Malone thought a while. ‘About ten years ago. But I tell you what – if I find the bastard who tossed Scungy into our pool, I’ll beat the shit out of him before I book him.’
‘Good. I’ll hold your coat. If he’s too big and young for you, I’ll hold him.’
Woolloomooloo is a pocket between two shoulders just east of the city centre. For over a hundred years before Malone was born ships, sealers, traders and passenger liners had docked in the small ’Loo Bay; pubs and brothels had for years put a ceiling on real-estate values. Sailors and prostitutes met in a common market and it was said that even a decent girl, if she slipped and fell on the broken pavements, would earn a quid before she was back on her feet. Gangs used to whet their razors on the local rocks before going up the eastern hill to Darlinghurst and Kings Cross to carve up the competition. For years poverty had hung over the ’Loo like a harbour mist. Across on the western ridge, on the edge of the Domain, one of the city’s parks, stands a statue of Henry Lawson, the proletarians’ poet. He had once written, ‘Sorrow and poverty taught me to sing’; but only drunken bawdy songs had come out of the ’Loo. Lawson, an alcoholic, might have understood and wept for those who sang them.
In recent years there had been efforts to coat the ’Loo with respectability. Old terrace houses had been gentrified, crones taken to a beauty parlour; blocks of Housing Commission flats had been built under the lee of the eastern hill. The merchant sailors no longer came to this part of the port of Sydney and the girls, or their daughters or granddaughters, had moved up the road to William Street or the Cross. Still, there were reminders of poverty: a men’s hostel stood in the shadow of the railway viaduct and every night the derelict and homeless stood in line waiting for a bed. They would be the skulls, the memento mori, at today’s anniversary party.
Scungy Grime had lived in one of the Commission flats. Up the road some winos sat in the gutter in the morning sun, sweating out last night’s plonk. When Malone and Clements got out of their car the bleary eyes sharpened for a moment and the red noses lifted like those of pointer dogs waiting to be put down. They hadn’t lost their sense of smell of a mug copper.
The two detectives went into the block of flats, found the superintendent and had him let them into Grime’s flat. ‘He was murdered, you say?’
‘No, we didn’t say that,’ said Malone. ‘What made you say it?’
‘I dunno. I guess I just jumped to conclusions.’ He was a fat man whose stained panama hat looked as if it would be a permanent fixture on his head; it had a screwed-on look, Malone thought, like a jar-lid. He was not surprised by his tenant’s death; he was a ’Loo resident, born and bred, he was familiar with a dozen ways of dying. ‘Someone come looking for him last night, but he’d already gone out –’
‘You see who it was?’
‘Nah. He was out there on the landing, the light was out – bastards around here are always pinching the globes. I was down the stairs, I just saw him knocking on Normie’s door. I sang out there was nobody home, I’d seen Normie go out –’
‘Describe the man.’
‘I can’t.’ The fat shoulders shook in a shrug. ‘I told you, the light was out, there was only the light from the landing below. He didn’t even look down at me, he just went along that hallway outside and disappeared – there’s another flight of stairs further along . . . Normie always looked a bit jumpy, you know what I mean? He come home Sat’day night and I spoke to him, he didn’t see me, and he jumped like I’d jabbed him with a needle or something. I got the idea, talking to him occasionally, he’d made some enemies when he was out at the Bay.’
‘You knew he’d been in jail?’
‘Oh, sure. You work here long as I have, you get to know everyone’s history.’ He would make a point of it, it was one of the perks of the job. He went to sit down in Grime’s small living room, to take a load off his feet, as he put it, but Clements stood holding open the front door.
‘We’ll check with you on our way out, Mr Shanagan.’
Shanagan could take a hint; in the ’Loo, if you didn’t, you often took something else, like a fist in the face. ‘Sure, sure. You know where to find me. Take your time.’
Clements closed the door on him and Malone said, ‘We’ll talk to him later. He’s busting to tell us anything we want to know.’
‘You think he knows any more than he’s told us?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. I’d say no. He’s a bull artist, the sort who’ll break their neck to be called as a witness. We’ll send one of the young blokes back to talk to him.’
The flat was small. A bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen: you could swing a cat in it, but the terrified beast would have been scratching the walls with each swing. It was neat, a place for everything and everything in its place. Including a diary and an address book, one placed neatly on the other; the morbid thought struck Malone that perhaps Grime had laid everything out for them. He had always thought Grime a cheerful little man, one who would have turned a blind eye to the possibility of his own death. But maybe he had been wrong about the little man.
‘Nothing’s been disturbed,’ said Clements, coming back from the bedroom. ‘Doesn’t look as if he died here. The bed’s still made, with the cover on it. He’s even got his pyjamas laid out on it!’
‘Where do you lay yours out? On the floor?’
Malone looked around. This was a lonely man’s home; one could feel the loneliness, like a sad current in the air. There was a solitary photo: a young Grime between a couple who could have been his parents. All three were smiling: a happy day long ago. Malone wondered if Grime had remembered when the photo was taken. He turned it over. On the back was a date: 1963, November 22. Not really a happy day, though he doubted that Scungy Grime, even then, would have been upset by the assassination of a President. He had always had a limited view of the world.
‘Did you know he worked on the wharves?’ Clements held up a card. ‘This is a WLU ticket.’
Malone shook his head. ‘He told me he was still on the dole. How would he get into the Wharf Labourers Union? He couldn’t lift a box of cornflakes.’
‘You’re living in the past, mate.’
‘My old man’s past. He worked on the wharves. Yeah, I know it’s all mechanized these days, but they still look for muscle.’
‘He could’ve been a tally clerk.’
‘If he was, God help the balance of payments. Put a pencil in his hand and he couldn’t do anything else but make two and two add up to five. Check with the WLU.’
‘What about his family? Did he have any?’
‘He had a wife one time, down in Melbourne. He came up here about ten years ago. He had a record down there, the same things he did up here, small-time stuff.’
He was looking through Grime’s diary. No full names were mentioned, as if the dead man stood by the old army and criminal code: no names, no pack drill. But occasionally a given name appeared in front of an initial, as if to distinguish that person from someone with the same initials. One name and initial figured twice in the diary, the last entry only two nights ago. Ring Jack A . . . ‘Where would a 905 number be?’
Clements was a grab-bag of inconsequential information, with a mind like the waste-bin of a computer. He frowned, bit his lower lip, then said, ‘Somewhere around Manly. Maybe Harbord, around there.’