Murder Song

by Jon Cleary

  “Are there any of his ministers mixed up with you right now?”

  O’Brien looked at him sideways. “What makes you ask that?”

  “Who employed that hitman to try and kill you tonight?”

  O’Brien laughed, but there was no humour in him. “Scobie, they don’t go that far, not down in Canberra! They have other ways of getting rid of you.”

  “You told Danforth you had enemies. Who did you mean, then?”

  O’Brien took off his tie, took the gold links out of his cuffs. He was debating how much he should tell Malone; he had never told even Anita the full story. All his life, though he had never been lost for words, he had always held back something of himself; had, indeed, used the flow of words as lies, as camouflage. Yet now he felt the urge to tell the truth, as if there were some salvation in it: salvation from another bullet, the final one. But he suddenly wasn’t afraid of death: that was the truth, too. He had the fatalism of someone who knew he had left everything too late.

  He said carefully, “All this is off the record, okay?” Malone hesitated, then nodded. “Unless you’re going to tell me you once killed someone or had them killed.”

  “No, nothing like that. I’m not a killer, I draw the line at that. No, it was the people I was mixed up with—still am. When I first came back here I had enough capital to start a small merchant bank, the O’Brien Cossack. I made a mistake calling it that, but I named it after one of my most successful rock groups. They all think I’m a sabre-wielder.” He managed a weary smile. “Which I guess I am. But the name appealed to a few characters back in those early days.”

  “What sort of characters?” Malone all at once was hungry, was taking nuts by the handful from a bowl in front of him.

  “Villains, real villains. I had trouble getting clients at first—the old established banks did everything they could to muscle me out. They didn’t want competition, even though they knew that pretty soon the banking system would have to be opened up. Then these characters started coming to me. One or two of my executives introduced them to me.”

  “George Bousakis, for instance?”

  O’Brien paused a moment. “Let’s leave names out of it for the time being. These guys came to me and asked me to launder money for them. Not as bluntly as that, but I knew what they wanted. And I said yes, because by then I was getting desperate. That got the bank on its feet. Laundering money from drugs, selling arms, bank hold-ups, art thefts in Europe—you name it, we took the money in and cleaned it up for them.”

  “How?”

  “Investment here and offshore. Some of it went back to Europe, some into Hong Kong real estate.”

  Malone had slowly begun to like the man sitting across from him; now he felt anger and contempt sickening him. He said nothing, but what he thought and felt was plain on his face and O’Brien saw it.

  “Don’t start moralizing, Scobie. I’ve been doing that to myself for the past four months, trying to turn the clock back to—Christ knows when. Back to when I was a kid, I guess. Or maybe when I first went into the police academy. Some time, anyway, before I got greedy and didn’t care how I made my money. I’m not proud of it, any of it. Not any more.”

  Malone couldn’t help his cynicism: “You mean a good woman has made you see the light?”

  “She doesn’t know even the half of it. But yes, in a way. But it’s too late, sport, it’s much too late.” There was no self-pity in his voice; Malone was thankful for that at least. “I know it even more than she does.”

  Malone felt ill at ease on the subject of Anita Norval, as if he were peering in a window on something private. “Who are these characters? Mafia?”

  “Some of them. Some from the Triads. But most of them are just plain Aussie and Kiwi crims, bastards who’d bump you off as soon as look at you.”

  “They still investing through your bank?”

  “Some of them, but it’s their clean stuff. I mean no dirty money, stuff to be laundered, has come in for, I dunno, three or four years. I just let „em know the bank was under suspicion, that the Costigan investigators were looking into us.”

  The Costigan commission had been an enquiry into crime and corruption that had gradually widened and deepened its net till the catch had become embarrassing.

  “Were they looking into you?”

  “No, but it looked like a good way of easing out those characters, or anyway of stopping laundering their money. By then the bank was becoming respectable.”

  “So they still have deposits with you, I mean the money they originally gave you?”

  “Yes. They’re in bonds, in companies the bank recommended. That’s the trouble—the bonds are mostly junk now. They also don’t like the way they were bought out of a mining company I started.”

  “So they’ve been pressuring you?” O’Brien nodded; and Malone went on, “Anyone else? Any politicians mixed up in this?” Again O’Brien nodded. “Who?”

  “No names, Scobie. Not yet.”

  Malone wanted to ask if Arnold Debbs was one of the names, but he refrained. “You’re making it bloody difficult to keep you safe. And me, too. That bloke tonight meant to kill me when I chased him down into the garage.”

  O’Brien said quietly, “How did you feel about killing him?”

  “It was him or me—I didn’t think about it. I’ll start to think about it when I have to write my report. The Department’s pretty tough on any cop who’s trigger-happy. I don’t like using my gun.” He was calm enough now, but he knew the real sweat would begin later in the darkness just before he would fall asleep. He repeated, “But it was him or me.”

  “I’m sorry about that.” There was a note of genuine regret in O’Brien’s voice; it struck Malone all at once that he was looking for a friend, even a straight cop. “I’d have spilled the beans on everyone if he’d killed you.”

  He’s gone too far: Malone had believed him up till that point. “Yeah,” he said dryly. “I’d have appreciated that.”

  O’Brien had enough shame to grin. “Okay, no extravagant promises. But don’t get killed on my account, Scobie.”

  “I’ll try not to.” He took another handful of nuts and stood up. He was suddenly tired, though the hour was still early. “I’m going to bed. My wife will be calling me at seven—she and the two younger kids are leaving first thing for Queensland.”

  “I bought an island up there a coupla years ago, off the Barrier Reef. I was going to retire there. If I lived that long,” he added after a moment.

  Malone turned back at his bedroom door. “Brian, when you were a greedy-guts, when you were flat out gathering all this loot, did you ever give a thought for the poor buggers without any, the battlers?”

  “Only my old man. But like I told you, he didn’t want to know me.”

  “What about the other battlers?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, it looks as if they’re going to have the last laugh.” Malone tossed the last nut into his mouth. “Maybe it’s true that the meek will inherit the earth.”

  O’Brien, now at his own bedroom door, shook his head. “Only if there are no prior claims. If I don’t take it away from the battlers, some other bastard will. There are no saints in private enterprise, Scobie. Good-night.”

  III

  Lisa called Malone at seven o’clock next morning, right on time; when she named a time, one could set the GPO clock by her. She told him to be careful, told him she loved him, then put Maureen and Tom on.

  “Will you ring us each night at Noosa, Daddy?” said Maureen.

  “Can I make it collect? Righto, I’ll call you. Take care.”

  “You too, Daddy.” She sounded suddenly very grown-up. “It’s a bugger of a job being a policeman, isn’t it?”

  “Watch your language, kid. Is that what they teach you at Holy Spirit?”

  “It’s French. Je boo-ger, tu boo-ger . . .”

  Smart-arse kids: the American TV family sitcoms were breeding them in homes all over the globe. “You’
ve been listening to those cute little creeps on TV again.”

  “When can I start swearing?” said Tom on the extension phone.

  “When I retire as a cop. Take care of Mum, Tom. When you come back I’ll take you to the rugby league grand final.”

  “I’d rather go to the soccer.”

  “You’ll go to the rugby league.” What were sons for if they weren’t for going to football matches that their fathers followed?

  Malone hung up, sat for a moment hugging the thought of the children to himself. He looked at his watch: it was too early to call Claire at school. He would call her this evening, hope that she would not have heard the news of his narrow escape last night. But he knew it was a faint hope: her antenna was as sensitive as her mother’s.

  He went out to have breakfast with O’Brien. He had forgotten to order it last night, but O’Brien had anticipated that he was a man of healthy appetite in the mornings. There was cereal, juice, bacon and eggs and pork sausages, toast and honey and marmalade and tea or coffee. Malone, still hungry, sat down to enjoy the lot.

  “Just as well you have no kids from your marriages.”

  “Yeah. I’ve always thought W. C. Fields was right. Any man who hates kids can’t be all bad.”

  “My three would clobber you unconscious if they heard you. I think I might do it myself.”

  “Sorry.” Again there was the abrupt change in tone, the almost desperate plea for friendship. “Maybe when this is all over, I could meet them. They might change my mind.”

  “What about Anita? Is she a child-lover?”

  “I think so. We’ve never talked about it. She’s a grandmother, you know.” He shook his head in wonder. “It’s hard to believe, when you look at her. Ten years ago, if someone had told me I’d be in love with a grandmother, I’d have thought it was—was obscene.”

  “All those under twenty-five still think it’s obscene.”

  George Bousakis came to pick up O’Brien; the two of them left for Cossack House with two fresh security men. Malone went down with them in the lift, said goodbye to them as they got into a hire car with darkly tinted windows, and stepped out into the wind-swept street. He looked up at the buildings opposite, but could see no open window: Blizzard was not waiting for him there.

  He walked up to Police Centre, glad of the exercise in the cold gusty morning; August was blowing itself out in ambushing blasts that lurked at every corner. The walk and the wind revived him, as if last night had been blown out of him. He was an objective cop again. Well, almost . . .

  Clements was waiting for him with the report from Melbourne. “Gotti had a record, he’s been in trouble since he was fourteen. Breaking and entering, assault, armed hold-up—he got only two years for that one, the judge thought he’d been led astray by older elements. The Victorian boys have put ha-ha after that one. They’ve suspected him of two hits down in Melbourne, but they couldn’t pin „em on him.”

  “They know any of his connections?”

  “Mostly older crims down in Melbourne, none of „em Mafia. He was Italian, but he stayed away from them. He had a connection in Canberra, he went up there twice in the past month, and he’d been to Sydney three times in the past coupla months. The Melbourne guys missed his trip this time, they don’t know when he came up to Sydney.”

  “Why didn’t they contact us the other times?”

  “What for? He hadn’t done anything. Would we have been happy if they’d contacted us to keep an eye on all their crims who they thought might be up to something? We’d be out at Mascot watching every plane coming in from Melbourne.”

  Police co-operation was improving nationally, but there was still a hangover from not-so-long-ago when each of the State forces and the Federal force were suspicious of the others’ honesty and efficiency. Those, however, had been the days before crime had become organized, before the crims had given a new meaning to commonwealth.

  “Righto, put someone on to seeing when he arrived and where he stayed. Something may turn up.” But he wasn’t hopeful. “Give me twenty minutes or so while I write my report on last night, then we’ll go down and see what we can find out about Frank Blizzard.”

  “You heard from Sam Culp?”

  “No. These bloody theatrical types . . . I rang again this morning, but they told me he didn’t stay at his hotel last night. I dunno, maybe he’s shacked up somewhere with some soprano. We’ll meet him at the airport.”

  They drove down to Minnamook in an unmarked car, the windows up against the wind sweeping across the scrubby trees on top of the South Coast escarpment. Malone looked out at the grey-green featureless landscape, forbidding and secretive as the whole wide continent behind it; two hundred years, he thought, and all we’ve done is chipped away at the edges of it. Flat and sunbaked, it yet held more mystery than even the darkest jungle. Fantasy took hold of him as he half-dozed in the car’s warmth: Frank Blizzard was held there somewhere in the mystery.

  Going down the F5 freeway Clements carelessly let the car wind itself up above the 110 kilometres-an-hour speed limit; he was doing 125 when he saw the flashing lights of the highway patrol car in his driving mirror. He wound down his window and put his blue light out on the roof; at the same time he eased his foot off the accelerator. The highway patrol car flashed its lights again, then slowed down and dropped away.

  “It’s nice to see they’re doing their job,” Clements said with a grin.

  They dropped down off the escarpment, easing their way past the heavy coal trucks, their air brakes gasping, on their way down to the steelworks at Port Kembla. They skirted Wollongong, possibly the cleanest industrial city in the world, certainly in winter; the smoke from the steel mills blew almost horizontally out to sea, lying on top of the tall smoke-stacks like the splintered, broken half of a thick mast. An empty coal truck passed them going the other way, speeding like a runaway locomotive, building up momentum for the long climb up to the top of the escarpment.

  “The highway boys will get him,” said Clements smugly, his foot now innocent, their speed down to just below the limit.

  Twenty minutes later they turned off into Minnamook. It was half a dozen stores, all owner-run, and perhaps a couple of hundred houses, most of them modest but with two or three would-be mansions up on the southern bluff where the Minnamook River ran into the sea behind the spit of sand dunes and ocean beach. It was the sort of village one found all up and down the South and North coasts from Sydney, some of them a century or more old, but all of them now under threat from developers. So far Minnamook seemed to be safe from the development blight.

  Clements went into a newsagency and general store, came out and got back into the car. “That guy remembers Blizzard. He’s been here fifty years, he wanted to tell me his life story.”

  “Don’t we all?” But the garrulous were often the best source of what a cop wanted to know.

  “Blizzard delivered papers for him as a kid. He was an orphan, like I told you. His uncle is dead, but his auntie still lives here.”

  “I’d rather be dealing with his uncle.”

  “So would I. But Auntie it’s gotta be.”

  Elsie Blizzard lived in a small weatherboard house fronting on to the riverbank. When Clements and Malone pulled up, two uniformed men, both young, appeared out of a side-street.

  Malone introduced himself and Clements. “Does the old lady know we’re coming?”

  “I don’t think so, sir.”

  They were eager and intelligent, one eye on transfer to the Big Smoke, where pollution and corruption might get up their nose but where life was at least interesting. They had the naïveté of the ambitious innocent who had not yet begun to climb, who did not know that the rungs were greasy with other men’s disillusion. It did Malone’s heart good to listen to them.

  “Our inspector warned us about Blizzard and what you think he’s been up to. We’ve been here since nine o’clock and we haven’t seen anyone hanging around.”

  “Unless, of course, he�
��s in the house with his aunt,” said the officer who had first spoken.

  Malone had considered that possibility, but hadn’t mentioned it to Clements. He looked at the big man and saw that, if he had not done so before, he was certainly considering it now. He had taken his gun out of his holster and put it in the pocket of his raincoat, keeping his hand in the pocket.

  “One of you go around to the river side of the house,” said Malone. “If he comes out, challenge him. If he doesn’t stop, shoot.”

  “To kill?” The two young officers had looked at each other; then the first one had asked the question.

  “To kill,” said Malone and hated the thought that he might be ordering these young men to kill their first man. “Who’s going?”

  Again the young officers looked at each other, then the second one, stocky and ginger-haired, his bright blue eyes now clouded with the unexpected, said, “I’ll go, Reg.”

  He went off at once, as if to be gone before his will suddenly folded, vaulting the low fence of the house next door and disappearing up the far side of it. Malone looked at the other young man, a good-looking dark lad with thick straight brows and a mouth that looked more used to smiling than being pinched nervously as it was now.

  “What’s your name, Reg?”

  “Capresi, sir.”

  “Why did they send two junior constables?”

  “I guess they weren’t expecting any trouble, sir. There’s a demonstration on in the „Gong today, there’s a strike at the steelworks, and I guess they figured that was more important. Sorry, Inspector, maybe I shouldn’t have said that. But down here local issues come first, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure, I understand.” Malone didn’t look at Clements. He was angry at himself for not having stressed the seriousness of this visit to Minnamook. “All right, just stand behind your car. If anything happens when that front door opens, if there’s any gunfire, get on to your headquarters right away. I’ll want back-up here immediately, local issues or not. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Malone and Clements, the latter still with his hand in his raincoat pocket, walked up the concrete path between the small, neatly trimmed lawns and the winter-brown shrubs. They reached the blue front door and there Mrs. Blizzard met them head-on. She flung open the door and Malone and Clements instinctively stepped aside, one going one way, the other the other. Mrs. Blizzard looked at them in angry puzzlement.