Murder Song (19 page)

“Hallo? . . . Yes. Who's this?” Then her hand shook and she almost dropped the phone. “No, Frank, no. Where are you?” She looked at Malone, mouthed,
It's him.
“No, Frank, I didn't send for them—”

Malone jumped up, grabbed the phone, jerking it from her hand more roughly than he had intended. “Blizzard? This is Inspector Malone—”

“I know who you are, Malone. You've been in my sights for a couple of weeks. You're dead, Malone, whether you know it or not.”

There was silence for a moment; then the dial tone burrowed against his ear. He put down the
phone,
replaced the needlepoint cover. Then he put his hand on Mrs. Blizzard's bony arm, felt the trembling flooding through her. She was on the point of tears and he thought for a moment he had hurt her when he had snatched the phone from her. Then he saw that the pain was much deeper, was all through her. He gently eased her back on to her chair.

“Did he threaten you?”

She shook her head, was dumb for a long moment. Then: “No. He asked me if I'd sent for you . . . As if I would—” She had forgotten that she had tried to cut him out of her life.

“Was it a local call? Or were there pips from an STD call?”

She shook her head again, not even looking at him. “No pips. No one ever calls me on a trunk call.”

Malone said to Clements, “That means he tailed us down here. Did you see anyone on our tail all the way down?”

“I wasn't even looking for anyone,” Clements confessed. “If that highway guy hadn't flashed his lights at me, I wouldn't have noticed him.”

Malone turned back to Mrs. Blizzard. She had poured herself another cup of coffee and seemed to be gathering some strength from it. He remembered an old aspirin powder slogan: a cuppa tea, a Bex and a nice lie-down; but he didn't think Mrs. Blizzard would ever lie down, not even for a murdering foster-son. There was something of the durability of cedar in her.

“I think we'd better have a policewoman move in here with you—”

“No,” she said firmly and put down her cup and saucer, her hand stiff and firm as a wrench. “Nobody's moving in here with me, not a stranger. I can look after myself, I've done it ever since my husband died. I'm just glad now that he's dead,” she added and there was just a slight tremor in her voice. “Don't worry about me, Inspector. Frank won't hurt me.”

Malone wasn't so sure, but he knew he would never win an argument with her, not if he stayed here all day. “Well, we'd better tell the local police to drop by every now and then.”

“I don't want them here—” But her objection now was only half-hearted.

“
If Frank calls again, you'll let us know.” He put his card on the table beside her cup and saucer.

She took her time about replying; then: “Depends what he talks to me about. If I think he's going to commit another—another murder, all right, I'll ring you. But not if he just wants to talk to me. I'm still his foster-mother, right?”

Malone had seen it before, the apron strings pulling the mother down into the drowning pool; but he knew Lisa would be the same if any of the children ever got into trouble. “Fair enough. Is there anyone else here in Minnamook that he's likely to contact? Old mates? An old girl-friend?”

“He had only one mate, but he was killed in Vietnam. He never had a regular girl-friend. He could be a little queer at times.”

“Was he homosexual?”

She was shocked, it was something beyond her ken.
“Frank?
Here in Minnamook? We'd never stand for anything like that, not when Frank lived here. Not even now. We're churchgoers around here,” she said, as if hell and its sins were miles away across the river and up in Sydney.

Minnamook had still managed to breed a multiple murderer: but Malone didn't mention that. He didn't know why he had asked the question about the possibility of homosexuality; it smacked of Clements' prejudices. “Did he play the field with the girls?”

“Play the field?” She wrinkled her nose. “I don't like that expression. He didn't have loose morals, if that's what you mean. He was a decent, religious boy all the time he lived with us.”

Well, he's a sinner now.
“Righto, Mrs. Blizzard. We'll probably be in touch again. Can Sergeant Clements take that photo? We'll send it back.”

She took the photo from the wall, handed it to Clements. “You'll ring me if you catch him? I don't want to read it in the papers or hear it on the wireless. I have the right to be the first to know, right?”

“We'll let you know at once, as soon as we catch him. Goodbye, Mrs. Blizzard. And don't be too rough on the local police. They only have your interest at heart.”

“
Just so long's they don't want to come into my home. I did you a favour letting you in.”

“And we appreciate it,” said Malone as she shut the front door in his face.

He knew with certainty, as if he were staring at her through clear glass, that behind the door she had already begun to weep. She would, however, never let anyone see the tears. She reminded him, in a way, of his own mother and he wished, somehow, that he could help her. But that was beyond him. Whatever he might do from now on would only hurt her even more.

IV

They thanked the two young policemen for their support and sent them back to Wollongong and local issues. Then they drove back north, Clements now alert to anyone who might be following them. But there was too much traffic on the freeway and it was impossible to tell if any particular car was tailing them. Once they pulled into the side of the road and stopped, but the following cars and trucks just hurtled by without slowing.

Clements shook his head. “He's too smart. We're never gunna catch him this way.”

Malone looked at his watch. “We're not going to make it to the airport in time. Let's see if Mr. Waldorf has already arrived home.”

They drove on and at the southern outskirts of Sydney, at Sutherland, they turned east and drove down to Yowie Bay. In the twenties and thirties it had been an area of very modest weekenders, interspersed with the occasional fibro or weatherboard cottage of a retired blue-collar worker. Fishermen frequented it to catch trevalli and leatherjackets; the odd shark or two had been sighted in the narrow bay, but they had been scared off in the years after World War Two by the real estate developers, as had the fishermen. The waterfront now was occupied by expensive houses, some of them with pretensions to mansions; behind them were more modest houses, solid in their own pretensions. This was an area of postwar money and the locals were proud to show it.

Sebastian Waldorf's home had a waterfrontage, but it was not a mansion. It had pretensions to being an Italian villa, a suitable abode for an opera singer; the builder, an immigrant from Lombardy, had
tried
to imagine Yowie Bay as Lake Garda. There was a pool at the water's edge and a five-metre boat moored at a small jetty. A red Lancia stood in the driveway.

Malone said, “I always thought opera singers made less than plumbers in this country?”

“No, it's cops who make less than plumbers,” said Clements, parking the car at the kerb. “Sebastian—I guess we'd better get used to calling him that—made his money overseas. He does all right back here, but he doesn't make the loot that Joan Sutherland and some of the others do.”

“Are you an opera lover?”

“I always thought
Il Trovatore
was some sort of pasta. I once ordered it in a restaurant.”

Sebastian Waldorf, né Samuel Culp, himself opened the rather ornate front door. “Yes? Are you reporters?”

“No,” said Malone. “Were you expecting someone from the press?”

Waldorf's face had been wide open in a welcoming smile; now all at once it closed up and he frowned. “Who are you?”

Malone introduced himself and Clements. “You might remember me? We were in the same group at the police academy back in 1965.”

“When you were plain Sam Culp,” said Clements with a policeman's ever-present suspicion of aliases.

Waldorf's face remained closed up. He was tall and well-built, a man who obviously took care of himself; he had Italian good looks that went well with the villa and the car. He was wearing a red cashmere sweater, tight designer jeans, expensive loafers and a gold watch on one wrist and a heavy gold bracelet on the other. He would never be lonely while he had a mirror to look into. Here was someone who would remember how he had looked every day of his life.

“What's this all about?” He had lost his Australian accent, he had an international voice that, Malone guessed, would take on the accent of wherever he happened to be.

“I think it would be better if we came inside, Mr. Waldorf,” said Malone.

The singer nodded and led them through a wide entrance lobby into a large living-room that
looked
out on to the bay through a screen of white-limbed gums. It was well furnished, but it did not look lived in, as if it saw its owner infrequently. There were paintings on the walls, all of them modern and none of them suggesting any Australian landscape. One wall was given up to shelves of books, records and cassettes and at least a dozen photographs of Waldorf in opera costume, sometimes with another singer, always a woman.

A good-looking young woman with long blonde hair and the beginnings of the build of an old-style Brünnhilde stood up nervously as the three men came into the room. Her bosom was slightly lopsided under her yellow sweater, as if she had not succeeded in getting both her breasts back into her brassière in time.

“This is Miss Vigil, one of my pupils. She is in the chorus of the company. We've just come back from Melbourne.”

Miss Vigil said hullo, gave Malone and Clements a charming smile, thanked
Mr.
Waldorf for his lesson and left the room. Malone waited for the closing of the front door, but heard nothing; Miss Vigil had just gone to another part of the house to await another lesson in whatever it was Mr. Waldorf was teaching her. Waldorf waved the two detectives to chairs and offered them a beer, which they accepted.

Then Malone told him why they were here. “You're on the hit list, we think. Do you remember Frank Blizzard?”

Waldorf had sat down, exposing red cashmere socks to match his sweater. Malone tried not to look at Clements, who was viewing all this sartorial splendour with the sick expression of a diabetic showered in jelly-beans. The singer shook his head. “I can't remember him, not what he looked like.”

“We keep running up against that all the time. None of us remember what he looked like. I saw a photo of him this morning as a teenager, it's out in the car, but even that didn't ring a bell.”

“I remember the incident when we threw him out into the street in his underpants.” He half-laughed, then changed his mind. “No, one shouldn't laugh. It's bloody serious.”

“Is your season over?”

“
No, I have another three weeks to go, then I go overseas. I have to do
The Magic Flute
and
La Traviata.
Are you opera fans?”

“No,” said the police chorus.

Waldorf smiled, relaxing for the first time since he had let them into the house. “I wasn't, at one time. I was in the police choir—you probably don't remember me being in that—and I used to think even Victor Herbert was highbrow stuff. Then someone told me I had a voice, not a great one but a good one. I got a scholarship to the Conservatorium, then another one to London. That was when I left the force. I went overseas, England, Germany, a couple of times in Italy. I did all right. Nothing like Sutherland—but then who does as well as her? I'm a baritone and we're never in as much demand as tenors. Tenors and sopranos, they're the spoiled ones. But I look good—” He spread his hands to display himself; Malone wondered if, with the tight jeans, he was working towards being a tenor. “And I'm versatile. The women with tin ears come to look at me prancing around in tight pants and the music lovers come to hear Pavarotti and the really great voices. Between us we guarantee bums on seats and that's the name of the game now in opera, the same as it is in everything else. On top of that, it beats the bejesus out of singing in the police choir.”

He was a mixture of conceit and tongue-in-cheek. A woman, had she been there, would have understood his attraction for her sex; Malone and Clements were still suspicious. Malone said, “Do you have a family?”

“My wife is German. She's taken the two kids home to Cologne.”

“You mean she's left you?”

“Is that any of your business?” There was a quick glance towards the door where Miss Vigil had exited, then he was looking at Malone again.

“Yes. If Blizzard comes here trying to get you, we don't want anyone else to get in his way. That's the only reason for asking,” he added, backing down. If the singer had lost his wife and children, he felt sorry for him, even if it was Waldorf's own fault. The break-up of any family wounded him because it reminded him of the preciousness of his own.

Waldorf,
too, backed down. “Yes. She won't be back. One of the reasons I'm going back to Europe is to be near the kids.”

“In the meantime, does anyone live here with you?”
Like Miss Vigil?

“No. Sometimes a—a friend stays overnight, but I'm here on my own mostly.”

Clements had got up and walked to the sliding glass doors that led out on to the terrazzo patio. The doors were closed against the wind coming across the bay, turning the water into a blue-white ruffled shawl. Two kookaburras sat on the long arm of a gumtree, their backs to the wind, looking as if they had given up laughing for life. Down below, the small yacht bumped against the jetty, its tall mast swinging from side to side like a metronome.