hoped she would not find.
She took out the small cardboard box with the St. Sebastian’s label on it. Inside it were the syringe and two ampoules; the label on the box said there should have been five. She knew, with sickening certainty, that the missing three had been used on Grime, Kissen and Lugos.
She was sitting in the living room in the dying light of the evening when her father at last came home. He was much later than usual, but she would not ask him why. She heard him come in the front door of the flat, call out a greeting in German as he always did, then come along the hallway. He passed the door to the living room, going towards his bedroom; then she heard him stop. He came bac
k, stood in the doorway.
“Romy? Is there something wrong?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
She held up the small box, then threw it across the room. It landed at his feet, but he didn’t bend to pick it up. He looked down at it, then at her.
“You have been in my room, going through my things?”
“Yes.”
They were speaking in German, as they usually did when alone. But this evening she wished they were speaking English, or indeed any language but her own. German was the language of her memories, those that had come back like a metastastis, overwhelming her.
He had been standing stiffly, almost as if he were on some sort of parade. But now he seemed to lose control of his legs; he leaned against the door jamb. For a moment she was tempted to rise and hurry to him; as she would have done only this morning. But she kept herself rigidly in her seat; it was he who had taught her control, or anyway bequeathed it to her. He drew a deep breath, then moved to his favourite chair and sat down, put both hands on the arms of it.
“You killed those people?” She was surprised at the steadiness of her voice.
He said nothing, but after a long moment he nodded.
“Why? Was it the same as that other time? An eye for an eye?”
Again he took his time about replying; then: “No, it was not that. Would you understand better if that were the reason?”
“I don’t understand anything at all at the moment. Why?”
And then slowly, deliberately, as if he were swearing out a police statement, he told her why.
III
That evening Malone and Lisa had gone to dinner at the home of new acquaintances, Will and Olive Rockne. They lived in Coogee, the small seaside suburb down the hill from Randwick, in a large blue-brick house built during World War I. Will Rockne was a local solicitor and he and Olive had a girl who went to Holy Spirit convent, which was where the Malones had met them last Parents’ Day.