by Jon Cleary
“You mentioned the marriage certificate. How much information does she have to give on that?”
“Not much that would help us. If she's over eighteen, all she has to do is produce some form of identification, a driver's licence, passport, something like that. There's no blood test required in Missouri, not that that would help us. She would have had to appear in person to sign the application and plunk down fifty dollars. Then she can marry the Devil himself. Or anyone who wasn't on an FBI Wanted list.” For the first time he grinned. “As your boss described it, Scobie, we've got bugger-all.”
Malone took his time; he could smell thin ice again. He was going to be giving Ambassador Pavane more information than the man would want to hear.
“Joe, you said you'd be talking to Canberra. Ask the Ambassador if the RSO—Roger? Roger Bodine—if he can go through Mrs. Pavane's personal belongings. See if there is a diary, something out of her past that'll give us a clue to who she was back before 1991.”
“Scobie, that's too delicate. Roger Bodine's a real pain in the ass—he takes everything so fucking seriously, as if he's the only one preventing World War Three. Washington's full of guys like him. But he's gotta live with the Ambassador when Mr. Pavane comes back. Better that you ask one of your Federal agents to do it—that keeps it out of the personal contact frame—”
“Joe, I'm trying to keep this as localized as I can. You, me and the embassy. I'll go out to the airport tonight and tell him myself. It'll be a helluva time to do it, but better to get it over and done with. If the mood's right, I'll ask him about going through her belongings. Let him know I want to see him, will you?”
“Sure.” Himes looked relieved. “How's that other case going, the one at the same hotel?”
“The wife's been arraigned—she's confessed to doing the husband.”
“You on it?”
“Up to a point.” He thought he owed it to Himes to be frank: “The wife was an old girlfriend of mine. I'm trying to stay out of the personal contact frame.”
Himes whistled softly, nodded sympathetically. “It ain't always easy, is it? I was once on a case till I found out I was chasing my wife's cousin. I got off it just in time. It was a total fuck-up—he was innocent. But boy—” He shook his head, grinned broadly, the boy there again in the man. “My wife beat hell outa me. Good luck and stay outa the frame.”
Then Gail Lee came to the doorway. “Andy is on the phone.”
Malone picked up the phone on the desk, asked for the call to be transferred. He motioned for Himes to wait, then Andy Graham came on the line:
“Boss? I'm down in Spring Street.” The heart of the financial district. “I think we've come up with the guy who was at Catalina that day, spoke to Mrs. Pavane. He works for a firm of stockbrokers.”
“You spoken to him yet?”
“Yeah, but he refuses to say anything. I think you'd better come down here and lean on him. I'm in the lobby—” He gave the address. “He's gotta come down in the lifts or the stairwell if he wants to shoot through. He dunno I'm still hanging around.”
“I'll be there in ten, fifteen minutes at the most. I'll have Agent Himes with me.”
On the way downtown Malone said, “This feller may be a dead loss.”
Himes nodded, said nothing. He knew the geography of blind alleys and dead ends; it was part of police work. They never taught it to you at the Academy, but like Malone he had learned it from experience. He kept his eye on the road now, appreciative of Malone's careful driving. “I'm a nervous passenger.”
Malone grinned, liking him more by the minute. “Join the club. Whenever I'm in a car and not behind the wheel, I've got my feet buried in the floorboards.”
Careful driver though he was, he was a careless parker, being a police officer. He parked the unmarked car in a No Standing zone and led Himes into the lobby of the Homestead Finance building. It was a new building, all marble and brass and a small forest of greenery in the lobby that was changed weekly, like a uniform. The building itself stopped almost any sunshine from reaching down into the roadway outside, but the developers had costed the bottom line of sunshine and it was a minus.
Andy Graham, tall and big, with a large face saved from being plain by lively blue eyes, came towards them. He was awkward, but he could move surprisingly quickly.
“He hasn't come down, boss.” He nodded good-morning to Himes, then addressed Malone again: “His name's Vokes, Giuseppe Vokes—”
“Who?”
“That's what I said when he told me. He's an associate partner in Buller & Arcadipane and he's a nephew of Arcadipane. His mother's Italian. The firm have two floors, the 11th and the 12th. He's a little guy, he's about Mrs. Pavane's age, I'd say, and he's snooty.”
“Towards cops or just towards everyone?”
“Cops, I think.”
“Where'd you get his family background?”
“I've got a mate on the stock exchange—”
Malone, by accident rather than design, was surrounded by staff who had mates, even in jail. “Righto, let's go up and lean on him. Joe?”
“Righto,” said Himes, making it sound like a foreign word, and they rode up to the offices of Buller & Arcadipane on a width of smiles.
They got off at the wrong floor, the trading floor. A glacier of computers stretched away into the distance; heads were visible above the crevasses like mountaineers who were refusing to surrender. There were shouts, but not shouts for help: the market was going up, who needed rescuing? Giuseppe Vokes, recognizing Andy Graham, got up from behind a computer in the front row and came towards them.
“You have no right barging in here—”
He was short, prematurely bald and with the face of a handsome fox. Just the bloke I'd choose to invest my money, thought Malone, who wouldn't have invested in Fort Knox even in its heyday.
“We're not barging in, Mr. Vokes. We have every right as police to come in and ask you some questions. You have the right not to answer them, but don't accuse us of barging in. Now can we go somewhere less exposed than this? Everyone thinks we're more interesting than the stock market.”
Heads had risen above the corrugation of computers: the mountaineers sighting rescue? Had the market suddenly started to avalanche?
“This way,” said Vokes and led the way out of the huge room and along a passage to an office. Malone noticed that it was not a corner office. He had learned enough about business to know that a corner office was the horizontal peak of the mountain.
Vokes ushered the three officers in, closed the door, then went round and sat behind a desk. The three visitors sat down, Malone and Himes on chairs, Graham on a couch against one wall. Vokes obviously knew the short man's talent for bringing everyone down to his level. Chairs were not invented only for the weary.
“I have told him—” Vokes nodded at Graham “—that I'm not prepared to answer questions. I know nothing about the American Ambassador's wife.”
“Maybe not,” said Malone. “But do you know anything about the woman she was before she became Mrs. Pavane?”
Vokes had spent a long time in front of computer screens; he could go blank in an instant. “I've never met the woman. I made a mistake—mistaken identity—that day at the restaurant—”
Malone had been reading bluff from his first day in the Service. “We're not going to accept that, Mr. Vokes, till we're absolutely sure. We'll go back over your career—”
“You can't do that,” said Vokes flatly.
“I think we can. As a member of the stock exchange, your business life is supposed to be an open book—am I right? Do Buller & Arcadipane have any American connections, Detective Graham?”
He knew Graham would have the answer. The younger man looked at his notebook: “Yeah, they have associate offices in San Francisco and New York with a coupla American firms.”
“You see, Mr. Vokes, we've already started. Our friend here, Agent Himes from the FBI, will check if you ever worked with those offices in the States—
”
Vokes chewed on his lips, then held up his hand. “Okay, okay. It's going back a long way—that's why I wasn't sure that day in the restaurant—”
“How far back?”
“Just before the crash, 1987. I didn't know her well—”
“Who?”
“If she is who I think she was, her name was Patricia Norval.”
“If you didn't know her well, how did you know her at all? Where?”
“She worked for a firm of stockbrokers—they were in the same building, over on Bond Street, before Buller & Arcadipane moved here.” He named the firm, but Malone had never heard of them. If Clements were here, he would probably be able to name their pedigree: he was Homicide's expert on the stock market and its cowboys. “They were a small firm—they never made it after the crash in '87. They just folded.”
“What happened to those who would've worked with her?”
Vokes spread his hands; small hands that looked like paws. “I dunno. They just—evaporated, I guess. I heard one or two of them moved interstate, to Melbourne and Brisbane.”
Himes, with a deferential look at Malone as if asking permission to intrude, said, “A whole group of brokers just breaks up and disappears? Why?”
Vokes looked uncomfortable. Why do I keep thinking of him as foxy? Malone wondered. “Mr.—Himes? You're asking me to point the finger when all there was was talk, suspicion—”
“We're always at home with suspicion,” said Malone. “It's our stock in trade.”
“I'll bet,” said Vokes and almost smiled. “Okay, there was talk that a scam was going on in that office. I don't think the two senior partners knew anything about it. It was this group, three or four of 'em. In the hullabaloo when the crash came, everyone had something bigger to worry about. By the time the exchange had got back on its feet, the firm had disbanded, was gone, and I guess the stock exchange board said forget it.”
“Did they get away with any money from the scam?” asked Himes.
“There was a rumour they took away several million, in '87 dollars. But nobody knew anything for certain.”
“Was Patricia Norval a broker?” asked Andy Graham, who was taking notes.
“No, but you'd often see her on the floor, the main floor and over at the futures exchange. But she never mixed with anyone but the guys from her own firm.”
“What did they do? Rob clients or the firm or what?”
Vokes nodded. They were into everything. They were buying and selling clients' stock and pocketing the profit after they'd buy the shares back when the price dropped. You could do it in those days. The rules are much tighter now. There was a boom before the crash, nobody thought it would end. A coupla the guys from the firm—I think one of them was going with Trish Norval—they were dealing in currency, using clients' money. It was a picnic, I tell you.”
“And no one was keeping an eye on possible scams?” asked Himes.
“There may have been, I dunno. If there was, nothing ever came out.”
Himes looked at Malone. “There was a big hustle on the Chicago exchange back in 1989. We, the FBI, were in on it. We cleaned it up,” he said, scoring a point for the FBI.
“So everyone got out of town?” said Malone, switching the limelight back from the FBI.
“I guess so. The two senior partners, they're dead. There never was any suspicion about them. It was the young hot-shots—” He looked around the three officers, all at once looked less foxy, almost regretful at what went on in his trade. “There are always hot-shots in this game. They're the ones generate the excitement. They also generate the occasional investigation.”
“Would you know the names of those who worked with her?” asked Graham, notebook still open, pen at the ready.
“They'd be on the stock exchange register for that time.” Vokes was clamming up again.
“I'll look 'em up,” said Graham and one knew that he would.
Just before he rose Malone said, “Why were you reluctant to talk to us, Mr. Vokes?”
Vokes looked at him steadily. “If you weren't a police officer, wouldn't you want to stay away from a murder?”
“I guess so,” said Malone, thinking of Delia Jones and thinking, I am a police officer.
The three police officers left the office. Vokes didn't rise, just nodded as they said goodbye. He was a short man safe in the fort of a chair.
As they went down in the lift Himes said, “The bureaucrats must be worried. These guys and their computers are gonna run the world this century. Another fifty years and we'll be bowing down to new gods.”
“Not me. Retirement is looking better and better,” said Malone and wished he could push the clock forward. They reached the ground floor and he said, “Andy, start tracing those who worked with Mrs. Pavane—or Miz Norval, whatever we're going to call her. I'll see if someone at Surry Hills has come up with where Mrs. Pavane had her Japanese meal just before she was topped.”
“No problem,” said Andy Graham and went off at his lumbering run but still disappearing quickly.
Malone looked after him. “If I sent him into a china shop he'd break every cup, saucer and plate before he found the door to get out. But if I sent him to the Antarctic to get the name of a particular penguin, he'd talk to a million of them and come back with the right bird.”
“After this posting,” said Himes, “I go back to take charge of a bureau somewhere—on the East Coast, I hope. Boston or Charleston would be nice. I hope I have your luck with the staff I get.”
They were standing in a square pool of sunshine; the rest of the narrow street was in shade. Malone became aware that the small square of warmth was crowded with about a dozen women, all in black except one, who was in grey, all with mobile phones stuck to their ears: power women who had just emerged from some conference. He had the sudden cock-eyed image that he was in the midst of a misery of Hasidic mourners, on their phones to determine the time of the next funeral. He looked for beards and wide-brimmed black hats, but there were none. Then he was aware that all the women, phones still to ears, were staring at him and Himes, all of them looking threatening, this time calling up reinforcements. Then he shook his head: he was having hallucinations.
“Why do women in business all wear black?” he said, trying to remember what Lisa had worn this morning.
“I dunno,” said Himes. “I dunno why my wife wears what she does.”
“What does she wear?”
“I dunno,” said Himes and grinned again, proud in a long line of blind husbands.
Malone took the parking ticket from his windscreen, tore it up, dropped it down a grating in the gutter and got into the unmarked car and they drove back to Surry Hills as the group of black-suited women broke up and moved away, some with phones still to their ears as if massaging earache. Malone, watching them in his driving mirror, grinned to himself. He had lost his battle against the progress of technology but it still amused him. Cave-dwellers have a simplicity to them that is appealing. To other cave-dwellers.
Then his car-phone rang: it was Gail Lee: “We've found out where Mrs. Pavane had her Japanese dinner. At Kyoto in Hunter's Hill.”
II
The Queen Victoria Building, the QVB, is one of the city's treasures, a huge Victorian galleried, copper-domed emporium of boutiques, cafés and restaurants. Long neglected, there was talk of demolishing it; it was a nest for unwanted storage, rats and prowling developers. Then Asian developers took it over and restored it to even better than its original glory. Local municipal authorities and developers, blinded by cataracts of the quick buck, had laughed at the folly of the foreigners and went looking for other heritages to pull down. Now, this day, the boutiques, the Olympic boom long over and the tourists gone home, were back to selling to the natives at their half-price winter sales. Windows were plastered with signs—50% OFF! BEST EVER SALE!—like old-time death notices.
Lisa was in one of the restaurants. It was a ritual that she and Scobie had lunch together once a week, but occa
sionally she came across here from Town Hall, just across the road, to have lunch on her own. She had worked for two years as the city's PR agent on the Olympics, a two-year headache that no amount of analgesics had ever helped. Now, like everyone else, she was astray. The Lord Mayor, a man afraid of decisions, had talked for the past six months of letting her go. She wasn't sure that she would not welcome the pink slip. City council politics were small wars that gave conflict a bad name and she had grown tired of them.
She was looking at the menu when she became aware of the woman standing by her table. She looked up to tell the waitress she had not yet made up her mind; but it was not the waitress. It was a woman in a long black coat and a black beret.
“Mrs. Malone?”
“Yes,” said Lisa reluctantly, wondering if this was another complainant against another of the council's rulings.
“I'm Delia Jones.” She stood awkwardly for a moment, then nodded at the empty chair opposite Lisa. “May I sit down?”
No, thought Lisa; but said, “If you wish.”
Delia sat down, almost gracefully. Then a waitress was beside them, waiting on their order. “What'll it be today, Mrs. Malone?”
“I'll have the crab-and-avocado sandwich. And a glass of the usual white.” Then Lisa looked at the woman opposite, heard herself say, “Would you like lunch?”
“Thank you. I'll have the same.” The waitress went away and Delia went on, “It must be nice to be known.”
“I come here regularly.” She didn't add: with Scobie.
“I can't remember when I last had crab. Scobie used to like it. It was cheaper then. Does he still count his pennies?”
Lisa was gathering her defences. Defences? What am I afraid of? She was studying the other woman (the Other Woman?) without being too obvious. The black coat, done up to the neck, was cheap, but Delia wore it with some style; there was a purple-and-green scarf inside the collar, just enough colour to relieve the drab coat. The beret was cheap, the cheapest sort of headgear bar a beanie, but Delia wore it rakishly, pulled forward over one eye. Yes, thought Lisa, she had been attractive, once.