Read Online Dark Summer by Jon Cleary - Free Book Online

a dead man in the swimming pool.”
    â€œI was going to ring you, Dad—” He had no excuse, really. He had been too concerned with the assault on his own feelings and those of Lisa and the kids. “How’s Mum?”
    â€œOut of her flaming mind with worry about the kids. About you and Lisa, too,” he added. But Malone knew his mother: she had never learned to show her love for him, her only child, but she shouted her love for her grandchildren like a Catholic Holy Roller. “Lisa rang her and she’s gone out to Vaucluse, to the Pretorius place.”
    Malone once again recognized Lisa’s talent for diplomacy. She would have known that Brigid Malone would have resented being left out of the comforting of the children. Brigid was not a mean- spirited woman, but her time was diminishing and any time lost from her grandchildren was time lost forever.
    He went to the screen door, looked out at the pool; the tapes were still in place there. He could be thankful that there was no taped outline of Grime’s body: the water was crystal-clear of death.
    He turned back into the kitchen, got himself a beer from the fridge, poured it into a glass as a gesture to his father and sat down opposite Con. He looked at the old man, once again seeing the tired wildness in the walnut face and the once-muscular frame; Malone knew that only his mother had kept his father out of jail. Con would never have been a criminal, but the Irish in him had always had a contempt for law and order, especially law and order based on any British model. He had hated authority, police, Masons, any conservative politician, Dagos, reffos; now he hated wogs, Asians and any man with long hair and an earring. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that lesbians did what he’d heard they did and he had no doubts that poofters deserved what AIDS did to them. He was, in his own opinion, an average Aussie, one of the real natives, not the bloody Abos. Malone loved him, but could never tell him.
    â€œDad, what’s life like on the wharves now? The bloke we found out there in the pool, he could’ve worked as a tally clerk.”
    â€œTally clerks don’t work, they’re all bludgers.” His net of prejudices was wide. “Why’d he finish up in your pool?”
    â€œHe was working for me. Someone must have resented that.”
    â€œWorking—? You mean he was an informer, a stoolie? Jesus, ain’t you got any shame? Using a man to dob in someone else.”
    Malone said patiently, “Dad, we do it all the time. You think the crims go in for a code of ethics?”
    â€œThey don’t dob in their mates. Not the decent ones.”
    â€œHow many decent crims do you know? Don’t give me any crap, Dad. I’ve had a bad morning.”
    Con Malone gave his form of apology, which was to change the subject: “About the wharves? They’re nothing like they used to be. They’re—” he searched for the right word “—they’re antiseptic. Yeah, antiseptic. Compared to what they used to be.”
    â€œHow much skulduggery went on?”
    â€œOh, it was dirty, real dirty. There was no guaranteed work when I first started on the wharves, there was just the call-up each morning. The stevedore boss played favourites. Or you were in sweet with the union boss and he saw you got work or there’d be trouble. There were stand-over blokes who ran things, some for the stevedore firms, some for particular union bosses who didn’t want any competition at the elections. There were some decent union men at the top, but they had just as hard a battle as the blokes at the bottom.”
    â€œWhat about smuggling, pillaging, things like that?”
    â€œOh, that was on for young and old. I did it meself, pillaging, I mean, not smuggling—I never went in for that, that was big-time and too dangerous. Some of the foremen were tied up in the smuggling racket, they