by Jon Cleary
“Did she use drugs?” The kids could often be traced through the dealers.
“I never saw her on anything. No, I don’t think so. Can we go now?”
Malone looked at Guyatt. “You want them, Sid?”
The burly detective looked at the two with distaste. “I don’t think so. We got enough of our own around here without bringing in outside trash.”
“Up yours,” said Damien and led Billy away down the street, the short fat youth putting on his glasses again, both of them, Malone mused, going back to a life that didn’t merit being mirrored.
After a look at the derelict houses, a cursory search that depressed both men, Malone and Clements left, promising to let Guyatt know if they came up with anything on the murder. After all, it had occurred on his turf and would go down on his running sheet. No detective liked a running sheet where no bottom line was drawn. That was the accountancy of crime.
III
Aldwych brought a basket of fruit to Cormac Casement; Shirl had nurtured a few social graces in him. He also brought the gold watch, neatly encased in a small box. “Don’t ask me where I got it, Cormac.”
Casement took the small box with his bandaged hands and passed it to Ophelia to open it. She was impressed: “Jack, I don’t know how you managed it, but thank you so much. When you called, I had no idea this was what you were bringing . . .”
Aldwych had never been invited to the Casement penthouse; but he had not been embarrassed at inviting himself this afternoon. Most of his life had been a series of self-invited visits: to petrol stations early in his career, then to banks, to anywhere where money could be picked up at the point of a gun. Today, however, he had no gun and had not come looking for money.
“If the cops notice you have it back, Cormac, you can tell „em where you got it. No, on second thoughts, only tell Scobie Malone. Don’t tell any reporters. Especially don’t mention my name. I wouldn’t wanna embarrass you.”
All three smiled, unembarrassed. Casement, over the last ten years, had met white-collar criminals, ones he had recognized long before their crimes had become public; they may not have been as deadly in dealing with their victims as this old man opposite him, but they had been just as ruthless and evil. Ophelia had known no criminals, but she had lived her life without ethical restraint; she also had a fond respect for anyone successful. And there was no doubt that Jack Aldwych had been successful.
“The briefcase?” asked Casement.
“No luck there, I’m afraid.”
Casement put the question a little hesitantly: “Did you find the kids who stole it? Who did this to me?” He held up his hands.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Aldwych looked at Ophelia. “Do you wanna listen to us talking business?”
“Yes,” she said easily, taking one of the bandaged hands in hers.
Casement smiled at Aldwych. “Jack, I don’t share my business problems with her, but this is our problem. You’re not really going to talk business, are you?”
Aldwych sat back in his chair. Though he could well afford it, he did not live in surroundings as luxurious as these. Ophelia, it seemed, spent her husband’s money even more lavishly than her younger sister spent Jack Junior’s. This big living room was filled with a mixture of European and Oriental antiques; somehow the mix did not look like a badly tossed salad. Even the pictures on the walls seemed to complement each other: a 15th century Japanese print by Motonobu did not clash with a winter landscape by Monet. Aldwych knew none of the artists nor recognized any of the furnishings, but he had somehow acquired a sense of taste. He had, for instance, never had a man killed in front of his wife and children. Certain things went well in the eye, others did not.
“Yes and no, Cormac. I’m here to protect my son.”
Both Casements looked at him in puzzlement. “Jack? Why, what’s he got to do with this?” Casement held up his hands again: they had become Exhibit A.
“Nothing. But things may be connected in all this mess and I wanna make sure Jack is right out of it.”
“Are you playing detective? Jack, I don’t mean to be offensive, but I find that amusing. You, an old retired—” He paused.
“Crim?”
“All right, if you think it fits. An old retired crim playing detective.”
“Cormac, who better than me would know a criminal act? Don’t let’s pussyfoot around. I’m being careful with my language here, Ophelia.” He grinned at her, as he had at Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine and other old molls. “I know where to look, where to ask. How d’you think I got that back for you?” He nodded at the watch, now on the ormolu-legged table beside Ophelia. “I want to know what you knew about young Rob before he was done in.”
A less observant man might have missed Casement’s caution; or was it that Ophelia came in before her husband could reply? “Jack, we knew nothing of Rob’s doings before he was—was done in. We would have him here occasionally at our parties, but only because he was young and good-looking and he’d bring a pretty girl with him. He was—decoration, if you like.”
“He never talked business with you, Cormac?” His disregard of Ophelia was almost bluntly rude. “Jack tells me Rob came to him for a loan a week after they met. Did he ever put the bite on you?”
Casement smiled at the old slang; banks now had portmanteau phrases for the same thing but still finished up bitten. “Not me, no.”
“You, Ophelia?” He tried to give her a kind look, but his eyes were too old and experienced.
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. She patted her husband’s arm. “Relax, darling. I gave him nothing.”
She could lie with all the gravity of a fallen angel; though long removed from it, she came of stock that saw no sin in infidelity. Her mother’s female deity had been Queen Marie, though that high-spirited consort had been half-English, half-Russian and her affairs had never been as numerous as gossip said they were. Ileana’s own affairs had been tolerated by Adam, since she tolerated his; they knew that their passion for others never equalled their passion for each other. It was just that they enjoyed the spice of variety. Ophelia felt the same way, but she had never attempted to explain it to Cormac, he was too Protestant Irish for that.
“Jack,” said Casement, “I don’t see how anyone could link Jack Junior to all this.”
“Mud sticks. Every reporter in town knows I’m his father. They don’t mention it in their columns, they’re afraid I might pay „em a visit. Which I might. Al Capone, you remember him?”
“Not personally,” said Casement and smiled; he enjoyed the company of this old—old crim. “Did you ever meet him?”
“I didn’t get to the States till after the war, he was dead by then. Nineteen forty-seven, I think he died. He was King of Chicago,” he explained to Ophelia, adding with a smile, “Someone once called me King of Sydney. There was no comparison. But Capone, he said something once. He said a kind word sometimes gets things done. A kind word and a gun always gets things done. Something like that. Anyway, it’s true.”
“You still carry a gun?” said Ophelia.
“Not in years. But I call on a feller in his office who’s written something nasty, you think he’s gunna know whether I’m carrying a gun or not? Sometimes it pays to have a reputation. Except when they try to pass it on to your son.” He looked at her with suddenly sad eyes. “Shirl, that was the wife, she’d come back to haunt me.”
Casement said quietly, “I think I can assure you that young Jack will never be linked to any of this mess. I’ll talk to Derek about it.”
“No, leave him to me. I do my own dirty work, Cormac.”
“It won’t be dirty work—”
“It could be. I don’t think this is your kind of game.”
IV
At four o’clock that afternoon Malone was sitting in his office catching up on that morning’s Herald. The Balkan stew was becoming bloodier; Boris Yeltsin had just been re-elected captain of a ship that was on the rocks; South Africa s
tood point-blank in front of the gun; here at home the Prime Minister, pushing for a republic, was charged with tearing apart the fabric of the nation. The metaphors spun like balloons in a whirlwind.
It was a relief when John Kagal came in and said bluntly, “Another one, Scobie.”
Malone suffered the theatrical pause as Kagal stood in the doorway; he just sat and waited. Kagal, he had heard, had once played Hamlet in a Macquarie University Players’ production: Yorick’s skull must have grown hair during some of Hamlet’s pauses. Kagal at last went on:
“Peta and I traced that secretary who worked for Pinatubo. Her name was Maryanne DaLuca, she lived in a flat out at Petersham. We went out there, found her mailbox still had last week’s letters in it. The neighbours said they hadn’t seen her since last Thursday morning. There was no deadlock on the door, so Peta and I picked the Yale lock—”
Malone didn’t dare ask. Kagal would give a short lecture on how to pick a lock and the point of his report would be delayed even further.
Kagal came suddenly to the point: “She was lying on the living room floor with two bullets in her. Doc Boon, he’s one of the young guys from the morgue, reckoned she’d been dead two or three days at least. That puts it Friday, probably. We’re doing the same as on that kid out at Redfern, soon’s they’ve checked for HIV they’ll extract the bullets and hand them to the on-call Ballistic guy. My bet is the same gun killed all three—the guy in the morgue, the kid at Redfern and Maryanne. Wouldn’t you?”
Malone offered no opinion. “What about the other girl?” He looked at his notes. “Teresita something?”
“The employment agency knew nothing about her. But I checked with a contact I have in the Tax Office, we were at university together.” There had been a commotion last year when it was discovered that several government department officers had been peddling information to private investigators, credit agencies and other outsiders who thought that freedom of information meant anything could be bought so long as the price was right. Kagal smiled: “It saved time. Going through the proper channels—well, you know, proper channels tend to get flooded, right?”
“Sure. Irrigate where you can,” said Malone, not to be outdone. “So where is Teresita and who is she?”
“Her PAYE monthly statement from Lava Investments and her tax file shows she is Teresita Romero, she lives in Double Bay in Longmuir. That’s a pretty expensive block of apartments—my uncle lives there. Not bad accommodation for a girl on four hundred bucks a week take-home pay. So I got on to another mate in Corporate Affairs this time and he gave me the home address of Mr. Belgarda, the managing director of Pinatubo. Same address as Miss Romero. The plot thickens, eh?”
“My very thought.” Malone remained straight-faced. “When will we know about the bullets?”
“It usually takes about four hours for the HIV test, the blood has to go all the way out to Westmead. I asked them to get a move on, but you can’t hurry doctors or pathologists, you know that. They move to their own waltz.”
Malone couldn’t top that one; but he’d try one of his mates: “I’ll ring Doc Keller, she has clout and can hurry things along.”
“Is it true she and Russ are engaged?”
“I don’t think they’ve announced it. You look puzzled?”
Kagal nodded, smiled. “Well, you couldn’t meet a nicer guy than Russ. But, well, I’d never have said he was the doc’s type, would you?”
“You never know with women. They move to their own waltz.”
You mean-minded bastard: meaning himself. But Kagal could take a joke against himself; he raised an approving thumb. “Touché . . . So what do we do? I mean about Belgarda?”
“Put out an ASM on him. Tell Immigration to check for him and Teresita on any international flights, ask the Feds to keep a lookout for him at any of the airports in case he tries to go interstate. He comes from Manila and I don’t want him heading back there before we can ask him some questions. If you tag him, let me know at once, no matter what time it is.”
“What about Redfern?”
“I’ve got Sid Guyatt working on that with his blokes. They’re looking for the dead kid’s girlfriend. She’s half-Asian, her name’s Kim. She shouldn’t be too hard to pick up, unless she’s gone interstate.”
Kagal stood up. “Scobie, what would happen if we never solved these cases?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“It’s a can of worms . . .”
Malone took his own long pause; he could never play Hamlet, but he might have played one of the grave-diggers. Digging his own grave . . . “It’s a can of worms, all right. But we’d never be able to keep the lid on it, the politics are too slippery. Some day when you’ve got pips on your shoulders and silver braid on your cap, you’re going to appreciate that fighting crime is only half the battle for us cops. Politics is Public Enemy Number Two.”
Kagal took the advice soberly. “It’ll never change?”
“Not unless human nature changes. And I’ve given up on that score.”
When Kagal had gone without any further remark, he sat on, uncomfortable with his pessimism.
Then he picked up the phone and called Romy. She promised to do what she could to hurry the HIV tests. At five-thirty, as he was getting ready to leave, she called back: “Westmead have just called. The boy in the Redfern case, he’s HIV-positive. The girl, Maryanne DaLuca, is clean. I’m taking the bullets out of them now and they’ll be with Ballistics in half an hour. Russ is with me, he and Jason James from Ballistics, he’ll bring them back. You want to speak to him?”
“No, tell him I’ll wait for him over at Ballistics. Thanks for your help, Romy. I love you.”
“I love you, too. But I’m spoken for.” She laughed and hung up. Standing over an HIV-positive corpse, extracting bullets from it, she sounded happier than she had sounded in two years. That was what love could do for her.
He rang Lisa to tell her he would be late for dinner—“Again?” she said. “How did I guess?”—and walked across to Police Centre and took the lift up to Ballistics on the fifth floor. Clarrie Binyan was waiting for him, unlocking the security door, then locking it behind him. There were eight thousand confiscated weapons on this floor, an arsenal of temptation that Binyan guarded as if they were sacred relics.
He was looking older, darker; Malone wanted to ask if Aborigines got darker as they grew older, but he refrained. He and Binyan chi-acked each other with racist jokes, but there was a line beyond which neither of them ever ventured. Binyan’s mother was a Koori from the east coast tribes and he often referred to her with affection; but he never mentioned his white father. The line was faint, like a finger trace in sand, but Malone never went beyond it. Binyan, this evening, certainly looked older and tired.
He led Malone into a side room where the forensic comparison macroscope was mounted. It was German, made by Wild Leitz, and it was Binyan’s boast that, by comparison, it made an eagle’s eye myopic. He sat Malone down on the stool in front of it, then placed two bullets under the macroscope.
“These came from the gun that shot the feller out at the morgue. The fired cartridge cases are nine-by-eighteen millimetres, not the usual ammo we see in here. You mentioned the yakuza—some of them use a Russian piece, a Makarov. It fires this calibre and it takes a silencer. It could be the make of gun we’re looking for.”
A phone on the bench beside the macroscope rang and Binyan picked it up. “Okay, send them up.” He hung up. “It’s Russ and Jason. I’ll let them in.”
He came back in a minute or two with Jason and Clements, who dropped two plastic envelopes on the bench. “Two slugs from Bugler, the kid out at Redfern. Two from Maryanne DaLuca. Seems our killer can’t resist letting off that second shot, just to make sure.”
Binyan took Malone’s place at the macroscope, ran the three sets of bullets beneath it, then repeated the process. At last he stood up. “Same gun. Same pattern, two bullets into each victim. So it’s the same feller, I’d say.
”
Clements was leaning with his haunches against the bench; he bit his lower lip, his substitute for the furrowed brow. “What puzzles me, if he’s used a gun to kill these three, why didn’t he use a gun on Rob Sweden and Kornsey—Bassano, I mean? He stuck them in the neck, a surgical job.”
“We don’t know it was the same man,” said Malone.
Clements nodded. “That’s true. But if it’s not, what’ve we got—a team? And what’s the connection between all the victims?”
Malone took his time sorting out the answers: “It looks as if Maryanne got hers because she knew too much about Pinatubo.”
“There’s no evidence of that.” Clements was playing defence attorney, an unusual role for him.
“We don’t have much evidence on anything, do we? We know young Sweden was up to no good. But we don’t know what his killer, or killers, had against him. Bassano—well, the Mafia could have caught up with him and ordered his killing. Frank Minto, he probably did no more than just get in their way.”
“The attack on Casement?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe it’s totally unrelated. What are you grinning at, Clarrie?”
Binyan ran his hand through his greying curly hair. “I’m just glad I’m not dealing with humans. Bullets and guns, they’ve got their characteristics, but in the end their motive boils down to one thing— they’re designed to kill. It makes our job so much simpler, we don’t have to worry about personality or psyche or all the rest of it. But you get me the gun that fired these—” he gestured at the bullets on the bench “—and I’ll give you enough evidence to nail the feller who used the gun. Then you can belt the shit outa him and find out the connection between all the murders.”
Malone looked at Clements. “You see how they’d do it in the tribe? Belt the shit out of him. We’re too civilized.”