Five-Ring Circus (32 page)

“It's half-and-half now,” said Ladbroke. “Capitalism is rearing its ugly head.”

“Who said it was ugly?”

“A figure of speech,” said Ladbroke, whose cynicism would have embraced anarchy if it had employed him to sell it. “Anyway, the money is going back to China and so is the girl.”

“In the meantime,” said Amberton, still feeling he had been pushed out to sea without an oar, “we're left with the Olympic Tower mess. All these murders. What do we do?”

“The same as we do in parliament and council,” said the Premier. “We establish a committee.”

“Who'll be on the committee?”

“Us,” said the Premier. “And only me will make any statements.”

Here we go again, thought Ladbroke. Should I apply for a literary grant as a translator of gobbledegook?

II

Malone had had a restless night. At six o'clock he phoned Greg Random at home. “Sorry to get you out of bed, Greg. I've got a problem—”

Random listened without comment while Malone told him of what had happened last night. Then he didn't explode, but his voice was cold: “You're a bloody idiot. You know the drill—”

“I don't want Lisa and the kids to know—”

“For Crissake, Scobie, this is a major incident. A cop's been shot at—”

“I don't want the media to know, spreading the story all over—”

“Okay, we'll keep it as low profile as we can. But you stay out of it—let the investigating teams do what they have to . . . You understand?
You stay out of it.”

“Righto, you win, Greg—”

“It's not a question of me winning—you know the drill, it's got nothing to do with how you or I
feel.
Don't be so bloody pig-headed—”

He hated this friction between himself and Random. “Righto, I'll get on to Randwick, to Physical Evidence—”

“I told you—stay out of it. I'll do it. Now pull your head in, stay out of the way and shut up.” Then the edge went out of his voice: “You're okay?”

“Except for the way you've just kicked my arse.”

“You deserved it. I'll see you later.”

By seven o'clock there were ten officers on the scene. Uniforms and plainclothes from the local Randwick station, Phil Truach from Homicide, a woman officer from Physical Evidence and a young red-headed officer from Ballistics. Malone came out of his front door as a uniformed man was running out Crime Scene tapes.

“We don't need those, do we? I don't want the neighbours getting edgy.”

The officer, a young bulky man with an Italian name that Malone had forgotten and an Italian regard for the sensible, rolled up the tapes. “Sure, Inspector. But we're gunna have to do some door knocking, case someone saw or heard something before you got home.”

Malone nodded resignedly. “Try your luck—ask them not to broadcast it.”

“Are you kidding?” He was Italian through and through. “Neighbours were invented for broadcasting. They were centuries ahead of Marconi.”

“Are you trying to make me feel better?”

Then the young Ballistics officer came in the front gate. He had a friendly face and Malone knew him only as Declan Something-or-Other. “You might have a problem finding the bullets, Declan. If you have to go into the garden next door, tell ‘em you're from the Water Board.”

Declan looked around, grinned ruefully. “We could be here all day. What was it—a shotgun?”

“No, a handgun with a silencer. The car was out there, about five or six feet from the gutter.”

“Sounds like a woman driver,” said Declan. “My wife always parks a short walk from the kerb . . . That'll cut down the area a bit. If it was a handgun, the velocity would be less. Okay, I'll start looking.”

Malone
went back into the house and rang Clements at home, told him what had happened. “Pick up Guo Yi. He'll probably be at work now, on the site—”

“Hold on, mate. Are you saying it was definitely him that tried to do you?”

“No, I don't. But he's my Number One suspect. Bring him in.”

“If it was him, he may already have shot through.”

“Not him. He's a smartarse, Russ. He'll be at work and he'll have an alibi for last night.”

“So what do we do? Bring him in and beat the shit outa him? Okay, okay,” as Malone started to protest. “But if he's what you say he is, the hitman, and he's after you, why's he doing it? Someone's using him. He's got no stake in Olympic Tower.”

“Then maybe if we beat the shit out of him, he'll tell us.”

“Don't come that one with me, mate. You've never come the heavy stuff—and don't expect me to, not this late in life. Have you told Lisa what happened?”

“No. And don't mention it to Romy, right?”

He hung up, went back out to the front garden. It was a beautiful morning; a wind-streaked cloud hung like washing in the sky. Malone walked under the awning of the camellias and Declan stepped in front of him and held up a scarred bullet.

“Bingo! A 32-calibre, I'd say. What's the matter?”

“It looks like it's been a busy gun. Two murders and an attempted one. The feller at Bondi, the one at Kirribilli and me.”

Declan slipped the bullet into a plastic envelope. “We'll find the other one. You look disappointed.”

“Do I? Not disappointed, just bloody frustrated. It looks as if there might be two killers, not one.”

He looked at him sympathetically. “Your family's in a safe house, you said. Maybe you should join them.”

“Not yet,” he said.

Ten
minutes before Malone got his car out of the garage Declan found the second bullet. “In the main trunk of one of your camellias. We've found the cartridge cases, too, out there in the gutter.”

“Get them to Clarrie Binyan soon's you can, tell him I'd like a report yesterday.”

He arrived in the car yard behind Homicide just as Clements and John Kagal got out of an unmarked car with Guo Yi. He was in shirt and slacks and wore not a black tie but the vivid slash of an Olympic tie. For some reason he was also carrying his safety helmet, tucked under his arm like a football

“This is insulting, Inspector.”

“It's not meant to be, Mr. Guo. Let's talk upstairs. Why the helmet? It's not dangerous around here.”

Going up in the lift to the fourth floor Malone, standing behind the young Chinese, raised his eyebrows in query at Clements. The big man just shook his head, but Kagal ran his finger across his own throat. Mr. Guo, evidently, was going to prove difficult.

Which he did in the interview room. “Am I to be questioned again?”

“Yes.”

“About what? I've answered all the questions you can ask me.”

“Not all, Mr. Guo. Where were you last night around eleven o'clock?”

Guo looked down at his tie, fingered it; mourning for the dead older men was over or he had suddenly become a Games booster. “I was home in bed.”

“With Miss Li?”

“If it is any of your business, yes. Why, what happened last night?”

“Someone tried to shoot Inspector Malone,” said Clements. Only he and Malone were in the interview room with Guo. He flicked a finger against the helmet on the table, made a pinging noise. “We think it might of been you.”

Guo Yi didn't try for inscrutability; he jerked his head back, went round-eyed. “Me shoot him? Why? Why would I do something stupid like that?”

Clements shrugged. “Maybe you don't like him? Or maybe someone told you to? You see, Mr.
Guo,
we have a very short list of suspects in all these murders and, unfortunately, you're on the list.”

“I've heard an expression since I came to Australia.” Guo had recovered his composure. “You're out of your fucking mind.”

“You're outa
your
fucking mind,” said Clements, temper just under control, “if you think we're not gunna get to the bottom of all this. I think maybe you'd better get a lawyer.”

“Do you have a lawyer?” asked Malone.

“No.” Guo appeared to be gathering himself together, like a soldier strapping on equipment. As if he knew the war was no longer a phoney one. “I shall have to ask a friend for advice.”

“Do that. Sergeant Clements will take you out to a phone.”

Malone stayed in the interview room; he was having trouble hiding his frustration and he didn't want to parade it. He looked up almost with irritation when Gail Lee came to the door.

“Russ has told me what happened last night. I'm glad they missed.”

“Thanks, Gail.” If nothing else, his relations with her were easier since this case had begun.

“Did he do it?” She jerked her head backwards.

“Guo?” He considered a moment, then nodded. “I think so. He's claiming he spent the night at home with his girlfriend. I think we need to talk to her. You and Sheryl go out to Cronulla and bring her in. She's supposed to be a student—do you know where she goes?”

“UTS. She's doing computers.”

“Try the Cronulla flat first. You try to pick her up at UTS, you might have a students union protest on your hands. We're never in the right.”

She looked back at him as she turned away. “I'm really glad he missed. We all are.”

He was touched by the concern, though he knew such concern for officers' safety was now endemic in the Service. There had been several recent incidents where cops had been in life-threatening situations and had responded, resulting in at least two civilian deaths. Public criticism of the police reaction had been loud and widespread, usually by people who had never been even close to such situations. The Service had become resentful of the criticism, had closed ranks. Malone knew that cops
were
not always above criticism but, like all cops, he resented it from those well outside the danger zone.

Clements and Guo came back into the room. Guo sat down and drew his helmet towards him as if for safety. Malone said, “Did the friend advise you on a lawyer?”

“Yes.” Guo had assumed the look of a man who had all the time in the world. “He will be here as soon as possible.”

Malone glanced at Clements. “Anyone we know?”

“Nobody's been named so far,” said Clements. “Madame Tzu was the friend who's finding him a lawyer.”

“Aren't you the lucky one, Mr. Guo, to have such a friend? Almost like a mother to you, I suppose.” Malone could taste the bile on his tongue. “What other advice does she give you?”

“Only professional advice,” said Guo, elbows now on the table, fingers steepled together. He looked like someone about to
give
advice. “After all, she and her partners pay my wages.”

Plus bonuses?
But Malone kept the question to himself.

III

“Look, Charlie—”

Jack Aldwych would not have called the du Barry woman Madame, nor Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek; madames were the women who had run his brothels and he had called them Ruby or Flo. He had had difficulty with the pronunciation of Tzu Chao and so, after their initial meeting, he had called her Charlie. She had accepted it with pained, amused tolerance, convinced yet again that the world was not yet free of barbarians.

“—we can't keep putting this off any longer. You've gotta come up with the money, that's final.”

He and Les Chung had come to the Vanderbilt for this meeting with Madame Tzu and General Wang-Te. They sat sipping tea, biscuits on the coffee table between them: Iced Vo-Vos this time. Aldwych had offended by asking for milk in his tea; Madame Tzu had instructed the maid to bring the milk in much the same sour voice that she might have used to call for yak butter. The atmosphere in the room
was
equally sour.

“A few more days,” she said defensively. She was not accustomed to being defensive and it hurt. She looked at Wang-Te, who had sat silent so far. “The general has been down to our embassy in Canberra—”

“What did they say?” Les Chung was as irritated as Aldwych, but showing it less. “Once things get to Canberra, they get lost. Things down there go round and round, like their streets.”

Wang-Te nodded. “A strange place. Full of ivory towers, someone at our embassy told me.”

“Like Beijing,” said Madame Tzu, and Wang-Te winced.

“Never mind the politics.” Aldwych belonged to a privileged class, the criminals who were above politics. “What did you get out of your embassy?”

Wang-Te put down his cup, looked at Madame Tzu. “We have to tell them.”

She wrapped her hand round her own cup, looked as if she might throw it at him. Les Chung said, “Tell us, what?”

“The money is going back to China,” said Wang-Te. “All of it. Nothing more will be said about it. The embassy told me it will become what you call an urban myth.”

“Fifty-one million dollars in solid cash?” said Aldwych. “Some myth.”

“General Huang's son is dead,” said Chung. “But his daughter is still alive. What if she talks?”

“She is to be taken back to China. She won't talk.”

“What if she won't go?” said Aldwych.

“Oh, she will go,” said Wang-Te. “Your Federal Police have already picked her up, I believe. There is nothing to worry about,” he said with all the assurance of a man who knew how a mouth could be kept shut. It had shocked him to hear the clamour of mouths in a democracy.

Madame Tzu could contain herself no longer. “Damn the embassy and its politics! Why can't the money stay here, be invested? Take the girl back, keep her mouth shut, but leave the money here. It will go back and what will happen to it?”

Aldwych sat back, studying her. He had had a certain morality as a criminal, forced on him by
his
wife, Shirl. She had known what he was, but she had turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the bank hold-ups, the prostitution racket and the gold smuggling; they were honest, almost
decent
crimes, so long as no one was killed or hurt. She had known nothing of the murders he had ordered, believing him when he had told her he had been framed each time he had been charged, welcoming him back with open arms and legs when he had been acquitted. He had never gone into drug dealing, knowing that Shirl would have left him if he had.