Dark Summer (39 page)

“Pay what?”

“All the spoiled food? The people, they not gunna eat what they left on the tables when you ordered 'em outa here.”

“No worries, Mr. Lugopolous. Hang a big sign out the front, saying the Needle Murderer Committed Suicide Here. You'll have to put on extra staff to handle the crowd.”

He walked out into the bright glare, stared across at the sea, brilliant as a blue sun, then up at the empty, careless sky. He really would have to buy some sunglasses, darken the summer.

11

I

THE DRUG
Unit officers held Janis for twenty-four hours, but in the end they had to release her. The sergeant in charge phoned Malone, who had come into Homicide on Saturday morning. “We could get nothing against her, Scobie, nothing that would stand up in court. She's a clever bitch. She's gone free.”

“Her prints weren't on the briefcase?”

“Sure they were, but they prove nothing. She said Keller asked her to hold the case for him while he got into the booth.”

Malone smiled to himself. “She's a beaut, isn't she?”

“I've never come up against a better liar. There were some other prints on the case, but those could be anybody's.”

Jack Junior's? But Jack Junior, with all his monogrammed gear, surely wouldn't have anything to do with a Gucci imitation? “Righto, Des, I guess she's beaten us for the time being. You kept the money?”

“Sure. That seemed to upset her. But what could she do?”

Clements came in late in the morning, looking like a longdistance runner who had found himself in the wrong race: the finishing line was miles further on than he had expected. “I've just spent the worst bloody night in my whole life.”

“How's Romy taking it?”

“Badly. Not so much her dad's death and the way he died, but what he'd done. She carries more than her fair share of blame, that girl. I tried to talk her out of it, but . . .” He sat down. Coffee was
bubbling
in the percolator outside Malone's office, but he was dead to the enticing smell of it. “She's gunna resign from the Forensic Division.”

“What's she going to do?”

“Christ knows. She doesn't. She's talking of going to Adelaide or Perth, finishing her obstetrics and going into practice.”

“Talk her out of that. She's done enough running away, she did that with her father, getting out of Germany. Resigning from Forensic isn't a bad idea—she doesn't want to be surrounded by more murder victims. You never know, we might get a copy-cat murder, another needle-in-the-bum job. Work on her, Russ.” He steadied himself, almost as if he were going to make the commitment himself: “Propose to her.”

Clements bit his lip, said nothing for a moment, then rose from his chair. “Yeah, I'll think about it. You never know . . .”

He went out to his desk. Malone got up, followed him out and crossed to the computer. He sat down in front of it, fed in his access code and ran the last week through the screen. The roll-call of names came up: some dead, one crippled for life, some of them still free and walking around. It was a Scoreboard he had seen scores of times. A drawn game, they would call it in cricket.

He went home at lunchtime, collected Tom and took him into the Cricket Ground, where Australia and England were locked in the third day of a Test. They sat in seats on the apron below the Brewongle Stand, both wearing wide-brimmed hats, both smothered in sunblock cream, both wearing dark glasses. The heat, if anything, had increased during the week. The natives sat around them, frying themselves alive in the climate they claimed was the best in the world. Every second mouth was devouring a meat pie and chips; beer flowed like a brewery that had burst its vats. Great day, mate, they told each other, and watched the melanoma grow like a crop of dark daisies.

“Dad, I wish I'd been able to watch you play,” said Tom suddenly.

Malone had heard there was an old newsreel film of him in action. Ray Robinson, the great cricket writer, had once said that he had a smoother action than Lindwall's, than which there was no higher praise. He had thought once or twice of trying to get a copy of the film; but he knew in his heart
that
he never would. There was nothing sadder than looking back at what you once were.

“I'll tell you something better. You grow up and I'll watch you play.” And hoped he would live to see the day.

Then he heard someone say, “There's Jack Aldwych, the crim.”

He turned his head and looked up at the private boxes, all of them stuffed with guests, all but the Aldwych box. There, Jack Aldwych sat with Jack Junior; it was odd, Malone thought, but they looked lonely. Then Aldwych looked down, caught sight of him and recognized him despite the wide-brimmed hat and the dark glasses. He smiled, gave a small wave, then gestured for Malone to come up to the box. Malone smiled in return, then shook his head.

“Who's that, Dad? D'you know him?”

“Just to nod to, that's all.”

“I think he wants us to go up and sit there. Why don't you, Dad?”

“I'll explain to you some other time.”

“Is it because you're a cop?” Malone saw several heads turn, noses come up sniffing the non-existent breeze. “Geez, you miss out on a lot, don't you? It'd be great up there in that box.”

“Turn around and watch the cricket, or I'll rip your bloody arm off.” An old Aunty Jack television comedy had been revived just before Christmas. Tom had laughed himself sick at it and for a week had been threatening his sisters with the series' catch-cry,
I'll rip your bloody arm off!

He grinned now at his father and gently thumped him on the upper arm. Malone wanted to put his arm round him, hug the breath out of him; but real Aussie fathers didn't do that in public. Crumbs, thought Malone, don't let me get to be like Con. And stroked the back of his son's neck.

He and Tom went home at the end of the day, burnt and tired and happy. There were no calls waiting for him from Homicide. Saturday night the family sat in front of the television set and watched a rented video of ancient Laurel and Hardy shorts. Antics that had broken up an older generation had the same effect on Malone and Lisa and the children; laughter ran through the generations like common blood. After the children had gone to bed, Malone lay on the couch in the living room and Lisa came and
sat
on the floor beside him.

“Is it all over?” she said.

“Some of it. There won't be any more bodies in our pool.”

“What are we going to do about Russ and Romy?”

“We
are going to do nothing.”

She thought about that for a while, then nodded. “No, I suppose not. It's such a shame, though. She's just what he needs.”

“Is he what she needs? Let 'em work it out themselves.” Sunday morning all the family went to Mass together. Then they came home and spent the day by the pool. Malone swam up and down in it, his only exercise for over a week, lazing through the water unpolluted by a murdered corpse. Lisa, Claire and Maureen read the Sunday papers. The two girls went through their usual sport of measuring the exposed teeth of the midget, non-luminous celebrities and habitual freeloaders at charity events on the social pages; there had been one week when the girls claimed to have measured enough enamelled inanity to have tiled a bathroom wall. Lisa told him over lunch that there was a two-page spread on the rising crime rate and there was an interview with Police Minister Gus Dircks in which he thought he was defending the police force but gave an entirely opposite effect. She also reported that the Gulf war was hotting up with increased bombing and that twenty-two experts had given their opinions on the probable outcome. The business pages were all doom and gloom: the recession was going to be much worse than all the economists and politicians had predicted. Malone didn't look at the papers at all, not even at the reports on yesterday's cricket.

Monday morning he was in his office when Luke Radelli rang him from Customs headquarters. “No go, Scobie. We kept surveillance on the warehouse up at Artarmon all weekend, but we didn't catch the fish we wanted. Some nong turned up Saturday afternoon with a key to the place and went in and opened up the case. We grabbed him, but he was a moron, some stooge they'd sent in. You ever hear of that trick they try in India or somewhere, they send out a goat to bait the tiger?”

“I've hear of it,” said Malone. “I tried it myself, once.”

“
Well, they tried it on us and we fell for it. This guy we picked up, he's not worth charging. The point is, we didn't get the guys we wanted. We've confiscated the cocaine and we'll destroy it. But I'm afraid it's like taking a bucket of water from the ocean, there'll be more and more of it coming in. It and heroin and the other crap.”

“If the recession gets any deeper, maybe no one will have any money to buy it.”

“Some hope. I see you got your needle killer, though. Congratulations.”

“Thanks, Luke.”

He hung up, sat a while, then called Roley Bremner. “How's the election going, Roley?”

“I think I'm gunna get back in, mate. Snow White and The Dwarf all of a sudden have gone missing. They were rostered for work Sat'day and yesterday, but they didn't show. I see you got your name in the papers. You must be pleased.”

Not really. Life, as Molly Maddux had said, was a bugger. But it could be worse. He could be out of work or lying somewhere in a trench waiting to be bombed. Or Keller could still be on the loose, needle primed.

“Yes,” he said, “I guess you could say that.”

Kirribilli

October 1990-April 1991

THE
END

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PREVIEW OF THE NEXT SCOBIE MALONE MYSTERY:

BLEAK SPRING

1

I

“AN AUCTION
is a dangerous place to be,” said Malone. “There's a terrible risk you'll end up buying something.”

“It's for charity, for heaven's sake,” said Lisa. “Otherwise, why are we here?”

“Alan Bond started going broke at an auction. He paid millions he couldn't afford for that Van Gogh painting,
Dahlias
.”

“
Irises
,” said Lisa and turned to the Rocknes. “The last time Scobie put his hand up, he was at school. He wanted to leave the room. Is Will mean with money, Olive?”

Olive Rockne looked at her husband. “Are you, darling?”

Will Rockne spread his hands, as if he thought that was a philanthropic gesture in itself. “You'd know that better than I would, love.”

Malone listened with only half an ear to the Rocknes. They were not friends of the Malones nor did he want them to be. He and Lisa had had dinner once at the Rockne home, the result of an unguarded moment of sociability at a meeting of the parents' association of Holy Spirit Convent; he had been bored stiff with Will Rockne and he had asked Lisa not to reciprocate with a return invitation. Tonight, at this arts and crafts festival to raise money for the school, the Rocknes had attached themselves to the Malones like long-time friends.

Malone hated these school affairs; at the same time he wondered if he were growing into a
social
misfit. He had never been one for parties or a night out with the boys, but at least he had been sociable. Now he found himself more and more reluctant to sound agreeable when Lisa told him there were certain functions they were expected to attend. He knew he was being selfish and did his best to hide the fact, but the other fact was that he had lost almost all his patience with bores. And Will Rockne was a bore.

Holy Spirit was a Catholic school, with the usual school's catholic collection of parents. There was the author who lived on literary grants and was known in the trade as Cary the Grant; there was his wife, who wore fringed shawls summer and winter and made macramé maps of some country she called Terra Australis. There were the tiny jockey and his towering blonde wife who, it was said, had taken out a trainer's licence the day they were married and had been exercising the licence ever since. There were the stockbroker who was being charged with insider trading and his wife who was terrified of becoming a social outsider. And there were the low-income parents, blue-collar and white-collar, whose children were at the school on scholarships and who, to the nuns' and lay staff's credit, were treated as no different. The Malone children's fees were paid by Lisa's parents, a generosity that Malone both resented and was glad of. He was becoming a bad-tempered old bastard in his early middle age.

“Will counts the pennies,” Olive Rockne told Lisa. “But he does throw the dollars around. Especially with the kids.”

“But not with her, she means.” Rockne gave Malone a man-to-man smile.

Malone had been idly aware all through the evening of something in the air between the Rocknes. He was no expert on marital atmosphere; as a Homicide detective he usually arrived at the scene of a domestic dispute after either the husband or the wife, or both, were dead; whatever had gone before between the couple was only hearsay. There was no visible argument between the Rocknes, but there was a tension that twanged against Malone's ear.

The Rocknes lived half a mile down the road from Holy Spirit and half a mile up from the beach at Coogee. Will Rockne practised as a solicitor, with an office down on the beachfront. Malone had had no dealings with him and had no idea how successful he was: all he knew about the Rocknes was that
they
had a solid, comfortable home, owned a Volvo and a Honda Civic and were able to send their two children, a boy and a girl, to private schools. He knew that most suburban solicitors did not make the money that partners in the big city law firms did; he also knew that they made more than detective-inspectors did, though that didn't disturb him in the least. He was rare in that he was almost incapable of envy.