Bleak Spring

by Jon Cleary

  “Why?”

  “Because I think he knew he was going to die.” She ducked her head, slid into the driver’s seat. His own door was still closed, the window up, and he barely heard her: “I think he paid someone to shoot him.”

  II

  There had not been one cheerful headline on the main pages of the morning’s newspapers. Malone remembered a line from the old Don McLean song, “American Pie”: bad news on the doorstep. Yugoslavia was reviving the old meaning of balkanization, though that bastard word had not been invented when that part of the world had been known as the Balkans. The US Secretary of State was on a merry-go-round in the Middle East, with the Arabs and the Israelis standing on opposite sides of the carousel watching him go round and round. There were typhoons and droughts and starvation and unemployment; bad news, it seemed, was infinite, the Four Horsemen were just four runners in a crowded field. So editors filled their back pages with news of the coming rugby league grand final: good news about Alexander’s ankle, Meninga’s hamstring, Stuart’s groin. A balance had to be kept, or what was a sports editor for?

  “No homicides today,” said Greg Random, folding his Herald and laying it on his desk.

  “There’s still time,” said Malone.

  He had come across to Police Centre for his weekly half-hour chat with Chief Superintendent Random, Commander, Regional Crime Squad, South Region. They were old workmates; Random had been in charge of Homicide for ten years, and there was never any awkwardness or questions of rank between them. Still, Random had others above him whom he had to answer to: Assistant Commissioners, the Deputy Commissioner, the Commissioner, the Minister. Occasionally he answered to God, but that was not obligatory under public service rules.

  “Don’t spoil my day, Scobie. I’ve looked at the weekly report. You still have five unsolved murders. How’s it going on the Rockne case?”

  “Round and round. Up till this morning I thought the wife might’ve done it. Not that she did the actual shooting, but that she paid someone else to do it.”

  “Motive?” Random had been born and raised on a wheat farm out west and, outwardly at least, he suggested he still worked to the slow rhythm of the bush. His build conjured up the image of a weatherbeaten fencepost, topped by grey hair thick as wire-grass. His voice was a slow-motion drawl, words kept to a minimum by the unlit pipe that was always between his teeth.

  “Several motives. I knew them slightly and I don’t think they got on that well. He was heavy-handed, I don’t mean he belted her, but he treated her as if she was a dumb blonde. Women get tired of that treatment.”

  “It’s not enough to drive ’em to murder. Go on.”

  “He had an affair—well, a weekend—with his secretary. There may have been other women, I don’t know. But the wife could have found out about them and that, on top of the way he treated her, could’ve put her over the edge.”

  “Is she the hysterical type?”

  “Not at all. In fact, she’s surprised me since the murder, she’s more in control than I’d expected her to be. Finally, there’s a fortune, five and a quarter million dollars in a hidden bank account that she says she knew nothing about. But maybe she did know. Add up all those factors and she’d have a reason for getting rid of him.”

  “There’s something else you’re thinking about. What is it?”

  “Well, this is just a feeling, intuition, if you like—”

  “I’ve never knocked intuition. My dad used to stand in the middle of a paddock in a dry spell and hold up his finger and say, ’Rain’s coming.’ He couldn’t feel a bloody thing with his finger, but he was right nine times out of ten. It was intuition.” He took his pipe out of his mouth and sucked in a deep breath, as if such a long speech had winded him.

  “Righto, intuition. I don’t feel there’s any grief in her. She acts as if shock has belted the soul-case out of her, but it’s bullshit. Very restrained, but still bullshit. And Russ Clements and I have caught her out a coupla times in straight lies.”

  “Lying isn’t a crime, otherwise we’d be locking up every politician, and bureaucrat in the country, including myself.” He no longer considered himself a working cop but a bureaucrat; he had been much happier, if less well paid, lower down the totem pole. He took his pipe out of his mouth again, looked at it as if he had removed a molar. “You haven’t much to go on for an arrest.”

  Malone nodded, “I know. There are too many loose ends at the moment. Where did Rockne get the five million from? It’s obviously not his, but it’s in the bank in his name, so legally it goes to the widow and the two kids. Unless the real owner comes forward, and intuition tells me that’s not going to happen.”

  “What about this bookie, Bezrow? Could the money be his?”

  “I don’t know. We can’t pin anything on him, not yet. But he’s in it, somehow. Then there’s Kelpie Dunne. It’s just too coincidental that he starts servicing Rockne’s car only a month before Rockne is murdered.”

  “Has he got a record for being a hitman?”

  “He has a record on just about everything else, ever since he was sixteen years old. I wouldn’t put it past him to knock someone off for a price. He was up not too long ago for assault with intent, but he got off because of a smart lawyer. She’s another factor.”

  “She? Who? You mention Angela Bodalle in the running sheet—you don’t mean her?” He aimed his pipe at Malone like a gun. “You’re a bugger for complicating things. A leading QC mixed up in a murder case . . . Go on.”

  “I don’t know at this stage what her involvement is. She’s a friend of the family—or anyway, of the wife.” He paused, then sighed and sank a little lower in his chair. “There’s all that, but there’s something else. Two things. Rockne’s secretary told Sergeant Ellsworth, from Maroubra, yesterday afternoon that Bezrow’s penciller, a feller named Charlie Lawson, called at Rockne’s office and asked for all of Bezrow’s files. She told him we’d put a seal on the filing cabinets. He made no trouble, just went away, presumably to give Bernie Bezrow the bad news. Then this other bloke, a Mr. Jones, a foreigner was how she described him, he puts in an appearance and asks for his files. When she told him the same story about sealing the filing cabinets, he got very shirty. Now maybe the five and a quarter million belongs to him and he was the one who bumped off Rockne. Except that when Ellsworth’s men went through the files, there was none on Mr. Jones. And none for Bernie Bezrow.”

  Random nodded. “But there’s something else, right?”

  “How did you know?”

  Random wet his finger and held it up.

  Malone grinned, wearily. “Yeah, there’s something else. Russ Clements went to see Rockne’s doctor, the family GP. Rockne knew he had a brain tumour, he’d known for a month. But he asked the doctor not to tell the wife, to give him time to put his affairs in order. Two weeks after he got the bad news was when he transferred the money out of a trust account into an account in his own name. He might have stolen it for his family and then paid someone to blow his head off.”

  “Who, for instance?”

  “Kelpie Dunne? Kelpie was originally a client of his.”

  “Why wouldn’t he just commit suicide? Why pay someone, unless he was trying to collect insurance, too?”

  “Maybe that was it, I dunno. Rockne was pretty tight with money, he could’ve been the sort who, even with five million in the bank, couldn’t bring himself to turn his back on an insurance pay-out. But Russ has checked and he didn’t increase the premium after he’d found out he had the brain tumour.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Kelpie works for a place called Hamill’s out in Newtown—we think they’re in the stolen car racket. Could you get the Motor Squad to look into them, stir up the water a bit? That might tickle Kelpie into doing something. What, I dunno, but something. We could drop him a hint about the five and a quarter million and he might be stupid enough to come back on the widow for an extra fee, assuming he did the job.”

&nb
sp; “I’ll talk to Ric Bassano about it. They’ve got a thing called Operation Pluto going right now. They’re a whimsical lot, the Motor Squad, they like to call their ops after cartoon characters. Anything else?”

  “The Fraud Squad. I want to see if they can dig up anything on that bank in the running sheet, the Shahriver Credit International.”

  “Done. Nobody else you’d like to use? The Audit Branch, Vice, Community Relations?”

  “Your sense of humour’s turned sour, Greg. It’s sitting here on your bum doing nothing.”

  “I keep holding up my finger—” he illustrated “—hoping something exciting will turn up, but I don’t have my dad’s intuition. Maybe it’s because you can’t open a window in this bloody place. There’s nothing written on the wind in here—it’s all filtered out by the air-conditioning.” His office was spartan, by his own choice; as if to remind himself never to become too comfortable here in the higher ranks. “Good luck. Don’t jump off the springboard before you’ve made sure there’s water in the pool.”

  “That’s original. Where’d you get it—the Police Boys Club?”

  He went out of the room as Random took a bead on him with his pipe. He walked out of the fortress of Police Centre and through the bright dry day to the Hat Factory, the one-time commercial building that now housed Homicide. He and the rest of the Homicide detectives had been resentful when they had been moved out of the near-luxury of the newly built Centre into the run-down Hat Factory. But a lick of government paint, some old but unused carpet discovered in a warehouse and a relaxed atmosphere had resulted in an acceptance of the new accommodation. A good deal of police detection is taken up with thinking and discussion, which are often indistinguishable from malingering. Time-and-motion consultants, a breed watered and fed by the State’s new conservative government, never found their way into the Hat Factory.

  As Malone entered his office, his phone was ringing. It was Sergeant Ric Bassano, of Motor Squad: “Scobie? Chief Super Random has been on to me. I gather you’re interested in Hamill’s, out at Newtown? Coincidence, mate. So are we. We’ve got Operation Ninja Turtle going—”

  Malone held his tongue before it could ask what had happened to Operation Pluto. “Are you going to raid them?”

  “Tonight. You want anyone held?”

  “There’s a cove named Kelpie Dunne, a mechanic. Get his particulars, as if you’re meaning to get back to him, but let him go if you can. I’d like him out of work for a few weeks, see what he does.”

  “What’s he done?”

  “Nothing recently, nothing that we can pin on him. But I’ve got my suspicions.”

  “Haven’t we all? As Pogo said, trust in God, but tie up your alligator.”

  Pogo? “Yep, he said it all.”

  He hung up, went out to the computer and ran through all the running sheets on the squad’s other homicides. None of them, it seemed, was as complicated as the Rockne case. He leaned back in his chair, wondering if he could start another hare running. If, of course, Kelpie Dunne did start running; the bastard might just stay put. He looked up as Clements came in and sat with his haunches on the table beside the computer.

  “Do you think we’d gain anything if we leaked to some reporter that there is a large sum of money in the background of the Rockne case?”

  Clements looked dubious. “Who, for instance?”

  “Grace Ditcham. She’d never let on where the leak came from.” Ditcham was the city’s best crime reporter, a terrier bitch, in the best meaning of the term, who had dug up more bones than the entire kennel of police dogs.

  Clements thought a while, biting his lip; then he shook his head. “Better not. A good lawyer would pounce on that as prejudicial before they’d even sworn in a juror. Let’s wait. But I’ve got something else.” He followed Malone back into the latter’s office, dropped a large desk diary in front of Malone. “Take a look at that. Open it where the ribbon marker is.”

  Malone opened the diary. The first entries at the top of the page listed half a dozen appointments, none with a name that meant anything to him. The last entry was not an appointment, simply: Dad called, wants me to call him back. Why?

  Clements said, “Rockne and his dad hadn’t spoken for God knows how long. Then the old man phones, but obviously Rockne wasn’t there to take the call. So he does what the old man asks—he calls him back. Turn the page.”

  Malone turned the page. The entry for two days later listed four appointments. The last one, for 5 P.M., was with Mr. Jones. “So what’s the connection?”

  “Who’s Mr. Jones? Nobody seems to have a clue. But he comes to see Rockne two days after Old Man Rockne rings up his son who he hasn’t seen or spoken to in we dunno how long.”

  “What’s working for you? Intuition or suspicion?”

  “They’re the same thing with me, but maybe that’s a cop’s dirty thinking. I think we oughta have another talk with George Rockne.”

  “Righto, first thing tomorrow. In the meantime I’ve asked Ellsworth to put Olive under surveillance. If Will Rockne didn’t pay someone to bump him off, then Olive is next on my list of suspects. You agree?”

  “Either her or Mr. Jones.”

  III

  The Motor Squad carried out their operation that night. Next morning Sergeant Bassano called Malone. “We did over Hamill’s last night. We got nothing out of the Newtown set-up—that was just a legitimate front, all the cars in there belonged to reputable clients. But they had another workshop, no signs, nothing, out at Tempe—when we raided it, they had fourteen stolen cars in there. Your mate Kelpie Dunne was working there, but we let him get away. Was that what you wanted?”

  “Just so long as you frightened him.”

  “Oh, I think we did that all right. He fell over the back fence getting away and one of my men said he went hobbling off as if he’d been kneecapped or something.”

  “We’ll keep an eye on him, we know where he lives. Thanks, Ric. And thanks to the Ninja Turtles, all of them.”

  “We changed the code name. It was Operation Peanuts.”

  IV

  George and Sugar Rockne lived out in Cabramatta, one of the far south-western suburbs. Malone and Clements drove out through another cloudless sky, the air as dry as that a thousand kilometres inland. They drove through the main shopping centre, past stores that suggested they were in the suburbs of Saigon or Phnom Penh. There were as many signs in Indo-Chinese characters as in English; a McDonalds stood alone, like a last outpost. Asian faces seemed to outnumber European; two elderly women in black pyjamas stood gazing into a Jeans West boutique; they looked at each other, smiled, shook their heads and walked on. As Malone and Clements turned into a side street, half a dozen Asian youths on the corner turned to look after the unmarked Commodore, their faces as impassive as plates.

  “They smell cop,” said Clements. “I’d hate to work out here. A foreigner in my own country.”

  “You sound just like my dad.”

  “You don’t feel the same way?”

  Malone shrugged. “I might if I had to work out here. But it’s the future, mate, like it or not.”

  He was, indeed, glad he did not have to work out here. Local gangs had most of the Vietnamese and Cambodian citizens intimidated and more than half the crimes committed were never reported to the police by the victims. The Force, pressured by ethnic groups who complained that there was not enough ethnic representation among the police, had recruited two young Vietnamese for enrolment at the police academy; one of them had resigned on graduation and the other had lasted only two months in the Force. Malone had never heard the reasons for the resignations, but he could make an educated guess that the two young men or their families had been threatened. He sometimes felt like telling the pressure groups that they should solve the problems themselves in their communities before asking the police to do it. But to make a remark like that would only have him, and the Force, branded racist or anti-immigrant.

  The Rocknes’ house was small
and unpretentious, built of fibro and with a corrugated-iron roof; but it was neat and well cared for. Malone noted at once that every window was barred and there was a strong security grille on the front door; George Rockne, for all his beliefs, didn’t trust the proletariat. The street was a mixture of similar small houses, some brick, some fibro, one or two very old weatherboards, and half a dozen two-and three-storeyed flats. There were also three small factories: one sign announced Pork & Duck Roasting. Several of the houses and flats had For Sale signs on them; Malone guessed they were enforced mortgage sales. Cars, all of them inexpensive models, some of them only an accident short of being wrecks, were parked along both sides of the street. Unemployment was high out here; only a year or two ago these cars would have been missing during the day, with their owners at wherever their owners had worked. The street was quiet, soulless in the bright glare, as if all those within the houses and flats were dead or dying.

  The two detectives walked up a concrete path between beds of marigolds, yellow nuggets on stalks; the two strips of lawn on either side of the path looked more like brown rush mats. Two large metal butterflies were attached to the grille security door; a ceramic kookaburra sat on a perch to one side, not laughing, morose as a crow. Sugar Rockne opened the front door behind the grille.

  “Oh, Mr. Malone and Mr. Clements!” Professionally she had always called men by their first names; it is difficult to be formal when wearing only a feather or two. This morning she was wearing a bright yellow track-suit, her hair fluffed up, her make-up, ready, it seemed, for any visitors who might call. Though Malone wondered how many visitors she and George would get way out here in the boondocks of Little Asia. She smiled broadly, as if delighted to see them. “George is out in the back yard.”

  She led them through the house, which appeared to be furnished with more knick-knacks than a tourist trap. George Rockne, in a neatly pressed shirt and shorts and long socks, was fitting a new nozzle to a length of plastic hose. He did not seem surprised to see Malone and Clements. His face crinkled into a wry, rather than a welcoming, smile.