Bleak Spring

by Jon Cleary

  Malone sat down, looked at Angela Bodalle. “I didn’t expect to see you, Mrs. Bodalle.”

  “I’m here as a friend of the family, Inspector, that’s all.”

  She was, Malone thought, the most decorative, if not the best-looking, of the barristers who fronted the Bar in the State’s courts. There were only five female silks in New South Wales and she was the most successful of them. She was in her late thirties or early forties, he guessed, a widow whose husband had already made his name as a Queen’s Counsel when he had been killed in a car accident some years ago. She had then gone to the Bar herself and last year had been named a QC. She specialized in criminal cases and had already gained a reputation for a certain flamboyance. The joke was that she wore designer wigs and gowns in court, her arguments were as florid as the roses that decorated her chambers, she castrated hostile witnesses with sarcasm sharper than a scalpel. Even the more misogynistic judges tolerated her as she stirred blood in desiccated loins.

  “Do you want to sit in while I talk to Mrs. Rockne?”

  “We all do,” said Mrs. Carss, settling herself for a long stay.

  Malone looked at her. “I think it’d be better if you didn’t. I’m going to have to ask her to run through everything that happened last night.”

  “Then she’ll want us to be there, to support her—”

  “I think what Inspector Malone is suggesting is best,” said Angela Bodalle.

  “Everyone’s taking over—” Mrs. Carss was resentful, outsiders were taking away her role as mother.

  Olive Rockne came into the room with her sister. She was dressed in a light blue sweater and dark blue slacks; the frilly look had gone, she was fined down, this morning the girlish woman had vanished. Her hair was pulled back by a black velvet band and her face was devoid of make-up. Malone wondered if, for the first time, he was about to see the real Olive Rockne.

  “Let’s go outside,” she said in a calm firm voice and led him and Angela Bodalle out to a glassed-in back verandah that had been converted into a pleasant garden room. It looked out on a pool in a garden bright with camellias and azaleas. The room was carpeted and furnished with cushioned cane furniture; the whole house, Malone had noted with his quick eye for furnishings, was comfortable. But there was little, if any, comfort in this house this morning.

  Rose Cadogan brought coffee and biscuits. “I’ll leave you alone,” she said with more diplomacy than her mother had shown and went back to the front of the house.

  “Olive, I won’t go over what you told me last night,” said Malone, taking the coffee Angela Bodalle had poured for him. “But I’d like you to tell me—did Will have time to argue with whoever shot him?”

  Olive, refusing coffee, said, “I don’t think so. It was all so quick.”

  “I’m trying to establish if it was someone attempting a robbery, shoving the gun at Will and demanding money and then panicking when Will tried to push him away. Was there time for that?”

  Olive looked at Angela, who sat down on the cane couch beside her, then she looked back at Malone. “No, I’m sure there wasn’t. I—”

  “Yes?”

  “I—I’ve been wondering—could he have been waiting for someone else, he made a mistake and shot Will instead?”

  “He could have been. But yours was the only silver Volvo in the car park. There might’ve been other Volvos, but yours was the only silver one.”

  “Then who could it have been?” said Angela. “Some psychopath, out to kill anyone, the first person who presented himself? There seems to be a plague of them at the moment.”

  Malone nodded, but made no comment. Yesterday afternoon, out at Haberfield, an armed robber, holding up a liquor store, had paused, unprovoked, to put his gun at the head of a customer lying as commanded on the floor and had blown his brains out. The previous Saturday a man had run amok in Strathfield, a middle-class suburb, with a semi-automatic rifle and killed seven people in a shopping mall before shooting himself. All the past week the air had been thick with the clamour for stricter gun laws, a demand Malone totally supported, but the politicians, more afraid of losing votes in the rural electorates than of being hit by a bullet in the cities (who would waste bullets on a politician?) were shilly-shallying about what should be done. The incidence of killing by guns in Australia was infinitesimal compared with that in the United States, but that was like saying a house siege was not a war. Someone still died, one life was no less valuable than a hundred.

  “Olive, had Will received any threats from anyone? A client or someone?”

  “I don’t think so. He would have told me—well, maybe not. He didn’t tell me much about his practice, what he did, who he acted for.”

  “Did he ever refer any clients to you?” Malone looked at Angela Bodalle.

  “A couple. One civil suit, I took that as a favour to him, and a criminal charge.”

  Malone waited and, when she did not go on, said, “A murder charge?”

  “It was an assault with intent, a guy named Kelpie Dunne.” She seemed to give the name with some reluctance. “I got him off.”

  “I remember him. He tried to kill a security guard down at Randwick racecourse. He’s a bad bugger. Some day he’s going to kill a cop. I hope you won’t try to get him off then.”

  Her gaze was steady. She was not strictly beautiful, her face was too broad to have classical lines, the jaw too square, but the eyes, large and almost black, would always hold a man, would turn him inside out if he were not careful. She raised a hand, large for a woman’s but elegant, and pushed back a loose strand of her thick dark brown hair. Malone felt that, with that look, she would make an imposing, if biased, judge. If ever she made it to the Bench, he was sure her sentences on the convicted would be more than just slaps on the wrist.

  “If I believe a client is innocent, I’ll always try to get him off.”

  “Did Will have any other clients like Kelpie? Innocent but violent?”

  Angela smiled: she didn’t think much of men’s wit; or anyway, policemen’s. “I wouldn’t know, Inspector. Will hadn’t passed a client on to me for, oh, twelve months or more.”

  Malone turned back to Olive. She had been watching this exchange with wary, almost resentful eyes, as if she felt excluded from what was her own tragedy. “Olive, Will made a mention last night of what he knew about the racing game. Did he have any clients from the game, jockeys, trainers, bookmakers—people like that?”

  “I told you he never mentioned his clients to me.” Her voice had a certain sharpness.

  “No, but you did say last night—as I remember it, Will said, if I knew, meaning me, what he knew about the racing game, and you said, Tell them, darling, or something like that . . .”

  “You have a good memory.”

  He hadn’t expected to be complimented, not at a time like this. “You learn to have one, as a cop. You sounded last night as if you knew something about racing that Will had told you.”

  She shook her head; last night the frilly curls would have bounced, but this morning not a hair moved. “It was nothing, I was just taking the mickey out of him. You know what Will was like, he knew everything about everything.” She said it without malice, but it wasn’t something he expected from a grieving widow.

  “Dad had one client, a bookmaker.” Jason stood in the doorway, all arms and legs and lugubrious expression. But his voice was steady, if the rest of him wasn’t.

  Malone, seated in a low chair, had to turn and look up at him. From that angle the boy looked even taller than he was: Malone had the incongruous image of a basketballer who didn’t know where the basket was. “Did your dad talk about the client with you?”

  “No. But I was with Dad one day, about, I dunno, about a month ago, he was taking me to basketball practice—” So the image wasn’t so far off, after all. “We called in at this bookie’s house and when he came out, he was there only about ten minutes, he was ropeable, really angry. He didn’t tell me what it was all about, all he said was neve
r trust a bookie.”

  “You know who the man was?”

  “Sure. It was Bernie Bezrow, he lives up in that weirdo house in Georgia Street. Syphilis Hall.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what we call it, the guys, I mean. Tiflis Hall.”

  Angela Bodalle said, “I don’t think you should get involved in this, Jason.”

  “Is that legal advice or friendly advice?” said the boy.

  “That’s enough!” For a moment Malone thought Olive was going to jump up and slap her son’s face; but she would have had to jump a fair height. “Don’t talk to Angela like that! She’s only trying to help.”

  The boy didn’t apologize, only looked sullenly at Angela; then abruptly he was gone from the doorway, folding himself out of sight. Olive put out a hand and took Angela’s. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right, darling.” Angela squeezed the hand in hers, then gave it back to Olive as if it were something that embarrassed her, like a gift of money. “Inspector, let’s cut this short for this morning. Give Olive time to get over what happened last night, then perhaps she’ll be able to give you more help.”

  Malone stood up. “Righto, we’ll give it a rest for today. But there will have to be more questions, Olive. In the meantime I’d like to go down and have a look through Will’s office. Did he have any staff?”

  “Just a secretary. She called me this morning, she’s terribly upset. Her name’s Jill Weigall.”

  “Could you get her for me? I’d like to speak to her.”

  He followed Olive in to a phone in the front hallway. She dialled a number, introduced him, then handed him the phone. “Treat her gently.” Then she left him, a little coldly, he thought, as if he had suddenly turned into some sort of enemy.

  As soon as he spoke to Jill Weigall he knew that she was a girl on the edge of hysteria. “I was going to ask you to meet me at Mr. Rockne’s office—”

  “No, no, I’ll be all right. I’ll meet you there—it’s something to do—”

  He wondered if she lived alone, but it was none of his business. When he hung up Angela Bodalle was standing beside him. He could smell her perfume, a subtle bouquet, and he wondered why anyone, coming to console a friend on the loss of her husband by murder, would bother to apply perfume. “If you are thinking of going through Will’s files, forget it. You can’t get an open warrant. You’ll have to name something specific you want.”

  “Is that free legal advice?”

  She looked at him appraisingly. “Inspector, are you looking to fight with me? I’d have thought we were both friends of Olive, that we’d be on the same side.”

  He backed down; he didn’t know why she irritated him. Perhaps it was no more than that she was a lawyer. “Righto. In the meantime I have to get some helpers . . .” He called the Maroubra station, spoke to Carl Ellsworth. “Have you come up with anything since last night?”

  “We set up a van near the surf club. We’ve been trying to trace everyone who had their cars in the car park. There were four hundred people in the social club last night. Not counting the staff and the entertainers.” Ellsworth sounded peeved, as if everyone should have spent Saturday night at home watching television. Preferably The Bill, the British series that showed how tough life was for cops. “Oh, Sergeant Clements is here, he wants to speak to you.”

  Good old Russ: on the job, starting at the starting point. “I think the boys here have got everything under control, Scobie. It’s gonna be the usual slog, unless they come up with a witness who saw everything. Where d’you want me to meet you?”

  “I’m going down to Rockne’s office—” He turned to Angela Bodalle, who was still shadowing him. “What’s the address?”

  She gave it to him. “I’ll come with you.”

  Malone gave the address to Clements. “If Carl Ellsworth has anything for me, bring it with you.”

  He hung up, gestured for Angela to go ahead of him and followed her into the living room, where the family was now congregated. It was a large room, but had the narrow windows of the period when the house had been built; Olive had attempted to lighten it with a pale green carpet, green and yellow upholstery on the chairs and couch, and yellow drapes. The only dark note in it this morning was the family. They all looked at him, the intruder, and not for the first time he wondered why the voters bothered to call the police, why they didn’t clear up their own messes.

  “Will you let me know if you find anything?” Olive sat between Shelley, her thirteen-year-old daughter, and Mrs. Carss. The tableau suggested the three ages of a Carss woman: the resemblance between them all was remarkable. They had another common feature: shock.

  “I’ll come with you,” said Jason, unwinding himself like a jeans-clad insect from a chair.

  “There’s no need,” said his mother. “Angela has said she’ll go down with Mr. Malone—”

  “Mother—” The boy was treating his mother almost formally, as if to mask his defiance. “Now Dad is dead, I’m the man of the house. I better get used to whatever I’ve gotta do.”

  His sister frowned and screwed up her pretty face. “Oh God, Jay, don’t start that Big Brother crap—”

  Her grandmother reached across a generation to slap her arm. “Watch your language, young lady!”

  “Let’s go, Mr. Malone.” The boy spun round and went out of the room.

  Malone looked at the assembled women. Rose Cadogan was gathering up the coffee cups to take them out to the kitchen. Malone noticed for the first time how remarkably neat the whole house was; it might be full of emotional debris, but the carpet would be swept, the corners dusted, the cushions plumped up and arranged. He wondered who the housekeeper was, then guessed it could have been any one of Olive, Rose or Mrs. Carss. There was a neatness about them that would always be with them, they would die neatly if they had anything to do with it.

  “For what it’s worth, I think Jason is right. He’s got to start learning to be the man of the house. Don’t worry, Olive, I’ll teach him gently.”

  He went out of the house, followed by Angela Bodalle and Jason. “Can I ride with you, Mr. Malone?” said the boy, not looking at the lawyer.

  She seemed to take no offence; she had built up a defence against all males, from schoolboys to senior judges. She walked away to her car: a red Ferrari, Malone noted.

  “I thought you’d have preferred to ride in a car like that,” he said to Jason as they got into the seven-year-old Commodore. “She wouldn’t need to get out of second gear to outrun this bomb.”

  “It’s not the car. I just don’t like flash women.”

  “I wish I was as much a connoisseur as you. What do I call you, Jay or Jason?”

  “Fred.” A slight grin slipped sideways across the thin, good-looking face. He had thick blond hair which, Malone guessed, would be even fairer in the summer, and the sort of complexion that would always need a thick coating of sunblock to protect it from sun cancers. “Bloody Jason, I hate it. Call me Jay, I guess. Everybody else does, except my mother and my grandmother. And Dad.”

  “How did you get on with him? Did you confide in each other?”

  “Is that what fathers and sons are supposed to do?”

  “Tom and I do.”

  “He’s, what, nine years old, Mr. Malone. He confides in you, but you don’t tell him everything, right?”

  This boy, unlike his mother, was years ahead of his birthdays. “So you and your father didn’t talk much, is that it?”

  “Not as much as I’d have liked. This is it, next to the milk bar.”

  There was council work going on at the northern end of the beach promenade; at long last it seemed that someone had decided to give Coogee a face-lift. Malone had come down here as a boy and youth to surf, but it had never been a popular beach with real off-the-wall surfers. For the big, toe-curling waves you went south, to Maroubra.

  He pulled the Commodore into a No Parking zone. Last night’s wind had dropped and today promised to be an early, if very
early, spring day. Out of the car he paused a moment and looked away from the beach. Over there, in its shallow hollow, was Coogee Oval, where he had begun his cricketing career; but if he closed his eyes, all he would see would be the darkness of his lids, nothing of the small glories of his youth. He doubted that he would ever confide any of those memories to Tom. He had never been a headline hero, even though he had gone on to play for the State. That would make life easier for Tom; he had never regretted that Tom was not the son of a famous father. He wondered what Will Rockne had thought of this gangling boy beside him, what he had tried to protect him from.

  A row of shops, their paint worn by the salt air, stood at this northern end, some with offices above them. There had once been an indoor swimming baths on this site; one winter it had been closed to swimmers and used to exhibit a grey nurse shark caught by the local fishermen. The shark had spewed up a tattooed human arm and the resultant murder case had become famous; police had caught the murderers but had also dredged up connections that stank as high as a dead shark. Malone was grateful that the Rockne case promised no such connections.

  The Ferrari, exhaust gurgling like an expensive drain, pulled in behind the Commodore and Angela Bodalle got out, exposing a nice length of leg as she did so. Malone, a connoisseur of limbs if not of flash women, remarked that she had very good legs. Some surf kids were standing in a group outside a milk bar and one of them whistled, but he was whistling at the car, not its owner.

  Angela looked up at the No Parking sign. “Do we worry about tickets?”

  “You can defend me if we cop any. Who has a key to the office?”

  “I do. Olive gave it to me.” She handed it to Jason, as if it were a peace offering.

  The boy just nodded, unlocked the door to the flight of stairs that led up to the offices of William A. Rockne, Solicitor. There was a reception room with a secretary’s desk and chair; some flowers drooped in a vase on the desk. Four leather-seated chairs lined one wall, fronted by a coffee table neatly stacked with old copies of the National Geographic and Vogue; there was also a single copy of Bikies’ Bulletin, but that could have been left by a client who had departed in a hurry, presumably on a Harley-Davidson or a Kawasaki. The inner office was larger than Malone had expected, with a bank of steel filing cabinets along one wall, an old-fashioned Chubb safe in a corner and a studded leather couch, that looked too expensive for its surroundings, against another wall. Facing the door was a wide leather-topped desk and a green leather chair to match the couch; in front of the desk were two clients’ chairs, also in green leather. Will Rockne’s degree was framed and hung behind his chair; below it was a wall-length shelf of legal books. The windows on either side of the framed degree looked out on to the beach and the sea, where gulls hung in the air like chips of ice.