Autumn Maze (23 page)

At four o'clock that afternoon Malone was sitting in his office catching up on that morning's
Herald
. The Balkan stew was becoming bloodier; Boris Yeltsin had just been re-elected captain of a ship that was on the rocks; South Africa stood point-blank in front of the gun; here at home the Prime Minister, pushing for a republic, was charged with tearing apart the fabric of the nation. The metaphors spun like balloons in a whirlwind.

It was a relief when John Kagal came in and said bluntly, “Another one, Scobie.”

Malone suffered the theatrical pause as Kagal stood in the doorway; he just sat and waited. Kagal, he had heard, had once played Hamlet in a Macquarie University Players' production: Yorick's skull must have grown hair during some of Hamlet's pauses. Kagal at last went on:

“Peta and I traced that secretary who worked for Pinatubo. Her name was Maryanne DaLuca, she lived in a flat out at Petersham. We went out there, found her mailbox still had last week's letters in it. The neighbours said they hadn't seen her since last Thursday morning. There was no deadlock on the door, so Peta and I picked the Yale lock—”

Malone didn't dare ask. Kagal would give a short lecture on how to pick a lock and the point of his report would be delayed even further.

Kagal came suddenly to the point: “She was lying on the living room floor with two bullets in her. Doc Boon, he's one of the young guys from the morgue, reckoned she'd been dead two or three days at least. That puts it Friday, probably. We're doing the same as on that kid out at Redfern, soon's they've checked for HIV they'll extract the bullets and hand them to the on-call Ballistic guy. My bet is the same gun killed all three—the guy in the morgue, the kid at Redfern and Maryanne. Wouldn't you?”

Malone offered no opinion. “What about the other girl?” He looked at his notes. “Teresita something?”

“The employment agency knew nothing about her. But I checked with a contact I have in the Tax Office, we were at university together.” There had been a commotion last year when it was discovered that several government department officers had been peddling information to private investigators, credit agencies and other outsiders who thought that freedom of information meant anything could be bought so long as the price was right. Kagal smiled: “It saved time. Going through the proper channels—well, you
know,
proper channels tend to get flooded, right?”

“Sure. Irrigate where you can,” said Malone, not to be outdone. “So where is Teresita and who is she?”

“Her PAYE monthly statement from Lava Investments and her tax file shows she is Teresita Romero, she lives in Double Bay in Longmuir. That's a pretty expensive block of apartments—my uncle lives there. Not bad accommodation for a girl on four hundred bucks a week take-home pay. So I got on to another mate in Corporate Affairs this time and he gave me the home address of Mr. Belgarda, the managing director of Pinatubo. Same address as Miss Romero. The plot thickens, eh?”

“My very thought.” Malone remained straight-faced. “When will we know about the bullets?”

“It usually takes about four hours for the HIV test, the blood has to go all the way out to Westmead. I asked them to get a move on, but you can't hurry doctors or pathologists, you know that. They move to their own waltz.”

Malone couldn't top that one; but he'd try one of
his
mates: “I'll ring Doc Keller, she has clout and can hurry things along.”

“Is it true she and Russ are engaged?”

“I don't think they've announced it. You look puzzled?”

Kagal nodded, smiled. “Well, you couldn't meet a nicer guy than Russ. But, well, I'd never have said he was the doc's type, would you?”

“You never know with women. They move to their own waltz.”

You mean-minded bastard
: meaning himself. But Kagal could take a joke against himself; he raised an approving thumb. “
Touché
. . . So what do we do? I mean about Belgarda?”

“Put out an ASM on him. Tell Immigration to check for him and Teresita on any international flights, ask the Feds to keep a lookout for him at any of the airports in case he tries to go interstate. He comes from Manila and I don't want him heading back there before we can ask him some questions. If you tag him, let me know at once, no matter what time it is.”

“What about Redfern?”

“
I've got Sid Guyatt working on that with his blokes. They're looking for the dead kid's girlfriend. She's half-Asian, her name's Kim. She shouldn't be too hard to pick up, unless she's gone interstate.”

Kagal stood up. “Scobie, what would happen if we never solved these cases?”

“What makes you ask that?”

“It's a can of worms . . .”

Malone took his own long pause; he could never play Hamlet, but he might have played one of the grave-diggers. Digging his own grave . . . “It's a can of worms, all right. But we'd never be able to keep the lid on it, the politics are too slippery. Some day when you've got pips on your shoulders and silver braid on your cap, you're going to appreciate that fighting crime is only half the battle for us cops. Politics is Public Enemy Number Two.”

Kagal took the advice soberly. “It'll never change?”

“Not unless human nature changes. And I've given up on that score.”

When Kagal had gone without any further remark, he sat on, uncomfortable with his pessimism.

Then he picked up the phone and called Romy. She promised to do what she could to hurry the HIV tests. At five-thirty, as he was getting ready to leave, she called back: “Westmead have just called. The boy in the Redfern case, he's HIV-positive. The girl, Maryanne DaLuca, is clean. I'm taking the bullets out of them now and they'll be with Ballistics in half an hour. Russ is with me, he and Jason James from Ballistics, he'll bring them back. You want to speak to him?”

“No, tell him I'll wait for him over at Ballistics. Thanks for your help, Romy. I love you.”

“I love you, too. But I'm spoken for.” She laughed and hung up. Standing over an HIV-positive corpse, extracting bullets from it, she sounded happier than she had sounded in two years. That was what love could do for her.

He rang Lisa to tell her he would be late for dinner—“Again?” she said. “How did I guess?”—and walked across to Police Centre and took the lift up to Ballistics on the fifth floor. Clarrie Binyan was
waiting
for him, unlocking the security door, then locking it behind him. There were eight thousand confiscated weapons on this floor, an arsenal of temptation that Binyan guarded as if they were sacred relics.

He was looking older, darker; Malone wanted to ask if Aborigines got darker as they grew older, but he refrained. He and Binyan chi-acked each other with racist jokes, but there was a line beyond which neither of them ever ventured. Binyan's mother was a Koori from the east coast tribes and he often referred to her with affection; but he never mentioned his white father. The line was faint, like a finger trace in sand, but Malone never went beyond it. Binyan, this evening, certainly looked older and tired.

He led Malone into a side room where the forensic comparison macroscope was mounted. It was German, made by Wild Leitz, and it was Binyan's boast that, by comparison, it made an eagle's eye myopic. He sat Malone down on the stool in front of it, then placed two bullets under the macroscope.

“These came from the gun that shot the feller out at the morgue. The fired cartridge cases are nine-by-eighteen millimetres, not the usual ammo we see in here. You mentioned the
yakuza
—some of them use a Russian piece, a Makarov. It fires this calibre and it takes a silencer. It could be the make of gun we're looking for.”

A phone on the bench beside the macroscope rang and Binyan picked it up. “Okay, send them up.” He hung up. “It's Russ and Jason. I'll let them in.”

He came back in a minute or two with Jason and Clements, who dropped two plastic envelopes on the bench. “Two slugs from Bugler, the kid out at Redfern. Two from Maryanne DaLuca. Seems our killer can't resist letting off that second shot, just to make sure.”

Binyan took Malone's place at the macroscope, ran the three sets of bullets beneath it, then repeated the process. At last he stood up. “Same gun. Same pattern, two bullets into each victim. So it's the same feller, I'd say.”

Clements was leaning with his haunches against the bench; he bit his lower lip, his substitute for the furrowed brow. “What puzzles me, if he's used a gun to kill these three, why didn't he use a gun on Rob Sweden and Kornsey—Bassano, I mean? He stuck them in the neck, a surgical job.”

“
We don't know it was the same man,” said Malone.

Clements nodded. “That's true. But if it's not, what've we got—a team? And what's the connection between all the victims?”

Malone took his time sorting out the answers: “It looks as if Maryanne got hers because she knew too much about Pinatubo.”

“There's no evidence of that.” Clements was playing defence attorney, an unusual role for him.

“We don't have much evidence on anything, do we? We know young Sweden was up to no good. But we don't know what his killer, or killers, had against him. Bassano—well, the Mafia could have caught up with him and ordered his killing. Frank Minto, he probably did no more than just get in their way.”

“The attack on Casement?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe it's totally unrelated. What are you grinning at, Clarrie?”

Binyan ran his hand through his greying curly hair. “I'm just glad I'm not dealing with humans. Bullets and guns, they've got their characteristics, but in the end their motive boils down to one thing— they're designed to kill. It makes our job so much simpler, we don't have to worry about personality or psyche or all the rest of it. But you get me the gun that fired these—” he gestured at the bullets on the bench “—and I'll give you enough evidence to nail the feller who used the gun. Then you can belt the shit outa him and find out the connection between all the murders.”

Malone looked at Clements. “You see how they'd do it in the tribe? Belt the shit out of him. We're too civilized.”

“We've been telling you that for two hundred years,” said Binyan, grinning. “Get outa here. I wanna go home to the gunyah.”

“Have you seen his gunyah, Russ? Two-storeyed, out in Dulwich Hill, garage, pool in the backyard, Saturday night is Corroboree Night. They throw another goanna on the barbie, run another video of Madonna . . . Admit it, Clarrie, you like being civilized.”

“Our day'll come,” said Binyan, pushing them towards the door. “Pick out your sacred site, so
we'
ll know where to bury you.”

10

I

THEY BURIED
Vince Bassano, alias Terry Kornsey, the next day; or rather, he was cremated, at least part of him. Malone and Clements went to the cemetery on the southern outskirts of the city, to stand outside the crematorium and watch who came to pay their last respects. The morning was grey and cool, a good day for last rites. Malone, who had been to a few funerals, as mourner and spectator, had come to believe that all Australian burials or cremations should be held on autumn or winter days, in seasons that kept the colour sense to a minimum. He had been to funerals where bright dresses, some even sequinned, white safari suits and rainbow ties had suggested the mourners had only stopped off on their way to the spring racing carnival at Randwick. He was as old-fashioned as his mother Brigid when it came to burying the dead.

There was no one amongst the funeral crowd who looked like a Mafia hitman; nor were there any Asians. There were a few broken noses and cauliflower ears, but they belonged to old rugby league players, now fellow members of Mrs. Kornsey at the St George Leagues Club. If Terry Kornsey had been as quiet and reclusive as his wife had said, Malone wondered if the club members had come out of respect for her or her husband.

The crematorium was painted a bilious green. Its tall chimney looked like a clock-tower from which the clock-face had been removed, as if acknowledging that time no longer mattered to those going up in smoke through its core. Huge box-gums, trees older than most of the bones in the cemetery, faced the eastern front of the low building; a couple of Roman pines stood at one end of the line of box-gums, like immigrant mourners at a native funeral. It occurred to Malone that Roman pines seemed to be a feature of all the cemeteries he had attended and he wondered why. He made a resolution to find out the
reason;
but he knew, even as he thought of it, that he wouldn't. Life was full of neglected explanations: no one knew that better than a cop.

As the crowd slowly filtered out of the service chapel, a man detached himself and came towards the two detectives. Malone was surprised to see it was Kenthurst, wrapped in a trenchcoat, hat-brim pulled down all round, looking like a five-hundred-dollar-a-day private eye, Philip Marlowe from Canberra's anything-but-mean streets. “What are you doing here, Ron?”

“I'm here representing the US Marshals' Service—unofficially, of course. I have to report Vince Bassano is no more, just a heap of ashes. You weren't inside, were you? I kept wanting to laugh. A full-sized expensive coffin with half a leg and a foot in it, going into the oven. I don't know whether any of the crowd in there knew what was inside it—”

“They couldn't have used a child's coffin.”

“No, I suppose not. The widow went up and touched the lid of the coffin, but no one else followed her. So I guess they all knew there wasn't much of Vince Bassano there. It was macabre. Well, he's officially dead now and the Marshals' Service can write him off their books. You here looking for leads?”