The Black Prince

by Peter Corris

  ‘Good on you,’ I took a card from my wallet and gave it to him. ‘Give me a call if you think I can help.’ I dug into the wallet again and took out a fifty dollar note. He swayed back and held up his hands. I put the note on the petrol tank of his bike. ‘Buy a wreath for Angie,’ I said.

  7

  And that was it. I put the computer jockeys onto tracing Clinton’s bank accounts and learned nothing useful. There’d been one big withdrawal since he went missing and nothing since. Wesley told me that Clinton didn’t have a passport, so that was a dead end as well. I talked to Noel Kidman again and learned nothing new. He was grateful for the breathing space Wesley was giving him and thought it might just see him through. I wished him luck and told him where to return the car when the semester was over.

  I talked to the coach of the football team Clinton played for. Like Leo Carey he was resentful at the absence of one of his best players. He said that Clinton had turned up drunk at training, been disciplined and hadn’t shown up again.

  ‘Pity,’ he said. ‘That kid had potential.’

  I tracked down some of Clinton’s schoolfriends and university classmates and team-mates. None had seen him or had any idea where he might have gone. I located a former girlfriend, a stunning looking redhead football groupie who’d latched on to Clinton after a game and clung for a while. She wasn’t bitter about him. He’d treated her well while they were together but made it clear that it wouldn’t last. When I asked if he was likely to get back with her, on the rebound from Angela as it were, she laughed.

  ‘There’d be three or four in line ahead of me,’ she said.

  A newspaper clipping arrived in the mail. It was from the student paper, the Southwestern Star, and gave an account of the career and death of Angela Cousins along with a photograph. It didn’t state that her death was due to the use of steroids; there was a reference to ‘aberrant reactions to medication’, but you could read between the lines. Even the cheap production couldn’t dim the beauty and optimism in the young woman’s face. I assumed Mark Alessio had sent it but there was no accompanying note. I put the clipping in the file I’d opened with my meagre notes and a short newspaper article on the Coroner’s finding of death by misadventure.

  I exhausted all the avenues I could think of and reported my failure to Wesley. I submitted a list of the people I’d talked to along with my expenses. He surveyed the document gloomily.

  ‘I can see you’ve put in the time, Cliff. That’s terrible about the girl. I wish we’d known about her, but I guess Clinton was still too angry about what his sister said. I think Mandy backed her up as well. Shit.’

  ‘He took it hard it seems. Well, you said he’s like that. The thing is, if someone intelligent and resourceful really wants to hide, he or she can. All I can say is that there’s absolutely no indication that he was suicidal or that he ran into trouble. That’s not to say that he won’t.’

  ‘Explain.’

  We were in the gym. I’d done a work-out after missing several sessions and it’d been hard. I was beginning to see that this exercise business was a lifelong commitment and I’d never been good at things like that.

  I towelled off and stretched to ease my aching shoulder muscles. ‘All the signs are that he set out to expose the people who’d given Angela the steroids. The word that came up was destroy. That’s a tough word. I know bugger-all about it, but I’m told there’s big money in performance-enhancing substances.’

  Wesley snorted. ‘Tell me about it. I saw it all when I was into body-building. But they’re sleazes, those guys. Losers.’

  ‘Maybe then,’ I said. ‘Not now, I suspect. Some of these athletes are earning really big bucks and their contracts require them to keep on performing. It’s a forcing house for drug abuse. If Clinton goes in boots and all against that sort of money he’s headed for trouble. The people behind it are organised, you can bet, and have muscle protection.’

  ‘And you’ve got no idea of where he might’ve looked.’

  ‘None. Do you?’

  Wesley shook his head. ‘In London, in the old days, sure. But not here. I could ask around but that’d be difficult in my line of work. You know what I mean. We have to be squeaky clean.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask around.’

  Wes wrote me a cheque. Before he handed it to me he said, ‘What if I hired you to look into this steroid business? If you found out where that girl had got the stuff we could deal with it and maybe Clinton . . .’

  ‘You’re grasping at straws, Wes. I could spend months on it and come up with nothing. I know you’re making a quid here, but you wouldn’t want to be shelling out a grand a week.’

  ‘You mean you don’t want to do it?’

  ‘I’m just saying, let’s not formalise it. I’ll ask around, but I mean it’d be unprofessional to make a contract. It’s outside my field of competence.’

  ‘Clinton’s got no competence at all as an investigator of any bloody thing. The way you tell it the next I’m likely to hear of him is that he’s dead in a ditch.’

  ‘Do you remember how it felt—the first girl you were crazy about?’

  ‘Yeah, madness.’

  ‘The chances are that’s the story here. A lot worse of course, given what’s happened. But you get over it. He’ll turn up. As I say, I’ll keep an ear out.’

  I took the cheque and I continued to do my work-outs and have my massages. But the atmosphere had changed. Wesley was morose and I felt that he thought I’d given up on his son. I didn’t feel that I had, but I didn’t feel good about it either. I made some enquiries about likely steroid pushers and came up with nothing. After four or five weeks I stopped going to the gym.

  Three months later I finished a remunerative and happily uneventful bodyguarding job. I was contemplating a short springtime holiday on the central coast on the strength of a respectable bank balance for once. I was tossing up about locations and wondering if I might be able to persuade Terry Kenneally to come with me. It depended on whether she could take a break from tennis coaching and how she’d feel about an indecent invitation from someone she hadn’t heard from in six months. I rated my chances as only fair or worse. I consulted the touring map and I’d decided on Nambucca Heads and was about to call Terry when the phone rang.

  ‘Hardy? This is Morton Grace from Campbelltown.’

  Morton Grace—an impossible name to forget. ‘Yes, Sergeant.’

  ‘D’you remember a kid named Mark Alessio, student at the university here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Had any contact with him since?’

  I said I hadn’t, then I remembered the anonymous newspaper clipping, but I let the answer stand. ‘Why?’

  ‘He was killed in a hit and run the day before yesterday. A witness says it looked deliberate. Station wagon. We found your card in his wallet. I thought you might know what he’d been up to.’

  I remembered giving him the card and the money, remembered his distress and determination. I felt the weight of it—two bright, promising young people dead and one missing.

  ‘Hardy, you there?’

  ‘Yes. He fancied himself as an investigative reporter. He was interested in the death of a student athlete. Maybe he found something out. Have you got any leads other than the station wagon?’

  ‘Thanks, Hardy.’ He rang off. I put the phone down and folded up the map.

  Call it what you like, guilt, conscience or simply reluctance to leave a job undone, but I figured I’d feel better if I put in some more work on the Clinton Scott disappearance. It was of long standing by this time and now I had a starting point. I rang the university, got through to the sports centre and asked to speak to Kathy Simpson.

  A man answered the phone. ‘She’s not on right now.’

  In the old days you could ask institutions for people’s phone numbers and addresses and get them, not anymore.

  ‘I see. When will she be on?’

  ‘Let me check. Ah, she took a two-day sickie.
Should be on again this evening.’

  I thanked him and rang off. I was grasping at straws the way Wesley had wanted me to. I was sure that Kathy had steered Mark Alessio to me. He’d smirked slightly when I named her and he’d responded by saying he couldn’t reveal his sources. Kathy’s taking two days off tended to confirm the connection. It was a bit stronger than a straw, a stick maybe.

  I spent the afternoon in the new Glebe branch of the Leichhardt library fumbling my way around on the internet looking for information on steroids. I discovered that all anabolic steroids, although they travelled under a variety of names, were essentially synthetic versions of the male hormone testosterone. The material was abundant and somewhat contradictory. Some sources insisted that moderate use of steroids was completely safe and enhanced recovery from injury, muscle building, aerobic fitness and that the increased muscle mass boosted confidence and the competitive spirit. The pro-steroid people said that negative reactions—baldness and testicle atrophy in men, hairiness and interference in menstrual cycles in women—were completely reversible when the steriod-taking stopped or was reduced. I waded through the psycho-medical jargon in a long article which concluded that studies of the effects of steroids on human moods were inconclusive.

  The anti-steroid brigade was strident and vociferous. One article simply listed scores of adverse side-effects that had been detected in athletes using steroids and regarded that as Q.E.D. Another writer said that the supposed beneficial effects were illusory or temporary at best. It was claimed that some of the side-effects, particularly the masculinisation of women, were irreversible. The moral aspect came into play for some analysts who insisted, with athletes like Carl Lewis, that steroid-users were nothing more than cheats and should be treated accordingly. ‘They should be treated the way a golfer at the Augusta Masters who threw his ball out of a bunker would be—banned!’

  What both camps agreed on was the danger involved in using black-market steroids produced under questionable conditions and likely to be adulterated. A sober medical study detailed the ways steroid use could kill you. The liver and the heart were viewed as particularly vulnerable. Damage to the liver could run from jaundice to a kind of hepatitis and the formation of tumours, both non-cancerous and malignant. Steroid use could cause the heart muscles to grow rapidly, leaving an area of tissue which was inadequately supplied with blood because the blood vessels couldn’t cope. Heart cells could die and a fatal heart attack could result. I wondered which of these very unpleasant side-effects had killed Angela Cousins.

  I arrived at the sports centre at 5.30. Kathy was behind the desk but not looking her former perky self. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her shoulders drooped. I watched her going about her tasks for a few minutes before I approached. Reluctant wasn’t the word. She looked half-dead.

  ‘Hello, Kathy. Remember me?’

  She looked at me dully. ‘No. Sorry.’

  ‘I’m the private detective who spoke to you about Clinton Scott a few months back. You put me onto Tanya Martyn and then you put Mark Alessio onto me. Remember now?’

  The name got a reaction. A spark of interest in her eyes that flared and died. ‘Oh, yes. Sure.’

  ‘I was sorry to hear about Mark. You were close to him, weren’t you?’

  She sniffed. ‘I tried to be. Look, I’ve got things to do . . .’

  ‘I need to talk to you, Kathy. About Mark. It’s important. I talked to him a couple of times and he sent me something in the mail. Do you get a break here?’

  The idea of talking about Mark seemed to do her some good, as I hoped it would. She nodded. ‘In half an hour.’

  ‘We’ll have a cup of coffee and a talk.’

  She nodded again and took a phone call. A section of the reception area was partitioned off and contained a couple of tables with chairs and a bank of self-serve machines. I sat and waited while Kathy worked. She did her best to be cheerful but it was a struggle. I stopped watching and doodled in my notebook instead. As the trainers and competitors came and went I speculated about which ones could be on steroids. Impossible to tell. I’d read that there were creams and oral treatments now to combat the pimples steroids often caused and more effective depilation procedures for women. There was always the giveaway of the so-called ‘roid rages’—uncontrollable, unprovoked, violent outbursts that had caused steroid users to injure themselves and others. But all was calm in the Southwestern University sports centre.

  Tanya Martyn strode in and stopped when she saw me. She was wearing medium heels, a short, tight grey skirt and a red blazer. She was carrying a sports bag that looked heavy. I got up and went towards her.

  ‘Hello.’ She dropped the bag and clicked her fingers.

  ‘Hardy,’ I said. ‘Cliff Hardy.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Suddenly, I was tongue-tied. I was attracted to her but I was out of practice at talking to attractive woman. I almost said something inane like, ‘I bet you’re glad it’s not raining.’ Instead I muttered something about how her team was going and she replied non-committedly. We exchanged smiles and that was it. She went up a flight of stairs with her back straight and the muscles in her legs moving smoothly. I judged that she’d forgotten me as soon as she reached the top. She was, as the commentators say these days, focused.

  Kathy came over and slumped into a chair.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘White with three sugars.’

  I fed the coins in and got the polystyrene cups filled. I put the three sachets of sugar and wooden stirrer down beside Kathy’s cup. I took mine black, mindful of my slight weight increase since quitting the gym. She drew out the fiddling with the sugar and stirred for as long as she could before she looked up at me.

  ‘I really liked him. He was so clever and so nice, so funny. Me, I’m just a dumb jockette. That’s what they call us sporting girls. I’m slowly getting together enough units for a diploma in human movement. A couple to go, but studying’s not my scene.’

  ‘The first night I saw you here you were efficient, on top of everything and very helpful to both me and Mark. You shouldn’t put yourself down, Kathy. You’ll get over this.’

  She drank some coffee and sniffed loudly. ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s difficult, you see. A lot of women in the sport scene are dykes. They tell you what bastards men are, how weak and unreliable they are. And, you know, you find that’s true sometimes. I knew Mark was just on the rebound from Angela Cousins who he’d hardly even spoken to. I mean, that’s silly, isn’t it? To be in love with a star sportswoman like that when you can hardly . . .’

  ‘Throw a Coke can into a rubbish bin?’

  She smiled. ‘He told you that?’

  I drank some of the bitter, thin coffee and wished I’d put some sugar in it. ‘Yeah. And you’re right, it is silly. But it happens. So you spent some time with him recently?’

  ‘Uh huh. A bit. We went to the movies a couple of times and to the pub. I helped him with layout and such on the paper. I’m okay at that. We . . . did it three times, no four. I liked it, but . . . but I’m not sure that he did. Oh, shit . . .’

  She was drooping again and I had to catch her before she slid down into the misery of indifference where one thing is much the same as another and memories are fuzzy. I leaned forward. ‘Kathy, what I need to know is about his investigation into the steroid suppliers. Did he talk to you about that?’

  Another sniff. ‘Yes, he did. He didn’t mention any names because he said it wasn’t safe for me to know.’

  Great, I thought. Very honourable. Thank you, Mark. ‘What did he say about it?’

  She shrugged and drained her cup. ‘He said it was all going on in Sydney and out here. And that there was a lot of money in it. He said some athletes took out loans to buy the steroids because they thought taking them’d get them prize money and sponsors and that.’

  ‘He didn’t say where the buying and selling happened?’

&nbs
p; ‘No. But I’ll tell you one thing he said that’ll interest you, Mr Hardy. I’ve just remembered. I’ve got a lousy memory. Mark said he’d met someone who’d seen and talked to Clinton Scott.’

  8

  She was fragile and needed careful handling. ‘When was this?’ I said quietly.

  ‘Mark said it must’ve been not long after Angela went into hospital.’

  ‘I see. And where did this happen?’

  ‘In Bingara. Mark went down there after she died, to talk to her family. He said one of them told him this young West Indian guy had been hanging around a few weeks before.’

  ‘What did Mark think about that?’

  She shrugged and glanced at the clock. Her break time was running out. ‘He didn’t say much about it. Didn’t even say who’d told him. Mark didn’t like Clinton for obvious reasons. Look, I have to get back.’

  ‘Okay, thanks Kathy. You’ve been a big help. I might need to talk to you again. Would that be all right?’

  ‘Sure. What’re you going to do now?’

  ‘Go to Bingara.’

  ‘Yeah. All these blokes chasing after Angela Cousins, even when she’s dead. I guess that’s star quality.’

  ‘I’m still after Clinton, but it begins to look as if that could have something to do with what happened to Mark. It’s a possibility anyway. Doesn’t that matter to you?’

  ‘No. Why should it? He’s gone. That’s all that matters to me. I’m not interested in revenge or any of that male shit. Thanks for the coffee. Excuse me.’

  She went back to work and threw herself into it, checking schedules, making up program cards, making phone calls. She carefully avoided looking my way. I got another cup of coffee and added whitener and sugar. I stirred the sugar in and pondered my next move. It sounded as if the sighting of Clinton Scott postdated his disappearance from Helensburgh and Campbelltown. To that extent it was encouraging and certainly worth following up. Not encouraging enough though to make contact with Wesley. I’d have to put in some more work on my own time and come up with more solid information to justify that.