by Jon Cleary
“Who found her?”
“The cleaning lady.” Clements belonged to that class which thought that to call a woman a “woman” was demeaning to her; it was another manifestation that contradicted the native myth that Australians did not believe in class distinction. “I’ve interviewed her and let her go home. She’s a Greek, a bit excitable about dead bodies.”
“So am I. I don’t like them. You talk to anyone else?”
“I’ve got a coupla the uniformed guys going through the building. So far they haven’t brought anyone up here.”
“The flat belong to her?” Malone nodded in at the corpse, now being covered in a green plastic shroud.
“No, it’s a company flat. There’s some notepaper and envelopes in a desk inside. Kensay Proprietary Limited. Their offices are in Cossack House in Bridge Street. She had a key, though.”
Malone, raincoat collar turned up against the wind coming across the western reaches of the harbour, looked out at the buildings surrounding them; then he looked at the bullet hole in the glass door. “A high-powered rifle?”
“I’d bet on it. I don’t think anyone would have been standing here and shot her through the glass. There’s a lot of dust and dirt here on the balcony—looks like the cleaning lady doesn’t come out here in winter. There’s no sign of any footmarks.”
Malone looked down at the marks his own and Clements’ shoes had made. Then he looked out again at the neighbouring buildings. “Where do you reckon the shot came from?”
“Over there.” Clements pointed at a block of offices in Kent Street, the next street west. “He’d have had an ideal spot there on that flat roof. It’s about a hundred and fifty metres away, no more. If he was experienced, with a good gun and a night „scope, she’d have been an easy target.”
“Righto, send for Andy Graham, get him to do the donkey work, tell him to search that roof and next door to it for any cartridge cases. Stay here till he turns up. I’m going out to Paddington, see if there’s anyone there to tell the bad news to.”
“Better you than me.”
“Some day you’re going to have to do it.” I just hope to Christ you don’t have to tell the bad news to Lisa.
He left Clements, went down in the lift with the two men from the funeral contractors and the body of Mardi Jack. The lift wasn’t big enough to take the stretcher horizontally and one of the men was holding Mardi Jack in his arms as if she were a drunken dancer.
“Wouldn’t you know it?” he said over the green plastic shoulder to Malone. “The bloody service lift isn’t working. I guess it’s gunna be one of them weeks.”
“At least you’re still breathing,” said Malone.
The man, tall and painfully thin, a living cadaver, wasn’t offended; his trade brought more abusive jokes than even a policeman’s lot. “Sometimes I wonder who’s better off,” he said and looked reproachfully at the shrouded corpse as if Mardi Jack had missed a crucial step in their dance.
Malone went out into Clarence Street, pushing through the small crowd that had stopped to see why an ambulance was double-parked in the busy street. There were also two TV vans double-parked behind it; a cameraman aimed his camera at Malone, but he shook his head and put a hand up to his face.
Two reporters came at him, but he just smiled and said, “See Sergeant Clements, he’s in charge,” and dodged round them.
There were two parking tickets on the Commodore; the Grey Bombers, the parking police, must be making blanket raids this morning. He lifted them off, stuck them under a windscreen wiper of one of the TV vans, got into the car and pulled out into the traffic. He glanced in his driving mirror as he drove away and saw the body of Mardi Jack, now on the stretcher, being pushed into the ambulance.
The start of another week, another job. He wondered how senior men felt in Traffic or Administration each Monday morning. But even as he drove towards that aspect of murder he always hated, the telling of the dreadful news to the victim’s family, he knew he would always prefer people to paper. The living and the dead were part of him.
II
Goodwood Street was a narrow one-way street lined on both sides by narrow-fronted terrace houses. Paddington in the last century had been a mix of solid merchants’ houses and workmen’s cottages and terraces; perched on a ridge, the merchants and one or two of the workmen had had a distant view of the harbour, but most of the citizens had just stared across the street at each other, not always the best of sights, especially on Friday and Saturday nights when the drunks came rolling home. Then in the twenties and thirties of this century it had become almost solely a working man’s domain, the narrow houses crowded with large families, constant debt and a solid Labour vote. In the last twenty years it had been invaded by artists moving closer to the wealthy buyers of the eastern suburbs, by writers who weren’t intellectual enough for Balmain and by yuppies turning the terrace houses into shrunken mansions. Houses with sixteen-foot frontages now brought prices that would have kept the families of years ago for a lifetime. It was another turn of the wheel in the history of any city that manages to survive.
Malone had to park again in a No Standing zone; the Commodore, in a year, collected more parking tickets than it did bird-crap. He knocked on a bright yellow door in a dark green house; the iron lacework on the upstairs balcony was painted white. As he was about to knock for the third time the door was opened by a girl in a terry-towelling dressing-gown; she had frizzled yellow hair and sleep in her eyes. She blinked in the morning sun.
“Yeah, what is it?” She had all the politeness of someone who hated her sleep being disturbed, even at ten o’clock in the morning.
Malone introduced himself. “Does Miss Mardi Jack live here?”
“Yeah. But she’s not in. Why?”
“Are you a relative?”
The sleep quickly cleared from the girl’s eyes; she was alertly intelligent. “Is something wrong? Is she in jail or something?”
Malone told her the bad news as gently as he could; he had had plenty of experience at this but it never became any easier. “Does she have a family? Parents or a husband?”
The girl leaned against the door as if mortally wounded by shock. “Oh my God! Shot?” She had a husky voice that cracked now; she cleared her throat, wrapped her dressing-gown tighter round her as if she had just felt something more than the morning cold. “You wanna come in?”
She led the way down a narrow hall, through a small living-room and out into a kitchen that seemed to be about two hundred years ahead of the vintage front of the house. Beyond its glass wall was a neat courtyard, complete with trees in pots, a bird-bath and a gas barbecue on wheels. Tradition could be respected only just so far, about half the length of the house.
The girl prepared coffee. “Espresso or cappuccino?”
All mod cons, thought Malone; this girl, and probably Mardi Jack, knew how to live well. Except that Mardi Jack had gone where all mod cons counted for nothing. “Cappuccino. Do you mind if I ask who you are?”
“I’m Gina Cazelli—Mardi and I share—shared this place. You asked about her family. She just had her father, he lives somewhere up on the Gold Coast. He and Mardi weren’t too close. Her parents separated when she was a little girl, then her mother died about, oh, I think it was five or six years ago.”
“Did she have any close friends, I mean besides you. A boyfriend, an ex-husband?”
“I don’t think she’d ever been married, at least she never mentioned that she had. She had no particular guy. She was—I shouldn’t say this about her, but I’m trying to help, I mean, find who shot her. She sorta played the field. Christ, that sounds disloyal, doesn’t it?” She busied herself getting cups and saucers, got some croissants out of a bread-tin and put them in a microwave oven. Malone noticed that the kitchen was as tidy and spotless as Lisa’s; Gina Cazelli at the moment looked like a wreck, but either she or Mardi Jack had kept a neat house. “She wasn’t a whore. She was just unlucky with the men she fell in love with. She’d
be absolutely nuts about some guy, it’d last three or four months and then he’d be gone. She’d bounce herself off other guys out of, I dunno, spite or self-pity or something. You know what women are like.”
She looked at him carefully and he smiled and nodded. “I try to know „em. It ain’t easy.”
She nodded in reply, took the croissants out of the microwave. “I haven’t had breakfast. Yeah, you’re right. Men are easier to know.”
“What did Mardi do? For a living?”
“She was a singer. Good, but not good enough, I mean to be a top-liner. She sang around the clubs, you know, the girl who comes on and sings for the wives before the smutty comic comes on and tells sexist jokes. She hated it, but it paid the rent. Her main income came from singing jingles for commercials. That was how we met. I’m an assistant producer with a recording studio.”
“Were you close? As friends, I mean.”
She handed him his coffee and a croissant, pushed strawberry jam in a small decorated crock towards him; he began to suspect that Gina was the one who kept the house up to House and Garden standards. She handed him a fancy paper napkin, yellow to match the front door and the colour strips on the kitchen cupboard doors and drawers.
“No, we weren’t that close. We sorta lived our own lives. There was ten years’ difference between us—she was thirty-three. It made a difference. She liked older guys.”
Malone sipped his coffee, trying not to be too obvious as he studied Gina Cazelli. She was dumpy and plain, her plainness not helped by her frizzed-out hair; it was the sort of hair that would always look the same, in or out of bed, any time of day or night; it was the latest fashion, Claire, the fashion expert, had told him when he had commented on a certain TV actress’s hair-style. Malone had seen Gina’s type before when he had had to brush against the fringes of the entertainment industry: the too-willing, efficient plain jane whom everyone would use because they knew that what she was doing was her whole life, her only escape from whatever drudgery was her alternative.
“Any particular older bloke?” It was one of his idiosyncrasies that he never used the word guy; fighting a losing battle, he stuck to the slang of his rabidly patriotic father, Con Malone, who hated more foreigners than even the Aborigines did. “A recent one?”
Gina shook her head; the hair shivered like an unravelled string cap. “No, there’s been no one for at least four, maybe five months. Nobody she’s brought home.” She munched on her croissant. “But—”
“But what?” he said patiently after waiting a few moments.
“I think there’s been one guy. He used to ring her here, not often, but maybe two or three times. She never told me anything about him and I never asked. She had a call from him on Saturday morning at the studio, we were doing a recording for a TV commercial. God, when I think of it!”
“What?”
“The jingle was „I’ll be alive forever’!” She gulped down a mouthful of coffee; for a moment she looked as if she was about to burst into tears. Then she shook her head again, the hair shivered. “Well, it was him. I took the call and he asked for her.”
“Did he ever give his name when you took a call from him?”
“No. When she came back from the phone she seemed upset, but she didn’t say anything. I had to work back and by the time I got home Saturday, about six, she’d gone out.”
Malone put down his empty cup, declined the offer of more coffee. Cappuccino and croissants on Monday morning in Paddington was okay for assistant recording producers and artists and ballet dancers, but not for working cops. “Could I have a look at her room?”
Gina hesitated, then nodded. “I suppose you’ve got to. But it’s like intruding on her, isn’t it?”
“It’s better intruding on the dead than on the living, but we don’t enjoy any of it.”
She smiled, a painful one, and for a moment looked less plain. “Why do we call you pigs? Not all of you are.”
She led him up the narrow stairs to a back bedroom that looked out on to the courtyard. The room looked as if it had been freshly painted, but it was a mess, a sanitized rubbish tip. The bed was unmade, clothes were strewn over the two chairs, the dressing-table looked like a wrecked corner of a beauty parlour. He began to suspect that Mardi Jack’s life might have been just as unkempt.
“She took two showers a day,” said Gina Cazelli, “but she hadn’t the faintest idea what a coat-hanger was for.”
“You mind if I look through here on my own? You can trust me.”
She looked around the room, sad and puzzled at what might be all that was left of her friend’s life; then abruptly she left him. Malone began the sort of search that always disturbed him, the turning over of a murder or suicide victim to see what was hidden beneath the body.
The closet was packed tightly with clothes, all of them expensive and, by his taste, a bit way out. There were leather and sequins and eye-dazzling silks and taffetas; Malone wondered how the man who never left his name could have had a discreet affair with her. Then he found a black woollen coat and remembered the black fox one in the flat where she had been murdered. He wondered if the man had bought them for her, thrown them over her to hide her.
He went through the drawers of the closet and the dressing-table. In the bottom drawer of the latter he found what a policeman always hopes for: the personal give-away that we always leave when we depart this life unexpectedly, the secret at last exposed to the light.
It was a journal rather than a diary; there were no dates other than the year, 1989, in gold figures on the green cover. There were no names, only initials; it seemed, however, that Mardi Jack wrote only about the men in her life, it was an all-male world except for herself. It seemed, too, that she fell in love, genuine love, as other people, fumble-footed, fall into holes that more nimble-footed elements avoid. The men, it also seemed, walked away, leaving her floundering; she would be bitter for a time, then the next temptation would appear. Christ, thought Malone, what makes women such masochists? He had forgotten that Lisa had already given him the answer: love is both a form of possession and a form of masochism and women feel the latter more deeply than men. Men once wore hair shirts, but it was women who had woven them and tried them on first.
The later entries spoke of B., “the love of my life.” He appeared sincere and gentle enough in the early days of their relationship—“He makes me feel as if I’m walking on clouds. All I want to do is sing love songs, happy ones. Get lost, Billie Holliday.” Then the words and music started to change: “God, he is just like the rest of them. The second brush off in a week.” One could feel the anger in her pen; the writing was shaky. “No excuses. I just won’t be there tonight, he says. Jesus, why do I bother? Won’t I ever learn? Come back Billie Holliday, Edith Piaf, all you women who cry the blues! I know, boy do I know, what you mean!”
Malone was embarrassed by the melodrama of her feelings, the banality of the entries; but she hadn’t been writing for him or anyone else, not even the man who had dumped her. He should not expect the laconic reporting style of a police running sheet.
The last entry must have been written on Saturday just before she had gone out to her death; the writing seemed to quiver on the page: “I’m seeing B. tonight—I hope! We must have it out between us. Will this be our last meeting? Please God no! He says there is someone else . . . When I first met him all those years ago in London there was already someone else—ah, but he was a different man then and I wasn’t even a woman, just a different girl.”
Malone closed the journal, continued his search, found nothing else that was helpful. He took the journal downstairs with him. “I’ll be taking this with me. I’ll sign for it. Did you ever see her writing in this?”
Gina Cazelli shook her head; she sat at the kitchen table sipping a second cup of cappuccino or perhaps even a third. There was still the look of pain on her round face, almost like a bruise. “You find anything in it?”
“Just a reference to someone called B. She neve
r mentioned him?”
“Never. But he was probably the guy she’s been seeing lately.” She frowned, squeezing her memory. “I can’t remember any of the guys she brought home, none of their names started with a B. There was a Charlie and a Roger and a Raul—he was South American. They were all bums, fly-by-nights or in the morning, but she couldn’t see that and I never told her.”
“Well, it’s too late to tell her now. I’ll send a policewoman out here to go through her things again. If you think of anything that might help, ring me.” He dropped his card on the table. Then he said, as he might to Claire in five or six years’ time, “Be careful with your men, Gina.”
She smiled wearily, wryly. “What men?”
He left her then, went out to the Commodore; sure enough, there was another parking ticket stuck behind one of the wipers. There were also two splashes of bird-crap on the bonnet. Grey Bombers and their tickets were not universal; but birds were everywhere, always haunting him. If he took the Commodore to Antarctica, the penguins would be sure to leave their frozen mark on it.
III
Russ Clements was already back at Homicide waiting for him, cleaning out his murder box, a cardboard shoe box, of last week’s homicide and making room for this week’s bits and pieces that might add up to incriminating evidence. So far there was very little.
“We went right through the apartment building, but came up with nothing. There’s only six permanent residents—the rest of the flats are company ones, used by company staff or visiting freeloaders. Nobody heard any shot, nobody saw Mardi Jack—the other two flats on that floor are also company ones. Andy Graham had a look at the roof of that building in Kent Street. Someone had been up there—there was a half-eaten sandwich and a Coke can.”