The Gilded Madonna Read online

  He closed my inner door less than carefully, causing the rippled-glass pane in the top panel to rattle in the frame.

  “You break it, you pay,” I yelled out through the door.

  I heard him complaining to himself as his arse hit the seat of the bench in my waiting room. Thump-grumble. He even sat down angrily it seemed.

  “Did you notice the knitted silk tie?” I asked Tom under my breath after I’d heard the door slam. “Quality stuff. That’s two guineas worth of anyone’s money.”

  I shushed Tom with my finger to my lips, pointed at my watch, and then twirled my forefinger over its face. Tom nodded. He understood the gesture—let Dioli stew for a while—and then we’d see if he had waited or had gone. I pulled up the venetian blinds of my picture window and then opened it, lighting two cigarettes, one of which I handed to Tom, indicating he should sit at my typewriter and clack away at something. He smiled. I leaned on the window sill and looked out over the park and the beach. It was important to establish rules and territories. When I’d been in Dioli’s position, the last thing on earth I’d have done was to have been uncivil to a fellow policeman, whether current or retired from the force, unless they’d transgressed in some serious manner, or if I’d known them personally, and also knew them to be dipsticks.

  When I’d finished my cigarette, I flicked the butt out onto the awning below. After closing the window, I checked my tie in the reflection of its glass before returning to my desk to have a quick look at what Tom had been pounding frantically on my typewriter—nonsense words, but Dioli would never see what he’d written. I pulled the sheet of paper from the typewriter and then screwed it up into a ball, throwing it inexpertly into the wastepaper bin in the corner. I missed—again—and it landed on the floor next to the bin alongside a dozen or so discarded efforts of a report I’d been trying to type unsuccessfully all morning. Tom smiled and then gave me a thumbs up.

  Dioli was sitting on the bench in my anti-chamber, jiggling his knee and looking like thunder.

  “Clyde Smith,” I said, holding out my hand. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Please come in, Officer …?”

  “I’m sure you know who I am,” he growled. “Your mate in there knows me; surely he told you.”

  “I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but you’re wrong there. I’ve no idea who you are, and ‘my mate in there’, as you put it, respected the fact that I asked him not to speak until I’d finished typing up my notes,” I said.

  Well, I had put my finger to my lips and Tom had pounded out four or five minutes of nonsense on my typewriter to make him think I’d been busy, but what Dioli didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Maybe I’d overplayed the “officer” thing, but my dander was up.

  “Now are you going to continue to glare or are you going to shake my hand and then come inside and introduce yourself like any normal person?” I added, with as obvious a faux-grin as I could muster this early in the morning.

  “Detective Sergeant Mark Dioli,” he said, giving me the once-over now I was on my feet and not behind the desk. “I’m the man who took over your job up at Randwick … your replacement,” he explained.

  “Oh, I thought you took D.S. Telford’s position? I’ve been gone for a year now. Interesting you should say you replaced me. I guess I’m still missed, eh?”

  I hated shitbags with chips on their shoulder. This guy was a large hessian sack full and had enough hide on him for a roomful of petty crims. “Come in,” I said. I stood back and ushered him into my office.

  “I’d like to speak to you alone, Smith,” he said.

  “Mr. Ridley is my personal assistant, Sergeant. Let me be the judge of whether he needs to hear what you have to say. And by the way, seeing you mentioned you’d taken over my job, I never called a civilian by their last name unless they were a criminal, or in the clink. So, until I invite you to call me by my first name, I’d prefer it if you called me Mr. Smith, or by the way we were all taught to address male civilians. ‘Sir’, will do just nicely, thank you.”

  He didn’t look at me, or reply, but sat rather abruptly and then leaned forward and tapped the envelope he’d thrown at me earlier, which I’d not opened but had moved to one side. I looked at it and waited for him to speak.

  “I came to tell you to keep your nose out of my business.”

  “And what business would that be?”

  “The Bishop case,” he snapped.

  “Oh, forgive me, I was under the impression that D.C. Paleotti was handling that case.” I knew I’d gone too far the moment I opened my mouth, but his arrogant smirk and aggressive manner had made my blood boil from the moment he’d barged into my office.

  “Look here, let me remind you you’re no longer a police officer—”

  “That’s right, Detective Sergeant, but I understand the law very well. I’m also a war veteran with a very nasty temper. Now, if you tell me you’re here on official business, I’ll hear you out. But if you’re not and you cross boundaries and overstep the mark, I’ll have you—”

  “Are you threatening me, Smith? Why I ought to—”

  “You ought to what? Go ahead, charge me with something. March me up to the station. All I’d have to say when we get there is you got antsy and took a swing at me. Not only would the desk sergeant and the rest of the cops piss themselves laughing at the idea, who do you think they’d believe if you denied it? You or me?”

  He slammed his hand on the edge of the desk and got to his feet. “I heard you were a thug, Smith.”

  Tom grabbed my arm. Had he not, I may have just forgotten my manner and hauled the arsehole over my desk and slammed his face into my typewriter once or twice.

  “I’ll give you until I count to five to reconsider your words, Dioli. I only have to pick up the phone and speak to my very, very good friend the chief superintendent and tell him one of his mutts raised its leg in my office and pissed on my desk and then you’d find yourself pounding the footpath as far out west in N.S.W. as it’s possible to be.”

  He tried to out-stare me, but I’d weathered worse from German soldiers holding pistols to my face. I smiled into his glare; that’s when I noticed his leg began to tremble.

  I started to count. “One, two, three …”

  He was a bully, as Tom and Vince had said. I could see him clenching his fists, but too afraid to do anything about it. I guessed he hadn’t really ever been anything but a shouter. I was anything but.

  “Four, five. Time’s up. Tom, get the chief superintendent on the phone,” I said.

  Dioli grabbed Tom’s arm as he was about to leave the room, but Tom shrugged it off. “Get your hands off me, Detective Sergeant Dioli,” he said, baring his teeth.

  “Wait!” Dioli said, holding his hands in the air, as if he was surren­dering to the Japs or something. Guess he’d watched too many war movies. “This is getting out of hand.”

  “This got out of hand the moment you walked through my door. All you’ve managed to do so far is to torpedo any chance of help from an experienced cop and alienate any good will you may have had with me.”

  He looked at me, fit to kill. But I didn’t flinch from his aggressive stare—it took less than a minute before he broke. I’d seen this pissant behaviour many, many times in my life. Braggadocio they called it in Italy—showing false courage to cover up a lack of self-confidence. He sat down and started to play with something invisible between his fingertips.

  “All right, then. Let’s all take a deep breath and forget the last ten minutes ever took place, shall we?” I spoke more for my own sake than for his. I’d just had a flash image of myself picking him up and throwing him bodily out of my picture window onto the shop awning below. I inhaled deeply through my nose and then reached for my smokes. I flipped the lid open and offered a cigarette to him and Tom.

  “Now, perhaps you’d like to tell me what was up your arse in the first place.”

  “The envelope—that’s why I’m angry. That’s why I stormed in here. You made me look like a fool,
Smith. Why would you do such a thing? You were a cop. You know this is meddling.”

  “I have absolutely no idea what you mean.”

  “Go on, open it.”

  My business card was inside. I held it between my fingers for a moment and then looked at him. “These are all over the place. Clyde Smith. Private Investigator/Journalist. There’s even a stack of them on the counter at the newsagent. It pays to advertise.”

  “Turn it over,” he said.

  My blood ran cold. In the same elongated capital letters, written in green ink, was my name.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “It was pushed through the letter slot of the Bishop’s front door during the night. They phoned me not half an hour ago.”

  “Tom, tell Harry to get in here. I think we all need to talk about this.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dioli said. “I thought you’d done it on purpose—”

  “Spend more time talking to the blokes you work with at the station. They would have told you that’s not my style. Now, do you want tea or coffee, Detective Sergeant?”

  “Tea will be good.”

  I waited.

  “Please,” he eventually added.

  *****

  I knew Harry would pour oil on troubled waters. I could be a hot head, there was no doubt about it. It was part of the struggle for every man who’d suffered trauma of some sort, whether it had been emotional or physical. The war had picked most of us up by the scruff of the neck and thrown us under a threshing machine.

  Scratch the surface of any returned serviceman who’d seen action and you’d find a seething mass of rage, bubbling away, mostly under control, but likely to surface at the littlest thing—usually precipitated by someone with an agenda of their own and not enough common sense to see it.

  Although I knew he wasn’t old enough to have fought in the last war, Dioli had been one such irritating dick, a man held together by a veneer of self-control.

  Had he rung and asked to see me, or even had knocked at my office door and introduced himself, I might still have been annoyed, but not as angry as I had been. I wasn’t proud of the way I’d played cat and mouse with him, but I apologised to no man, unless I’d done something that wasn’t warranted. Dick-measuring competitions had never been my thing. Dioli had tried to flop his out on my desk, and in front of Tom, his junior ex-colleague, and as far as I was concerned what had fallen out of his trousers wasn’t in the race for a prize.

  I’d seen his type before, but never in the police force. Most of the guys I’d worked with had got slapped down really quickly if they’d tried to poke their noses above the general level of indifference that was all pervasive in most suburban cop shops. I’d been an exception, and it had taken me years of crime solving, fighting the system, and handing out tough love before I’d gained the grudging respect of the men and women I’d worked with.

  What Dioli expected to achieve by lording it over a lot of people who’d been doing the job since he was a teenager I’d no idea. Still, I was embarrassed over my lack of self-control—I usually waited longer before I went for the jugular.

  Harry had worked his magic. I heard a few soft laughs as I entered the vestibule of my office with a tea tray. Tom caught my eye and raised an eyebrow.

  Although he’d softened a little, Dioli was still wary of me. He smiled a bit at Harry, but basically ignored Tom. It was obvious he still felt he had to mark his turf. I’d seen it all my life—people who tried to prove something rather than succeeding by knuckling down and making their successes by their own hard work.

  He was hiding something—I could see it as plain as day. It wasn’t to do with the reason he was here, it was more personal. I’d got used to men in the camp putting up fronts, pretending to be something they weren’t, hiding their feelings, or keeping a lid on things. Mark Dioli seemed to be guarding something. All men had secrets; I even had a few of my own.

  “If you didn’t put your business card through their letter slot, then who did?” Dioli said, looking annoyed because he’d just dunked his biscuit in his cup and the end had broken off and fallen into his tea before he could get it into his mouth. A small drop had splashed onto his fresh, pale-blue shirt.

  “Tell me one thing,” I replied, turning my business card over. “Did you wonder why I’d write my own name on the back of the card if it’s printed so clearly on the front?”

  “Well, of course,” he protested, unconvincingly.

  Okay, I was tired of playing games with him. It was obvious he was out of his depth. I opened my desk drawer and threw the envelope that had arrived for me when we were away in Melbourne onto the desk.

  “I got one of these while I was away. Empty too. But same hand­writing, same coloured ink …”

  “And you think …”

  “Jesus,” I muttered, wondering who this guy could be rooting to get a D.S. job straight after his sergeant’s exam. “Someone obviously thinks I should be involved in the Bishop case.”

  “No way,” Dioli said, sitting back in his chair and shaking his head.

  “Very well, Detective. As there’s nothing more to discuss, I’ll bid you good day and wish you all the best with your investigation.”

  He looked for all the world like one of those sideshow clown amusements. The type that twisted their heads from side to side and into whose mouth you had to insert a ping-pong ball, aiming it to fall into numbered slots below.

  “Hang on, Clyde,” Harry said, giving me one of his looks. “Perhaps if any information comes your way you could hand it on to the detective sergeant, as a gesture of goodwill.”

  I’m sure my fake smile would have curdled milk, but I tried, the best I could. “For sure. If anything comes up, I’ll surely give it to the chief superintendent.”

  “No, please. Send it to me. I’ll make sure it gets the attention it deserves,” Dioli said, a little too quickly for it to be anything other than an intercept.

  “It’s no problem, Detective Sergeant. In fact, I’ll see him far more regularly than I will you, so I’ll just pass it on to him …”

  “I tell you what, Mr. Smith, if you do run across anything, please just telephone the station and I’ll come down in person myself to collect it.”

  I hadn’t missed the slight hesitation before he’d said the “mister” before my name.

  As I stood to shake his hand, he hesitated before he took mine. “By the way, I’ve been wondering, how did you know the Bishop case was being handled by D.C. Paleotti?”

  “When a former cop never has to put his hand in his pocket to pay for a drink with his ex-mates at the pub after work, nothing’s a secret, Sergeant. Surely you know that by now? Station chatter at the local, that’s how I know,” I lied. The last thing in the world I wanted was to get Vince into any trouble.

  Dioli didn’t quite jam his hat back on his head or stomp down the stairs noisily. But the moment I returned after having escorted him down to the street, I found Tom leaning out the window laughing softly to himself. Harry was in my chair shaking his head at me.

  “Really, Clyde?” he said, but with a grin.

  “What?”

  I wasn’t really good at feigned innocence but I tried my hardest.

  *****

  “Tom said you were very hard on him.”

  “Maybe I was a bit too hard, yes, Harry. But anyone who bullies a keen young constable, picks apart everything he does, and then calls him a poofter for no other reason than for bolstering his own ego, doesn’t deserve any respect. The way he barged into my office and started mouthing off had me angry before he even said a word. I have way too much anger inside me to control sometimes.”

  We’d gone for a walk after having lunch in the beer garden of the local pub, and were now sitting on the raised sandstone wall of the promenade, gazing out over the beach, our jackets by our sides, and our feet dangling over the twenty-foot drop down to the sand.

  “You look very handsome in your new sunglasses, Clyde,” he said, surre
ptitiously rubbing his little finger against the outside of my thigh.

  “Thank you again, Harry. I really like them.”

  My birthday had happened to be on the same day as the water polo match in Melbourne: the sixth of December. When we’d dined in the Hungarian restaurant that night, he’d slid the beautiful kidskin case across the table to me. They were expensive Persol glasses, made by Ratti, and must have cost him a fortune. Worn by all the major Italian male heartthrobs in the movies, I could have only dreamed of buying a pair. “Per il sole,” I’d remarked to him, when I’d seen them for sale in the window of a Bourke Street jeweller and then had explained Persol was a contraction of the Italian phrase I’d just uttered—for the sun.

  “You’re handsome, Clyde. The sunglasses do nothing but accentuate your good looks.”

  I blushed red-hot. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to being paid compliments, even as heartfelt as the one Harry had just thrown at me.

  “I’m sorry you heard about me losing my rag, Harry.”

  He chuckled and then patted my shoulder. “I’ve seen you stab two men to death and shoot another through the head, Clyde. Seeing you get annoyed doesn’t count in the greater scheme of things. But I know you well enough to realise something else must have made you kick off like that. Want to share?”

  “I want to have a swim,” I said, gazing off over the breakers, avoiding a direct answer for the moment. I looked up into the lifesaver tower and watched the young man on shark duty, perched some twenty feet above the ground atop a sharply pointed pyramid of Meccano-like struts, scanning the sea with his binoculars. “Or be up there where he is …”

  “Go ahead,” Harry said. “Strip off and jump in the water. I’ll look after your clobber.”

  I grinned at him.

  “You asked why I kicked off? I haven’t had time to tell you yet, but Billy rang me before you arrived. He told me that Sonny Mullins’ mother died six years ago. She drank a bottle of rum, posted a suicide letter in the local post box and then went home and took a bottle of sleeping pills before setting fire to her house. Everything incinerated.”