Jon Cleary - Murder Song

Malone introduced himself. ‘Does Miss Mardi Jack live here?’

‘Yeah. But she’s not in. Why?’

‘Are you a relative?’

The sleep quickly cleared from the girl’s eyes; she was alertly intelligent. ‘Is something wrong? Is she in jail or something?’

Malone told her the bad news as gently as he could; he had had plenty of experience at this but it never became any easier. ‘Does she have a family? Parents or a husband?’

The girl leaned against the door as if mortally wounded by shock. ‘Oh my God! Shot ?’ She had a husky voice that cracked now; she cleared her throat, wrapped her dressing-gown tighter round her as if she had just felt something more than the morning cold. ‘You wanna come in?’

She led the way down a narrow hall, through a small living-room and out into a kitchen that seemed to be about two hundred years ahead of the vintage front of the house. Beyond its glass wall was a neat courtyard, complete with trees in pots, a bird-bath and a gas barbecue on wheels. Tradition could be respected only just so far, about half the length of the house.

The girl prepared coffee. ‘Espresso or cappuccino?’

All mod cons, thought Malone; this girl, and probably Mardi Jack, knew how to live well. Except that Mardi Jack had gone where all mod cons counted for nothing. ‘Cappuccino. Do you mind if I ask who you are?’

‘I’m Gina Cazelli – Mardi and I share – shared this place. You asked about her family. She just had her father, he lives somewhere up on the Gold Coast. He and Mardi weren’t too close. Her parents separated when she was a little girl, then her mother died about, oh, I think it was five or six years ago.’

‘Did she have any close friends, I mean besides you. A boy-friend, an ex-husband?’

‘I don’t think she’d ever been married, at least she never mentioned that she had. She had no particular guy. She was – I shouldn’t say this about her, but I’m trying to help, I mean, find who shot her. She sorta played the field. Christ, that sounds disloyal, doesn’t it?’ She busied herself getting cups and saucers, got some croissants out of a bread-tin and put them in a microwave oven. Malone noticed that the kitchen was as tidy and spotless as Lisa’s; Gina Cazelli at the moment looked like a wreck, but either she or Mardi Jack had kept a neat house. ‘She wasn’t a whore. She was just unlucky with the men she fell in love with. She’d be absolutely nuts about some guy, it’d last three or four months and then he’d be gone. She’d bounce herself off other guys out of, I dunno, spite or self-pity or something. You know what women are like.’

She looked at him carefully and he smiled and nodded. ‘I try to know ’em. It ain’t easy.’

She nodded in reply, took the croissants out of the microwave. ‘I haven’t had breakfast. Yeah, you’re right. Men are easier to know.’

‘What did Mardi do? For a living?’

‘She was a singer. Good, but not good enough, I mean to be a top-liner. She sang around the clubs, you know, the girl who comes on and sings for the wives before the smutty comic comes on and tells sexist jokes. She hated it, but it paid the rent. Her main income came from singing jingles for commercials. That was how we met. I’m an assistant producer with a recording studio.’

‘Were you close? As friends, I mean.’

She handed him his coffee and a croissant, pushed strawberry jam in a small decorated crock towards him; he began to suspect that Gina was the one who kept the house up to House and Garden standards. She handed him a fancy paper napkin, yellow to match the front door and the colour strips on the kitchen cupboard doors and drawers.

‘No, we weren’t that close. We sorta lived our own lives. There was ten years’ difference between us – she was thirty-three. It made a difference. She liked older guys.’

Malone sipped his coffee, trying not to be too obvious as he studied Gina Cazelli. She was dumpy and plain, her plainness not helped by her frizzed-out hair; it was the sort of hair that would always look the same, in or out of bed, any time of day or night; it was the latest fashion, Claire, the fashion expert, had told him when he had commented on a certain TV actress’s hair-style. Malone had seen Gina’s type before when he had had to brush against the fringes of the entertainment industry: the too-willing, efficient plain jane whom everyone would use because they knew that what she was doing was her whole life, her only escape from whatever drudgery was her alternative.

‘Any particular older bloke?’ It was one of his idiosyncrasies that he never used the word guy ; fighting a losing battle, he stuck to the slang of his rabidly patriotic father, Con Malone, who hated more foreigners than even the Aborigines did. ‘A recent one?’

Gina shook her head; the hair shivered like an unravelled string cap. ‘No, there’s been no one for at least four, maybe five months. Nobody she’s brought home.’ She munched on her croissant. ‘But –’

‘But what?’ he said patiently after waiting a few moments.

‘I think there’s been one guy. He used to ring her here, not often, but maybe two or three times. She never told me anything about him and I never asked. She had a call from him on Saturday morning at the studio, we were doing a recording for a TV commercial. God, when I think of it!’

‘What?’

‘The jingle was “I’ll be alive forever”!’ She gulped down a mouthful of coffee; for a moment she looked as if she was about to burst into tears. Then she shook her head again, the hair shivered. ‘Well, it was him. I took the call and he asked for her.’

‘Did he ever give his name when you took a call from him?’

‘No. When she came back from the phone she seemed upset, but she didn’t say anything. I had to work back and by the time I got home Saturday, about six, she’d gone out.’

Malone put down his empty cup, declined the offer of more coffee. Cappuccino and croissants on Monday morning in Paddington was okay for assistant recording producers and artists and ballet dancers, but not for working cops. ‘Could I have a look at her room?’

Gina hesitated, then nodded. ‘I suppose you’ve got to. But it’s like intruding on her, isn’t it?’

‘It’s better intruding on the dead than on the living, but we don’t enjoy any of it.’

She smiled, a painful one, and for a moment looked less plain. ‘Why do we call you pigs? Not all of you are.’

She led him up the narrow stairs to a back bedroom that looked out on to the courtyard. The room looked as if it had been freshly painted, but it was a mess, a sanitized rubbish tip. The bed was unmade, clothes were strewn over the two chairs, the dressing-table looked like a wrecked corner of a beauty parlour. He began to suspect that Mardi Jack’s life might have been just as unkempt.

‘She took two showers a day,’ said Gina Cazelli, ‘but she hadn’t the faintest idea what a coat-hanger was for.’

‘You mind if I look through here on my own? You can trust me.’

She looked around the room, sad and puzzled at what might be all that was left of her friend’s life; then abruptly she left him. Malone began the sort of search that always disturbed him, the turning over of a murder or suicide victim to see what was hidden beneath the body.

The closet was packed tightly with clothes, all of them expensive and, by his taste, a bit way out. There were leather and sequins and eye-dazzling silks and taffetas; Malone wondered how the man who never left his name could have had a discreet affair with her. Then he found a black woollen coat and remembered the black fox one in the flat where she had been murdered. He wondered if the man had bought them for her, thrown them over her to hide her.