Dilemma. Jon Cleary
hear me.’
‘Anyone follow her?’
She shook her head. ‘I dunno. I went downstairs to the cellar. You think someone might of been eyeing her? Nah, I don’t think so. The men around here left Norma alone, most of ’em were Ron’s mates. He was everybody’s mate.’
‘No strangers in that night? I see you have a sign: Visitors Welcome.’
‘Oh, there were half a dozen or so. But none of ’em went near Norma.’
Malone paid for the beers. ‘Thanks, Charlene. What’s your surname?’ And Graham had taken out his notebook. ‘Colnby? C-O-L-N-B-Y?’
‘You gunna be coming back?’
‘Probably, when we catch up with Ron. If you think of anything else, call me.’ He gave her his card.
‘Scobie Malone – you Irish?’
‘Just enough to make me interesting.’
She laughed. ‘Come again. All visitors welcome.’
Out in the car park Malone looked up. The day had changed abruptly. A nor’-easter had struggled in from the coast, from Town, and the sky was racing towards the Blue Mountains, no longer blue up close but grey and green and scarred with development. Malone lived in Randwick, a seaside suburb, and he hated the thought of having to live out here. The Westies in the western suburbs always got the rough end of the pineapple: weatherwise, economically, socially. They always got the wrong winds, the worst cold, the worst heat. There were areas here as arid as the drawing boards from which they had been lifted; the original planners had never understood the meaning of community. The suburbs were not slums or ghettos. Houses stood on their own small plots and they all had gardens of a sort, some luxuriant, some just weeds. There were shopping malls, cinemas, clubs, a rugby league team whose players would have been gods if the voters had believed in gods. Those that believed in gods or God, the post-World War II immigrants, had long ago learned that gods and God had no influence with politicians or bureaucrats. The population was mixed, an ethnic stew, and their voices, multilingual, were as loud in protest as those from elsewhere. But when the crunch came, when the pineapple was up-ended, who got the rough end? Malone looked back at the club. For all its indoor garishness, its temptation to gamble, it drew the locals together.
‘Would you like to live out here, Andy?’
‘I grew up here. I went to Mount Druitt High.’
‘How’d you find it?’
‘I felt like murder sometimes.’ Graham was very still, very sober. ‘I’d go down to the beaches, Bondi, Coogee, and I’d look at all of them who lived there and I’d want to murder the bastards.’
‘You changed your mind since you joined the Service and got to know one of the bastards from the beaches? Me.’
Graham relaxed, his silhouette shivering again. ‘It takes all sorts to make a world, doesn’t it?’
‘I wonder what sort of world Ron Glaze wanted?’
6
On their way back to Homicide, having paid their call on Jeff Backer and given him what little they had learned from Mrs Colnby, Malone and Graham diverted to the morgue in Glebe. Here in this inner suburb the breeze was cooler, as if it might have blown through the morgue before getting to the street. The two detectives entered the nondescript building from the rear; it had the look of a warehouse, which in a way it was. They were told that Dr Clements was in the Murder Room.
They went down through the long main room where blue-gowned attendants, like bored priests, were administering pathology last rites to half a dozen corpses. Malone, though a man with a strong stomach, kept his eyes on the far end of the room. Out of the corner of his eye he saw something red-and-yellow and slimy, like something from a fisherman’s net, dropped on one of the scales between the stainless steel tables at which the technicians worked. Behind him he heard Graham strangle something between a cough and a burp, but he didn’t look back. Blue honeycombs of insect killers hung from the ceiling and a dozen air-conditioners did their best to strain the clogged air.
Romy Clements, in gown, apron and gloves, was working on the body of Norma Glaze. ‘Not feeling well today, Andy?’
‘I’d rather of stayed outside.’
Romy smiled at Malone. ‘You notice how all the really big men are weak-stomached? Russ is the same … Well, here she is. Mrs Norma Dorothy Glaze – maiden name Compton. Born 22 May 1963. Death by strangulation.’ She pointed to the purple fingermarks on the dead woman’s throat. ‘He was a strong man, whoever he was. He throttled her with one hand, his left.’
Malone looked at the corpse; there was an obsceneness to the naked dead. No matter how beautiful a woman might have been, or how handsome a man, in death the beauty, in Malone’s eyes, was gone. Nothing showed but flesh, waiting to rot, and hair waiting to fall off the skull. He dreaded the day he would have to look on the corpse of someone he loved.
‘She bruised at all?’
‘Quite a lot. Breasts, ribs, on her jaw. Scratches, too. There’s bruises, too, on the inside of the thighs, around the vagina.’
‘There’d been intercourse?’
‘I’d say so. I don’t think it was rape, though.’
‘Probably not. At the moment the main suspect is the husband. They were separated.’
‘There’s no semen, so you can’t do a DNA.’
‘We found a box of condoms,’ said Graham, eye-level about three feet above the corpse. ‘A box of a dozen – a couple had been used. We didn’t find them, they’d probably been washed down the toilet.’
‘If he used a condom, twice, then it doesn’t suggest rape.’
‘Looks like they had a fight,’ said Malone, ‘and it got out of hand.’
Romy pulled a sheet up over Norma Glaze, wrenched off her rubber gloves. ‘She’s booked for a more detailed autopsy this afternoon. If the husband is left-handed, I’d say he is your man. But I’m not a detective.’
‘I’ll bet Russ is glad,’ said Malone.
She took off her gown. She was a good-looking woman, dark-haired and broad-cheeked. There was a composure to her that Malone always admired. Her father had been a serial killer; her career and her relationship with Russ Clements had been almost ruined by the scandal. But she, and Russ, had weathered it and Malone had a protective affection for them both.
‘You should get him,’ she said. ‘Husbands who kill their wives never seem to escape the wedding ring. Old German saying.’
7
That was Tuesday, 29 March 1994.
Enquiries confirmed that Ron Glaze was indeed left-handed in everything but his handshake.
‘He had a strong handshake,’ said the manager of the car salesyard where he had worked. ‘The sort that made a customer believe in him. I was sorry to let him go, but that’s the way things have been. I can’t believe he killed Norma, no way.’
An ASM was put out for Ronald Glaze. His car was found two days later in a car park in Newcastle, 160 kilometres north of Sydney. Across the Hunter River from the car park the pipes of the BHP steelworks belched smoke, visual music to the Novocastrians. The Big Australian was still making money; downsizing was something that happened only to Americans, a word from another language. On 1 April a man’s body was fished out of the river. At first it was thought to be Ron Glaze, which would have left everything simple and uncomplicated. Unfortunately it was another man, another murder, this time by the wife and her lover.
Ron Glaze disappeared and the Glaze murder case was moved to the back-burner of the computer files.