Peter Corris - The Marvellous Boy

‘Not a bloody clue. He came here two or three times a week for six months or so, we had a few drinks and we…’ she waved at the bed. ‘Sometimes he stayed the night, not often He paid up and we didn’t talk hardly at all. As often as not he was drunk when he lobbed in and he stayed drunk; he always brought grog with him.’

‘What did he wear?’

‘Why?’

‘Might give me an idea of what he was doing or where he lived.’

‘Yeah, I suppose it could. Let me see now.’ She resumed the hand in chin position and seemed to be enjoying herself. Somehow she gave out a lot of warmth and I would have been enjoying her company if I hadn’t been so tense about the information. ‘I never saw him in a suit, that means he wasn’t a professional man, right?’

I smiled. ‘Right,’ I said.

‘He wore jeans and T shirts I think, jumper sometimes… boots I think.’

‘Anything distinctive — tattoo, scar, jewellery?’

‘No, nothing like that. Oh, he was very brown.’

‘Suntanned?’

‘Yeah, sort of.’

‘But not really like a tan?’

‘No, it was a yellowish colour and very even all over. He must have been a nudist.’

Something was beginning to come through, a faint buzz, a distant hum that promised a connection, a link. I closed my eyes and let the synapses tick before I asked the next question. She looked at me expectantly.

‘Tell me, Honey, was this fifteen stone all fat?’

‘Oh shit no, didn’t I say? He’s a muscle man, or he was. He was getting a bit flabby from the drink but he had muscles like this.’ She lifted her arm and flexed it in the strongman-admiring-his-bicep pose.

I smiled at her and she smiled back and rotated her wrist; I could imagine the ounce of muscle sliding along under the skin.

‘Where did you meet him Honey?’ I said quietly.

‘I picked him up outside the Spartacus Health Studio. Know it?’

‘No.’

‘Pitt Street, bottom end, it used to be a good spot in the old days. I was just going past this night, not really looking. Well, I’m not everyone’s cup of tea, not any more. He was coming out and he was really something, Hercules you know? I must have looked at him right because he said something and there we were.’

I believed it, every word. It all hung together, the athletics, the adulation, the muscle-building, maybe the dissipation, too. And other things made sense. I was itching to get back to my notes, to tie things together with arrows and signs for a equals b. I was staring straight at Honey while doing this thinking and she became agitated, her blue-veined hands started fluttering and plucking at the frill on her cushion.

‘Ah, you said you’d tell me about this,’ she said hesitantly. ‘It’s not political is it? I don’t want to know if it’s political.’

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Oh, Canberra and that.’

‘No, it’s not political. It’s about old ladies looking for lost boys and rotten apples in barrels and people not getting what they deserve.’

She yawned, she was used to babblers. ‘You said something about paying me,’ she said.

‘Do you know anything more about this guy, Honey? Anything at all? Did he have a car?’ I was clutching, reaching for little confirmatory details that would bolster up the theory I was building.

‘No, I never saw a car. Hey where’re you going? What about the money?’

I got up and pulled out my wallet, released a twenty and five and let them flutter down onto the bed. She looked at them with disappointment shaping her eyebrows and pouting lips.

‘I thought there’d be more.’

I reached down and patted the purple hair, partly out of curiosity. ‘You’ve been a great help, Honey. Tell you what, if it all works out I’ll buy you a present. What d’you need?’

‘A facelift.’

I thought of other faces, faces changed by time and booze and distress. My most recent picture of Warwick Baudin was more than eight years old. I wondered if I’d know him.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ I said. ‘Talking of faces, is Warwick recognisable from the pictures?’ I bent and gently retrieved the prints.

She shrugged. ‘I dunno. Warwick is it? It just said W on the letter. I recognised him but I’m good with faces — depends how good you are with faces.’

Fair enough. I patted the hair again, it was stiff with spray and dye and chemicals. ‘I hope it all works out Honey, I’ll be in touch.’

She muttered something I didn’t catch and I left the room and went down the stairs and out of the house. The sun had broken through again and the day was bright and glaring but Inge wasn’t on her chair any more. Honey Gully didn’t come out on her balcony to wave me goodbye — all the good whores were indoors waiting for the day to end.

My theory was built on hints and mortared up with guesses and intuitive leaps. I worked on it as I plodded through the steamy heat towards my car. Richard Selby looked to be at the bottom of it; I assumed he was Henry Brain’s benefactor, the one who had set the works in motion and had followed up by talking to young Booth, the lawyer. He had a stake in it, his wife and kids were in line for the Chatterton money or threatened with the cold shoulder. He had a lot to lose but the question was — how had he got into the game? The obvious answer was in response to something dropped from Henry Brain’s wagging, alcoholic tongue.

The car was a sweat-box; I wound the windows down and drove along with the other perspiring prisoners down past the park to lower Pitt Street. I parked a few blocks from the station, stuck the. 38 in my pants and hit the street. The place was listed in the book and I reached it in a couple of minutes. There were two windows above an army disposals store; one said Spartacus and the other said Health Studio in big, freshly painted letters. I went up a narrow staircase and met the same words again, this time on two plate glass doors. Smaller letters said that the manager of the establishment was Leonidas Green. I went into a small room formed by six-foot-high movable partitions. A girl was sitting at a desk reading a magazine, smoking and drinking coffee from a polystyrene cup. Her yellow hair fell down from a centre part that ran like a white scar along her skull. She looked up and gave me a fifty carat smile with capped teeth, red lips and eyes like jewelled spiders.

‘Good afternoon sir,’ she breathed, ‘are you interested in building your body?’

‘Not really, I need a new one.’

She smiled at lower voltage. She was wearing a sleeveless dress the colour of her hair and an even, sun-lamp tan; she drew on her cigarette and showed me her profile when she blew the smoke away. Her voice was phoney-American.

‘How can I help you?’

‘Is Mr Green around?’

‘He’s very busy. If you could tell me your business.’

I cave her a card. ‘A few questions, no trouble.’

‘I’ll see.’ She got up and came sashaying around the desk on three-inch heels.

‘I’ll see, too,’ I said and went through the gap in the partitions with her.

We went into a gleaming room about sixty feet long by thirty wide. The polished boards gleamed, chrome barbells and other equipment gleamed, but the gleamingest things of ill were the mirrors that ran around all four walls. There was even a mirror on the back of the partition that formed the reception room. They ran from floor level up to the height of a tall man and after taking a few steps into the room I felt as though I was surrounded. The girl swayed over to where three men were throwing a medicine ball around. They stood about ten feet apart at the points of a triangle and they were heaving the big ball hard, mixing up low and high throws. We stood back and watched for a minute and when one of the players missed his catch the girl stepped forward.