Babylon South

by Jon Cleary

  “Don’t get up.” Malone and Clements hadn’t moved. “Pizza, eh? I thought only pimply kids ate that, and gummy Italians.”

  “What’s your problem, Greg?” said Malone. “You look even more unhappy than usual.”

  “The wife’s gone down to Melbourne with her sister. She’s spent five hundred dollars on an outfit she won’t be game to wear anywhere else and she’ll put two bucks on a horse and come back and say she’s had a wonderful time.” He grinned, showing slightly buck teeth. “Actually, I was glad to get rid of her. I can catch up on my reading—I’ve got five Elmore Leonards. You ever read him? Oh, there’s a homicide.”

  Malone was not surprised at Random’s way of telling them they had a job; it was his habit, his way of saying that murder was nothing to get excited about. Random hated excitable cops.

  “They’ve found the body of a woman in her apartment in The Vanderbilt in Macquarie Street. Emma Springfellow.”

  Malone choked on his slice of pizza and Random looked at him out of those aged grey eyes. “I thought that might spoil your lunch. Get down there as soon’s you can. I’ll alert Scientific and the rest of „em. Can I try a piece of that?”

  Malone handed him the rest of the pizza. “Watch your pimples.” Then he looked soberly at Random. “Emma Springfellow. They sure it’s murder?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It wasn’t suicide?”

  “I don’t know. The uniformed chap who phoned it in said it was murder. A bullet in the chest. You make up your own mind.”

  “Greg, can I stay with this one? I’m still on the Walter Springfellow homicide.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of putting you on anything else. Why?”

  “I just want to be bloody-minded.”

  Random looked at him, then grinned his slow grin. “You were always that. Why change?”

  He went away back up the room to his own desk. Malone stood up, put on his jacket after wiping his fingers on a paper napkin. “Righto, lunchtime’s over.”

  “Hold it a minute.” Clements dialled his phone. He waited a moment, jotting down some figures on a slip of paper, then: “Sid? Russ Clements. I want five hundred each way on Kensei.” He hung up, saw Malone’s raised eyebrows and grinned. “Okay, it’s more than I usually bet. But it’s the one day of the year. And while my luck’s in . . .”

  Malone led the way out of the room, wondering what his own luck was going to be from here on in.

  II

  Clements parked their unmarked car under a No Standing sign in the lane beside The Vanderbilt. They got out of the car and the heat instantly wilted them. Coming down from Homicide, Clements had switched on the car radio and a news report had told them that the temperature was 34 degrees Celsius (“94 on the old scale,” the announcer advised for the benefit of any ancient who might be listening) and still climbing. Malone hoped that Emma Springfellow’s body was in an air-conditioned room.

  They walked back into Macquarie Street and up the steps into the old but well-preserved apartment building. The doorman saw them coming and opened the glass doors to them at once. He was a small, thin man and his brown uniform, shiny at the elbows and knees, hung on him as if he had lost weight since the original fitting. He had bright friendly eyes that couldn’t be dimmed by the pain and puzzlement in the rest of his face. This was the most exclusive apartment block in the city: murder, most of all, should have been excluded.

  “Police?” He had a thin, chirpy voice. “Oh yes, I remember you, Inspector. I’m Joe Garfield, I found Miss Springfellow. I went up—”

  “Can you get someone to relieve you down here?” said Malone. “We’d like to see you upstairs. What floor is it on?”

  “The tenth. She owns—owned the whole floor. I’ll be up in a jiffy, soon’s I get someone.”

  Malone and Clements went up in the automatic, timber-panelled lift, one that climbed slowly, as if it had been designed not to bring on giddiness in anyone who travelled in it. There were residents in the building who had lived here for fifty years or more, elderly voters who had no wish to travel speedily, especially towards heaven. The two detectives stepped out into a small hall, also panelled, and went through the open front door into the Springfellow apartment.

  “She lived here all alone?” said Clements to no one in particular.

  There were eight rooms to the apartment, every one of them expensively furnished; it was difficult to place the sour, dark woman amidst all this light elegance. There was nothing modern about it; this was the past at its best. There were two shieldback chairs by Chippendale, a sideboard by Hepplewhite, other furniture in the style of those craftsmen by the best of Australian makers; there was no wall-to-wall carpet, but rugs that covered almost the same area. On the silk-papered walls hung a Pissarro, a Degas, a Monet, all paintings that would not offend the sensibilities of a maiden lady; there were no robust Tom Roberts or any of the vulgar later Australians. The robust policemen, capable of vulgarity, were all that was out of place.

  The uniformed sergeant had met Malone on other cases. “She’s in the main bedroom, Scobie. Two bullets, I think. They couldn’t have missed her heart.”

  Malone stood in front of the air-conditioning in the window, cooling off. The building had been built long before built-in central air-conditioning; every window, as far as Malone could see, had its own small unit. They were effective and he was glad for Emma Springfellow’s sake. She might offend people while she was alive, but she would not want to offend when she was dead.

  “G’day, Jack. How long’s she been dead?”

  “Hard to say. Some time last night, I’d guess. The rigor mortis is starting to loosen up.”

  “Any weapon?”

  “No sign of it so far.”

  “Go through the flat, Russ. I’ll have a look at the body. Which way, Jack?”

  Jack Greenup, the sergeant, led the way down a narrow hallway to a big room that looked out over the Botanical Gardens to the harbour. Malone’s first thought was: all the Springfellows, while they lived, had to have a view of the harbour. It must have been a pool from which they loved to drink. But then there were three million other voters who, if they could have afforded it, would have loved to drink at the same pool.

  “There she is.” Greenup was a heavily built man with a battered face; but law-abiding footballers had done that to him, not criminals. He had been a prominent rugby league forward up till a couple of years ago and still missed the roar of the crowd and the sweet malice of an uppercut in a scrum. But he was not without feeling and he looked down now at Emma Springfellow with compassion. “Poor woman.”

  Malone looked at the bedroom first. This was as elegant as the outer rooms, though more feminine: a room, he guessed, in which any woman, even a punk rocker, would delight to waken. The bed was queen-sized, though he wondered with whom Emma would ever have shared it; the silk coverlet had been half-dragged off it and one of the bedside tables had been knocked over. Two or three books lay scattered on the floor. Malone remarked the title of one of them: Unquiet Souls.

  Then he walked round the bed and looked down at Emma. She lay on her back, one hand still clutching the coverlet, an ugly dark stain on the breast of her white blouse. Malone looked at the mask out of which she would never look again; there was no malice on it, no contortion, just a cold still peace. She looked strangely young, but then corpses often did.

  She was one of the privileged; yet it had availed her nothing. She had finished up at the most democratic level, dead. He stepped over the body and pushed up the window; there was no balcony. Ten floors below, workmen were busy in Macquarie Street, preparing for the nation’s 200th birthday celebrations that would begin in a couple of months. It was one of the most attractive boulevards in the whole country; and one whose mention suggested power, at least in Sydney. Up the street on the far side was Parliament House, the bear-pit where State politics were fought out behind an elegant colonial façade; on this side were the brass plates of the city’s spec
ialists, the medical oligarchy who believed in their own feudalism. There were few, if any, ugly buildings in its length; it was a street that, without effort, suggested dignity, even permanence in a city that was constantly changing. Murder had been done, even if only politically, in Parliament House; but that was to be expected. Otherwise, it was not a street for violent crime.

  He pulled down the window, turned round as Clements came to the door. “The Scientific fellers are here, Scobie.”

  “Get them started. What about the doc?”

  “He’s on his way. Oh, the doorman’s come up, too.”

  Malone went out to the living-room; or would Emma have called it the drawing-room? Garfield, the doorman, was there, fidgeting anxiously. He had freshly combed his sparse dark hair sideways across his sallow scalp; it lay on his head like a black lace doily on a melon. He kept putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out again. He was not accustomed to being surrounded by police.

  “How did you come to find Miss Springfellow?” asked Malone.

  “I brought her paper up first thing this morning, the same’s I do with all the flats. That would have been just after eight, when I come in. She usually went for a walk over in the Gardens every morning about ten. I didn’t see her this morning, but I didn’t think nothing of it, it could of been too hot for her. Then about, I dunno, three-quarters of an hour ago, maybe more, a lady phoned me downstairs, a lady from, I dunno, somewhere, Pymble, I think. She said she was expecting Miss Springfellow for lunch, a Melbourne Cup lunch, and she hadn’t turned up and she hadn’t been able to raise her on the phone, would I go up and see if anything was wrong. I come up and I saw the paper was still outside her door. I knocked, but I got no answer. So I used me pass-key and I come in and I found her. I phoned you blokes and that was it. I still can’t believe it. Not her.”

  All this had come out almost without his taking a breath. He was a decent man, not a gossip, a doorman who respected doors that were closed; but he would talk about this for the rest of his life, beginning tonight. He could not wait till he got home to tell the wife and family. Miss Springfellow—murdered! Her, of all people: you wondered who might be next.

  “Were you working last night?”

  “Nup. I do me shift from eight to eight, four days a week. Next week I do three days. There’s another bloke, Paul Kosciusko, same’s the mountain, works with me.”

  “So there’s no one on after eight p.m.?”

  “Nup. There’s a security lock, a good „un—you’d have to break the glass in the doors to get in. All the tenants have their own key.”

  “Did Miss Springfellow have any visitors before you went off last night?”

  “Yeah.” Then he hesitated, as if he suddenly realized he might be pointing the finger at someone. After a moment he went on: “Her niece come in about five minutes before I went off.”

  “The niece. Justine?” The doorman nodded. “How was she?”

  “How’d you mean?”

  “Did she look normal or was she upset or anything?”

  “She seemed all right. I don’t know her well—I’ve only seen her once or twice before. I’ve seen her in the papers, of course.”

  “She wasn’t a frequent visitor to her aunt?”

  “Eh? Frequent? No, no. This was the first time I’d seen her in, geez, I dunno how long.”

  “Did you call up Miss Springfellow to let her know her niece was coming?”

  “We do that all the time—it’s part of the security.”

  “How did she sound?”

  “I dunno. The same as usual, I suppose. She was always a bit cold, always a lady, but. I put Miss Springfellow, the niece, into the lift and then I knocked off.”

  “So you didn’t see her leave?”

  Again the hesitation: “No-o. Look, I don’t wanna put anyone in, Inspector—”

  Malone gave him a reassuring smile. “You’re not, Joe. We don’t arrest people just because they’ve been visiting someone. We need more than that. That’s why all these fellers are here.”

  Garfield looked around the room at the Scientific men, the photographer and the two uniformed officers. He had followed the government medical officer into the apartment and now he and Malone had to stand aside as two men from the funeral contractors came in with a stretcher. Murder has its own bureaucracy.

  “Geez, I didn’t know it took so many of you.”

  “Union rules,” said Malone and saw that Garfield wasn’t sure whether to take him seriously or not. “If Miss Springfellow had any other visitors, after you’d gone off, how would they get in?”

  “They’d speak to her on the intercom and she’d just press the button in the flat here. It’s out there by the front door.” He nodded back over his shoulder. “It’s a standard system, the same as you find everywhere else.”

  “Righto, Joe. Could you give Sergeant Clements a list of all the other tenants?” He looked over at Sergeant Greenup. He always respected protocol; he never gave orders to another officer’s men. “Jack, could you have your chap go down and start asking them if any of them heard any shot or saw anything suspicious?”

  Greenup looked at his constable, a good-looking boy who had all the alertness of a young pointer: he looked as if he might go bounding down the fire-stairs looking for a scent. “Okay, Gary, you’ve always wanted to be a detective. Now’s your chance.”

  “If someone comes up with something,” said Malone, “bring „em up here. Be polite.”

  “Yes, sir.” The young policeman went off, nose held up to the wind, followed by the doorman, who went with some reluctance. It would have been something to tell the family tonight, to explain how the police worked.

  “He’s a good boy, that Gary,” said Greenup, who was content to remain in uniform; detective work meant broken shifts and too many hours. “You might keep an eye on him. He’s got more intelligence than he knows what to do with.”

  “We don’t want him with us, then,” said Clements and put on his dumb look.

  Malone turned as the police surgeon came through the door from the bedroom. He was a red-faced, balding man with a large belly and he preferred corpses to be found on beds rather than on the floor; like an overweight penitent, he always had difficulty in getting up from his knees. He was dusting down his trousers now as he stopped in front of Malone.

  “Two shots to the chest, Scobie, one right through the heart, as far as I can see. Death would have been instantaneous. Both bullets are still in the body. The empty cases are missing. What sort of killer housekeeps after a murder?”

  “Any idea when she died?”

  “I’d be guessing at this stage—I’ll let you know after the autopsy. But I’d say between ten and eleven o’clock last night, give or take an hour or so. Can they take the body now?”

  Malone glanced at Clements. “Okay?”

  “The Scientific guys have done their bit. Yeah, it’s okay.”

  The police surgeon went back into the bedroom and Malone nodded at the framed photograph and the leather-bound book Clements was holding. “What have you got there?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” said Clements and looked at Malone warningly.

  The GMO came back, followed by the two funeral men, the green-shrouded body of Emma Springfellow on the stretcher between them. As they passed the door of a room off the living-room, the man at the front of the stretcher pulled up sharply. The man at the rear kept walking for a pace, driving the stretcher into the front man’s back. Emma Springfellow made her last involuntary movement, sliding forward on the stretcher to kick the bearer in the behind, something she would never have done while she was alive.

  “For Chrissakes, Des—”

  “There’s a TV in there.” Des, a beefy man who looked as if he might have started carting carcasses in an abattoir, twisted his arm to look at his watch; Emma rolled to one side and for a moment looked as if she might slide off the stretcher. “The Cup’s just about to go.”

  Everyone in the room, the Scie
ntific men, the photographer, even Jack Greenup, looked at Malone. He looked at Clements, sighed and grinned. “I don’t think Emma would have minded. She was going to a Cup lunch anyway.”

  The funeral men took the stretcher into the room, which seemed to be a den, put down Emma and stood aside while all the other men crowded in beside them. Malone stood in the doorway, Emma Springfellow’s shrouded corpse at his feet. Someone switched on the television set and the picture came on the screen.

  “They’re off! Just in time!”

  Excitement throbbed in the room as, six hundred miles away, twenty-one horses thundered round Flemington racetrack, today’s altar for the nation. Only Emma and Malone remained unexcited: she because she was beyond all odds, he because he had no interest in horse-racing, not even in the Melbourne Cup. He was lucky he had his rank, otherwise he might have been arrested for being un-Australian.

  “You beaut!” Clements stepped back as his bet, Kensei, went past the post a head in front. His heel caught under the stretcher and he would have sat on Emma if Malone hadn’t caught him. He looked down between his legs at the green plastic shroud. “Sorry, old girl.”

  Nobody else had backed Kensei. They all looked morosely at the grinning Clements. Des, the stretcher-bearer, said, “How much did you have on him?”

  “Just ten bucks,” said Clements. “I’m not a betting man.”

  Everybody began to file past him and Malone. Des and his mate picked up Emma Springfellow and she left her apartment for the last time, going out head first, no way for a lady to depart.

  When they were alone Malone said to Clements, “For a non-betting man, you know how to pick the ponies.”

  Clements grinned. Then abruptly he sobered and held up the silver-framed photograph. Two men in bush trousers and shirts, rifles held in the crook of their arms, stood with a foot each resting on a huge crocodile. In the bottom corner of the photo a neat hand had written: Roper River, June 1963. With much love.

  “The Roper River—that’s in the Northern Territory.”

  “That’s it. You recognize the two guys?”