The Easy Sin (11 page)

He remembered the agony, spread over two days, in which his father had died. It had been messy, with vomiting and diarrhoea, but his mother had attended to all that, telling his father he must
have
eaten something and should be more careful. Clyde had wanted to go to a doctor, but Shirlee had said, no, she'd get the doctor to come to him. The doctor, because he wasn't called, never had.

When Clyde was dead, Shirlee had cleaned him up, wrapped him in his best suit, and told Corey to go up into the timber and dig the grave. Pheeny, only sixteen then, had helped him, silent and puzzled, asking no questions, just doing what their mother ordered. Then they had carried the body up to the grave and dumped it in it. Their mother had followed them, lugging a suitcase and with other of Clyde's clothes slung over one arm.

“Bury them with him,” she had said. “I'm gunna tell people he's left us and run off with some woman. You keep your traps shut, understand?”

“What we gunna tell Darlene?” Corey had asked.

Darlene had not come down to the house that weekend. She, like Corey, had no time for their father, but Corey doubted she would have stayed in the house while their mother killed him.

“We tell her the truth. She'll understand.” Then Shirlee had looked down at the body lying crumpled at the bottom of the pit. “I dunno why I ever married him.”

“You had us,” said Corey defensively.

She turned her head towards him and Pheeny, but in the darkness he couldn't see her face. “Yeah. I suppose I owe him that.”

“Thanks,” Corey had said sourly and walked off down through the timber. “You fill in the hole, Pheeny.”

That had been four years ago. Shirlee had told Darlene the truth about their father's murder, making no excuses, telling it flatly, take it or leave it. Darlene had taken it; Corey had been unable to read her face. She had never talked about it with him or Pheeny and gradually their father had faded from memory, a ghost who never haunted them.

Mum had kept them together ever since. He looked at her now, as domestic as any mother could be, and said, “I'm not gunna be in any killing of that guy in there. I decked that maid of his, I didn't mean to kill her, and I've got that hanging over my head. You wanna get rid of Mr. Magee, you and
Pheeny
and Darlene can do it. Count me out.”

She arranged the sandwiches neatly on a plate. “Please yourself. How's he behaving himself?”

“Still trying to tell us he's broke. I'm beginning to think if we'd snatched his girlfriend, insteada him, he wouldn't of come good with the money. I think we might of been sold, whatdotheycall it, a pig in a poke.”

“I don't think so,” said Shirlee emphatically. “Chantelle knows where the money is. Here, have a sandwich. You want tea or coffee?”

Corey put two of the sandwiches on a second plate. “I'll feed him.”

Shirlee looked at him shrewdly; sometimes she wondered how much of herself was in her kids. “You're not starting to feel sorry for him, are you?”

“No,” said Corey and wondered if what he felt was regret for his own life.

IV

Malone looked at Clements across the roof of their car.

“You go back to the office, keep digging into Kunishima. I'm going down to the Ritz-Carlton, see if I can have a word with Mrs. Magee.”

“What's she like?”

“I think she'd have saved the
Titanic
if she'd been there. Controlled, I think is the word.”

“She's all yours, then. Right now I'm in the grip of a controlled woman. I tried to call her at lunchtime, but they said she'd gone out to lunch with Mrs. Malone.”

“They're conspiring against us. No, not
us
. You. Lisa will be talking to me when I get home about husbands, no names, no pack drill, who lose thousands of dollars on shonky investments.”

“She wouldn't, would she? My friend Lisa?”

Malone grinned. “Don't expect me to defend you,
mate
.”

Clements gave him the middle finger and Malone, still grinning, went off down Macquarie Street to the Ritz-Carlton. The sunshine was still bright, the passers-by seemingly unworried. Half a dozen
of
them, strangers to each other, came towards him, all of them identical, water-bottles to their mouths, mobiles to their ears. Nobody, it seemed, could remain unconnected to someone, anyone, for longer than five minutes. I'm getting old, he thought, and felt no regret, just a comfortable smugness.

“Yes,” said the clerk at the Ritz-Carlton, “Mrs. Magee is in. Who shall I say is calling?”

“Detective-Inspector Malone.”

The clerk nodded as if detective-inspectors came to the hotel all week long. He spoke to Caroline Magee on the phone, then gave Malone the room number.

Malone rode up in the lift, sorting out what questions he would ask and finding them a jumble.

Caroline was waiting for him with the door open, smiling like a good hostess. “Inspector, come in. I didn't expect to see you again so soon.”

“You expected to see me again?”

She led him into the room, taking her time. It was not a suite, just a bedroom with a small lounge space that looked out across the Botanic Gardens to the distant harbour heads. Malone could only guess at the price: five hundred dollars a night? Caroline Magee, it seemed, was not short of a quid or two.

“Naturally,” she said at last as she sat down and motioned him to take a seat. “Isn't that the way the police work? Always coming back?”

“It's the only way we know. Persistence.”

“Plod, plod, plod?”

“We try to be a little more light-footed than that. You've had experience of the police before this?”

“No-o.” He noticed the slight hesitation; then she went on, “Only for traffic offences. In the UK.”

“Never out at Coonabarabran?” he asked with a smile.

She returned the smile. “Never. I was just a young girl then, never in trouble.”

Then he pitched a beanball: “When Errol asked you to come out here, did he tell you he had something like forty million dollars salted away somewhere?”

She
didn't duck; nor looked surprised. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Oh, we have it on good authority. He stole it.”

“The Kunishima Bank? Well, well.” She rolled her eyes, only slightly, at her ex-husband's rash cheek. “Forty million?”

“You knew nothing about his plans?”

“Plans?”

“He knew I-Saw was going down the gurgler, so he must've been preparing for it for quite a while. You don't grab forty million just like that—” He snapped his fingers. “Not unless you're holding up a bank or one of the armoured-car companies that service banks. What plans were you going to discuss with him, if he was planning to do a bunk?”

“Am I under suspicion or something?” She gathered chill round her like a wrap.

“What makes you think that, Mrs. Magee?”

She gave him another smile, this time no more than a dental inspection. “All right, you are just covering every possibility. No, Errol told me nothing about stealing money or doing a bunk anywhere. I thought I was coming out here to help him salvage something from the wreckage. All I knew was that everything was in a hell of a mess.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“No, but I guessed. Too much optimism, over-expansion. It's an IT disease, Inspector. Dotcom spread quicker than Spanish ‘flu. Or Hong Kong ‘flu or whichever is the latest strain. Everybody wanted in, whether they knew anything about it or not. Errol was—is a salesman, not an IT genius. He sold himself, and the world out there was full of suckers. I-Saw was a good idea, but Errol—and he wasn't the only one—he thought it a Vision, with a capital V. It wasn't. It was just a good idea.”

“Was he a ladies' man?”

“You mean was he charming and sexy? No, he wasn't. But he always had girlfriends, even during our marriage. I told you, he was a salesman.”

“What did you see in him?” She was a remarkably attractive woman the more one looked at her;
some
women never improve beyond one's first impression of them, but Caroline Magee seemed to gradually show a different facet of herself, like a dancer unwrapping veils. Malone had seen a photo of Magee and he could not help but wonder what she had seen in the small, nondescript man.

She gave him the dental display again. “Have you ever asked your wife what she saw in you?”

He considered that for a long moment; and was surprised at the answer: “No-o. No, I haven't.”

“What women see in a man, outside the obvious—I don't think you can put a finger on it. I thought I saw something in Errol, but I was wrong—and I knew I was wrong in the first twelve months. He was a pain in the arse to be married to. Why do you ask if he was a ladies' man?”

“There's a woman involved in the ransom bid . . . Whom did you work with in London?”

“A firm of stockbrokers, Greenfield and Co.”

“And you resigned to come out and help Errol out of his mess? You must be a bit narked, now. Giving up your job—”

“No, I took extended leave, two months. I knew Errol well enough not to give up a good job on the basis of a promise.”

“What was the promise?”

“A bonus, plus salary, if I helped him work out his problems.”

“A big bonus?”

“Big enough. But it's all just a busted bubble now.”

“You'll stay till we find Errol?”

“Of course. I just hope you find him—” A slight hesitation: “Alive.”

“I hope so, too. We may want to charge him with murder.”

If she was shocked at that, she did not show it. “The maid? I don't think Errol would have done that. He's a coward at heart.”

He couldn't help the barb: “And you still loved him?”

She wore a breastplate: “No, I didn't. I
thought
I did.”

He looked around the room, then back at her. “You'll be staying on here?”

“
Only till the end of the week.” The smile this time was friendlier. “I had hoped to stay in Errol's apartment. But I don't think Miss Doolan would agree to that. We have shares, as it were, in Errol, but I don't think we're partners.”

The smile widened, the chill gone now, and he found himself liking her.

“You'll go back to England?”

“Of course.”

“You don't think this is the Lucky Country?”

“Of course it is. Lucky it has prospered as much as it has, considering the idiots who run it.”

“You've become a Pommy.”

“No, just someone far enough away to get the big picture. Or the capital B, capital P, Big Picture. I'm long-sighted, I take the long view.”

“So do I. I stay at home and try to convert the ones who don't see beyond next week or the next election.”

“How much success do you have?”

“Very little. But I'm Irish, we're used to banging our heads against the wall.” He stood up. “Will you wait till we've found Errol?”

She looked at him, a half-smile now. “I don't love him, Inspector. But I'm not heartless.”

“Sorry. When you leave the hotel, where will we find you? Back at Coonabarabran?”

“No, that's a long way behind me.”

“No folks? Parents or siblings?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“It's our nature, otherwise we'd never get any answers.”

“I have a brother, but I've lost touch with him. There's nothing to keep me here.”

“Except Errol.”

Again the hesitation, then: “Yes, except Errol.”

“We'll be in touch, Mrs. Magee. We don't want to lose you.”

She
said nothing to that, just opened the door. The chill was back.

4

I

“WE'VE BEEN
forgetting one thing,” said Clements. The dead maid. The corpse. What brought us in, Homicide.”

Malone nodded. “Yeah, I know. But you haven't met all the suspects. A greedy lot of buggers who make you forget what'shername. Juanita.”

“We have another greedy bugger outside—”

“Don't sound so superior.” But he grinned as he said it.

“Okay, lay off. This is another greedy bugger. Mr. Vassily Todorov, Juanita's boyfriend. Asking have we found Mr. Magee, so that he can sue him for what's owed to Juanita.”

“You're kidding.”

“No, mate, I'm not. I'm greedy—was greedy. But I have my standards. You want to see him?”

“Not particularly, not the way you describe him. But all right—” He got up from behind his desk, looked at his watch. “If I were a superintendent I'd have been outa here half an hour ago.”

“You're not there yet.” Clements heaved himself off the couch. “When you are, you won't meet too many like Vassily.”

Vassily Todorov was built as if chipped out of rock; all rough edges and a shard for a nose. He was a good six inches shorter than either of the two detectives, but as wide as Clements and none of it fat. Malone wondered if he was one of the Bulgarian wrestlers or weight-lifters who always seemed to be deserting their homeland. Juanita Marcos must have been desperate to choose him as a boyfriend. Or maybe Todorov was a good rock, in different ways, in bed.
What women see in a man, outside the obvious
. . .

He was surprisingly polite: Clements hadn't led Malone to expect politeness. “Good afternoon,
Inspector.
It is good of you to see me. Sergeant Clements has explained?”

“Yes, Mr. Todorov. But we haven't found Mr. Magee yet. You're a little prema—you're a little early.”

“Premature?” Todorov had flecked eyes, as if someone had thrown sand into them and he hadn't even blinked. “I suppose we should have expected it.”

“You speak English very well. How long have you been out here?”

“Two years.”
So he could have been an absconding weight-lifter, from the Olympics
. “I taught English at a Berlitz school in Sofia.”