Pride’s Harvest. Jon Cleary
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your list?’
‘He will be, if you want him there.’
‘Put him on it.’ Then Malone turned to Clements. ‘Well, how’d you go?’
‘Bugger-all. Nobody understands why it happened. None of the drivers saw anything unusual in any of their loads, not when they brought the loads in from the fields.’
Malone glanced at Baldock. ‘Did the Physical Evidence boys find any blood on any of the trucks or buggies?’
‘None.’
‘What time do they start work here?’
‘The pickers start at seven in the morning,’ said Mungle in his quiet voice; it was difficult to tell whether he was shy or stand-offish. ‘The gin starts up at seven thirty. If the feeder was stopped at eight fifteen or thereabouts, that means the body must of been in the first or second load brought in the day before the murder. No one can remember who would have been driving that particular buggy.’
‘Our only guess,’ said Clements, ‘is that he was shot during the night and the killer scooped out a module, put the body in and re-packed the cotton again. They tell us that would be difficult but not impossible.’
‘He could have been brought in by the murderer in a buggy,’ said Malone. ‘Wally, would you ask Koga to step out here again?’
Mungle went across to the office and while he was gone Malone looked about him, faking bemusement. Baldock said, ‘What are you looking for?’
‘Media hacks. Down in Sydney they’d be around us like flies around a garbage tip. Don’t you have any out here?’
‘There’s the local paper and the radio station.They were out here Tuesday morning, getting in our way, as usual. They’ll be making a nuisance of themselves again, soon’s they hear you’re taking over.’
‘I thought they’d have heard that anyway,’ Malone said drily. ‘I don’t want to see ’em, Curly. This is your turf, you handle them. You’re the police spokesman, okay?’
Then Koga, diffident as before, came back with Wally Mungle. ‘You wanted me, Inspector?’ The thin, high voice broke, and he coughed. ‘Excuse me.’
‘What sort of security do you have out here, Mr Koga?’
‘None, Inspector. Mr Sagawa and I live – lived over there in the manager’s house.’ He pointed to a farmhouse, a relic of whatever the farm had once been, a couple of hundred yards away. ‘We were our own security. It was good enough, Mr Sagawa thought . . .’
But not good enough, Malone thought. ‘Where were you Monday night?’
The question seemed to startle Koga; he took off his glasses, as if they had suddenly fogged up; he looked remarkably young without them. ‘I – I went into town to the movies.’
‘What did you see?’ Malone’s voice was almost too casual.
Koga wiped his glasses, put them back on. ‘It was called Sea of Love. With Al Pacino.’
Malone looked at Baldock and Mungle. ‘I saw that down in Sydney at Christmas.’
‘It’s already been on out here,’ said Mungle. ‘They brought it back – by popular demand, they said. I think the locals were hoping the cop would be bumped off the second time around.’
Malone looked at Clements. ‘I thought you said this was a conservative district?’ Then he turned back to Koga, who had listened to all this without really understanding the cops’ sardonic acceptance of the public’s attitude towards them. ‘Was Mr Sagawa at the house when you got back from town?’
Koga shook his head. ‘No, he did not come home at all that night.’
‘Did that worry you?’
‘Not really. Mr Sagawa liked to – ’ he looked at Baldock; then went on, ‘ – he liked to gamble.’
Malone raised an eyebrow at Baldock, who said, ‘Ray Chakiros runs a small baccarat school out at the showgrounds a coupla nights a week, Mondays and Thursdays. We turn a blind eye to it. It never causes us any trouble.’
Malone wondered how much money had to change hands for no trouble to be caused; but that wasn’t his worry. ‘All right, Mr Koga, that’ll do. Thanks for your time.’
Koga bowed his head and Malone had to catch himself before he did the same; he did not want to be thought to be mocking the young Japanese. Koga went back to the office and Malone turned to the others. ‘Righto, let’s go back to town. Russ, you take Curly. Wally can ride with me.’
Clements was not the world’s best actor, but he could put on an admirable poker face. Wally Mungle’s own dark face was just as expressionless. He got in beside Malone and said nothing till they had driven out past the fields and on to the main road into town. As they did so, Malone noticed that all the cotton-pickers, the trucks and the buggies had stopped and their drivers were staring after the two departing police cars. He looked back and saw that Koga had come out on to the veranda of the office and was gazing after them. He wondered how far the young man, with his thick glasses, could see.
Mungle said, ‘Are you gunna ask me some questions you didn’t want Sergeant Baldock to hear? I don’t go behind his back, Inspector.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. No, Sergeant Baldock knows what I’m going to ask you. It’s about your cousin Billy Koowarra.’
‘Yeah, I thought it might be.’ Mungle nodded. He had taken off his hat and a long black curl dangled on his forehead like a bell-cord. He was a good-looking man, his features not as broad as those of a full-blood; his nose was straight and fine, and Malone wondered what white man had dipped his wick in tribal waters. He knew, from his experience in Sydney, that the mixed-bloods were the most difficult to deal with. They saw the world through mirrors, all of them cracked.
‘How long have you been a cop, Wally?’
‘Four years.’
‘Any regrets?’
Mungle stared ahead of them down the long black strip of macadam, shining blue in parts as if pools of water covered it. A big semi-trailer came rushing at them and he waited till it had roared by. ‘Sometimes.’
‘They treat you all right at the station?’
‘I’m the token Abo.’ He smiled, as much to himself as to Malone. ‘No, they’re okay.’
There had been a recruiting campaign to have more Aborigines join the police force, but so far there had been a scarce response. Every time Malone saw a TV newsreel of police action in South Africa, he was amazed at the number of black Africans in uniform, many of them laying into their fellow blacks with as much enthusiasm as their white colleagues. That, he knew, would never happen here.
‘What about amongst your family and the other blacks?’
‘My mum’s proud of me. I never knew my dad.’ He offered no more information on his father and Malone didn’t ask. ‘The rest of the Kooris – ’ He shrugged. ‘Depends whether they’re sober or not. When they’ve had a skinful, some of ’em get real shitty towards me.’
‘What sort of education did you have?’
‘I got to Year Eleven. One time I dreamed of getting my HSC and going on to university.’ He was a dinkum Aussie: he had said haitch for H. It was a characteristic that always brought a laugh from Lisa, the foreigner. ‘We Kooris are supposed to live in the Dreamtime. Some of us have different dreams to others.’
Malone could think of nothing to say to that; so he said, ‘What about your cousin Billy?’
‘Is he a suspect?’
‘I don’t know. What about him?’
‘He’s