Dark Summer (19 page)

What from, the murderer's needle or your own?
But Janis did not believe in being cruel to be kind; she had no conscience, but she wasn't malicious. “The first thing is, well get you introduced into our programme. You'll see someone downstairs in the clinic, they'll probably advise methadone—”

“If—
when
I come again, will I see you or someone else? I—I feel I can trust you.”

“I work here at the Cross only two days a week. I do another day at St. Sebastian's, with patients there who have your problem. If you come here and I'm not here, they can get me on my beeper and you can come over to the hospital and see me there, okay?” She stopped and looked hard at the girl. “It's not going to be easy, Ava.”

“I—I know that. But I want to try—” She suddenly shut her eyes, looked as if she wanted to weep. Somewhere in another cubicle someone started to cry. But tears and self-pity were part of the atmosphere in this building.

Then the phone rang. Janis picked it up, recognized the voice at once. “You're not supposed to ring me here . . .”

“I know that, for Crissake,” said Snow White. “But I thought you'd wanna hear the bad news. We lost the stuff, the whole fucking lot. It's still there in place, but we got Buckley's chance of picking it up. They're watching it. I just thought you'd like to know, you're so fucking smart.”

“Thank you, Mr. Black,” she said and hung up in his ear. Then she looked across at Ava, who was wiping her eyes. “As I said, Ava, it's not going to be easy.”

III

That morning, Wednesday, Malone went over to Balmain to see Jimmy Maddux's widow. He didn't take Clements: two big cops crowding into her home would be amongst the last things a grieving woman would wish for. A young uniformed officer drove him in a marked car; Malone would have preferred an unmarked one, but he had no choice. Balmain, as he remembered it, had never been an area
to
welcome mug coppers.

The tiny suburb occupied a peninsula on the south side of the upper harbour. Its narrow streets seemed to meet each other accidentally. On top of the ridge were a few large houses, built by ships' masters and shipbuilders in the middle of the last century, most of them now occupied by academics and architects and one or two successful writers and artists. Down the slopes were the narrow houses of those who had given Balmain its character over the years: a motley mixture of immigrants, a village that saluted the flag of the Balmain Tigers, the local rugby league team, before it would think of singing the national anthem. Fair Australia advanced only when the Tigers won the premiership.

The Madduxes lived in one of the narrowest houses in one of the narrowest streets. Malone got out of the police car, saw the curtains flick back at windows like the sidelong glances of a dozen eyes, and said to the driver, “Come back for me in twenty minutes. I don't want them throwing stones at you.”

The young cop grinned. “It's okay, sir, they know me. I play for the Tigers' seconds. Reserve grade.”

“You mean they let cops play for the Tigers?”

“We get a dispensation, a sort of annulment for the weekend. It's like the Catholic Church—so long as we confess our sins on training nights, they pick us for the weekend games.”

He drove away and Malone shook his head at the improving intelligence amongst young cops and especially amongst the Tigers. He went in through the rickety wooden gate and in two strides had reached the peeling front door. Jimmy Maddux, it seemed, had not been a home handyman.

The door was opened by a young woman only a kilo or two ahead of a weight problem. She was not pretty, but there was a suggestion of liveliness about her round face that, before yesterday, might have made her attractive. Now her face was slack, her eyes red-rimmed, her hair uncombed. She had that blank look of shock that Malone had seen before on the faces of young women, those who had not expected to be made widows so early. Behind her, in the small narrow house, there was a subdued babble of voices. This, of course, was a village: he should have known that everyone would have rallied round the grieving Molly Maddux.

H
e introduced himself, “I'm sorry to intrude, Mrs. Maddux, but I have to ask a few questions—”

“Why?” Her voice was a flat whine.

The door was pulled wider and another young woman, slimmer, more in control of herself in every way, stood there, her arm going round Molly Maddux's shoulders. “Look, come back some other time. For God's sake, she's just lost her husband! Where are your bloody feelings, for God's sake?”

He kept his tone as gentle as he could; in circumstances like these it was always the outsiders, the family comforters, who were aggressive, who got up his nose. “I don't want to upset Mrs. Maddux any more than she is. But her husband was murdered—”

“Murdered?”
The round plump face seemed to flatten like dough flung against a wall.

“Didn't you know?”

“Roley Bremner said it was an accident—”

He had told Bremner not to mention the word
murder,
but since then the media had exposed the accident for what it truly was.

“No, love, it was murder.” The other young woman pressed Molly Maddux's shoulders. “It was on the news last night and it's in the papers this morning. But we kept it from you . . .” She looked at Malone. “I'm her sister. She's taking Jimmy's death hard enough as it is . . . We're keeping it from the kids, too. They're only seven and eight, the eldest, and the twins, they're three. The older ones'd understand murder is different.”

If they don't understand, the kids at school will tell them.
He often wondered why people tried to protect children from tragic news; inevitably, eventually, they learned it from the wrong sources. “Look, I know this is a bad time, but there's never a good time for this sort of thing—”

“You're not gunna go away, are you?” said the sister.

He sighed; the sun was hot on his back, baking him, but it was not the real cause of his discomfort. “No, I'm afraid not. Let's get it over with.”

The two sisters looked at each other, then Molly Maddux nodded and stepped back from the doorway into the narrow hall. “Come into the bedroom, there's too many people out the back.”

“
The family and neighbours,” her sister explained. “I'll come in with you. I don't think she oughta be left alone with you. Nothing personal.”

Malone smiled, but said nothing. He followed the sisters into the front bedroom, a room bursting under the pressure of the double bed, the wardrobe and the dressing-table; a small cheap print of Hans Heysen's gumtrees hung above the bed, like a tiny window on a larger, uncluttered world. Malone himself had been born in a room like this, though the house in Erskineville, another working-class inner suburb, had been slightly larger than this. But the atmosphere was the same, a hundred years or more of battlers' hopes that had gone mouldy, never able to escape through the front door to realization. Malone himself had escaped, but Molly Maddux's fate was written in her dulled eyes. He wondered if the dreams had died only yesterday.

The sisters sat down on the chenille-covered bed and Malone leaned against the wardrobe. It was like conducting an interview, he thought, in a phone booth. “Did your husband ever talk to you about enemies?”

“Enemies? Jimmy?” She shook her head. The whine had gone out of her voice, it was softer, almost a whisper: she had just suffered a second shock, one more devastating than the first. It could happen, Malone knew: most people are prepared, even if only subconsciously, for death; but not for murder. “He got into fights occasionally—he had a pretty touchy temper. But enemies? No, no.”

“Did he talk to you about this election that's coming up? The union election?”

She was silent for a long moment; she seemed to be having trouble putting her thoughts together. “The union election? Yeah, once or twice, but he never said much about what went on at work. Not lately.”

“Not lately? Why was that?”

Molly Maddux hesitated, looked sideways at her sister, then up at Malone. “We ain't been getting on too well lately. We used to argue, have fights.”

The sister also looked up at Malone. “Is this necessary? You don't have to pry, do you, I mean into personal stuff, do you?”

Malone
slipped off his jacket; the room was stifling. He wanted to loosen his tie, but restrained himself. Not out of any dress code, but because he felt, somehow, that it would be an insulting comment on how some other people had to live, in these cramped, stuffy hot-boxes. “Look—what's your name?”

“Sheryl. Sheryl Longman.”

“Sheryl, prying into other people's business doesn't make me jump up and down with joy. I hate it, if you want the truth. But yes, it
is
necessary. We have to find out who killed Jimmy—whoever it was, he isn't going to come forward and confess it.” He looked back at Molly Maddux. “Why were you having fights, Molly? Did you or he have something on your minds, something that got you short-tempered with each other? You said Jimmy had a pretty touchy temper.”

She hesitated again, then drew a deep breath, pulled her thoughts together. “We used to fight over money. He made good money, but somehow it all went. He liked to bet, on the horses and dogs, and he drank a lot. But—” She avoided her sister's eye this time. “I wasn't any good with it, either. I mean, saving money. It just seemed to, I dunno, run away, you know . . .” Her voice trailed off.

For the first time Malone saw the coloured photo in the cheap tin frame on the dressing-table: a solidly built, curly-haired man with his arms round two boys who wore beanies and scarves in black and gold, the Tigers' colours. “Was Jimmy close to your children?”

She glanced at the photo. “He thought the world of 'em, especially the two boys. That was another thing we fought over—he said if we went on spending money the way we were, the kids would never have a better life than us. He was always talking about a better life, but somehow, I dunno . . .” Her voice trailed off again.

“Molly—” This was the difficult bit: “Molly, could I look through his papers? His bank book or building society book, if he had one. A notebook, if he kept one. That sort of thing.”

“For God's sake!”

“I
know,
Sheryl. Molly?”

She hesitated, then she got up, opened the door of the wardrobe as he stood aside, and took out an old-fashioned tin box. “It's locked. He always carried the key with him on his key-ring.”

It
was Sheryl who voiced Malone's query: “You mean he kept a
locked
box? One you weren't supposed to look into? Jesus—
men
!” She looked up at Malone. “Do you keep things from your wife, if you've got one?”

“Quite a lot,” he said. “Only I don't keep them in a locker. Molly, did they give you back Jimmy's personal things when you identified the body?”

“She didn't identify him, his brother did,” said Sheryl. “Yes, they give us Jimmy's things. I'll get them.”

She went out of the room. Molly Maddux sat back on the bed, stared up at Malone with a terrible, bruised look on her face. She was glistening with sweat, rivulets of it running down her temples out of her dark hair, but she seemed unaware of it. “Why would anyone wanna murder him?”

“I don't know,” said Malone, not even daring to hope that the locked box in his hand might contain something that would open up another window on Jimmy Maddux.

Sheryl came back with the key-ring and Malone selected one of the keys. He opened the box, tilted it on to the bed as both women leaned forward. The contents tumbled out: a birth certificate, an insurance policy, two packets of condoms, some letters held together by a rubber hand, two silver medals, a gold pass for the Sydney Cricket Ground and the Football Stadium, and a bank pass-book.

“Could I see the letters?” said Molly.

But first Malone held up the silver medals. “These Jimmy's?”

“Yeah, when he was at school up north, he come from a little place near Murwillumbah, he was the school swimming champion. He won those medals.”

“Molly—Roley Bremner told me it was a joke down on the wharves that Jimmy couldn't swim.”

She nodded. “Yeah. Jimmy told me about it. He told them that. The truth was he was scared of sharks. When he first come to Sydney, he went swimming in the harbour and was chased by a shark. He'd take the boys to the beach, but he'd never go in the harbour. Can I see those letters?”

Malone held on to the letters, instead held up the gold pass. “How could Jimmy afford this? It costs six thousand dollars to join, plus something like two or three hundred a year. If you were always
short
of money, like you said . . .”

“I dunno, I just dunno. He took the boys once or twice to the stadium, but he told me someone had given him tickets. Can I see those letters?” Her voice now was sharp.

“I don't think you'd better, love,” said Sheryl quietly.

Molly looked at her sister, frowned, then suddenly her hand shot out and she snatched the bundle of letters from Malone. She tore at the rubber band, snapped it off and dropped the loose letters, a dozen or so of them, into her lap. Malone watched the two women; he began to feel sick, wanted to roll back everything he had started. Sheryl glanced at him, her eyes suddenly sharp with hatred, then she looked back at her sister.

Molly was reading a few lines of each page of the letters; her hands were shaking and the pages fluttered as if in an unfelt current in the stifling, airless room. But of course there was a current: one between the sisters that Malone, standing so close to them, could feel.

“Darling Jimmy
. . . Oh shit! Sheryl, how could you, you bitch? My own sister!”