by Jon Cleary
“By the police or by Chess’s father?”
Carmody said nothing. He all at once seemed to be driving more carefully, concentrating, as the traffic coming out to the racecourse and the showground had thickened.
Malone said, “Sean, are the cops in this town corrupt?”
They were entering the outskirts of town. Carmody remained silent till he pulled the car up outside the police station. He switched off the engine and turned to face Malone.
“No,” he said flatly. “I don’t think you’d find one of them who would take money. They might bow to a bit of pressure, but that’s a different thing. This isn’t a big town, Scobie. Maybe everyone doesn’t know everyone else by name, but they know them by sight. The police, like everyone else, have to live in it. They have family, friends, neighbours—they belong. It’s not like the city. Where are you stationed?”
“Police Centre, in Surry Hills.”
“Where do you live?”
“Randwick.”
“A suburb, another part of the city altogether. You get my point? Have you ever had to question or arrest anyone who lives in your street or just around the corner? Don’t be too harsh on the locals, Scobie. They do their job as best they can. They may not treat the blacks as well as they might and if ever there was a Gay Mardi Gras out here, some of them might act like Stormtroopers, the sort I saw in Germany in the nineteen-thirties. But that’s par for the course in Australia. We’ve never been as tolerant as we claim. We delude ourselves as much as the Brits or the Americans or the French or anyone else. The only ones, I think, who don’t delude themselves are the Chinese. Or maybe it’s because they’re so inscrutable, we can’t tell.”
“What about the Japanese? Aren’t they inscrutable?”
“Maybe you’ll know more about that when you get deeper into the Sagawa murder.”
It was very oblique, but Malone caught a note of criticism in Carmody’s tone: you’re being sidetracked from what brought you here. He thanked the older man for the lift and got out of the car.
“Where are you going now?”
“To see Trevor.”
Carmody raised an eyebrow. “I can drive you there.”
“I don’t think so, Sean. Thanks, though.”
He turned and went into the station before he had to explain to Carmody why he didn’t want him there when he questioned his son-in-law. He went upstairs to the detectives’ room and was relieved to find Baldock was not there, though he wasn’t quite sure why he felt that way.
Clements looked up from his preparation of the running sheet. “I just got back from the airport. The three Nips came in. Gus Dircks and Koga were there to meet them.”
“Not Doc Nothling or Trevor Waring?”
“No. Gus Dircks was all over them—I was surprised he hadn’t brought flowers.”
“Did he see you?”
“It’s a small airport, mate. It’s pretty hard to get lost in it. He didn’t speak to me, just gave me a hard glare and turned his back.”
“What about the Japs?”
“They all look alike to me. They were well-dressed and the one who seemed to be the boss, he looked as if he was used to being considered important. I nearly fell over when Gus actually bowed his head to him, Jap-style.”
“You can start practising—your manners need a shake-up. Anything from Tokyo yet?”
“Andy Graham got off the phone about five minutes ago.” He sorted out some notes he had jotted down. “There’s nothing much to add to what we already know. He did his technical training in cotton farming in the US, in Alabama and Arizona. He’s got no criminal record, not even a traffic ticket. Tokyo just said, „More to follow.’ Whatever that means.”
“It could mean they’re following up a lead. I wonder if his bosses could tell us anything? Make a date for us to see them late this afternoon, after the races.” He looked at his watch. “I’m running late to see Trevor Waring.”
“Then we’re going to the races this afternoon?” Clements looked eager. He was not an eclectic gambler, he was not interested in cards or baccarat or flies crawling up a wall. But horse-racing drew him like a magnet, he would have laid bets with the Man from Snowy River on which brumby would finish in front of their wild horse chase.
Malone sighed, beginning to feel the weariness brought on by a mind that was becoming increasingly cluttered almost by the minute. Reason, and his usual orderly approach to a case, told him he should wipe the Hardstaff murder and the suicide of Billy Koowarra from his thoughts: he was here to find the murderer of Kenji Sagawa and nothing else. But the net he had thrown kept getting caught on unseen obstacles in dark waters.
“I think we might. Everyone else in town is going to be out there. Unless—” The net caught again. “Unless you think we ought to keep an eye on Koga and his bosses just in case the killer wants to try his luck again?”
“I think that’s someone else’s job, don’t you?” Clements’s face showed nothing. “After all, they were met by the Police Minister himself out at the airport. If he can’t look after „em, who can?”
Malone grinned, nodding appreciatively. “You should be our Foreign Minister. You’d have the country at war in five minutes . . . I’ll meet you back here at twelve thirty.”
He went out to meet with Trevor Waring, taking the net with him.
II
Waring’s office was in a small two-storeyed complex of professional offices just off the main street. The building looked no more than three or four years old, built probably when developers, swept along on the surface of a boom, thought prosperity could only get bigger and better. Now the boom was over, wool and grain prices were down, developers were on the dole and the nation’s belt was starting to feel like a tourniquet. As Malone crossed from the other side of the street he saw two “For Sale” notices in upstairs windows of the block, like commercial Band-Aids.
The solicitor’s rooms were on the ground floor, the largest office in the complex. Malone remembered the old saw: smart lawyers and smart accountants could always keep themselves busy. In good times they helped the successful reduce their taxes, in bad times they facilitated bankruptcies. They had learned how to harness an ill-wind.
Waring was waiting for him; anxiously, it seemed. There was no one in the outer office, but as soon as Malone knocked on the door and entered, Waring came through from his own office, hand outstretched. Like meeting a new client for the first time, Malone thought. He had all policemen’s suspicion of lawyers and their intentions: it was there between the lines of a policeman’s swearing-in oath.
“Come in, come in, Scobie! Coffee?” There was a coffee percolator on an electric hob in the other office. “Sugar? Milk?”
Ease off, Malone silently advised him. He took the china cup and saucer, none of your thick mugs or styrofoam cups here, and followed Waring into the latter’s office. It was a room for a successful lawyer, though not as richly furnished as some that Malone had visited down in Sydney; but down there the fees made those of country solicitors look like pension cheques. Still, Waring had done well, as a solicitor, a cotton farm investor or a part-time grazier. Malone sat down in a chair upholstered in genuine leather, none of your antique vinyl, and looked at Waring across the leather-topped desk.
“How’s the case coming along?” said Waring with genuine interest.
Which one? Malone had to bite back the question; and determinedly pushed the Hardstaff murder to the back of his mind.
“Sagawa? We’re making progress.” You were always “making progress,” even if sometimes it was the generals’ strategic retreat. Never confess, especially to a lawyer, that you didn’t know where the hell you were going. “Trevor, why didn’t you tell me the other night, when we first met, that you had shares in South Cloud?”
Waring stalled. “I thought you might ask me that.”
“Yeah, you’re a lawyer, I guessed you might.”
“Would you believe me if I said I just didn’t think it was important to mention it
? That it slipped my mind entirely?”
“No.”
There was a set of four pipes in a rack on the desk. Waring reached for one, but didn’t attempt to fill it; he looked at it, as if wondering what he should do with it, then he put it back in the rack. He looked at Malone. “Why not?”
Malone sipped his coffee. It was excellent: Lisa, the coffee expert, with her Dutch conceit that the Dutch made the best brew in the world, would have approved. “What happens to your share of the company if the Japanese decide to pull out of the whole venture? Which they might do, if they think there’s too much anti-Jap feeling around here.”
“They have invested too much to want to pull out.”
“From what I’ve read, the Japanese will always cut their losses if it means losing face. They are economic imperialists, but they don’t want to start another war, even a small local one, to prove it.”
Waring smiled. He picked up a pair of square, gold-rimmed glasses from the desk, put them on, looked carefully at Malone, then took them off and put them back on the desk. Malone sat, patient: he had been scrutinized by the best, from Supreme Court judges to top crims.
“I don’t mean to sound offensive, Scobie, but you’re a smart cop. Or are all the cops down in Sydney experts on economic imperialism?”
“We take courses in it now, instead of pistol practice.” Come on, Malone. You sound like some tough private eye. Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer would have struggled against the dry wit and arid skepticism he had heard from the native crims. “Trevor, let’s cut out the fencing. No offence, but I think I’ve had more practice at it than you, even though you’re a lawyer. I’ve been in the ring with—” He named two of Sydney’s top Queen’s Counsels and then two of the nation’s top criminal elements. “No bullshit, Trev, just a friendly talk man to man.”
Here in his office Waring did not seem anywhere near as bland as he had in his own home; his eyes, indeed his whole face, took on a shrewdness that Malone hadn’t detected before. He picked up his glasses again, but didn’t put them on; then he leaned back in his chair. “Am I a suspect of some sort?”
Malone pursed his lips as if he were thinking over the proposition; but he had already decided. “Yes, I think you might be. You and at least a couple of dozen others. In a murder case, Trev, I never rule out anyone except myself and the corpse.”
Waring smiled and the smile seemed to relax him a little. “I see your point. I don’t suppose I can plead that I’ll say nothing without my lawyer being present?”
“Not unless you believe that old one, that a lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client?”
Waring shook his head, smiling again. “No, I don’t think I’m a fool, Scobie. And I think I’m a good lawyer, though maybe I haven’t been tested as much as those QCs you mentioned . . . Okay. To answer your question as to what would happen to my shares in the company if the Japanese pull out—well, we’d try to raise the money to buy them out.”
“Try to raise it?”
“It wouldn’t be easy. It’d take a lot—at least by local standards.”
“How much?”
Waring hesitated; though he was not unsophisticated, he had none of the city lawyers’ glib approach to large sums of money.
“About ten million dollars, if all the outstanding options were to be taken up. That’s a five-stand gin out there and we have twenty thousand hectares cleared, with eight thousand hectares already under crop. There’s an option on another fifty thousand hectares that has to be taken up in the next three months. The original plan was to make this the largest cotton project in Australia. If we don’t take up the option and clear the land, then we’ve put too much cash into what we’ve already developed.”
“Could you raise sufficient money for a buy-out, I mean locally?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. People around here are strapped for cash now—interest rates, poor crop prices, things like that. Normally this is a rich district, but already this year there have been six farms taken over by the banks.”
“Who would buy in, then?”
“A Yank syndicate. Or some of the big money that’s still down in Sydney or Melbourne, despite the slump. I’d be pushed out.”
“And you don’t want that?”
“Scobie, we grow cotton here that’s the equal of any grown anywhere in the world. We sell every bale we pack. I got in at the jump—why would I want to be bought out now, just when it’s all coming to fruition?”
“Had any offer been made before Sagawa’s murder, to buy out the Japs?”
A slight hesitation; a hand fiddled with the glasses. “Just a tentative one.”
“Who proposed it? The outsiders? Or someone local?”
“Like who?”
The tongue gave out the name, not the mind: “Chess Hardstaff, maybe?”
Waring put on his glasses. “We-ell, yes. He was the one who told us there was outside interest.”
“Yet he was the one who got the Japs here in the first place? Why didn’t he invest then?”
“I wouldn’t know. Chess plays everything close to his chest. Max Nothling said something one night when he was half-drunk. That if ever they open Chess up for heart surgery, they’ll find his thorax packed tight with secrets. They won’t have to slice open his sternum, there’ll be a combination lock on it. I don’t think anyone in the district knows what makes Chess tick, not even his daughter.”
“What about Max Nothling? Would he know?”
“Him least of all, probably. Chess and Max have never been close. Not till lately, that is.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Waring spread a hand, as if surprised by what he had just said. “I don’t know, frankly. It just struck me then that lately I’ve seen them together more than ever before. It may be just coincidence, with the Cup meeting coming up. I just don’t know.”
“Could Nothling raise enough money to share in the buy-out?”
“I doubt it. His wife, Amanda, has most of their money. She inherited quite a bit from her grandfather, old Sir Chester. She was his favourite.”
“Gus Dircks’s wife also owns shares. Would they have enough to buy into the takeover?”
“You’re asking me to divulge clients’ confidential affairs. They’re all clients of mine.”
“Forget I asked the question, Trev. You’ve just answered it.” Malone put down his empty cup, waved away Waring’s offer of a refill. “The other night you said Sagawa had been to see you about threats. Did he show you the letters?”
“No.”
“You’re a lawyer, he came to you for advice and you didn’t ask to see the letters he was complaining about?”
“He didn’t bring them with him. I never saw him again after that.”
“Your name isn’t mentioned in the running sheet. Didn’t any of the investigating officers come and question you?”
“No.”
“Where is South Cloud’s registered office?”
“Care of this office.” Waring still wore his glasses; there was a pinched look to his face now, as if his eyes were suffering from focusing so carefully on Malone. “Look, if you’re thinking of accusing me of murdering Ken Sagawa, I think I’ll choose not to answer any more questions. Your family come to stay with mine, you come out to my house for dinner . . . Christ Almighty!” For a moment Malone thought he was going to burst into tears.
Malone stood up. “Trevor, I don’t think you murdered Sagawa. You were happy with the status quo, with the Japs running things, am I right?”
Waring nodded, knowing there was still something to come.
“But—” Malone picked up his hat. “But I still think you know more than you’ve told me. Without knowing it—or, I dunno, maybe even knowing it—you could be an accessory before or after the fact. Think about it.”
He went out, the net still trawling in dark waters.
III
He went back to the police station and brought his own additions to the running sheets up
to date. It looked like a weather forecast: waves were beginning to rise.
Then Clements came in and Malone said, “Let’s go to the races.”
Driving out of town Clements said, “How’d you get on with Waring?”
“You ever feel you wish you hadn’t started something?”
“I was with a girl once. She talked all the way through it, about what a month of aerobics would do for my agility. I was flat out being agile and there she was under me talking about aerobics. But I was too far in to stop, if you know what I mean.”
Malone laughed, feeling some of the tension and weariness slip away from him. Once he had come into the dressing-room at Adelaide Oval, having spent the whole day in the field and having bowled thirty-two overs while the temperature had hovered around the old hundred degrees F. mark; the dressing-room attendant had handed him a long cold beer, he had downed it in one long slow swallow, and living had become bearable again. Clements sometimes, as now, had that effect on him.
“I didn’t get much out of Waring, nothing really concrete.”
“Just suspicions?” Clements nodded. “I know what you mean. But where would we be without them?”
“Pull in at the carnival first. I said I’d meet Lisa and the kids there.”
Lisa and Ida Waring and their respective children were waiting for them; with two exceptions. “Where’s Claire?” said Malone.
“Tas is looking after her for the day,” said Lisa.
He looked at her teasing smile. “On a day like this, I thought he’d like to be with his mates.”
“Relax, Scobie,” said Ida, also smiling. A conspiracy of mothers, he thought: how can you lick „em? “Tas is a gentleman—or at least I know he is towards Claire. He’s also trying to show he’s independent. One of the local girls, he’s taken her out a couple of times, is talking as if she has an option on him.”
Malone looked at her, suddenly no longer concerned for his daughter’s moral safety: concerned, instead, for Ida and her family. How will I ever be able to face her if Trevor turns out to be implicated somehow in Sagawa’s murder? Will she look on me as a gentleman if I have to arrest her husband?