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‘My mum’s proud of me. I never knew my dad.’ He offered no more information on his father and Malone didn’t ask. ‘The rest of the Kooris – ’ He shrugged. ‘Depends whether they’re sober or not. When they’ve had a skinful, some of ’em get real shitty towards me.’
‘What sort of education did you have?’
‘I got to Year Eleven. One time I dreamed of getting my HSC and going on to university.’ He was a dinkum Aussie: he had said haitch for H. It was a characteristic that always brought a laugh from Lisa, the foreigner. ‘We Kooris are supposed to live in the Dreamtime. Some of us have different dreams to others.’
Malone could think of nothing to say to that; so he said, ‘What about your cousin Billy?’
‘Is he a suspect?’
‘I don’t know. What about him?’
‘He’s a silly young bugger, but that’s all I’m gunna say about him. We Kooris stick together,Inspector. Anyone will tell you that, especially the whites.’
Malone abruptly pulled the car into the side of the road, just opposite the grain silos on the edge of town. ‘Wally, let’s get one thing straight from the start. I’ve got my faults, but I’m not a racist. I don’t care what yours or Billy’s or anybody else’s skin is like, I treat them with respect till something happens to make me change my mind. But whatever changes my mind, it has nothing to do with the colour of their skin. Now can you get that through your black skull?’
Wally Mungle, like most Aborigines Malone had known, had a sense of humour. He suddenly smiled his beautiful smile. ‘Fair enough.’
Malone started up the car again. ‘Before we see Billy, take me down to the black settlement. I don’t want to talk to anyone, just look at the conditions there.’
‘I don’t live down there, y’know. My mother does, but I don’t.’
‘Where do you live?’ Malone put the question delicately. Twice in fifteen minutes he had had to be delicate: it might lead to cramp in a tongue that, too often, had got him into trouble.
‘I’ve got three acres over the other side of the river. I live there with my wife and two kids.’
‘Is she black?’
Mungle looked sideways at him. ‘Does it matter?’
They went round the war memorial; it seemed to Malone that the Anzac was ready to swivel on his pedestal, his bayonet at the ready. They drove down the main street, which was full now with cars and trucks parked at an angle to the kerb. It seemed to Malone, imagination working overtime, that people coming out of the stores stopped to stare at him and Wally Mungle. In the shade of the stores’ awnings men and women stood motionless, heads turned in the unmarked police car’s direction, ears strained for Malone’s answer.
They had reached the far end of the main street before Malone said, ‘No, it doesn’t matter if she’s black. But I’m a stranger here, it’s a whole new turf to me, and people around here don’t look at things the way I’m used to. I’ve learned that just since I got in last night.’
‘Fair enough. Yeah, Ruby’s black. She’s a mixed-blood, like me. We would of been called half-castes in the old days, but that’s out now. Ruby’s what the Yanks call a quadroon, or used to. She’s got more white blood than me, it shows.’
‘She got white relatives around here?’
A slight hesitation, then a nod: ‘Yeah, but they’d never admit to it. She doesn’t press it, she’s quite happy with things the way they are. By the time our kids grow up, things will have changed – we hope. They’ll be white enough to be accepted.’
‘What are they, how old?’
‘A boy, six, and a girl, three. Nobody would know they’re Kooris, they could pass for Wogs.’
‘Is that what you want for them when they grow up, to pass for Wogs?’
‘No.’ He said it quietly, but his voice was emphatic. ‘I want ’em to be Kooris. I just don’t want ’em discriminated against because of the colour of their skin. I’ve had enough of that. You got any kids?’
‘Yes. Pure white, all three of them. The only discrimination against them is that their father is a cop.’
‘My kids have got that, too.’ But he smiled his beautiful smile again. ‘Okay, turn off here.’
They were just beyond the edge of town, coming to a two-lane bridge over the river, the Noongulli. Malone turned off on to a red-dirt track that led parallel to the river and soon came to the Aboriginal settlement. At first glance the location was idyllic. There was a wide bend in the river and a small beach of flood-washed sand on the far side of the grey-green stretch of slow-moving water. Red river-gums, their trunks blotched like an old man’s skin, hung over the river as if looking for fish to jump to the bait of their leaves. Shade dappled the ground under a stand of yellowbox and on the far side of the river Malone could see the white rails of the racecourse seeming, at this distance, to hover above the ground like a giant magic hoop that had become fixed without any visible support. A white heron, looking in the reflected sunlight from the river almost as insubstantial as if it were made of no more than its own powder-down, creaked in slow motion up towards the bridge. Then Malone saw the reality.
The settlement, standing back about fifty yards from the river bank, was a collection of tin shacks flung together without any pattern, as if the shacks had been built where the corrugated iron for the walls and the roofs had fallen off a truck driven by a drunk. Four abandoned cars, stripped of their engines, wheels gone, lay like dead shrunken hippos between a patch of scrub and the shacks. The cars’ seats rested in a neat row under two yellowbox trees, seats in a park that had been neglected and forgotten. Two drunken Aborigines lay asleep on two of the seats, just as Malone had seen other, white drunks in inner city parks in Sydney. The track through the settlement was a rutted, dried-out morass of mud in which half a dozen raggedy-dressed children played as he had seen his own children play in the sand on Coogee beach. The shacks themselves, some of them supporting lean-tos roofed over with torn tarpaulins, looked ready to be condemned. The part of the settlement’s population that Malone could see, perhaps thirty or forty men and women of all ages, did not appear to have anything to occupy them. They sat or lolled on shaky-looking chairs, against tree-boles or on the ground, just waiting – for what? he wondered. Wine flagons were being passed around, unhurriedly, without comment, every drinker waiting patiently for his or her swig. None of the boisterousness of white beer-swillers here: these blacks were prepared to take their time in getting drunk. And maybe that’s what they’re waiting for, he thought: to get drunk, to have the mind, too, turn black. He couldn’t blame them and never had. It was just a pity they could make such a bloody nuisance of themselves. But that was the cop in him, thinking a policeman’s thoughts.
‘Well, that’s it,’ said Wally Mungle, making no attempt to get out of the car; silently advising Malone not to do so. ‘Dreamtime on the Noongulli.’
‘How did you get out of it?’
‘Because I wanted to.’
‘What about the others?’ He tried to sound uncritical, but it was an effort.
Mungle didn’t appear to resent the implied criticism. ‘Most of ’em are full-bloods. I think they’ve given up the fight. This district has always had a pretty bloody attitude towards us Kooris. It’s hardly changed in a hundred and fifty years, ever since Chess Hardstaff’s great-grandfather came out here and started Noongulli Station. There was a massacre here, right where we’re sitting, in eighteen fifty-one – a dozen Koori men and half a dozen women were shot and killed. There was a trial, but nobody went to gaol for it. The shire council showed a lot of sensitivity when they nominated this spot for the settlement – they thought they were doing us a favour, giving us a river view. It was put up twenty years ago when there was a conservative government in and when Labour got in, they did nothing about moving it from here. Now we’ve got a conservative coalition again and there’s been promises about improvements, but so far there’s been bugger-all.’
‘Does everyone here live on the dole?’
‘Practically everyone. In the old days, when I was a kid, some of the men got work at shearing time, but now the shearing teams come in from outside and none of the local graziers want to have anything to do with the Kooris.’
‘What about Sean Carmody out at Sundown?’
‘Well, yeah, him and his grandson take on a few. But they’re looked on as radicals. His son-in-law,Trevor Waring, who lives next door, doesn’t take on any.’
‘What about out at the cotton farm? Billy worked there.’
‘He was the only one. Practically all the work there is mechanized – these guys here ain’t trained for anything like that. Billy was just a sorta roustabout out there. The token Abo for the Japs.’
‘Why was he sacked?’
Mungle said nothing for a long moment; then decided to be a cop and not just a Koori: ‘Billy likes the grog a bit too much. If he had a hangover, he wasn’t always on time for work. Sagawa didn’t like that, so he fired Billy. I don’t blame him.’
‘Does Billy blame him?’
‘You better ask him that. You seen enough out here?’
Malone looked out at the depressing scene once more. The three or four circles of drinkers, aware all at once that their kin, Wally Mungle, was in the car with the stranger, had stopped passing the wine flagons and had all turned their heads to look at the two cops in the Commodore. Their faces were expressionless, mahogany masks. Sitting in their shapeless clothes in the dirt, surrounded by squalor, they still suggested a certain dignity by their very stillness.
‘Christ!’
‘I don’t think He wants to help,’ said Wally Mungle. ‘The God-botherers pray for us Kooris every Sunday, but it goes right over the heads of their congregations. I think Jesus Christ has given up, too.’
‘Are you religious?’ Malone remembered it had been bush missionaries who had first brought education to the Aborigines.
‘I used to be. Not any more, though.’
Malone started up the car, swung it round and drove back along the river and up on to the main road. He and Mungle said nothing more to each other till Malone pulled the car into the yard behind the police station.
‘Do you want to come in with me while I question Billy?’
Mungle hesitated, then shrugged. ‘I better. I can’t go on dodging the poor bugger.’
Malone wondered how many other Kooris he had dodged in the past. It struck him that, even in his mind, he had used the word Koori, the blacks’ own name for themselves.
The lock-up cells were clean and comfortable, but that was all that could be said of them. There was an old-fashioned lavatory bucket in one corner, two narrow beds and that was it. These were for one-night or two-night prisoners; they weren’t meant as home-from-home for long-term inmates. Malone had been told that remand prisoners were taken over to Cawndilla, the District headquarters town. There was a steel door to the cell, with a small barred opening in it; a small window high in the outer wall also had bars on it. Malone guessed that dangerous crims would not be locked up here, but would be taken immediately to District. Five minutes with Billy Koowarra told Malone that the boy was not dangerous.
He was nineteen, stringily built, with long curly hair and a sullen face that at certain angles made him look no more than a schoolboy who had just entered high school, one that he hated. He nodded when Mungle introduced Malone and stood leaning flat against the wall, like someone waiting to be shot.
‘This the first time you’ve been locked up, Billy?’
The boy looked at Mungle, who gave him no help; then he looked back at Malone. ‘Nah. I been in here, I dunno, two or three times.’
‘Drunk each time?’
‘That’s what they said.’
Malone decided to hit the boy over the head, shake him out of his sullenness. ‘Billy, what do you know about Mr Sagawa being murdered?’
The boy’s eyes opened wide in sudden fright, as if he had just realized why this stranger from the city was in here to question him. He looked at Mungle, then leaned away from the wall as if he were about to run; but he had nowhere to run to. ‘Jesus, Wally, what the fuck is this? Why’d you bring him in here, let him ask me something like that?’
‘Take it easy, Billy. If you dunno anything about Mr Sagawa’s death, just say so. Inspector Malone isn’t accusing you of anything.’
‘I wanna get outa here!’ Koowarra looked around him in panic. ‘Shit, all they locked me up for was being drunk! I ain’t done nothing!’
‘We’re not saying you have,’ said Malone. ‘When did you last see Mr Sagawa?’
Koowarra had begun to shuffle along the wall, his back still to it. ‘This fucking place is getting me down, Wally! Get me outa here!’
‘I can’t do that, Billy, not till Inspector Narvo comes back. This is the fifth time you’ve been in here, not the second or third. You’ll probably have to stay here another night, I dunno. But that’s the worst that’s gunna happen to you. Now why don’t you tell us? When did you last see Mr Sagawa?’
Koowarra had stopped shuffling, was flattened against the wall again. He looked from one detective to the other, then he said, ‘Monday. I went out to see him, I dunno, about seven o’clock. I was gunna apologize and ask for my job back.’
Malone had not expected such a direct answer, but he knew that often a prisoner being questioned told the truth, or what sounded like the truth, in the hope of a favourable reaction from his questioner. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Wally Mungle frown as if he, too, hadn’t expected such a frank answer.
‘That was all you had in mind, Billy? Just to apologize and ask for your job back?’
The boy suddenly seemed to realize that he might have been too honest; his face abruptly got older, seemed to become wooden and darker. ‘What else would I wanna see him for?’
Malone shrugged, careful not to press too hard. ‘I don’t know, Billy. What did he say when you apologized?’
‘I didn’t see him. When I got out there – ’
‘How did you get out there?’
‘I walked. I don’t own no wheels. I tried to thumb a lift, but nobody around here gives a Koori a lift, not after dark. Right, Wally?’
‘Right.’ Mungle sounded even quieter than usual.
‘Why didn’t you get to see Mr Sagawa? Wasn’t he in his office or anywhere around the gin?’
‘I think he was in his office. His car, he’s got a blue Toyota Cressida, was parked outside.’
Malone looked at Mungle. ‘Was the car still there the next morning, when they found his body?’
Mungle nodded. ‘It was still there. The car keys were in the ignition.’
‘Any prints on the car?’
‘The Crime Scene fellers didn’t find any. Not even Sagawa’s.’
‘Didn’t you find that queer? The owner’s print nowhere on his own car? You didn’t mention that in the running sheet.’
Mungle worked his mouth in embarrassment. ‘I forgot, Inspector. I thought it was queer at the time, but I didn’t make a note of it. Sorry.’
Malone wasn’t going to tick him off any further, not in front of a prisoner, even if the latter was his cousin. He looked back at Billy Koowarra. ‘Why didn’t you go in to see Mr Sagawa?’
‘There was someone with him, I think. I waited about twenty minutes, but nobody came out. So I started walking back to town.’
‘What time was this?’
‘I dunno, about seven thirty, I guess. Mebbe eight o’clock, I dunno. I don’t own a watch.’
‘Was there another car there?’
‘Yeah, a fawn Merc.’
‘You recognize whose it was?’
The boy shook his head. ‘I didn’t get close. I stayed, I dunno, about a hundred yards away, by the kurrajong tree near the inside gate as you come up from the road.’
‘How many Mercedes in the district?’ Malone asked Mungle.
‘Half a dozen, I guess. Ask Billy, he’s the car man.’
For a moment there was a spark of – something: a dream, a hope? – in the boy’s dark eyes. ‘Yeah, I can’t wait till I get a car of me own – ’ We Kooris are supposed to live in the Dreamtime. Some of us have different dreams to others. ‘There are seven Mercs around here. Not all the same model, though.’
‘Did the car pass you when you were walking back to town?’
Koowarra spread his hands, almost an Italian gesture. ‘I dunno. There was half a dozen cars passed me, maybe more, and a coupla semi-trailers. One of the cars was a Merc, but I dunno whether it was the one out at the gin.’
‘You didn’t hear any row going on in the office?’
‘No, I was too far away. I told you,’ he added petulantly. He was edgy again, pressing himself back against the wall. Somewhere in another cell a man’s voice, a little slurred, had begun to sing: Like a rhinestone cowboy . . .
Malone looked enquiringly at Mungle, who said, ‘Another cousin. He knows all the country-and-western ballads.’
Malone wanted to ask why the other cousin had to borrow his sad songs from another culture; but didn’t. Instead, he said, ‘Righto, that’ll do for now, Billy. When you’re released, don’t leave town. We’ll need you as a witness.’
‘Shit, where’m I gunna go? I’m stuck here, like everyone else.’ He banged the back of his head against the wall, then leaned towards Mungle, grabbing the front of the latter’s shirt. ‘Get me outa here, for Chrissake! I can’t stand being locked up no more!’
