by Jon Cleary
Out by the pool Malone was saying, “You’re not telling the truth, Olive. Or your memory is falling apart. Either way, I think you’d better start talking to your friend Mrs. Bodalle or some other lawyer.”
“You do suspect me of having something to do with Will’s murder, don’t you?” There was no note of anger or shock in her voice; he could have been an inspector from the Randwick council, telling her she was behind in her rates. “That’s really shitty, Scobie.”
“Unfortunately, that’s how my job is most of the time. I think you’d better talk to Mrs. Bodalle. In the meantime, Olive, don’t do anything foolish, like trying to disappear.”
In the house Jason was staring out at his mother. “Sarge, why do people commit murder?”
Clements almost said, Ask your mother, instead he said, “Jay, I’ve worked on a hundred homicides. For every one there was a different reason.”
He knew that countless juries had asked the same question as Jason had. But now was not the time to talk of juries while Malone was outside there pointing the finger at the boy’s mother.
III
Malone had always liked elegant women; her elegance had been what had first attracted him to Lisa. The attraction lay, perhaps, in the fact that as a boy, his contact with such women had been nil; Erskineville, where he had grown up, and later the Police Department, had never been metaphors for refined taste. Angela Bodalle, he had to admit, was good to look at, even if her manner could rub him raw.
“I’ve been half expecting you, Inspector, after what you said on Sunday morning.”
“What did I say?”
“That you never phoned, you just knocked on the door What did my clerk say when you announced yourself?”
“He knows me, I’ve been here before to these chambers.”
Clements had dropped him off outside Temple Chambers in Phillip Street and had then driven back to Homicide. Phillip Street, named after the colony’s first governor, is flanked for the most part by unprepossessing buildings. It is, however, the main breeding ground for the city’s lawyers; the air is thick with smug professional superiority, most of it male. Round the southern corner is the State Supreme Court, twenty-two layers of even greater smug superiority, again most of it male. Barristers, in wigs and gowns, stalk the street between their chambers and the courts like black peacocks; the occasional peahen can be seen, but she knows her place and walks some steps behind. Tradition rules here, though it runs close to snobbery. The grey horsehair wigs come from the same makers in London who supply English Queen’s Counsels. QCs once wore robes that dazzled the eye, but in 1714, on the death of Queen Anne, they donned black and had worn it ever since, though half the local silks would have had trouble placing Anne in the British royal succession. Tradition rules, at up to seven thousand dollars a day. Angela Bodalle, Malone had heard, commanded about half that price but was working her way up the scale.
She was dressed this morning in a cream silk blouse and a discreetly patterned blue and black skirt; the jacket of the suit was hanging on a coat-tree in one corner. The room was large and airy, unlike some of the nooks Malone had been in in older chambers. A royal-blue carpet gave the room an added lift. There were two large prints by American artists on facing walls and a third wall held an original by Frank Hodgkinson; Malone knew none of the artists, but remarked the difference between them and some of the prints and paintings he had seen in other barristers’ rooms. The furniture was light oak, the upholstery a paler blue than the carpet. The law might have a gloomy rather than a bright side, but Angela was obviously determined to lighten her own mood, if not her clients’. Four large bowls of early roses stood on small tables against the walls. Even the shelves of legal books looked as if their bindings had been retouched.
She gestured at the papers on her desk. “You’re fortunate to catch me in. I have a case tomorrow, it’ll probably be a long one. The Filbert murder—not your turf, was it? No, of course not, it was in North Region.”
“I read a bit about it. You’re defending the husband?”
“No, I’m prosecuting this time.”
“That’s a turn-up, isn’t it? I mean, for you.”
“My first time. I thought I should show a little public spirit, so I put my name to the DPP. He agreed. I think it amused him to have a woman prosecuting a man for killing his wife. We lawyers like to be amused, we pride ourselves on our wit. Or the males among us do. How’s Olive?”
“You mean she hasn’t rung you? I thought she’d have been on to you by now.”
She smiled, but showed very little of her teeth. “She has, Inspector. You have been leaning on her pretty heavily. You shouldn’t do that, not without her lawyer present.”
“Meaning you?”
She nodded. “I think I’ll have to insist that if you want to talk to her in future, I be there.”
“That may not be easy, Mrs. Bodalle. Not if you’re going to be in court for the next six or seven weeks. I try not to work at night, if I can avoid it.”
She smiled again, showing more teeth this time; she looked almost friendly. “I’d like meeting you in court, you and I could have quite a time jousting, as my more pompous male colleagues call it.” Then she shuffled the papers in front of her. “But I’m busy now, Inspector. Why have you come?”
He liked direct women; there were more of them around than many men, including Clements, were prepared to admit. He was equally direct: “Why did you recommend that Will Rockne take his car to Hamill’s to be serviced?”
“They told you I recommended him?”
“No. I met your client Kelpie Dunne there and I put two and two together. It’s an old police habit.”
The almost-friendly look had abruptly gone from her eyes; she was prepared to joust, seriously. “I recommended Hamill’s because they are so damned good.”
“Not because Kelpie works there?”
“It was Mr. Dunne who told me how good they were.”
“He got in touch with you especially to tell you that?”
“No, I bumped into him one day in the street—he saw me getting out of my car.”
“Does Olive know Kelpie?”
Her gaze was direct. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Where do you live, Mrs. Bodalle?”
“I don’t know that’s any of your business, but you’ll find out anyway, I’m sure. I live at McMahon’s Point. Why?”
McMahon’s Point lay in the western shadow of the Harbour Bridge, a narrow finger shoved into the waters of the harbour. “I just wonder why you go all the way out to Newtown to have your car serviced. There must be good workshops on your side of the water.”
“I told you, I go to Hamill’s because they are so good. I’m very careful of my car. I’m what I suppose they call a car woman. If I were a man you’d be claiming there was some sexual symbolism in what I drive.”
“Not me. If you saw what I drive, you’d class me as impotent. So you would never drive a Volvo?”
“No. They are just for safety-minded drivers. Not that I’m reckless. But when you’ve driven a Morgan or an Alfa or a Ferrari . . . What do you drive?”
“A Commodore, nearly eight years old. You’d leave me standing at any traffic light. If Hamill’s are so good at servicing high-priced sports cars, why did you recommend that Will take his Volvo there? Wouldn’t the mechanics have turned up their noses at it?”
“They might have, but not when I asked them.”
“Are they sweet on you or your Ferrari?”
She smiled again. “Both, maybe.”
“Would any of the mechanics, besides Kelpie, have been clients of yours?”
“No.” The smile had gone again.
“Where does Olive take her Honda Civic?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. Not to Hamill’s—they’d draw the line there.”
Malone had never understood the snobbery about cars, but he wouldn’t dare voice that to someone who had called herself a car woman. “Mrs. Bodalle, you’ve been a
friend of the family how long?”
“A year, maybe a little less.”
“Oh? Somehow I’d got the idea that you’d been a friend a long time, that you and Olive were old friends.”
“We’re close friends. How long we’ve known each other doesn’t really matter, does it? How many old friends do you have?”
Come to think of it, and he had not thought much about it at all because it did not worry him, he had no old friends or even close ones. Except, of course, Russ Clements, and (wrongly, he admitted now) he had always thought of Russ as a workmate. He was not an authority on friendship, so she had him there.
“How did you meet?”
She considered the question, as if debating whether she had to answer or not; then she said, “We went to the same school, I was a couple of years ahead of Olive. Then we bumped into each other again at a legal convention, she was there with Will . . .”
“Were you a close friend of Will’s?”
The thought amused her; she shook her head. “Are you hinting I might have had an affair with him? Forget it, Inspector. Neither of us ever really liked the other.”
“Did you dislike him enough to want to kill him?”
She was far from amused now; her look could have killed. “That’s a stupid question! If you’re going to continue that line, your time’s up.” She shuffled her papers together.
He grinned. “Mrs. Bodalle, you’re not on the Bench, not yet. Only judges tell a cop when his time’s up. I’m not accusing you of killing Will Rockne, I just asked you if you disliked him enough to want to kill him. You’re a lawyer, you should know the difference.”
She didn’t relent, “I think you’d better go.”
He stood up, not made awkward by his dismissal. Police are always being dismissed or told to get lost or to fuck off, depending on the manners of those being bothered by the police. He had been dismissed by women with tongues like spiked leather: at least Angela Bodalle was coldly polite.
“If you didn’t get on with Will, I don’t suppose he ever confided to you that he had a brain tumour?”
That stopped her shuffling her papers; her hands were as still as dead birds. “Does Olive know?”
“She does now. I don’t think she knew till I told her. The autopsy showed it was inoperable. He’d have been dead in six months or less. The killer could’ve waited if he’d known. Good luck with your prosecution. How’s Filbert pleading?”
“Not guilty. You men usually do, don’t you?” Then she said quickly, “Sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
“Why don’t you like men, Angela?”
He went out without giving her time to reply. Outside in the street he stood and watched as four barristers, gowns aflutter in the wind that had sprung up, heads bent to keep their wigs anchored (why, he wondered, did they wear their wigs in the street; how many white horses had given up their hides to supply this conceit?), made their way round the corner to the courts, where more wind would blow at thousands of dollars a day. Like most cops, he had little time for lawyers, even those on the police side, the prosecutors; he could not imagine his being enthused at working with Angela Bodalle as the prosecutor. He wondered what her fee would be if she had to defend Olive Rockne against a charge of murdering her husband.
IV
It had been a bad day for bookmakers at the Randwick midweek meeting. There had been seven races on the card and in six of them the favourites, heavily backed, had romped home; the horses, as they passed the post, had been laughing and even those most lugubrious of characters, the jockeys, had been smiling. Bernie Bezrow sighed, a hissing sound, and looked at his clerk.
“Charlie, this has got to stop. The punters have stopped coming to the course and those who do have an unearthly anticipation of what’s going to win. How did the TAB do today?”
Charlie Lawson, thin as a slide-rule and as old-fashioned, thirty years a bookie’s clerk, an old-timer who never used a calculator but still persisted with his pencil and his nimble mind that could tell you the square root of the national debt in ten seconds flat, pushed back his straw hat and nodded in agreement with his boss. “Things are crook, Bernie. The TAB was down twelve per cent today.”
That was the only satisfactory note in the day, that the government betting agency was also feeling the pinch of the recession. “I hate to break the law,” Bernie said piously, “but it looks as if we’ll be forced to concentrate on the footy.”
“We been doing that since the start of the season.” Charlie Lawson was a matter-of-fact man, as a good penciller should be.
“Don’t flourish the obvious, Charlie. I’m trying to ease my conscience, if I can find it. I had one, once, but it got lost somewhere in all this fat. What’s the money now on Penrith for the grand final?”
“Too much. If Penrith wins, we might have to retire.”
Bezrow sighed again. “The thought doesn’t frighten me, Charlie. The good old days have gone.”
He looked round the betting ring, at the now empty stands, the litter, the backs of the departing small crowd. He was one of the privileged, the rails bookmakers, the last of those who had been household names, or anyway stables names, in the racing game, Jack Shaw and Ken Ranger and Terry Page and now himself, the last identity. Punters such as Hollywood George and Melbourne Mick and Kerry Packer had bet hundreds of thousands of dollars with him; he had taken them and they had taken him and there had never been any ill-feeling; it was a game that no one but true gamblers understood. Now, it seemed, it was all coming to an end; maybe only a temporary end, but he would be dead before it revived. He sighed once more, struggled out of his chair, took Charlie Lawson’s hand to help him as he stepped down off his stand.
His private security man, whom he employed only on race days, came across the paper-strewn lawn. “Not much to worry about today, Matt. Charlie has it all there in the bags.”
The Australian Jockey Club didn’t allow security guards other than their own to wear uniform; Matt, a big blunt-faced man, wore slacks and a jacket, but carried a gun in a shoulder holster. There had been several attacks on bookmakers over the past twelve months, not on the racecourses but, mostly, as they were about to enter their homes. Bezrow had never been attacked, but, like most of the top bookmakers, he had been tested with threats of extortion. He had lied to Malone and Clements when he had claimed to be a fatalist. He was a long way from being a cowardly man, but when it came to personal safety, of his own and of Charlie Lawson, he didn’t believe in long odds.
“You want us to drop you off first, Mr. Bezrow?” The security guard took his job seriously, especially now in the recession. Young punks, amateurs, were moving into areas where previously only professional stand-over men had operated.
“No, just escort Charlie. I have someone waiting for me in my car. I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Charlie. We’ll talk about the odds on Penrith.”
He walked out of the betting ring towards the car park. Despite his huge bulk he didn’t waddle; he walked almost daintily, as some fat people do. Cars were still easing their way out of the racecourse and he dodged them with some grace. Then he came to the peacock-blue Rolls-Royce. His chauffeur, a thin dapper Vietnamese, held open the rear door for him.
“The gentleman is waiting for you, sir.”
“Leave us for fifteen minutes, Trang. I’ll signal you when we’re ready to go.”
He got into the car with some difficulty, sank back beside the slim body already in the rear seat. “Hello, Walter. Thank you for coming. You have enough room?”
Walter Palady was pressed hard up against the leather trim, making room for his host. “Yes, Bernard. Did you have a good day?”
“Not a good day at all. But that’s the least of my worries. Have the police been back to you again?”
Palady shook his head. “No. But that is not to say they have forgotten us.”
“Did my name come up at all?”
“No. The two officers asked who had recommended Mr. Rockne to our bank, but my manager
had a convenient lapse of memory. It is an advantage that banks have a reputation for not thinking fast on their feet—when did a bank manager ever give a snap decision?” He smiled and Bezrow smiled in return as a fee. “Some clients, most clients, complain, but they are the stupid little depositors in ordinary banks.” He smiled again at the big, and not stupid, depositor beside him. “No, Bernard, you are safe. So far.”
“So far? That’s what worries me. How long does it take you, Walter, to move my money through your branch here to the Caymans?”
“We can do it overnight, if we have to. But it looks better if we send it out in parcels. It goes a roundabout route, through places not as obvious as the Caymans.”
Bezrow chewed his thick lips. “I’ll be depositing a lot of money with you in the next couple of weeks, a lot. The rugby league grand final,” he explained when he saw the polite puzzlement on Palady’s face. “You haven’t been here long enough, Walter, but you’ll find that Australians’ main cultural pursuit is sport,” he said, sitting there in his Rolls-Royce in the car park of the State’s biggest racecourse. “Nobody ever made money in this country betting on the arts. Of course some pop stars have made a fortune or two, but one can’t say they are part of the arts.” He smiled at Palady; the latter smiled back, though he was musically deaf and wouldn’t have known Beethoven from boogie-woogie, whatever that was. “This year the rugby league, and remember it is played in only two States, will pull in fifty million dollars in bets. All of it illegal, except up in Darwin, where, it seems, anything goes.” He spoke with the bitterness of a man who hated unfair competition. “My SP network—”
“SP?”
“Starting price betting. It’s illegal, but it’s like Prohibition was in the US in the Twenties—nobody sees anything wrong with it, except the wowsers. Don’t ask me to explain wowsers to you, Walter, or we’ll be here till dark. They are sort of civilian ayatollahs. What I’m telling you is that in the next couple of weeks I shall be depositing several million dollars and I don’t want anyone coming to you and asking awkward questions. Have you moved any of the money Will Rockne deposited with you?”
