Autumn Maze (7 page)

“Did you know Rob Sweden?” said Malone.

The pretty girl, an Indian, behind the reception desk closed her big dark eyes for a moment, opened them again, then nodded. “We're all—” She gestured with a graceful hand, looked for a moment as if she might weep. Then she recovered: “Yes, I knew him.”

“Did you ever meet him outside the office?”

“You mean, did I go out with him?” Her father had been a Bombay lawyer; but she was more direct. Circumlocution never got you anywhere with Australians, they didn't understand the uses of it. “No, he never went out with any of the girls from the office. He was—discreet?—that way. He always treated us politely. No, you know, harassment.”

“A gentleman?”

“Oh yes. They're scarce today.” She sounded as if she might show them her bruises.

“Not amongst us older types,” said Malone, thanked her and he and Clements left.

The Futures Exchange was hidden behind the facade of a building that belonged to another age, when a future had no value to anyone but the person whose dream it was. The building had been gutted and turned into a temple owned and run by the money-changers: Jesus Christ would never have got past the security guards at the entrance.

Malone and Clements, being police and not messiahs, were admitted. They found Jim Ondelli, Casement's general manager, in the ten-year-bond pit. He was in his early forties, thin-faced and curly-haired, his trader's vest of purple-and-pink stripes worn over what looked to Malone like a very expensive shirt. He handed his clipboard to a younger man, a mere boy, and came towards Malone and Clements.

“You're from the police? They rang me from the office.”

Malone
introduced himself and Clements. “Is this a good time to talk?”

“Oh sure, no worries. The bond market, especially the ten-year-one, is pretty slack at the moment, everyone's waiting to see what the Japanese are going to do. What can I do for you? I mean about Rob Sweden. Poor bugger.”

It was like being in an aviary; or, as Clements, a chauvinist, would have described it, at a women's luncheon party. Chatter chipped the air, shouts bounced like invisible rubber balls. Ondelli led the two detectives under a balcony where, somehow, the noise was less overwhelming.

“Are you doing what young Sweden did?”

“Yeah. He was one of our traders, not the best but good enough. He might've developed, I dunno. I tried him on several of the pits, they all handle a different commodity. He wasn't quite quick enough for the really volatile pit, say the share-index one over there.”

“Was that why you transferred him to the bank?”

“That was his own idea, not mine.”

“What would he have earned?” said Clements, a punter.

“Here? It varied. He'd have earned less at the bank. The clerks here, the young ones hoping to be traders, they're usually on around forty thousand a year. A trader like Rob would get sixty to a hundred thousand, depending on how good he is. The „gun' trader—that kid over there, for instance—” Ondelli pointed to the share-index pit, where a group of traders, most of them young, stood in a semi-circle facing another young man in a green-and-white jacket. “That kid is as good as anyone on the floor. He's with—” He named one of the major banks. “He has the money to play with. When he bids, the others jump in— that's why they're watching him as if he's some sort of orchestra leader. He'd be on a hundred and fifty thousand, probably plus bonuses.”

The two detectives looked at each other and Ondelli grinned. “It's bloody obscene, is that what you're thinking?”

In these times, yes
. But all Malone said was, “We're in the wrong game.”

Ondelli went on, “This is, in effect, no more than a gambling den, a legitimate one. It has its
uses,
though. It can guarantee a price for a farmer, for instance, for his produce, say six months down the track. It can protect him against a poor harvest or a glut harvest—up to a point, that is. We can do nothing about the low prices right now for wool and wheat. As for the rest of it—” He shrugged. “It's gambling, a casino.”

“How much money passes through here each day?” Clements, the bookies' friend, was hooked: this was one form of gambling he had never examined. It also opened up the possibility that, somewhere on this crowded, noisy floor, lay the reason for Rob Sweden's murder.

“The transactions? We're the ninth largest futures exchange in the world. We handle about seventy thousand transactions a day, about thirty billion dollars' worth.”

The two detectives, feeling more poverty stricken by the moment, looked at each other again. Then Malone said, “What would the largest do?”

“That's the Chicago Board of Trade. It does a million transactions a day. There's also the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Between them they do just on sixty-five trillion dollars a year in contracts. That's sixty times the value of all the shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange.”

Malone looked at Clements. “You going to leave the bookies and try your luck here? He's the scourge of the bookies,” he explained to Ondelli.

“Can anyone make money on the side here?” asked Clements.

“You mean trade for themselves? No, that's a no-no. The Exchange is very strict on that. Rob Sweden wouldn't have been into that.”

“What about scams?” Ondelli frowned as if offended and Clements added, “I'm not suggesting young Sweden was in any scam. But can they work them?”

“Sure,” Ondelli admitted. “Any business where money is traded, there's always the opportunity for a scam. Cornering the market in something, for instance. That's been tried everywhere. The Japanese invented the first futures market, in Osaka back in 1650, and they invented the first corner about the same time.”

“What about other scams?”

Ondelli
looked dubious. “I dunno whether I should be telling you all this, I'm putting a bad odour on the Exchange. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of what goes on here every day is honest trading. But there's the exception, there always is. A futures exchange is a convenient place for laundering money, you know what I mean?”

“We know what you mean,” said Malone. “Go on.”

“Say someone wants to launder a million dollars, some drug dealer or some guy who's wondering how he can avoid tax. He picks some trader who's got a blind eye, gives him the million and tells him to trade in some futures that are never going to move, something like New Zealand wool futures or North American lumber. They're not volatile, they go up or down only a few cents, but they're nothing to get excited about. The guy leaves his money with the trader for, say, a month, three weeks. Then he comes back, says he's decided to get out of the market. The trader writes him a cheque for a million dollars, less commission, a
clean
cheque, and the guy walks away with his money all nicely laundered.”

“Who polices something like that?”

“The Exchange itself. It has an audit staff, they keep an eye on everything going on. See those screens up there above each of the pits? That young girl in the middle of each pit, they're kids virtually straight out of high school, she records every transaction that takes place in her pit. She speaks into that mike she's wearing and the computer translates her voice into those figures you see on the screen. That information goes around the world simultaneously, to every major futures exchange—a guy in Chicago or Tokyo or London knows at once what's happening down here in Sydney. Everything on those screens comes before the audit staff and over a week or a month they pick up any blips in what should be normal trading. They inform the trading broker in question and he has twenty-one days to reply. If he can give no satisfactory answer, he goes before a tribunal of the Exchange's chief executive and two outside members of the board. They can fine the broker up to a quarter of a million dollars and take away his licence. At the same time he might be investigated by the Securities Commission, that's a separate thing. They can prosecute the broker and he can get up to five years in jail. The Exchange is self-regulating, but it's tough. Not like some of these other self-regulating bodies.”

“
Has anyone been caught laundering money?”

“Not as far as I know. But that's not to say it hasn't happened.” He looked at them shrewdly. “You're not telling me Rob Sweden might've been into something like that?”

“So far we're not suggesting anything. Why did he transfer to the Casement bank?”

“That puzzled me. He wasn't the banking type—he wouldn't get the excitement in the bank's foreign currency department that he got here. He just sprung the news on me.”

“You know he was murdered?”

There was one of those inexplicable moments when the world is suddenly silent: the noise in the pits abruptly stopped, as if everyone on the floor had heard what Malone had just said. Ondelli gave an audible gasp and his eyes almost disappeared as his thick brows came down. Then the noise started up again and his voice was only a whisper: “Murdered?”

“Yes, he was murdered before he was tossed off that balcony.”

“Jesus!” Ondelli shook his head; his curls bounced. “It'll be the talk in the pub this evening. So does that alter the picture on Rob? Do you mean something here—” he waved a hand around him “— maybe had something to do with his death?”

“Could be,” said Malone. “Here's my card. If a blip, as you call it, comes up on those screens in the next week or two, a scam or something that Rob Sweden might've been connected with, let me know.”

Malone and Clements went back to Homicide in Surry Hills. Homicide, Major Crime Squad, South Region was in a refurbished commercial building that had once been a hat factory; Sydney, the oldest of the colonies, had long ago given up trying to keep all its services in government buildings. One advantage to working in the Hat Factory was that big heads from Administration rarely ventured there.

Malone rang Lisa to see if he was still in the doghouse. Her voice was cool: Tom says he understands, there's duty and all that.”

“What's he doing?”

“He's in his room listening to the radio. They're playing that Ice-T song about killing cops. He's dancing to it, seems to be enjoying himself.”

He
sighed. “You should've married someone on the dole, they're home all the time.”

“Oh, now we've joined the New Right, have we?”

“I dunno why, but I still love you.”

But when he hung up he knew he had been forgiven; seventeen years of marriage had inured Lisa to the vagaries of a cop's wife's life. The children sometimes had trouble adjusting to his abrupt coming and going, the broken promises on outings; but Lisa, despite her own occasional annoyance, acted his advocate with them. He was well aware and grateful that she was the rock on which the family stood.

He called Peta Smith in to his small corner office. She came in, briskly cool but with an understated deference to him. She was twenty-nine, a year older than John Kagal, attractive without being either pretty or beautiful, with thick blonde hair cut short, a wide jaw and alert blue eyes. She always wore, no matter what the season, a suit and a blouse; she was neat. She had been with Homicide six months and had proved as efficient as any of the men; yet Malone, aware of the chauvinism amongst the majority of the men under him, was protective of her and so hindered her chances to show how good she was. He was uncertain of her feelings towards him, whether she resented his protection of her.

“Peta—” He explained that there now might be a connection between the Sweden murder and that of the missing corpse from the morgue. “The Rocks station will run the day-to-day stuff on the Sweden murder and Campsie will do the same on this feller they picked up out at Canterbury. But I want you to keep a flow chart, bringing in the bits and pieces from The Rocks and Campsie.”

She nodded. “The media are starting to ask questions—”

“Check with Russ, then you handle „em.” She got up to go, but he checked her: “Down at The Wharf, did you have a look at the service entrance to the apartments?”

Again she nodded, briskly. “I went down in the service lift, it goes right down to the basement garage. The PE team had been down there, but said they found nothing.”

“What's the security like?”

She grimaced. “Pretty lousy, considering what it's like in the rest of the building. There's a grille door at the top of a ramp, it's operated electronically by a card-in-the-slot. There's a smaller door in that
large
one, its latch is loose, anyone could open the door. It's a joke, security down in that garage.”

“One other thing—would anyone hear the service lift when it's going up or down? I mean from the front desk?”

“I checked that with the doorman. He said no, everything in the building is supposed to be for the comfort of the tenants. Silent lifts, things like that.”

He sat back. “Peta, do you ever fall down on anything?”

“Only in the guys I choose.” She smiled and left him wondering if she was having love trouble here in Homicide.

Clements came in with the preliminary report from the Physical Evidence team on the Sweden case. “They haven't come up with much. There are fingerprints all over the apartment—evidently the maid goes pretty light on with the duster, she just re-arranges the dust. Fingerprints will check „em out with everyone who comes and goes in the apartment, including all those we talked to this morning. I asked „em to get Cormac Casement's—that'll go down well with the Wicked Witch when our guys walk in with their little pads.”

“Anything else?”

“They found a trace of blood on the fancy coverlet in the second bedroom, where there might of been a struggle. Just a faint smear, as if a needle or something with blood on it had fallen on the coverlet. It's a fancy pattern, they say, and the killer could of missed the smear in it. There's nothing else. If Rob Sweden had a visitor he knew, we don't know if he offered him a drink. The maid said she washed up all the glasses this morning, Mrs. Sweden told her to. Evidently Mr. and Mrs. Sweden had a drink when they got home from the opera and the uniformed boys were there to tell them what had happened. I'd have a drink, too.”