The Black Prince

by Peter Corris

  ‘You’re careful.’

  ‘Have to be.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Think about it. I’m working with young people. Hands-on stuff, as it were. Think about the harassment and abuse possibilities.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘It’s true, same with giving out information. Tricky. Anyway, what’s happened to Clint Scott?’

  ‘Hold on. I’m supposed to be asking the questions.’

  The thwack of the squash ball seemed to underline her clipped delivery. ‘Me first.’

  ‘He hasn’t been seen by friends or family for going on a month. I haven’t checked with his academic and sports people here yet, but I think it’ll be the same story with them. His family’s worried. The police are doing what they do.’

  She nodded. ‘Black—therefore, unpredictable. Not important.’

  I shrugged. ‘You could say that. I’m a friend of the father. I work out at his gym. Clinton taught me the ropes. I . . .’

  ‘No need to be defensive, Mr Hardy. I’ll tell you what I know.’

  It was getting on for six o’clock. I was tired and in need of a drink. It’s easy to get testy under those circumstances and blow an interview, especially with someone who clearly had her own agenda like Ms Martyn. I ignored the reproach and tried to look obliging.

  ‘I know Clinton Scott, of course. Good athlete, very good. Bit predatory with the women they tell me. He and Angela Cousins had a thing going for a while, but she’s not dead. Better if she was, probably.’

  ‘Could you explain that?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I should.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Private detectives. They’re always in the media, talking on television . . .’

  ‘Not me. I take the private part seriously. And I’m a friend of this kid’s father. I’m not interested in anything but finding him. Believe me.’

  She sighed. ‘You’re convincing. Angela played guard for the team here. Tall kid, 180 plus. Bloody good, but lightly built. Aboriginal ancestry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice. White as me, whiter, but she was proud of it and why not? Anyway, she took a wrong turning.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  She moved closer to me, so close I could feel the warmth of her. She must’ve felt my warmth, too, and she didn’t move away. Her voice went low, conspiratorial. ‘She got on the steroids somehow and was given some bad stuff or had a bad reaction. Look, this has all been kept very quiet after the stuff about the League players. I shouldn’t be telling you . . .’

  ‘It’s all right. It goes no further.’

  ‘It was kept quiet partly on account of her family, partly because it’s the last thing the university needs. Funding and that. I don’t pretend it’s altruistic. I only know about it because . . . well, I knew the signs.’

  ‘So how is she?’

  ‘She’s in a coma. Has been for a couple of weeks. Hopeless. It’s only a matter of time till they pull the plug.’

  4

  Tanya Martyn gave me the address of Angela Cousins’ parents in Parramatta. Angela herself was on life support in the Parramatta District Hospital and Ms Martyn’s understanding was that her case came up for review by the medical authorities very soon. I made notes and she jiggled her car keys indicating that I didn’t have much longer.

  ‘Thank you, Ms Martyn, you’ve been very helpful.’

  Somehow we’d drawn closer so that we were almost touching. Now she drew away a bit as if she’d just noticed. ‘Can’t see how.’

  ‘One last thing—is there anyone who might know something about what was going on in Clinton’s head? The kid he shares a house with doesn’t know anything and he’s been out of touch with his family.’

  She stood up and flexed her shoulders, picked up the clipboard. We moved towards the door. It was raining hard outside and the sight of it seemed to affect her. ‘I hate the rain,’ she said. ‘Silly but I do. I should live in San Diego where it doesn’t happen. Sorry, what was that you said?’

  ‘Someone who knew Clinton intimately.’

  She laughed harshly. ‘Yeah, well, you could try Ted Kinnear. Coaches the men’s basketball team. Coach is supposed to know what the players are up to. Hah. Look at me—at first I thought Angela was bulking up from the weights. Still, worth a try. You’d get him here tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She turned away and then turned quickly back, shaking her head. ‘Hold on. Ted Kinnear handed over to his assistant recently. Leo Carey’s the man you want.’

  I thanked her yet again. She nodded and strode out into the rain as if daring it to trouble her. I felt oddly lonely after she’d gone. That’s been happening to me lately. I get a feeling with someone that a connection’s possible here, and then it falls away.

  I sat damply in my car thinking about what I’d got. It seemed like quite a haul of information for comparatively little investment of time, but which way did it point? I was going to have to stay in the district to talk to the basketball coach the next day so I decided to put in one more house call. In any case, Parramatta would be a better place to stay in than Campbelltown—better chance of a decent meal at least.

  I caught the tail end of ‘PM’ as I drove to Parramatta. Pauline Hanson’s popularity was rising rapidly according to the polls, as people saw in One Nation a way to show how pissed off they were with the others. Bad news. But the rain eased. I found the Cousins’ address in the northern section of the town, across the street from the Pentecostal church. As always when confronting Aborigines, I had to prepare myself. Don’t patronise; don’t be too matey; don’t . . . I’d soldiered with Aborigines, boxed with them, drunk with them, joked with them for more than twenty years and still I never felt comfortable at first meetings. My English, Irish gypsy and French ancestors had arrived in the late nineteenth century and lived in cities. I had no reason to feel personally guilty about the dispossession of the Aborigines but I did.

  I exchanged my damp parka for my dry leather jacket, smoothed my hair and straightened my shirt collar after doing up two more buttons. There were lights on in the house, an unremarkable double-fronted brick-veneer job with a neat front garden and a cement path. I pushed open the wrought-iron gate and stopped dead still. The dog occupying the middle of the path was low-slung, black and emitting a barely suppressed fury. It barked three times and I didn’t move a muscle. It looked like a Staffordshire terrier, normally a congenial breed, but all terriers can bite and hold ferociously and you never can tell.

  An outside light came on over the front door. It opened and a tall man stood there.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Are you Mr Cousins?’

  ‘I am. Who’re you?’

  I told him, keeping my voice down, no need to advertise the business to the neighbours. ‘Would you call off the dog, please?’

  ‘Jerry, back here!’

  The dog retreated and I advanced a few steps, brushing away a branch of a shrub that had partly obscured my vision of the man. I could now see that he was tall, thin and straight, with brown skin and a frizz of white hair. I stopped short of the porch but put one foot up on it.

  ‘Hardy,’ he said. ‘Private detective. You the bloke Jimmy Sunday talks about?’

  Some time back I’d helped ex-fighter Jimmy Sunday straighten a few things out for Jacko Moody, who was then on his way to the national middleweight title. ‘I know Jimmy. Yes, I guess so.’

  ‘Come in, then. Don’t worry about the dog, he won’t hurt you.’

  ‘He puts on a good act.’

  ‘That’s all it is.’ He reached out and we shook hands. It was like touching wood; I felt thickened knuckles and callused fingers and palm—a boxer and an axeman for sure.

  We went into the smallish house which was similar in design to the one in Helensburgh but in much better condition. Cousins led me into the sitting room and turned off the TV set. He gestured for me to sit down and I took a chair
near the fire and leaned forward to rub my hands in front of it.

  Cousins smiled. ‘They used to say you’d get chilblains from doing that. I never did. Tell you the truth, I don’t know what a chilblain is. What can I do for you, Mr Hardy?’

  ‘I’m looking for young Clinton Scott. He’s dropped out of sight and his family’s worried. I’ve been told he kept company with your daughter. I’m sorry, I know what happened to her and I know this must be hard for you, but I thought you might be able to help me.’

  I guessed his age at forty-plus and they hadn’t been easy years. A few of the marks of boxing were on his face—a little scar tissue around the eyes, a flattened and marginally off-centre nose, one slightly thickened ear—but the lines and planes of his face suggested that his usual expression was one of peace and good humour. There was an uppishness to him. At the mention of Angela, some of this fell away.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be here about the old-time boxers’ association, something like that. You’ve got the look yourself . . .’

  ‘No, sorry. Not that.’

  All my worries about the barriers of ethnicity fell away. This was a man in pain and I’d dealt with plenty of those. ‘I knew a Joey Cousins once,’ I said. ‘I boxed with him in the army. He was a sergeant. Welterweight. Good punch.’

  Cousins brightened a little and nodded. ‘My uncle. I was named after him, but my dad was against fighting so I went under the name of Joey Lewis. Sort of joke, you know?’

  ‘I get it. How did you do?’

  He shrugged. ‘West Australian middleweight title. Fought in the west mostly. Got to Adelaide a couple of times. Darwin. Never had the name to get fights in the east. I came east in the late seventies but the game was in the doldrums. Before Fenech and them. I had a few goes in the tents and that was enough for me. Gave it away.’

  ‘Probably wise.’

  ‘Yeah. I did all right. Worked in the timber game until that all slowed down. Got a fair package.’

  I nodded. We’d covered some neutral ground now and made some connections. He cracked his knuckles and stared at the fire. ‘Well, something to do with Angie?’

  I gave him the story in as much detail as I could. He listened, still looking at the fire. The dog padded in from somewhere and curled up in front of the fire, not far from my feet. Cousins reached forward and patted him. The dog didn’t stir. ‘My wife’s at her church group,’ Cousins said. ‘Got very churchy lately. Always a bit that way. Not a bad thing in a woman. Does no bloody good for me though. Fancy a drink?’

  ‘That’d be good.’

  He went out and came back with a longneck of VB and two glasses. He poured the drinks and took a judicious sip. ‘Be easy to get on the piss after all this,’ he said. ‘But I won’t. Wife needs me. Gotta slog on, haven’t you?’

  ‘Right.’ I drank to that.

  ‘Yeah. Well, Clinton. Bloody nice kid. Angie brought him around a couple of times. We both liked him. I’ve known a few West Indians here and there. Good people. I remember Julie, that’s the wife, saying that it was a good combination, West Indian and Koori. You know the Saunders family, Reg and them? Reg had a West Indian in the line, grandfather I think. And he was a captain in the army. First Koori officer. His kids’ve done well, too. My Julie was looking ahead . . . See, Angie’s our only kid and Julie comes from this big family down Bingara way, on the south coast. She’s a Roberts, big mob of them down there. That’s where we met. I mean, she’s real light-skinned and the welfare took her away as a nipper and stuck her in an institution. She only connected up with her people much later. So it’s all very important to her, like. She was thinking about grandchildren.’

  He got up and opened a drawer in a dresser. He took out a framed studio photograph and showed it to me. Julie Cousins was many shades lighter than her husband and Angela was the same. They were a good-looking threesome, making allowances for Joe Cousins’ hard knocks. Angela, who looked to be in her late teens, was tall and slight with an athletic carriage and a winning smile. Just looking at her image it was hard to believe that she wouldn’t go on to do great things. In my jacket pocket. I had the photograph of Clinton after kicking his goal—similarly promising and future problematical. I handed the picture back and he put it away.

  ‘Did you see Clinton after Angela went into hospital?’

  He nodded and drank some more beer. ‘A couple of times. He was really cut up. Angry as hell. I went in one time and found him after he’d been to see her. He was crying and he was pulling his boot to bits.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A footy boot. He had a sports bag with his gear in it. He’d taken out one of his boots and was ripping it to shreds with his hands. Not easy to do, that.’

  ‘What did he have to say?’

  ‘Not much. He’d been drinking pretty heavily I’d say. He nearly got run in by the cops, too.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘This was another time. Bit later. He was here. He’d brought us back from the hospital in his car. A copper came to talk to us, you know, about the steroids. It was the first Clinton had heard of it. Julie and me’d only been told the day before. We thought she’d had some sort of attack. Shit!’

  He finished his drink and I followed suit. He refilled the glasses and it was as if we were drinking to lost hopes and broken dreams.

  ‘What did Clinton do?’

  ‘When the copper mentioned the steroids and asked us if we knew where Angie’d got them, Clinton went wild. We knew bugger-all, of course. Clinton screamed that it was impossible. That Angie wouldn’t do anything like that. That’s what I thought at first, but they explained the tests and all and you couldn’t knock it. Clinton attacked the copper. I hauled him off and we got it calmed down, but he was off his head and it was touch and go for a bit, believe you me.’

  That seemed to head off my next question—did Clinton know anything about how Angela made this fatal turning? Joe Cousins nursed his beer, turning the glass in his battered hands.

  ‘There’s no hope for her, you know,’ he said. ‘She’s going soon. Julie’s just getting her strength up for it. It’s hard. It’s fuckin’ hard. I was disappointed in Clinton if you want to know the truth.’

  ‘Why?’

  He looked at me. His eyes were moist and he rubbed at them in much the same way as Wesley Scott had done. ‘The last night we saw him, after a hospital visit, he said he’d get the people that gave Angie the steroids. He said he’d destroy them. But that’s weeks ago. Julie wanted to talk to him, explain what was going to happen. Talk about a service or something. But his phone doesn’t answer and it was no good leaving messages at the university. We haven’t seen or heard from him since that night.’

  ‘I’m sorry for your trouble,’ I said. ‘And I’m sorry to have had to bring all this up.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s all right. Better to talk than sit and brood about it. D’you reckon he meant it, about getting the bastard who gave her the steroids?’

  ‘I think he did.’

  ‘Good luck to him. I wish I could be there when he does.’

  So do I, I thought.

  5

  Two glasses of beer on an empty stomach was an effective appetiser. I drove to the nearest motel, booked in and found a restaurant that served steak and salad and house wine for a reasonable price. It’d go on Wes Scott’s bill but I never liked to pad the expenses for a friend. The food was good and the red must have been out of one of the better casks because it slid down nicely. The rain had stopped and the sky was clear. The air was cold, moved about by a slight breeze. After a day of driving and sitting I felt the need for exercise. I zipped up the leather jacket and walked around the town for an hour, deliberately keeping my mind off the case.

  Parramatta has a real and honest feel to it, like a place that belongs where it is for real historical and geographical reasons, and does a job it’s supposed to do. Like a lot of Australians, I feel a bit anxious when I’m a long way from the wat
er, but Parramatta didn’t set up too much of that, maybe because the river isn’t far away and it leads to the harbour. Wednesday was evidently a quiet night in the centre. There were pubs doing reasonable business and the usual ebb and flow out of the takeaway joints, but no energy. That suited me. I was tired and my warm room with the double bed and an instant coffee with a dash of Johnny Walker red from the minibar was beckoning.

  Back at the motel, I had a shower, wrapped the towel around me and did some stretching and a few push-ups. Nothing strenuous. I debated whether to have the laced coffee before, after or during making a report to Wesley. I decided on after and phoned him.

  ‘Cliff, I was hoping you’d call.’

  ‘Any news your end?’

  ‘No. Nothing. What’ve you found out?’

  They’re often like that; the anxiety makes them unreasonable so that they think one day on the job should bring concrete results. It never does. I told Wesley about meeting Noel Kidman and the deal I’d made with him.

  ‘That’s fine. I’ll send him a cheque. What else?’

  ‘Nothing much, Wes. But there was a girl Clinton was involved with.’ I described Angela Cousins. There was a silence so long I had to ask if he was still there.

  ‘Yeah, I’m here. An Aboriginal girl? Why didn’t he talk about her, or bring her home?’

  ‘I think you know the answer to that.’

  ‘God, I didn’t think it was that serious.’

  ‘Easy, Wes. I don’t know the finer details of your family set-up.’

  He managed a short laugh. ‘You could hardly accuse Mandy of being prejudiced against blacks. No, I can’t think of anything apart from the blue with Pauline. I’m beginning to wonder if I knew the boy at all.’

  Joe Cousins was probably having the same thoughts, but at least the Scotts didn’t have all their eggs in the one basket. I told Wesley what had happened to Angela and about Clinton’s reaction. I didn’t mention the drinking or the boot-shredding.

  ‘Steroids? My god, Clinton really was hot on that subject. I told him I’d never taken them back in my body-building days. I had a hard time convincing him. He once said he was ashamed to be of the same race as Ben Johnson. I’m not surprised he went wild. The girl couldn’t have done anything worse in his eyes.’