Murder Song

‘Yeah, what is it?’ She had all the politeness of someone who hated her sleep being disturbed, even at ten o’clock in the morning.

Malone introduced himself. ‘Does Miss Mardi Jack live here?’

‘Yeah. But she’s not in. Why?’

‘Are you a relative?’

The sleep quickly cleared from the girl’s eyes; she was alertly intelligent. ‘Is something wrong? Is she in jail or something?’

Malone told her the bad news as gently as he could; he had had plenty of experience at this but it never became any easier. ‘Does she have a family? Parents or a husband?’

The girl leaned against the door as if mortally wounded by shock. ‘Oh my God! Shot?’ She had a husky voice that cracked now; she cleared her throat, wrapped her dressing-gown tighter round her as if she had just felt something more than the morning cold. ‘You wanna come in?’

She led the way down a narrow hall, through a small living-room and out into a kitchen that seemed to be about two hundred years ahead of the vintage front of the house. Beyond its glass wall was a neat courtyard, complete with trees in pots, a bird-bath and a gas barbecue on wheels. Tradition could be respected only just so far, about half the length of the house.

The girl prepared coffee. ‘Espresso or cappuccino?’

All mod cons, thought Malone; this girl, and probably Mardi Jack, knew how to live well. Except that Mardi Jack had gone where all mod cons counted for nothing. ‘Cappuccino. Do you mind if I ask who you are?’

‘I’m Gina Cazelli – Mardi and I share – shared this place. You asked about her family. She just had her father, he lives somewhere up on the Gold Coast. He and Mardi weren’t too close. Her parents separated when she was a little girl, then her mother died about, oh, I think it was five or six years ago.’

‘Did she have any close friends, I mean besides you. A boy-friend, an ex-husband?’

‘I don’t think she’d ever been married, at least she never mentioned that she had. She had no particular guy. She was – I shouldn’t say this about her, but I’m trying to help, I mean, find who shot her. She sorta played the field. Christ, that sounds disloyal, doesn’t it?’ She busied herself getting cups and saucers, got some croissants out of a bread-tin and put them in a microwave oven. Malone noticed that the kitchen was as tidy and spotless as Lisa’s; Gina Cazelli at the moment looked like a wreck, but either she or Mardi Jack had kept a neat house. ‘She wasn’t a whore. She was just unlucky with the men she fell in love with. She’d be absolutely nuts about some guy, it’d last three or four months and then he’d be gone. She’d bounce herself off other guys out of, I dunno, spite or self-pity or something. You know what women are like.’

She looked at him carefully and he smiled and nodded. ‘I try to know ’em. It ain’t easy.’

She nodded in reply, took the croissants out of the microwave. ‘I haven’t had breakfast. Yeah, you’re right. Men are easier to know.’

‘What did Mardi do? For a living?’

‘She was a singer. Good, but not good enough, I mean to be a top-liner. She sang around the clubs, you know, the girl who comes on and sings for the wives before the smutty comic comes on and tells sexist jokes. She hated it, but it paid the rent. Her main income came from singing jingles for commercials. That was how we met. I’m an assistant producer with a recording studio.’

‘Were you close? As friends, I mean.’

She handed him his coffee and a croissant, pushed strawberry jam in a small decorated crock towards him; he began to suspect that Gina was the one who kept the house up to House and Garden standards. She handed him a fancy paper napkin, yellow to match the front door and the colour strips on the kitchen cupboard doors and drawers.

‘No, we weren’t that close. We sorta lived our own lives. There was ten years’ difference between us – she was thirty-three. It made a difference. She liked older guys.’

Malone sipped his coffee, trying not to be too obvious as he studied Gina Cazelli. She was dumpy and plain, her plainness not helped by her frizzed-out hair; it was the sort of hair that would always look the same, in or out of bed, any time of day or night; it was the latest fashion, Claire, the fashion expert, had told him when he had commented on a certain TV actress’s hair-style. Malone had seen Gina’s type before when he had had to brush against the fringes of the entertainment industry: the too-willing, efficient plain jane whom everyone would use because they knew that what she was doing was her whole life, her only escape from whatever drudgery was her alternative.

‘Any particular older bloke?’ It was one of his idiosyncrasies that he never used the word guy; fighting a losing battle, he stuck to the slang of his rabidly patriotic father, Con Malone, who hated more foreigners than even the Aborigines did. ‘A recent one?’

Gina shook her head; the hair shivered like an unravelled string cap. ‘No, there’s been no one for at least four, maybe five months. Nobody she’s brought home.’ She munched on her croissant. ‘But –’

‘But what?’ he said patiently after waiting a few moments.

‘I think there’s been one guy. He used to ring her here, not often, but maybe two or three times. She never told me anything about him and I never asked. She had a call from him on Saturday morning at the studio, we were doing a recording for a TV commercial. God, when I think of it!’

‘What?’

‘The jingle was “I’ll be alive forever”!’ She gulped down a mouthful of coffee; for a moment she looked as if she was about to burst into tears. Then she shook her head again, the hair shivered. ‘Well, it was him. I took the call and he asked for her.’

‘Did he ever give his name when you took a call from him?’

‘No. When she came back from the phone she seemed upset, but she didn’t say anything. I had to work back and by the time I got home Saturday, about six, she’d gone out.’

Malone put down his empty cup, declined the offer of more coffee. Cappuccino and croissants on Monday morning in Paddington was okay for assistant recording producers and artists and ballet dancers, but not for working cops. ‘Could I have a look at her room?’

Gina hesitated, then nodded. ‘I suppose you’ve got to. But it’s like intruding on her, isn’t it?’

‘It’s better intruding on the dead than on the living, but we don’t enjoy any of it.’

She smiled, a painful one, and for a moment looked less plain. ‘Why do we call you pigs? Not all of you are.’

She led him up the narrow stairs to a back bedroom that looked out on to the courtyard. The room looked as if it had been freshly painted, but it was a mess, a sanitized rubbish tip. The bed was unmade, clothes were strewn over the two chairs, the dressing-table looked like a wrecked corner of a beauty parlour. He began to suspect that Mardi Jack’s life might have been just as unkempt.

‘She took two showers a day,’ said Gina Cazelli, ‘but she hadn’t the faintest idea what a coat-hanger was for.’

‘You mind if I look through here on my own? You can trust me.’

She looked around the room, sad and puzzled at what might be all that was left of her friend’s life; then abruptly she left him. Malone began the sort of search that always disturbed him, the turning over of a murder or suicide victim to see what was hidden beneath the body.

The closet was packed tightly with clothes, all of them expensive and, by his taste, a bit way out. There were leather and sequins and eye-dazzling silks and taffetas; Malone wondered how the man who never left his name could have had a discreet affair with her. Then he found a black woollen coat and remembered the black fox one in the flat where she had been murdered. He wondered if the man had bought them for her, thrown them over her to hide her.

He went through the drawers of the closet and the dressing-table. In the bottom drawer of the latter he found what a policeman always hopes for: the personal give-away that we always leave when we depart this life unexpectedly, the secret at last exposed to the light.

It was a journal rather than a diary; there were no dates other than the year, 1989, in gold figures on the green cover. There were no names, only initials; it seemed, however, that Mardi Jack wrote only about the men in her life, it was an all-male world except for herself. It seemed, too, that she fell in love, genuine love, as other people, fumble-footed, fall into holes that more nimble-footed elements avoid. The men, it also seemed, walked away, leaving her floundering; she would be bitter for a time, then the next temptation would appear. Christ, thought Malone, what makes women such masochists? He had forgotten that Lisa had already given him the answer: love is both a form of possession and a form of masochism and women feel the latter more deeply than men. Men once wore hair shirts, but it was women who had woven them and tried them on first.

The later entries spoke of B., ‘the love of my life’. He appeared sincere and gentle enough in the early days of their relationship – ‘He makes me feel as if I’m walking on clouds. All I want to do is sing love songs, happy ones. Get lost, Billie Holliday.’ Then the words and music started to change: ‘God, he is just like the rest of them. The second brushoff in a week.’ One could feel the anger in her pen; the writing was shaky. ‘No excuses. I just won’t be there tonight, he says. Jesus, why do I bother? Won’t I ever learn? Come back Billie Holliday, Edith Piaf, all you women who cry the blues! I know, boy do I know, what you mean!’

Malone was embarrassed by the melodrama of her feelings, the banality of the entries; but she hadn’t been writing for him or anyone else, not even the man who had dumped her. He should not expect the laconic reporting style of a police running sheet.

The last entry must have been written on Saturday just before she had gone out to her death; the writing seemed to quiver on the page: ‘I’m seeing B. tonight – I hope! We must have it out between us. Will this be our last meeting? Please God no! He says there is someone else … When I first met him all those years ago in London there was already someone else – ah, but he was a different man then and I wasn’t even a woman, just a different girl.’

Malone closed the journal, continued his search, found nothing else that was helpful. He took the journal downstairs with him. ‘I’ll be taking this with me. I’ll sign for it. Did you ever see her writing in this?’

Gina Cazelli shook her head; she sat at the kitchen table sipping a second cup of cappuccino or perhaps even a third. There was still the look of pain on her round face, almost like a bruise. ‘You find anything in it?’

‘Just a reference to someone called B. She never mentioned him?’

‘Never. But he was probably the guy she’s been seeing lately.’ She frowned, squeezing her memory. ‘I can’t remember any of the guys she brought home, none of their names started with a B. There was a Charlie and a Roger and a Raul – he was South American. They were all bums, fly-by-nights or in the morning, but she couldn’t see that and I never told her.’

‘Well, it’s too late to tell her now. I’ll send a police-woman out here to go through her things again. If you think of anything that might help, ring me.’ He dropped his card on the table. Then he said, as he might to Claire in five or six years’ time, ‘Be careful with your men, Gina.’

She smiled wearily, wryly. ‘What men?’

He left her then, went out to the Commodore; sure enough, there was another parking ticket stuck behind one of the wipers. There were also two splashes of bird-crap on the bonnet. Grey Bombers and their tickets were not universal; but birds were everywhere, always haunting him. If he took the Commodore to Antarctica, the penguins would be sure to leave their frozen mark on it.

3

Russ Clements was already back at Homicide waiting for him, cleaning out his murder box, a cardboard shoe box, of last week’s homicide and making room for this week’s bits and pieces that might add up to incriminating evidence. So far there was very little.

‘We went right through the apartment building, but came up with nothing. There’s only six permanent residents – the rest of the flats are company ones, used by company staff or visiting freeloaders. Nobody heard any shot, nobody saw Mardi Jack – the other two flats on that floor are also company ones. Andy Graham had a look at the roof of that building in Kent Street. Someone had been up there – there was a half-eaten sandwich and a Coke can.’

Malone looked at the murder box. ‘You got the sandwich in there?’

Clements grimaced. ‘You kidding? It’s gone to Scientific. They’ll hold it and we’ll match the bite prints against whoever we pick up.’

‘Any cartridge cases?’

‘None. Possibly a bolt-action rifle. He coulda been a pro or a semi-pro – he knew what he was about. One shot and he didn’t have to extract the shell. The roof is about twenty feet below the balcony, so he’d have been shooting upwards. That meant he was probably aiming to put the shot between the bars of the balcony railings.’

‘At night?’

‘The railings and Mardi Jack were both silhouetted against the lights in the living-room, assuming he shot her Saturday night. You ever use a night ’scope? You’d be surprised how accurate you can be with ’em.’ Clements was the gun expert of the two of them. Malone hated guns and spent the minimum allowable time on the practice range.

Malone sat down, taking off his jacket. After almost a year here in the new Police Centre, he was still getting accustomed to the extra space in his own office. For years the Police Department had been scattered over the inner city; Homicide at one time had been quartered in a leased commercial building. It had lent a certain informality to murder, an atmosphere not always appreciated by the murderers brought in, some of whom expected the Brueghel-like scenes of Hill Street Blues and felt cheated to look like no more than tax evaders. The Police Centre had an antiseptic look to it which Clements, a naturally untidy man, was doing his best to correct. Malone, for his part, kept his office neat, as if expecting Lisa to come in any day and do housework.

‘Anything on the company that owns the flat?’

‘Kensay. I’ve been on to Companies Registration. It’s one of ten companies that are subsidiaries of Cossack Holdings. That’s why it’s in the Cossack building.’

‘What does Kensay do?’

‘It owns a music publishing company and a recording studio and it makes TV commercials. It was registered in 1983.’

‘Cossack Holdings – who are they? You’re the big-time investor.’

It was a private joke between them that Clements was the richest honest cop in the NSW Police Department. He had always been a lucky horse punter and since the October 1987 market crash he had dabbled on the stock exchange, picking up some sweet bargains through his brokers. He was not greedy, did not even have an ambition to be rich; he just gambled because he loved gambling. He was also incorruptible.

‘They’re a public company, unlike Kensay. They’re the leading shareholder in the O’Brien Cossack. That’s a merchant bank. Their shares are very dicey at the moment – there are lots of rumours. The bank and the guy who started all the companies are being investigated by the National Companies and Securities Commission. Brian Boru O’Brien.’

‘Brian Boru. B …’

‘What?’

Malone told him about the B. in Mardi Jack’s journal, pushing the book across his desk at him. ‘It’s a long shot –’

Then he looked up as Chief Inspector Greg Random wandered into his office. Greg Random had never been a man in a hurry, but lately he had seemed to be ambling aimlessly up and down the corridors of the Centre. He had been the chief of the thirty-six detectives in the old Homicide Bureau; but regionalization had broken up the Bureau and reduced the staff to thirteen detectives, too few for a chief inspector to command. Random had been moved to a supernumerary position, where he was lost and unhappy. He had come in now because he could still smell a homicide a mile away.

‘What happened down in Clarence Street?’ He was a tall, thin man with a shock of white hair and weary eyes. Nothing ever surprised him, neither the depravity of man nor the occasional kindnesses.

Malone told him. ‘We aren’t even in the starting blocks yet. All we know is she was shot by a high-powered rifle.’

‘Like those other two, the Gardner case and Terry Sugar?’

Malone raised his eyebrows. ‘I hadn’t thought about them.’

‘That’s all I’ve got, time to think. There’s bugger-all else for me to do.’

‘You think there’s some connection?’

‘I don’t know – that’s your job.’ Malone was now in charge of the remaining thirteen detectives and he sometimes wondered if Greg Random resented his luck. ‘Get Ballistics to get their finger out. Tell ’em you want a comparison of the bullets by tomorrow afternoon at the latest.’

Malone wanted to tell him that he no longer ran Homicide, but he couldn’t kick a man who was now virtually a pensioner, even if on a chief inspector’s 44,800 dollars a year. ‘Righto, Greg, thanks for the suggestion.’

Random hung around for another minute or two, then wandered out and disappeared. Malone looked at Clements. ‘Righto, you heard what the Chief Inspector said. Get your finger out.’

Clements sighed, picked up the phone and dialled Ballistics two floors above them. He spoke to someone there for a minute or two, trying to sound patient as he pressed his point, then he put down the phone. ‘They say they’re short-staffed – they’ve got two guys away in the bush and two off with the ’flu. They’ll do their best, but do we think all they have to do is help us solve homicide cases.’

Malone stood up, put on his jacket and raincoat and the battered rainhat he wore on wet days. ‘Come on, let’s go down and talk to Cossack Holdings. If nothing else, you might pick up some bargains.’

They drove down in an unmarked police car. The sun had disappeared and it was raining again, the rain riding a slanting wind down through the narrow streets of the central business district. Sydney was still a clean city compared to many, but high-rise development was doing its best to turn it into a city of shadows on sunny days and canyons of gloom on days such as today. The roadway and the pavements glistened like dirty grey ice; a red traffic light was bright as a desert sun in the dull day; a shoal of umbrellas made a shifting pattern as it drifted down Bridge Street. Clements parked the car, but ignored the threatening meter with its Expired red glare.

They rode up to the thirty-fifth floor, rising past the bank offices on the lower floors to the executive offices of Cossack Holdings. The reception lobby would not have been out of place in a five-star hotel. The black-haired girl behind the big desk was dressed in a beige suede suit that complemented the green suede walls. A Brett Whiteley hung on one wall; an Arthur Boyd faced it. This was not a reception lobby that welcomed would-be clients rattling a tin cup.

The girl did not look surprised that Cossack should be visited by the police. ‘May I tell Mr Bousakis the nature of your visit?’ Her vowels were as rounded as her figure.

‘Who’s Mr Bousakis?’ said Clements, who had made the introduction of himself and Malone.

‘The chief executive. You said you wanted to see the boss.’ She obviously thought all policemen were vulgar.

‘I think we’ll tell him the nature of our business when we see him,’ said Malone, smiling at her. ‘It won’t take long.’

She didn’t smile back, but got up and went into an inner office. It was almost a minute before she came back and held open the door. ‘Mr Bousakis will see you.’

The inner office was as big as the reception lobby; the shareholders in Cossack kept their executives in the style to which they aspired. George Bousakis did not rise from behind his big desk; from the bulk of him it looked as if he got to his feet only in an emergency. He was a huge man, at least six feet four and three hundred pounds: Malone still thought in the old measures when assessing a stranger. He was in his mid-forties with black slicked-back hair, a hint of handsome features behind the jowls and fat cheeks, and dark eyes that would miss nothing, even that which was hidden. He wore a pink shirt with white collar and cuffs, a blue tie with a thin red stripe in it, and a dark blue double-breasted suit. Converted to sailcloth, Malone reckoned there was enough material in the shirt and suit to have equipped a twelve-metre yacht.

‘Good morning. Miss Rogers didn’t say which section you were from.’ He had a pleasant voice, at least in timbre; but there was a hard edge to it.

‘Homicide,’ said Malone and explained the reason for their visit. ‘Miss Jack had a key to the flat. Who would have given her that?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’ Bousakis showed no shock at the news of murder in one of the company flats; Mardi Jack could have been something discovered missing from stock during an inventory check. ‘I wouldn’t know Miss – Jack? – if I fell over her.’

It would be the end of her if you did, Malone thought. ‘Do you ever use the flat yourself, Mr Bousakis?’

‘Never.’

‘Who does use it?’ Malone sat back, letting Clements take over the questioning. Their teamwork was invariably good: Malone always knew when it was time to change the bowling.

‘Some of our executives. Sales directors, people like that. And out-of-towners, people from our interstate offices. We put them up there instead of in hotels. We’re very cost-conscious,’ he said, evidently blind to the indulgence amidst which he sat. The room, green and grey, had suede-covered walls like the outer office; the carpet almost buried one’s shoes; the furniture was antique or a good reproduction of it. The paintings on the walls were from the traditional school: there was a Gruner, a Streeton, a Wakelin: they were familiar, but Malone did not know enough to name the artists.

‘Any of the O’Brien Cossack personnel?’

‘Occasionally. We try to keep ourselves separate from the bank.’

‘Why?’

Bousakis’ voice hardened just a little, his fat lips looked suddenly thin. ‘It’s just company policy.’

‘What about Mr Brian Boru O’Brien?’ Clements seemed to have a little difficulty in getting the name out.

Bousakis’ gaze was steady. ‘What about him?’

‘Would he use the flat?’ What a bowler to have at the other end, thought Malone in cricket terms: Clements thumped the ball down straight at the batsman’s head, the West Indians would have offered him full citizenship right off.

‘Why should he do that? Mr O’Brien has the penthouse suite at the Congress, only a couple of blocks from here.’

‘He lives there?’

‘Yes. Mr O’Brien’s not the sort of businessman who goes in for flamboyant mansions. He likes to live quietly, without too much self-advertisement. We have enough of that in this town,’ Bousakis added with a curled tongue, and Clements nodded in agreement.

Malone wondered what the penthouse suite at the Congress hotel would cost. Five thousand a week, six, seven, even allowing for corporate rates? It was an expensive way of living quietly, of being cost-conscious. He then began to wonder what the rumours were that Clements had mentioned about Cossack Holdings.

‘What does Mr O’Brien do? I mean in regard to Cossack?’

‘He’s the executive chairman. He leaves the day-to-day running to me, but he’s here every day, doing the strategic thinking. He wouldn’t even know we own that apartment you’re talking about.’

‘I think we’d like to see him,’ said Malone, taking over the bowling, deciding it was time to start seaming the ball.

‘I don’t think that can be arranged at such short notice –’

‘You mean your girl outside hasn’t already warned him we’re here?’ Clements was still thumping them down.

‘You’re pretty blunt, aren’t you, Sergeant?’

‘This is one of his milder days,’ said Malone, deciding that Clements had bowled enough bean-balls. ‘We don’t want to be rudely blunt, Mr Bousakis, but we are investigating a murder committed in a flat owned by one of your companies.’