Dark Summer (28 page)

He
had turned round and was staring down towards the rear of the restaurant. He turned back. “Fucking Jack Aldwych is down the back there. And fucking Les Chung.”

Four Japanese in the next booth, ears tuned to pick up the local idiom, nodded to each other. Australia was just what they had been told it would be, a robust country.

Luisa looked down towards the back booths, saw Jack Aldwych gazing at her. She raised her hand and gave him a forty-carat wave. He smiled at her in return and said something to the auburn-haired girl beside him.

What Aldwych said was, “You have to admire her, putting up with someone like her husband.”

“In my job,” said Janis, “I'm continually amazed at the men some women choose. As a sex, we're masochists.”

“Not you,” said Aldwych. “Is she a masochist, Jack?”

“Are you talking sex or just in general?”

Aldwych was suddenly uncomfortable. He was an old man, he had never gone in for kinky sex with Shirl, and you certainly never talked about it in front of a girl young enough to be your granddaughter. Not even one as brass-bound as this one next to him. “Finish your lychees. Jack. It's time we were going.”

In the next booth Fay Chung said, “Les, how does a man like Pelong stay out of jail?” Meaning: how do you, if you know him so well, also stay out of jail? It is a little-known historical fact that wives invented the micro-chip: they can squeeze a dozen questions into one. “He must have a record as long as your arm.”

“Not
my
arm. He and I have no association whatever.” Which was not strictly true. There
had
been an association at one time, but it had been temporary, during another gang war, and it had not been an easy one. Pelong had an abiding hatred of all Asiatics and Chung had an equally durable contempt for intelligences as far below his own as Pelong's. “He eats here occasionally, pays without complaint and tips too much. The waiters love him.”

“Has anyone ever tried to kill him?”

“
What makes you ask that?”

“I don't know. I'm just in the mood for those sort of questions.”

“Drink up your tea. It's time we were going.”

The Aldwych party and the Chungs left at the same time. As they passed the Pelong booth both Aldwych and Chung, without losing stride, said goodnight to the Pelongs. The three women, Janis, Luisa and Fay, looked at each other with that swift appraisal that has put women on a par with Indian scouts and security cameras; they missed nothing of importance in each other, taking in the abundance or absence (in Janis' case) of jewellery, the cut and expense of dress and, most important, the intelligence in each other's eye. Out in the street the Aldwyches and the Chungs parted.

Aldwych paused as he recognized an old acquaintance. “G'day, Fred. What're you doing down here amongst the Chinks?”

“Howyagoing, Jack,” said Fred Cargo. “I'm working for Denny Pelong. I'm his sorta Jack-of-all-sorts.”

“His minder?”

“Yeah, sorta. I'm retired, but. Like you, Jack. I don't wanna go back inside.”

“You shouldn't be working for Denny, then.”

“It's his missus I'm really working for. Nice lady. Who else is gunna give a fifty-eight-year-old ex-con a job?”

“Still, watch out for Denny. Take care, Fred.”

He moved on, not having bothered to introduce Jack Junior and Janis, who had lingered nearby waiting for him. He had used Fred Cargo once or twice as a stand-over man, but he was now part of the past.

Jack Junior was about to follow his father when he saw that Janis had not moved, was looking around.

“What's the matter?”

The Dixon Street mall was crowded. The nearby Entertainment Centre had just spilled ten
thousand
people into the streets; Billy Joel had sent them home flushed and excited and singing snatches of his songs. Janis was looking for Snow White and The Dwarf, but she didn't feel Jack Junior had to know that. She had discovered that he was a worrier, something his father certainly wasn't. At dinner she had all at once begun to wish that Jack Senior was her partner.

“You notice something? A crowd like this and nobody notices anything.”

“You
noticed something,” he said.

“What?”

“That nobody notices anything.”

She smiled at him, but more to herself. Oh Jack, Jack, how long am I going to be stuck with you? He was her means to an end, but she did not want him with her till the end.

Half an hour later, inside the restaurant, Denny Pelong abruptly announced he had had enough and wanted to go home. “Whatever you say, sweetheart,” said Luisa. “You go and tell Fred to collect the car while I go to the little girls' room. You got your credit card?”

“Course I got it—” Then he checked his pockets. “No, I musta left me fucking wallet at home.”

“I'll pay, sweetheart. You go and tell Fred.”

Denny Pelong stepped out of the restaurant. The crowd had thinned a little, but the mall was still lively with people, most of them youngsters in groups, still thrilled by the Joel concert, too wide awake to go home. There was no sign of Fred Cargo. Pelong suddenly had a moment of inexplicable panic, something he had never experienced before.

He was looking up the mall, half-aware of raucous music approaching him from behind, when the hitman did the job. He was a young man, dressed like most of the concert crowd in jeans and summer shirt, and he carried a portable stereo, a “ghetto-blaster.” Strapped to it was a pistol fitted with a silencer. The stereo was blasting out a Billy Joel hit as it was pushed up against Pelong's back. He went down, with two .22 bullets in him, to the tune of “You're Only Human.”

IV

“
I don't fucking know,” he said in the moment before he lapsed into unconsciousness; if he were to die, it was a remark unlikely to go down in any list of famous last words. He had been asked by a police officer, on the scene within two minutes of the shooting, if he knew who had shot him. He did not give his denial out of any criminal code of honour; he would have squealed with all the power in his punctured lungs if he had recognized his assailant; his only code was to repay any wrong done to him in any way he could.

It was Fred Cargo who had gone into the restaurant to give Luisa the news. She went pale, but she took it better than he had expected. “Where the hell were you, Fred?”

“I'd went for a leak, Mrs. Pelong—”

Malone and Clements arrived ten minutes later, Clements bringing his own car, with blue light flashing on the roof, down the mall to the join the police cars and the ambulance which had just arrived. They had left Romy and Peter Keller with Lisa, Malone telling her to ring for a cab to take them home. The mall was crowded again, but the throng was held back by the police cars and, now, by the media vans and cars nosing into the scene. The blue and red lights of the police cars were oddly out of place in the Chinatown colour scheme of orange-red and yellow, like spots of paint dropped on the wrong canvas.

The PE team was already at work, the Crime Scene tapes strung out, but Phil Truach was the only Homicide man present.

“Nobody saw anything, Scobie—”

“Where the bloody hell was the surveillance? There was supposed to be a bloke on Pelong's tail round the clock.”

“He went for a leak—”

“You just said Fred Cargo went for a leak, too. Thank Christ it's not a cold night—the whole of bloody Chinatown would have gone for a leak.” Malone's anger had been building up all during the quick trip in from Randwick. Not at the fact of Pelong's being shot but at the growing multiplication of events that would mean more headlines. If this kept up, the Gulf war was in danger of being relegated to the Deaths Notices page. “Where's Mrs. Pelong?”

“
She's over there by the ambulance. He's in pretty bad shape. They're taking him to St. Sebastian's.”

“Anyone in the restaurant?”

“No, I got the manager to clear out the place. Upstairs, too. Did you know they've got a gambling club up there?”

Malone looked at Clements. “Did you know that?”

“I can't believe it,” said Clements.

The three Homicide men exchanged looks that said nothing; illegal gambling had nothing to do with them. The bureaucracy of crime prevention saved many headaches. Then Truach said, “Most of those in the restaurant were Japanese. This isn't gunna do much for tourism.”

“It hasn't done much for Pelong,” said Clements, watching Pelong, festooned with drips, being loaded into the ambulance. “You want me to talk to the wife, Scobie?”

“Let her go for the moment. We'll talk to her at the hospital. Let's see what we can dig up here.”

Ten minutes later they had dug up nothing, “I believe Fred Cargo when he says he went for a leak,” said Clements.

“Maybe he did,” said Malone. “Maybe someone paid him to go and splash his boot. It wouldn't be the first time it's been done.”

With the departure of the ambulance, the crowd began to disperse, going back into the restaurants that were still open or going home. The police at work were never as interesting as a corpse or someone close to being a corpse. Billy Joel had provided better entertainment.

Malone and Clements left for the hospital, with Truach to follow as soon as the PE team had done their work. As they drove up to the hospital in Darlinghurst, Clements said, “At least this wasn't a needle-in-the-bum job, so it wasn't the same guy who did Lee-roy.”

“Not unless he's changed his MO.”

St. Sebastian's was the biggest hospital in the inner city, halfway between the sleaze of King's
Cross
and the brittle gaiety of the Oxford Street homosexual community. Its public and private sections stretched along an entire block; it catered for the poorest and the wealthiest, all within a kidney stone's throw of each other. It was run by nuns dedicated to St. Sebastian the martyr, whose name was usually invoked against the plague, possibly the one disease not to be found in the neighbourhood. Tradition had it that he had been a beautiful youth who had spurned the advances of the Emperor Diocletian, a career decision that enhanced his sainthood in the eyes of the nuns and made him a fool in the eyes of the community further up the road. Even saints can't please everyone.

Denny Pelong was in the operating theatre in the private section, where, Malone and Clements were told, the doctors were fighting to save his life. The two detectives found Luisa Pelong in a small, otherwise unoccupied waiting room. A television set was turned on in one corner of the room and on the wall nearby was a garish colour print of Sebastian decorated with Diocletian's arrows, a picture of doubtful comfort to anyone waiting in the room for news of a dying relative. Luisa was leaning back in a chair, staring with uninterested eyes at a late-night movie. The first thing Malone noticed was not the jewellery but that this afternoon's bruise on her jaw was hidden by cleverly applied make-up.

“Mrs. Pelong?”

She started, as if she had been woken from a doze, then looked up at the two men as if puzzled as to why they should be disturbing her. Then she frowned. “Oh Christ, you don't wanna talk to me now, do you?”

“Better now than tomorrow.” Malone pulled up a chair opposite her, his back to the television set; Clements sat down on a couch at an angle to both of them, St. Sebastian poised above him to shed a shower of arrows on him. “We don't like things to go cold on us. Do you know who did it?”

She shook her head. There was a cup of tea on the small table beside her chair and she picked it up and began to sip it. Behind Malone Mary Astor told Humphrey Bogart,
“Oh, I'm so tired, so tired of lying and making up lies.”
Luisa looked at Clements. “Turn that off, would you?”

Clements got up and switched off the television.
“The Maltese Falcon,
I've seen it a dozen times, I reckon. The more I see it, the more I wonder how Sam Spade was taken in by that woman.”

Luisa
gave him a look that should have sent him down to Emergency. “Is that supposed to mean something?”

He smiled, sank back on the couch. “We're on your side, Mrs. Pelong. Right, Inspector?”

“All the way. But I hope you don't mind me mentioning it, Mrs. Pelong, you don't look too shocked. Upset, maybe, but not
shocked
.”

“Mr. Malone, you know who Denny is, you know what his life's been. I'm upset, why the hell wouldn't I be? But no, I ain't shocked. This ain't the first time I've sat in a room like this, waiting for him to come out alive. You marry a guy like Denny and you marry the consequences. I read that somewhere, only I think they said it better.”

“You said it well enough. I understand you were still in the restaurant when it happened?”

“I'd stayed to pay the bill and go to the loo.” She was about to drink again from her cup, but now she put it back in the saucer. “Are you trying to say something, Mr. Malone?”

“Not at present, Mrs. Pelong.” He gave her a moment to make of that whatever she liked; but she did not take the bait. “Did you see anyone in the restaurant you or your husband knew?”

She didn't hesitate: “Yeah, there was Jack Aldwych and Les Chung, they was in two booths right at the back. Not together, I don't think.”

“Did you speak to them? Or your husband?”

“No, we just said goodnight to 'em when they left. That was about, I dunno, about half an hour before—” She looked down at her cup, still half-full, then put it back on the side table. “Before what happened to Denny.”

Over the years Malone had become accustomed to dealing with women in circumstances like these; but there was no one way of doing it, no two women were the same. Pure grief from a widow was both the simplest and the hardest to deal with. Molly Maddux's anger at her husband's duplicity had somehow made it easier for him to cope with her. Now he was feeling his way, cautiously, with Luisa Pelong, who might yet be a widow. He could not get her reaction into focus, it was as if she were showing her feelings through an almost closed door, giving him glimpses that ranged from numbed worry through
almost
to indifference.