Bleak Spring. Jon Cleary
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florid as the roses that decorated her chambers, she castrated hostile witnesses with sarcasm sharper than a scalpel. Even the more misogynistic judges tolerated her as she stirred blood in desiccated loins.
‘Do you want to sit in while I talk to Mrs Rockne?’
‘We all do,’ said Mrs Carss, settling herself for a long stay.
Malone looked at her. ‘I think it’d be better if you didn’t. I’m going to have to ask her to run through everything that happened last night.’
‘Then she’ll want us to be there, to support her – ’
‘I think what Inspector Malone is suggesting is best,’ said Angela Bodalle.
‘Everyone’s taking over – ’ Mrs Carss was resentful, outsiders were taking away her role as mother.
Olive Rockne came into the room with her sister. She was dressed in a light blue sweater and dark blue slacks; the frilly look had gone, she was fined down, this morning the girlish woman had vanished. Her hair was pulled back by a black velvet band and her face was devoid of makeup. Malone wondered if, for the first time, he was about to see the real Olive Rockne.
‘Let’s go outside,’ she said in a calm firm voice and led him and Angela Bodalle out to a glassed-in back verandah that had been converted into a pleasant garden room. It looked out on a pool in a garden bright with camellias and azaleas. The room was carpeted and furnished with cushioned cane furniture; the whole house, Malone had noted with his quick eye for furnishings, was comfortable. But there was little, if any, comfort in this house this morning.
Rose Cadogan brought coffee and biscuits. ‘I’ll leave you alone,’ she said with more diplomacy than her mother had shown and went back to the front of the house.
‘Olive, I won’t go over what you told me last night,’ said Malone, taking the coffee Angela Bodalle had poured for him. ‘But I’d like you to tell me – did Will have time to argue with whoever shot him?’
Olive, refusing coffee, said, ‘I don’t think so. It was all so quick.’
‘I’m trying to establish if it was someone attempting a robbery, shoving the gun at Will and demanding money and then panicking when Will tried to push him away. Was there time for that?’
Olive looked at Angela, who sat down on the cane couch beside her, then she looked back at Malone. ‘No, I’m sure there wasn’t. I – ’
‘Yes?’
‘I – I’ve been wondering – could he have been waiting for someone else, he made a mistake and shot Will instead?’
‘He could have been. But yours was the only silver Volvo in the car park. There might’ve been other Volvos, but yours was the only silver one.’
‘Then who could it have been?’ said Angela. ‘Some psychopath, out to kill anyone, the first person who presented himself? There seems to be a plague of them at the moment.’
Malone nodded, but made no comment. Yesterday afternoon, out at Haberfield, an armed robber, holding up a liquor store, had paused, unprovoked, to put his gun at the head of a customer lying as commanded on the floor and had blown his brains out. The previous Saturday a man had run amok in Strathfield, a middle-class suburb, with a semi-automatic rifle and killed seven people in a shopping mall before shooting himself. All the past week the air had been thick with the clamour for stricter gun laws, a demand Malone totally supported, but the politicians, more afraid of losing votes in the rural electorates than of being hit by a bullet in the cities (who would waste bullets on a politician?) were shilly-shallying about what should be done. The incidence of killing by guns in Australia was infinitesimal compared with that in the United States, but that was like saying a house siege was not a war. Someone still died, one life was no less valuable than a hundred.
‘Olive, had Will received any threats from anyone? A client or someone?’
‘I don’t think so. He would have told me – well, maybe not. He didn’t tell me much about his practice, what he did, who he acted for.’
‘Did he ever refer any clients to you?’ Malone looked at Angela Bodalle.
‘A couple. One civil suit, I took that as a favour to him, and a criminal charge.’
Malone waited and, when she did not go on, said, ‘A murder charge?’
‘It was an assault with intent, a guy named Kelpie Dunne.’ She seemed to give the name with some reluctance. ‘I got him off.’
‘I remember him. He tried to kill a security guard down at Randwick racecourse. He’s a bad bugger. Some day he’s going to kill a cop. I hope you won’t try to get him off then.’
Her gaze was steady. She was not strictly beautiful, her face was too broad to have classical lines, the jaw too square, but the eyes, large and almost black, would always hold a man, would turn him inside out if he were not careful. She raised a hand, large for a woman’s but elegant, and pushed back a loose strand of her thick dark brown hair. Malone felt that, with that look, she would make an imposing, if biased, judge. If ever she made it to the Bench, he was sure her sentences on the convicted would be more than just slaps on the wrist.
‘If I believe a client is innocent, I’ll always try to get him off.’
‘Did Will have any other clients like Kelpie? Innocent but violent?’
Angela smiled: she didn’t think much of men’s wit; or anyway, policemen’s. ‘I wouldn’t know, Inspector. Will hadn’t passed a client on to me for, oh, twelve months or more.’
Malone turned back to Olive. She had been watching this exchange with wary, almost resentful eyes, as if she felt excluded from what was her own tragedy. ‘Olive, Will made a mention last night of what he knew about the racing game. Did he have any clients from the game, jockeys, trainers, bookmakers – people like that?’
‘I told you he never mentioned his clients to me.’ Her voice had a certain sharpness.
‘No, but you did say last night – as I remember it, Will said, if I knew, meaning me, what he knew about the racing game, and you said, Tell them, darling, or something like that . . .’
‘You have a good memory.’
He hadn’t expected to be complimented, not at a time like this. ‘You learn to have one, as a cop. You sounded last night as if you knew something about racing that Will had told you.’
She shook her head; last night the frilly curls would have bounced, but this morning not a hair moved. ‘It was nothing, I was just taking the mickey out of him. You know what Will was like, he knew everything about everything.’ She said it without malice, but it wasn’t something he expected from a grieving widow.
‘Dad had one client, a bookmaker.’ Jason stood in the doorway, all arms and legs and lugubrious expression. But his voice was steady, if the rest of him wasn’t.
Malone, seated in a low chair, had to turn and look up at him. From that angle the boy looked even taller than he was: Malone had the incongruous image of a basketballer who didn’t know where the basket was. ‘Did your dad talk about the client with you?’
‘No. But I was with Dad one day, about, I dunno, about a month ago, he was taking me to basketball practice – ’ So the image wasn’t so far off, after all. ‘We called in at this bookie’s house and when he came out, he was there only about ten minutes, he was ropeable, really angry. He didn’t tell me what it was all about, all he said was never trust a bookie.’
‘You know who the man was?’
‘Sure. It was Bernie Bezrow, he lives up in that weirdo house in Georgia Street. Syphilis Hall.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what we call it, the guys, I mean. Tiflis Hall.’
Angela Bodalle said, ‘I don’t think you should get involved