The Gilded Madonna by Garrick Jones (ebook reader for comics TXT) 📕

the air, as if he was surren­dering to the Japs or something. Guess he’d watched too many war movies. “This is getting out of hand.”

“This got out of hand the moment you walked through my door. All you’ve managed to do so far is to torpedo any chance of help from an experienced cop and alienate any good will you may have had with me.”

He looked at me, fit to kill. But I didn’t flinch from his aggressive stare—it took less than a minute before he broke. I’d seen this pissant behaviour many, many times in my life. Braggadocio they called it in Italy—showing false courage to cover up a lack of self-confidence. He sat down and started to play with something invisible between his fingertips.

“All right, then. Let’s all take a deep breath and forget the last ten minutes ever took place, shall we?” I spoke more for my own sake than for his. I’d just had a flash image of myself picking him up and throwing him bodily out of my picture window onto the shop awning below. I inhaled deeply through my nose and then reached for my smokes. I flipped the lid open and offered a cigarette to him and Tom.

“Now, perhaps you’d like to tell me what was up your arse in the first place.”

“The envelope—that’s why I’m angry. That’s why I stormed in here. You made me look like a fool, Smith. Why would you do such a thing? You were a cop. You know this is meddling.”

“I have absolutely no idea what you mean.”

“Go on, open it.”

My business card was inside. I held it between my fingers for a moment and then looked at him. “These are all over the place. Clyde Smith. Private Investigator/Journalist. There’s even a stack of them on the counter at the newsagent. It pays to advertise.”

“Turn it over,” he said.

My blood ran cold. In the same elongated capital letters, written in green ink, was my name.

“Where did you get this?”

“It was pushed through the letter slot of the Bishop’s front door during the night. They phoned me not half an hour ago.”

“Tom, tell Harry to get in here. I think we all need to talk about this.”

“I’m sorry,” Dioli said. “I thought you’d done it on purpose—”

“Spend more time talking to the blokes you work with at the station. They would have told you that’s not my style. Now, do you want tea or coffee, Detective Sergeant?”

“Tea will be good.”

I waited.

“Please,” he eventually added.

*****

I knew Harry would pour oil on troubled waters. I could be a hot head, there was no doubt about it. It was part of the struggle for every man who’d suffered trauma of some sort, whether it had been emotional or physical. The war had picked most of us up by the scruff of the neck and thrown us under a threshing machine.

Scratch the surface of any returned serviceman who’d seen action and you’d find a seething mass of rage, bubbling away, mostly under control, but likely to surface at the littlest thing—usually precipitated by someone with an agenda of their own and not enough common sense to see it.

Although I knew he wasn’t old enough to have fought in the last war, Dioli had been one such irritating dick, a man held together by a veneer of self-control.

Had he rung and asked to see me, or even had knocked at my office door and introduced himself, I might still have been annoyed, but not as angry as I had been. I wasn’t proud of the way I’d played cat and mouse with him, but I apologised to no man, unless I’d done something that wasn’t warranted. Dick-measuring competitions had never been my thing. Dioli had tried to flop his out on my desk, and in front of Tom, his junior ex-colleague, and as far as I was concerned what had fallen out of his trousers wasn’t in the race for a prize.

I’d seen his type before, but never in the police force. Most of the guys I’d worked with had got slapped down really quickly if they’d tried to poke their noses above the general level of indifference that was all pervasive in most suburban cop shops. I’d been an exception, and it had taken me years of crime solving, fighting the system, and handing out tough love before I’d gained the grudging respect of the men and women I’d worked with.

What Dioli expected to achieve by lording it over a lot of people who’d been doing the job since he was a teenager I’d no idea. Still, I was embarrassed over my lack of self-control—I usually waited longer before I went for the jugular.

Harry had worked his magic. I heard a few soft laughs as I entered the vestibule of my office with a tea tray. Tom caught my eye and raised an eyebrow.

Although he’d softened a little, Dioli was still wary of me. He smiled a bit at Harry, but basically ignored Tom. It was obvious he still felt he had to mark his turf. I’d seen it all my life—people who tried to prove something rather than succeeding by knuckling down and making their successes by their own hard work.

He was hiding something—I could see it as plain as day. It wasn’t to do with the reason he was here, it was more personal. I’d got used to men in the camp putting up fronts, pretending to be something they weren’t, hiding their feelings, or keeping a lid on things. Mark Dioli seemed to be guarding something. All men had secrets; I even had a few of my own.

“If you didn’t put your business card through their letter slot, then who did?” Dioli said, looking annoyed because he’d just dunked his biscuit in his cup and the end had broken off and fallen into his tea before he could get it into his mouth. A small drop had splashed onto his fresh, pale-blue shirt.

“Tell me one thing,” I replied, turning