Winter Chill. Jon Cleary
tore at their hair so that they looked, to a passer-by, like mourners who had gone wild in their grief. Joanna Brame pulled on her beret again and Malone settled his pork-pie hat on his head. Novack evidently used a strong hair-spray, for his hair was set like concrete.
‘You said you wanted to ask me questions, Inspector. Could it wait till this afternoon, say five o’clock? I’m really not in any fit condition—’
Malone hated any sort of delay in an investigation, but there would be others he would have to question. ‘Five o’clock then, Mrs Brame.’
‘Thank you, Inspector.’ Novack took her arm and led her across to the Cadillac. He opened the rear door for her, but she paused and looked back at Malone. The wind whipped away her words, but he thought she said, ‘I may be able to help you.’
3
Driving back to the Hat Factory, which had indeed once been a hat factory turning out trilbies, fedoras, even bowlers once upon a time, and now housed Homicide, Clements said, ‘Have you got the feeling there’s a thousand lawyers sitting on your back?’
‘I hope they’re not all like that cove Zoehrer. I’ve just placed him. He’s one of those big damages lawyers from California – Melvin Belli’s another one. They invented that palimony thing. The way you used to play around, it’s a wonder you didn’t cop a palimony suit.’
‘You know none of the girls ever stayed long enough. But let’s drop that, I’m a married man now. So how do we handle this Brame case?’
‘We’re spread thin. Keep Phil and Peta on it and maybe we can spare John Kagal. I’ll load the rest of the calendar on to the other fellers. At least three of the cases should be wound up this week or Greg Random will want to know why.’ Random was the Chief Superintendent, Regional Crime Squad, South Region. ‘I suppose we’ll have to officially let the New York PD and maybe the FBI, I dunno, we’ll have to let them know what’s happened. I’ll check it out with the Consul-General. In the meantime …’
‘Yes?’
‘Put Peta on to questioning Zoehrer and any other of the lawyers who might give us some light on why Brame was done in.’
‘She’s a bit young – inexperienced, I mean—’
‘She’s all right, Russ. And she’s better-looking than you or me. All these lawyers haven’t come all this way just to discuss the law. Junkets like this one, for lawyers or doctors or politicians, they’re an excuse for a tax-deductible holiday. A young lawyer on holiday, who’s he going to let his hair down for – a good-looking sort like Peta or you and me?’
‘You’re sexist.’
‘Only in a good cause.’
Back at his office, in the glass-walled cubicle that passed for the Homicide commander’s domain, he ran through the computer sheets that had been neatly laid on his desk. There had been last-minute hitches in two of the murder cases; the other three on the list would be wrapped up and sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions by the end of the week. The Brame homicide looked as if it would get the full-scale investigation that the Americans would expect. It was going to be a round-the-clock job.
He reached for the phone to tell Lisa he would not be home for dinner. The phone at Randwick had rung four times before he remembered she would be at the dentist’s. He waited for the answering machine to take over, but when it came on all he got was Maureen’s voice saying, ‘This is—’ Then her voice cut out and he knew the machine had gone on the blink again, as it had twice in the past month. It was supposed to have been fixed and he wondered why Lisa, usually so meticulous in running the household, had neglected to call a technician.
He flipped through his small personal notebook, found the number of their dentist. ‘May I leave a message for Mrs Malone? This is her husband.’
‘Mr Malone, your wife isn’t here.’
‘Oh, she’s left already?’
‘She hasn’t been in at all. She had no appointment—’
He thanked the receptionist and hung up. He sat back in his chair, puzzled and a little angry: why had Lisa lied to him? Was she planning some surprise? Then a memory came back, like a spasm of pain, and he felt a hollow sense of dread. Years ago, before any of the children were born, he and she had been in New York on a round-the-world honeymoon financed by a lottery win; an extravagance, one of his last, that he had insisted upon. Lisa, suffering a lost filling, had left their hotel and gone looking for a dentist. She had been kidnapped along with the wife of the then Mayor of New York and held to ransom by terrorists. It was ridiculous that history could repeat itself, but the agony of that search for her came back like new pain.
Then reason, the hook on which hope hangs, sometimes weakly, took over. Lisa had not gone to the dentist. So where had she gone and why had she lied to him, something she had never done before? He trusted her so absolutely that the thought did not enter his mind that she might have gone to meet another man. But where was she?
1
He got her at home at four o’clock in the afternoon. ‘Where have you been? I’ve called half a dozen times – you said you were going to the dentist’s, I tried there—’ There was silence at the other end of the line. ‘Darl, for Chrissake, what’s going on?’
Something that sounded like a long sigh came down the line. ‘I’ll tell you when you come home—’
‘Tell me now. I’ll probably be late – not before seven or eight, anyway—’
‘No, I’ll tell you when you come home.’ There was a pause, then she said, ‘I love you,’ and hung up.
He put the phone back in the cradle and looked up to see Clements standing in the doorway. ‘You look as if you’ve been talking to one of the Yank lawyers. Mr Zoehrer?’
‘No, Lisa.’
‘Oh?’ Clements waited for further comment, but when none came he went on, ‘Ballistics just called. They haven’t got the bullet that killed Brame yet. The morgue’s snowed under, dead ’uns everywhere.’
‘The natural place for them.’ His mind was still on Lisa.
‘You want me to come with you to see Mrs Brame?’
‘Who else?’
‘I thought you might prefer Peta. The good-looking one.’
They left half an hour later to go to the Novotel. As they were leaving the big main room Peta Smith, taking off her trenchcoat and her hat, came in. ‘Nothing, Scobie, nothing worthwhile. Brame was at a reception at the Darling Harbour convention centre last night, but no one noticed anything out of the ordinary about him, I mean how he behaved. Nobody remembers seeing him after eleven o’clock, when someone saw him in the hotel coffee lounge with a guy.’
‘Who?’
She shrugged. ‘Who knows? Like I told you, there are a thousand lawyers in town – most of ’em are strangers to each other. Except the guys at the top.’
‘Are they being co-operative?’
She smiled. ‘I’ve had four invitations to dinner, six to drinks and two to mind your own business.’
Malone looked at Clements. ‘Could you have done as well? Thanks, Peta. Get Andy Graham to help you set up the flow charts. Don’t work late.’
‘I wasn’t going to. I accepted one of the dinner dates. That okay?’
‘Just so long as you feed it into the running sheets.’ But he grinned. ‘Not with Karl Zoehrer, I hope? I don’t want him suing Homicide for palimony.’
When he and Clements drove into the Novotel at a few minutes to five, the lawyers were filtering back from their afternoon