Bleak Spring (15 page)

“Would any of the mechanics, besides Kelpie, have been clients of yours?”

“No.” The smile had gone again.

“
Where does Olive take her Honda Civic?”

“I haven't the faintest idea. Not to Hamill's—they'd draw the line there.”

Malone had never understood the snobbery about cars, but he wouldn't dare voice that to someone who had called herself a car woman. “Mrs. Bodalle, you've been a friend of the family how long?”

“A year, maybe a little less.”

“Oh? Somehow I'd got the idea that you'd been a friend a long time, that you and Olive were
old
friends.”

“We're
close
friends. How long we've known each other doesn't really matter, does it? How many old friends do you have?”

Come to think of it, and he had not thought much about it at all because it did not worry him, he had no old friends or even close ones. Except, of course, Russ Clements, and (wrongly, he admitted now) he had always thought of Russ as a workmate. He was not an authority on friendship, so she had him there.

“How did you meet?”

She considered the question, as if debating whether she had to answer or not; then she said, “We went to the same school, I was a couple of years ahead of Olive. Then we bumped into each other again at a legal convention, she was there with Will . . .”

“Were you a close friend of Will's?”

The thought amused her; she shook her head. “Are you hinting I might have had an affair with him? Forget it, Inspector. Neither of us ever really liked the other.”

“Did you dislike him enough to want to kill him?”

She was far from amused now; her look could have killed. “That's a stupid question! If you're going to continue that line, your time's up.” She shuffled her papers together.

He grinned. “Mrs. Bodalle, you're not on the Bench, not yet. Only judges tell a cop when his time's up. I'm not
accusing
you of killing Will Rockne, I just asked you if you disliked him enough to
want
to
kill him. You're a lawyer, you should know the difference.”

She didn't relent, “I think you'd better go.”

He stood up, not made awkward by his dismissal. Police are always being dismissed or told to get lost or to fuck off, depending on the manners of those being bothered by the police. He had been dismissed by women with tongues like spiked leather: at least Angela Bodalle was coldly polite.

“If you didn't get on with Will, I don't suppose he ever confided to you that he had a brain tumour?”

That stopped her shuffling her papers; her hands were as still as dead birds. “Does Olive know?”

“She does now. I don't think she knew till I told her. The autopsy showed it was inoperable. He'd have been dead in six months or less. The killer could've waited if he'd known. Good luck with your prosecution. How's Filbert pleading?”

“Not guilty. You men usually do, don't you?” Then she said quickly, “Sorry, I didn't mean that.”

“Why don't you like men, Angela?”

He went out without giving her time to reply. Outside in the street he stood and watched as four barristers, gowns aflutter in the wind that had sprung up, heads bent to keep their wigs anchored (why, he wondered, did they wear their wigs in the street; how many white horses had given up their hides to supply this conceit?), made their way round the corner to the courts, where more wind would blow at thousands of dollars a day. Like most cops, he had little time for lawyers, even those on the police side, the prosecutors; he could not imagine his being enthused at working with Angela Bodalle as the prosecutor. He wondered what her fee would be if she had to defend Olive Rockne against a charge of murdering her husband.

IV

It had been a bad day for bookmakers at the Randwick midweek meeting. There had been seven races on the card and in six of them the favourites, heavily backed, had romped home; the horses, as
they
passed the post, had been laughing and even those most lugubrious of characters, the jockeys, had been smiling. Bernie Bezrow sighed, a hissing sound, and looked at his clerk.

“Charlie, this has got to stop. The punters have stopped coming to the course and those who do have an unearthly anticipation of what's going to win. How did the TAB do today?”

Charlie Lawson, thin as a slide-rule and as old-fashioned, thirty years a bookie's clerk, an old-timer who never used a calculator but still persisted with his pencil and his nimble mind that could tell you the square root of the national debt in ten seconds flat, pushed back his straw hat and nodded in agreement with his boss. “Things are crook, Bernie. The TAB was down twelve per cent today.”

That was the only satisfactory note in the day, that the government betting agency was also feeling the pinch of the recession. “I hate to break the law,” Bernie said piously, “but it looks as if we'll be forced to concentrate on the footy.”

“We been doing that since the start of the season.” Charlie Lawson was a matter-of-fact man, as a good penciller should be.

“Don't flourish the obvious, Charlie. I'm trying to ease my conscience, if I can find it. I had one, once, but it got lost somewhere in all this fat. What's the money now on Penrith for the grand final?”

“Too much. If Penrith wins, we might have to retire.”

Bezrow sighed again. “The thought doesn't frighten me, Charlie. The good old days have gone.”

He looked round the betting ring, at the now empty stands, the litter, the backs of the departing small crowd. He was one of the privileged, the rails bookmakers, the last of those who had been household names, or anyway stables names, in the racing game, Jack Shaw and Ken Ranger and Terry Page and now himself, the last identity. Punters such as Hollywood George and Melbourne Mick and Kerry Packer had bet hundreds of thousands of dollars with him; he had taken them and they had taken him and there had never been any ill-feeling; it was a game that no one but true gamblers understood. Now, it seemed, it was all coming to an end; maybe only a temporary end, but he would be dead before it revived. He sighed once more, struggled out of his chair, took Charlie Lawson's hand to help him as he stepped down off his stand.

His
private security man, whom he employed only on race days, came across the paper-strewn lawn. “Not much to worry about today, Matt. Charlie has it all there in the bags.”

The Australian Jockey Club didn't allow security guards other than their own to wear uniform; Matt, a big blunt-faced man, wore slacks and a jacket, but carried a gun in a shoulder holster. There had been several attacks on bookmakers over the past twelve months, not on the racecourses but, mostly, as they were about to enter their homes. Bezrow had never been attacked, but, like most of the top bookmakers, he had been tested with threats of extortion. He had lied to Malone and Clements when he had claimed to be a fatalist. He was a long way from being a cowardly man, but when it came to personal safety, of his own and of Charlie Lawson, he didn't believe in long odds.

“You want us to drop you off first, Mr. Bezrow?” The security guard took his job seriously, especially now in the recession. Young punks, amateurs, were moving into areas where previously only professional stand-over men had operated.

“No, just escort Charlie. I have someone waiting for me in my car. I'll see you tomorrow morning, Charlie. We'll talk about the odds on Penrith.”

He walked out of the betting ring towards the car park. Despite his huge bulk he didn't waddle; he walked almost daintily, as some fat people do. Cars were still easing their way out of the racecourse and he dodged them with some grace. Then he came to the peacock-blue Rolls-Royce. His chauffeur, a thin dapper Vietnamese, held open the rear door for him.

“The gentleman is waiting for you, sir.”

“Leave us for fifteen minutes, Trang. I'll signal you when we're ready to go.”

He got into the car with some difficulty, sank back beside the slim body already in the rear seat. “Hello, Walter. Thank you for coming. You have enough room?”

Walter Palady was pressed hard up against the leather trim, making room for his host. “Yes, Bernard. Did you have a good day?”

“Not a good day at all. But that's the least of my worries. Have the police been back to you again?”

Palady
shook his head. “No. But that is not to say they have forgotten us.”

“Did my name come up at all?”

“No. The two officers asked who had recommended Mr. Rockne to our bank, but my manager had a convenient lapse of memory. It is an advantage that banks have a reputation for not thinking fast on their feet—when did a bank manager ever give a snap decision?” He smiled and Bezrow smiled in return as a fee. “Some clients,
most
clients, complain, but they are the stupid little depositors in ordinary banks.” He smiled again at the big, and not stupid, depositor beside him. “No, Bernard, you are safe. So far.”

“So far? That's what worries me. How long does it take you, Walter, to move my money through your branch here to the Caymans?”

“We can do it overnight, if we have to. But it looks better if we send it out in parcels. It goes a roundabout route, through places not as obvious as the Caymans.”

Bezrow chewed his thick lips. “I'll be depositing a lot of money with you in the next couple of weeks, a lot. The rugby league grand final,” he explained when he saw the polite puzzlement on Palady's face. “You haven't been here long enough, Walter, but you'll find that Australians' main cultural pursuit is sport,” he said, sitting there in his Rolls-Royce in the car park of the State's biggest racecourse. “Nobody ever made money in this country betting on the arts. Of course some pop stars have made a fortune or two, but one can't say they are part of the arts.” He smiled at Palady; the latter smiled back, though he was musically deaf and wouldn't have known Beethoven from boogie-woogie, whatever that was. “This year the rugby league, and remember it is played in only two States, will pull in fifty million dollars in bets. All of it illegal, except up in Darwin, where, it seems, anything goes.” He spoke with the bitterness of a man who hated unfair competition. “My SP network—”

“SP?”

“Starting price betting. It's illegal, but it's like Prohibition was in the US in the Twenties—nobody sees anything wrong with it, except the wowsers. Don't ask me to explain wowsers to you, Walter, or we'll be here till dark. They are sort of civilian ayatollahs. What I'm telling you is that in the next couple of weeks I shall be depositing several million dollars and I don't want anyone coming to you and
asking
awkward questions. Have you moved any of the money Will Rockne deposited with you?”

“Not yet. I don't think he had any intention of doing so.”

“It wasn't Rockne's money, you know that? He came to me and said he had a client who wanted to bury some money, bury where no questions would be asked. I met the client and recommended your bank. That was before you arrived out here.”

“Harold Junor tells me it was originally deposited in a trust account, with Mr. Rockne as the trustee. Then two weeks ago it was transferred to an account in Mr. Rockne's name only.”

“Junor didn't query it?”

Palady shifted awkwardly in his confined space. “Bernard, how would you feel if we queried what you did with your money? We're not that sort of bank. If we were, what use would we be to our clients?”

Bezrow nodded. “Point taken. So what's happening to the money?”

“The police told us to freeze it till further notice, which we've done. After that . . .” He shrugged, the only movement he could make without fighting the heavyweight beside him for space. Other people's money never worried him, once they had paid their commission and fees.

“When the police come back, Walter, keep my name out of it. Understand?”

“That may not be so easy, Bernard.”

“Harold Junor will think of something, he's been here long enough to know the ropes. This country has some of the most incompetent and dilatory investigators one could ask for—you have only to read the accounts of the royal commissions and other investigations going on all over the country at the moment.”

“Inspector Malone didn't strike me as either incompetent or dilatory.”

“He's a Homicide detective, Walter. Throw him into the money field and I'm sure you and Harold Junor can bamboozle him. After all, your bank has fooled some of the best financial brains in bigger countries than this backwater.”

Palady looked hurt, but did his best to smile in agreement. It was taking him some time to
become
accustomed to Australians, even those with Russian blood in them. Their rudeness was not as civilized as that of the English and the French. He admired those two, aspired to be a blend of them, perhaps because in his polyglot blood there was a pint or two of those nationals.

5

I

“WHAT DO
you want for lunch tomorrow? Or are you going to disappear again without telling me?”

“Mum, I did tell you—you just weren't listening. I told you Jill had called, she wanted you, and then she asked me if I wanted to go down and have a hamburger with her.”

“What did she want me for?”

Jason and Olive were making their slow way down the aisles of the supermarket here in the Randwick shopping centre, he pushing the trolley and she choosing what she wanted from the shelves. Olive had always done her grocery shopping here at Franklins at Will's insistence; Franklins was cheaper than the other chains and Will had been a compulsive comparison shopper. Olive, on the other hand, was an impulse buyer; the true species, not the lovers, who made the real world go round. Jason had grown tired of hearing the constant arguments over her spending. Today, he guessed, they had come here to Franklins out of habit.