Dark Summer. Jon Cleary
was not insensitive. ‘You want me to drive you home?’
‘I’ll get a cab, charge it to petty cash.’ He was a tight man with his own money. One of the heroes in his pantheon was J. Paul Getty, the oil billionaire who charged his house-guests for their phone calls. ‘If Doc Keller has anything interesting to tell you this evening, ring me at home.’
As soon as he stepped out into the street, his jacket over his arm, the heat hit him, threatening to fry him on the pavement. He squinted in the glare, thinking perhaps he should start wearing sunglasses, as Lisa was always insisting he do; then out of the bright yellow furnace appeared a cab, a miracle at this time of day on a holiday. A true-blue Aussie egalitarian, he got into the front seat beside the driver, a young Chinese student.
‘You’re a cop?’ the driver asked warily, eyes slanting sideways at his passenger.
‘Do I look like one?’
He was only six months in from Singapore, but already he had the Australian nose. ‘It’s not so much what you look like . . .’
‘You mean we have a smell to us? Relax –’ as the cab wavered ‘ – I’m not going to pinch you for insulting an officer. Where do you come from? Singapore? What are the cops like there? Can you smell them, those in plainclothes?’
The driver was frank, a most un-Chinese habit. ‘I was a student, you had to learn to recognize them. Otherwise you finished up as a guest of Mr Lee. At least you police here aren’t political.’
‘Thank you,’ said Malone, but wondered how many of the native students would agree.
Before he got out of the cab he paid the exact fare, sorting out the change in his pocket; tipping was un-Australian, despite the propaganda of immigrant waiters, and in Malone’s case it was unheard-of. The Chinese driver, studying for an economics degree, was philosophical. ‘You want a discount for cash?’
‘Funny bugger. I’ll get you deported.’
The cab drove off and Malone stood on the pavement and looked at his home, his castle gift-wrapped by Physical Evidence blue-and-white-checked tapes. Somehow, the tapes were an obscenity, like insulting graffiti; countless times he had stepped over them going into other people’s homes and he had not been unaware of how they changed the aspect of a house or an apartment. This, however, was different: it was, as Greg Random had said, too close to home.
A young policeman, in shirt sleeves, put on his cap and came along to Malone from the marked police car standing at the kerb. ‘I’ve been told to stand by, Inspector. Everyone’s gone.’
‘You know if they had any luck with the neighbours? Anyone see anything?’
‘Not as far as I know. The lady next door, Mrs –’ he took his notebook from his pocket ‘ – Mrs Cayburn said she heard a car draw up during the night. She doesn’t know what time it was, but it was still dark.’
Malone looked up and down the street. This was one of the few streets still left in Randwick that had no apartment blocks; two rows of older, solid houses on their sixty-foot lots faced each other across the roadway. The houses had a respectability about them; they had been built in a time when respectability had a value. Some, like Malone’s, had been built at the time of Federation, at the turn of the century; the rest had been built during or just after World War I. Up till now, as far as Malone knew, none of the houses had known murder or wife-beating or scandal; at least none of them had called for blue and white taping to be stretched around them.
‘You’ve got a visitor, sir.’ The young officer was obviously a surfie when off-duty; he was all mahogany, in colour and in muscle. On such a day, he should be down amongst the big ones, riding them on his board. Instead, here he was riding herd on a house where all the excitement was finished. ‘An old guy, said he was your father.’
‘You checked him?’ Why did he think that the old guy might be Jack Aldwych? He was becoming edgy again, the Crime Scene tapes were binding too tightly.
‘He wasn’t much help, sir. Said he’d never had to identify himself before to get into his son’s place. I asked him for his driving licence, but he said he didn’t drive, why’d he want a licence? Finally, I got him to show me his pension card. He’s an obstreperous old coot, isn’t he?’ He looked cautiously at Malone as he offered the opinion.
Malone grinned and relaxed. ‘That’s my old man. He hates cops.’
He left the young cop with raised eyebrows and the unspoken question and went into the house. Con Malone was sitting at the kitchen table, a glass of beer in front of him. The old man lived in the past, pottering around in his bigotry and old habits. He had never learned to appreciate beer from a can, he had always drunk it from the bottle or a glass and he wasn’t going to risk cutting his lip on a flaming piece of tin and spoiling the taste of the beer with blood.
‘Why didn’t you ring us?’ he demanded as soon as Malone came into the kitchen. ‘I had to hear it on the wireless, one of my granddaughters finds a dead man in the swimming pool.’
‘I was going to ring you, Dad –’ He had no excuse, really. He had been too concerned with the assault on his own feelings and those of Lisa and the kids. ‘How’s Mum?’
‘Out of her flaming mind with worry about the kids. About you and Lisa, too,’ he added. But Malone knew his mother: she had never learned to show her love for him, her only child, but she shouted her love for her grandchildren like a Catholic Holy Roller. ‘Lisa rang her and she’s gone out to Vaucluse, to the Pretorius place.’
Malone once again recognized Lisa’s talent for diplomacy. She would have known that Brigid Malone would have resented being left out of the comforting of the children. Brigid was not a mean-spirited woman, but her time was diminishing and any time lost from her grandchildren was time lost forever.
He went to the screen door, looked out at the pool; the tapes were still in place there. He could be thankful that there was no taped outline of Grime’s body: the water was crystal-clear of death.
He turned back into the kitchen, got himself a beer from the fridge, poured it into a glass as a gesture to his father and sat down opposite Con. He looked at the old man, once again seeing the tired wildness in the walnut face and the once-muscular frame; Malone knew that only his mother had kept his father out of jail. Con would never have been a criminal, but the Irish in him had always had a contempt for law and order, especially law and order based on any British model. He had hated authority, police, Masons, any conservative politician, Dagos, reffos; now he hated wogs, Asians and any man with long hair and an earring. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that lesbians did what he’d heard they did and he had no doubts that poofters deserved what AIDS did to them. He was, in his own opinion, an average Aussie, one of the real natives, not the bloody Abos. Malone loved him, but could never tell him.
‘Dad, what’s life like on the wharves now? The bloke we found out there in the pool, he could’ve worked as a tally clerk.’
‘Tally clerks don’t work, they’re all bludgers.’ His net of prejudices was wide. ‘Why’d he finish up in your pool?”
‘He was working for me. Someone must have resented that.’
‘Working –? You mean he was an informer, a stoolie? Jesus, aint you got any shame? Using a man to dob in someone else.’
Malone said patiently, ‘Dad, we do it all the time. You think the crims go in for a code of ethics?’
‘They don’t dob in their mates. Not the decent ones.’
‘How many decent crims do you know? Don’t give me any crap, Dad. I’ve had a bad morning.’
Con Malone gave his form of apology, which was to change the subject: ‘About the wharves? They’re nothing like they used to be. They’re –’ he searched for the right word ‘-they’re antiseptic. Yeah, antiseptic. Compared to what they used to be.’
‘How much skulduggery went on?’