Malone looked at the huge man beside White. He was about two metres tall and seemed all body and limbs; his tiny head sat on his wide shoulders like an afterthought at birth, something stuck on when the doctor had discovered the newborn infant was incomplete. The small face still had a baby look to it, blank but for a permanent frown of puzzlement between the small blue eyes. Malone guessed that The Dwarf would have a one-track mind: two thoughts at the same time in that small head would only cause a traffic jam. Snow White would do the thinking for them. ‘Your name is –?’
The Dwarf hesitated, as if the question had baffled him, then he said in a surprisingly soft voice, like a girl’s, ‘I’m Gary Schultz.’
‘What’s this about?’ said White, whose voice was anything but girlish; it had the threat of fists or even worse behind it.
‘Did you know a man, a tally clerk, named Normie Grime?’
‘No,’ said The Dwarf, quick off the mark for once.
White glanced at him, the mouth tightening still further till the thin lips disappeared; then he looked back at Malone. ‘Gary’s forgotten. Yeah, we knew him. We worked with him once on a job over at Walsh Bay.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘I dunno. Before Christmas, maybe, I dunno. What’s up with him?’
‘He’s dead,’ said Malone, ‘that’s what’s up with him. Murdered.’
The four men were silent for a moment. Beyond their circle there was the rattle of a chain, a man’s shouting, the hum of a fork-lift as it sped past. Heat came up from the concrete in an eye-searing blaze, was reflected off the red metal containers, pressed down from the glaring sky; Malone could feel himself being boiled and shrunken by it, his skin closing up, suffocating him. Between the bow of one ship and the stern of another he caught a glimpse of water, but it looked like burning glass. This summer Lisa had insisted he start wearing a hat, he was developing sun cancers on his cheeks, but he had left the hat in the car. A gull flew overhead, mewing harshly like an Outback crow.
Then White said, ‘What’s it got to do with us?’
‘We thought you might be interested,’ said Clements, taking over the bowling. ‘We understand he came from Melbourne, the same as you.’
‘There’s about three million people come from Melbourne. We dunno most of ’em. What sorta shit are youse trying to lay on us?’
‘How come you can run for union office with a criminal record? You’ve done time, right?’
‘I been rehabilitated,’ said White, and beside him a slow grin spread across The Dwarf’s baby face. ‘My probation officer got me a second chance.’
‘Who’s your probation officer?’
‘He’s dead,’ said White, and the smile on The Dwarf’s face was now fixed like a scar. ‘The poor bugger just give up and died. I got word only a week ago. He come from Melbourne, too, one of the three million.’
The heat and White’s insolence were getting to Malone; but he kept the lid on himself. ‘We want you, we can always get you through the WLU, right?’
‘Next month I’ll be the secretary, sitting right there in the offices. Drop in. You won’t be welcome, but drop in anyway.’
Malone got back into the car and Clements went round to get in on the other side. He paused and looked across the pale grey glare of the roof at The Dwarf. ‘You running for office, too?’
The giant widened his grin. ‘Nah, I’m just Snow’s campaign manager. I’ll help count the votes when they come in.’
‘Is there gunna be any need for that? I thought bastards like you would have the votes already counted.’
As they drove away Clements looked as if he might snap the steering wheel with his furious hands. ‘Jesus, how are they let run loose?’
‘You heard the man. Rehabilitation. It’s bullshit, of course, but they’re getting away with it. But I don’t want us getting mixed up in union politics, we’ve got enough on our hands. What d’you think? You think they had anything to do with Scungy’s murder?’
‘I dunno. The Dwarf looks big enough to have carted Scungy into your place under one arm. But you notice his feet? Tiny, at least for his size. Wayne Murrow said the heel-print in the lawn in your side passage was that of a big shoe, he guessed it might’ve been a size eleven or twelve. It was hard to tell whether Snow White has big feet. He was wearing the sorta boots builders’ labourers wear, they always look big.’
As so often in the past, Malone was grateful for his offsider’s eye for detail. ‘What else did you notice?’
‘Those containers where they came out from. They were all marked with red triangles – that means it’s dangerous cargo. I remember from the days when I was with Pillage. There are three classes, marked by numbers. Class One would be explosives, ammo, whisky –’
‘Whisky?’
‘Sure. It’s been known to blow up. Maybe I’m over-suspicious, just because they’re crims. But why would they be marking containers with yellow chalk, which was what they were doing, when the containers have already been unloaded?’
‘Maybe they were marking them for the delivery trucks?’
‘Unless they’ve changed the system, the tally clerks do that. Neither of those guys is a tally clerk. In the old days when I worked on Pillage, before containers were used, stuff used to disappear off the wharves like a magical act. Whisky was always a target because it was easy to get rid of once it was outside. A shonky pub owner would buy a case half-price and both him and the bloke who’d swiped it would be happy. Think of the profit, you pinch a container full of it. If the containers are full of explosives or ammo cargo, that’s a heist I’d rather not think about.’
‘If Scungy knew they were pinching that sort of stuff, he’d never have told me. He hated giving me any information, even about the drug racket – I had to lean on him. He wasn’t a natural-born nark.’
‘So what d’you think? They found out he was working for you and got rid of him?’
‘Maybe. Probably. I’m just puzzled why they chose to do it with a needle in his bum. That doesn’t look their style. They’d do him with a gun or an iron bar, they’re the sort who like the look of blood.’
‘If either of them did it, why use the same MO on the Kissen woman? You think he, Snow White or The Dwarf, got kinky and thinks he’s discovered a new way of bumping off people? I seem to remember they kill each other off with curare in the Amazon jungle, but it’d be new to Sydney.’
They drove up through the city and over to Palmer Street. Only when they got there did Malone realize that Sally Kissen had lived within half a dozen blocks of Scungy Grime. Clement parked in a lane off the busy street, which carried a steady stream of fast-moving traffic towards the Cahill Expressway and the Harbour Bridge. Palmer Street had been named after the shipping merchant who had built up the surrounding area. Long after his death the street had become famous for its brothels and sly-grog shops, two sources of income the merchant had overlooked. The pace of the city and progress had now put paid to those businesses: the prostitutes now worked William Street, just up the road, but they saluted the flag of history by renting rooms in houses like Sally Kissen’s.
The Crime Scene tapes had been removed from the front of the house, but