Bleak Spring

by Jon Cleary

  “A model named Boris Collins,” said Malone and produced his badge

  “Oh shit.” The manager could not have been more than thirty, but he had the look of a man who had spent most of those years on a used car lot. The eyes were weary from sizing up prospects, those who could pay and those who would renege; there was the paunch from too many liquid lunches with the more promising buyers; the mouth was loose from too many forced smiles. He didn’t smile now, but looked positively downcast. “What’s he been up to?”

  “Does he get up to much?”

  They were standing amidst the mass of metal. The manager put on dark glasses, expensive shades with gold bars, and Clements took out his, a cheaper pair, and put them on. Malone just squinted.

  “Well, no-o. But—don’t quote me—things are so bloody desperate in the trade, you know, some guys bend the rules a bit, you know, promise things we can’t deliver . . . Anyhow, he’s not here. He walked out last night, said he was going back to Russia. I didn’t even know he came from fucking Russia. Who’d wanna go back there, I ask you?”

  “Had he talked to you about leaving?”

  “No, it came just outa the fucking blue.” He was letting his thinning red hair down; he didn’t talk like this to customers, not even ones who might renege. “He hadn’t made a sale in, I dunno, a month at least, but he said he was out there, following up contacts with people he said he knew. He came to us with pretty good references.”

  “Like what?” said Clements. “The Russian embassy?”

  The manager’s brow furrowed. “The what? What would their references be worth in our game? You ever seen a Ziv or a Zim or whatever they call ’em? They look like something outa Detroit in the Fifties. Nah, his references were from overseas. He’d worked for Mercedes in Europe and the States—”

  “Did you check the references?”

  “Well, no-o. You mean they were faked? Christ, I must be getting dumb in my old age. Tell you the truth, I took him on face value. He had what I was looking for—class, if you want a word for it. He wasn’t the sort of sales rep you’d find on a Holden lot. No offence, you know what I mean. He’s been with us six months and for the first four or five months, no matter how bad things were, he outsold us all. Except myself.” Pride had to be defended.

  “Do you have a home address for him?”

  “Sure, come across to the office. You sure you don’t wanna trade up? I’ll give you five hundred for the Commodore and you can drive off today in last year’s 450SEL, just the job for running down the hot-rod hoons.”

  “We’re in Homicide,” said Malone. “We go slow.”

  Dooligan stopped dead in the doorway of his glass-fronted office. “Has he murdered someone? Jesus!”

  “No. We just hope he can help us with some enquiries. His home address?”

  “Darlene, could you scribble out Boris’s home address for these gentlemen?”

  The girl in the office had enough hair to have stuffed a sofa, was pretty, wore a tight sweater and an even tighter skirt and would have been subjected to sexual harassment every day of the week; but she looked as if she would have been able to deal with it, even better than some of the girls out on the beat. She typed out an address and gave it to Malone with a smile. “Give my love to Boris when you see him.”

  “You knew him socially?”

  “I went out with him a coupla times, but I never knew him. Nobody did.”

  “You went out with him?” The manager sounded incredulous. “You kept that pretty quiet!”

  “We have our little secrets, us girls.” She gave him a smile that cut his balls off.

  On the way out of the office Dooligan said, “I got on okay with Boris, but like Darlene said, he was always a bit of a mystery man, you know what I mean? Never went out with us to a party or dinner, never anything like that. Never mentioned any family. That was why I was surprised when Darlene said she’d been out with him.”

  “Maybe she had something more to offer him than a night out with the boys,” said Clements.

  “She’s never offered it to any of us. Well, give him my regards when you see him, tell him business is still lousy. You win Lotto, come back and see me. I’ll give you a deal that’ll have you driving away from here in a top-of-the-range model. You can pass on the Commodore to the wife then.”

  “Actually, it belongs to the Commissioner’s wife. Good luck. We hope business picks up.”

  As they approached the Commodore the two whores came strolling along. “How’s business?” said Clements.

  “Lousy.”

  “It’s that way all round.”

  “Not with cops, I’ll bet.”

  “No, we’re still getting plenty. Take care. Use a condom.”

  They smiled and walked on. Only another hour or so before going home to greet the kids coming back from school, before preparing the meal for the husband who might or might not suspect where the extra money was coming from.

  The address Malone had been given for Igor Dostoyevsky, aka Boris Collins, aka Mr. Jones, was in Potts Point, buttock-by-buttock with Kings Cross but less soiled.

  “Drop me off in Coogee. I want to see Olive again. Pick up John Kagal and have him with you when you bring in Mr. Jones.”

  “What are you gunna ask Olive this time?”

  “If Mr. Jones has been to see her.”

  As the Commodore pulled up opposite the Rockne house Malone glanced across to the nearby side street. “There are two fellers in a white Commodore over there. Would they be Ellsworth’s men?”

  “Either them or they’re Mr. Jones and one of his mates. I’ll wait.”

  Malone crossed the road and walked round the corner. He approached the Commodore, leaned on the roof and bent down to speak to the burly young man on the passenger’s side. “I’m Inspector Malone. I hope you’re who I think you are.”

  “Detectives Tilleman and Blake, sir, from Maroubra. We’re part of the Rockne surveillance team.”

  Malone straightened up, waved to Clements to move off, then opened the rear door of the car and slid in. “Has Mrs. Rockne had any visitors? A man, for instance, a tall feller, well dressed?”

  “No male visitors, sir.” They were both young, probably in their first year as detectives, Malone thought; one lean, the other burly, both of them eager to show they were wide awake and nothing had escaped them. “A woman visitor arrived about half an hour ago, with a young girl. An elderly woman.”

  “That’s probably Mrs. Rockne’s mother and the daughter Shelley. Any sign of the boy, a long drink-of-water of a kid?”

  “No, sir. But—” Malone waited, and the burly detective, Tilleman, went on. “Twice since we’ve been here Mrs. Rockne has come out to her car, that Honda Civic parked in the driveway, and used the car phone. Why would she come out of her house to use the car phone?”

  “Unless the house phone, for some reason, is out?”

  “It’s working, sir. Ben here went down to that phonebox down the street and called the Rockne house, they’re in the book. Mrs. Rockne answered, but Ben said he had the wrong number and hung up. The house phone is working all right.”

  “So, as you say, why would she come out to use the car phone? I think I’ll think about that one for a while. In the meantime, ring Sergeant Ellsworth, tell him I want a warrant and a request on Telecom for a full list of calls made from Mrs. Rockne’s car phone since Sunday. Telecom keep a record of all calls on cellular phones. Tell him I’d like it on my desk by tomorrow morning. Oh, give him my regards. And good work, you two—I’ll see he gets to know about it.”

  He left them, walked round the corner and across the road to the Rockne house. He did not see the brown Mercedes parked further up Coogee Bay Road nor the tall, well-dressed man seated behind its wheel.

  6

  I

  JASON HAD answered the phone when it rang. A man’s voice asked, “Can I speak to Mrs. Rockne?”

  His mother had come along, taken the phone and waited till he had gone down the
hall into the kitchen. There, standing just inside the doorway, he had strained his ears to hear what was being said. He despised himself for eavesdropping like this, but Mum had brought it on herself. The family was in trouble, under threat even, and she was still trying to lock him out as if he were some outsider.

  He heard her say, “I’ll call you back—where are you?” Then she hung up and he heard her go up the hallway and out the front door. He ran silently up the hall and into the living room. From there he could see out through the side windows to the driveway. His mother’s car was parked at the front corner of the house; he could just catch a glimpse of her in the front seat, just her left shoulder and arm. Then she leaned forward, her head coming into view, and he saw she was on the car phone. What was going on with her, for Chrissake?

  Then she got out of the car and he went swiftly back to the kitchen, took a milk carton out of the fridge and poured himself a glassful. It was the wrong drink for the moment; it thickened in his mouth and he could hardly swallow it. He was angry and puzzled and hurt; what the hell was going on? He waited till his mother came into the kitchen and then he blurted out, “Who was that on the phone? Why’d you have to go out to the car to call him back?”

  She pulled up sharply, her head going back as if he had slapped her. “Have you been spying on me?”

  “Yes!” He put down the glass of milk, thumping it on the kitchen table; a few drops of milk splashed on the worn oak surface. It was an old country piece, one of his mother’s prides, a relic from her grandmother’s farmhouse. “Yeah, I was!”

  “That’s bloody despicable, Jason! It’s none of your business who I talk to on the phone!”

  “Nothing is my business, it seems!”

  Coming back from the supermarket yesterday, she had refused to discuss the encounter with Mr. Jones—“No, Jason, forget it. I don’t want you and Shelley involved in any of this. I’ll work it out.”

  “Who with? You and bloody Angela?”

  That was the wrong thing to say; she had shut up like a bank vault. She had not spoken to him the rest of the way home and last night had been an edgy and uncomfortable three or four hours before he had finally given up and gone to bed. Claire Malone had called him, but he had found he had nothing, really, to say to her; she was sweet and friendly, but he had kept comparing her with Jill Weigall. He had even thought of calling Jill, asking her if she would like to go to a disco or something, but that would have meant going to his mother and asking for money. No way would he do that: money was not to be discussed, fifty bucks or five million.

  Now, his throat thick with milk and anger, he said, “It is my business, Mum! Jesus Christ, do you think Mr. Jones, or whatever the hell his name is, is gunna concentrate on just you, leave Shelley and me alone?”

  “Don’t swear at me!”

  “I’m not swearing at you, for Chrissake! You wanna hear me really swear?”

  “No!”

  She turned away from him, went to the kitchen sink, stood there as if puzzled that she had nothing to do; she looked right and left along the draining board, as if looking for meat or vegetables, anything, to be prepared. It was a big kitchen, with timbered cupboards, a double wall-oven, a microwave oven, a jumbo-sized refrigerator and enough appliances, Will had once said, to stock an Elcom showroom. But, Jason remembered, it had been the one extravagance of his mother’s that his father had never harped on. Now she turned back from the sink and looked round the kitchen as if she wanted to escape from it. Or (the thought hit him with horror) from him.

  “Jason, I have to handle this myself. It’s a—a self-discipline, if you like. It’s my way of holding on. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  He wanted to say, You’re trying to say you don’t trust me; but all he did was nod. She didn’t seem to realize it, but he, too, was holding on.

  “Dad’s funeral is tomorrow—we have to get through that and it’s not going to be easy. After that

  “After that—what?”

  “I don’t know, Jason. I honestly don’t know. Maybe we’ll sell the house, move away from here . . . I just don’t know. But whatever happens, don’t make it any harder for me.”

  She looked suddenly vulnerable, no older than Shelley, for Chrissake. He moved to her, put his arms round her, waited for her to cry on his chest; but she didn’t, just stood leaning against him, her arms round him but not pressing him to her. She doesn’t love me, he thought; but that couldn’t be true. She had always loved him and Shelley; when he was a little kid, she had embarrassed him with how clinging she could be. She couldn’t have changed that much; but something had happened to her. Maybe he should look in the mirror: maybe his father’s murder had changed him, too.

  “We’ll get through, Mum.” But he wondered where to.

  Then he released her and went into his bedroom and shut the door. This was his retreat, but now he wondered how safe it would be. He looked at the posters on the walls: cricketers, American basketballers, Michael Jackson, all of them smiled at him as if he were their friend. Pretty soon it would be time to tear them down; but what would he replace them with? The future looked as if it was going to be no more than a blank wall.

  He turned on his radio, put on headphones (Mum hated loud music) and listened to Two Triple J; the station was playing the old Jimmy Barnes’s track, “Working Class Man.” He’d never be one of those, not with his share of the five-million-and-a-bit. He pushed the headphones back, so that he could barely hear the music; he dozed off, another singer lulling him to sleep, and Jill Weigall walked in his dream through a mist of banknotes Then the ringing of the phone woke him, a faint sound beyond the music. He sat up, pulling off the headphones, and heard his mother pick up the receiver in the kitchen. He could hear only the murmur of her voice, then the phone was put back on its cradle, he heard her go out the back door and down the side of the house to her car. He lifted himself off his bed, peered out of his narrowly opened window. His mother was in her car, on the phone again.

  He sank back on his bed, wanting to weep. He was still lying there, still feeling absolutely bloody dreadful, when he heard her come back into the house. Then ten minutes later there was a murmur of voices coming up the side driveway; it was Shelley and Gran Carss, a gruesome twosome if you needed a pair. He put on his headphones and lay back, this time with some wideawake dreaming of Jill that made him horny. When Shelley knocked on his door, he pulled an open copy of the Women’s Weekly over his groin.

  “Come in.”

  She came in, flopped on the end of his bed and reached for the magazine. “What are you doing with that, for Pete’s sake?”

  He grabbed it, held it in place. “Trying to find out what makes you weaker sex tick. How was it staying with Gran?”

  She wrinkled her nose, dropping her voice. “Drack. She’s even worse than Mum about the music being too loud. She thinks Michael Jackson shouts. Michael! She rolled her head and her eyes at the sacrilege, looked at his poster and rolled off the bed and genuflected. Then she got back on the bed. “How’s Mum been? She don’t—doesn’t—” she waved a finger at him and smiled before he could pick her up on her grammar “—doesn’t look so hot. I mean she looks, you know, worried.”

  Her own concern showed; he wanted to confide in her his own worry. “She’s got the funeral on her mind. It’s gunna be rough, Shell. You reckon you’re gunna be able to cope?”

  “Well, we’ve got to. haven’t we?” She sat up, all at once looking much older than thirteen. God, he thought, we’re going to be geriatric before our time! “Jay, don’t you think Mum has become sorta—well, cold? Is that what a murder does to some people?”

  There was a ring at the front door. He sat up, the Women’s Weekly slid off his lap: everything was okay down there, flat as an hermaphrodite’s. “I’ll get it,” he shouted to his mother and escaped from his room before he had to give Shelley an answer.

  He groaned silently when he opened the front door. Claire’s father stood there, Mr.—no, Inspec
tor Malone. More trouble? “You don’t look too happy, Jay.”

  He was surprised that he still had his wits about him. “The funeral’s tomorrow, Mr. Malone. None of us are happy.”

  “No,” said Malone. “I suppose I could’ve picked a better time to call. Is your mother home? I see her car’s outside.”

  Jason led Malone through the house and out to the garden room, where his mother stood with his grandmother, both staring out at the garden as if planning some replanting. The two women turned their heads to look at the detective with unwelcoming eyes. “Hello, Scobie,” said Olive in a cold flat voice. “More questions?”

  “You might’ve waited,” said Mrs. Carss. “The funeral’s tomorrow, you know.”

  “I know,” said Malone, “but some things can’t wait. I’ll make it quick, Olive.”

  “And hurtful?”

  Oh, for Chrissake, Mum, back off! Shelley came into the room and Jason wished she hadn’t. All at once he felt protective towards his sister.

  “No, I hope not,” said Malone. “This time it’s—concern, if you like. Has a Mr. Jones been in contact with you? A Russian, a tall, well-dressed feller?”

  “A Russian?” said Mrs. Carss. “What would she have to do with any Russians?”

  Olive said nothing and Jason knew at once that she was going to deny meeting Mr. Jones. He stepped forward and said, “Yeah, he’s been in touch with us. Yesterday up at the car park in Randwick Village.”

  “That right, Olive?”

  Olive glanced at Jason before she looked back at Malone; her look was strange, almost as if she hated him for having spoken out. “Yes, that’s right. I had no idea he was a Russian.”

  “What did he want9’

  Jason waited for his mother to answer that; she hesitated, then said, “He said that money in Will’s secret account was his.”