Bleak Spring (28 page)

“It wouldn't be Mrs. Bodalle, would it?” That was a wild cast into the pond.

Bezrow frowned. “You have me there, Inspector. I've heard of Mrs. Bodalle—who hasn't?—but I've never met her. No, I'm sure you know my lawyer, Caradoc Evans.”

“Oh sure, we know him. A Welshman and a Georgian. We're up against something, don't you think, Russ?”

“I still like our chances,” said Clements. “You wanna take a bet from me, Mr. Bezrow? What odds will you give me?”

“I closed the book a moment ago, Sergeant. Coffee?”

9

I

JASON WAS
in bed with Jill Weigall. It was no dream; yet he couldn't believe it. When she slid off him and lay beside him, he remained flat on his back, every nerve-end wanting to burst out of his skin. He kept his eyes closed, not wanting to wake up. That was what he actually said: “I don't wanna wake up.”

“I wish you could stay till morning. I'd keep you awake all night.
That's
unbelievable.”

He was no longer embarrassed by
it.
“Well, you gotta go with what you've got.”

She just smiled; and he wondered if he was making a fool of himself by trying to sound cool and sophisticated. He would never ask her, but she could not have been to bed with guys as young as himself, at least not since she herself had been his age. She was experienced—God, was she experienced!—and she had spoiled him for any young girls in the future. For a moment he thought of Claire Malone, whom he had never even
touched,
and was instantly ashamed, though he didn't know why. From now on his whole life was going to take a new direction, at least when it came to women.

He had moped around the house all day after he and Mum had come home from the court; he hadn't wanted to go to school and face all the guys with their unspoken questions. Gran had been there, fussing about, picking on him for being in the way, and Shelley, sensibly, had escaped and gone to school in the afternoon. When she came home she had told him she wished she had stayed at home—“God, you'd of thought I was a
freak
or something! If it hadn't been for Mother Brendan . . . Usually she's a drag, but today she was really nice. I think we should give up school, Jay, move right away. Go somewhere else, up to Queensland maybe, somewhere where nobody will know us. You think Mum might say yes?”

“
We can ask her. But not yet . . .” Not till we find out if we can keep that five million dollars. That had been on his mind all day, once they had released his mother from that ridiculous charge of murdering Dad.

Then, almost without thinking, he had rung Jill at the office. Miraculously, she had had no date for tonight, and the invitation had tumbled out of his mouth: would she like to go to a movie with him?

He had had to borrow the money from his mother: “Fifty dollars? What do you want that much for?”

Just as well he hadn't asked for a hundred, his first thought. “Mum, I owe the guys a movie and a hamburger. It's my turn to shout.” She would kill him if he told her it was to take out Jill. “Come on, be a sport. We can afford it.”

She looked at him shrewdly and for a moment he worried that she was going to ask him if he was taking out Jill. But she said, “You're not thinking of that five million dollars, are you?”

“Yes,” he grinned.

She smiled, too, and gave him the fifty dollars. “We mustn't, not yet.”

“You're spoiling him,” said Gran Carss, but he felt so good that he even grinned at her.

His mother lent him the Civic, insisting that he put on his P plates—P plates, for God's sake, when taking out a girl like Jill! But as he drove over to pick her up at her flat in Tamarama, he smiled at the thought: he was on a Provisional licence, at least as far as a lover went. But before he went up and knocked on the door, he removed the plates.

He took her to see
City Slickers,
a movie she said she wanted to see—“I love Billy Crystal.” He was glad she hadn't chosen some R-rated show, all chock-a-block with nudity and sex; that would only have made him uncomfortable. When he came out of the cinema with her he was thrilled and relieved when she suggested they go back to her flat—“My flatmate is away for the week.” He silently thanked the absent flatmate. The twenty-eight dollars he had left in his wallet wouldn't have bought the supper Jill expected from a guy on his first date with her. They had gone to an early session and there would have been time for him to have had to buy her a proper dinner.

He
hardly looked at her flat; all he noted was that it seemed cramped after the rooms in the house at Coogee. He guessed you had to live small when you started out living on your own. She cooked them bacon and eggs and took a Sara Lee apple danish from the fridge for dessert. “I'm the world's worst cook. Do you want to marry a fabulous cook?”

The question took him by surprise; but it seemed an innocent one. “I haven't got around yet to thinking about a girl in the, you know, kitchen.”

“Where do you think of them? In the bedroom?”

The apple danish, though oiled with ice cream, went down his throat like a lump of rock. “Sometimes.”

She smiled. “I'm teasing you, Jay. Come on, finish that.”

“What about the washing-up?” Why did he ask that, for God's sake? To show he was domesticated or something?

“Leave it. I'm not a good housekeeper, either.” He had noticed that: the kitchen sink was full of last night's dishes.

Ten minutes later, he was astonished how quickly it happened, she said, “Undress me.”

He had lost his virginity twelve months ago to a girl from Ascham at a party in Bellevue Hill, where he had been a virtual stranger. She had been much more experienced than he, though no subtler; it had been like groping a female gorilla. When he first got inside her sweater she told him she had only been screwed (the word had jolted him: he hadn't expected it to come out of Ascham with the la-di-dah Darling Point accent) by Protestant boys from Cranbrook or Scots; she wanted to know if a Catholic boy, with his sense of sin, would be hotter; her mother, it seemed, was a psychologist. The word
sin
had also jolted him; it almost made him go limp. But he had recovered and had sinned, twice, flat out like Lucifer himself.

Now he opened his eyes and turned to look at Jill, at her profile against her tangled hair and at the undulations of her marvellous body. He said, “I love you.”

She shook her head. “Not yet, Jay.”

“
Why? Because I'm too young for you?”

She put her fingers on his lips. “No, for other reasons, Jay. Wait till you've known other girls . . . I've got something to show you.”

She got out of bed and he shut his mouth tight before he could make some bloody stupid remark about what she was showing him as she went to a dressing table, then turned and came back to him. She sat on the side of the bed and handed him an envelope. He recognized it at once, the sort of legal envelope he had seen many times in his father's office.

“What is it?”

“It's your father's will. I found it today in one of his legal books. Looks like he had hidden it there for some reason.”

“I thought Mum had already got a copy of the will?”

“I don't know whether there's another copy of that. After the police released all your father's personal papers, I sent them up to your place in a box. Then I found that copy today when I was going through the books on his shelves. It's one he made three weeks ago.”

“Do you know what's in it?”

She looked at him reproachfully. “Jay—”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean had you peeked at it. But why give it to me? Why not to Mum?”

She got back under the sheet, as if the discussion was now too serious for nudity. He eased himself up in the bed, she propped a pillow up behind him, and they lay there like a couple who made a habit of discussions in bed.

“I should give it to her, I suppose. But she turned her back on me at the funeral, did you know that? So deliberate, right there in front of all your relations and friends. But not before she told me I shouldn't even
be
there. God!” He was shocked at the anger in her and didn't even know how to handle it. “I wasn't there because I was your father's mistress or anything! One weekend, that was all, a bloody miserable failure! I was there, for God's sake, because I worked for him for two years, because he was my boss!”

“
I looked for you after the funeral—” He touched her bare arm.

“I sneaked away. I've never been so humiliated. But it's over now—forget it. Take the will home to your mother.”

“I think I'll open it.” The envelope was only slightly sealed; it was remarkable how easily the flap came unstuck in his hand. “Is it against the law?”

“What a crazy question! God, your father's been murdered, they arrested your mother, there's millions of dollars that nobody knows where they came from—”

She made him sound really dumb; naked as he was, he seemed to flush all over. “Yeah, I guess opening your father's will is nothing, then.” He pulled out the single-page document. “It's not very long. I always thought they ran to pages and pages . . .”

“Maybe it's just a codicil to another will. I didn't see what was in it, he held his hand over it while he got Mrs. Rosario the cleaning lady and me to sign it. What's it say?” She didn't appear particularly interested, it could have been just another client's last will and testament.

“. . . I hereby revoke all prior wills and testa—testa—mentary dispositions heretofore made by me and declare this to be my last will and testament . . . Does that mean everything he's written before doesn't mean anything now?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“. . . Blah, blah, blah . . . to divide my entire estate, including the monies in account Number 5104 in the Shahriver Credit International Bank at its Sydney Office, equally between my two children, Jason William Rockne and Shelley Mary Rockne . . . My wife, Olive Mary Rockne, will understand the reasons for my exclusion of her from any benefits from my estate . . .” He turned his head, looked directly at Jill. “This is gunna floor Mum.”

It was a moment or two before Jill said, “Did your mother and father hate each other?”

“I dunno. I never thought so. But—there was
something
between them that I never cottoned on to.”

“Jay, I don't think you should let your mother know you know what's in the will. Seal it up and
just
give it to her without saying anything.”

“I'll have to tell her where I got it.”

“Yes, you'll have to do that. You don't have to tell her where you were when you read it.” She smiled, but tossed back the sheets and got out of bed. “I'd love some more of what we've just had, a whole night of it, but I think you'd better take the will home to your mother, give it to her tonight and not in the morning. If you get home too late, she might guess we've been to bed. I don't want her thinking that's all I'm intent on, going to bed with the Rockne men.” Then she turned back, leaned across the bed and put her palm against his cheek. “I'm sorry, Jay. That sounded cruel, mentioning your father.”

He stared at her, wanting to pull her back into bed; she must know how much she was tempting him, yet she was so casual about what she was showing him. God, he was so innocent, he had so much to learn about women!

Somehow he got the thickness out of his throat. “There's something else in the will.” He read from the page. “To my secretary, Jill Weigall, I leave the sum of ten thousand dollars, the amount to be found in cash in my office safe . . .”

She sat down heavily on the side of the bed, remained very still. Suddenly he was taking her nudity for granted. When she looked back at him over her shoulder, the lock of hair down over her brow, all he was aware of were her eyes. They were deeply hurt. “He was paying me off. I feel like a bloody whore!”

“No, Jill. Dad wasn't like that—” But he wondered. He realized now how little he had known his father. “He knew he was dying, with that brain tumour, and he just wanted to show how he appreciated you working for him. Don't knock him, Jill. He's dead and can't explain . . .”

“Oh God!” She turned and reached for him, pulled him towards her, held him. It wasn't sexual and he realized it. “I'm sorry, Jay. I didn't mean to hurt you . . . Forgive me?” She put her hand under his chin, held his face away from her.

“Sure—”

She kissed him softly on the lips. “Go home, Jay. Call me tomorrow and let me know what your
mother
says about the will.”

He left her reluctantly, not because he wanted to stay in bed with her, to have that bloody wonderful sex with her, but because he knew now, with utter certainty, that he was in love with her. He didn't have to wait, as she had advised him, till he had known other girls. He
knew.

He drove home, switched off the Civic's lights so that he wouldn't disturb his mother and Shelley if they had gone to bed, and pulled up sharply as he saw Angela's Ferrari blocking the driveway. He reversed out into the roadway and swung the Civic into the kerb. He got out of the car and instantly a man was standing beside him.

“Oh, it's you—Jason, isn't it? I'm Constable Pilecki, from Randwick police.”

He couldn't believe how rigid he had gone with fright; tonight he was experiencing emotions he had never felt before. “You scared the hell outa me!”

“Sorry, mate.” He was young and bulky, but a good six inches shorter than Jason. “We're supposed to be keeping an eye on the family.”

“You weren't following me tonight, were you?”

“Nah. We saw you go out, but our instructions are to stay with your mother. She's been home all night.”