The Gilded Madonna, Garrick Jones [best fiction novels txt] 📗

When I’d finished my cigarette, I flicked the butt out onto the awning below. After closing the window, I checked my tie in the reflection of its glass before returning to my desk to have a quick look at what Tom had been pounding frantically on my typewriter—nonsense words, but Dioli would never see what he’d written. I pulled the sheet of paper from the typewriter and then screwed it up into a ball, throwing it inexpertly into the wastepaper bin in the corner. I missed—again—and it landed on the floor next to the bin alongside a dozen or so discarded efforts of a report I’d been trying to type unsuccessfully all morning. Tom smiled and then gave me a thumbs up.

Dioli was sitting on the bench in my anti-chamber, jiggling his knee and looking like thunder.

“Clyde Smith,” I said, holding out my hand. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Please come in, Officer …?”

“I’m sure you know who I am,” he growled. “Your mate in there knows me; surely he told you.”

“I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but you’re wrong there. I’ve no idea who you are, and ‘my mate in there’, as you put it, respected the fact that I asked him not to speak until I’d finished typing up my notes,” I said.

Well, I had put my finger to my lips and Tom had pounded out four or five minutes of nonsense on my typewriter to make him think I’d been busy, but what Dioli didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Maybe I’d overplayed the “officer” thing, but my dander was up.

“Now are you going to continue to glare or are you going to shake my hand and then come inside and introduce yourself like any normal person?” I added, with as obvious a faux-grin as I could muster this early in the morning.

“Detective Sergeant Mark Dioli,” he said, giving me the once-over now I was on my feet and not behind the desk. “I’m the man who took over your job up at Randwick … your replacement,” he explained.

“Oh, I thought you took D.S. Telford’s position? I’ve been gone for a year now. Interesting you should say you replaced me. I guess I’m still missed, eh?”

I hated shitbags with chips on their shoulder. This guy was a large hessian sack full and had enough hide on him for a roomful of petty crims. “Come in,” I said. I stood back and ushered him into my office.

“I’d like to speak to you alone, Smith,” he said.

“Mr. Ridley is my personal assistant, Sergeant. Let me be the judge of whether he needs to hear what you have to say. And by the way, seeing you mentioned you’d taken over my job, I never called a civilian by their last name unless they were a criminal, or in the clink. So, until I invite you to call me by my first name, I’d prefer it if you called me Mr. Smith, or by the way we were all taught to address male civilians. ‘Sir’, will do just nicely, thank you.”

He didn’t look at me, or reply, but sat rather abruptly and then leaned forward and tapped the envelope he’d thrown at me earlier, which I’d not opened but had moved to one side. I looked at it and waited for him to speak.

“I came to tell you to keep your nose out of my business.”

“And what business would that be?”

“The Bishop case,” he snapped.

“Oh, forgive me, I was under the impression that D.C. Paleotti was handling that case.” I knew I’d gone too far the moment I opened my mouth, but his arrogant smirk and aggressive manner had made my blood boil from the moment he’d barged into my office.

“Look here, let me remind you you’re no longer a police officer—”

“That’s right, Detective Sergeant, but I understand the law very well. I’m also a war veteran with a very nasty temper. Now, if you tell me you’re here on official business, I’ll hear you out. But if you’re not and you cross boundaries and overstep the mark, I’ll have you—”

“Are you threatening me, Smith? Why I ought to—”

“You ought to what? Go ahead, charge me with something. March me up to the station. All I’d have to say when we get there is you got antsy and took a swing at me. Not only would the desk sergeant and the rest of the cops piss themselves laughing at the idea, who do you think they’d believe if you denied it? You or me?”

He slammed his hand on the edge of the desk and got to his feet. “I heard you were a thug, Smith.”

Tom grabbed my arm. Had he not, I may have just forgotten my manner and hauled the arsehole over my desk and slammed his face into my typewriter once or twice.

“I’ll give you until I count to five to reconsider your words, Dioli. I only have to pick up the phone and speak to my very, very good friend the chief superintendent and tell him one of his mutts raised its leg in my office and pissed on my desk and then you’d find yourself pounding the footpath as far out west in N.S.W. as it’s possible to be.”

He tried to out-stare me, but I’d weathered worse from German soldiers holding pistols to my face. I smiled into his glare; that’s when I noticed his leg began to tremble.

I started to count. “One, two, three …”

He was a bully, as Tom and Vince had said. I could see him clenching his fists, but too afraid to do anything about it. I guessed he hadn’t really ever been anything but a shouter. I was anything but.

“Four, five. Time’s up. Tom, get the chief superintendent on the phone,” I said.

Dioli grabbed Tom’s arm as he was about to leave the room, but Tom shrugged it off. “Get your hands off me, Detective Sergeant Dioli,” he said, baring his teeth.

“Wait!” Dioli said, holding his hands in