Peter Corris - The Black Prince

Ian had brought in a couple of novels but my ribs were so sore and my neck so stiff that I found it hard to get into a reading position. So I lay there and thought. Not to a lot of purpose. As usual, more questions than answers. It must have been Bindi who drove me to the hospital. Why? And one thing was for sure; Stan Morris’ very accomplished smoko brawler Albie wasn’t on steroids. What did that mean?

The Asian nurse whose name I’d found out was Rose put her head around the door. ‘Are you up to another visitor, Mr Hardy?’

‘Male or female?’

‘Very male.’

‘Show him in.’

The door closed then opened and a big body filled the space. I blinked in surprise as he strode towards the bed, dreadlocks swinging. Bindi.

Reacting slowly, I fumbled for the buzzer. He was too quick for me and his big hand closed on it before I could find it. I was scared. He was large and powerful and disposed to violence and I was incapacitated.

He moved the buzzer away and released it. ‘I guess you don’t recognise me, Mr Hardy.’

I tried to get some volume in my voice but it still came out thin and strained. ‘Your name’s Bindi and you worked me over a couple of nights ago. What the hell are you doing here? Come to finish the job?’

He shook his head slowly and the dreadlocks danced. When he spoke there was no trace, of the gruff Aboriginal tone. ‘I’m Clinton Scott.’

My jaw would have dropped if it hadn’t been wired up. I stared at him. He was clean-shaven now, unlike the other night when he’d had thick stubble. His breath was clean and he’d washed. I tried to imagine him without the flattened nose, chipped teeth, a couple missing, and battered mouth. There was a scar running down the side of his face and he carried an extra twenty kilos. I could almost do it. The fat distorted his features and the belly widened and shortened him. It was difficult to see him as the whip-like young man in the football jumper, but still…

‘You came to my dad’s gym and I took you through your program. Eight minutes stretching, seated bench press, three by twelve reps on

… ‘

‘Jesus. You are Clinton.’

He pulled up a chair. ‘That’s right. I’m sorry about this.’ His hand sketched the work on my jaw. ‘I didn’t mean to hit you that hard. You sort of leaned into it. They tell me you’ve got cracked ribs. I didn’t do that too, did I?’

‘Only indirectly. Your parents… ‘

‘Yeah, okay. I can imagine. But I had to do it this way. What the hell are you doing? Stan told me to turn you into a vegetable and I told him I had. I’m taking a big risk coming here.’

We talked for an hour. He told me that he’d recognised me, assumed I was looking for him and felt he couldn’t let that happen. He apologised again for not doing a better job of pulling his punches. I told him what game I was in and what I’d been doing and he confirmed most of my assumptions. He’d taken up drinking and eating junk food to put on weight. He’d deliberately provoked the fight in Bingara to incur damage to his face. He’d connived with Stella Nickless to get the ransom money. His share was fifteen thousand which he was using to finance his pursuit of the supplier of steroids to Angela.

‘I tracked you to Queensland and I sort of thought you’d given that up for a bit,’ I said.

‘You’re pretty good at detecting, but you’re wrong there. I really got into the Aboriginal thing. I thought it’d get me closer to Angela’s spirit. Didn’t.’

He’d said he’d learned all he could about Aboriginal manners and mores in order to pass himself off as one as a good disguise when he got back to Sydney and went looking for his revenge. It succeeded. He’d got on to Stan Morris through a footballer who was suffering kidney failure as a result of using steroids.

I said, ‘That figures. I talked to Tommy at the Aboriginal settlement out in the Daintree reserve. He said you were interested in payback.’

‘You can hardly talk. Want some water?’

He gave me some water, his way of heading off the question, but I wasn’t going to be headed off.

‘That’s dumb,’ I said. ‘You could go to gaol for twenty years.’

‘I don’t care,’ he said sullenly. ‘That bastard killed the most beautiful person on this fucking planet and he deserves to die.’

‘Well, if it’s Stan Morris and you’re so bloody close to him why haven’t you done it by now?’

‘I nearly did. I sort of wormed my way into his confidence. I fought in one of his bloody smokos and did all right, but I said it was a mug’s game and was there anything else I could do. He took me on as a minder and driver and that. He reckons he’s one sixteenth Aboriginal himself and that we have to stick together. He offered me some of the shit and that’s when I nearly broke his neck. But it turns out he only supplies Sydney. The guy who supplies the west is a mate of his and they’re meeting up soon. When they do, I’m going to kill him and tell Stan why.’

‘Listen, Clinton, there’s a lot of feeling against all this doping of athletes, especially with the Olympics coming up. If you can get the goods on the suppliers they could go away for a long time.’

Clinton sneered at me. ‘Bullshit. Stan makes a ton of money out of drugs and gambling and his mate’s probably doing the same. They’d get a high price lawyer and either beat the charge or get it knocked down. How’d I go as a chief prosecution witness, eh?’

Despite myself, I looked at him as he wanted me to. He was right, he couldn’t pass as a solid citizen.

‘Besides,’ he went on. ‘If I show up Rex Nickless’ll put some heavies onto me. He’s done it before, Stella says.’

That was news, but an estranged wife isn’t necessarily a reliable witness as I knew from personal experience. ‘He says he just wants a statement from you about his wife’s screwing him out of fifty grand. He needs it as a leverage in the divorce action.’

‘Believe that and you’ll believe anything.’

I could see his point but what he was proposing was just youthful madness, inspired by grief rather than logic. ‘So what’s your plan?’

‘After I deal with them, I’ll clean myself up. Lose all this flab and get my nose fixed. I’ll square things with Mum and Dad and go down to Melbourne and try to get into an AFL side and make some money.’

As a mixture of fact and fantasy that took some beating. ‘So you’ll be Clinton Scott again when you’re starring with…’I pulled the only AFL team name I knew from some recess of memory, ‘Essendon, and Rex Nickless won’t pick up on that?’

‘He’ll cool down. Hey, I’ll pay him back.’

Despite the dreads and the earrings and the flab and the destruction of his good looks, he was a boy again. A very confused boy and one trying to play a part in a man’s game. There was the question of who killed Mark Alessio to consider, if that’s what happened. But I didn’t want to serve that up to him just yet. I tried another tack.

‘Look, Clinton, you’re not an Aboriginal warrior caught up in some primitive ritual the fucking clever men devised to keep the young bloods in their place. You know about that, don’t you?’

‘No.’

‘That’s what a lot of Aboriginal custom was about-old blokes securing the young women for themselves and keeping the young fellers busy elsewhere.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

I shrugged, which hurt, but I managed it. ‘Suit yourself. But anyway, you’re a tertiary-educated city man who’s as much European as anything else. Your dad’s got a lot of Portuguese in him and your mother…’

‘Stop it! I don’t want to hear this shit!’

‘You’d better listen, son. Mark Alessio got too close to the action you’re talking about and look what happened to him.’