The Easy Sin

by Jon Cleary

  Malone grinned. “How tightly?”

  Unexpectedly she smiled; it changed her whole face, made her very attractive. “It was nothing serious . . . He had Kylie. But now and again one thing would lead to another . . . You know how it is—” She looked at Sheryl, not at the old man beside her. “Basically, just one-night stands.”

  “Here amongst the work-stations?” said Malone.

  “No. Up till yesterday the work-stations were in operation twenty-four hours a day. He'd take me home . . .”

  “Did he hold hands with any of the other women on the staff?”

  “I don't know. He might have . . . And that's all I'm going to tell you. Here comes Kylie. Don't tell her.”

  “You talking about me?” said Kylie as she reached them.

  “Only sympathetically,” said Sheryl, reacting quicker than Malone. “You must be terribly hurt by what's happened to Errol.”

  “Oh, I am,” said Kylie, and sounded as if she might also be pleased. “What's going to happen to you, Louise?”

  “Oh, I'll be okay,” said Louise, settling back into her chair. “In this game you're always ready to jump. It's the nature of it.”

  “Basically,” said Malone and then from another age asked, “Don't you ever think of long-service leave and superannuation?”

  “What are they?” she said, but gave him the pleasant smile again.

  IV

  Darlene hung up the phone and stepped out of the phone-box into the glare of the Sutherland street. She put on her dark glasses and stepped under the shade of a shop awning. She only knew this southern suburb from passing through it on the way down to the bush cottage. She was a stranger here.

  “We've got to get right away from where we usually are,” her mum had said. “We don't make any calls from anywhere near home. I dunno whether they can trace phone calls, but we're not gunna take any chances. Don't use your mobile.”

  Shirlee had organized them all, right after breakfast. First, she had spoken to Phoenix, who always wanted to argue: “You go back up to Hurstville and check in at Centrelink, tell ‘em you're still looking for a job. Then go and bank your dole cheque—”

  “Ah shit, Mum—”

  “Wash your mouth out,” she said, washing dishes.

  “Well, for Crissakes, Mum, we're gunna be rich—why the fuck—why the hell've I gotta worry about my dole cheque? Or fuck—or Centrelink? I'm not innarested in a job now.”

  “We don't arouse suspicion, that's why. So none of the nosy neighbours back in Hurstville can talk—”

  “Mum,” said Corey, lolling back in a chair at the breakfast table, “why d'you think anyone's gunna suspect us? You think they got guys out there, watching Pheeny don't turn up at Centrelink?”

  “As for you,” said his mum, the general, “you be certain, you go back to town, you walk around like you got a sore back. Men on workers' compo, the insurance companies, they got private investigators watching you like hawks. I seen it on TV a coupla months ago.”

  Corey worked for a haulage company as its chief mechanic. A week ago he had conveniently strained his back and had gone to a doctor, recommended by one of his workmates, who, for the right consideration, would give a death certificate to a glowing-with-health gymnast.

  “How long we gunna give ‘em to make up their minds to pay the ransom?”

  “Four, five days, a week at the most. They're gunna bargain. I been reading about Big Business, them takeover deals. They bargain for weeks. They do something, I dunno what it means, it's called due diligence.”

  “Mum,” said Darlene, putting on her face, looking at it in her vanity mirror, wondering what she would look like when she was a million dollars richer, “this isn't big business. It's a ransom, five million dollars. Petty cash to them.”

  “You been working too long at that bank,” said Corey. “You dunno what real money means.”

  She put away her mirror and lipstick. “We can't sit around here looking after His Nibs, feeding him, taking him to the toilet . . . I'll give ‘em a deadline. I'll call ‘em today, give ‘em till five o'clock. They want more time, I'll say till five p.m. tomorrow. That'll be the absolute deadline.”

  “And they don't come through?” said Corey. “What do we do then?”

  “We do him,” said Phoenix and nodded towards the front of the house.

  His brother and sister looked at him and his mother paused at the kitchen sink, a wet plate in her hand. “I think we'll have to talk to Chantelle.”

  Chantelle was their contact, the one who had told them where the money was. Or where they had thought it was.

  Now Darlene paused under the shop awning and wondered if she should go on into the city. She had phoned in first thing this morning to the bank and told her boss she was not well, but would be in at work tomorrow. Bloody women, had been his only comment and he had hung up in her ear.

  She was worried that the police were already on the case; but that was because of the stupid bungle, the killing of the maid. Sometimes she wondered at the intelligence of her brothers. Corey had all his marbles, but at times he could be as coldblooded as their mother. Pheeny was two or three marbles short and she wondered how he would keep his mouth shut after they had collected the ransom money and let Errol Magee go. But that was in the future, down the track, as Pheeny, who never thought beyond tomorrow, would say.

  She and her brothers had been petty crims ever since their early teens. They had never been encouraged to take up thieving; but neither had they been discouraged. Their mother, and their father when he wasn't doing time, had looked upon it as part of growing up, like acne, or in her own case, period pains. Darlene herself had never felt any conscience; if money or clothes or make-up was there to be taken, it was taken. She had never stolen from workmates, but that had been only because it was stupid. Her mother, in the only piece of advice she had given on how to get ahead in the world, had told her that.

  She had never gone in for breaking and entering, as Corey and Pheeny had, but that had been more laziness than conscience. Their father had used guns in his hold-ups, but Darlene had never thought much of him anyway, let alone loved him. When her mother had told her, almost off-handedly, that she was getting rid of their father, she hadn't enquired how or why. He would not be missed, she had told herself, and that had been true.

  Shirlee had supplemented the family budget with stolen credit cards, ATM cards and shoplifting. None of them had ever been caught, not even dumb Pheeny. Of course, Clyde had been caught and jailed half a dozen times, but that was to be expected; he had been a loudmouth and thought he had flair. Flair and the loud mouth had landed him in jail and, finally, in a grave.

  Shirlee had been firm about one thing: no drugs. She knew the money that was in drugs, but that had been her one moral principle: no drug dealing. And Darlene had always admired her mum for it, as if she were a volunteer aid worker. The family had gone on, making adequate but constant money to supplement what Darlene and Corey earned by working, and then had come this big opportunity.

  Now she walked back to the railway station. She passed a newsagent's and saw the billboard: E-Tycoon On Run. She smiled and a young man, passing her, paused and smiled back. She looked at him, puzzled, then gave him a glare that sent him on his way. She had had half a dozen boyfriends, but they had been only passing fancies, one or two good in bed but none of them a long-term prospect. She would wait and see what she could attract with a million dollars.

  In the meantime Chantelle needed to be consulted. She bought a ticket, went out on to the platform and waited for a train. A few minutes and then a loudspeaker announced: “The 10.48 for Central is running fourteen minutes late. Good luck.”

  She had enough sense of humour to smile at the thought of taking a train, no matter how late, to discuss a ransom of five million dollars.

  V

  “What did you do?” asked Lisa.

  “I should have done a lobotomy on him,” said Romy. “When he told me—” Her voice trailed of
f.

  The two women were having lunch in the pavilion restaurant in Centennial Park. They were surrounded by other diners: women, children, a few older men who looked like retirees: it was not a restaurant that catered for serious dining or serious deals. But both Lisa and Romy Clements looked serious.

  Romy picked at her crab salad. She was a good-looking woman edging towards that mark where her age and her measurements might complement each other. She had an air of quiet confidence and competence to her that made her a success in her job; but today she was a wife and it was a long time since Lisa had seen her so—not unconfident, but unsure.

  “Why are men so desperate for money?”

  “Come on, Romy. Not just men. Women, too. I don't think we were—not my generation.”

  “Nor mine.”

  They sat a moment in satisfied contemplation of their generation's lack of greed. Out beyond the windows of the restaurant the huge park, a green oasis, was restless with horse riders, cyclists, joggers and a swarm of small children shredding the air with hysterical laughter. At a nearby table a young mother was telling a three-year-old boy not to stuff his mouth so full. The boy looked at her uncomprehendingly, as if to tell her that was what mouths were for.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What can I do?” Romy chewed on a piece of crab. “The money's gone. It won't bankrupt us—but I felt like bankrupting him. Cutting his balls off with a scalpel.”

  Lisa smiled. “That would have—”

  “I know.” Romy, too, smiled; but wryly. “Cutting off my nose to spite my face . . . The irony is, this morning they brought in the girl from the Magee apartment, the one he killed. I did the prelim autopsy on her. That was just before Russ came out to the morgue and told me what he'd done. Then I called you. I hope you didn't mind?”

  Lisa reached across and pressed her friend's hand. The Dutchwoman and the German had bonded almost from the moment they had met, civilized Europeans amongst the Australoids. Both of them were better educated than their husbands, had more sophisticated tastes; yet both were happily married and each knew she had made the right choice. If either of them were nostalgic for their heritage, they never told anyone, not even each other.

  “I didn't say anything to Russ,” said Romy, “but my father was greedy.”

  Her father had died six months ago in jail, where he was serving a life sentence for murder. She rarely mentioned him, ashamed of him and his deed but bound to him by childhood love when he had been a doting father. She had gone four or five times a year to visit him in jail, coming back home and saying nothing to her husband. And Clements had never questioned her about the visits. It had been he and Malone who had arrested her father.

  “Russ isn't greedy,” said Lisa. “Not really.”

  “Yes, he is. Or was. He told me he wanted to make the money to set up a trust fund for Amanda, but I didn't believe him. And he knew I didn't.” She pushed her plate away from her. “Why am I eating? I can't taste anything.”

  “Sixty thousand dollars?” said Lisa. “Are you tasting the money?”

  Romy frowned at her. “What sort of question is that?”

  “I'm Dutch, darling—we're supposed to be careful with money. Not as careful as Scobie—but who is? If he lost sixty thousand dollars, you'd be doing a post-mortem on him at the morgue.”

  She looked out the big glass walls again. These 500 acres, “a countryside in the midst of a city,” as the originator of the park called it, were only five minutes walk from her house and she came here often on her own. She found isolation here, even amongst the riders, the joggers, the cyclists and the picnickers; her own space, as her daughters would have called it. She would sit beside one of the small lakes and watch the ducks bobbing their heads and the swans with their question-mark necks and sometimes doze off under the warm blanket of the sun and forget the world that, though it rarely touched her and the children, was where Scobie lived his working life. Where murder and greed and betrayal signposted the city in which they lived, where even this “countryside” had known murder to shred its peace.

  She said abruptly, surprising herself, “He's up for promotion.”

  “Who?” Romy was adrift in her own thoughts.

  “Scobie. He says Russ will probably take over Homicide.”

  It was Romy's turn to stare out through the glass walls. “Do you ever wish that they had some other job? Traffic or Fraud, something without murder to it?”

  “Often. But would you give up Forensic, cutting people up to see how and maybe why they died?”

  Romy took her time. “No-o.”

  “Then we put up with what we've got. You could have chosen much worse than Russ.”

  Romy pulled her plate back in front of her, picked at the crab salad again. “I still could cut his balls off.”

  A boy about seven paused by their table. “Whose balls?”

  “Yours. Get lost,” said Romy and started to laugh. Lisa joined in.

  Diners at other tables looked at them, two very attractive women sharing a happy day out on their own.

  At a far table a mother said to her seven-year-old son, “What did the lady say to you?”

  “She said she'd cut my balls off.”

  “Serves you right for speaking to strange women,” said his father. “Remember that, when you grow up.”

  He looked across the restaurant and wondered what sort of exciting sex life those two good-looking women led.

  “What are you looking at?” said his wife.

  “The ducks,” he said and went back to his long black coffee, which did nothing for the libido.

  3

  I

  MALONE AND Sheryl Dallen delivered Kylie Doolan back to the Magee apartment, where Paula Decker was waiting for them. Malone had phoned her before leaving Minto and she had sounded as if she was jumping at the chance to being involved in the Magee case again.

  “I'll move in with Miss Doolan,” she said, looking around the apartment like a prospective buyer. “My boss okayed it.”

  “Nobody asked me,” said Kylie.

  “Miss Doolan,” said Malone; his patience with women had been long learned, “this is for your protection. You may still be on the kidnap list.”

  She stared at him as if he were threatening her; then she abruptly turned and went into one of the bedrooms. It was the wrong room. A moment later she came out and went into the main bedroom.

  Malone looked at Sheryl and Paula Decker and shrugged. “Don't let her out of your sight, Paula. I'm going to make a call.”

  “The toilet's that way,” said Sheryl, nodding.

  “A phone call,” he said and saw her grinning. She was enjoying working with him and he with her, but he would have to see she kept her place. Maybe the word had already got around that he was on his way out of Homicide. The Police Service had always been secretive, even about official business, and the times had not changed.

  He went into the kitchen. The chalked outline of Juanita Marcos' body had been scrubbed out; the kitchen looked almost too spick and span, like a magazine advertisement, to have ever been used; all that was missing was the copper-bottomed saucepan that had killed Juanita Marcos. The ransom message on the kitchen's computer had not been scrubbed out, but it was almost irrelevant now, like last week's grocery list.

  He checked his notebook, dialled a Harbord number, a beach suburb north of the harbour. “Hello? Blackie? Inspector Malone.”

  “G'day, Mr. Malone.” Blackie Ovens had been a stand-over man, an iron-bar expert, who had worked for Jack Aldwych for almost fifty years, one way or another. He was now valet, butler, chauffeur and general handyman to the old retired criminal boss. “The boss ain't here. He goes in once a week to the office, to talk with Jack Junior.”

  “How is he, Blackie? I haven't seen him in almost a year.” He and the old crim were almost friends, as cops and criminals often are, but never social friends.

  “He's getting old, Mr. Malone. But ain't we all? He's really slowed
down, spends all his time reading. Reading books. He sent me out the other day to buy—whatyoucallthemthings? Bookmarks. Like he used to send me out once to buy bullets. Don't tell him I said that.”

  “You know me, Blackie. I've never grassed on a mate in my life.”

  “We're mates?”

  “We are now, Blackie. Phone him and tell him I'm coming. They still in the AMP Tower?”

  “Yeah. Up there with all the respectable ones.” He laughed, dry as wind on dust. “Makes you laugh, don't it?”

  “Not in Sydney, Blackie.”

  He hung up, left Sheryl and Paula Decker with Kylie Doolan and walked round the quay, along the colonnade under the expensive restaurants where IT millionaires once, and some still did, dined, and up the hill, past the Police Museum where he had once worked when it had been a police station, to the AMP Tower. This end of town was where most of the city's tallest buildings had been erected; buried beneath them, somewhere down there in the foundations, were the colony's beginnings. Jack Aldwych sat in his office forty-five floors and several basement floors above the ghosts of crims of long ago. The ghosts never bothered him, as Malone well knew.

  “Scobie, I'd begun to think you'd forgotten me!”

  “Never, Jack. I've got framed running sheets on you on my office wall. Hello, Jack,” he said to Jack Junior and shook hands with both men. “Still a great view from here.”

  “We deserve it,” said Aldwych, but his smile was self-mocking rather than smug.

  Landfall Holdings, which covered a multitude of companies and several sins, occupied the whole of this floor. This corner office, that of the managing director Jack Junior, had a view of the harbour that made the view from Magee's apartment look like a small postcard.

  The receptionist, an elegant brunette who was the granddaughter of one of Aldwych's old brothel madams, brought Malone coffee and gave him a smile that her grandmother would have charged him for.