The Gilded Madonna Read online

  “So it couldn’t have been her who send the picture?”

  “No. Even if she had asked someone to post it for her in Western Australia, it still came from a G.P.O. box here in Sydney. Billy managed to track down Trafford Olsen, who’s still going backwards and forwards between the mental hospital and rehab after losing both legs and an arm in New Guinea. He told Billy he remembered taking that photo, but as he couldn’t develop it himself while we were in Africa, he gave the roll of film to Sonny when he left to come back home, so he’d never seen those pictures.”

  “And then there’s the envelope with green ink …”

  He did know me well. I muttered a soft, “Yeah, that too.” I’d been dwelling on the coincidence. Two seemingly unrelated items arriving on my doorstep at the same time.

  “You don’t think the photo and the green ink are connected, do you, Clyde?”

  I shook my head. “I spent about an hour of my thinking time under the shower last night trying to find out how the kidnap and disappearance of two small children here in Coogee could possibly be related to Billy, me, Sonny, or Johnny. Johnny had no family. Besides, he was dead well before Sonny had arrived back in Australia on the troop ship.”

  “Well, Clyde, do you want my advice?”

  “I’d rather have something else, but as we’re out in public … go on.”

  He nudged me with his elbow, I could have wound my arms around his neck and kissed him right there out in public for the brilliance of his smile and the care in his eyes.

  “The photo is an enigma, agreed, and it seems futile losing sleep over it without more information. But, the two other things—the empty envelope with your name on it and your business card with your name written on the back—they have to be connected to the Bishops.”

  “You think it’s like the Daley Morrison case when someone left a note with my initials on it in the evidence bag? Someone within the police force who wants me to investigate it from the outside?”

  “Maybe. But you can probably be sure it’s neither Vince nor Philip this time.”

  “Look, Harry. I get loads of fan mail from both my review columns and from my monthly crime report in the Sydney Morning Herald. Perhaps it’s some punter trying to say if the cops aren’t getting anywhere with the case, perhaps they need to bring in outside help?”

  “Maybe you’re right, Clyde. Now, sorry to change the subject, but what are you doing tonight?”

  “Well, I’ll give you a choice if you’re free. I have a review to phone in later today for tomorrow’s afternoon edition. We can either go eat somewhere, or there’s a new movie opened last night at the Boomerang.”

  “What is it?”

  I took out my notebook. “These Wilder Years. Cagney and Stanwyck.”

  “Isn’t Cagney a bit old to be still playing gangsters?”

  I laughed. “It’s a modern teenage angst movie from what I can tell. Walter Pigeon’s in it too. But if you like, High Society is showing at the Ritz cinema up at The Spot. It’s a musical with Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra.”

  “Now you’re talking, Clyde. You’ve had enough angst for the day. Something entertaining is just what the doctor ordered. It’s something Mother might like, too. Do you mind if I invite my parents?”

  “No, I don’t mind,” I said, my voice betraying me. With his parents along, there’d be no stay over after the movie.

  “I’ll make it up to you, Clyde. I’ve told them I might be busy all weekend. I’ve arranged it with Shirley. She’s coming on Saturday morning and staying until Monday, and she’s very grateful for the extra cash. How those nurses manage on their pitiful wages, I’ve no idea.”

  “You’re forgiven. It will be nice to see your mum and dad as well. Perhaps we could have an early dinner at the dining room of the Oceanic Hotel beforehand?”

  “That sounds like a terrific idea. I’ll phone and make a booking. I know Mother wants to discuss something with you before your meeting with Billy on Monday anyway, so it will kill two birds with the one stone.”

  *****

  After we returned to the office, I phoned an old mate who worked at central records and asked him whether I could perhaps bend our arrangement and if I could come in later in the day. If I ever needed to trawl through any police files, he always gave me open slather on Wednesdays, as it was usually the quietest period during the week. It wasn’t totally above board, but as I still had my army investigation card, and he liked me from years of working together, he said there’d be no problem. So I left Tom with Harry to talk through some advertising ideas for his adventure tours business and then drove into the city.

  A lot of guys who’d been cops before the war and who were approaching retirement had elected to transfer to the files sections of the police force, where they could still keep their hands in, but save on shoe leather. I usually learned more with a large cardboard box full of cakes for afternoon tea and a chinwag over a few smokes than from trawling through records—and it was a perfect opportunity to catch up on who was doing what to whom around the traps.

  Mark Dioli was the reason I’d decided to pay them a visit. He’d transferred to Randwick barely a month after his D.S. exam, and I wanted to know why.

  It took all of five minutes after I’d deposited my box of pastries and cakes on the afternoon tea table before I started to hear things like, “I heard they couldn’t wait to get rid of him”, “Stood on other people’s shoulders”, “Wouldn’t mix with the others”, “Stuck up”, “Quarrelsome, un-cooperative”. However, the phrase that stuck in my mind was the mention of his tyrannical grandfather.

  “Tyrannical grandfather?”

  “Great War veteran with more medals than bloody MacArthur on his chest. Cranky old bastard,” one of the older detectives said. “Dioli lives with him. Adopted, so he’s not his real grandfather. The parents went down on the Greycliffe.”

  “The ferry that collided with the steam ship? That Greycliffe? How did he survive then?”

  “Four or five months old, I heard. The whole family was lost. One of the ship’s crew pulled him and his mother out of the ferry as it went down. She died three days later from an infection after swallowing too much water, and the kid was put into an orphanage.”

  I shook my head. What a start to life. Maybe that’s why he had such a streak of blustering arrogance. Maybe it was in compensation for the guilt at having survived? He’d probably grown up with the story of how lucky he was.

  “I heard the old man’s only surviving relative, a brother, went down on it as well and then years later when he found out the boy was still in a home, adopted him,” one of the other old-timers added.

  Half an hour later, after they wandered back to work, I got stuck into local branch copies to see if I could find Dioli’s service record. Hurlstone Park, Dulwich Hill, Enmore, Stanmore … ah, here it was, Marrickville. I asked if I could use the phone and called the senior sergeant who’d worked there during Dioli’s tenure. Fifteen minutes later, I had what I’d been after. Gotcha, you silly bastard! My smile as I hung up the phone was truly gratifying.

  Negligence of duty was as bad a crime as corruption. I wonder how Detective Sergeant Mark Dioli would react if we were to summons him to our tribunal to answer questions? And then I told myself that I’d save the information for the right time, when I really needed him to cooperate with me.

  The other thing I learned, which really made me bristle, was a letter in Dioli’s current file pertaining to his sudden appointment as detective sergeant at my old nick. One of the guys from records had dug it out and handed it to me just as I was about to leave to go home. In the letter, the assistant commissioner, having met Dioli a few times, had selected him, on the basis of his charm and careful grooming, as one of the first for rapid advancement to try to give a new, fresh face to the detective branch of the N.S.W. police force. It hadn’t hurt that Dioli had scored a perfect one hundred percent for his sergeant’s exam either.

  I guess all us old-timers
had been tarred with the same brush of corruption, sloth, and indifference as many of the men I’d worked with when I’d first started out. I couldn’t give a shit, I told myself, as I stomped off to find my car, hoping it hadn’t been towed away from a half-hour parking zone outside the records office, and reminding myself for the umpteenth time that I wasn’t a copper anymore.

  I guess I really did give a shit, and it annoyed the hell out of me that I did.

  CHAPTER SIX

  All the way along my run this morning, I couldn’t shake one of the songs out of my head from the movie last night. “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”, one of the catchiest tunes from High Society, was still buzzing through my brain as I jogged past the tennis courts one block from home.

  I’d taken a different route this morning, following the footpath that ran next to the tram lines from the hoop at the terminus up to the top of Carrington Road and then down again to the western end of my street. Had I not gone that way, no doubt I’d have missed the constable directing traffic away from Brook Street and down Dolphin Street.

  “Hey, Dave,” I said as I slowed down to find out what was going on.

  “Oh, gidday, Clyde,” he said.

  “What’s the stoush?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “As if they’d tell me. I’ve just been told not to let traffic through—not even locals. There’s another one of us up at Ormond Gardens doing the same—new bloke since you left.”

  “Nice to see you, mate. Take care,” I added over my shoulder as I turned to head off home.

  I guessed the reason for the stoush would have to be connected to the man leaning against one of the gate posts at the entrance to my block of flats—the last person on earth I’d expect to see.

  “Morning,” he said, taking off his sunglasses and placing them in the breast pocket of his summer jacket. I couldn’t help but notice it was a very expensive, obviously tailor-made linen number.

  “Hello, Detective Sergeant,” I said. I tossed my head in the direction of the oval on the opposite side of the road. “I suppose you’re here because of whatever kicked off over there.”

  “I wondered if you’d like to come up to the station. There’s some­thing I’d like you to see.”

  “Can’t it wait? I haven’t had a shower yet.”

  He looked at his watch. “The post-mortem is scheduled to start at seven, and Jack Lyme more or less ordered me to fetch you before he starts. He told me you’d be out running, so I’ve been waiting for you to get back.”

  “Any clues, or are you just going to let me stew?”

  “I know you don’t consider me much of a detective, but one thing I do know is not to suggest, but wait for people to speak for themselves after they’ve seen things with their own eyes.”

  I was determined not to lose my rag with him again, so I ignored the jibe about his perceived opinion of my thoughts on his detective skills—I had none as yet.

  “You can either wait down here while I shower and get changed or you can come up and I’ll make you a cup of coffee while I get ready.”

  He followed me up the stairs.

  *****

  Jack Lyme was not one to be perturbed by anything much, so when I entered his examination lab and saw he’d called in the senior medical examiner from the main city office, I was rather surprised.

  Jack was a forensics specialist. He usually gave bodies a look over, submitted his report to go along with the cadaver when it went to either the local hospital, the coroner, or to the police specialists in the city. He introduced me to Doctor Halloran, but as I already knew him, I shook his hand and smiled. It was the furrow on Jack’s brow had me slightly puzzled.

  “So, Detective, there’s a body on the slab covered in a sheet,” I said over my shoulder to Dioli. “What is it you wanted me to see?”

  “Go ahead, show him,” Dioli said to the two doctors.

  Halloran pulled the sheet down to the man’s waist. What I saw made me take a deep breath. The man’s throat was cut so deeply his head looked like it had almost been severed.

  “If you tell me this man was found in the public toilet behind the grandstand of Coogee Oval opposite where I live, I might just need a chair,” I said.

  As Dioli said nothing, and the other two men seemed to be waiting for me to speak, I guess my suspicions had been proven. I pulled the sheet down to the man’s knees.

  “Jesus!” I said.

  Above the man’s pubic bone was a deeply incised X, at its centre an embedded Catseye marble. I recognised it as the modus operandi of the Silent Cop killer, who we’d named after the concrete traffic domes set into the middle of intersections on the roadway. Five inches tall and set around the circumference with reflective glass marbles, they were painted yellow and used as a centre marker around which cars were supposed to make their turns at the intersection.

  “The Silent Cop case was yours, I believe?” Dioli asked. I ignored him.

  “Same as the others?” I asked Jack.

  “Yes, Clyde. Same incision above the pubis, inserted Catseye, and throat cut by someone close up behind. Right-handed perpetrator, just like the others.”

  I moved closer and crouched down behind the head of the torso. There it was. The unmistakable deep bite into the top of the man’s left shoulder. The killer’s signature, imprinted in flesh. I sighed and stood up. Jack patted my shoulder. Both he and I had run into so many dead ends trying to search dental charts. We’d spent hours pouring over the few records that only some dentists kept. Most didn’t bother. The tooth pattern was perfect; no missing teeth, no irregularities. Too perfect. Another thing that had kept me awake for hours at night.

  Dioli had moved to the doorway and was leaning against the wall, his hands in his pockets, watching me with a slight smile hovering at the corner of his mouth. Had I been less generous, which I wasn’t, I could easily have interpreted it as a smirk. I ignored him and turned back to Jack.

  “So I suppose—”

  “Yes, ejaculate over the buttocks and upper thighs at the back.”

  “I didn’t examine the last cases, Clyde,” Dr. Halloran informed me. “However, when Dr. Lyme called me early this morning, I pulled the medical reports from our central office and read through them in the taxi on my way here. I’d say the weapon was the same, and the man was killed in the same manner, with all the same telltale details.”

  We’d had a spate of four killings, all in a relatively short period of time. Men’s throats sliced through to the spinal column from behind with a cut-throat razor, the X-shaped incision embedded with a Catseye marble, the bite mark on the left shoulder, and evidence of inter­course—withdrawal at the point of orgasm.

  “You swab for other traces?”

  “What do you take me for, Clyde,” Jack said with a smile. “Of course. However, there’s evidence the victim had ejaculated at the time of, or shortly before death. Traces of semen in the urethra, his pubic hair, and on his right hand.

  “Sick bastards,” Dioli muttered from behind me and then added, “What?” as we three turned to stare at his inappropriate remark.

  “If you’d like some advice, Detective Sergeant, I’d keep your comments about other people’s private lives to yourself,” the chief medical examiner said. Quinton Halloran’s icy stare had made me bite my tongue more than once when I’d unwittingly offered some thoughtless observation. “It’s not only unhelpful, but it’s unfitting for someone to make value judgements about the victim of a crime. Honestly, those sorts of remarks are more fitting for some lout in a public bar than for a new detective sergeant.”

  Dioli blushed furiously red.

  “Can I go now?” I said to him.

  “What? Aren’t you going to—”

  “It’s your case, Detective Sergeant. Besides, yesterday you made yourself pretty damned clear that I don’t work here anymore, and I should keep my nose out of your business.”

  “But—”

  “My notes are on file. Read those, do your forensics, invest
igate the victim’s background, and interview people who live in the area who might have seen something. All basic stuff, you should knock it over in a day or two. Once you’ve got your basics sorted, start planning your chain of investigation and get photos and notes pinned up on the case board in the detective’s office. For what it’s worth, start off by finding out who this man is and go from there.”

  “We know who he is, Clyde,” Jack said as I was about to leave the room. “He’s a lance corporal at the army barracks down in High Street, behind the hospital.”

  Army guy, trawling for blokes in public toilets late at night? Not all that uncommon, but risky. Poor bastard didn’t deserve to die like that.

  “Can I have a word outside, Sergeant?” I said as I picked up my hat from the trolley on which I’d left it when I’d arrived. “Speak later, Jack. Nice to see you again, Quinton,” I added as I held the door open for Dioli.

  “What is it?” he asked the moment I’d closed the door behind him.

  “Outside. A quick cigarette and a bit of advice on your case—free, gratis, and for nothing.” It irked me, but there was a case to be solved, one I’d worked on for over two years.

  He offered me one of his cigarettes. Mother-of-pearl case with gold fittings. Gold Ronson lighter. Did this guy go around proving his self-worth with everything he did? He lived in Rozelle, for fuck’s sake. I’d looked up the “grandfather’s” address. They lived in a suburb that was known as a den of thieves, filled with dirt-poor families and tumble­down, Victorian-era, semi-detached weatherboard houses.

  “Listen,” I said. “You’ve made it perfectly clear you want to do it your own way. But the gossip around the traps says you need to spend more time on the job.” He was about to object, but I held up my hand. “Hear me out. It’s just what I’ve heard. Don’t shoot the messenger, okay? You’ve got more of a reputation for shaking hands than for doing police work, and I can guarantee you that’s a recipe for disaster if you want help from the other guys at the nick.”