Pride's Harvest (22 page)

“There'll be trouble tonight,” Carmody said again.

Malone, turned halfway round in the front seat, noticed that Strayhorn, who had become very quiet since getting into the car, hadn't even glanced at the settlement. He wondered if the old man now
regretted
having told as much as he had.

They dropped him at the entrance to the showground. Malone said, “When does the carnival and circus leave town?”

“We pack up Monday morning.”

“You thinking of leaving before then?”

“That'd look like I'm running away, wouldn't it?” Strayhorn's mocking grin was evident even through his beard. “Don't worry, Mr. Malone. I'll be here for the rest of the weekend. Unless Chess Hardstaff runs me outa town again when I tell him who I am.”

I'd like to be there, thought Malone. But the Hardstaff case wasn't his concern: he had to forget it. “Take care. And stay off the grog. The lock-up is going to be full enough tonight.”

Strayhorn tipped his hat to both of them, an old-fashioned gesture that surprised them, and went into the showground. He paused and dropped his plastic bag with its contents into an empty oil drum that doubled as a refuse bin, took off his hat to a young girl who passed him leading an elephant, and disappeared behind one of the carnival tents.

“A dying breed,” said Sean Carmody. “My father would have finished up like that if my mother hadn't scrimped and saved and bought some land and made him settle down.”

“Was your dad happy when he died? Did they bury his illusions with him?”

“I don't know,” said Carmody, somehow not surprised at the question. “I wasn't there to ask him. He died in November nineteen sixty-three. I was in Dallas then. You'd have been very young when Kennedy died.”

“I was old enough to come pretty close to tears. A lot of very young people did.”

“I cried,” said Carmody without embarrassment. “But not for Jack Kennedy, though that was sad enough. For my father. He had a dream, but I don't think he even knew what it was. Not clearly, anyway. He envied me, I think. He was a wanderer and I got to wander much further and wider than he had ever dreamed about.”

“A free spirit?”

“
I was never that. And I don't think Fred Strayhorn is. He will always remember what happened to his mother and father here in Collamundra.”

“I just wonder why he didn't point the finger at Chess Hardstaff when he had the chance.”

“Maybe we'll never know how much pressure was applied to him.”

“By the police or by Chess's father?”

Carmody said nothing. He all at once seemed to be driving more carefully, concentrating, as the traffic coming out to the racecourse and the showground had thickened.

Malone said, “Sean, are the cops in this town corrupt?”

They were entering the outskirts of town. Carmody remained silent till he pulled the car up outside the police station. He switched off the engine and turned to face Malone.

“No,” he said flatly. “I don't think you'd find one of them who would take money. They might bow to a bit of pressure, but that's a different thing. This isn't a big town, Scobie. Maybe everyone doesn't know everyone else by name, but they know them by sight. The police, like everyone else, have to live in it. They have family, friends, neighbours—they
belong.
It's not like the city. Where are you stationed?”

“Police Centre, in Surry Hills.”

“Where do you live?”

“Randwick.”

“A suburb, another part of the city altogether. You get my point? Have you ever had to question or arrest anyone who lives in your street or just around the corner? Don't be too harsh on the locals, Scobie. They do their job as best they can. They may not treat the blacks as well as they might and if ever there was a Gay Mardi Gras out here, some of them might act like Stormtroopers, the sort I saw in Germany in the nineteen-thirties. But that's par for the course in Australia. We've never been as tolerant as we claim. We delude ourselves as much as the Brits or the Americans or the French or anyone else. The only ones, I think, who don't delude themselves are the Chinese. Or maybe it's because they're so inscrutable, we can't tell.”

“What about the Japanese? Aren't they inscrutable?”

“
Maybe you'll know more about that when you get deeper into the Sagawa murder.”

It was very oblique, but Malone caught a note of criticism in Carmody's tone: you're being sidetracked from what brought you here. He thanked the older man for the lift and got out of the car.

“Where are you going now?”

“To see Trevor.”

Carmody raised an eyebrow. “I can drive you there.”

“I don't think so, Sean. Thanks, though.”

He turned and went into the station before he had to explain to Carmody why he didn't want him there when he questioned his son-in-law. He went upstairs to the detectives' room and was relieved to find Baldock was not there, though he wasn't quite sure why he felt that way.

Clements looked up from his preparation of the running sheet. “I just got back from the airport. The three Nips came in. Gus Dircks and Koga were there to meet them.”

“Not Doc Nothling or Trevor Waring?”

“No. Gus Dircks was all over them—I was surprised he hadn't brought flowers.”

“Did he see you?”

“It's a small airport, mate. It's pretty hard to get lost in it. He didn't speak to me, just gave me a hard glare and turned his back.”

“What about the Japs?”

“They all look alike to me. They were well-dressed and the one who seemed to be the boss, he looked as if he was used to being considered important. I nearly fell over when Gus actually bowed his head to him, Jap-style.”

“You can start practising—your manners need a shake-up. Anything from Tokyo yet?”

“Andy Graham got off the phone about five minutes ago.” He sorted out some notes he had jotted down. “There's nothing much to add to what we already know. He did his technical training in cotton farming in the US, in Alabama and Arizona. He's got no criminal record, not even a traffic ticket. Tokyo just said, „More to follow.' Whatever that means.”

“
It could mean they're following up a lead. I wonder if his bosses could tell us anything? Make a date for us to see them late this afternoon, after the races.” He looked at his watch. “I'm running late to see Trevor Waring.”

“Then we're going to the races this afternoon?” Clements looked eager. He was not an eclectic gambler, he was not interested in cards or baccarat or flies crawling up a wall. But horse-racing drew him like a magnet, he would have laid bets with the Man from Snowy River on which brumby would finish in front of their wild horse chase.

Malone sighed, beginning to feel the weariness brought on by a mind that was becoming increasingly cluttered almost by the minute. Reason, and his usual orderly approach to a case, told him he should wipe the Hardstaff murder and the suicide of Billy Koowarra from his thoughts: he was here to find the murderer of Kenji Sagawa and nothing else. But the net he had thrown kept getting caught on unseen obstacles in dark waters.

“I think we might. Everyone else in town is going to be out there. Unless—” The net caught again. “Unless you think we ought to keep an eye on Koga and his bosses just in case the killer wants to try his luck again?”

“I think that's someone else's job, don't you?” Clements's face showed nothing. “After all, they were met by the Police Minister himself out at the airport. If he can't look after „em, who can?”

Malone grinned, nodding appreciatively. “You should be our Foreign Minister. You'd have the country at war in five minutes . . . I'll meet you back here at twelve thirty.”

He went out to meet with Trevor Waring, taking the net with him.

II

Waring's office was in a small two-storeyed complex of professional offices just off the main street. The building looked no more than three or four years old, built probably when developers, swept along on the surface of a boom, thought prosperity could only get bigger and better. Now the boom was over, wool and grain prices were down, developers were on the dole and the nation's belt was starting to
feel
like a tourniquet. As Malone crossed from the other side of the street he saw two “For Sale” notices in upstairs windows of the block, like commercial Band-Aids.

The solicitor's rooms were on the ground floor, the largest office in the complex. Malone remembered the old saw: smart lawyers and smart accountants could always keep themselves busy. In good times they helped the successful reduce their taxes, in bad times they facilitated bankruptcies. They had learned how to harness an ill-wind.

Waring was waiting for him; anxiously, it seemed. There was no one in the outer office, but as soon as Malone knocked on the door and entered, Waring came through from his own office, hand outstretched. Like meeting a new client for the first time, Malone thought. He had all policemen's suspicion of lawyers and their intentions: it was there between the lines of a policeman's swearing-in oath.

“Come in, come in, Scobie! Coffee?” There was a coffee percolator on an electric hob in the other office. “Sugar? Milk?”

Ease off,
Malone silently advised him. He took the china cup and saucer, none of your thick mugs or styrofoam cups here, and followed Waring into the latter's office. It was a room for a successful lawyer, though not as richly furnished as some that Malone had visited down in Sydney; but down there the fees made those of country solicitors look like pension cheques. Still, Waring had done well, as a solicitor, a cotton farm investor or a part-time grazier. Malone sat down in a chair upholstered in genuine leather, none of your antique vinyl, and looked at Waring across the leather-topped desk.

“How's the case coming along?” said Waring with genuine interest.

Which one?
Malone had to bite back the question; and determinedly pushed the Hardstaff murder to the back of his mind.

“Sagawa? We're making progress.” You were always “making progress,” even if sometimes it was the generals' strategic retreat. Never confess, especially to a lawyer, that you didn't know where the hell you were going. “Trevor, why didn't you tell me the other night, when we first met, that you had shares in South Cloud?”

Waring stalled. “I thought you might ask me that.”

“
Yeah, you're a lawyer, I guessed you might.”

“Would you believe me if I said I just didn't think it was important to mention it? That it slipped my mind entirely?”

“No.”

There was a set of four pipes in a rack on the desk. Waring reached for one, but didn't attempt to fill it; he looked at it, as if wondering what he should do with it, then he put it back in the rack. He looked at Malone. “Why not?”

Malone sipped his coffee. It was excellent: Lisa, the coffee expert, with her Dutch conceit that the Dutch made the best brew in the world, would have approved. “What happens to your share of the company if the Japanese decide to pull out of the whole venture? Which they might do, if they think there's too much anti-Jap feeling around here.”

“They have invested too much to want to pull out.”

“From what I've read, the Japanese will always cut their losses if it means losing face. They are economic imperialists, but they don't want to start another war, even a small local one, to prove it.”

Waring smiled. He picked up a pair of square, gold-rimmed glasses from the desk, put them on, looked carefully at Malone, then took them off and put them back on the desk. Malone sat, patient: he had been scrutinized by the best, from Supreme Court judges to top crims.

“I don't mean to sound offensive, Scobie, but you're a smart cop. Or are all the cops down in Sydney experts on economic imperialism?”

“We take courses in it now, instead of pistol practice.”
Come on, Malone. You sound like some tough private eye.
Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer would have struggled against the dry wit and arid skepticism he had heard from the native crims. “Trevor, let's cut out the fencing. No offence, but I think I've had more practice at it than you, even though you're a lawyer. I've been in the ring with—” He named two of Sydney's top Queen's Counsels and then two of the nation's top criminal elements. “No bullshit, Trev, just a friendly talk man to man.”

Here in his office Waring did not seem anywhere near as bland as he had in his own home; his
eyes,
indeed his whole face, took on a shrewdness that Malone hadn't detected before. He picked up his glasses again, but didn't put them on; then he leaned back in his chair. “Am I a suspect of some sort?”

Malone pursed his lips as if he were thinking over the proposition; but he had already decided. “Yes, I think you might be. You and at least a couple of dozen others. In a murder case, Trev, I never rule out anyone except myself and the corpse.”

Waring smiled and the smile seemed to relax him a little. “I see your point. I don't suppose I can plead that I'll say nothing without my lawyer being present?”

“Not unless you believe that old one, that a lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client?”

Waring shook his head, smiling again. “No, I don't think I'm a fool, Scobie. And I think I'm a good lawyer, though maybe I haven't been tested as much as those QCs you mentioned . . . Okay. To answer your question as to what would happen to my shares in the company if the Japanese pull out—well, we'd try to raise the money to buy them out.”

“Try to raise it?”

“It wouldn't be easy. It'd take a lot—at least by local standards.”

“How much?”

Waring hesitated; though he was not unsophisticated, he had none of the city lawyers' glib approach to large sums of money.