Bleak Spring

by Jon Cleary

“Not a hint. Why would I expect it? At that time I had no idea that Will was going to die, that he knew he was . . .” Her voice trailed off. She was enmeshed in a drama she didn’t quite believe, was slipping deeper and deeper into the net.

  “You didn’t suspect something when he had you witness the new will?”

  “Why would I? Sergeant, we have people coming in here every week changing their wills, every time some man has a row with his wife or they both have a row with their kids. Then they come back the next week and change it back to the original.”

  “Was there any reason why Mrs. Rockne was left out of the will?”

  “There was nothing spelt out. Jay didn’t show me the will, he just read out parts. There was something about her understanding the reason for leaving her out of it—”

  She stopped abruptly and after a moment Malone said, “Go on, Jill.”

  Once more she hesitated; she shook her head, as if in despair, and the hair fell down over her brow again. She’s damned attractive, Malone thought, I wonder what she would be like in bed? And felt the thwack of Lisa’s hand across the back of his mind.

  “God, you’d think I’d be used to it, wouldn’t you? People’s secrets, I mean, their private feelings. Every day of the week I type them out . . . Jay said his mother and Mrs. Bodalle are—lovers. They’re lesbians, sort of. Bisexual. Double-gaited. But he saw them . . . Will must’ve known about it and that’s the reason he cut Jay’s mother out of the will.”

  “How did Jay react to what he saw? When was it—when he left you and went home last night?”

  “Yes. It shattered him. Men—boys—you don’t respond to that sort of thing very well, do you?”

  Malone looked at Clements, who gave no indication of how he responded; then he looked back at Jill. “I think it depends on who you find out is a lesbian. A lot of women don’t respond too well when they find out their husbands or boyfriends are homosexual. How is Jay? Angry, disgusted, shocked or what?”

  “All of those, I think.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “About Mrs. Rockne? I don’t feel anything—it’s her business. Well, yes, I guess I do feel something. She might’ve thought about what effect it would have on Jay and Shelley.”

  “Are you surprised Mrs. Bodalle is that way inclined?”

  “No. You sound surprised, Inspector.” She was regaining some of her composure.

  “I’m not, now I come to think about her. Russ and I are not as innocent as you think, Jill. We’re not poofter-bashers and we don’t rough up dykes. But every now and again we have to change our views on someone and sometimes it takes a little time. Did you suspect Mrs. Bodalle was a lesbian?”

  “No. Well, like you, thinking back—maybe yes. I have two friends who are lesbians. I tried to make Jay see that it wasn’t the end of the world, his mother being one . . .” She smiled, totally composed now. “She probably wouldn’t thank me for taking her side.”

  Clements said, “Are you going to accept the ten thousand dollars?”

  “Mrs. Rockne insisted I had to. I think she sees it as another excuse for hating me even more.”

  Malone said carefully, “Do you think she would physically harm you?”

  She looked at him just as carefully. “Do you mean she might try to kill me? I’ve thought about it, since this morning. You wouldn’t have arrested her, would you, if you hadn’t thought her capable of killing Will?”

  Then the phone on a side table beside Malone rang. He looked at Jill, who said, “That’s the private line. That’s the first time it’s rung since—” She frowned while she tried to remember. “Since Mr. Jones rang last week asking about his files.”

  “Answer it. Play it as if you’re alone here.”

  Jill picked up the phone, cleared the sudden nervousness from her throat and said, “Hello? Mr. Rockne’s office.” She looked at Malone and nodded. “No, Mr. Jones, I told you, there are no files here on you . . . No, the police found nothing of yours, as far as I know . . . No, Mr. Jones, I won’t—” She put down the phone. “He hung up.”

  “You won’t what?”

  “He told me not to tell the police he’d called or I’d regret it.”

  III

  “The police know about you,” said Bezrow earlier that Tuesday morning. “They’ve been to see me, asked me if I knew you. Of course I said no.”

  “What do they know me as?”

  “All your names. Jones, Collins, Dostoyevsky. Do you have passports in all those names?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d better get a new one in a new name. They’re on to you, Igor. They didn’t tell me what they know about you, but they’ve already mentioned the Shahriver Bank, so you can have a bet at very short odds that they know about the money you deposited there.”

  The Georgian-by-descent and the Russian were at Randwick racecourse, standing by the rails watching the early morning track work. The dawn sun struggled through the spring fog, turning it to pale amber; horses came and went through the mist like mythical beasts in some hugely staged opera. Bezrow came down here one morning a week, the spy in the vicuna trenchcoat coming out into the cold. The true spy beside him, out of a job now, looked around him as if wondering what quirk of events had landed him here in this fog.

  “Why did we have to meet here at this hour?” said Dostoyevsky, who still thought in his own name. “I hate getting up early. It’s never been a Russian habit, not in diplomatic circles.”

  “Who would think of looking for a Russian fugitive at a racecourse at this hour? Igor, we are safe here.” Two horses galloped past, wide out on the track, the jockeys in the mist looking like nothing more than humps on the horses’ backs. The hoofbeats died away like fading heartbeats and Dostoyevsky, a superstitious man, shivered slightly. “I can understand your concern about that lost money. Five million! T’ch, t’ch.” Bezrow shook his head: even a bookmaker wasn’t used to losing so much.

  “We haven’t lost it! We’ll get it back!” Dostoyevsky was suddenly angry and irritable; it was the early rising. “We don’t give up so easily!”

  “How? Igor, this country has certain laws. If the money is in an account in Rockne’s name, how do you prove it isn’t his? By making a statement to the court that it is money stolen by your colleagues in Moscow and sent out here to finance the next revolution? This country is in a mess and getting deeper, but occasionally its laws work. The courts here have become rather accustomed to making judgements about greed, because they’ll say that’s the main reason, not revolution, why you stole the money.”

  “A moralist bookmaker. Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

  “Don’t be smart with me, Igor. Your and my arrangement is purely a business deal. I don’t have to flatter you or believe in what you’re doing.”

  “Ten per cent for arranging where I could bank the money.” Dostoyevsky did not sound bitter. Instead he smiled; in the KGB one learned cynicism, it was a necessary quality. “Come the new revolution, capitalist commission like that will be done away with.”

  “Half of the commission went to Rockne. I thought you knew that?”

  Despite what he felt towards Rockne, the Russian had to shake his head in admiration. “He takes five per cent commission, then steals ninety per cent! And he was just a suburban solicitor? Those poor fools back home, Yeltsin and the others, who want to join the capitalist system—they don’t know what they’ll be up against. Wall Street and the City of London must be rubbing their hands. Did you know Rockne was such a thief?”

  “Would I have used him for my own dealings if I’d known? He knew nothing about the Shahriver Bank or any bank that took money and hid it the way you wanted yours hidden. But he was shrewd enough to guess that I might know of one. He knew I had my SP business and he guessed not all the money from it went into the reputable banks—which, in these days, is another oxymoron.” Cynicism was a quality necessary, also, to bookmaking. “What about his father?”

  Dostoyevsky shook his head. “Small-time
, an idealist. Too honest for his own good, really. That was why I went to him. I knew he’d keep his mouth shut, even in the Party. We’d had a dossier on him for years.”

  Bezrow smiled. “Did you have one on me?”

  “A Georgian bookmaker? You were beyond redemption. I was surprised and a little worried when Rockne told me whom I would have to deal through. Then I checked on you and found you had a reputation for honesty, too. Except as far as the taxman went.”

  “Honesty has nothing to do with taxes.”

  The Russian nodded in agreement and the two of them stood there in the rising mist while they shared a contempt for taxes that went beyond ideology. More horses went past, less ghostly now.

  “There goes—” Bezrow named one of the horses. “I’ve been warned he’ll win by the length of the straight on Saturday. His connections are using a new, undetectable dope.”

  “I know about it. Our scientists developed it, but now the Cold War is over, what use is there for it? We were going to offer it to Saddam Hussein, but morality prevailed. So now we’re offering it to horse trainers and athletic coaches. Science shouldn’t be wasted.”

  “Of course not. Just don’t back that particular horse with me. In the meantime what are you going to do about the five million dollars?”

  “I shall have to apply more pressure on Mrs. Rockne. My colleagues in Moscow are becoming desperate. After last month’s coup failed . . . That comes of relying on stupid old men. All that time in power and they hadn’t learned how to hold on to it.”

  “You needed a Georgian. Another Stalin.” Bezrow leaned on the rail. He did not marvel at the situation in which he found himself as the business partner of a man whose ideology, even whose nationality, he despised. He was an opportunist and opportunism is an ideology in itself. “And if Mrs. Rockne doesn’t give you back the money?”

  Dostoyevsky waited till another horse had galloped past, as if afraid that the jockey might hear him: “Then I shall have to kill her. My masters demand that.”

  The sun broke through, but Bezrow felt suddenly chilled.

  10

  I

  “TELL ME what you know about Angela Bodalle’s husband,” said Malone.

  He and Clements were leaning on the promenade wall above the beach, each of them eating an ice cream. It was a fine day and there was a sprinkling of people on the beach, though there were few in the still-too-cold water. Half a dozen board-riders, slightly sinister-looking in their wet-suits, sat waiting for waves to roll up out of the flat sea. A wino sat on a bench and gazed with watery eyes, that might have been tears of remembrance, at a young shorts-clad mother and her two small children as they went by. Gulls strutted like grey and white colour gangs protecting their turf and out across the bay a wandering albatross, looking lost, hurried south for its late date with a mate somewhere in the Antarctic. The birds, Malone decided, looked like the only employed in the landscape.

  “He would have been older than her,” said Clements. “I never saw ’em together, but from the way she looks now I’d say he must of been twenty years older than her. I saw him a coupla times in action, but the only time I came up against him in court was when I was with Pillage. We brought in a gang that’d been milking the wharves for quids—we charged ’em with, I dunno, I think it was taking stuff worth a hundred thousand dollars, but they’d got away with much more than that. He got them off, they walked away scot-free and laughing like drains.”

  “He and his missus seem experts at getting crims off the hook.”

  “He wasn’t crooked, nothing like that. He was just like she is, he never missed a detail in a case. He wasn’t as—flamboyant, is that the word?—as she is, but you always knew when he was in court, the law students would turn up to watch him. He just had one problem—he liked the grog. Everyone knew about it. He’d never miss a day in court, but I’m told his juniors would sometimes sit two or three feet upwind from him, just so’s they wouldn’t get drunk on the fumes from him.”

  “How’d he die?”

  “An accident, somewhere up in the Blue Mountains. I never paid much attention to it, it happened just after I joined Homicide. Why the interest in him?” Clements finished his ice cream, chewing on the last of the cone with all the enjoyment of a child.

  “Not him, especially. Her. Who would know all about her, other than Olive Rockne?”

  “Grace Ditcham,” said Clements without hesitation. “She knows more about the court regulars than the Sheriff’s office.”

  “How’s the petty cash? Let’s take her to lunch—we’ll put her down as a gig on the vouchers. Before we do that, though, we’ve got to arrange protection for our girl Jill. Pretty soon we’re going to have more minders out than President Bush. Greg Random’s going to start complaining about the overtime.”

  “Our little bit to fight the recession.”

  Protection was arranged for Jill Weigall through the Randwick station, where the sergeant in charge complained, not about the overtime, but the stretching of manpower. “Scobie, we’re gunna have to share this around. I can’t spare my guys to baby-sit.”

  “Dick, she’s very pretty.”

  “That’s different, then. I’ll do it m’self. Do I get bed and board?”

  Grace Ditcham was available for lunch and Malone and Clements took her to Harpoon Harry’s, a seafood restaurant attached to an hotel and just down the road from Homicide. It was not a meeting place for matrons, there were no gloves and flower-bedecked hats here; most of the clients were men and the few women with them looked the sort who could hold their own in a man’s world. The food was good, if slightly overpriced according to Malone’s antique scale of prices, and the helpings were ample enough to satisfy Clements. Grace Ditcham tucked into her John Dory with all the appetite of a woman who did not have to watch her weight.

  “I brought everything I could find on the Bodalles.” She tapped her fork on the manila folder beside her plate. “She never figured in any stories about her husband, not till Lester was killed. Seems she was the ’little woman’. . . Aren’t we all?”

  “Not you, Grace,” said Clements.

  “Only because I go a round or two for a pound or two every Friday night with my husband. Not what your dirty minds think. We go to gym and whoever lasts longest on the equipment, the weights and the rest of it, pays the week’s bills. It’s called equal opportunity, though Fred calls it extortion, something his mum didn’t tell him about when he was growing up . . . Come to think of it, somehow I can’t see Angela ever having been the ’little woman.’”

  “Was Lester the domineering type when it came to women?”

  “I’d say so, though I don’t know what he was like with her. But he was a great one for patting your bum and being condescending about your intellect. Very lovable.” She bit into a piece of John Dory as if biting into a piece of Lester Bodalle.

  “What about the accident that killed him?”

  She put down her knife and fork, opened the folder. “I can’t give you these tear-sheets, I got them out of the paper’s morgue. The stories say he was killed when his car ran off the road on a back road in the Blue Mountains. It was pretty horrific—the car caught fire and he was incinerated.”

  “Was he drunk?” said Malone.

  “The stories don’t say. The fire charred him beyond recognition. But Angela gave evidence and said yes, he was under the influence. They’d had an argument and he rushed out of the house and jumped into his car and took off. They had a holiday home up outside Blackheath.”

  “What was the argument about? Did she say in court?”

  “About his drinking, funnily enough.”

  “What happened then? I mean, after his death?”

  “Well, first, she was left well provided for. That’s what most women think of first if some prominent man kicks the bucket—what did he leave the widow? It’s the battle of the sexes, who gets the spoils.”

  Malone looked at Clements. “Why is it that men are supposed to be the cynical se
x?”

  “Search me. I put women on a pedestal and they keep stepping down off of it into my face, usually in high heels.”

  “Okay, you two, stow your romantic ideas about us—I’m not impressed . . . Angela came out of her shell almost immediately, I gather. I’d only see her off and on, but here are some pix of her in the Sunday social pages. The Freeloaders Parade, we call it.”

  Malone looked at the faded clippings. Angela Bodalle was rarely smiling in any of the photos, but her companions flashed the usual display of teeth as if they were posing for some dental competition. The social pages of the Sunday papers were an orthodontist’s study chart. “No men?”

  Grace Ditcham took back the clippings. “You know, I don’t think I’d noticed that before. No, not a guy in sight.” She looked at the two men shrewdly. “Are you telling me she’s gay?”

  “We’re not telling you,” said Malone, “we’re asking you.”

  “So that’s why you asked me to lunch. And I thought you were after my body.”

  “Not if Fred pumps iron.”

  “Frankly, I don’t know if Angela is a lesbo. If she is, she’s never shown it towards me or any of the girls I know in newspapers.” She smiled; she had lively blue eyes, but the squint-lines round them made her sometimes look worried. Or maybe, Malone thought, as a crime reporter she had had to squeeze shut her eyes against too many ghastly sights. “How come you guys found out she was gay?”

  “Accidentally. It’s not a crime, so we’re not holding it against her—”

  “That’s big of you.”

  “—we were just wondering if she was like it when she was married to Lester.” He picked up the folder again, skimmed through the story on the accident that had killed Lester Bodalle. “Blackheath police covered the accident. Righto, we’ll get in touch with them.”

  Grace Ditcham sipped her wine. “Scobie, this isn’t idle stuff. What are you on to? Do you suspect Angela is trying to cover up something on the Rockne murder? Has she got something going with the widow?”

  “Maybe.” Malone tried to sound non-committal.