Dilemma. Jon Cleary
on the pavement and looked across at Wisden’s Car Sales, at the cars standing there in long rows, the floodlights reflected in the wind-screens like malevolent smiles. Oh shit, he said aloud and began to cry.
That was when he decided to go back home and try again. When he saw the Volvo parked out front by the kerb, he wondered if she had had too much to drink. Whenever she did, she would never pull the car into the side driveway and up under the carport. Once she had done that and had driven off the path and ruined a whole row of azaleas in bloom. He had nearly killed her, he was so bloody angry.
He paused halfway up the front path and looked around him. Even in the moonlight the garden looked a mess; it was as if she had let it go, to spite him. He would start repairing it tomorrow. Rebuild the garden and their marriage.
He had parked his car behind the Volvo. The two of them together, one behind the other, were a reminder of happier times. She was a careless driver, even when sober, but tonight she had parked the Volvo neatly. Right in the gutter, not like a woman’s usual parking, a short walk from the kerb. He grinned at the thought, a car salesman’s joke. His mood was lighter as he let himself quietly into the house.
The light was off in the hallway; she had gone to bed. But why wouldn’t she have? It was two o’bloodyclock in the morning. He headed in the darkness, with the sureness of long practice, for the bedroom. If she had had too much to drink, she would be dead to the world; he knew what the vodka and tonics could do to her. They could make her sexually wild, but afterwards she would be as dead as a log. He would get into bed beside her, go to sleep and in the morning she would turn to him and sleepily feel for him, as she always did. Or always had.
He was approaching the bed when he tripped on her clothes on the floor. He fell on the bed, across her. She didn’t stir nor gasp: nothing. He felt the nakedness of her, ran his hand up over her thigh and hip: no movement, nothing. He sat up, kneeling on the bed.
‘Norma – hon—’
Then, suddenly afraid, he stood up, crossed to the doorway and switched on the ceiling light. Norma lay on the bed naked, legs wide apart, her head twisted to one side as if she were trying to avoid looking at him. The bed was a mess, the sheet and single blanket halfway to the floor.
‘Hon – for Chrissakes—’
Then, back beside the bed, he saw the marks on her throat and the big eyes, luminous no more, staring at the end of her world.
That was when he started to run, though it was almost five minutes before he actually moved other than to sit beside her, stroking her head and weeping.
5
‘Why’d you call us?’ asked Malone.
‘We’re stretched. We’re short three detectives, two sick and one suspended – he’s under investigation.’ The local detective-sergeant, Jeff Backer, didn’t elaborate on why one of his men was under investigation; you protected your own, particularly against other cops. ‘We’re handling four homicides. This one came up, the obvious suspect’s shot through. We could be weeks finding him.’
‘So you expect us to go looking for him?’
‘You’re the experts, aren’t you?’ There was no real friction; this was trade talk. Malone had not previously met Backer, but he had immediately liked him. ‘It looks to me like open-and-shut. All we have to do is wait till Ron Glaze gives himself up. Unless he’s gone somewhere and done himself in.’
‘Has he any form? Belting her, stuff like that?’
‘Nothing we’ve heard of. Out here it’s not uncommon, but the women don’t report it.’
‘Even less so in the eastern suburbs.’
‘They have more money there to hide the bruises.’ Backer was a local through and through.
Malone, easing himself back into work after the Noosa holiday, had come out here to get away from the paperwork that had accumulated on his desk in his absence. Normally a case as straightforward as this one would not have attracted the Homicide chief; two junior detectives would have been sent. Malone had brought one of them with him, Andy Graham; Andy, in whom enthusiasm ran like a fever, would do all the legwork without complaint. Malone felt relaxed, glad he had picked an open-and-shut case to begin with.
The house was still roped off by Crime Scene tapes when Malone and Graham arrived, but the Physical Evidence team had gone and now there were only Backer and two uniformed men on the scene. Malone had noted that the house was neat and well kept: no peeling paint, no dump of cartons and newspapers on the front verandah. The garden was a gardener’s plot, crammed with shrubs, but it had been allowed to grow wild. The lawn was a thick carpet that needed a mowing. Inside the house the nearness fell apart.
‘The wife was okay as a housekeeper, so the neighbours say, but since her and her husband broke up three months ago, she sorta slipped. She’s got her own hairdressing business and she was negotiating to lease another one over in Penrith. Seems she got sorta sloppy about the house. The husband was a dead-keen gardener, when he wasn’t selling cars, but once he’d gone she let the weeds take over.’
‘Who found her body?’
‘That’s it. A guy phoned our duty desk six o’clock this morning, said there was a dead woman at this address. Then he hung up.’
‘Glaze?’
‘Who else?’
‘Whose is that Volvo out the front?’
‘Hers.’
‘Any prints?’
‘They’ve got some out in the kitchen, on the fridge door and on a Coke bottle and a glass. But the guy from Fingerprints said he was puzzled – there’s not a dab anywhere in the car, the front seat, the wheel, the dash. All wiped clean. Same in here—’ He led Malone into the main bedroom. ‘The bedhead, the side table, the door – all wiped clean.’
‘Mrs Glaze might’ve been sloppy, but hubby wasn’t. That what you’re saying?’
‘I’m not saying anything. I’m just telling you what we’ve come up with.’ Backer was in his forties, overweight, bald; he had a thick black moustache and tired dark eyes. Malone recognized the type: the good cop worn, like an old tyre, by too much roadwork. Who could still be shocked by the occasional brutal crime or the murder of a child, but not by this straightforward domestic. ‘Unless it was someone else killed her.’
‘Any suspect? She have any boyfriends?’
‘Not as far as we know. For the moment my money’s on Ron Glaze.
They had come back to the living room. It was comfortably furnished, looked lived-in; but it was the sort of furniture bought by a couple who had other things to think of. The prints on the walls were of castles, cathedrals, mosques: someone’s escape? There was a photo of Norma Glaze on the television set in one corner, the only photo in the room. None of Ron Glaze. There were two rows of Condensed Books volumes on a small bookshelf and beneath them two heaps of magazines: beauty magazines and gardening ones. Somehow, perhaps because of the break-up of the marriage, it was all as sterile as a hospital waiting-room.
‘What’s your guy doing?’ said Backer.
‘Andy?’ Malone looked over his shoulder at Graham, who had gone into the bedroom. ‘Just looking. If there’s anything that the PE people missed, he’ll find it. Did you see the body?’
‘Yeah, I was here when the pathologist arrived. He told me nothing, they never do. Strangled, that was all he’d say – I could see that for m’self.’
‘I’ll call in at the morgue on the way back. Anything, Andy?’
Graham had come back into the living room. He was a big young man and his restlessness seemed to make him bigger, his bulk changing shape as you looked at him. ‘Nothing, boss. The usual stuff in the bedroom drawers – the PE guys left ’em, not worth taking. Women’s stuff, a box of condoms that was open—’