Dark Summer (38 page)

“No,” said Keller. Then suddenly he shouted, “Turn off that terrible music!”

Up at the front one of the Drug Unit men found the system, switched it off. The café was abruptly quiet. From behind Clements came the rattle of dishes, an incongruous sound even though it came from a kitchen. Was someone out there actually going ahead with the washing-up?

“No,” said Keller, voice quiet and calm again. “You're too gentle a man, Inspector. I've observed you. You won't let me kill Miss Eden, not so that you can effect an arrest. You value a life, Inspector, even someone's like Miss Eden.”

“Do you think I value your life, Janis?” Malone kept his eyes on Keller, didn't glance at Janis. Talk, keep talking: that was the advice in situations like this.

Janis dragged her stare away from the needle to look at him. “I hope so. Let him go. I'll go with him if he promises not to kill me.”

“Will you promise that, Peter?”

“How can I?” Keller's voice was still under control, but his face had now begun to sweat. The café was not warm; above the kitchen door an air-conditioner hummed. Janis shivered, but not with cold. “All I can promise is that I
shall
kill her if you try to stop me leaving.”

“Where will you go? Back to Germany? Or to Bolivia and your friends there?”

“How do you know about them?” It was a slip: Keller shook his head in annoyance. But then he shrugged, as if conducting a debate with himself. What did it matter what the police knew?

“Romy told us,” said Malone; and saw the immediate hurt in the older man's face. “Germans
living
in Bolivia. One of them the son of an old Nazi, a man who was a friend of your father's. Your father helped him escape from Germany right after the war, right? You've been in touch with the family ever since you came to Australia. Romy knew that, but she never knew the family was in the drug trade. Neither did we, Peter. Are they?”

“You have no proof,” said Keller.

“Oh, we'll come up with proof eventually. Did you know who you were dealing with, Janis?” He didn't look at her, still kept watching Keller.

“No,” She was holding herself rigid, her gaze still fixed on the needle an inch from her flesh. Then she looked up, realizing she, too, had made a slip. “I don't know what you're talking about!”

Malone ignored her. “Romy told us why you killed Mr. Grime and Mr. Lugos, Peter. You thought they had learned who you were, what you were involved in. But why did you kill Sally Kissen? Just because she was a prostitute? Did you find it demeaning that you had to visit her every once in a while, that you had to pay for sex? . . . Sorry!” The needle had quivered above Janis' arm. “All right, Peter, I'm not trying to cut your balls off in front of a woman. But why kill Sally Kissen?”

The sweat was glistening on Keller's face now. “The woman had no respect—”

“You wanted respect from a whore?”

Keller ignored that, though the needle quivered again. “She used to call me Adolf. The night I killed her she laughed—she said
Heil Hitler
while I was . . .” Adolf Hitler: A. H. on the kitchen calendar. “She was high on cocaine. No man likes being laughed at, especially by a whore.”

“How did Scungy Grime know you were in the drug trade? He was working for me, you know.”

“I knew that. I don't know how he found out about me, but he was waiting for me one night when I came out of Mrs. Kissen's place. He said he had a proposition to put to me.” Keller seemed intent now on confession; his gaze kept moving from Malone to Clements and back again. Except that he still had hold of her wrist and had the needle poised above her arm, he could have been oblivious of Janis. “I put him off. I told him I'd meet him the following evening. That was when I killed him, outside his front door in the flats where he lived. I was as surprised as you must have been when his body was found in
your
swimming pool. You were surprised, yes?”

“I was surprised, all right. So were my kids.”

“I'd never have done that, tried to frighten anyone's children.”

You have a child of your own, a grown woman, and you don't appear to have given her much consideration.
“What about Leroy Lugos?”

“He had seen me once at Mrs. Kissen's, when I was leaving. I knew you had interrogated him—I tapped into your computer. There was nothing about me in the data, but I couldn't be sure Mr. Lugos hadn't mentioned me to you. So I killed him, to see if you would come looking for me. You didn't.”

It was all so cold-blooded, a police report. “But we have now, Peter. How long did you think you could get away with this?”

“Who knows? There are men in this city, Inspector, who have been dealing in drugs for years and they are still free. And look at the white-collar criminals who are still not in jail. I used to have respect, great respect, for the law, Inspector. But not any more. Romy has probably told you what happened to me in Germany—”

“She just confirmed what we already knew. We checked on, you through Interpol.”

“Ah yes.” Keller nodded at the efficiency of the law enforcement agencies. He raised himself in the booth and looked up to the front of the café as he heard the sound of approaching sirens. Malone turned his head and saw the three police cars pull up out in the street, their sirens gurgling away into silence. More theatrics, he thought: why couldn't the buggers arrive without the fanfare? Then he looked back at Keller as the latter sank down again on his seat and went on as if undisturbed by the commotion outside: “I grew tired of being a poor man, Inspector. No money, no authority, nothing. If they had let me stay in Germany I should have been a chief superintendent by now. I have—had—” For a moment his voice faltered. “I had a daughter who earned more than I did, who had authority, who had respect. You gave her respect, didn't you, Sergeant?”

“I gave her more than that,” said Clements quietly.

“Love?” Keller considered that, then shrugged. Then he went on, nodding at the briefcase on
the
seat beside him. “I had no intention of cheating on my friends in Bolivia. They were going to pay me a nice commission on what I collected for them. It was going to be what they call an ongoing thing. But not now, that won't be possible any more. So I am taking this money and I'm going to disappear and start again somewhere. It happens, doesn't it? My friends in Bolivia had to do it and they succeeded. Now will you let me and Miss Eden walk out of here? Her car is across the road.”

Janis looked up at Malone. “Let us go—
please
!”

“No,” said Malone and took out his gun. He reached for a chair up-ended on a table against the wall behind him, set it on the floor and sat down. Clements moved away from the kitchen door and sat with his haunches on the edge of the table, folding his arms. It all looked very casual to those officers still at the front of the café. A face appeared at the tiny round window in the kitchen door, but Clements glowered at it and it disappeared.

“No,” said Malone. “We are going to stay here, Peter, till you either kill Miss Eden and then I shoot you, or you come to your senses and give yourself up.”

“No!” Janis' scream was little more than a whimper, caught in her throat. “No, you can't let him do that!”

Malone looked over his shoulder at Clements. “I think it might be an idea, Russ, if you went and called Romy. Ask her to come here—”

“
Nein
!” It was a guttural animal cry.

Malone looked back at Keller. “When we bring Romy here, Peter, we don't want the two of you speaking in German. We want to understand everything that is said between you—”

“Nothing will be said between us!” Then Keller raised the hand that held the needle, ran the back of it over his glistening forehead. Then he lowered the needle again towards Janis' arm. “No, don't bring her. She despises me, just as her mother did.”

“I don't think so,” said Clements, still quiet, “I talked to her, Peter. She'll try to help you—”

“How? Don't be foolish, Russell. She can't help me. No one can but myself. And Miss Eden.” He looked at her, not menacingly but almost as if he were her father. “We're birds of a feather, Miss
Eden.
Both despicable . . . You really would shoot me, Inspector?”

“You kill Miss Eden, Peter, and yes, I'll shoot you.” Malone raised his gun, hoping he would not have to squeeze the trigger. He had never had to shoot a man in such a cold-blooded way; he would hear the shot forever. He saw the look in Keller's eyes, saw that the man had read his intention and was truly surprised.

Keller all at once said something in German, perhaps a prayer, but only he and God would know, then he let go of Janis' wrist, pulled back his cuff and jammed the needle into his own arm. He looked at Malone, said something else in German, then he said in English, calmly and finally, “It does not take long—”

IV

Before the ambulance arrived to take away Keller's body, Clements said, “Get Andy to give you a lift back to Homicide, Scobie. I'm going out to the morgue. I don't think there should be the risk that the bag will come in, they'll open it up and it's her father.”

“Stay with her, Russ. Stay with her till you feel she's okay to be left alone.”

“Thanks, mate.” Clements had never looked unhappier. When Keller had died, slumping forward on to the booth table, the big man had let out a slubbering sigh, as if he were about to weep. It had not been pity for the dead man; it had been pity for the daughter who would have to be told what had happened. And he had known it would have to be he who would tell her. “I'll call you, let you know how she's taking it. I'm not gunna take any statement from her. Someone else can do that, okay?”

“Sure. I'll do it.”

Then Clements left and ten minutes later the ambulance arrived. In the meantime Malone had transferred his attention to Janis.

When Keller had fallen on his face across the table from her, she had reared back, hitting her head against the wall of the booth. At once Clements had pulled her out of the booth and half carried her up to another and sat her down. Malone had taken the briefcase from the seat beside Keller and opened
it;
the combination lock was set at zero, so he had no trouble in doing so. As he had expected, the briefcase was full of money, hundred-dollar notes. The case had looked to be an expensive Gucci one, till he had examined it further and recognized it as a not-very-good imitation, probably made in Hong Kong or Taiwan.

He took it up to Janis, sat down opposite her, while Andy Graham and the local police came down to take care of Keller's body. Malone looked at the closed briefcase lying on the table between himself and Janis.

“I haven't counted it, Janis, but there's a lot of money in there.”

One could almost see her collecting herself, like a woman who had dropped her belongings. She was still pale and her wrist was red where Keller had been grasping it; it seemed that her auburn hair was suddenly vivid, as if her paleness highlighted it. “It's not mine. That man was carrying it when he sat down opposite me.”

Malone had to hide his admiration; she could lie like a military spokesman in wartime. “You're trying to tell me he was a stranger to you?”

“I've never seen him in my life before.”

“He was a cleaner at St. Sebastian's. He knew you. Who gave you the money?”

“I told you, it was that man's—Peter?”

“Peter Keller. The man you were giving that money to for the cocaine that's waiting for you—” Just in time he stopped himself from saying
out at Artarmon.
He was losing his patience with her, the tension of the minutes with Keller was having an aftereffect. He glanced up at the two Drug Unit men who had come down to join him and Janis and now stood in the aisle. “Do you want to take her away and question her? I think she's going to be difficult.”

“Sure, Inspector.” They were both young men, relaxed and relieved; it was a good clean bust, the dirty work had been done by Homicide. When they walked through the crowd outside with this good-looking suspect, the credit would be theirs. Though they would not expect any applause: half the crowd in this place were probably drug-users of some sort. Public appreciation of the police was to be avoided: it
was
like an Arab having a good word for a Jew, or vice versa. “We'll take the money, okay? A Gucci, eh?”

“It's a fake,” said Malone.

Janis glanced at the briefcase, then frowned; but it was no more than a faint line in her otherwise smooth brow. What a cheapskate Jack was! She should have known. And if all had gone well, she would have given him the Vuitton case he had asked for . . . “I repeat, that case isn't mine. If you knew me, you'd know that. If I can't afford the real thing, I don't settle for an imitation. That case was brought in here by that man who just killed himself. Who would have killed me if you had let him.” She looked at Malone. “And you would have, wouldn't you?”

“Then I would have killed him.” Malone was tired of her now. “You wouldn't have died in vain, as they say.”

“You shit!”

“Maybe. We all have a bit of it in us, Janis.” Then, all at once worn out, he gestured for the Drug Unit men to take her away.

He sat for a few moments in the booth, then looked up as Andy Graham, for once not bouncing up and down, stood over him. “You okay, boss?”

He nodded, then stood up, trying to get some ease of movement into his iron skeleton. “You do the report on Keller, Andy. I'll give you the details. I'll wait for you outside.”

As he walked towards the front door of the café, the proprietor, who looked as if he had aged twenty years in twenty minutes, stopped him. “Hey, who's gunna pay?”