by Jon Cleary
Malone grimaced at the description.
“Those loaders you see, they call „em module movers, load them on to those semi-trailers, who take „em up to the gin, where they’re off-loaded by what they call a moon buggy.”
“How long does the cotton harvest go on?”
“I don’t know when they expect to finish here. It usually begins late March and goes till the end of June.”
“This is one harvest they won’t forget.”
Sergeant Baldock and Constable Mungle were waiting for them at the cotton farm’s main office. The weather was still reasonably warm and Baldock had discarded his jacket. In his tattersall-checked shirt, wool tie, moleskin trousers and R. M. Williams boots, he looked more like a man of the land than a detective. As Malone and Clements drew in alongside him, he put on a broad-brimmed, pork-pie hat, completing the picture in Malone’s mind of a farmer on his way to market, more interested in crops than in crime.
“Here comes Mr. Koga, the assistant manager,” Baldock said.
A young man, slim and taller than Malone had expected of a Japanese, came out of the office and approached them almost diffidently. He had a thin, good-looking face, a shy smile and wore fashionable and expensive tinted glasses.
“Some senior executives are coming down from Japan at once.” He had a thin piping voice, made thinner by his nervousness. He had come to this country, which he had been told was xenophobic, at least towards Asians, and after only a month he was temporarily in charge, only because his immediate boss had been murdered. Xenophobia could not be more explicitly expressed than that. “I don’t suppose you can wait till then?”
“Hardly,” said Malone as kindly as he could. He had never been infected by racism, though his father Con had done his best to tutor him in it, and he was determined to lean over backwards to avoid it in this particular case. “Who discovered the body, Mr. Koga?”
“Barry Liss.” Koga had difficulty with the name. “He is over at the gin now. We shall go over there, yes?”
“Sergeant Clements would like to talk to the men out in the fields. Could you take him out there, Constable Mungle?”
Clements looked out at the white-frothed fields stretching into the distance, said, “Thanks, Inspector,” then he and Mungle got back into the Commodore. The Aboriginal cop, in fawn shirt and slacks and broad-brimmed hat, looked like a Boy Scout against the bulk of Clements.
Malone followed Koga and Baldock over to the gin, aware as they drew closer of the faint thunder within the huge shed.
“He’s probably inside,” said Koga and opened a door that immediately let out a blast of noise. They went inside and Malone knew at once that there would be no questioning in here.
The thunder in the hundred-feet-high shed was deafening; maybe a rock musician would have felt at home in it, but Malone doubted it. He was not mechanically-minded and he could only guess at the functions of most of the machines, which he noted were all American-made, not Japanese as he had expected. The seed cotton seemed to move swiftly through a continuous cleaning process, streaming through from one type of machine to another. He stood in front of one which Koga, screaming in his ear like a train whistle, told him was a condenser. Behind large windows in the condenser he saw the flow of now-cleaned cotton, like thick white water out of a dam spill. Behind him a supervisor stood at a console, watching monitor screens; Malone looked around and could see only three other workers, a man and two girls, in the whole building. All four workers wore ear-muffs and seemed oblivious of Koga and his guests. It struck Malone that if Kenji Sagawa had been killed in this shed during working hours no one would have heard the shot.
Koga and the two detectives moved on, past blocks of solidly packed cotton coming up a ramp to be baled; the two girls were working the baling machine, unhurriedly and with time for one of them occasionally to glance at an open paperback book on a bench beside her. The man, Barry Liss, was marking the weight of each bale as it bumped down on to an electronic scale. He looked up as Koga tapped him on the shoulder and nodded towards the exit door. He handed his clipboard to one of the girls and followed the three men out of the shed, slipping off his ear-muffs as he did so.
“I understand you found Mr. Sagawa’s body,” said Malone when he had been introduced to Liss.
“Jesus, did I!” Liss shuddered. He was a wiry man, his age hard to guess; he could have been anywhere between his late twenties and his early forties. He had black hair cut very short, a bony face that had earned more than its fair share of lines, and a loose-jointed way of standing as if his limbs had been borrowed from someone else’s torso and had not yet adjusted to their new base. “It was the bloodiest mess I ever seen. I don’t wanna see anything like it again. But I told you all this, Curly.”
“I know you did, Barry. But Inspector Malone is in charge now.”
Malone looked at Baldock out of the corner of his eye, but the local detective did not appear to imply anything more than what he had simply said. Malone looked back at Liss. “Where did you find him, Mr. Liss?”
“Over here. He was packed in one of the modules that had been brought in and he finished up against the spiked cylinders in the module feeder. It made a real mess, all that blood. Ruined that particular load.”
“I’m sure it did,” said Malone, who wasn’t into cotton futures.
Liss led the way over to the huge machine that was inching its way along a length of track, eating its way into the long, high compacted cotton that stood, like a long block of grey ice at the open end of this annexe to the gin shed. A long loader was backing up to the bulked cotton, adding more to the supply.
“These moon buggies bring the cotton in,” said Liss. “Maybe Mr. Sagawa’s body was in one of the loads, I dunno. I only found him when his body jammed the cylinders.”
“Was the module stack as long and as high as this the night before you found the body?”
“No, it wouldn’t of been more than, I dunno, four or five metres.”
“So the body could have been brought in in one of those trailers from out in the fields?”
Liss looked at him, shrewdness increasing the lines on his face. “You don’t miss much, do you?”
“We try not to. How long was the stack when you started up this machine Tuesday morning?”
The lines didn’t smooth out. “Bugger! I didn’t think of that.” He looked at Baldock. “Sorry, Curly.”
“It’s okay,” said Baldock, but looked as if he had asked the question, and not Malone.
Malone said, “What was your first reaction when you found the body?”
Liss shook his head, shuddered again. He looked tough, as if he might have seen a lot of blood spilled in pub brawls, but obviously he had never seen anyone as mangled as Sagawa must have been. “I thought it was some sorta incredible bloody accident—how the hell did he get in there? Then that night, the night before last, they told me the Doc had said he was murdered. Shot. If they’d shot him, why let him be chewed up like that? If they knew anything about the works here, they’d have knew his body was never gunna go right through the system and be chopped up like the green bolls and the hulls and that.”
Malone’s smile had no humour in it. “That’s pretty graphic.”
“Eh? Oh yeah, I guess it is. I just think it’s a bloody gruesome way to get rid of someone, that’s all. There was nothing wrong with him, he was a good bloke. He expected you to work hard, but you wouldn’t hold that against him. Most of us work hard out here in the bush, right, Curly?”
“Right.” said Baldock; then saved the face of the city bludger. “But down in Sydney the police are flat out all the time. Right, Scobie?”
“All the time,” said Malone.
“Well, I guess you would be,” said Liss. “From what I read, half the population of Sydney are crims, right?”
“Almost.” Malone wasn’t going to get into a city-versus-country match. “Well, thanks, Mr. Liss. We’ll be back to you if we have any more questions.”
&n
bsp; “Be glad to help. Hooroo, Curly. Give my regards to the missus.”
Liss went back into the gin, adjusting his ear-muffs as he opened the door and the noise blasted out at him.
“He’s all right?” said Malone.
Baldock looked surprised. “You mean is he a suspect? Forget him. He’s a tough little bugger, but he’d never do anything like this.”
“Who’s the government medical officer? He got a mention in the running sheet.”
“Max Nothling. He’s got the biggest practice in town, but he doubles as GMO. He’s Chess Hardstaff’s son-in-law. He told us he’d had Sagawa’s body on the table in the hospital mortuary for an hour before he woke up there was a bullet in him, that it was the bullet in his heart that’d killed him, not the chewing-up by the spikes in the module feeder.”
“I’d better have a talk with him.” Malone looked at the huge module feeder slowly, inexorably eating its way into the slab-sided glacier of cotton. He did not like coming on a trail as cold as this; he preferred the crime scene to be left as undisturbed as possible. “Did your Physical Evidence Section get everything before you let them start up the gin again?”
“We got the lot, photos, everything. They sent a Fingerprints cove over from District Headquarters. Their reports are on my desk back at the station, they came in just before I left.”
“You said there was no sign of the cartridge.”
“The Ballistics guy went through the office, all around here, right through the gin, he went through the lot with a fine-tooth comb. He found nothing.”
“Who was he?”
“Constable James. Jason James.”
“There’s only one man better than him at his job and that’s his boss. Who, incidentally, is three-parts Abo.”
Baldock didn’t react, except to say, “It’s a changing world, ain’t it?”
Not out here, thought Malone.
They walked away from the gin shed towards the office a couple of hundred yards away. It was a silver-bright morning with patches of high cloud dry-brushed against the blue; one felt one could rub the air through one’s fingers like a fine fabric. A moon buggy rumbled by with another load of cotton, raising a low, thin mist of dust. Life and work goes on, Malone thought: profits must be made, only losses of life are affordable. Crumbs, he further thought, I’m thinking like a Commo: I wonder what they would have done to me in this town fifty years ago?
“You got any suspects?”
They had reached the police vehicles and Baldock leaned against his car. “None. Or a dozen. Take your pick. It’ll be like trying to find a particular cotton boll in one of those modules.”
“Any Jap-haters in the district?”
Baldock hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah, but I think they’re a bit too obvious to go in for murder. There’s Ray Chakiros. He’s president of the local Veterans Legion.”
The Veterans Legion all over the nation harboured a minority of ex-servicemen who were still consumed by a hatred of old enemies; they got more media space than they deserved and so were continually vocal. Moderation and a call to let bygones be bygones don’t make arresting headlines or good sound bites.
“Chakiros?”
“He’s Lebanese, but he was born here in Collamundra. His old man used to run the local café back in the days when we had only one. Now we’ve got coffee lounges, a McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut, a French restaurant, a Chinese one. Ray Chakiros owns the McDonald’s and one of the coffee lounges and he’s got the local Mercedes franchise. He’s got fingers in other pies, too—you know what the Wogs are like.”
Baldock wasn’t embarrassed by his prejudices; he was one of many for whom they are as natural as dandruff.
“What’s he like?” said Malone, wondering about Chakiros’s prejudices.
“He runs off at the mouth about Japs or any sorta Asians, but I don’t think he’d pull a gun on any of „em. He’s all piss and wind. He served in World War Two in New Guinea, but they tell me he never saw a Jap till the war was over. I’ve interviewed him, but I think he’s in the clear.”
“Anyone else?”
Again Baldock took his time before answering. “There’s an Abo kid they had working here, but Sagawa sacked him last month. Wally Mungle knew him, they’re cousins. Then maybe there are half a dozen others, but we’ve got nothing on any of „em.”
“Where do we start then?”
Baldock shrugged. “Start at the bottom and work up.”
“Who’s at the bottom?” But Malone could guess.
“The Abo, of course.” Baldock said it without malice or prejudice. It struck Malone that the local sergeant was not a racist and he was pleased and relieved. Baldock might have his prejudices about Wogs, but that had nothing to do with race. Malone did wonder if there were any European Jews, refugees, in Collamundra and how they were treated by Baldock and the locals. He hoped there would be none of those on the suspect list.
“His name’s Billy Koowarra,” said Baldock.
“Where can I find him?”
“At the lock-up. He was picked up last night as an IP.” Intoxicated Person: the all-purpose round-up lariat.
Malone saw Clements and Mungle come out of the office, where they had been questioning the office staff. He said delicately, a tone it had taken him a long time to acquire, “Curly—d’you mind if I ride back with Wally? You go with Russ.”
Baldock squinted, not against the sun. “Are you gunna go behind my back?”
“No, I promise you there’ll be none of that. But you’ve had some trouble with the blacks out here, haven’t you? I read about it in a quarterly report.”
“That was six or eight months ago, when all the land rights song and dance was going on. All the towns with Abo settlements outside them had the same trouble. It’s been quiet lately, though.”
“Well, I think Wally will talk more freely to me about his cousin Billy if you’re not listening to him. Am I right?”
Baldock nodded reluctantly. “I guess so. He’s a good bloke, Wally. It hasn’t been easy for him, being a cop.”
“It’s not that easy for us, is it?”
Baldock grinned. “I must tell him that some day.”
Then Clements and Mungle arrived. At the same time Koga, who had gone back into the gin shed, came out and walked towards the policemen. He was wide of them, looking as if he wanted to avoid them; his step faltered a moment, then he went on, not looking at them, towards the office. The four policemen looked after him.
“How did he get on with Sagawa?”
“We don’t know,” said Baldock. “I asked Barry Liss about that, but he said he couldn’t tell. He said the two of them were like most Japs, or what he thought most Japs were like. Terribly polite towards each other. I gather Koga never opened his mouth unless Sagawa asked him to.”
“Is he on your list?”
“He will be, if you want him there.”
“Put him on it.” Then Malone turned to Clements. “Well, how’d you go?”
“Bugger-all. Nobody understands why it happened. None of the drivers saw anything unusual in any of their loads, not when they brought the loads in from the fields.”
Malone glanced at Baldock. “Did the Physical Evidence boys find any blood on any of the trucks or buggies?”
“None.”
“What time do they start work here?”
“The pickers start at seven in the morning,” said Mungle in his quiet voice; it was difficult to tell whether he was shy or stand-offish. “The gin starts up at seven thirty. If the feeder was stopped at eight fifteen or thereabouts, that means the body must of been in the first or second load brought in the day before the murder. No one can remember who would have been driving that particular buggy.”
“Our only guess,” said Clements, “is that he was shot during the night and the killer scooped out a module, put the body in and re-packed the cotton again. They tell us that would be difficult but not impossible.”
“He could have been brought in by t
he murderer in a buggy,” said Malone. “Wally, would you ask Koga to step out here again?”
Mungle went across to the office and while he was gone Malone looked about him, faking bemusement. Baldock said, “What are you looking for?”
“Media hacks. Down in Sydney they’d be around us like flies around a garbage tip. Don’t you have any out here?”
“There’s the local paper and the radio station. They were out here Tuesday morning, getting in our way, as usual. They’ll be making a nuisance of themselves again, soon’s they hear you’re taking over.”
“I thought they’d have heard that anyway,” Malone said drily. “I don’t want to see „em, Curly. This is your turf, you handle them. You’re the police spokesman, okay?”
Then Koga, diffident as before, came back with Wally Mungle. “You wanted me, Inspector?” The thin, high voice broke, and he coughed. “Excuse me.”
“What sort of security do you have out here, Mr. Koga?”
“None, Inspector. Mr. Sagawa and I live—lived over there in the manager’s house.” He pointed to a farmhouse, a relic of whatever the farm had once been, a couple of hundred yards away. “We were our own security. It was good enough, Mr. Sagawa thought . . .”
But not good enough, Malone thought. “Where were you Monday night?”
The question seemed to startle Koga; he took off his glasses, as if they had suddenly fogged up; he looked remarkably young without them. “I—I went into town to the movies.”
“What did you see?” Malone’s voice was almost too casual.
Koga wiped his glasses, put them back on. “It was called Sea of Love. With Al Pacino.”
Malone looked at Baldock and Mungle. “I saw that down in Sydney at Christmas.”
“It’s already been on out here,” said Mungle. “They brought it back—by popular demand, they said. I think the locals were hoping the cop would be bumped off the second time around.”
Malone looked at Clements. “I thought you said this was a conservative district?” Then he turned back to Koga, who had listened to all this without really understanding the cops’ sardonic acceptance of the public’s attitude towards them. “Was Mr. Sagawa at the house when you got back from town?”
