Peter Corris - White Meat

I pushed open the door to the gym. The bulb over the ring was glowing, making a sickly greyish patch of light in the centre of the room. My feelings of threat and danger became more intense; I felt as if I were walking into an ambush prepared especially for me. Still, I went. I took a couple of steps into the room and strained my eyes at the darkness that hung in every corner. There were no sounds, no movements. I looked again at the ring, this time with eyes that had grown used to the gloom. What I’d taken for shadow at first glance now didn’t look like shadow any more. It had shape and bulk but it was very still. I moved quickly across to the ring and climbed through the ropes.

Jimmy Sunday lay there with his eyes open, staring up into the bulb the way no living eyes could. He was wearing a polo-neck sweater and jeans. The rolled neck of the sweater was soaked with blood and blood had seeped through and run in a trickle across the canvas floor. I crouched beside him feeling sad and sick and furious with myself. Every instinct should have told me that Sunday would be out-matched coming up against Coluzzi. I had know that, but I’d let myself be persuaded otherwise because I was being easy on myself. I’d dramatised my own self-sacrifice of siding with the Aborigines and ignored the objective facts – that they didn’t have a chance. I had the resources to do something about it, I had the cop contacts, or I could have headed Coluzzi off somehow. But I hadn’t and this was the result.

Death does different things to different faces. I’d seen my father dead and ready for departure in a funeral parlour; his skin was painted, a thing unimaginable in life. He looked like a waxworks dummy and my mother just said “It isn’t him” and we went away. She didn’t even cry.

Death in the raw, violent death, is different again; I’d seen the evil stamped like a stencil mark across some dead faces and innocence blooming on others. In death Jimmy Sunday looked younger than he had in life and I was reminded that I’d thought him young when I’d first seen him at a distance. The scars from boxing and boozing and living had been almost erased and his brown skin was smooth and taut. Somehow that made it worse. I closed his eyes and went away. There was nothing else to do, not there.

I left the gym and walked back to my car with my shoulders hunched and the pistol tucked into my waistband. I felt an urge to use it on Coluzzi or one of his apes but at the same time I recognised that as the immature and useless impulse it was. When I got home I had a drink and poured another, then I called the Sharkey number. When Rupe came to the phone he was nervous. When I identified myself he was hostile. I told him that Sunday was dead and asked if he had any family. There was a silence before he spoke.

“Yeah, sort of. A woman and a kid, not his, but same thing.”

“Did you know about the plan to move against the Italians?”

“A bit, not much. I wasn’t gonna be in on it. Too fuckin’ old. But I heard Jimmy was gonna give the word at lunchtime today, but no-one seen him since last night. Where’d you see him?”

I told him and he said he’d send someone over there.

“Who done him?” he asked.

“I can’t prove it Mr Sharkey.”

“Ah, what the fuck does it matter. You got anything else to say?”

“No. Just that I’m sorry.”

His answer was the sharp click of the connection being broken. That did wonders for me. I sank some liquor and poured some more. The glass suddenly felt as heavy as lead, full of reproach. I set it down and started working through my little red book of telephone numbers. My first call was to Grant Evans. The second, back to me, was from a policeman in Macleay. My next call was to a security organisation in the city. I followed that with a call to Major Ian Mahony who was head of the security firm that guarded Macleay hospital. I had to give him references in the constabulary and the military. They seemed to satisfy him and I got an interview arranged with him for the following morning, in Macleay. I poured the liquor back into the bottle and went grimly off to bed to prepare myself for my busy day.

My last conscious thought was that I had put the finger on Jimmy Sunday for Coluzzi.

Busy is right. The radio alarm woke me at six o’clock. I came swarming up out of a dream in which I’d been fighting a ring full of people with my bare fists. I must have set my jaw resolutely in the. dream because it was aching like fury when I got out of bed. I made coffee and swilled down aspirin and caffeine tablets. The coffee was stale, this case had dragged on and I’d neglected my domestic necessities. I promised myself some fresh coffee and clean sheets when I’d done what I had to do. I had a shower and let the water play on my injuries, a split scalp and battered knuckles, both beginning to heal. I had lost two teeth, knocked out clean, and another was very loose. That wasn’t such a bad score except that I was still waiting for the cheque to justify them. Today, I’d be on my own time, the way to go out of business someone once told me.

I drove to the airport through a clear, mild morning. The traffic seemed to acknowledge the clemency of the day by parting in front of me and staying back to allow me through. As before, there was no crush for the flight to parts north. I handed in Penny’s unused return ticket and my unused Newcastle to Sydney section plus some cash and got a return ticket to Macleay. I had no luggage, no guns, no hand grenades, just my bright, sharp wits and my tarnished old soul. I bought the papers and a copy of Ragtime and boarded the plane. The papers told me everything that was going on in the country around that time which was nothing; Ragtime gripped and held me like a new lover and I didn’t lift my face from it for the whole trip. I knew what I was going to do in Macleay. I didn’t have to think about it any more. I got a taxi into town and arrived at Major Mahony’s office punctually at nine-thirty which was just as well. Mahony was a Britisher in his fifties. His face spoke of hot parade grounds and long nights over the bottle in the mess. He was bulky behind his mahogany desk. Pink scalp showed through thinning silver hair but he still had a few good, bullying years in him.

“You come well recommended, Mr Hardy,” he barked, “but you ask a lot. Convince me.”

It was an old tactic and the only way to confront it was head-on.

“What do you think of drugs Major – hemp smoking and things like that?”

He glared over the pipe he was stuffing, a big black job that looked fit to roast a quarter pound of shag.

“Hate it. Degenerate. Catch any of my people at it and out they go.

“Precisely. That’s why I’m here. If you co-operate with me it’ll help to close down a drug-growing and distribution point in this part of the country.”

He grunted and puffed at the pipe.

“Hemp you said?”

“Hemp certainly, but you know where that leads.”

“Do I not. I was in the Middle East for long enough – people lolling about, pansies…” He broke off choked, I suspected, by his excitement, but he coughed as though the tobacco smoke had caught in his throat. I followed up quickly.

“All I need is access to the woman, ten minutes alone with her, then the services of a stenographer for a few minutes.”

“Sick woman, Mr Hardy, very sick. I checked with the hospital this morning. She’s dying.”

“Does she know?”

“Yes, they told her. She insisted on knowing. Does that alter your plans?”

“No.” I could have added “on the contrary” if I’d intended to be perfectly frank with him, but I didn’t.

“I suppose it can’t do any harm considering the circumstances,” he mused. “The woman might be glad to perform a last service.” He looked at me enquiringly.