Dark Summer (17 page)

“I intend to. Go on.” Aldwych's voice was quiet, toneless.

Jack Junior recognized the signs. “All right, forget it.”

“No, go on. Why do you wanna get rid of me?”

“Dad—” Jack Junior decided on confession. “Someone rang me at the office this morning. I don't know who it was, it was just some guy. He said someone was talking to the wrong people and they thought it might be you. I asked who the wrong people were and he said you'd know.”

“They're barking up the wrong tree. I think I'd better have a word with them.”

“Who?”

“It's Denny Pelong, for sure. He wouldn't of phoned you himself, I don't think he knows how to dial a number—” He had never had any respect for Pelong's intelligence; the man had the cunning of a shithouse rat, but couldn't read a road map on the Nullabor Plain. “I'll go and see him.”

“Dad, I don't think that's a good idea—”

“You worried for me?”

“
Of course I am! Christ, you've gone all these years without getting hurt—”

“Keep your eyes on the road or we're both gunna get hurt . . . Oh, I been hurt all right. Your mother just never told you. Twice I got shot, when you were little, once I got a knife in me, another time a mug tried to carve me up with a razor . . . You don't look surprised?”

“Well, no. Mum always tried to protect me—for years I thought you were just an SP bookie. It wasn't legal, running a starting-price shop, but it wasn't—well,
criminal.
I was fifteen before I found out what you were really up to.
That
was a shock. Anything after that . . . No, I'm not surprised you've been knifed or shot, even if it was years ago. But why take the risk now?”

“Slow down.”

Jack Junior had accelerated as they went up the hill above The Spit, past the mortgages sweltering in the heat, above the yachts and cruisers flying For Sale pennants. Life was getting tough for the battlers, even the middle-class yuppies; but Aldwych had no sympathy for them. It was a dog-eat-dog world and he never failed to marvel that most mugs thought otherwise. He had never bothered with mortgages, had never indulged himself with a rich man's toys; he was as conservative fiscally as he was politically. His money was safe, wisely invested by Jack Junior.

He had never seen his son so concerned for him; it was kind of touching, enough to make any father feel proud. He just wondered why he harboured a nagging suspicion of Jack Junior's concern.

“Okay,” he said at last, “I'll stay out of it. But if they phone you again . . .”

III

Malone sat in front of the computer, almost hitting the keys at random; almost, but not quite. The computer may, some day, solve all crimes without a cop's having to leave his desk; but a human finger, prompted by a human brain, will still have to press the first key. The old “murder box,” the stand- by of detectives for years, had gone. Clements had kept the “murder box” for the team of Malone and himself, a battered, stuck-together shoe-box into which had gone every small piece of evidence connected with the crime of the hour; the box had gone, was now in the police museum, and so had the feeling of
closeness
to a crime, a
touching
of the murderer, an identification of the case with Malone and Clements that, at least in their own minds, made it “theirs.” Now everything went into the computer, was stored in the data bank, was available to anyone who had the entry code. But no computer has yet been built that can, of its own accord, duplicate the random thoughts of a man. A man, for the time being, is still safe in his own irrational thought processes.

He had punched in his entry code: 8747—Scomal. Complex codes were not encouraged, as if the computer was telling cops that it thought they were simple-minded men. The central data bank for the whole of Australasia was here in Sydney: crims from Auckland, Perth, Port Moresby, Oodnadatta, even Canberra, met here in an identification parade that none of them was aware of. Malone's fingers did their idle work and a name came up to join the parade: Dallas George White. It was not an entirely irrational turn-up: his name was lodged as securely in Malone's mind as it was in the data bank. Other names followed: Gary Schultz, Normie Grime, Sally Kissen, Ulysses Lugopolous, Ava Redgrave, real name Jean Auburn, Tuesday Streep, real name Shirley Strunk, John Aldwych . . . Malone kept running the names, looking for some connection.

Half an hour ago there had been a conference in the office of Superintendent Greg Random, head of the Regional Crime Squad, over at Police Centre. It had not been a large gathering; Random did not contribute to the theory that minds multiplied produced a greater sum of intelligence. He was a senior officer now, but the habits of his days as the member of a two-man team still clung. He and Malone got on well.

“So what have we got? So far this week—and it's only Tuesday—so far we've got three murders close in and another three on the outskirts. Those three don't concern us, Parramatta can look after them. But the Minister has been on to the Commissioner and the Commissioner's been on to the DC and he's been on to the A/C Crime, and
he's
been on to me. It seems that the Minister wants them all cleaned up before you knock off and go home tonight.”

“So far we don't have a definite link between any of them,” said Malone. “It's just a gut feeling I have.”

Random
wrinkled his long nose. “I don't think the Minister would know what a gut feeling is, even though he's a farmer. Not good enough, Scobie. How many men have you got on this?”

Malone indicated himself, Clements, Graham and Truach. “Just us four so far. There's help from the Randwick Ds on Scungy and the Glebe fellers are doing the leg-work on Maddux. The same GMO, Dr. Keller, is on all the murders—she's teed up the forensic pathologist on the needle cases. Fingerprints have their fellers on Grime and Kissen, but so far they've found nothing. There were some prints on the wall beside Kissen's bed, but they could have been her customers—there were at least four different sets. None of them in the record. Right now they're checking the diving mask. The prints on our pool gate were mine.”

“You have any spare men?”

“I've got two fellers away in the bush, down at Albury on that hitch-hiker murder, and most of the others are working on pre-Christmas cases.”

“That's another point raised by our lord and master. There are twelve unsolved murders on our books. He says it doesn't make the government look very good.”

“Jesus Christ Himself couldn't make that government look good,” said Clements. “They are the greatest bunch of—”

Malone chopped him off before politics caught alight. “Five of the murders are of Vietnamese—I was working on one when I was employing Scungy. As far as we can see, none of them is related. Four of them occurred out in the west, but try to get anyone out there to talk . . . Out there around Cabramatta, Little Vietnam, it's the country of the blind. No one sees anything. A man gets shot right in front of them and they say they were looking the other way and saw and heard nothing. Let Gus the Great himself go out there and try to get something out of them.”

Random nodded sympathetically at the bitterness in Malone's voice, “I know, Scobie. But the fact remains, our record isn't looking good at the moment. We had all that bad publicity last year, with the SWOS and the Tac Response guys getting over-eager . . . Even the crims are sending us sympathy notes.”

“
Really?” said Andy Graham.

“Really,” said Random, straight-faced and patient. “I think you'd better come up with something pretty quick, Scobie. I'll get the PR lot to put out a release that we have several leads, that we hope to have an arrest within a couple of days.”

“Which murderer are we supposed to be arresting?” said Clements. The mood in Random's office would have turned milk sour.

“Take your pick. How about being close to picking up Grime's killer? That might scare off whoever's trying to scare you, Scobie.”

“It might not, too, Greg. Let's say we've got a lead on Jimmy Maddux's killer. I'd like to put a bit of pressure on White and Schultz.”

But since his return to Homicide, since sitting down here at the computer, he had managed to put pressure on no one, least of all White and The Dwarf. The names on the screen did not connect. The data bank knew nothing of the fact that Leroy Lugos was the pimp for Ava and Tuesday; it said nothing about Scungy Grime ever having known Dallas White or Gary Schultz. The computer, he felt, would be right at home in Cabramatta, another territory where connections were never made.

Then the phone rang: it was Roley Bremner. “Scobie, I got some information for you. Normie Grime was working night shift Sunday night on Number 8 wharf. Snow White and The Dwarf were working next door on Number 9. That help you any?”

Never discourage an informant, especially one on your side. “I think it might, Roley. Did you see Mrs. Maddux?”

“Yeah, she took it pretty crook. I didn't hang around. Her family's looking after her. I find out anything more about them bastards, I'll let you know.”

He hung up and Malone sat gazing at the phone. Then: “Inspector?”

Malone looked up. Peter Keller stood in the doorway of the big room, immaculate in white overalls, like an engineer in a dust-free, germ-free laboratory; he carried a broom and a black plastic rubbish bag and behind him in the corridor was a commercial-sized vacuum cleaner. “May I begin
cleaning?”

“Is it that late?” Malone looked at his watch. “Sure, go ahead.”

He stood up, arched his back, then slipped the cover over the computer. Everyone else in Homicide left it uncovered, but he always covered his typewriter at night and he automatically did the same with the computer.

Keller stood watching him. “The computer, it helps your police work? We did not have them in Germany when I left, not in our area. The secret police had them, of course, but not us.”

“West Germany had secret police?”

“Of course. Doesn't every country? East Germany had its
Stasi,
thousands of them. Now Germany is one again, the
Stasi
are looking for jobs, but who will employ an ex-Communist secret policeman?” He smiled. “Perhaps the CIA?”

Somehow Malone had not expected any humour from the rather dour-looking German. “Maybe. Were you law and order cops expected to co-operate with the secret police?”

“In Germany, Inspector, all bureaucracies are expected to co-operate. It is in our nature. Of course, it didn't always happen. Not in my time. Less so now, I should imagine.” He looked at the covered-up computer. “A wonderful invention.”

“Can you operate one?”

Keller had begun to empty the waste-baskets. “No, Inspector, I am old-fashioned, out of date. Technology makes me feel I am an idiot . . . There were times when I would have given my pension for the information one could find in a machine like that. I was telling your colleague, Sergeant Clements, last night, I very much wanted to be a detective. But it never happened. I had the tenacity. That is what one needs as a detective—tenacity.”

Malone smiled. “And luck.”

“Yes,” said Keller. “And luck. But I never had that, either.”

He went on down the room, moving from desk to desk, crisscrossing from one to another in a pattern as methodical as a military marching routine; there was a Teutonic thoroughness to him that was
almost
a caricature, but Malone knew from experience that stereotypes were only moulds with the cracks in them papered over. He wondered sometimes in whose mind's eye he, too, was a stereotype. He certainly knew where the cracks were.

He picked up his jacket and was halfway out the door when the phone rang in his own room. He went back to it. “Inspector Malone? It's Bill Dibble, from Customs. Head office has okayed the divers—they'll be at Glebe Island at nine-thirty this evening, when it's dark. I thought you'd like to know, in case you wanna be here.”

Malone sighed. He had been looking forward to a swim, a light supper and an early night. “I'll be there.”

IV

Malone lifted himself out of the pool, caught the towel that young Tom threw at him. “Da-ad—”

When
Dad
was stretched into two syllables, it was always a sign that one of his kids was going to ask a favour. “Righto, what is it this time?”

“Dad, the kids at school in my class, can I bring 'em home tomorrow afternoon? They'd like to talk to the cops who are protecting us.”

“How many kids?”

“Twenty-eight,” said Tom, innocent enough to quote a true figure, something he would learn not to do in years to come.

The picture of twenty-eight curious kids crowding into the Malone back yard was too much: Malone couldn't be angry, could only be amused. “Tom, the Police Commissioner would be out here like a shot—”

“They'd like to talk to him, too—”

“Pull your head in, nerd,” said Maureen, hauling herself out of the water and sitting on the edge of the pool. “There's no publicity, understand? I dunno why . . .”

Malone looked down at the young constable standing waist-deep in the pool. “What do you
think,
Dick? You want to be interviewed by twenty-eight kids?”

“Fifty-three,” said Maureen. “If Tom has his class, I wanna have mine.”

Constable Elmore, only two years out of high school, grinned. He was blond and good-looking, a hunk, as Claire had described him to her mother, who had agreed; but he was still a boy, still had a long way to go to prove himself as a cop. Lisa, and to a lesser extent Malone, had tried to make him part of the family while he was here on duty, but he was not entirely at ease with the situation. He preferred senior officers to show more rank than Malone was showing in a pair of swim-trunks.