Dark Summer (29 page)

“Do you think they had anything to do with the shooting of your husband?”

“I wouldn't know.” She tightened her lips, as if locking her mouth shut.

He recognized the signs: he was going to get no more from her tonight. “Righto, if that's the way you want it, Mrs. Pelong.”

That unlocked the mouth again: “Want what?”

“Do you want us to find out who tried to kill Denny, or don't you?”

She stared at him, then she nodded. “If you can, yes. But I'm not gunna help. I don't wanna be next.”

“Why would anyone want to kill you?”

“Why would anyone wanna—” But then, unexpectedly, she laughed softly, shook her head at her question and looked at him from under her brows. “That's dumb, ain't it? Someone has been wanting to kill him ever since I first met him.”

He stood up, nodding to Clements, who also rose to his feet. “We'll have to talk to you again, Mrs. Pelong.”

“You or someone else?”

“Will it make any difference?”

“My hubby used to say, never talk to the monkeys, always talk to the organ-grinder.”

“That's original,” said Malone, straight-faced.

“Don't kid me, Inspector. Denny's never had an original thought in his life.” She begun to take off her jewellery, put it in her handbag.

“We're going to put a police guard on your husband, just as a precaution.”

“Have you asked permission?” A middle-aged nun, dressed in an old-fashioned habit, all in white and pale grey, stood like a large gull in the doorway.

The territorial imperative again: it was never so defiantly upheld as in a hospital. “Not yet, Sister. But I think it'd be a good idea, don't you?”

“
Who are you?” The brogue was as thick as a Connemara mist.

“Inspector Malone.”

Her features didn't relax, but he knew he had scored better than a McTavish or a Leibowitz would have. “Mother Catherine will have to approve it. But I'll tell her you recommended it.” Then she looked at Luisa. “Your husband is still in the theatre. One of the doctors would like to talk to you.”

“How is he?” asked Malone.

“Not well, Inspector. If you're thinking of waiting to question him, put it out of your mind.”

“We'll come back tomorrow. Will you be here, Mrs. Pelong?”

“Where else?”

The door of her was still more than half-closed to him. She stood up, gathering herself together; she was undiminished by the removal of her jewellery. She followed the nun down the wide silent corridor. This private section was more like a hotel, there were no emergency cases being rushed to operating theatres, no blood on the walls or floors. A uniformed police guard sitting outside the door of one of these expensive rooms was going to stand out like a gargoyle.

Lusia, halfway down the corridor, looked back over her shoulder; she was defiant, of the two detectives, of whatever she might have to face. Malone waited for her to swing her hips at them, but she didn't, and he was glad of that. She had a sort of cheap dignity about her, which was all she could afford; diamonds and bank accounts in Switzerland, of which he knew nothing, do nothing for real dignity, which is natural wealth. He had to admire her, even though she irritated him.

When they got down into the hospital foyer Truach was just coming in the front door, “I came up with nothing more, Scobie. He was shot by the Invisible Man. How is he, still alive?”

“He's still on the table.”

“What about his wife?”

“I dunno. She could have had Pelong set up. I don't think they're too happy together—he bashes her around, I think. She said she stayed behind to go to the loo and to pay the bill. Why would the wife pay the bill? Mine never pays for me.”

“
I checked with the young cop from Central who was first there. He said Pelong had nothing on him. No wallet, no credit cards, nothing. She
could've
been paying the bill. Fred Cargo told me Jack Aldwych and Les Chung were in there tonight. She mention them?”

“Yeah. We'll talk to them. Russ and I'll go over to see Aldwych, you go out and talk to Les Chung.”

“
Now?
” Truach looked at his watch. “It's midnight.”

Malone looked at his own watch. “You're five minutes slow. What're you waiting for?”

Truach gave his twisted grin. “You're a hard man, boss. I think I'll report you to the union. Where does Les Chung live?”

“Ask Russ. He's got Elvis Presley's last seven addresses.”

Clements produced a thick notebook, flipped through it, gave Truach an address in Rose Bay. “There's no minder, no guard dogs. Just go straight up and press the doorbell. Les Chung is respectable, at least to the neighbours.”

As they went out they passed a plaster cast of St. Sebastian pierced from all angles by metal arrows. To Malone it seemed that in the saint's agonized stare one eye was askew, as if he were saying:
All this for a halo?
Join the club, thought Malone: police work was much the same.

“You notice he had an arrow in his bum?” said Clements.

8

I

GOING HOME
in the Daimler Aldwych had said, “They're showing
The Maltese Falcon
tonight. I watch it every time they run it.”

“I've never seen it,” said Janis, who was not a late-night-movie fan. After ten o'clock, if she was not otherwise engaged, she read, usually books about men or women who had succeeded, or sometimes failed, in the power game, “I've heard of it. What's it about?”

“A conniving woman,” said Aldwych, sitting in the back seat, but watching that Jack Junior didn't try any cowboy act in the late-night traffic.

He's getting at me again, was Janis' instant reaction. But the thought didn't frighten her. If she was going to play in the big league in the future, then she had to learn to deal with a big-league player from the past. It was another challenge. “Does she win out in the end?”

“No.”

“It must be an old-fashioned movie, then. Have you seen it, Jack?”

Jack Junior looked sideways at her. “A couple of times. Dad likes to see himself in the Humphrey Bogart part.”

“Keep the speed down . . . No, I see
you
in that part. I prefer Sydney Greenstreet. He's the leader of the villains.” He smiled at Janis as she half turned and looked at him. “Stay and watch it with us.”

“She has to get home, Dad. It's late.”

“No, no, I'll stay. Do you have a spare bed in that big house?”

“There are half a dozen that have never been slept in.” Jack Junior's tone suggested that he
would
prefer that the beds remained unslept in.

From the back seat Aldwych was once again aware of the undercurrent between the two younger people. He was not an expert in analysing affairs; he looked on advice-to-the-lovelorn columnists as criminal as himself. He could plan the robbing of a bank, a betting scam, the deployment of a string of brothels; but he was a novice in the field of romance. He could barely remember his and Shirl's courtship; their marriage had been comfortable rather than passionate. Something was going on between Jack Junior and this girl and he couldn't, for the life of him or of Jack, put his finger on what it was. Shirl had been simple, if not simple-minded; the women of today were too complex and ambitious for their own good. He would have to have a word with Jack, though for the moment he didn't know what the word would be.

They watched the film on the television set in the living room. It was a big room, with a twelve-foot ceiling and rich burgundy silk drapes. The furniture was a mixture of styles; Shirl Aldwych had had an eclectic eye, only spoiled in her last years by cataracts that had resulted in one or two aberrations such as the Spanish bishop's chair that stood in one corner. Aldwych occasionally sat in it, adding to the aberration. Still, Janis remarked, whatever the mixture of styles, the room smelled of money, laundered so long ago that it could almost be classed as old money.

The movie entertained Aldwych as much as ever. When Sydney Greenstreet, huge, urbane, walked out of his last scene with the words, “Well, sir, the shortest farewells are the best,” he clapped, as he always did. In the semi-darkness of the big room Janis looked at him, but he just smiled at her and returned his gaze to the screen.

When Mary Astor finally sank down in the elevator, staring with enigmatic dark eyes at Humphrey Bogart through the grille of the elevator doors, he looked again at Janis. She had already turned to face him.

“She was too clever,” she said. “That was her trouble.”

“You think a woman can be too clever?”

“A man, too. All the financial pirates we've had in the last few years, they were all men. All too clever and all flat on their faces now. No women, though.”

“
Do you mean women are cleverer than men? That if they don't get too clever, like Brigid O'Shaughnessy in that fillum, they don't get caught? Do you think she's right, Jack?”

“I never criticize women in general,” said Jack Junior. “Not in front of a woman.”

“You remind me of the big man in the movie,” said Janis, ignoring Jack Junior, still looking at his father. “The Sydney—Greenstreet?—character.”

It was the ultimate compliment; but he recognized it for the flattery that it was. “No, Gutman, that's the character's name, he's smoother than I ever could be. Education, you need it to be smooth. Jack's educated, aren't you, Jack?”

“But not smooth, I hope.”

Aldwych looked back at Janis, gave her his old man's smile; if he lived long enough, if Jack Junior produced children, it might even turn into a fair facsimile of a benevolent grandfather's smile. “You're smooth, Janis.”

It was not a compliment; and she knew it. But from anyone else she would have accepted it as praise.

Then outside the dogs began to bark. Father and son looked curiously at each other, both abruptly alert; then Jack Junior rose and went out of the room. In the hall he called, “It's all right, Blackie, I'll see to it.”

“We usually don't get visitors this time of night,” Aldwych told Janis. “It used to happen in the old days, but not any more.”

She had a moment of panic. Had something gone wrong with Dallas White and Gary Schultz and they had traced her here? Then there were voices in the hall and Jack Junior came back with the policeman Malone and another big man who was obviously also a cop. Aldwych didn't rise from his high- backed leather chair, but, she noticed, he did not look resentful of this middle-of-the-night intrusion by police. It occurred to her that he might welcome any sort of disruption to his retirement, any reminder of the bad old days.

“You remember Miss Eden, Inspector? Hello, Russ. The dogs didn't bite you? I'd better have
their
teeth seen to. It's all that canned food you see on TV.”

“Bull terriers,” said Malone. “They're a change from Rottweilers. I had a brush with a couple of them this afternoon out at Denny Pelong's.”

“How is Denny? I saw him tonight, but we just nodded hello.”

“He's not too well, Jack. Just after you left that restaurant tonight, someone put two bullets into Pelong's back. We've been to the hospital and he's still in surgery. They don't know if he's going to make it.”

Janis somehow turned her face into a mask. God, had Dallas White tried to kill Pelong right there outside the restaurant where she had been dining? Had he been trying somehow to implicate her?

“Are you expecting me to be upset? Forget it, Scobie. I couldn't care less what happens to Denny Pelong.” Aldwych looked at Janis out of the corner of his eye. “Are you shocked to hear me say that, Janis?”

“Not at all. You forget, I'm a social worker. We're case-hardened.”

As soon as she said it she knew it was a mistake. It was a flippant remark, even if true of herself. But it had switched the attention of the two police officers to herself, something she didn't want. She had been too clever.

“Do you know Denny Pelong, Miss Eden?” said Malone.

“No. Should I?”

“Not necessarily. But he is one of the biggest, if not
the
biggest, drug dealer in the State. I thought one of your junkies might have mentioned him.”

She had made another mistake. But before she could remedy it, Jack Junior interrupted: “Inspector, would you and Sergeant Clements like a drink? A cup of tea or coffee?”

“Tea, thanks,” said Malone, and Clements nodded.

“Janis—” Jack Junior turned to her without rising from his chair. “Would you mind? The kitchen's out there to the right.”

There was a sudden tension that spread out like a radiation to touch the other three men; then
Janis
smiled, or at least bared her teeth like the bitch bull terrier out in the garden. Aldwych recognized it; but Jack Junior had already turned away to speak to Malone and Clements, playing host. Janis went out to the kitchen, walking stiff-legged, looking, against all the odds, prudish and spinsterish. The latter, of course, is now an obsolete word, or anyway condition; but Jack Junior had just set their relationship back a hundred years. She was seething and could have boiled the water for the tea on her chest. He would pay, oh my God, how he would pay!

Jack Junior, not oblivious of what he had done but intent on safety, said, “Inspector, my father is retired, you know that. I'm a respectable businessman and Dad is proud that I am. Why, now, would he want to get himself involved in the shooting of someone like this Pelong?”

“Mr. Aldwych, I didn't suggest anything like that . . . I don't think, Jack, that you hired a hitman to get rid of Pelong—”

“Thank you, Scobie,” said Aldwych with rough urbanity, in his Sydney Greenstreet role.