Murder Song

‘Have you?’

‘What’s it to you, Scobie? You’re not on the Fraud Squad.’

‘If someone bumps you off, I don’t want to be following two trails all over Sydney. I’d rather just have one suspect, even if I don’t know who he is.’

O’Brien smiled without any humour. ‘You’re pretty bloody brutal, aren’t you?’

‘Brian, I’m not going to fart-arse about on this. It looks like an innocent bystander, Mardi Jack, was killed instead of you. He’s sure to come back and try for you again. He’s already killed two others, he may go for me and Christ knows how many others. That’s enough on my plate. I don’t want to be chasing some greedy bastards who think you’ve cheated them out of a million or two. Or some husband who’s found out you’re sleeping with his lady wife.’ That last was a dart tossed casually.

It landed on the board if not on the bull’s-eye. ‘Keep her out of this! She’s the only decent thing that’s happened to me in twenty fucking years!’

Malone pushed away the half-eaten slice of carrot cake; he was not as hungry as he had thought. ‘I’m going back to town, to Homicide. I think it might be an idea if you came with me.’

O’Brien continued to sit. ‘Not if I have to make any statement.’

Malone looked at him carefully. He hadn’t yet warmed to O’Brien: he was the free-wheeling entrepreneur that was a new breed, one for which Malone had little time. Unambitious himself, uninterested in being rich, he had tried to but had never understood greed, for either money or power: in today’s world he knew that made him a simpleton. O’Brien was the very epitome of the new breed, yet Malone fancied there was a slight crack in him through which decency, a long-dead seed, was trying to sprout. He remembered that, though Horrie O’Brien had been the rebel in the academy class, he had never been unpopular, neither with the cadets nor the instructors, though he had been a loner.

‘You’ll have to make a statement about knowing Mardi Jack and going to the flat with her – there’s no way you can dodge that. But we’ll keep quiet about your lady friend – I don’t want to bring her into it unless we have to.’

‘Not even then,’ said O’Brien quietly and vehemently. ‘No way.’

Malone was non-committal on that. ‘I want you to look at some names and photos with me. They’re being sent up from Goulburn this morning.’

‘Goulburn?’

‘The main academy is down there now, they only do secondary courses at Redfern. They keep the police library at Goulburn. You and I can look at the class of ’65.’

O’Brien hesitated, then stood up. ‘Okay. Can you give me a lift back to town? I don’t own a car. I usually have a hire car pick me up.’

‘I thought all you fellers had a Rolls or a Merc or both.’

O’Brien smiled, again without mirth. ‘I once bought my old man a Merc. He sent it back with a note telling me to drive it up the track where the sun never shines.’

He went into the house without saying any more about his relationship with his father. He came out two or three minutes later with a briefcase and walked across to where Malone was waiting for him by the police car.

‘You call your lawyer?’

‘No. If you must know, I rang my lady friend.’

Malone looked around the stud, admiring it and, yes, suddenly envying O’Brien his possession of it. He thought what it would be like to live here with Lisa and the kids, to breathe this clear air every morning, to live in this easy rhythm, never to have to think about homicides and the sleaze of human nature that irritated him every day like an incurable rash. He said, ‘I wouldn’t come up here again, not till we’ve nailed this killer.’

‘Why not? We have a security patrol here.’

‘All day, twenty-four hours a day?’

‘No, just at night.’

Malone pointed to a clump of trees bordering a side road beyond the main paddock. ‘He could park his car amongst those trees and you’d never notice him. He could pick you off right where you’re standing and he’d be gone before anyone knew where the shot came from.’

‘That’s a fair distance, three hundred yards at least.’

‘This bloke is an expert, Brian. With a ’scope, you’d be like a dummy in a shooting gallery. Take my advice. Don’t come up here unless you have to and then have your security guards here to meet you. Just warn them, this bloke might take them out, too.’

O’Brien stared across at the trees, as if the assassin was actually there. There was no sign of immediate fear on his face, but he was looking, for the first time, at the possibility of his own death. ‘I don’t want to die, Scobie. Not now.’

‘Who does?’

They drove back to the city, through the flat sprawl of suburbs and along the main roads too narrow for the traffic that clogged them. Freeways were being built, but for every mile of freeway laid down it seemed that a thousand cars had been newly spawned to flood it. They passed several miles of used car lots, metal beasts waiting to be released to add to the flood.

O’Brien was silent most of the way, not sullen but worried-looking. Malone kept the conversation casual. ‘My sidekick, Russ Clements, has been looking up your history. You were bigger than I thought you were on the pop scene.’

‘I was in it when it started to take off, just after the Beatles first appeared.’

‘Russ told me about some of the groups you managed. There was one called – was it the Salvation Four or something?’

‘The Salvation Four Plus Sinner. They were big.’

‘I asked my two girls about them – they’d never heard of them.’

‘How old are your girls?’

‘Nine and almost fourteen.’

‘Another generation. Pop groups are like Olympic swimmers – they hit gold once, then they sink without trace.’ There was no pity in his voice for the failed pop groups or Olympic swimmers.

‘Why did you get out of the game?’

‘Boredom. And greed,’ he said frankly, as if avarice was a virtue. ‘I was making a million a year, but that’s chicken-feed in the pop game.’

‘The chickens started to bite you?’

‘Scobie, a million bucks is like a short-handled umbrella – you can’t swagger with it. But fifty or a hundred million, that’s different.’

‘I thought you didn’t like to swagger? The low profile and all that.’

‘The richest guy in America doesn’t swagger. He lives in a small city in Oklahoma and drives a pick-up truck to his office. But when he lifts the phone, the banks fall on their knees and salaam.’

‘The banks salaaming you now?’

O’Brien smiled ruefully: there was some humour in it, even if it was as dry as a western creek-bed. ‘Not now. Not now.’

When they reached Police Centre Russ Clements was waiting for them with the file from Goulburn. The file cover was dark blue, the spine of it faded to a sky blue where it had been exposed to light on a shelf; the papers and the single photo in it were yellowing round the edges. Evidently no one had looked at the file since 1965.

The three men sat down in Malone’s office, but first Malone pointed out to O’Brien the three red pins on the map behind his chair. ‘Parramatta, Chatswood, City – three random murders. That’s what we thought at first. There’s going to be another one, I can feel it in my bones –’ He had Celtic bones, in which superstition was ingrained in the marrow.

‘We have a hundred and fifty-one names to choose from,’ said Clements. ‘Less Terry Sugar and Harry Gardner. We also have the same number of suspects, less, of course, those two and you two.’

‘Thanks,’ said Malone. ‘You always know how to keep the spirits up.’

‘I was in the class,’ said Clements soberly. ‘But not the same group. I think we can narrow it down to your group, if you can remember them all.’

‘The names aren’t classified in groups?’

‘No. We’re all lumped together.’

‘What about the photos?’

‘There’s only one, a class photo. There’s a caption on the back with all the names. Except there are only a hundred and fifty guys in the photo. They must have taken the names from the class roll without identifying them with individuals in the photo.’

O’Brien said sarcastically, ‘The police academy must’ve been pretty smart in those days. I can’t remember – did they teach us how to identify mug shots?’

Malone could feel Clements’ resentment even across the desk: no policeman likes the force being criticized, no matter how valid the criticism. He cut in before Clements could make a comment: ‘Have you worked out who’s missing?’

‘Not yet,’ said Clements. ‘I thought we’d start by you two trying to remember the names of all the guys in your group.’

Malone’s was the mind trained by experience in the use of memory, but it was O’Brien, the half-trained accountant turned entrepreneur, the man who lived by his wits and the dropped name, who remembered most of their group-mates. Clements wrote the names down and then Malone and O’Brien tried to match a face in the photo with a name. The whole procedure took them half an hour. Without remarking on it, both Malone and O’Brien spent as much time looking at themselves when young as they did identifying the other members of their group. Malone felt a sense of loss looking at the distant youth who was himself: he was a stranger whom he wished he knew better. What had he felt in those days, what had he thought about, what mistakes had he made? But it was all so long ago, it was like trying to draw pictures on water.

At last O’Brien said, ‘The guy who’s missing is Frank Blizzard.’

Malone frowned. ‘I remember the name. But I can’t remember what he looked like.’

‘That was him. As soon as he left you, you couldn’t remember what he looked like. There was something else –’

Malone waited.

‘We caught him cheating on an exam paper, remember? We hazed him, gave him a helluva hosing with a fire hose, then we kicked him out into – what was it, Bourke Street? – just in his underpants.’

‘I remember that,’ said Clements. ‘It was all around the academy the next morning.’

‘It was a stupid bloody thing to do,’ said Malone. ‘I mean, what we did.’

‘We were young,’ said O’Brien. ‘We thought cheating was against the rules.’

‘Wasn’t it? Isn’t it still?’

‘Not in the big wide world, chum. Frank Blizzard was just ahead of the rest of us.’

Out of the corner of his eye Malone saw Clements’ lip lift just a fraction; he did his best to show no expression himself. ‘Would what we did to him be enough for him to start killing for revenge?’

‘After all these years?’

‘You should’ve stayed in the force,’ said Clements; his dislike of O’Brien was blatant. ‘You’d have learned some people will wait for ever for revenge. Women are the worst.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Malone. ‘War veterans are as bad, some of them.’

‘We weren’t at war with Blizzard,’ said O’Brien.

He was aware of Clements’ feeling towards him; for a moment he had looked unexpectedly uncomfortable. His hands gripped the seat of the chair beneath him like anchors; then they slowly relaxed, like an arthritic’s whose pain had been conquered. He moved stiffly, showing his shoulder to Clements, and looked at Malone.

‘None of us reported his cheating, not until they called us in and put it to us about what they’d heard. I can’t remember who it was who grassed, but then all the rest of us could do was nod and say yes, we’d done it. There were six of us, as I remember.’

Malone nodded, remembering the scene in the Inspector’s office, hazy though the memory was, like a soft focus flashback in a television mini-series. At that time he thought they might all be dismissed from the academy; but Blizzard’s sin or crime or whatever you called it had been greater. Hazing, in those days, was tolerated in institutions as civilized barbarism, no worse than poofter-bashing. Blizzard had been doomed from the moment that – had it been Jim Knoble? – had opened his mouth and told about the cheating. Frank Blizzard had gone from the academy by lunchtime next day.

‘I was there when he went out the gates,’ said O’Brien. ‘He got out into Bourke Street and all of a sudden he went berserk, right off his bloody rocker. I couldn’t hear half of what he was saying, he was standing out in the middle of the road, in the traffic, but I did hear him yell he’d blow the place up. Then he caught sight of me and he put his arms up, like he was holding a rifle, and made out he was shooting me.’

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