by Jon Cleary
Brick, who owned the place, was an overweight ex-rock musician in his late thirties who wore his dark, oiled hair in a ducktail and had an array of T-shirts all with the same message: Elvis Lives! The walls of the coffee lounge were hung with framed blow-ups of record covers of Presley, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly and other kings of the ancient past. Brick (no one knew if he had another name) knew he was an anachronism, at least to most of his customers, but he also knew where his dreams were, still back there in the past. Something he would never have confessed to any of the kids who came in here every day of the week.
He brought Jason and Claire two caramel malteds. “There, build you up for the day. Sorry about your dad, Jay. I dunno what the world’s coming to. When’s the funeral? I’d like to send some flowers or something.”
“The end of the week, I think. They haven’t released his—his body yet from the morgue.”
“You going to school today?”
“I’m taking the week off.”
Brick went back behind his counter. He ran a well-ordered place and the police and those parents who knew their kids came here never bothered him; he had two kids of his own and was said to be a stern father. It was not his usual practice to bring orders to the kids in the booths or at the tables; but life wasn’t all rock’n’roll and the shouted lyric, there were moments when you offered to send flowers to a funeral and you didn’t want the world to know. He turned down the taped music, wished he had put on something else but the Beatles doing “Roll Over Beethoven.” He had never liked them, anyway.
In the booth Claire said, “You sleeping okay?”
“You sound just like my mum.” He grinned and put his hand on hers. “No, I’m okay, hon.”
“Hon? I’m your honey?”
“That slipped out. No. No, it didn’t. I guess I really like you, Claire. You know how a guy really feels when something like this happens. I’ve really looked forward to you calling me every day.”
“You’d do the same for me.” Then the horror of what she had said struck her; her eyes opened wide and she shook her head. “Oh God, why did I say that?”
“I guess because your dad’s in danger every day, practically. Cops are, it’s part of the job, I guess. It wasn’t for my dad,” he said wonderingly. “Jesus, I still can’t get it through my head the way he died!”
“How’s your mother?”
He sucked on the straw in the caramel malted. “She’s taking it much better’n I expected. Or anyway, she’s hiding it better. She’s in, you know, control. You think you know someone and then—”
“Then what?”
“Do you know your mother and father? Really know ’em?”
Claire pushed the malted aside. “I’m dieting . . . Jay, I don’t think I know anyone, not really. Oh, I know Maureen and Tom, but they’re only kids. I don’t know you. When it comes to Mum and Dad and adults . . .” She shook her blonde head at the unknown tribe of an unknown country, one the map of which she had been allowed only to peek at. “I think school should make it a compulsory subject for the HSC, the study of adults.”
He smiled, really enjoying her company. “Do you have to go to school?”
She sighed, pressed his hand. “I wish I didn’t have to . . .” She wanted to kiss him, he looked so lonely, but if the word ever got back to Holy Spirit that she had been seen kissing a boy in public, and she in her school uniform for God’s sake, Mother Brendan would kill her. “I’ll see you here this afternoon.”
“I’ll miss you, hon.”
He watched her go out of the coffee lounge, the only good thing in his life right now. He got out of the booth, paid for the malteds, said goodbye to Brick, a good guy, and headed for home. He passed Randwick police station, wondered if soon they would have a poster in there asking for information on the murder of William Rockne. There had been half a column in yesterday’s papers, but nothing this morning; he wondered if it would be worthwhile starting a scrapbook, just in case. But that, he decided at once, would be really bloody ghoulish.
He stopped halfway down the hill of Coogee Bay Road and looked ahead to the ocean stretching out to the horizon and beyond, to Tahiti and South America, to places he would see some day when they collected his father’s five-and-a-bit million. He suddenly felt better, though ashamed by the reason for it.
When he turned in the front gate at home his mother was backing her Civic down the driveway. “Where are you going, Mum?”
“To aerobics.”
Aerobics, for Chrissake!
“What’s the matter? You don’t think I should be going? Jason, I’m trying to take my mind off what’s happened! I can’t just sit inside the house and think all the time!”
“Okay, Mum. I didn’t mean anything—”
But he turned away from her and went into the house, wondering what she expected him to do to stop thinking about what had happened. Shelley had gone to stay for a couple of days with Gran Carss and, as he walked in, he all of a sudden felt how goddamn lonely and empty the house was, like a bloody mausoleum, though he’d never been in one of those. As he walked into the kitchen to get a Coke from the fridge, the phone rang.
It was Jill Weigall. “Jay? I just wanted to speak to your mother—”
“She’s out, Jill. She—she’s gone shopping.”
“How’re you feeling?”
“Pretty lousy.”
“Me, too. You’re not going to school, right? How’d you like to come and have lunch with me here at the office? I can’t leave it, just in case. We can get some hamburgers—”
“Great! I’d like that.” Suddenly she was as clear in his mind as if she were standing next to him; he wanted to see her. “How about twelve thirty? I’ll bring the hamburgers, okay?”
He hung up, wondered at the excitement rippling through him. She couldn’t be interested in him, surely? Sure, she was an older woman, but . . . The phone rang again and he grabbed it, wanting to hear her voice again.
“Jason? It’s Angela Bodalle.”
It was a let-down, a drop right from the rooftop. “Oh, hello, Mrs. Bodalle.”
“Jay, why don’t you call me Angela? I’m a friend of the family, all of you. I’ll be seeing a lot of you from now on.”
He ignored that, said, “You want Mum? She’s out. She’s gone to her aerobics class.”
“Where? Aerobics?” He said nothing, there was silence on the line, then she said, “You don’t approve, do you?”
“You don’t, either, do you?” He had stepped into adult territory, talking as man to woman, an older woman.
Again there was silence; then: “I don’t think it’s my place, Jay, to approve or disapprove.”
“You’re a friend of the family, you said.”
“Are you cross-examining me, Jay?” He could imagine that goddamn smile of hers. “All right, I disapprove. But only because of what other people will think. Most of them don’t understand how your mother feels.”
“Do you understand?”
“Yes, of course I do. You are forgetting, Jay—I deal with people almost every day of the week in situations like your mother’s.”
She actually sounded sympathetic, somehow softer, dammit, than the way he usually saw her. “Well, yeah, I guess so. It’s just—well, never mind.”
“I’d like you to talk to me, Jay. We have to help your mother.”
“Yeah, well . . . I’ll tell Mum you called. You at your chambers?”
“Yes, I’m not in court this morning. I’ll be here till noon.”
He hung up, went into the family room and turned on the TV and got, you wouldn’t bloody believe it, a programme called Aerobics Oz Style. He lay slumped on a couch, sipping Coke, and watching the sweating bodies gyrate, arses out, boobs bouncing, and thought of his mother doing the same thing at that very moment, trying, she had said, to stop thinking. He closed his eyes to stop the tears.
He was still lying on the couch, still watching TV, this time an American soapie, when his mother came home. She came
into the family room, looking young and slim and so bloody healthy he felt angry. “Mrs. Bodalle called,” he said and looked back at the television screen.
“Why don’t you call her Angela? She’s asked you to. Where is she, at her chambers?”
She went out to the kitchen. As soon as she disappeared he turned the sound right down on the TV and sat up, ears strained. He felt ashamed and embarrassed, just like the time he had lain in bed and listened to his mother and father making love. But, like then, he kept his ears wide open.
“Angela, don’t tell me what I can and cannot do! I had to get out of the house, can’t you understand that? It’s all right for you, you’re not surrounded by things that remind me of him. It’s as if he’s still here!”
Jason looked at the screen: two women were arguing, their mouths wide open in silent abuse. He wondered what Angela was saying that had his mother so much on edge.
“Yes, of course I’m going to claim it!. . . How can it harm me? We’re entitled to claim it, it’s in Will’s name . . . Oh, for God’s sake! Angela, are you losing your nerve? I’m the one who’s under pressure . . . Okay. All right, darling, I know how you feel . . . No, I’ll wait. It’s just that it’s such a temptation . . . Yes, you know I do...”
Jason heard her replace the phone and at once he turned up the TV sound again. He slumped back on the couch, but his limbs were as stiff as poles and his head abruptly began to ache. He looked up as his mother came and stood in the doorway.
He forced himself to ask, “What did she want?”
“She just wanted to know how we’re coping. She’s a friend, Jason, I wish you’d accept that. What are you doing, watching something like that? You should be studying.”
“I can’t concentrate. Maybe I should’ve gone to school.”
“It’s up to you. I still don’t know when we can have the funeral. Angela is trying to find out when they’re going to release Dad’s—Dad’s body.”
“Why is she doing that? Why didn’t you ask me to do it?” He stood up, every inch of him aching, as if his goddamn bones had turned to iron.
She looked up at him, a slight look of puzzlement on her face, as if she were wondering whether she had lost all touch with him. “I just didn’t think of it . . . Could you have done it? I mean, faced up to something like that?”
“Who’s organizing the funeral?”
“Angela.”
“Jesus!”
Then the front doorbell rang. He pushed past her, almost roughly, and went down the hall and opened the front door. Inspector Malone and the other one, the sergeant, stood there. He was suddenly glad to see them: at least they were an interruption.
“Your mother home, Jay?”
He led them back through the house, out to the garden room, where his mother had retreated, where she stood in her electric-blue gym outfit, her hair tied back with an electric-blue ribbon, looking so young and healthy it was gross. He caught a glimpse of himself in the small mirror above the drinks cabinet and he winced, he looked so goddamn old.
“I said we’d be back, Olive. A few more questions.”
“More?” She sat down, arranging herself in her convent-girl pose again. “Would you like some coffee? Jason, would you make some? The kettle’s on.”
Jason went into the kitchen and Malone and Clements sat down apart from each other, so that Olive would have to keep turning her head from one to the other to watch them and their reaction to her answers to their questions. It was an old ploy, but still a good one.
Malone, as a fast bowler, had never believed in a few warm-up balls; he had always bowled the first ball as fast as he could, hoping to surprise the batsman by bowling him or at least hitting him somewhere vulnerable. “Olive, when we mentioned the five thousand dollars that was withdrawn from your joint account last week, you let us believe Will had drawn it.”
“Did I?” She had ducked under the bean-ball, “It wasn’t intentional. I can’t remember anything I told you—when was it?—Sunday morning?”
“No, it was yesterday morning.”
She shook her head; but she was totally composed. “I’ve lost track of all time, Scobie.” She ran her hands up her lycra-clad thighs, not sensually but as if testing that her muscles had benefited from her work-out, “I went to aerobics this morning—I thought if I had a really good work-out, I could put my mind back into gear . . . Yes, I withdrew the money. It was to pay for our holiday on the Reef.”
Clements looked at his notebook; Olive turned her head to watch him. “Mrs. Rockne, that’s definitely not what you said yesterday morning. You said then that your husband must’ve withdrawn the money. You were going to Lizard Island, which you said is pretty expensive—exclusive is the word you used—and you had to get new outfits. I don’t know what Inspector Malone thinks, Mrs. Rockne, but I think you’re lying. Are you?”
Olive stared at him, then slowly turned her gaze on Malone. “Do you let him talk to everyone like that?”
“I never try to stop him, Olive. More often than not he gets us the answer we want.”
“And what sort of answer do you want? You’re grilling me again, Scobie. Or should I call you Inspector?”
“Please yourself. What’s your answer to what Sergeant Clements just asked you?”
Then Jason came back with four coffees and a plate of biscuits. “These are Mum’s home-made, you’ll like ’em, Mr. Malone. Claire told me you had a sweet tooth.”
Malone smiled at the boy as he sank down, all arms and legs again, into a low chair beside his mother. “Do you two swap gossip about your respective parents?”
“Jesus—sorry. No, geez, no. I dunno what made me say that—about your sweet tooth, I mean.”
“Jason, I think it’d be an idea if you went in and did some study. He’s missing school and he’s got the HSC trials coming up. He wants to go to university and do law, like his father.”
He didn’t; he wanted his share of the five-and-a-bit million and to take off for the other side of the world. “No, I’ll stay, Mum . . . I keep trying to tell her, Mr. Malone, she has to accept I’m man of the house now, right?”
“Yes, I think you could say that, Jay. Let him stay, Olive. Unless you have something to say that you don’t want to say in front of him.”
“No, no. It’s just that—I suppose I’m trying to protect him and Shelley. I can’t get used to the idea that Jason’s suddenly grown up, over a weekend.”
The boy wiggled his big hands at the two detectives; the gesture was too awkward for supplication, it suggested helplessness. Clements nodded sympathetically, but said nothing. The boy was under siege, but didn’t know whom to strike out at.
Malone, not pausing to indulge his sweet tooth, passed up the plate of biscuits, bowled another fast ball at Olive. “Did you know Will had a brain tumour?”
She did not play that one at all well; she had prepared herself for a certain line of attack and he had flung one at her out of the dark. “Where did you get that?”
“The GMO, the government medical officer who did the autopsy. It’ll be in the official report for the coroner. She, the GMO, says it looks to her as if it would have been inoperable. You didn’t know? He’d never complained of headaches or anything?”
“Once or twice he complained of a headache in the morning, but when I’d ask him at night he’d say it had gone during the day.”
“That’s one of the symptoms,” said Clements, who had talked to Romy. “Unlike a migraine, which gets worse as the day goes on. Did he vomit at all?”
“Once, I think. But he said it was probably something he’d ate.” She looked genuinely shocked, her face pale and stiff; the gym outfit now seemed a mockery, fancy wrapping on a lifeless mannequin. Jason put out a tentative hand, but she seemed unaware of it, and he dropped it back on his own knee. Then she said, “I wonder if he knew?”
“There might be something in his papers—we’ll have to get permission to go through all of those. What about insurance?”
&nbs
p; “He was insured—I don’t know how much for.”
“We can check that. At the same time we can check if he increased the insurance recently.”
“Why would he do that?” said Jason, trying to be adult.
“People do that sometimes when they know they have something incurable. They try to dupe the insurance company, but they rarely get away with it. Of course, with all that money in the secret account, why would he worry about trying to dupe the insurance company?”
Olive had her eye on the ball again; she was once more composed, the stiffness gone from her face. “You’re starting to hint that you suspect Will of something. I don’t think I want you to talk about him like that in front of Jason.”
“I’m not suspecting Will of anything—yet. So far all we’re trying to do is establish a motive for his murder. We’ve had the five and a quarter million dollars frozen, by the way.”
“Can you do that?” Her composure cracked a little. “Isn’t it ours? Mine and the children’s?”
“Not till we’ve been through all of Will’s papers. Then there’ll be probate. I wouldn’t start spending it yet, Olive.”
Exactly what Pa Rockne had said, thought Jason; and suddenly wondered if the money would ever be theirs. And, strangely, all at once didn’t care.
Malone stood up and Clements followed suit. “Olive, could I see you alone a moment?”
Without a word she got up and followed him out of the house, to stand behind the gate that led into the pool enclosure. Jason got to his feet and looked at Clements. “Is my mother in trouble, Sarge?”
“I don’t know, Jay.” Clements played a dead bat. “The inspector doesn’t always let me know what he’s thinking.”
