Murder Song (8 page)

“He wouldn't have come in contact with them unless they were brought in and charged. The gangs have only started to operate in the last two or three years. He'd been on the desk all that time.”

“They were my first suspects,” said Danforth, putting in his two cents worth; it was worth no more. He had no time for anyone who wasn't white, preferably of British stock and Protestant. He would never understand how Jack Chew, a Chink, had risen to be a sergeant. Chinese should only run restaurants or market gardens.

Chew
passed over his sheets to Malone. “My guy is just as unexciting. He'd led a pretty nomadic life—”

“What's that?” said Danforth, who had never learned to hide his ignorance.

“Wandering. A drifter,” said Chew with Oriental patience. “But once he married, he settled down, was a good husband and provider. As far as his wife knows and as far as we can find out, he never fooled around with other women. He was a good-looking guy and he was popular with the women at the leagues club near where he lived. But it never went beyond some mild flirting. No jealous husbands or boy-friends. The main point is, he had no connection with Terry Sugar, at least not for twenty years or more.”

“What was the connection then?”

Chew nodded at the sheets in Malone's hand. “It's all in there. Compare the two of them.”

Malone saw it at once:
Enlisted as a police cadet, February 1965.
“He was at the academy? Harry Gardner?”

“He dropped out as soon as he'd finished the course and then went walkabout for five years all over Australia.”

“Where are your sheets?” said Danforth to Malone.

“You didn't tell me to bring them—” Malone was trying to picture the academy classes of twenty-four years ago. “I remember him now—dimly. He was in my group . . . Jesus!”

“You remembered something?” said Ludke.

“There is a connection with my case. Mardi Jack, my girl, wasn't the target.” Russ Clements had been right after all. He told them about his visit to Brian Boru O'Brien. “One of his companies owns the flat where the murder happened. The killer was expecting O'Brien to be there.”

“So?” said Chew.

“Terry Sugar, Gardner and O'Brien were all at the academy at the same time. They were all in my group.”

Danforth and the two junior officers sat back, saying nothing. Then Hans Ludke broke the
silence:
“Does that put you on the hitman's list, too?”

4

I

MALONE GOT
out of the car, waited till Lisa and the children had got out, then set the alarm and locked it. He debated whether to remove the hub-caps and lock them in the boot, but decided it would be too much trouble. Everyone in the street knew he was a cop and he had to take the chance that they either feared him or respected him. Erskineville had never been an area, even when he was growing up here, that had loved cops. Even his father had hated them.

Con Malone, the cop-hater mortally ashamed of having a cop for a son, was waiting in the doorway of the narrow terrace house for them. This was a house much like Mardi Jack's and Gina Cazelli's in Paddington; but Erskineville had never become gentrified like that other inner city district. All that had changed since Malone had lived here was that European immigrants had replaced the old British and Irish stock and that brighter colours had been painted over the old standard brown. Con, an immigrant-hater as well, had only just become accustomed to the Italians and Greeks and Lebanese newcomers, when, you wouldn't believe it, the bloody Asians had started to move in. What with one bias and another, he was in a state of constant warfare never quite declared.

“G'day, kids.” He was not a kissing grandfather; that was for the Wogs. He shook hands with Lisa, but just nodded to Malone. He was as afraid of sentiment as he was of foreign invasions. “Gran's ready to put dinner on the table. You know what she's like, no waiting around.”

“No pre-dinner drinks?” said Malone. “No canapés?”

“None of your fancy stuff with Mum,” said Con, but had enough sense of humour to grin. “You been busy?”

“Same as usual,” said Malone and followed his family and his father down the narrow hall,
stepping
back, as he did every time he came here, into another life. Even though he was an only child and had loved his parents in the same undemonstrative way they loved him, he had wanted to escape from this house ever since he could remember. The dark small rooms, the ever-present smell of cooking, the constant shouts and screams from the ever-warring couple next door which would keep him awake at night; he had known there was a better place to live somewhere out there. His mother and father, he had known even then, would never leave; not even now when the Wogs and the Yellow Horde were pressing in on them. They felt safe in the small, narrow house. And, he hated to admit it, he too had felt safe: the whole world, it seemed, had then been a safer place. At least there had been no hit lists with his name on them.

His mother had dinner on the table; they were expected to arrive on time. She clasped the children to her, as she had never clasped Scobie to her; then pushed them into their chairs around the dining table. She gave her cheek to Lisa's kiss, but didn't return the kiss; she loved Lisa as much as she did the children and Scobie, but, like Con, she could not handle public sentiment.

“Get started! Don't let it get cold.”

It was a roast lamb dinner, the usual: none of your foreign muck here. Con had bought a bottle of red, his compliment to Lisa, the sophisticate in the family. Malone noticed it was a good label and he wondered who had advised the Old Man. Gradually Con Malone was changing for the better, but his son knew it was too late.

When dinner was over Lisa went into the kitchen to help Brigid with the washing-up, the children went into the front room to watch television and Malone and his father sat on at the dinner table to finish the bottle of wine.

“I notice someone shot a copper out at Parramatta last week. You working on that one?”

“No, that's for the Parramatta boys. I've got my own case.”

“That singer they found in Clarence Street?” Though he would never admit it, Con Malone followed all the police news. He knew the dangers of his son's job and he was afraid for him, though he would never admit that, either. “They're shooting a lotta coppers these days,” he said, giving his wine a
careful
look, as if he were a wine-taster.

Malone remarked his father's concern and was touched by it; but he could never let Con know. All at once he was struck with the sad, odd wonder at what he would say to the Old Man on his deathbed. Would there be a last moment when both of them would let the barrier down and they would admit the truth of the love that strangled them both?

“It's a different world, Dad.”

“You ever get any threats?” He had never asked that question before.

“Once or twice.” There had been more than that; but why worry his father with them? “You just have to pick the serious ones from the loud-mouths.”

“You ever tell Lisa about „em?”

“No. When you were having those union fights on the wharves, did you tell Mum?”

“No.” Con drained his glass, took his time before he said, “If someone ever tries to get you, let me know.”

“Why? What'll you do?”

“I dunno. Bugger-all, I suppose. But I'd just like to know.”

Malone looked at his own glass; the wine had the colour of drying blood. “No, Dad. I don't bring my worries home to Lisa—” Which wasn't strictly true; she anticipated them. “I'm not going to do it with you. I can handle whatever comes up. But if something ever does happen to me, I hope you and Mum would help prop up Lisa and the kids.”

“You think we wouldn't?” Con Malone looked offended. “Jesus Christ—”

“Who's swearing?” said Brigid, coming in from the kitchen. “What if the children hear you?” They were her angels, to be protected from the world. She sprayed the house with holy water, as if dampening down the dust of sin; her rosary beads were always in her pocket, more important than a handkerchief. All her life she had been religious, but little of it had rubbed off on her husband and only a little more on her son. But at least I'm a believer, Malone thought. He doubted that his father was.

Lisa ran a hand affectionately round the back of Con's neck; his blunt wrinkled face coloured.
“
I don't think you could teach them anything, Dad. They hear it all on TV these days.”

“Not in this house,” said Malone with a grin. “Mum's got the TV aerial aimed straight at St. Mary's, the Cardinal's her favourite news-reader. Sermons and hymns and no news unless it's good news.”

They all laughed, including Brigid: unlike so many narrowly religious, she could laugh at herself. She had never believed that Christ had gone through life without a smile or a joke.

When it was time to go home Malone carried Tom, who was already asleep, out to the car and settled him in the back seat between Lisa and Maureen. Brigid kissed all the children good-night, gave her cheek to Lisa and smiled at Malone. Con stood with his hands in his pockets, but it was obvious he had enjoyed having the family, his and Brigid's family, come to visit them.

An Asian man and woman passed the Malones, said good evening in soft shy voices and went into a house several doors up the street.

“That's Mr. and Mrs. Van Trang,” said Brigid. “They're a real nice couple. They're Catholics,” she added, naturalizing them, forgiving them for being foreigners.

Con had just nodded at the Vietnamese. He looked at his son as the latter said good-night to him across the roof of the Commodore.

“Drive carefully,” he said: it was the closest he could come to saying,
I love you all.

“Night, Dad. Look after yourself.” Some day he would put his arms round his father, when he was dying or dead.

Claire got in beside Malone as he settled in beside the wheel. “Enjoy yourself?” he said.

“I shouldn't say it, Daddy, but why does Grandma's house always smell of cooking?”

He took the car out from the kerb, pausing to let another car, drawing out from the kerb some distance behind him, go past. But it too paused, and he pulled out and drove on down the narrow street.

“There's been about a hundred years of cooking in that house, my grandmother lived there before Gran. It sorts of hangs around, the smell.”

“You think we should bring Grandma a can of Air-o-zone next time we come?”

“You'll do no such thing!” said Lisa sharply. “Just stop breathing if you don't like it while you're
there.
That's Grandma's home, smell and all.”

Malone turned into a main road; the car following him did the same. “It doesn't smell like your cooking,” Claire said. “I wouldn't mind if it did. But it's, I dunno, cabbage, stuff like that.”

“Corned beef and cabbage,” said Malone. “I grew up on it.”

“Yuk,” said Maureen from the back seat.

Malone was almost halfway home to Randwick before he realized that he was being tailed. At every turn he had made, another car had made the same turning. He was tired, he had not been alert; now all at once it came to him that the car following him was the same one that had pulled out from the kerb behind him in the street in Erskineville. Suddenly his hands felt clammy on the wheel.

What to do? He could continue on to the police station at Randwick, but that would only alarm Lisa and the kids; he did not want to frighten them, in case his own fear was a false alarm. Hans Ludke's question this afternoon,
Does that put you on the hitman's list?,
had been at the back of his mind all evening, like the smell of his mother's cooking.

He reached Randwick, turned into his own street as rain began falling again. He had led the hitman (if, indeed, he was the hitman) to his own home; but, he guessed, the man probably knew where he lived, anyway. Their phone number was in Lisa's name, L. E. Malone, but that wouldn't have fooled anyone really intent on finding out where he lived; if the hitman knew where Con and Brigid Malone lived, he certainly would know where their son lived.

Malone swung the Commodore in the entrance to his driveway; then braked sharply, throwing Tom forward and waking him. The driveway gates were closed. Time and again he had lectured Lisa and the kids against leaving them open. Now he wished for them and the garage door to be wide open.

He glanced back along the street. The other car had come round the corner and pulled into the kerb about fifty yards up the street, dousing its lights. Malone hesitated.

“What's the matter?” said Lisa. “We don't have automatic gates, remember?”

“I told him we should get them,” said Claire. “Everybody has them now.”

“We can't afford „em on a cop's pay,” said Maureen. “He's told us.”

“
I'll open „em,” said Tom and fumbled with the door handle.

“Stay where you are!”

There was a note of panic in Malone's voice. He hastily got out of the car before Lisa could comment on it, hunched over as much to make himself a smaller target as against the rain, and moved quickly to open the gates. Too late he realized that he had stupidly left the headlights on: as he stood in their glare, fumbling with the bolt of the gates, he felt as exposed as if he were in the middle of the Nullarbor Plain in broad daylight. He was wearing no hat or raincoat; the rain fell on him in drenching sheets, he was almost blinded by the water pouring down his face. His fingers were frozen (by fear or cold?); the gates refused to open. Then he jerked the bolt up out of its socket, he dragged the gates open, swung them back and stumbled back to the front door of the car. As the other car, its lights now on, pulled out from the kerb and came at gathering speed down the street.