Dilemma. Jon Cleary

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      She came into his arms as easily as if they were old lovers. There was no frantic tearing at each other; she led him towards the main bedroom, again as if they were old lovers. Only when they were undressing, on opposite sides of the bed, did she notice his claw.

      ‘Is that your loving hand?’

      She said it with a smile and he wasn’t offended; but all at once he was embarrassed by it. As he had been with other women. ‘No.’

      ‘How’d it happen?’

      But he just shook his head, fell on the bed and pulled her down on him. Later, he would not remember the next half-hour. Drunkenness seemed to overtake her: the drunkenness of sex, the delayed effect of the drinks she had had at the club: he would never know. She tore at him as if she hated him; but wouldn’t let go. At last he struggled free, fell back from her.

      She grabbed at him again. ‘Yes!’

      ‘No – I can’t—’

      ‘What’s the matter? Your dick crippled like your hand?’

      That shocked him, he hadn’t expected that sort of cruelty; he was equally shocked when he hit her. Anger is the most primitive emotion, the least civilized attribute of man. It comes from the oldest and deepest part of the brain, is always there; the last emotion left in a paralysed brain is anger. Later, he would remember that psychiatrists had put that opinion in court.

      She rose up in the bed, hit him in the face with her fist; the fist turned into a claw, tore at him. He put up his left hand, tried to push her chin up and away. The hand slipped to her throat as she clawed at him again. She was babbling incoherently; she hit him in the eye and he swore with pain. Then his grip tightened on her throat.

      He was shocked when she fell on him, pushing his left arm back into him. His fist opened and he slid his hand away from her throat. He pushed her off him, slipped to one side and lifted himself to look at her.

      Then tentatively, like a lover’s hand, he put his left hand on her throat again. There was no pulse.

       4

      Ron Glaze couldn’t take no for an answer: it was the salesman in him.

      After he had left the club he had gone to McDonald’s and stuffed himself with two Big Macs; unhappiness made him hungry. You’ll never grow up, his mother had told him; but hadn’t spoiled him by turning him into a mummy’s boy. When McDonald’s told him they wanted to close down for the night he had gone out and sat on a bench in the mall. People passed him, some that he knew; they said Hi, and he nodded back at them. Some of them looked back at him curiously, but none of them came back to speak to him. He sat there for almost an hour, then he got up and wandered up the main street, stood on the pavement and looked across at Wisden’s Car Sales, at the cars standing there in long rows, the floodlights reflected in the wind-screens like malevolent smiles. Oh shit, he said aloud and began to cry.

      That was when he decided to go back home and try again. When he saw the Volvo parked out front by the kerb, he wondered if she had had too much to drink. Whenever she did, she would never pull the car into the side driveway and up under the carport. Once she had done that and had driven off the path and ruined a whole row of azaleas in bloom. He had nearly killed her, he was so bloody angry.

      He paused halfway up the front path and looked around him. Even in the moonlight the garden looked a mess; it was as if she had let it go, to spite him. He would start repairing it tomorrow. Rebuild the garden and their marriage.

      He had parked his car behind the Volvo. The two of them together, one behind the other, were a reminder of happier times. She was a careless driver, even when sober, but tonight she had parked the Volvo neatly. Right in the gutter, not like a woman’s usual parking, a short walk from the kerb. He grinned at the thought, a car salesman’s joke. His mood was lighter as he let himself quietly into the house.

      The light was off in the hallway; she had gone to bed. But why wouldn’t she have? It was two o’bloodyclock in the morning. He headed in the darkness, with the sureness of long practice, for the bedroom. If she had had too much to drink, she would be dead to the world; he knew what the vodka and tonics could do to her. They could make her sexually wild, but afterwards she would be as dead as a log. He would get into bed beside her, go to sleep and in the morning she would turn to him and sleepily feel for him, as she always did. Or always had.

      He was approaching the bed when he tripped on her clothes on the floor. He fell on the bed, across her. She didn’t stir nor gasp: nothing. He felt the nakedness of her, ran his hand up over her thigh and hip: no movement, nothing. He sat up, kneeling on the bed.

      ‘Norma – hon—’

      Then, suddenly afraid, he stood up, crossed to the doorway and switched on the ceiling light. Norma lay on the bed naked, legs wide apart, her head twisted to one side as if she were trying to avoid looking at him. The bed was a mess, the sheet and single blanket halfway to the floor.

      ‘Hon – for Chrissakes—’

      Then, back beside the bed, he saw the marks on her throat and the big eyes, luminous no more, staring at the end of her world.

      That was when he started to run, though it was almost five minutes before he actually moved other than to sit beside her, stroking her head and weeping.

      5

      ‘Why’d you call us?’ asked Malone.

      ‘We’re stretched. We’re short three detectives, two sick and one suspended – he’s under investigation.’ The local detective-sergeant, Jeff Backer, didn’t elaborate on why one of his men was under investigation; you protected your own, particularly against other cops. ‘We’re handling four homicides. This one came up, the obvious suspect’s shot through. We could be weeks finding him.’

      ‘So you expect us to go looking for him?’

      ‘You’re the experts, aren’t you?’ There was no real friction; this was trade talk. Malone had not previously met Backer, but he had immediately liked him. ‘It looks to me like open-and-shut. All we have to do is wait till Ron Glaze gives himself up. Unless he’s gone somewhere and done himself in.’

      ‘Has he any form? Belting her, stuff like that?’

      ‘Nothing we’ve heard of. Out here it’s not uncommon, but the women don’t report it.’

      ‘Even less so in the eastern suburbs.’

      ‘They have more money there to hide the bruises.’ Backer was a local through and through.

      Malone, easing himself back into work after the Noosa holiday, had come out here to get away from the paperwork that had accumulated on his desk in his absence. Normally a case as straightforward as this one would not have attracted the Homicide chief; two junior detectives would have been sent. Malone had brought one of them with him, Andy Graham; Andy, in whom enthusiasm ran like a fever, would do all the legwork without complaint. Malone felt relaxed, glad he had picked an open-and-shut case to begin with.

      The house was still roped off by Crime Scene tapes when Malone and Graham arrived, but the Physical Evidence team had gone and now there were only Backer and two uniformed men on the scene. Malone had noted that the house was neat and well kept: no peeling СКАЧАТЬ