“That’s interesting, very interesting. Maybe I better meet these people. Where and when?”
I told him. He didn’t sound happy but I said that was all I’d been given. He said he’d be there and rang off.
It left me edgy, without diversion. Ailsa wasn’t due in until the next day. A postcard told me that. The rest of the mail was just waiting to be waste paper and I obliged it. I wished I’d asked Sunday about guns. I hoped there wouldn’t be any guns. I wished Penny would come to see me but I knew she wouldn’t. I wished the fight would be called off; I read the last couple of days’ news reports on the fighters. They were both in great shape, both going to win, according to their trainers, both going to be world’s champions. Moody had made the better impression in training. He was comfortably favoured to win. Coluzzi must have got good odds on his money. I called a man I knew and got fifty dollars to win thirty-five on Moody. Then I worried. What if Coluzzi knew the man I knew? What if the man I knew told Coluzzi? I drank and smoked and worried. Then I thought the hell with it. I’m a private detective, I’m tough. I can be stupid if I want to be.
I called Harry Tickener and we insulted each other for as long as we could stand it. He had tickets for the fight and was going himself. He agreed to leave two for Ted Williams at the paper and to meet me at the club with two for me.
“Ailsa?” he asked.
“I hope so.”
“Good. I expect to have company too.”
“That’s nice. Do I know her?”
“Your name’s never come up.”
“OK, be mysterious. I’ll see you there.”
“You won’t be able to miss us.”
That was a good exit line. I wondered what it meant. Harry sounded happy. Good. If Harry could be happy maybe we could all be happy.
25
Twenty hours later I was happy. Ailsa flew in around eleven and we went straight back to her place and to bed. We got out of bed an hour later for something to eat and drink and then back again. After that session I smoked and we picked up the pieces. Her tan told the story of where she’d been and she filled me in on the progress of her interests in the Pacific. The picture amounted to good news and more good news. I told her I was glad about it and she scrutinised me for the irony in such remarks that usually sparks off our fights. It wasn’t there. The heart had grown fonder. I told her about the Tarelton case and promised I’d take her out to dinner when I got the cheque.
“Oh that reminds me,” I said. “I’m taking you out tomorrow night if you’re free.”
“Good, where?”
“The boxing.”
“Ugh, no thanks – horrible.”
“Harry Tickener’ll be there.”
“Harry’s nice but still, no.”
“I think he’s got a girlfriend.”
“Really, that’s interesting. Who?”
“I don’t know, and if you don’t come tomorrow night I’ll make sure you never find out. I’ll break it up and you’ll never know.”
She yawned. “Who cares.”
“I gather you’re not coming?”
“Right. Come and see me afterwards.”
We wasted the afternoon a bit more and I left. I went home and played with my pistols for a while; I cleaned them and loaded them and checked their actions. Then I wrapped them up and put them away. I’d bought some cut price Scotch and I sampled it just to see whether it was a bargain. Not bad. Quite smooth. Of course the first drink can be misleading so I had a second. I thought I detected a metallic taste so I had a third. I was mistaken about the metallic taste. It was good smooth whisky that needed drinking without any judgemental attitudes in view. I had a fourth in a calm, purely objective frame of mind.
I ate something and showered and dressed myself in the clothes I’d worn to break into Sammy’s gym some nights before. I took the papers I’d removed then from the hiding place and stuck them in my pocket. I thought again about the guns and compromised by putting the Colt into the clip in the car. The Celica had gone back to the Tareltons soon after my arrival back in Sydney. I had a mind-flash image of Madeline Tarelton as I climbed into the Falcon. An unscrupulous, despicable person would ring her up some time and find out just how much her husband didn’t understand her. But an unscrupulous, despicable person wouldn’t be driving to Newtown for a show-down between ethnic minorities, and he wouldn’t be haunted by the eyes of a dark girl standing stock-still while blood rained on her.
I was nervous and early, much too early. I drove into town and down to the Rocks to kill time. The Opera House billowed up like bedsheets in a high wind. North Sydney was canopied by purplish cloud, but the sky to the east was a pale powder blue. The stratosphere was in two moods like me; my satisfaction at the conclusion of the Tarelton case, messy though it was, was tempered by the threat of the events ahead. I parked and wandered up through the city which gradually emptied around me. By eight o’clock there was only a thin line of traffic made up of people snapping up the last parking spots for their night on the town. Nine-tenths of the city was asleep and the remaining tenth was only fitfully awake in those oases of light where celluloid was spinning, liquor was flowing and there was money to be made. I went back to my clean car and drove to Newtown.
I parked half a mile from the gym and walked through the streets Any one of the couple of black people I passed could have been Sunday’s confederates, or none of them. It seemed to me that Coluzzi was a brave man to agree to a meeting in this territory. I’d have insisted on neutral ground. The thought bothered me as I walked along. Coluzzi was totally professional to all appearances and this was a bad move. I scouted around the gym looking for signs of trouble but everything was as quiet as a synagogue on Sunday. I walked back to my car and took out the gun. The door to the building was open and I took the stairs as quietly as I could. On the stars the stale smell of tobacco smoke and the reek of sweat blended into a threat of mustard gas. The place whispered of tension and danger. It was a good place not to be.
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.