Bleak Spring (17 page)

When he got back to the Civic he heard his mother say, “Write a letter to my lawyer, Mr. Jones. Her name is Angela Bodalle, B-O-D-A-L-L-E. You'll find her office address in the phonebook.”

Jones said nothing, just looked at her, then at Jason. Then he shoved the box of cornflakes at Jason. “You have this. It's the sort of mush that should be brain food for you and your mother.”

Then he was gone, striding quickly off among the cars, moving arrogantly into their paths, ignoring the tooting of horns and the screech of brakes. Jason looked at his mother.

“He'll be back, Mum. Who is he, did he tell you?”

She was staring after the disappearing Jones, now just a silhouette against the bright light of the exit. “No. But we're not going to give him the money.” Then she looked at him across the roof of the Civic. “You want us to keep it, don't you? I think Dad meant for us to have it.”

“
Why?”

“Because I think he knew he was going to die.” She ducked her head, slid into the driver's seat. His own door was still closed, the window up, and he barely heard her: “I think he paid someone to shoot him.”

II

There had not been one cheerful headline on the main pages of the morning's newspapers. Malone remembered a line from the old Don McLean song, “American Pie”: bad news on the doorstep. Yugoslavia was reviving the old meaning of balkanization, though that bastard word had not been invented when that part of the world had been known as the Balkans. The US Secretary of State was on a merry-go-round in the Middle East, with the Arabs and the Israelis standing on opposite sides of the carousel watching him go round and round. There were typhoons and droughts and starvation and unemployment; bad news, it seemed, was infinite, the Four Horsemen were just four runners in a crowded field. So editors filled their back pages with news of the coming rugby league grand final: good news about Alexander's ankle, Meninga's hamstring, Stuart's groin. A balance had to be kept, or what was a sports editor for?

“No homicides today,” said Greg Random, folding his
Herald
and laying it on his desk.

“There's still time,” said Malone.

He had come across to Police Centre for his weekly half-hour chat with Chief Superintendent Random, Commander, Regional Crime Squad, South Region. They were old workmates; Random had been in charge of Homicide for ten years, and there was never any awkwardness or questions of rank between them. Still, Random had others above him whom he had to answer to: Assistant Commissioners, the Deputy Commissioner, the Commissioner, the Minister. Occasionally he answered to God, but that was not obligatory under public service rules.

“Don't spoil my day, Scobie. I've looked at the weekly report. You still have five unsolved murders. How's it going on the Rockne case?”

“
Round and round. Up till this morning I thought the wife might've done it. Not that she did the actual shooting, but that she paid someone else to do it.”

“Motive?” Random had been born and raised on a wheat farm out west and, outwardly at least, he suggested he still worked to the slow rhythm of the bush. His build conjured up the image of a weatherbeaten fencepost, topped by grey hair thick as wire-grass. His voice was a slow-motion drawl, words kept to a minimum by the unlit pipe that was always between his teeth.

“Several motives. I knew them slightly and I don't think they got on that well. He was heavy-handed, I don't mean he belted her, but he treated her as if she was a dumb blonde. Women get tired of that treatment.”

“It's not enough to drive 'em to murder. Go on.”

“He had an affair—well, a weekend—with his secretary. There may have been other women, I don't know. But the wife could have found out about them and that, on top of the way he treated her, could've put her over the edge.”

“Is she the hysterical type?”

“Not at all. In fact, she's surprised me since the murder, she's more in control than I'd expected her to be. Finally, there's a fortune, five and a quarter million dollars in a hidden bank account that she says she knew nothing about. But maybe she did know. Add up all those factors and she'd have a reason for getting rid of him.”

“There's something else you're thinking about. What is it?”

“Well, this is just a feeling, intuition, if you like—”

“I've never knocked intuition. My dad used to stand in the middle of a paddock in a dry spell and hold up his finger and say, 'Rain's coming.' He couldn't feel a bloody thing with his finger, but he was right nine times out of ten. It was intuition.” He took his pipe out of his mouth and sucked in a deep breath, as if such a long speech had winded him.

“Righto, intuition. I don't feel there's any grief in her. She acts as if shock has belted the soul-case out of her, but it's bullshit. Very restrained, but still bullshit. And Russ Clements and I have caught
her
out a coupla times in straight lies.”

“Lying isn't a crime, otherwise we'd be locking up every politician, and bureaucrat in the country, including myself.” He no longer considered himself a working cop but a bureaucrat; he had been much happier, if less well paid, lower down the totem pole. He took his pipe out of his mouth again, looked at it as if he had removed a molar. “You haven't much to go on for an arrest.”

Malone nodded, “I know. There are too many loose ends at the moment. Where did Rockne get the five million from? It's obviously not his, but it's in the bank in his name, so legally it goes to the widow and the two kids. Unless the real owner comes forward, and intuition tells me that's not going to happen.”

“What about this bookie, Bezrow? Could the money be his?”

“I don't know. We can't pin anything on him, not yet. But he's in it, somehow. Then there's Kelpie Dunne. It's just too coincidental that he starts servicing Rockne's car only a month before Rockne is murdered.”

“Has he got a record for being a hitman?”

“He has a record on just about everything else, ever since he was sixteen years old. I wouldn't put it past him to knock someone off for a price. He was up not too long ago for assault with intent, but he got off because of a smart lawyer. She's another factor.”

“She? Who? You mention Angela Bodalle in the running sheet—you don't mean
her
?” He aimed his pipe at Malone like a gun. “You're a bugger for complicating things. A leading QC mixed up in a murder case . . . Go on.”

“I don't know at this stage what her involvement is. She's a friend of the family—or anyway, of the wife.” He paused, then sighed and sank a little lower in his chair. “There's all that, but there's something else. Two things. Rockne's secretary told Sergeant Ellsworth, from Maroubra, yesterday afternoon that Bezrow's penciller, a feller named Charlie Lawson, called at Rockne's office and asked for all of Bezrow's files. She told him we'd put a seal on the filing cabinets. He made no trouble, just went away, presumably to give Bernie Bezrow the bad news. Then this other bloke, a Mr.
Jones,
a foreigner was
how
she described him, he puts in an appearance and asks for
his
files. When she told him the same story about sealing the filing cabinets, he got very shirty. Now maybe the five and a quarter million belongs to him and he was the one who bumped off Rockne. Except that when Ellsworth's men went through the files, there was none on Mr. Jones. And none for Bernie Bezrow.”

Random nodded. “But there's something else, right?”

“How did you know?”

Random wet his finger and held it up.

Malone grinned, wearily. “Yeah, there's something else. Russ Clements went to see Rockne's doctor, the family GP. Rockne knew he had a brain tumour, he'd known for a month. But he asked the doctor not to tell the wife, to give him time to put his affairs in order. Two weeks after he got the bad news was when he transferred the money out of a trust account into an account in his own name. He might have stolen it for his family and then paid someone to blow his head off.”

“Who, for instance?”

“Kelpie Dunne? Kelpie was originally a client of his.”

“Why wouldn't he just commit suicide? Why pay someone, unless he was trying to collect insurance, too?”

“Maybe that was it, I dunno. Rockne was pretty tight with money, he could've been the sort who, even with five million in the bank, couldn't bring himself to turn his back on an insurance pay-out. But Russ has checked and he didn't increase the premium after he'd found out he had the brain tumour.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Kelpie works for a place called Hamill's out in Newtown—we think they're in the stolen car racket. Could you get the Motor Squad to look into them, stir up the water a bit? That might tickle Kelpie into doing something. What, I dunno, but something. We could drop him a hint about the five and a quarter million and he might be stupid enough to come back on the widow for an extra fee, assuming he did the job.”

“I'll talk to Ric Bassano about it. They've got a thing called Operation Pluto going right now.
They'
re a whimsical lot, the Motor Squad, they like to call their ops after cartoon characters. Anything else?”

“The Fraud Squad. I want to see if they can dig up anything on that bank in the running sheet, the Shahriver Credit International.”

“Done. Nobody else you'd like to use? The Audit Branch, Vice, Community Relations?”

“Your sense of humour's turned sour, Greg. It's sitting here on your bum doing nothing.”

“I keep holding up my finger—” he illustrated “—hoping something exciting will turn up, but I don't have my dad's intuition. Maybe it's because you can't open a window in this bloody place. There's nothing written on the wind in here—it's all filtered out by the air-conditioning.” His office was spartan, by his own choice; as if to remind himself never to become too comfortable here in the higher ranks. “Good luck. Don't jump off the springboard before you've made sure there's water in the pool.”

“That's original. Where'd you get it—the Police Boys Club?”

He went out of the room as Random took a bead on him with his pipe. He walked out of the fortress of Police Centre and through the bright dry day to the Hat Factory, the one-time commercial building that now housed Homicide. He and the rest of the Homicide detectives had been resentful when they had been moved out of the near-luxury of the newly built Centre into the run-down Hat Factory. But a lick of government paint, some old but unused carpet discovered in a warehouse and a relaxed atmosphere had resulted in an acceptance of the new accommodation. A good deal of police detection is taken up with thinking and discussion, which are often indistinguishable from malingering. Time-and-motion consultants, a breed watered and fed by the State's new conservative government, never found their way into the Hat Factory.

As Malone entered his office, his phone was ringing. It was Sergeant Ric Bassano, of Motor Squad: “Scobie? Chief Super Random has been on to me. I gather you're interested in Hamill's, out at Newtown? Coincidence, mate. So are we. We've got Operation Ninja Turtle going—”

Malone held his tongue before it could ask what had happened to Operation Pluto. “Are you going to raid them?”

“
Tonight. You want anyone held?”

“There's a cove named Kelpie Dunne, a mechanic. Get his particulars, as if you're meaning to get back to him, but let him go if you can. I'd like him out of work for a few weeks, see what he does.”

“What's he done?”

“Nothing recently, nothing that we can pin on him. But I've got my suspicions.”

“Haven't we all? As Pogo said, trust in God, but tie up your alligator.”

Pogo?
“Yep, he said it all.”

He hung up, went out to the computer and ran through all the running sheets on the squad's other homicides. None of them, it seemed, was as complicated as the Rockne case. He leaned back in his chair, wondering if he could start another hare running. If, of course, Kelpie Dunne did start running; the bastard might just stay put. He looked up as Clements came in and sat with his haunches on the table beside the computer.

“Do you think we'd gain anything if we leaked to some reporter that there is a large sum of money in the background of the Rockne case?”

Clements looked dubious. “Who, for instance?”

“Grace Ditcham. She'd never let on where the leak came from.” Ditcham was the city's best crime reporter, a terrier bitch, in the best meaning of the term, who had dug up more bones than the entire kennel of police dogs.

Clements thought a while, biting his lip; then he shook his head. “Better not. A good lawyer would pounce on that as prejudicial before they'd even sworn in a juror. Let's wait. But I've got something else.” He followed Malone back into the latter's office, dropped a large desk diary in front of Malone. “Take a look at that. Open it where the ribbon marker is.”

Malone opened the diary. The first entries at the top of the page listed half a dozen appointments, none with a name that meant anything to him. The last entry was not an appointment, simply:
Dad called, wants me to call him back. Why?

Clements said, “Rockne and his dad hadn't spoken for God knows how long. Then the old
man
phones, but obviously Rockne wasn't there to take the call. So he does what the old man asks—he calls him back. Turn the page.”

Malone turned the page. The entry for two days later listed four appointments. The last one, for 5
P
.
M
., was with Mr. Jones. “So what's the connection?”

“Who's Mr. Jones? Nobody seems to have a clue. But he comes to see Rockne two days after Old Man Rockne rings up his son who he hasn't seen or spoken to in we dunno how long.”