Winter Chill. Jon Cleary
Malone sighed. ‘They’ll expect it. We never tell ’em anything, but they always write it down anyway.’
‘The media,’ said Zoehrer. ‘Bless ‘em, they think we can’t do without them.’
He sounded sincere, as a good lawyer should, but Malone had the distinct impression that the big man would wring everything he could out of the media.
The four men entered the Brame suite, doing their best not to look like a threatening phalanx. Vases, large and small, of flowers decorated the big main room, an intended welcome for the wife of the president of the ABA; no one had remembered to remove them and they now supplied the wrong note, like a laugh at a funeral. Even the bright airiness of the room itself seemed out of place.
Joanna Brame was sitting in a chair, staring out of the big picture window at the city skyline on the opposite side of the narrow strip of Darling Harbour. As she sat there the monorail train came into view and slid round the curve beneath her like a pale metal caterpillar. She turned her head as the four men came in, but did not immediately rise. When she did at last stand up she did so with slow grace; there was none of the stiff angularity that Malone knew shock could bring. She was dressed in a beige knitted suit that showed no untoward bulges in her figure; a brown vicuna coat had been dropped on a nearby couch. She was tall with short grey-blond hair, the patrician look that came of a special mix of flesh and bone, and large grey eyes that had a touch of hauteur to them; Malone had the quick thought that Mrs Brame would not suffer fools gladly, if at all. She was also someone who could hide her grief and shock like an accomplished actor.
‘Mrs Brame!’ Zoehrer strode across the room, hands outstretched. ‘I’m Karl Zoehrer, we met at the White House—’
She gave him her hand, held a little high, almost as if she waited for it to be kissed. ‘Of course, Mr Zoehrer.’ Then she looked at the other three men, waiting for them to introduce themselves.
Novack did so. ‘There are no words to express our feelings over what’s happened—’
‘No,’ she said and looked at Malone and Clements. ‘Is it too soon to ask who killed my husband?’
‘I’m afraid so, Mrs Brame. May we ask you some questions?’
‘Can’t the questions wait—?’ Zoehrer all at once had become a heavyweight guardian angel.
‘It’s all right.’ Joanna Brame held up a hand; Malone had seen judges call for quiet with the same gesture. She might not be a lawyer’s wife, you know what I mean, but she would hold a jurist’s view of things, she would ask questions as well as answer them. She had a low deep voice with some edge to it that, Malone guessed, usually got her what she asked for. ‘Where is my husband? His – body?’
‘At the city morgue.’ Malone saw an excuse to get her away from the interruptions and interference he felt sure would be coming from Zoehrer. ‘We’ll need you to identify him. It has to be done by a relative.’
‘Has his brother been informed?’
‘His brother?’ said Zoehrer. ‘He has a brother here at the convention?’
‘No, he’s Australian, not American. He is a partner in a law firm here in Sydney. Rodney Channing. You may know him, Inspector?’
Malone looked at Clements and left the answer to him. ‘We’ve heard of him, Mrs Brame. But he’s not in our line of work, he’s not a criminal lawyer. It’s a different name – are they stepbrothers?’
‘No, brothers.’ She reached for her coat; Novack helped her on with it. ‘Shall we go?’
‘I’ll come, too,’ said Novack. ‘Your husband is an American citizen, I take it?’
‘Naturalized. He was born here in Australia. Do you have a car? Thank you, Mr Zoehrer, I’ll be more hospitable when I’ve done this – this duty.’
‘Sure, sure.’ Zoehrer looked as if it was the first time in years he had been dismissed. ‘I’ll be taking over the convention – I’ll see there is someone to take care of you, Mrs Brame—’
She turned back in the doorway of the suite; Malone, immediately behind her, had to pull up sharply. ‘I’ll be perfectly all right, Mr Zoehrer. Thank you, though, for your concern.’
When Malone led the way out of the lift down in the lobby the crowd there had thinned out. There were still clusters of people around the lobby; they all turned their faces towards the lift as the doors opened. Even those with mobile phones grafted to their ears, the new street performers, the new clowns and mimes, said Hold it and stopped speaking to stare at the new widow. Cameramen and reporters swept in a wave towards Malone and the others, but he moved quickly towards them before they could get too close to Joanna Brame.
‘Not now. There’ll be a full statement later, but at the moment we have nothing definite.’
‘How’s Mrs Brame taking the murder?’ That was from a fresh-faced television reporter, not one of Malone’s favourite breeds.
‘C’mon, how would you take it if your girlfriend was murdered?’ It was not the sort of reply that the police manual recommended, but it stopped the questions long enough for Malone to make his escape.
Down on the lower level the doors opened and a gale blew in. Joanna Brame produced a brown beret from her coat pocket and jammed it on her head. A grey Cadillac with DC plates and a chauffeur was waiting for Novack. ‘Will you ride with us, Inspector?’
‘That’s my car over there, sir. You know where the morgue is?’ Novack shook his head. ‘Sorry, why should you? You’d better follow us.’
It was a ten-minute drive out to the morgue near Sydney University. When the attendant on the front desk phoned through to Romy’s office, she came out to greet them. ‘This is Dr Keller,’ said Clements and added with the pride that Malone had noticed since their marriage, ‘my wife.’
Joanna Brame and Novack hid any surprise they may have felt and made no comment. Which surprised Malone, whose experience of Americans was that they commented on everything.
‘I’ll have your husband brought out. If you would go into that room there?’
Malone ushered Joanna Brame into the side room where the body could be viewed through a window. As he touched her elbow he could feel the trembling in her arm and, involuntarily, he pressed the elbow sympathetically. She looked sideways at him. ‘I have done this before, Inspector. My first husband—’
Romy came into the small room as, on the other side of the window, a white-coated attendant wheeled in a trolley on which lay a green-shrouded body. A zip was pulled and Orville Brame’s face was exposed, the mouth open, the eyes shut. It would be Malone’s only glimpse of the murdered man and, as always, he wondered what events would pile on the death of this man about whom he knew nothing and would certainly never learn everything.
Joanna Brame drew a deep shuddering breath, took off her beret. ‘Yes, that’s my husband.’
‘Orville William Brame?’ said Romy.
‘Yes.’ She watched while the shroud was zipped up again and the trolley wheeled away; then she turned her back on the window and looked at Romy. ‘Will there be an autopsy or anything?’
‘It’s a homicide, so yes, there has to be. We have to take out the bullet that killed him.’ Romy’s voice was soft, sympathetic; there was no hint of officialdom about her, though she was the deputy-director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine. In her white coat and with her dark hair pulled back she looked severe, but for the compassion in her dark blue eyes. ‘We have to wait on HIV tests—’
‘HIV? AIDS tests? For my husband?’
‘It’s standard practice these days, Mrs Brame, for every autopsy. It’s no reflection on your husband.’
‘He would be amused. He always tried to