The Gilded Madonna Garrick Jones (ebook reader online .txt) 📖

going to talk—or rather, you’re going to talk. I’m going to listen. I’m sure you won’t need much encouragement, given the alternatives.”

“Talk about what?”

“You’re going to tell me all you know about two men.”

“Which two?”

“Marvin Keeps and Terrence Dioli.”

“Keeps is dead.”

“I know that, Greyson. I was busy pushing a dagger into the heart of Rinaldo Tocacci not five feet away from Keeps when he took a bullet through the eye.”

“You killed Tocacci?”

“With this hand,” I said, patting his cheek.

“The deal?” He was shaking by this point.

“You sign your confession, you come to testify at a Crown commission I’m sitting on, and nothing will happen to you.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, the document will always be there. Your confession will probably include quite a few well-known politicians and businessmen who turned up for a bit of fun with the boys under your ‘care’?”

He nodded. “They’ll kill me.”

I shrugged. “They might.”

“Prison sounds like a better option.”

I opened the passenger door of my car for him. He sat on the edge of the seat with one leg still outside on the curb and looked up at me.

“You know what they do to men who abuse children in prison, Greyson?” I said, standing with one hand resting on the top of the door frame, ready to close it. “Even seventy-year-old men? In the dark with a blanket over your head and your legs tied wide apart, they might start with a cigar case or a gloved finger or two—maybe even a broom handle—no one would stick their dick in you, if that’s what you’re thinking. Then they’d graduate to fists, maybe splintered table legs, wire coat hangers. You know how long it takes to die with a perforated bowel and how painful that might be?”

I slammed the door shut, hoping he’d managed to pull his leg inside quickly enough.

As I walked to the driver’s side of my car and opened the door to get in, I lifted my hat to the woman who was waiting for the bus and waved at her kid, giving him a wink as I did so. “Morning,” I said.

“Gidday!” the lad yelled back with a bright smile and a brisk returned wave. I took a shilling from my pocket and flipped it across the street. He jumped in the air and caught it.

“Howzat!” I yelled.

Both the mother and the boy laughed and thanked me. I liked to think that at heart I was a nice, caring bloke, despite what was probably going through Greyson’s mind at the moment.

*****

When I’d arrived outside the old lockup with Lionel Greyson in my passenger seat, Tom had been waiting outside, an army lance corporal and a private standing behind him. He’d been chatting to Dave, my beat copper mate, and they’d both waved as I’d drawn up next to the curb.

Just before we’d turned into Coogee Bay Road, not a hundred yards from the cop shop, I’d pulled over to the side of the road for fifteen minutes and had filled up a few pages of my shorthand pad. I’d jotted down the salient points of the conversation I’d had with Greyson while we’d been driving from his house in Newtown to the old lockup. After reading back to him what I’d written, and satisfied I’d left nothing important out, I’d given him a cigarette and had watched it tremble in his fingers as he’d sucked the smoke into his mouth noisily.

He’d been so frightened of what I’d said could happen to him in jail that he’d been very forthcoming, and while I’d read my shorthand notes back to him, he’d been eager to correct my three purposeful inaccuracies. Those corrections had given me good cause to believe what he’d told me had been on the money—my “mistakes” had been a test to see how truthful he’d been. Liars often got caught up in their own falsehoods. It was something I’d learned early on as a detective. People under pressure often forgot their own fabrications or changed their stories—and only a few minutes after they’d made them.

“Jeff Ball here yet?” I’d asked Tom through my car door window while watching Dave and the two army men lead Greyson away.

“Not yet, Clyde. He’ll be here in a minute. He called a short while ago apologising. Said he’s been on the phone most of the morning.”

“Righto,” I’d replied. “Tell him I’ll call him from a public telephone when I get to Rozelle. I only want to double-check he’s been able to organise everything we spoke about on the phone this morning.”

“What shall I do?” Tom had asked.

“Sit a few feet in front of Greyson and use your nail file to clean your fingernails slowly, sigh a lot, look around, but never make eye contact.”

“To make him nervous?”

“I’ll make a true gumshoe of you yet,” I’d said, winking cheekily at his broad grin.

I’d stuck my arm out of the car window and given a lazy signal before pulling out into the road. The young bloke I’d forced to slam on his brakes had leaned on his horn, and I’d given him a cheery wave, smiling at his angry red face in my rear vision mirror, and then had put my foot down and driven off with a quick toot of my car horn.

*****

At a little after eleven, I parked my car in Clubb Street, Rozelle, opposite the house in which Terrence and Mark Dioli lived.

I’d phoned Jeff Ball in the morning just after I’d got back from my early morning run. Harry had still been asleep, snoring softly, so I’d closed my study door and put the call through. I’d needed to tell Jeff that I’d decided to visit both Greyson and Dioli senior and to bring them both in for questioning. I’d suggested he should interrogate Greyson and perhaps contact Howard Farrell before he started to see what information he could give him in advance. Jeff had thought it a very good idea, proposing he might ask Howard if he’d be willing to using an “open switchboard” during Greyson’s