by Jon Cleary
“There’s nothing like that in the kitchen! It’s as clean as my own!”
“It won’t be when we’ve finished looking at it, Marge. Now would you like to take our orders? Detective Mungle and Mr. Koga first, they’re our guests.”
She gave him a suspicious glare, glanced across the room at Narelle Potter, then took her pad from her apron pocket. “Narelle ain’t gunna like this—”
“I’m sure she isn’t.” Clements looked across at the stiff-faced Narelle and gave her a smile that made the women in the dining-room wonder if this wasn’t the next-morning taste of a one-night stand. But the four men at the table, the three detectives and the young Japanese, knew it was far more than that.
As they began to eat Malone said, “Did anyone trouble you last night, Wally?”
“Nup. There were some galahs shouting down in the street after closing time, but that was all.”
“Are you going out to the gin this morning, Mr. Koga?”
The young Japanese was eating only fruit, cutting an apple into delicately thin slices; Malone would not have been surprised if he had made some sort of decoration with them on his plate. He was as awkward with Koga as Wally Mungle must have been last night.
“The gin and the farm will be closed for the weekend: I don’t know what my bosses will think—they arrive on this morning’s plane from Sydney. They expect us to work seven days a week when we’re harvesting.”
“They obviously don’t realize the importance of the Collamundra Cup. Were they coming anyway, before Mr. Sagawa’s death?”
“No. They had great faith in him. I thought everyone did,” he added; then looked down at his plate, as if embarrassed by saying the wrong thing.
Poor bugger, thought Malone: I wonder how I’d feel in a country town in Japan where nobody wanted me? “We’ll try and get someone to go out there with you.”
Mungle looked up from his bacon and eggs, but said nothing.
“No, Inspector,” said Koga. “I shall be all right. Today, anyway. Everybody will be at the races.”
“Where are your bosses going to stay?” asked Clements. “How many of them are coming?”
“Three. They will stay in the house out at the farm. It will not be what the president of our corporation is accustomed to, he is a very rich man, but I think it will be—be safer. Perhaps they will not listen to me, I am so junior. But where else can they stay?”
Malone had a mischievous idea: “I’ll talk to Mr. Dircks, if I can catch him. He owns twenty per cent of the company—or his wife does. Maybe he can put them up.”
Clements grinned; and even Wally Mungle smiled. Koga looked at the three of them, then he, too, smiled. People nearby, still watching them covertly, wondered what the joke was that two Sydney cops, an Abo and a bloody Jap could share. Multi-culture was going bloody mad.
“No,” said Koga. “I shall stay with them at the house. We shall be okay.”
Later, when all four of them walked out of the hotel, they found Koga’s car had all four doors heavily bashed. The young Japanese closed his eyes behind his glasses and went pale; then he opened them and looked at Malone. “Why? It is so stupid.”
“Drunks last night, probably.” Malone hoped so. Drunks could be dangerous enough, especially in a mob, but cold-blooded harassment was far worse: that could lead to more killing. He had seen it down in Sydney with the neo-Nazis at work on newly-arrived Asians. “You still want to risk it on your own today?”
Koga nodded; he was not without courage. But Malone hoped he was not filled with some sort of kamikaze spirit. “I shall be all right, Inspector. But perhaps you will come out to the gin and explain the police situation to my bosses.”
“If I can’t get there, I’ll have Sergeant Clements meet them. In the meantime, Mr. Koga, keep your head down.”
Koga bowed his head and Malone heard a voice nearby say, “Christ, look at that—bowing to a mug copper!”
Malone ignored whoever had said it, stood with Mungle and Clements and watched Koga drive away up the main street. Then they got into the Commodore and drove round to the police station. Clements parked the car in the yard, took the Brno Twenty-two rifle out of the locked boot, and followed the other two into the station and up to the detectives’ room. Baldock was doing paper work at his desk. He sat back, saw the rifle in Clements’s hands and looked enquiringly at Malone.
“We picked it up last night.” Malone explained what had happened. “It belongs to Ray Chakiros. I want the gun and the bullets on the midday plane for Sydney. Russ will call Ballistics and tell „em they’re on their way.”
Baldock didn’t move.
“Now,” said Malone.
Baldock raised himself slowly from his chair. He looked at Mungle. “Wally, I’ve put a note on your desk about those two radicals out at the settlement. Have a look at it, will you?”
Mungle took the hint and moved down the room to a desk at the far end. Then Baldock looked at Malone and Clements. The hair that grew along the sides of his head stood out like tangled wire; the top of his scalp shone as if he had been polishing it for the last hour. His round face seemed to droop, as if all the muscles had gone slack.
“Scobie, I’ve already had two phone calls. One from Ray Chakiros, the other from Gus Dircks.”
Malone was not surprised. “None from Hugh Narvo?”
“He’s not coming in till midday, otherwise he’d have been on to me, too.” He nodded at the rifle, which Clements had laid on his desk. “Do you really think that’s the gun that killed Sagawa?”
“I don’t know, Curly. But let me tell you something. Our Commissioner doesn’t have much time for our Minister. If I went back to Sydney and John Leeds got to hear that I’d let myself be pressured by Gus Dircks, I could find myself back here, taking your job. The Commissioner had twelve years of political pressure from the last mob when they were in government and he never stood a bar of it. He won’t stand any of it from this crowd, either. And he’d get very stroppy if I or anyone else bowed to it. You’ve got a long way to go to your pension, Curly. Don’t hurry it up.”
Baldock considered this, working his mouth like a wine-taster; then decided today was not a vintage day. He picked up the rifle. “Pity we can’t do our own testing. You got anyone in particular you’d like to be the target?”
Malone could have let that one rub him up the wrong way; but he just smiled. “Half the town. One more thing, Curly. Why did you pick Wally to look after Koga last night? Wasn’t that asking for trouble, especially with Narelle Potter and her prejudices?”
“Scobie—” Baldock sounded weary. “There was no one else. I went downstairs and the duty sergeant just said a blunt no when I asked for a uniformed guy to take Koga down to the Mail Coach. He said all his men would be too busy trying to keep the peace in town. The truth is, half of them would have turned their backs and walked away if anyone had gone for the Jap.”
“Jesus!” Malone threw up his hands and looked at Clements. “I thought that only happened up in the bush in Queensland or over in WA.”
Clements said nothing, just chewed his lip; but Baldock said, “We’re all Aussies,” and walked away down the room and out the door, carrying the rifle as if he were looking for a target, any target.
Malone glanced down towards Wally Mungle, but if the Aborigine had heard anything he wasn’t showing it.
Then a young uniformed constable came to the door, looking cool and neat in shirt-sleeves and, it seemed to Malone, totally uninterested in anything that might be going on up here in the detectives’ room. Regionalism could operate even within a police station.
“Someone to see you, Inspector.”
It was Sean Carmody, dressed in collar and tie and moleskins, a houndstooth-checked jacket over his arm, a broad-brimmed hat in his hand. He looked like landed gentry, this man who had started life as a drover’s son. “I thought I’d catch you at the hotel, but you’d left.”
“What is it, Sean?”
“I did some t
hinking last night after you left. About that bearded stranger you saw in the library. I called in at the carnival and circus on the way in. They’ve had an old cove with a beard working for them, but he came into town yesterday afternoon and they haven’t seen him since. One of the men said he thought he might have got drunk. Evidently he likes the bottle.”
“Sean, are you playing detective?” Malone couldn’t help the irritation in his voice.
Carmody smiled. “No, I’m playing newspaperman. Don’t get excited,” he said as Malone and Clements exchanged looks. “I’m not going to write anything. I’m just curious about the Hardstaff murder, that’s all.”
“You’re not curious about the Sagawa murder?”
“What does that mean, Scobie?” The smile faded.
“Nothing.” It would be time to ask other people about Trevor Waring after he had questioned Waring himself. “You any idea where the old bloke might be now?”
Mungle came down from the other end of the room. “I heard what you were saying. The other day when I was out at the settlement, I saw an old bloke with a beard down along the river. He was sitting there on his own, drinking plonk, it looked like.”
“You speak to him?” said Malone.
“No. I had other things on my mind.”
Malone didn’t ask what they were. Any Koori cop going into a black settlement, where everyone either resented or suspected him, would always have things on his mind.
He turned to Clements. “Russ, get on to Andy again, ask him if he can hurry up Tokyo. Then go out and meet the plane that’s bringing in those Japs. Stay in the background, there’s no need to introduce yourself to them just yet. Just see who meets them.”
“Care for a ride out to the airport, Wally?” said Clements.
“I’d prefer it,” said Mungle. “But Curly wants me to go out to the settlement and check on those nongs who’ve come in from Canberra.”
“Give Mr. Carmody and I time to get out there ahead of you,” said Malone. “I don’t want to be involved in that ruckus . . . Sean, would you take me out to the river and we’ll see if we can dig up the stranger?”
“Are you encouraging my curiosity?”
It was Malone’s turn to smile. “No, maybe I’m going to indulge my own.”
Carmody looked at him skeptically; then led him downstairs and out to his car. It was a silver-grey Volvo.
“I’m glad it’s not a beige Mercedes,” said Malone, “otherwise you’d be on my list of suspects.”
“I met Hitler, Goebbels and Stalin and hated their guts.” Carmody settled in behind the wheel. “Why should I want to kill a harmless little Japanese?”
Malone, who was no expert in history but knew about murder, could have told him that four out of five murder victims were harmless, no matter what their nationality.
Driving out of town in the thin stream of traffic already heading towards the racecourse, Malone said, “Did you cover many murders when you were a newspaperman?”
“Only the big ones and somehow you never thought of them as murders at the time. They were too big for the word murder. I was in Dallas when Jack Kennedy was shot and in Los Angeles when Bobby Kennedy got it. I was never a police roundsman, if that’s what you’re asking me.”
“But you’re playing at being one now?”
“Not playing, Scobie. I don’t mock other people’s tragedies.”
“Sorry, Sean. I didn’t mean it to sound like that.” He liked this old man too much to want to offend him. He changed tack: “What do you know about Narelle Potter?”
Carmody glanced at him without turning his head; unlike most elderly men, he didn’t appear to have lost any of his peripheral vision. “Very little, other than what gossip I’ve heard. Why do you ask?”
“She’s a woman with a chip on her shoulder against all minorities and most foreigners, particularly if they’re not the same colour as her. She has no time for blacks or Japs. She doesn’t appear to have much time for me, either.”
“Are you a minority?”
“Russ and I are, in this town, anyway. Did you know her husband?”
“Better than I know her, yes. He was older than her, twenty years at least, I’d guess. He didn’t have much interest outside of his pub, his horses and his shooting. He was always out shooting—’roos, dingoes, rabbits, anything. He had the biggest collection of guns in the district.”
“Yet he accidentally shot himself?”
Carmody did turn his head this time. “Who told you that?”
Malone considered. “Nobody, now I come to think of it. I just assumed it.”
“I took you for the sort of cop who’d never assume anything . . . It was his wife who shot him. Her gun went off as she was getting through a fence. I gather from the gossip that she’s never touched a gun since.”
“I wouldn’t blame her,” said Malone, but even in his own ears he sounded noncommittal, as if he were passing an opinion on someone he had never even met. And maybe he had not met the real Narelle Potter, not yet.
They turned out of the traffic, down the track that led past the blacks’ settlement. There was some activity there this morning, the women and children in one large group, the men in another. The men stood in a circle around a young Aborigine who was haranguing them; it looked like a two-up school, but Malone, smelling trouble in the still morning air, knew a different sort of gamble was being planned; more than two pennies would be thrown in the air before the day was out. It was none of his business: let Hugh Narvo and his uniformed men deal with it. He just hoped that Wally Mungle would not have to take sides.
“There could be trouble,” said Carmody. “Probably tonight. I think it would be a good idea if we all went straight home after the races. You can come back later for the ball—I’m baby-sitting. You’re going to the ball?”
“Lisa wants to. I’ll probably do what I’m told.”
Carmody smiled. “Ain’t it always the way? What’s the difference between being in love and being henpecked?”
“Don’t risk your neck by asking Lisa that.”
They drove on perhaps half a mile beyond the settlement, came to another bend in the river where willows trailed their green petticoats, brown-streaked with autumn, in the shining water. The bearded stranger from the library, thin and naked, with coat-hanger shoulders and saddlebag buttocks, was knee-deep in the water washing himself.
Malone got out of the Volvo and slid down the bank to the edge of the water; Carmody remained at the top of the bank. “Cold?”
“Not as cold as some of the charity around here.” The old man grinned, gap-toothed, through his wet grey beard. “That what you expected me to say?”
“Why would I expect you to say that?”
“Us old swaggies, you think we’re all bush philosophers, the wisest men in the land outside those gurus you hear on the wireless.”
“You don’t claim much wisdom?”
“Not much. What can I do for you?”
“I hear you work for the carnival and the circus over there.” Malone nodded across the river. “When did you last carry your swag?”
“I carry it all the time. I work only when it pleases me.” He came out of the water and began to dry himself by standing in the sun and running his palms down over his bony body and legs. He seemed unconcerned that he might not make a hopeful sight for a younger man who didn’t want a glimpse of the future for himself. “You’re a copper, ain’t you? Who’s your mate?” He looked up at Carmody. “You’re not the Police Commissioner, are you?”
“Hardly. I’m Sean Carmody, one of the locals.” His face was relaxed with amusement and—something else. A glimpse of what once might have been his own future, one he had avoided?
“Carmody? Carmody? You any relation to Paddy Carmody?” Then he slapped a bare hip. “Of course, I know you! You own that place out along the road. You his son? Geez, how time flies!”
“You’ve been here before?” said Malone.
“On and off.” He pulled on
some droopy, patched underpants that looked like old-fashioned women’s bloomers with the elastic gone from the legs. “I was born here.”
“What’s your name?”
“Fred Strayhorn.”
Malone looked up at Carmody. “You heard of him?”
Carmody shook his head. “It’s an unusual name.” Then, with an old-time newspaperman’s memory for names, but a memory that dated him, he said, “There was a Billy Strayhorn played with Duke Ellington’s band. I’ve seen his name on some records I have at home. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen it.”
“No relation.” The gap-toothed smile appeared once more in the beard, which he was now drying with his fingers. “I can’t even play a gum leaf.”
Malone said, “What are you doing over on this side of the river? Why not over there at the carnival?”
Strayhorn pulled on his trousers, nodded at two empty wine bottles. “When I get on the red-eye I like to keep my shame to m’self. I’m a shameless old bugger, except about my drinking.”
“I saw you last night in the town library.”
“I know you did.”
“You were sober then. What made you go on the plonk? Was it something you read in those pages you tore out of the local paper?”
Strayhorn paused as he was about to pull on the shirt he had slept in. He looked distinctly less clean and neat than he had last night. “I didn’t tear out the pages. They were already gone.”
Malone looked out at the river. In the slowly moving water a fish jumped, creating a small silver explosion, A spoonbill flapped its way down the opposite bank, taking its time going nowhere. The scene could not have been simpler and more peaceful, yet he could feel currents in the air that bore something far heavier than an aimless bird.
“What were you looking for?”
“The same as you, I reckon.” The old man was shrewd, even if he disclaimed any wisdom. He sat down, began to pull on socks, neatly darned, and the new black boots he had been wearing last night. “The Hardstaff murder.”
“What’s your interest in that?”
“I was here when it happened.” He squinted up at both of them, looking at Malone and Carmody in turn. “What d’you think of that?”
