Murder Song Read Free Page B

survive.
    Malone had to park again in a No Standing zone; the Commodore, in a year, collected more parking tickets than it did bird-crap. He knocked on a bright yellow door in a dark green house; the iron lacework on the upstairs balcony was painted white. As he was about to knock for the third time the door was opened by a girl in a terry-towelling dressing-gown; she had frizzled yellow hair and sleep in her eyes. She blinked in the morning sun.
    â€œ Yeah, what is it?” She had all the politeness of someone who hated her sleep being disturbed, even at ten o’clock in the morning.
    Malone introduced himself. “Does Miss Mardi Jack live here?”
    â€œYeah. But she’s not in. Why?”
    â€œAre you a relative?”
    The sleep quickly cleared from the girl’s eyes; she was alertly intelligent. “Is something wrong? Is she in jail or something?”
    Malone told her the bad news as gently as he could; he had had plenty of experience at this but it never became any easier. “Does she have a family? Parents or a husband?”
    The girl leaned against the door as if mortally wounded by shock. “Oh my God! Shot? ” She had a husky voice that cracked now; she cleared her throat, wrapped her dressing-gown tighter round her as if she had just felt something more than the morning cold. “You wanna come in?”
    She led the way down a narrow hall, through a small living-room and out into a kitchen that seemed to be about two hundred years ahead of the vintage front of the house. Beyond its glass wall was a neat courtyard, complete with trees in pots, a bird-bath and a gas barbecue on wheels. Tradition could be respected only just so far, about half the length of the house.
    The girl prepared coffee. “Espresso or cappuccino?”
    All mod cons, thought Malone; this girl, and probably Mardi Jack, knew how to live well. Except that Mardi Jack had gone where all mod cons counted for nothing. “Cappuccino. Do you mind if I ask who you are?”
    â€œI’m Gina Cazelli—Mardi and I share— shared this place. You asked about her family. She just had her father, he lives somewhere up on the Gold Coast. He and Mardi weren’t too close. Her parents separated when she was a little girl, then her mother died about, oh, I think it was five or six years ago.”
    â€œDid she have any close friends, I mean besides you. A boyfriend, an ex-husband?”
    â€œI don’t think she’d ever been married, at least she never mentioned that she had. She had no particular guy. She was—I shouldn’t say this about her, but I’m trying to help, I mean, find who shot her. She sorta played the field. Christ, that sounds disloyal, doesn’t it?” She busied herself getting cups and saucers, got some croissants out of a bread-tin and put them in a microwave oven. Malone noticed that the kitchen was as tidy and spotless as Lisa’s; Gina Cazelli at the moment looked like a wreck, but either she or Mardi Jack had kept a neat house. “She wasn’t a whore. She was just unlucky with the men she fell in love with. She’d be absolutely nuts about some guy, it’d last three or four months and then he’d be gone. She’d bounce herself off other guys out of, I dunno, spite or self-pity or something. You know what women are like.”
    She looked at him carefully and he smiled and nodded. “I try to know „em. It ain’t easy.”
    She nodded in reply, took the croissants out of the microwave. “I haven’t had breakfast. Yeah, you’re right. Men are easier to know.”
    â€œWhat did Mardi do? For a living?”
    â€œShe was a singer. Good, but not good enough, I mean to be a top-liner. She sang around the clubs, you know, the girl who comes on and sings for the wives before the smutty comic comes on and tells sexist jokes. She hated it, but it paid the rent. Her main income came from singing jingles for