by Jon Cleary
“Why?” She sounded as if she had asked this question a thousand times.
“Sun cancers. I was out in the open air alla time, I get sun cancers.”
“Where'd you get that tan, then?”
“It's natural. Me father's half-Tongan.” Clyde had come from a long line of Yorkshiremen. “He's related to Jonah Lomu.”
“Who?” She knew nothing about football, of any code. She had her own sporting problems, she was a dysfunctional synchronized swimmer, she always put up one foot too many when she was under water. She sighed, wondering why she hadn't taken a job down a coal mine. “I don't believe a word of it, Phoenix. Here. You walk out on this job and we cut off your welfare cheque.” She sorted through papers on her desk, extracted one and handed it to him. “You can start today.”
He looked at the piece of paper. “Lavatory attendant?”
“You've got the build for it,” she said and looked out at the other hopefuls. “Next!”
Phoenix Briskin was blind with fury when he walked out of the Centrelink office. He stepped on to a pedestrian crossing right in front of a Range Rover driven by a woman with six kids in the vehicle.
IV
“Mum, for Crissakes, there's a police car coming up the road!” Corey had been sitting out on the cottage's narrow front verandah, wondering if he would retire to the bush, on a bigger spread than this, if and when he got his share of the five million bucks. He liked the peace and quiet, he had come to recognize the different types of trees, he even knew some of the bird calls. If he could find a decent bird, of the human kind, to settle down with, there would be worse ways of living.
But at the same time he was despondent, wondering what they would do if nobody came up with the ransom money. Then he looked down the distant road and saw the police car creeping up towards them like a stalking blue-and-white dog.
Shirlee came to the screen door, but didn't come out on to the verandah. “Go down to the gate and see what they want. I'll take care of His Nibs.”
She went back into the kitchen, donned one of the blue hoods, took a long carving knife and went into the bedroom where Errol Magee, half-asleep, sat slumped in his chair. He blinked and looked up as she came in, holding the knife in front of her as if about to use it.
“You open your mouth and I'll cut your throat.” She said it matter-of-factly, as if suggesting she might give him a slice of roast beef.
He was so tired and despairing he was almost beyond fear. “You would, too, wouldn't you?”
“Try me. Now shut up!”
Outside Corey had gone down from the verandah and, forcing himself not to hurry, walked the fifty-yard path down to the battered front gate where the police car had just come to a stop. Two cops got out, a stout, grey-haired sergeant and a tall young constable who looked uncomfortable. The Briskins had never had any dealings with the local police and Corey had never seen these two before.
“Mr. Briskin?”
Corey nodded, keeping himself together. If they wanted to search the house, he was not going to fight them; while their backs were turned he would make for the timber and Mum could look after herself. He would not be deserting her, he knew she would tell him to run.
“I'm afraid we've got some bad news. Not tragic news, but bad news.”
“My sister?” He had always been protective of Darlene.
“No, your—brother?” The sergeant looked at his notebook, then looked again. “Phoenix? That his name?”
“Yeah. We call him Pheeny or Nix. What's happened to him?”
“He stepped off the footpath, far's we can gather, right in front of a four-wheel drive. He's in St. George's Hospital in intensive care.”
“How'd you find us here?” Had Pheeny been babbling while unconscious?
“The Hurstville police went to your home. The next-door neighbour said you hadn't been there for a coupla days, you were probably down here at your weekender. They phoned us and Constable Haywood here, he remembered seeing your car when he drove past here this morning.”
Corey wondered why Constable Haywood would have driven up this deserted road this morning, but he wasn't going to ask him. “I'll go up straight away, see my brother. Anyone else hurt?”
The sergeant looked at his notebook again. “Everybody but the woman driver of the vehicle. Evidently after she hit your brother, she went up on to the footpath and hit a pole. There were—” he checked his notebook again, “there were six kids in the vehicle, none of ‘em wearing a seat-belt. All six are in hospital with broken noses, smashed teeth, concussion. Quite a mess, evidently.”
Just like you, Pheeny, We want things fucked up, leave it to you. “Okay, I'll go up. Thanks for the info.”
“You got someone here with you? Constable Haywood said he saw a woman out the back when he drove past this morning.”
Bloody Hawkeye Haywood. “My mother. She's laying down right now. I'll tell her.”
“You want any help? Case she, you know, collapses or something. It's pretty shattering news for a mother.”
You dunno my mum. “No, she'll be okay. We'll go up straight away. Thanks.”
“We'll wait and give you an escort out as far as the main road. Take your time.”
All at once Corey, irrationally, wished Pheeny was here so that he could kick his dumb arse. Jesus, you couldn't trust him to cross the road . . . Then he saw his mother coming down from the house, minus the hood and the knife.
“Some problems?” She was wiping her hands on her apron, ready to deal with any problems.
“Yeah, Mum—” He explained what had happened. “Pheeny's in hospital, in intensive care.”
“And six children,” said the sergeant and looked at his notebook again. “All under eight years old. In hospital. Not intensive care, fortunately.”
“Oh, the poor dears!” Shirlee sounded as if she had devoted her life to the care of children. “Well, we better get up there, Corey.”
“The police are gunna escort us as far as the main road, Mum.”
If Shirlee was fazed by the complication, it didn't show. “No, sergeant. I have to get things for Phoenix—pyjamas, things like that. I wouldn't think of holding you up. Thank you for bringing us the news. We'll let you know how my son is when we get back. Come on, Corey, I need some help.”
She turned and went back up the path; the general had despatched the troops. Corey looked at the police and shrugged. “That's Mum. She'll run the hospital when we get there.”
The sergeant looked after the disappearing Shirlee. “Yeah, well—” Then he, too, shrugged. “Okay, give us a call when you get back, let's know how things are. Drive carefully.”
They got back into the police car, it swung round and went back down the road, raising a little dust as if that was what all police visits did. Corey looked after it, cursing, then he ran up the path and into the house.
“You stay here—” Shirlee had a suitcase on the kitchen table, was folding a pair of Phoenix's pyjamas. “If they pull me up down the road, the police, I'll tell ‘em you stayed behind to tell Darlene what happened.”
“How's she gunna get back from the station? When I dropped her off this morning I said I'd be there to meet the train. Four o'clock, I dunno, something like that.”
“She's got her mobile. Call her, tell her to meet me at the hospital. I wish Pheeny'd listen to me. I told him to buy a dressing-gown. How's he gunna look, walking around the hospital in this?” She held up a plastic mac.
“Mum, for Crissakes, stop worrying about how he's gunna look! He's in intensive care, he's not gunna be wandering around the fucking hospital!”
“Wash your mouth out.”
She closed the suitcase, pulled on a light coat. She was neat and professional, a hospital visitor. She would have Pheeny out of his coma in no time.
“Look after His Nibs.”
“You look after yourself, Mum.”
“I always do.”
She picked up the suitcase. Brisk now as a regimental sergeant-majo
r, a breed more practical than generals; they are close, not to the big picture but the small picture of war, which is where you are wounded or die. She went out by the screen door and down to their car, a light-grey Toyota (“if you're gunna hold up a service station,” Clyde had advised, “you always wanna have a car that's hard to identify, no fancy colours”). A minute later Corey heard the car drive away.
He put on one of the hoods and went into the bedroom. Errol Magee looked up at him, shifted uncomfortably in his straps. “What's going on? You heard from anyone about the ransom?”
“No luck, sport. I'm beginning to think you're expendable. They've got to the bottom line and you don't add up. At the end of the day.” He had taken to reading the financial pages once they had planned the kidnapping.
Magee slumped in his chair. After a while he looked across at Corey, who had sat down in a chair. The blue hood faced him impassively.
“You ever give up hope?”
“I dunno,” said Corey. “I was never the hopeful sort. I just took things as they come.”
“I read something once. Hope is the prayer of fools.”
“I dunno nothing about prayers. You must of been pretty hopeful when you first started out. You weren't a fool, were you?”
“Do you care what I was?”
“I dunno. Maybe I do. You must of had a life like I never dreamed of. Hoped for. What happened, sport? You got greedy?”
“I guess so.” He would never have talked like this to Kylie or Caroline or any of the other women in his life. But they had never been threatening . . . “Are you going to kill me?”
“I dunno. I'd keep hoping, sport. Or praying.” Corey stood up. “You wanna a leak or something?”
V
The police car was parked on the main road, just south of where the dirt road entered. Constable Haywood nudged his sergeant as the Toyota came out of the side road. “The mother's on her own. Why isn't her son going up to see how his brother is? I would.”
“Jack, never interfere in a family, ‘less you have to. He might hate his brother's guts, for all we know.”
“I still think I might go up there later, after I've dropped you off back at the station. Just a social call.”
“Please yourself. In the meantime we're supposed to be looking at semi-trailers doing more than eighty along this stretch. Here comes one now. He looks a sucker for a ticket.” He raised the speed camera, aimed it at the truck came towards them. “How about that! Ninety-seven. Let's go and give him an Easter card.”
5
I
“YOU HAD lunch with Romy today,” said Malone. “What did you talk about?”
“World politics,” said Lisa. “Women's rights. Public transport.”
“Neither of you ever travel by public transport.”
They were in the kitchen, she at the stove, he sitting at the table sipping a light beer. It was a very modern kitchen, refurbished a year ago at what was, by Malone's standards, great expense; but it was a workplace, not a sterile display of kitchen furniture. Lisa's touch, that of home, was in every room in the Federation house. The house was a hundred years old and year after year it had survived, under various owners, as a home.
“Did Russ ask you to ask me what we talked about?”
“No. I left him at the Aurora building—they've got a stake-out there. What did you talk about?”
“Stupidity. Men's. Open the wine, give it some time to breathe. Why on earth did Russ risk all that money?”
“He's admitted it. Greed. What are we having?”
“Chicken stroganoff. The whites are in the fridge. Sixty thousand dollars. Romy said she wanted to cut his balls off.”
“She said that in a restaurant? Out loud? Where were you, at Machiavelli?” A restaurant for suits, where balls, metaphorically, were cut every day. “We'll have the Semillon. I'll give Con Junior a sip or two, start him young as a wine connoisseur. He's already got as much sense as some of them.”
Tonight was family night. Claire and her husband Jason were coming, bringing six-month-old Cornelius Junior with them. Maureen would be bringing her favourite of the moment, an ABC reporter named Eddie or Freddie or Teddy. And Tom might or might not be bringing a girl: his whims were below his navel, an unreliable region. It was a weekly ritual that Scobie and Lisa looked forward to, a small reward for all the effort of bringing up Claire and Maureen and Tom. Malone, an Old Testament sceptic, sometimes wondered how much Adam and Eve had missed out on. Family night in the suburbs of Eden couldn't have been a ball of fun.
“Is Russ on the I-Saw case? The murder?”
“Yes and no. I kicked him off to start with, then I needed him.”
“How's it going?”
“Nowhere, so far. The murder of the maid seems to be getting lost in the kidnapping. Everybody's talking ransom so much, or how much money has gone down the gurgler at I-Saw, the maid's on the back burner. If they have back burners in morgues. Do we have to talk about this?”
“You brought it up.” She turned from the stove, pressed herself against him and kissed him. “Resign tonight and let's fly.”
Then Tom came in the back door. “Oh hell, you're not at it again!”
“You're just frustrated,” said Malone. “You didn't bring a woman?”
“She'll be here in time for dinner. She's having drinks with a guy about a job. She worked for I- Saw till yesterday. You told me to look into I-Saw, remember?”
“How do you know her?”
“I dealt with her on the internet.”
“You've never met her?” Lisa was back at the stove.
“I took her out once or twice.” Tom turned a blank face towards his father; and Malone knew he had taken Whoever-She-Was to bed once or twice. “Her name's Daniela. Daniela Bonicelli. She's half- Italian.”
“Which half? Bottom or top half?”
“All right, cut out the juvenile jokes,” said Lisa. “We don't talk police business at the table, understand?”
“How long's she been with I-Saw?” said Malone.
“Almost since it started, I think.”
“Is anyone listening to me?” asked Lisa. “Police business is out. O-U-T. If you want to grill Miss—what?—Bonicelli, if you want to question her, you can drive her home.”
“What's she like?” asked Malone. “Attractive?”
“A dish. Sexy as all get out,” said Tom.
“Then I'll drive her home,” said Lisa.
“That's a drag. She lives out at Hurstville.” For Tom, like most of the young from the eastern suburbs, anything south or west of Central Station was a suburb of Jakarta (“there are so many, y'know, Asians out there”).
“There's the doorbell,” said Lisa. “Answer it.”
“How do you stand her?” asked Tom, grinning.
“A cop's patience,” said Malone and went through to admit Claire, Jason and baby Con.
Claire had matured into a younger version of Lisa: blondly beautiful, serene and in calm control of her husband. Malone kissed his daughter, shook hands with his son-in-law and tickled his grandson's two chins.
“You want to hold him?” Claire proffered the baby.
“No, thanks.” He was not an infant-loving grandfather; they were too often wet and smelly, they had no conversation and they were all autocrats. “Send him along to me when he's twelve. I'll tell him about the birds and the bees.”
“They learn that at day care,” said Jason.
He was a very tall beanpole of a young man, but moved without awkwardness, almost gracefully. One had to look twice at his face to discover he was good-looking; it was almost as if he had chosen anonymity as a look. He was relaxed, but still cautious. His mother and her lesbian lover had murdered his father; he had a dichotomy of feeling towards her, he still loved her, yet hated her for what she had done. How he would explain his feelings to his own son in later years was something that Malone often wondered about.
“How's work?”
“Round and round,” sai
d Malone. “How's it with you?”
Jason was a civil engineer. “Enough to keep us going. Just.”
“Just as well I'm going back to work,” said Claire. After nine months off, she was starting as an associate with the biggest law firm in the State. Malone, a cop, wondered at the future: not only too many lawyers, but too many women lawyers. “I've never learned to spell budget.”
“She didn't inherit any of your tight-fistedness, Scobie,” said Jason.
“I think we adopted her.”
It was banter, the sort of lightweight glue that holds families together when nothing serious is threatening.
Then Maureen arrived with her man of the moment; or the nano-second. Her tastes changed too quickly for her parents to keep up with her; they just prayed that these playthings never hurt her. She referred to them as her toy-boys, but never in front of them. This latest one was Neddy: Neddy Brown. Malone recognized him. He was an ABC reporter, one of the new breed who referred to the de-bree left by floods and bushfires and thought fantastic a cover-all adjective for everything from delight to disaster. Tertiary education, Malone often thought, taught them not to waste words.
He was short and compact and amongst Malone, at six-one, Tom six-three and Jason six-four he looked like a rugby scrum-half waiting to be thrown the ball by the big men in the line-out.
“This is a fantastic coincidence, Mr. Malone. Only today I was assigned to the Errol Magee kidnapping, so I guess our paths will be crossing—”
Malone decided to cut him off at the pass: “I'm not on the kidnapping. I'm just handling the murder of Magee's maid—”
“They're connected, though, aren't they?”
“Drinks, anyone?” said Lisa, doing her own cutting off at the pass. “Get that, will you, darl?”
The front doorbell had rung. Malone escaped, went down the hallway and opened the door. Daniela Bonicelli had arrived; a dish, sexy as all get-out. She had dark, appraising eyes, a short straight nose and lips like a baby's teething ring. Malone marvelled at his son's luck, at all the bon-bons that just seemed to fall into bed with his son. Fantastic!
