A Different Turf

JON CLEARY

A Different Turf

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

l

‘A typical woman,’ said Clements, but with affection. ‘You ask her a question in the dark and all she does is nod her head.’

‘If she doesn’t have a headache,’ said Lisa, ‘that’s all you need.’

‘Don’t be crude,’ said Malone. ‘Not in front of the b-a-b-y.’

It was hospital bedside chat, just another coverlet to keep the patient warm. Romy Clements, breast-feeding her day-old daughter, smiled at the three of them. She was a goodlooking, square-jawed woman, dark-haired and looking still a little peaked from what had been a difficult birth. She had insisted on a natural birth and had given the doctor the edge of her tongue when he had suggested a caesarean. She had wanted to tell him she knew all about pain, both mental and physical, but she did not have that kind of conceit. She had wondered, but not discussed it with the doctor or any of the mid-wives, if her aversion to the knife on her own body had something to do with the fact that, as Deputy-Director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, she assisted in the use of the knife on bodies in the city morgue almost every day in the week.

‘Russ’, parents are coming up from Cootamundra tomorrow. Their first granddaughter.’

Clements explained: ‘My two sisters have five boys between them. Mum will be out of her mind with this one. It’s a pity—’ Then he abruptly shut up, tripping over his tongue.

Romy put out a hand to him. ‘It’s all right. As you say, it’s a pity my mother couldn’t have seen her. But …’ Her mother had been dead twelve years. No mention was made of her father, who had suicided after committing three murders. Malone, looking at the infant Clements, wondered how she would be protected against her heritage.

Clements was a big man, over six feet tall and weighing more than a hundred kilos. His forte was untidiness, though since his marriage to Romy two years ago there had been some improvement in his outward appearance. His mind, however, was a stuffed garbage bag; he could fossick in it and come up with a fact that nailed a piece of evidence to any number of courtroom walls. He was a senior-sergeant, the field supervisor in Homicide, Major Crime Squad, South Region, and some day he might make chief inspector. But he would go no further, he had left his run too late, and by then the Young Turks, with their tertiary education degrees and untainted by the old police culture, would be running the Service.

‘Have you decided on a name?’ asked Lisa Malone, who liked life to be neatly catalogued. She was Dutch, though she had spent very little of her life in Holland, and there was a Dutch neatness to her that Malone and their children gently derided, though they would not have wanted her any other way.

‘Russ wanted to call her Marlene. He has some idea that all German girls are called Marlene or Romy or Brunhilde. She’s going to be Amanda.’

‘She’ll be called Mandy,’ said Malone, who liked Amanda but not the diminutive.

‘No, she won’t,’ said the new mother and Malone knew Amanda Clements would never be called Mandy. Not if the child had her mother’s willpower.

‘The girls and Tom will be in to see you,’ said Lisa. ‘They are already looking on her as their cousin.’

Malone looked again at the new baby, tiny face pressed against its mother’s breast. He tried to remember his first sight of his own three, but couldn’t and felt a certain shame. A man should remember something like that; after all, he was partly responsible for their entry into this life. He did remember that at the time he had had no worries about them, not even for Tom, the youngest, now almost fifteen; when they had come into the world the future had still looked reasonably bright. Sure, Australia had been on the verge of a recession when Tom arrived, but the country had weathered earlier recessions and two Great Depressions, in the eighteen nineties and the nineteen thirties; the national anthem had always been She’ll Be Right, Mate and somehow things had always come right, mate. But now the new century was just round the corner of the calendar and the future was a mess of lines on a computer screen. Old certainties had been shattered and Malone had begun to worry now for Claire, Maureen and Tom. And, because of his love for Russ Clements and Romy, he would worry for Amanda.

‘Time we were going.’ He stood up. ‘Can I kiss your wife while she’s got her breast bared?’

‘I dunno,’ said Clements. ‘Ask your wife.’

As the Malones walked down the corridor of the hospital Lisa said, ‘I’m glad for Romy. Today she starts a new life.’

‘In more ways than one.’

‘That’s what I meant. She can forget her father now.’

‘I hope so. If she doesn’t, then her old life isn’t over.’

Lisa looked at him with love, put her hand in his. ‘There are things about you that still touch me. Don’t ever change.’

They were a handsome couple, though they never thought of themselves as such. He was tall and broad-shouldered and still reasonably presentable round the waist; he had the sort of face that, because it did not run to fat would look handsomer as he grew older. Lisa was of medium height tending towards tallness, which was accentuated by her upright carriage. She was better than merely goodlooking, but she had no vanity about it. She had kept her figure with diet and once-a-week aerobics; she ran a tight house and kept her husband and her children from ever being slobs. Appearance counted with her, but not for appearances’ sake. She just had, as Malone did, standards.

‘This way.’

Malone opened a door that led to a flight of stairs. Romy was in the private wing of St Sebastian’s, but Malone, ignoring the hospital’s underground garage, had parked the car in the doctors’ section outside the main general wing. Anything to save a dollar or two, Lisa had said, but had gone along with his parsimony. She had lived with it so long she had palpitations on the rare occasion when he splurged money.

The stairs ended at a door that opened into the reception area of the Emergency ward. It was Saturday night – Butchers’ Picnic Night, as Malone had heard one ambulance medic describe it – and the casualties had already begun arriving. A young boy with a broken arm; a motorcyclist who, helmetless, had gone through the windscreen of a car; a woman who had cut her wrists and was screaming she wanted to die: they stood, sat, lay in the waiting area like wreckage from Bosnia. Then, stretched out on an ambulance gurney, Malone saw a man he recognized, though his face was a bloody mess beneath the pads taped to it.

‘Just a minute,’ he told Lisa and stepped across to the Triage desk. He had once looked up the word triage: the act of assorting according to quality. He could only assume that its use was designed not to hurt the feelings of those who thought they deserved first attention, that no one was more damaged than they. An ambulance medic was giving details to me duty nurse.

He finished, turned round and pulled up when he saw Malone. ‘Scobie! How’re things?’

‘All right with me, Billy.’ He looked around at the casualties, then at the man on the gurney. ‘But you look as if you’re already having a busy night.’

‘And it’s only eight-thirty.’ Billy Logan was a wiry middle-aged man with close-cropped sandy hair and a lined face that could have been a mask; he had once told Malone that it was the only face he could wear on duty. ‘It’s starting to wear me down, this job. It’s about time I applied for promotion and got into administration.’

‘The feller over there, what happened to him?’

‘You know him?’

‘His name’s Bob Anders, he helped me on a case once. He’s with – or he was, maybe still – the Securities Commission. He’s one of their investigators.’

‘A-N-D-E-R-S?’ The medic turned back to the nurse, gave her the name; then he turned back to Malone. ‘He was bashed in Oxford Street about half an hour ago. A bit early in the night, they usually don’t go around bashing ’em till later.’

‘They?’

‘He’s gay, isn’t he? This time they rolled him as well, took his wallet. That’s why we had no identification. Poor bugger.’ He looked across at Anders, then back at Malone. ‘But there’s gunna be a job for you, I’d say. The kid leading the bashers, he was shot’

‘Dead?’

‘The third in two months. Looks like you’ve got a serial killer. Or a gay vigilante. Depends which way you look at it.’

2

Sunday morning Malone went to Mass with Lisa and the children. Lisa appeared to pay attention to the sermon, but Malone and the children all had the blank expressions of minds that were elsewhere. The sermon was based on a letter of St Paul to the Ephesians; Paul, whom Malone considered one of the Great Know-Alls, was not one of the family’s favourites. Malone often idly wondered if anyone from Ephesus ever wrote back. Did an Ephesian ever come in from his mailbox and grumble to his wife, ‘More bloody junk mail’? Such thoughts enabled him to get through a dull sermon.

Coming out of Mass his pager beeped. ‘Oh, God,’ said Maureen; and Lisa, Claire and Tom all rolled their eyes. There were disadvantages to being the family of an inspector, the Co-ordinator in charge of Homicide. There were, of course, advantages: seventy thousand plus dollars a year, good superannuation, the occasional chance that one might be a hero, a surviving one, that is. Yet, for all their complaints, Malone knew that none of them would want him to be anything else but a Homicide detective. Not so long as it was his own sole desire, which it was. Even though he could never fully explain to himself why.

In the church car park he unlocked the car and they all got in. It was a new car – his first in ten years – a Fairlane this time instead of the Holden Commodore he had driven for so long. It had hurt him to go out and buy the new car; he was not a car man, a petrolhead, and any vehicle that continued to go without falling apart was good enough for him. But the family, pleading social disgrace, had finally prevailed. And now they had the new car, complete with car phone.

Detective-Senior-Constable John Kagal was at Strawberry Hills. ‘I was beeped to come in, sir. Surry Hills wants us to come in with their task force on the guy who’s killing the gay-bashers.’

‘Did you know your friend Bob Anders was bashed last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Righto, I’ll be in.’ He hung up, cutting short any further discussion. He always tried to keep police business, especially murder, as remote from the family as possible. ‘Sorry. I’ll be as quick as I can. I’ll meet you for lunch – where are we going?’

‘Doyles at Watson’s Bay,’ said Lisa. ‘If you’re not there, I’ll charge it to the Commissioner.’

‘I love you four. I read about a family like you. The Borgias.’

‘They’d have finished you off right quick.’ Claire was twenty, as goodlooking as her mother and as serene.

‘Can I come with you?’ Tom was going on fifteen, almost six feet tall and broad with it; Malone hoped that his son might be a better fast bowler than he himself had once been. He saw more to laugh at in the world than either of his sisters, but he was not careless of its traps. ‘I won’t get in your way.’

‘You can come with me the day you join the Service.’

‘Oh, God.’ Maureen was seventeen, more vivacious than the rest of them, a happy cynic who was beginning to trouble her father. ‘Two of them in the family! Big Cop and Little Cop.’

Malone left the car with them and caught a taxi into Strawberry Hills. The glass-fronted building had once been a mail-sorting exchange, notorious for its union troubles, but now it housed an administration section of Australia Post and several Police Service units, including Homicide. The ghosts of union organizers still wandered the building, depressed by all the peace.

John Kagal was waiting for him, as immaculate and handsome as ever. He was dressed this morning in a blue cotton skivvy, well-cut navy blazer, grey slacks and black loafers. Lately he had adopted the fashionable haircut of Hugh Grant, but his eyes were too shrewd for the floppy, little-boy look. He was masquerading, but Malone felt that was his natural pose. He did his best to like the younger man, but something always intruded on his good intentions. Perhaps it was Kagal’s slightly superior air, the knowledge that he had two university degrees and nobody else in Homicide had even one; perhaps it was that he had been to one of the more expensive private schools, that somewhere in his background was a family with money. Though he rarely, if ever, spoke of them. He was intensely private and that did not mesh with the police culture.

‘Garry Peeples at Surry Hills asked us to come in.’ It was typical of Kagal that he named rank only for chief inspectors and above; his own rank, or lack of it, seemed to trouble him. Peeples, Malone remembered, was a senior-sergeant in charge of detectives at Surry Hills. ‘He seemed to think that the killings are getting out of hand.’

‘Righto, let’s get over there. Anyone else in here today?’ Homicide did not run a duty officer at night and weekends, but there were always three detectives on call should local command detectives need them.

‘Kate is coming in, just in case we need her.’

Kate Arletti was one of two women members of Homicide, a girl who held her own against the chauvinism, repressed but still occasionally visible, in the seventeen-men-plus-two-women unit. She and Kagal got on well together, often working as partners, and Malone had begun to suspect mere might be something more than police work going on between them. So long as they didn’t start holding hands in the office, he didn’t mind. That was one of his standards.

On the way over to Surry Hills in an unmarked police car, Malone said, ‘I saw Bob Anders last night at St Sebastian’s. I was there saying hello to Russ’s new daughter.’

‘They both well, the baby and Dr Clements?’ Malone had noticed in the past that Kagal always gave Romy her rank.

‘Thriving. Your friend wasn’t. He looked badly bashed up.’

Kagal nodded. ‘I saw him first thing this morning. The bastards did a job on him. But he got one of them.’

‘Who? Bob Anders? He did the shooting?’

‘No, no. The killer. Or killers. There have been three in the past two months and there was one last year when we were working on the Huxwood case.’

‘Why weren’t we called in before this?’ But he knew why. There was nothing so sacred as a patrol commander’s turf; it was the civilized version of the animal kingdom’s territorial imperative. ‘No, don’t tell me. Let’s try and look like guests.’

Surry Hills police station was part of the complex known as Police Centre, a fortress-like building presumably designed to let the voters know that the police had a fortress-like mentality. A recent royal commission into police corruption, however, had shown that cracks were appearing in the mental fortress.

The patrol commander, a tall thin chief inspector named Neil Kovax, greeted Malone as an old friend and just nodded at Kagal.

‘I’ll get Garry Peeples in here.’ He made the call on his phone, then sat back. He was bald on top but had full grey hair along the sides; he had a thick military-style moustache which, over the years Malone had known Kovax, he had seen turn from black to grey to now almost-white. He was an old-style cop who, Malone guessed, had taken some time to come to terms with his current turf, a major part of which was the homosexual community’s territory. ‘This is a puzzling one, Scobie. I think we might be dealing with vigilantes.’

‘An ambulance feller said that to me last night.’

Then Senior-Sergeant Peeples came in. He was tall, taller by a couple of inches than Malone, with broad shoulders and muscular arms that seemed to bulge out of his shirt. Malone, abruptly aware of the territory they were now in, could see Peeples being asked to strip for a photo in the gay press. He wondered how Peeples would react to such a request.

‘Inspector—’ He nodded at Malone and Kagal. ‘Has the boss filled you in? No? Well, we’re not sure where we’re heading on these murders. Last night’s was committed by a woman, the three previous ones by three different men. The connection on the three earlier ones was that the bullets came from the same gun – we think a Browning Thirty-two. There hasn’t been an autopsy on last night’s victim, so we’re still waiting on the bullet. But we picked up a shell that’s the casing for a Thirty-two.’

‘The killings, they were all connected to a gay-bashing?’ said Malone.

‘The four we’re concerned with. There’ve been other bashings, some gays, some straights, but they were usually just people being rolled for whatever they had on ’em.’

‘And all four homicides were done by different persons?’ said Kagal. ‘Using the same gun? Assuming last night’s gun was the same one.’

‘That’s the puzzle,’ said Peeples. ‘What’ve we got here? A group of gay vigilantes?’

‘Was last night’s killer a lesbian, maybe?’ said Malone. ‘Or a transvestite?’

‘Could’ve been. The kids we interviewed all had different versions. You know what it’s like.’

Malone indeed knew what it was like. No gaze was so fractured as that of a crowd. He had once interrogated ten witnesses to a murder in broad daylight and come up with ten descriptions of the murderer. Who, when he was finally arrested, proved to look like none of the descriptions.

‘Who was shot last night?’

‘Kid named Justin Langtry, seventeen. Lives – lived – in Erskineville with his mother and three other kids, she’s a single parent. I sent one of our girls out to see her last night. I thought I’d go out this morning. Unless you’d like to?’ he said hopefully.

Malone knew when the buck was being passed; he’d lost count of the number of times he had knocked on doors to talk to bereaved wives and mothers. ‘Okay, I’ll do it. But first John and I’ll go up and talk to last night’s victim, Bob Anders.’

‘You know him?’ said Kovax.

‘He’s a friend of John’s,’ said Malone, and Kovax and Peeples looked at Kagal with wary interest. ‘Then we’ll go out and see – what’s her name? Mrs Langtry? – in Erskineville. What’s the address?’

‘Billyard Street, it’s off—’

‘I know it,’ said Malone. ‘I was born in the next street.’

Driving the half a dozen blocks up to St Sebastian’s, Malone looked out at Oxford Street, the main artery that led from the city out to the beach suburbs. Twenty, thirty years ago this had been a working class shopping area: small shops that even then had been wondering what their future would be. Now it was gay territory, from Whitlam Square, named after an ex-Prime Minister of liberal persuasion, up across Taylor Square where drunks had once congregated like seals on the small island in its centre, to the slope past Victoria Barracks, where the vestiges of an army command still lingered like faint memories of wars that everyone else had forgotten. The first few blocks up from Whitlam Square had a mixture of shops, small restaurants and pubs that catered for the gay community; there were also baths and the offices of a gay newspaper. Beyond Taylor Square were more gay hotels and in a side street The Wall, the high stone wall of an old gaol where male hookers now paraded. It was all territory which Malone, carrying the baggage of another generation’s moral sense, had always avoided, glad that he had never been posted to Surry Hills or Kings Cross, the other turf on to which the gay community spilled over.

St Sebastian’s was one of the older hospitals that had survived, aided by additions and face-lifts. Anders was in one of the general wards, his battered face half-hidden by dressings. He smiled wanly at Malone and Kagal as they approached his bed and put out a hand to Kagal, who took it and pressed it.

‘Hi, Inspector,’ he said through bruised and swollen lips. ‘I’m a sight for sore eyes, the nurses tell me.’

Malone remembered him as a tall, goodlooking man who had worn an earring; his right ear was now a torn mess painted with yellow medication. The dark moustache above the swollen lips had none of the bristly defiance Malone remembered; it looked limp and drab, like the shadow of a glum mouth. He was still holding Kagal’s hand, clutching it with – love? Malone wondered.

‘Bob, we have to ask you a few questions. Do you know the woman who came to your rescue last night?’

Anders moved his head slowly on the pillow. ‘I hardly saw her. I was on the ground, the young shits were kicking me—’

‘Where was this?’

‘Up by the barracks. I was walking down from Paddington town hall, I was heading for the Albury—’

Malone knew of it: a pub mainly for drag queens. Something must have shown in his face because Anders said, ‘I’m not into drag, Inspector. I had to meet someone there, a guy who’s a nurse. I have a sick friend—’

All at once he closed his eyes, looked ready to weep and Kagal squeezed his hand. ‘It’s all right, Bob. But we have to ask questions, we have to find out who’s doing these murders.’

Anders opened his eyes; mere was a shine of tears at the corners. ‘Why?’

Kagal looked at Malone. There was a sudden silence in the ward; the other three patients lay in their beds looking at Malone as if waiting on his answer. ‘We are cops, not judges,’ he said and even in his own ears he sounded limp and priggish.

One of the patients got out of bed, pulled on a faded dressing-gown and went unsteadily out into the corridor. The other two men turned away, one to a book, the other to stare out the window.

‘So you can tell us nothing about the killer?’ said Malone.

‘I’m sorry, Inspector – no. I was too busy trying to protect myself – the shits were trying to kill me, that was all I was thinking …’ His voice trailed off; then he recovered: ‘What will you do about the kids who weren’t shot? Who did this to me?’

‘I presume they’ll be charged. But that’s not in mine and John’s area, we’re strictly homicides.’

‘They’ll be taken care of,’ said Kagal and pressed Anders’ hand. ‘I’ll see to it, Bob.’

They said goodbye to Anders and walked out into the corridor. There the man who had got out of bed was waiting for them. He was in his sixties, a small hard nugget of a man, crumbling at the edges but with a core of bitter prejudices. Malone recognized his own father in the man: the hatred of bosses, of police, of anything and anyone who tried to run his life. Us and Them would be his motto. And Them would include everyone outside the norm of his narrow outlook. Malone had seen it so many times in Con Malone.

‘That poofter in there, has he got AIDS?’ His voice was as rough as his looks. ‘The nurses won’t tell us.’

‘No,’ said Kagal and Malone marvelled at the younger man’s control. ‘He just has a bad case of assault and battery. Any more questions?’

Then he walked on and Malone was left with the bigot ‘No one deserves what that man has had done to him. Not even poofters.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said the man and stomped back into the ward.