Now and Then, Amen

by Jon Cleary

  “I hope this isn’t going to become a regular habit, Inspector.” Hourigan was a frank host; in one’s eighties, politeness only wastes valuable time. “What’s it about now?”

  Malone told him bluntly, watching both him and Brigid. The old man showed no expression; Brigid dropped her hand, made a discordant thump on the keyboard. “Both Father Marquez and I had threats over the phone today. I’d like to interview Mr. Paredes or Mr. Domecq. Are they staying here?”

  “What makes you think they have anything to do with what you’ve just told me?” He was still standing, leaning on the silver walking-stick; he made no gesture for them to be seated. Behind him Brigid had quietly closed the keyboard lid and stood up.

  “I’ll tell you that, Mr. Hourigan, when I’ve talked to them. Are they here?”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” said Brigid. “They’re in the study. I’ll get them.”

  She had to pass her father to go out of the drawing-room. He put up the walking-stick, blocking her way. “You’ve just made me out a liar.”

  “That’s what you are, Dad. I didn’t make you one.”

  She pushed the walking-stick aside and went on out of the room. She moved with dignity and grace, Malone remarked, almost queenly. The Hourigans, no matter where they had come from, had learned the touch of class that arrogance gives.

  Fingal looked at Malone. “Do you have daughters, Inspector? They’re much harder to handle than sons.”

  “Even when the son is an archbishop?”

  Fingal ignored that, looked at Clements. “What do you do, sergeant? Just stand in the background?”

  “Most of the time, yes,” said Clements. “Sometimes you learn more that way.”

  Then Fingal looked at them both, his bright-blue eyes glinting in the light of the expensive lamps surrounding him; he was afraid of shadows, there were all those gathered in his past like a black storm. “You’re a couple of smart-arses.”

  “We try,” said Malone.

  Then Brigid came back into the room with Paredes and Domecq. They were better- and more prosperous-looking then their photos had shown. Both of them were immaculately dressed in navy-blue mohair, their white shirts with the starched collars reminding Malone of a fashion he had seen in old magazines. They had the air of men prepared for any situation.

  “This wasn’t my idea that you should meet Inspector Malone,” Fingal told them.

  Paredes smiled politely, looking unperturbed. “There is nothing to be concerned about, Mr. Hourigan. Back in the States we are always being interviewed. The FBI, Congressional committees . . . It is the lot of political refugees.”

  Malone had met this ploy before: be frank, lay everything out in the open. Well, almost everything. “Mr. Paredes, did you ever meet Sister Mary Magdalene?”

  Paredes glanced at Brigid, who had gone back to sit at the piano. “Miss Hourigan’s daughter? Never. A dreadful tragedy . . . We came here today to pay our respects to Miss Hourigan.”

  “What about you, Mr. Domecq? Did you ever meet her?”

  “I never had the pleasure. If she was as charming as her mother . . .” He gave Brigid a gambler’s smile, all charm and challenge under the dark moustache. She gave him no smile in return. She had opened the keyboard and now she struck a note, one that sounded curiously flat.

  Domecq’s voice was the one Malone had heard over the phone. “Where were you this evening, Mr. Domecq? Say three-quarters of an hour ago?”

  “Why, I was here.” Domecq looked surprised; or feigned it. “I was upstairs, having a bath.”

  “I can vouch for that,” said Fingal. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, Inspector. You’re also being bloody insulting. I think I’ll have a word with your superiors.”

  “I think you already have, Mr. Hourigan. He passed on the word this morning. But maybe you’d like to have a word with the Commissioner? I’m working directly under him.”

  Fingal said nothing for a moment, then he nodded his head in appreciation. “You are a smart-arse.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” said Brigid from her place at the piano. She looked as if she might at any moment start playing, perhaps some martial music. “I’m relying on you, Inspector, and you too, Sergeant, to find out who murdered my daughter. Nobody else seems to care.”

  Most other mothers, Malone thought, would have broken down at that. But Brigid Hourigan was in control of herself; whatever turmoil of grief and anger was going on inside her, none of it showed on the surface. Malone recognized an ally, though he wondered how much she, being a Hourigan, would demand of him and Clements.

  “I might have cared more if you had brought her home sooner,” said Fingal. “I hardly knew the girl.”

  Malone felt suddenly uncomfortable; behind him he sensed that Clements felt the same way. Even Paredes and Domecq looked as if they wanted to be gone from the room. Family tensions were the smallest of wars, understood by everyone and the wounds felt accordingly.

  Brigid seemed to sense the others’ embarrassment; she changed the subject. “Did Father Marquez have any family?”

  “Just his mother, as far as I know.”

  “I must call on her—I feel we owe it to her. If it had not been for Teresa . . . I think I need a drink. Where is the liquor kept, Dad?” Evidently she didn’t know her way round her father’s house.

  He hesitated, then nodded towards a flamboyantly inlaid bureau. “In there.”

  She went to the bureau, pulled at a handle and the whole top opened up to expose two shelves of cut-glass decanters and expensive glasses. “How cute! Where’s the ice—in the bottom drawer?”

  It was: the bottom drawer was a shallow refrigerator. Fingal realized that none of his visitors, least of all his daughter, was impressed; or if they were, not in the way he had intended. The bureau would be thrown out tomorrow. He had begun to weaken: he could be made to look small. And all because of his daughter.

  Brigid took her whisky straight, except for one ice cube. She held the glass up to the men enquiringly, but they all shook their heads. Then, still moving with dignified grace, she went back to the piano stool. She looked at Paredes and Domecq with calm hostility.

  “Both of those young people died because of what you two gentlemen are trying to do.”

  “You are mistaken, Miss Brigid,” said Paredes, as calm as she. “Our visit to Australia has nothing to do with Nicaragua.”

  “Bullshit,” said Brigid without raising her voice; somehow she even made the word sound dignified. “They are here, Inspector, with my brother the Archbishop to raise money for their precious Contras. Teresa told me all about it.”

  “You are treading on dangerous ground here,” said her father. “You’re committing slander.”

  “Dad—” She smiled, took a sip of her whisky. “When I was growing up, our house stank with slander. You never had a good word to say for anyone, even the nuns who taught me. If Señor Paredes and Señor Domecq think I’m slandering them, let them sue me. They have two good witnesses, police witnesses. Would you speak for the plaintiffs, Inspector?”

  The interrogation had been taken away from Malone, but he didn’t mind. “I don’t think so, Miss Hourigan. But as your father says, you’re treading on dangerous ground.”

  She caught the warning; but she seemed careless of the risk she was running. She looked into her glass and, with her face turned downwards, Malone saw the tears glistening on the long eyelashes. The grief in her was about to burst out.

  “Mr. Paredes, Mr. Domecq,” said Malone, “I’d like you to come with us. We have some questions—I think it would be better if I didn’t ask them here.”

  “Do you have a warrant?” said Fingal.

  “It’s only for questioning, Mr. Hourigan. But if you want to make an issue of it, I’ll see the Commissioner . . .”

  Fingal stared at him, then he turned to the two Nicaraguans. “Go with him, Francisco. I’ll have my lawyer there as soon as possible.”

  “I’d like your son to co
me with us, too,” said Malone. “Where is the Archbishop?”

  There was no smirk; but there was a flash of triumphant satisfaction on the shrewd old face.

  “You’ve missed him. He left for Rome an hour ago.”

  9

  I

  “YOU CAN go in my car, Señor Paredes,” said Fingal Hourigan; then abruptly changed his mind: “No, I’ll need it. Try our police cars—they’re comfortable enough.”

  The change of mind was abruptly rude; but Malone, amused, saw the reason for it. Fingal, at this stage, wanted no public connection with the Contra agents; the Hourigan Rolls-Royce would be too obvious an advertisement. Let Paredes and Domecq travel in a slum for tonight.

  On the ride in to Homicide Domecq looked bewildered: as if, in what had seemed like Heaven, God had turned out to have no influence. “Don’t you know who Señor Hourigan is?”

  “No,” said Clements dead-pan into the driving mirror, “who is he?”

  Malone, half-turned in the front seat, saw Paredes smile thinly. This isn’t the first time he’s ridden in the back of a police car, Malone thought; the older man was a veteran of many and varied situations. Interrogating him was not going to be easy.

  He said something in Spanish and Malone said, “Speak English, Mr. Paredes. It will make it easier for you.”

  “In what way, Inspector? You’re not threatening us, surely? I just told my friend we are in the hands of honest cops. It is only a matter of adjustment.”

  That’s the way we seem to be going on both sides in this case; but he was not going to tell Paredes that. Maybe the Nicaraguan had already guessed it. He looked as confident in the back of the police car as any Police Commissioner.

  Clements pulled the car up in front of the Remington Rand building. “I thought you might like to take „em in the front entrance, Inspector. I’ll put the car in the garage.”

  Malone got out and waited for Paredes and Domecq to follow him. He was not sure that he wanted to see any reporter idling his time up on the sixth floor, but if one should be there and ask embarrassing questions, could he be blamed if the reporter made the wrong inference from the evasive answers?

  There were, however, no reporters visible. As they had come in across the pavement to the front door of the building, four young men had passed them. One of them made a moue of his lips and blew a sour kiss to Domecq, who glanced in puzzlement at Malone.

  “He thinks you’re a cop,” said Malone. “The gay district starts just up the street.”

  “You have a gay community here?” Paredes sounded as if he found the thought distasteful; behind the sleek conservative look was an old-time Latin macho man. “A district?”

  “Oh, we’re up with everything here. We’re not as behind the times as you seem to think.”

  When they got out of the lift on the sixth floor both Nicaraguans looked around them, as if not believing where they had been brought. “This is Police Headquarters? A private office block?”

  “No, this is just Homicide.”

  Paredes smiled, still looking around him. “And you say you’re not behind the times?”

  “Remington Rand sponsor us,” said Malone. “Next year IBM are taking us over. Or is it the CIA? You’d know about them, wouldn’t you?”

  “The CIA? Never heard of them.” Paredes smiled again, but Malone could see that, for the first time, the Nicaraguan looked unsure of himself. Malone decided to push him a little more off-balance.

  “Who made the decision to threaten me and Father Marquez?” he said bluntly. “You or Mr. Domecq?”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about.” Paredes had recovered; the acting was perfect.

  Malone looked at Domecq. “We have a tape of your last call, Mr. Domecq. You probably know that voice-prints are as good as finger-prints, they’re just as incriminating.”

  Malone’s own acting was perfect. So was Clements’s, who had just arrived: he didn’t even blink at Malone’s bald lie. Both men, however, knew they would be marooned like shags on a rock if, or rather when, Domecq asked for a copy of the tape.

  They were saved by the belle. She came walking down the aisle between the desks; the other detectives in the big room stopped work and turned to stare after her. She wore a revealing cocktail dress, with a matching shawl thrown over her shoulder; she was blonde and glamorous, but she also looked business-like; she gave the impression that she would be business-like even if she were naked. But she would never be any man’s whore.

  “Inspector Malone?” She had a pleasant voice, made only slightly artificial by the fluting vowels taught her at one of the more expensive eastern suburbs schools. Malone privately thought of it as the Ascham accent, easily acquired by the poor but socially ambitious just by standing outside the school gates and listening to the mums waiting for their daughters. “I’m Zara Kersey.”

  He recognized her now, if only from her photos which were a constant feature in the Sunday newspapers. She was known to the society columnists as the Queen of the Freeloaders; no charity ball, no gallery opening, no fashion launching was complete without Zara Kersey. A widow, she had once been married to a lawyer who, suiciding, had finished up at the bottom of the harbour with the load of tax evasion schemes he had devised and for which he was to have been prosecuted. She had been left three children and no money; that was when she had taken up freeloading. She had also taken up her husband’s shattered practice; she had a law degree that she had never used up till then. Now, seven years later, she was one of the most successful commercial lawyers in Sydney. Malone wondered why Fingal had sent her and not a criminal eagle.

  “Mr. Hourigan sent me to represent and advise you,” she told the two Nicaraguans. Domecq almost fell over himself to show his appreciation; he would have followed a skirt into Hades. Paredes, however, was not impressed. “I am accustomed to lawyers looking less—seductive?”

  She flicked a finger at the low-cut silver dress she wore. “Take no notice of this. I’ve just come from a party to launch a new perfume.” She held out a wrist to Domecq, the ladies’ man, and he sniffed at it like a bloodhound doused with a bucketful of clues. “Like it?”

  “Let Sergeant Clements have a sniff,” said Malone. “He’s been seduced by half the girls on the perfume counter at DJ’s.”

  Mrs. Kersey withdrew her arm and was suddenly brisk. “Is there any charge against my clients, Inspector?”

  “None so far. We’re just having a little get-together.”

  “I’ve heard of you. You’re supposed to be a hard nut to crack.”

  “Just non-seduceable, that’s all,” said Malone.

  It seemed to him that she would be above using what had once been called womanly wiles; but he was in no mood for a skirmish between the sexes. She was a lawyer and he was a cop and he wanted no gender differences. He had a natural sympathy for women, but he was uncomfortable with them as opponents. He had always been glad that women had never played his class of cricket.

  “Your clients don’t have to talk, but it might pay them to listen to some of the questions we have to put to them.”

  “Questions such as what?”

  Malone looked at Paredes. “Are you doing any business with a company called Austarm?”

  Paredes looked at Zara Kersey and she said, “Austarm is a perfectly legitimate business, Inspector. I myself drew up its articles of association. It makes small arms. It supplies the Australian Army, if you are looking for credentials. What’s the relevance of that question?”

  “Relevant to what, Mrs. Kersey?”

  She had made a mistake; but she had got out of worse traps. “You’re not interested in legitimate business deals.”

  “If they’re legitimate, Mr. Paredes won’t have anything to hide. What are you buying?”

  Paredes hesitated; then, on a nod from Zara Kersey, he said, “Rifles and machine-guns.”

  “Austarm is one of Mr. Hourigan’s companies, a subsidiary of Ballyduff Holdings?”

  “Correct,” sa
id Mrs. Kersey.

  “Is there an export licence for these arms?” said Clements, and Malone looked at him gratefully. Clements always had a good practical question buried away amongst his notes.

  “Yes. Mr. Hourigan has arranged that.”

  “I’m sure he has,” said Malone, wondering which conduit Fingal had used to make the connection in Canberra. “But why him and not Sir Jonathan Tewsday? He runs Mr. Hourigan’s companies, doesn’t he? Is Archbishop Hourigan involved in all this? Is he the one who’s arranging the finance?”

  “Where did you get such an outrageous idea?” Zara Kersey, too, could act.

  “From a letter his niece wrote to a young priest, Father Marquez. He was murdered tonight.”

  She had apparently been briefed before she got here; she showed no surprise. “Neither my clients nor Mr. Hourigan and the Archbishop had anything to do with murder.”

  “The murderer tried to kill the Inspector too,” said Clements quietly.

  That shocked Mrs. Kersey. “I wasn’t told that! I’m sorry, Inspector . . . Well, now I can understand your prejudice . . .”

  “I’m not prejudiced,” said Malone, though he knew he was. Clements’s quiet remark had brought back the event of an hour ago with shattering clarity. He could feel himself trembling inside, as if his very foundations were about to give way. He was silent for a moment, gathering some control, then he said, “I’m just curious. You’re not a criminal lawyer, but you must be used to entanglements in your own field. This one is chock-a-block with entanglements. And—” his voice hardened, though it got no louder—“I’m going to get to the bottom of it! If that’s being prejudiced, then that’s what I am!”

  “There may be cross-connections, Inspector—life is full of them, as you well know. But there is no evidence of any connection on the part of my clients with the murder of the priest and the attempt on your life.”

  “The Inspector says he was threatened by Señor Domecq,” said Paredes. “He says he has a tape of the telephone call.”