Murder Song (24 page)

Way out here: two miles at the most. But, Malone guessed, Debbs probably felt no more at home here in this area than those voters who had recently arrived from Greece or Italy or the Lebanon.

“We shan't take up too much of your time, Mr. Debbs—” Malone went for the throat. “Do you know a man named Joseph Gotti?”

“One of my constituents? The name doesn't ring a bell. I'm not the sort of politician who remembers everyone's name.” Debbs smiled, being frank.

“No, he's not one of your voters. He came from Melbourne, came up to see you in Canberra a week or two ago. An Italian, smallish build, young. A professional hitman.” Malone delivered the last like a professional hitman, right between the eyes.

Debbs didn't blink, but the pale blue eyes abruptly hardened, became thin blue screens behind which his real eyes had retreated. “Oh,
him.
I didn't take to him at all. But a hitman? You exaggerate, Inspector, surely? No, you don't, I can see that. Where is he now?”

“In the City Morgue. I shot him the other night.” Another professional hit right between the eyes; but again Debbs didn't blink. “It was in the papers.”

“Of course! I heard it on the radio—but I didn't take any notice of the man's name. Who was he shooting at? You?”

“We think it was your friend Brian Boru O'Brien.”

For a moment the real eyes were pressed against the blue screen, showing venom. “Did Mr. O'Brien send you to see me?”

“No. Why did Gotti come to see you, Mr. Debbs?”

Debbs sat back in his chair. He wore an expensive shirt and tie under the cheap dark blue woollen cardigan, part of his disguise when he came to honour the locals with his presence. This was a safe Labour seat; he would never be voted out, no matter how he treated the natives. But this area was not really his scene, though he had been born not five miles from here. Like his wife he was not really Labour, if the truth was ever to come out; both of them could just as easily have been Liberal or even National, the
conservative
rural party, though the latter possibility would have made even the farmers' sheep laugh. They had chosen Labour because the party talent at that time had been at an all-time low and they had known they could easily beat the competition for pre-selection as a candidate. They lived in Strathfield, a solid middle-class suburb halfway between their respective electorates, and looked upon these duty visits to their parishes as penance for sacrificing their real self-interest. The cardigan, worn to impress the locals of his humble origin, felt like a hair shirt every time he put it on.

“Inspector, for a month there I was acting-Shadow Minister for Immigration. Gotti came to see me about an uncle of his who wants to emigrate from Italy. I told him I could do nothing for him myself, but to see his local member, Nick Odskirt. When you're in Opposition there's not much one can do,” he said sadly, but sad for himself not the voters.

“Did Gotti give any references, say who'd recommended he come and see you?”

“No, he just turned up. He seemed a young man with a lot of initiative. I mean, to come all the way up from Melbourne.”

“Did he say why he didn't come up to see the Minister?”

“Yes, he told me he'd been given the brush-off. He said he was a Labour voter. A hitman!” He shook the big white head, as if hitmen were unknown in the Labour Party.

Clements was bursting to smile; instead, he said, “I have a note from our informants, Mr. Debbs, that a week before, Gotti came up to Canberra and went to see Tony Lango. Did he mention Lango as a reference?”

Debbs frowned, as if trying to remember another voter's name. Then he raised his eyebrows; they went up the teak-coloured face like white grubs. “You mean Tony Lango, the one mentioned in the Crime Authority report in the newspapers? The Mafia man? Good God, no! If he'd mentioned him, I'd have had him thrown out at once. Was he an associate of Lango's? Good Christ, and he was asking me to sponsor one of his uncles! The uncle could have been a don or a godfather or whatever they call them!”

Malone recognized a blank wall, even one hung with a cardigan. He stood up. “Righto, we won't take up any more of your time, Mr. Debbs. The voters outside have probably got more problems
than
we have. Can we get you here if we think of anything else?”

“No, I'm going back to Canberra right after lunch. I'll be there for the next fortnight, Parliament is in session.” He stood up, held out his hand; the screen slid away from his eyes, they looked almost friendly. “Why was Gotti trying to kill my friend Mr. O'Brien?”

“We don't know,” said Malone. “Do you, Russ?”

“Haven't a clue,” said Clements, giving Debbs back his hand. “But something'll turn up. It always does.”

The two detectives went out through the outer office, Malone now apologizing to the now considerably larger waiting crowd. “Great feller, Mr. Debbs. He'll do everything he can for you. Vote for him every time.” He looked at the secretary. “Right?”

“Every time,” said the secretary, waiting for his MP to retire or die so that he could put his own name up for pre-selection.

Out on the footpath there were more people waiting. Malone was surprised at the patience on their faces, as if waiting was a lifelong habit. These were the unlucky ones in the Lucky Country; he felt helpless and angry just looking at them. He knew there would be precious little help inside for them, Debbs had his own problems.

The two policemen got into their car. Across in the park the winos were weaving and stumbling around on the brown, patchy grass, playing touch football with a sweet sherry bottle. The fruiterer came out of his shop and approached the car.

“You police?” He was a Greek, but he had the local nose. “Why you don't arrest them bums? They a bloody nuisance.”

“They're just playing football,” said Malone. “I thought they were South Sydney practising for the grand final.”

“I bet you barrack for them silvertails, Manly,” said the fruiterer, sour as one of his own lemons.

As they drove away Clements said, “What d'you reckon about Debbs?”

“He's a liar, every slice of him. Now we've got to find out why.”
V

“They've traced young Gotti to me,” said Arnold Debbs, cardigan discarded, now at ease again in his English-tailored suit; or as at ease as he could be in view of what he now knew. “They've traced him to you, too, Tony.”

Tony Lango edged a little closer to the log fire in the big stone fireplace; he always felt the cold, was never comfortable except at the height of summer. He was as wide as he was tall, not all the bulk of him fat. When he had first come to Australia thirty years ago from Calabria he had earned money as a part-time wrestler around the clubs and on late night television; now he was a full-time farmer and drug dealer. He had a broad swarthy face, a huge nose overhanging a thick moustache and deceptively merry eyes; children loved him, as they had Hitler. He had three sons and four daughters and seventeen grandchildren whom he doted on; and he had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of other children, to none of whom he ever gave a thought. Late in life he had set his eye on respectability, but he had left his run too late. He would have been amused to learn that he and O'Brien had had similar ideas.

“How d'you know all this?”

“I have a contact.” The contact had given Debbs the information only a few minutes before Malone and Clements had arrived at his office that morning. “It's reliable, Tony. That's why I got on to all of you in a hurry.”

He had called the conference as soon as the two detectives had left his office. By chance, all of those he had phoned had been available and now they were all gathered here at the Debbs' country retreat on the outskirts of Bowral, halfway between Sydney and Goulburn. He and Penelope had bought the thirty acres and the old colonial cottage three years ago, but they had never publicized the purchase and so far, fortunately, no media muckrakers had discovered it. Bowral was a retirement retreat for silvertails and none of the Debbs' constituents would have looked with favour on their MP's living the country squire life.

It was not a big house and the room in which the five men sat was small enough for them to fill
it.
Penelope, an unlikely pioneer type, had furnished it with colonial antiques; there was even a spinning-wheel standing in one corner, though it was useless for spinning lies and promises. There were woollen rugs on the polished floorboards and, appropriately, a print of a local, long-dead bushranger on a wall.

“Where'd you get this Gotti anyway, Tony?” said Leslie Chung. He was in his mid-forties, a refugee from Shanghai via Hong Kong; he was rumoured to be a Triad boss, but Debbs wasn't sure if that was true. Chung was a jewellery and gem importer and that was all Debbs really knew about him; he doubted if the others in the room knew much more. Chung was balding, slim and always impeccably dressed: his clothes told more about him than his thin, impassive face. He was always polite, but in the manner of a royal executioner: he would bow before cutting off your head. “He wasn't very efficient, trying to shoot down Mr. O'Brien in front of a crowd of witnesses, including a police inspector.”

“I was the one who recommended him.” Dennis Pelong was the brute in the room, a burly man with a face as blunt and hard as his huge fists. He had come straight from a golf course and Debbs wondered what sort of club would have him as a member. He wore a woollen beanie that made him look pointy-headed and did nothing for his unintelligent looks, a turtleneck sweater and a bulky golf jacket. He looked like an over-the-hill heavyweight just back from a training run. Nobody knew exactly where he came from. Debbs thought there was a streak of the tarbrush in him, but one couldn't tell whether it was Aborigine, Maori, Tongan or anywhere south of the Equator. He ran one of the biggest drug rings in the country, had an animal ruthlessness about him and Debbs was afraid of him more than of anyone else in the room. “He done some good jobs for me, three or four. Don't start fucking complaining, Les.”

“I was just remarking, Dennis, not making an issue of it.”

“Yeah, well . . .” Pelong couldn't stand the Chink, he was so fucking uppity. Pelong was a racist, even towards his own mother, the dark-skinned woman whom he had last seen when he had run away from home on his fourteenth birthday.

“Let's talk about what we're gunna do, not what's been done,” said Jack Aldwych. “We gotta wash out any connection with Gotti. You do anything about that, Arnie?”

Debbs kept his temper, which he never displayed in front of these men, knowing it would only
endanger
him. He hated being called Arnie; but he would never have chided Jack Aldwych for doing so. Big Jack, as he was called, was the biggest man in this gathering, biggest in physique and in his power. He was in his late sixties, handsome in a coarse, beefy way, with thinning silver hair, shrewd blue eyes that looked kinder than they actually were, and a voice like a gravel chute in full working order. He had a legitimate business empire of a chain of clothing boutiques, half a dozen hotels, real estate holdings and a medium-sized engineering plant that, a joke to those in the know, made safes for trusting businessmen. He had no investment in casinos or night-clubs—“You own one of them,” he had once told Debbs, “you always got the police sniffing around.” He was one of Australia's ten richest men, but he never figured in any of the lists of the country's richest. His real wealth, like an iceberg of green slime, was hidden beneath the surface.

“It's being attended to, Jack. Gotti's body is being sent back to Melbourne and the file on him will just sort of be put to one side.”

“Just like in Canberra?” said Chung, and all the men, with the exception of Debbs, laughed. They all had minor bureaucracies of their own, but Christ help any mug who put any business to one side, like they did down in Canberra.

Debbs admired and envied the power these men had: it was almost imperial. He aspired to such power, though theirs was based on the uses of evil and he was not, basically, an evil man. All that bound him to them was that they had all been duped by that bastard Brian Boru O'Brien. It was not the amount of money they had been duped of that made them so implacably resolved to kill O'Brien: it was almost petty cash to some of them. It was the knowledge that he could turn out to be the informer who could send them all to prison for years; or, in the case of Jack Aldwych, for the rest of his life. Debbs sometimes wondered why he had introduced O'Brien to them. But hindsight is everyone's stroke of genius.

“We still have to attend to O'Brien,” Chung went on.

“Get one of your guys,” said Pelong. “You Chinamen are supposed to be the expert killers, you been doing it for five thousand years, I read.”

“You've been reading comics, Dennis. We're a peaceful race.”

“
Bullshit.”

“Okay, cut out the cackle,” said Aldwych, the last emperor, if not of China, then certainly of this room. “Why has O'Brien got this guy Malone with him? I know Malone. A nice guy, but he's so bloody honest he turns your stomach. I had one of my blokes approach him years ago, when he was on the Vice Squad, and he beat the bejesus outa him and then give him a ticket for double-parking. He's got a nice sense of humour,” he added appreciatively and smiled, an old man's gentle grin. “What's he doing with O'Brien?”

“That's where we may be lucky,” said Debbs. “
Nil desperandum.”

One of his political heroes had been a certain prime minister who had had a classical tag for every occasion. Debbs had had no classical education, but had bought a good dictionary and found the foreign phrases in the back of it.

“What the fuck's that?” Pelong had never looked into a dictionary.