by Jon Cleary
“Did you put Dettol or something on it?”
“Russ poured a beer over it. Relax. The priest is looking at you.”
Lisa and the children went up to receive Communion. Malone, after a reproachful look from Lisa, got up and followed them. He hadn’t been to Confession in at least three years, but his sins, he figured, were minor; venial ones, as the Marist brothers at school used to call them. He was probably guilty of at least one of the seven deadly sins, but at the moment he couldn’t think of any. He thought of them at random, gave his own judgement. Wrath: probably; Envy: no; Gluttony: no; Avarice: definitely no; Sloth: and still be in Homicide? Lust: well, maybe, but he had always kept it in hand (or maybe he should rephrase that). And last but not least, Pride: well, no, he didn’t think so. If he had felt it, it was not large enough to be sinful. He stepped out of the pew and fell in behind Lisa and the children. A state of grace was a state of mind and he couldn’t remember when he had last felt exalted enough to enter Heaven at a moment’s notice.
Standing in the aisle he wondered if Sagawa’s murderer was somewhere in the queue, his mortal sin expiated by confession to the priest and the Host ready to be laid on his tongue, all sin forgiven, even murder. He could see no one up ahead remotely connected with the Japanese; he wanted to turn his head to look behind him, but a woman pushed him in the back and whispered for him to get a move on. The Lord mustn’t be kept waiting, not while you looked for a murderer in His church.
Coming out of the church he was surprised to see Narelle Potter rising from a back pew and going out ahead of them. He had not thought of her as a churchgoer; but maybe she was the town’s Mary Magdalene, making a late penance.
“Are you coming back to Sydney with us tomorrow, Daddy?” said Claire.
“I don’t know, love. I still have work to do out here.”
“Are you working today?” Maureen made a face when he nodded. “Oh darn! Why do cops have to work seven days a week?”
“I think I’ll work one day a week when I grow up,” said Tom.
“Just like the rest of the country,” said Lisa, who at times could be puritanical towards her adopted land. Immigrants make the best, if not the most welcome, critics. “Will you be coming out for lunch?”
“I’ll see how things go. I’ll try and make it for supper, though, I promise.”
“We’ve been invited to a sunset supper out at the Nothlings’.”
Malone raised his eyebrows. “Amanda Nothling’s?”
Lisa nodded. “I gather it’s an annual thing to close out the Cup weekend. Not the whole town, just the elite.”
“We’re elite?”
“I guess we are. Ida said they’d got their invitation and we’re included.”
“Us too?” said Maureen, who never could and never would refuse an invitation: she would have gone to the razing of Carthage and the bombing of Pearl Harbor if she had been invited. “Us too?”
“No. Whenever were kids an elite?”
“They are in American TV sitcoms,” said Claire.
“Sitcoms? Keep your jargon out of my hearing. There’s your friend Mrs. Potter.”
Malone grinned at the children. “No time for jargon, but she loves non sequiturs.”
“What’s that?” said Tom.
“I dunno. It’s something she taught me.” He looked over his shoulder at Narelle Potter, who was standing at the church gate talking to a young couple, “I think I’ll walk back to the pub with her.”
“I knew it was gunna happen,” said Maureen, ham-acting. “Leaving his wife and kids for another woman.”
“It’s just a sitcom,” said Claire. “It’s not real life.”
“I don’t think I’ll get married,” said Tom, “or have kids.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said mother. “Not for the time being, anyway.”
Malone belted each of his grinning kids under the ear, kissed Lisa, said he would call her at lunchtime and hurried to catch up with Narelle Potter as she went out the gate. “Mind if I walk back with you?”
Her mind had been elsewhere; she looked startled. “What? No, not if you want to. Is that your family? Nice-looking kids.”
“They get it from their mother.” He was modest; which is close to a state of grace. “You’re a regular at Mass?”
“Are you?” That meant she wasn’t. So what had brought her here this morning?
“When my wife and kids hold a gun at my head, yes.”
“So you go for their sake?”
Partly; but he also went for his own reasons. He had little patience for the trappings or bureaucracy of religion, but he needed religion itself; at least, some of the time. He was the sort of Catholic whom priests took for granted, not worth bothering about, because he would save himself when the time came.
“I go for my husband’s sake, just occasionally. He was what they call a good Catholic, so I do it to please him. He wasn’t a good man, but that’s a different thing.”
He knew what she meant. “I thought you loved him?”
“What gave you that idea? Never mind, you’re only guessing. Yes, I did love him. But a man doesn’t have to be good for his wife to love him. You’d know that, being a policeman.”
He grinned. “Narelle, have you and I declared a truce?”
“No.” She didn’t return his smile. “Not yet. But you’ve been busting to know all about me and I thought I’d save you the trouble.”
“What have you got against me, other than that I’m a cop?” Which he knew was enough in the eyes of so many.
She walked some distance in silence. The streets were empty, all the stores but the newsagent’s closed. A travel coach went through, bleary faces staring out through windows blurred by dust; they had no look of interest in what they saw, they had been on the road all night from Sydney and they still had a long way to go to wherever they were going. Malone felt that, metaphorically, he was a passenger on the same bus. He remembered, when young, travelling on a coach like that through a small town in outback Queensland where a sign described it as “just east of too far west.” Some destinations were like that.
At last Narelle said, “You’re trouble. All you people from Sydney are. Police, licensing inspectors, politicians, the do-gooders for the Abos, those stirrers who organized yesterday’s demo. We’re better off without you.”
“Gus Dircks, too?”
“Forget him,” she said contemptuously. “He’s useless.”
I agree; but for once his tongue didn’t wag. “Why is it that everyone in this town doesn’t want to know who killed Ken Sagawa?”
“Everyone? Even the local police?”
“No, not them.” He had noticed a slight change in those at the station; nobody had rushed to help him and Clements, but they seemed less hostile and obstructionist. And there was the very noticeable difference in Hugh Narvo’s attitude. He let his tongue wag: “There’s always the chance of a second murder.”
“Who? The other Jap?”
“I don’t think so.” He debated whether he should let his tongue go further; then took the risk: “Someone tried to shoot me last night on my way home from the ball.”
She had been about to step off the kerb to cross the main street to the Mail Coach; but she stopped dead, as if the traffic light had turned red and the roadway was full of menacing traffic. “You? Someone tried to kill you?”
He nodded. “Just imagine what that would bring from Sydney. Collamundra would be overrun. I’m not that important myself, but the Police Department hates its officers being killed.”
She started off across the road and he had to grab her arm and haul her back; a car went past, horn blaring and a youth in the passenger’s seat leaning back and yelling abuse. She shivered, her arm trembling in his grasp.
“Don’t commit suicide, Narelle. I don’t think it was you who tried to kill me.” It was cruel, but he had never been taught that the law had been designed to be kind and merciful. He sometimes tried to make it so, but more often t
han not it was a losing battle.
“Me? Kill you?” They were still standing in the gutter; she had the stunned look of a drunk who had woken to find herself there. “You’re out of your mind! God, why would I want to kill you? Shoot you? I’m scared out of my wits by guns—I always hated them . . .” Her face was stricken, all her looks drained out of the pale, strained flesh; she reminded him of some women athletes who aged twenty years in a twenty minutes’ run. “I was carrying the gun that killed my husband.”
“Yes, I know.”
Her look was jagged-edged, “Is that why Russ all of a sudden cold-shouldered me? Or was it something else he’d heard?”
“Russ and I have never discussed you.” It was easier, and kinder, to lie. “Narelle, where were you last Monday night?”
Her voice was sharp. “Running the bar. I’ve already told Curly Baldock that.”
“Only after I sent him back to ask you, so don’t blame him for leaning on you. But someone else has come up with the suggestion that you weren’t in the bar all night.”
“Who?” They hadn’t moved out of the gutter; the traffic light had turned green, then almost instantly red.
It had been Wally Mungle. “Someone. Where were you, say between ten and eleven o’clock?”
The light turned green. They crossed the street and he took her arm to help her over the deep gutter to the kerb. She looked down at his hand, as if his gesture was satirical. He drew his hand away, almost angrily. The world had dropped down a deep dark hole from the one he wished he lived in, that he remembered dimly from other days. Everyone was suspicious of everything, even an expression of politeness.
“I went up to my flat and laid down. I had a headache.”
He looked at her quizzically. “Narelle, that one’s worn out. It’s a woman’s easiest excuse. It was the first thing Eve said to Adam when they got out of Eden.”
She didn’t smile, “I told you, I had a headache.”
“Brought on by what?”
“Men in general.” He could imagine that, with the bar full of them every night. “The noise gets to me sometimes.”
“Just the noise? Not some man in particular?”
Another shot in the dark; he was becoming the world’s best blind marksman. “No.” But the answer was in her eyes, not in her voice.
“Come on, Narelle. Isn’t it better I ask you than go around town asking other people?”
They had paused again on the corner, the Mail Coach stretching away from them at an angle on both sides. There were old-fashioned beer posters, behind glass, on the walls of the hotel, relics that she had somehow preserved: Walter Jardine paintings of footballers in baggy shorts, tennis players in long cream flannels, posters that his own father would have known in his youth. Narelle Potter had done a wonderful job of preserving the past in her hotel, but somehow she had let her life fall apart.
She said quietly but flatly, “He’s a married man. I’m not telling you his name.”
“So you did leave the pub for that hour or so?”
“Yes. I went with him to tell him I was breaking it off.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“Love?” She laughed. “No. It was just—I don’t know. Foolishness. Loneliness. I haven’t thought what to call it.” She looked straight at him. “But I can tell you one thing. He is not the sort of man who’d murder anyone. Either Ken Sagawa or you.”
“He’s not the man you were with last night?”
“Bert Truman?” She laughed again, this time less harshly. “Nobody in town would believe this, but Bert and I are just friends—we never do anything more than just hold hands. He was suddenly without a date last night, the girl he was taking to the ball didn’t show up from Sydney, and he rang me and asked me on the spur of the moment. No, Bert wasn’t the man.”
“Righto.” He could see that she was not going to give him the name of the married man; he would have to ask Curly Baldock to track him down. “But getting back to who might’ve had a shot at me. Friday night you made it pretty plain you have no time for Japs or Abos. When I told you I wanted a room for Constable Mungle and Mr. Koga, you acted as if I’d asked for a room for a couple of AIDS patients. Did any of those galahs down the bar, the ones who yelled to call out if you wanted help, did any of them offer to scare me out of town?”
“Inspector—” She had recovered some of her poise, though there was none of the hip-displacement swagger. “I don’t ask anyone in this town to do anything for me, not even the men who take me out. I’ve run my hotel on my own ever since my husband died and it’s the best run one in town—your friends down at the police station will tell you that. Even the women who gossip about me will tell you, too. If I wanted to get back at you, I’d do it my own way. And it wouldn’t be with a gun!”
They had moved along to the closed side-door of the Mail Coach. He had wondered for a moment while she had been speaking, why she didn’t leave Collamundra. Now he realized this hotel was her castle and, despite her reputation, she was more secure here, known, than she would be anywhere else, where she would have to start all over again as a nobody. Men are sometimes given a second chance, sometimes several; women, never. Eve has a lot to answer for; or perhaps it is because the Bible was written by men. Malone wondered, however, how Narelle would feel in twenty, twenty-five years from now, when the castle had turned into a prison and men no longer found her attractive. By then she might be too old for the empty ecstasy of one-night stands, she might have a perpetual headache from loneliness.
“Fair enough,” he said. “But you can’t blame me for asking. It may surprise you, but I don’t get shot at every day.”
She softened, smiled for the first time. “Have you had breakfast?”
“I had it with Russ earlier. He’s down at the station waiting for me.” He grinned. “Were you going to ask me to have it with you? People would talk.”
“This may surprise you, but you’re the first man I’ve ever asked to have breakfast with me, at least out in the open. I mean, since Bruce died. I’m indiscreet, I know that, but I never advertise.”
He broadened his smile, touched her arm; then just before he turned away he said, “Narelle, have you made any guesses who might’ve killed Ken Sagawa?”
“Yes. But you’d never get me to swear to it.”
She opened the door to the private entrance, went in and closed it in his face.
He walked on and round to the police station. As he ascended the stairs to the detectives’ room he could hear the shouts and complaints from the lock-up cells; there had evidently been a full catch of last night’s drunks. A constable in shirt-sleeves, carrying two buckets of water, went through, shaking his head angrily as he saw Malone.
“Bastards, spewing all over the place!”
Malone gave him a sympathetic smile, went on up the stairs. That was one thing about homicide: blood, somehow, was less revolting than vomit.
Clements was alone at the desk he had been given, the running sheets laid out like a racing form guide in front of him.
“Picking winners is easier than picking killers.”
He had consumed his fair share of beer and wine last night, but he looked none the worse for it; this morning he had eaten a breakfast that might have made one believe he hadn’t eaten since the same time yesterday. He had an indestructible stomach, a colon that worked like a never-failing flush valve and arteries that were flooding tunnels. The inner man of Clements suffered less than the outer, though hardiness had nothing to do with his soul. Clements never mentioned religion, unless prompted, and Malone stayed away from the subject.
“I’ve dug the bullets out of the car. Sundays the plane for Sydney leaves at nine, so they’re on their way—I got one of the patrol boys to drop them off at the airport. Ballistics will have someone pick „em up at Mascot and we’ll have a phone report by midday. I’ve just been going through these again.” He held up the sheets. “People questioned.”
“Let’s hear them.” Mal
one took off his jacket and sat down.
“Okay, the whereabouts of Sagawa’s contacts at the time of the murder, say from eight p.m. till midnight. Koga was at the movies here in town. The show came out at eleven, but I think we can eliminate him anyway. I wouldn’t put him on my list.”
“Why not?”
“What would he have to gain? In a year or two’s time, maybe he could want Sagawa’s job. But right now, it’s too soon, he’s still not sure whether the natives are friendly or cannibals. There’s no way he’s gunna get the manager’s job, not yet—and that’d be the only reason he could have for murdering Sagawa.”
“They could have had a blue and he killed him in anger.”
“Do you think Koga’s got that sort of temper?” Clements looked at him, knowing the answer. “Forget it, Scobie . . . Barry Liss and the others out at the gin—I don’t think so. All of them can account for where they were at the supposed time of the murder and their accounts have been corroborated. Again, what would be the motive? Aussies have never loved the bosses, but they don’t go around murdering them. The union contingency funds don’t cover that . . . Ray Chakiros and his jerk of a son? Maybe. I don’t think the old man would pull a trigger, but the son might have. We’ll put a tick against them.”
“I leaned on the kid last night over whether he and his mates were at that concert at Bathurst. I think they were lying.”
“I’m sure of it. I got Curly Baldock to check. They were still in one of the pubs, the Western Star, at eight o’clock—one of the uniformed guys saw them. If they’d left here to drive to Bathurst right after eight, they’d have got to the concert in time to hear James Blundell sing „Goodnight, Sweetheart’.”
“Does he sing that?”
“Well, whatever.” Clements’s own tastes ran to Broadway musicals; he was mired in the forties and fifties, caught between “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” and “Some Enchanted Evening.” “Do you reckon young Phil and his mates went out to scare Sagawa and somehow killed him instead?”
“I dunno, Russ. They could’ve. Or maybe they were up to something else they didn’t want us to know about. I’m inclined to believe the kid when he said he didn’t kill Sagawa. You know, you get a feeling?”
