The Marvellous Boy Page 13

  Honey Gully’s room was full of early afternoon light and the signs of her own creativity; silk-covered cushions were scattered about on the floor and the low bed and some tapestries of Oriental design showing sexually ambiguous figures in contorted positions, adorned the walls. There was a dressing table covered with the usual stuff, a heavy carved chest and a high bookshelf crammed with paperback and hard-cover books.

  She shook free of me and glided into the room; dropping down onto a big cushion by the bed, she drew her knees up, the purple tented up into an elegant triangle.

  “Well?”

  My aggressiveness had subsided on the stairs and dropped away completely now. Somehow the room was pathetic as if it were the work of a frustrated artist or a woman playing at being a college girl. Standing awkwardly in the doorway I let her regain the initiative. The chin cupped in the hand and the incline of the head were probably perfected twenty years before at least, but the gesture still had charm and some freshness.

  “Well, I don’t think you’re here for a screw, you don’t look the type. If you want information on someone you’re out of luck. I don’t ask their names and I shut my ears if they try to tell me.” She put her palms over her ears and grinned mockingly. I grinned back and came into the room.

  “You’re quite a girl,” I said and meant it. “You must have been beating the men off a few years back.”

  “I still am, darling.” She tossed her head. “You’d be surprised how many men like drooping tits.” She played with the catch on her gown. “Care to see?”

  “Not just now. I want to talk about someone who probably saw the whole show.”

  “I told you, no names.

  “You can’t pull that, Honey.” I tapped my pocket. “I’ve got his picture. I can tell you this, you won’t be getting him in trouble. If you can help me it’s a stroke of luck all round.”

  She sighed. “I could use a few strokes myself—of luck that is.” Her own wit cheered her up. “Let’s have a look at him.”

  “Better put your glasses on, Honey,” I said.

  She stuck her hand under the big pillow on the bed and pulled out an embroidered, beaded case which she opened and took out a pair of glasses with fuse-wire thin gold frames. She hooked them onto her fine, experienced face where they looked stylish.

  “They look good,” I said. I lowered myself onto one of the cushions and took out the photo-prints.

  “Rubbish,” she said as I handed the prints over, “they make me look like a hag, which I am.” But she was pleased just the same and disposed to co-operate. She looked carefully at the pictures for a long time, then pulled off her glasses and stared across the mile or so of space between us.

  “They’re not very good of him.”

  My heart bumped. “But you do know him?”

  She leaned back, vamping. “Many times, many times.”

  I was too tense for it. “Where is he now?” I rasped.

  “Haven’t a clue,” she said cheerfully. “Haven’t seen him for ages.”

  “Jesus! You don’t know where he lived?”

  “No dear, he never took me home to meet his Mum.”

  18

  I wasn’t really let down; I hadn’t expected him to be boarding there, but I’d hoped Honey would still be in touch with him. Still, a year isn’t a long time, I thought. The trail was still warm compared to some I’ve followed and it was time to consolidate, get all I could on him, and look for the next doorway.

  I made a cigarette while she fiddled with the pictures. Her face was hard and vain but there was humour in it and in the set of her lean body. She looked as if a shrug might always be her next movement. I blew smoke and put the match in a seashell ashtray.

  “You must have liked this one, Honey?”

  “Why d’you say that?” She went on fiddling nervously.

  “Do you let all your clients use you as a mail drop?”

  She looked up shrewdly. “Know about that eh? Let me tell you, I was furious. It broke all my rules.”

  “Like not knowing their names?”

  “Well, that gets broken from time to time. No, I mean about getting involved, families and all that.”

  “I get it. Something came from Canberra?”

  “Canberra, yes.”

  “Was that the last you saw of him, when he picked that up?”

  “The very last. I wasn’t sorry, he was no good.”

  “In what way?”

  “In every way—mean, selfish, rough . . .”

  “He was violent?”

  “I’ll say. I thought he was going to eat me the first time. Look, this isn’t embarrassing you?”

  “No, I’m older than I look. Go on.”

  “He really liked the old stuff, you know? Kinky for it.”

  “Kinky in what way?”

  “Just . . . very keen, very appreciative of me and I’m no picture. I’ve been through the mill and I’ve got the marks to prove it. He lapped it up.”

  “Did he have much money?” I butted the cigarette in the seashell; the old tart fanned the smoke away from her face irritably and reached under her gown to scratch. I decided she was closer to sixty than forty.

  “He didn’t have much money,” she said slowly, “but enough. Most of what he had must have gone on booze.”

  “What did he drink?”

  “Everything, but he never got really pissed. He was big, see? I mean really big,” she tapped the pictures. “These don’t show it. He must have been close to fifteen stone and getting heavier. I suppose he could carry a lot of grog.”

  “All right, now let’s try to pin it down a bit. When did this letter from Canberra come?”

  “About a year ago, October or November last year. Look, what is all this . . .?”

  “Tell you in a minute. Did he say what was in the letter or give you any idea of what he was doing?”

  “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—tatoo, 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, n
ot 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.

  19

  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, sunlamp 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 gave 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 all 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.

  “Mr. Green, there’s a gentleman to see you.”

  The shortest man in the group, a chunky guy with crisp curling grey hair, jerked his head around impatiently.

  “Not now Ronnie, tell him to come back later.”

  I moved around Ronnie and stepped up to him. He was about five ten and four feet across the shoulders; muscles bulged everywhere under his black singlet. He was middle-aged but the skin on his face was tight and smooth. The other two were carbon copies—six-footers with waved hair and vacant expressions. Their muscles looked to be trying to burst out of their singlets and shorts and run away to start life on their own.

  “Let’s make it now,” I said. “It won’t take a minute and then you can go back to playing ball.”

  The Adonis on the left suddenly flicked the medicine ball at me, I moved aside and it hit Ronnie in the stomach. She collapsed and coffee from her cup flew everywhere and her cigarette dropped onto a canvas mat. Green swooped on the butt and snarled at the ball-thrower.

  “You fuck-wit Kurt, go and get a mop.”

  The other man helped Ronnie up; her spider eyes blazed and she shook off his hand. Green was holding the smoking butt between two fingers as if it were a dead mouse.

  “I’ve told you not to smoke in here Ronnie,” he said. “Go away, I’ll talk to you later.” He passed the cigarette to her and bent down again to pick up my card which the girl had dropped. He read the card and clapped his hand to his forehead theatrically.

  “Oh my God, what do you want?” He eyed me professionally and noticed the bulge. “Keep the gun where it is will you? I’ve got some sensitive people here, they’re likely to faint at the sight of a gun.”

  Kurt was back with a mop soaking up the spilt coffee. The other he-man had wandered off towards a wall. He picked up a small bar-bell and began moving it one-handed from waist level to shoulder; he turned sideways and looked lovingly at the overblown muscles in his upper arm. I pulled out the photographs and gave them to Green.

  “I’m looking for this man. Do you know him?”

  He gave them a bored glance. “Hard to tell, I don’t think so.

  “Look again, it’s important.”

  “Just who do you think you are? I’ve said I don’t recognise him.”

  Raised voices and a flurry of movement took our attent
ion to the end of the room.

  Green groaned, “Not again,” and hurried off towards the commotion. Kurt shouldered his mop and followed; his mate moved in front of the mirror like an entranced Narcissus. At the far end of the room, away from the windows, four men were gathered around two who were lying on a canvas mat. A big, fat character who was polishing one of the mirrors stopped work and turned to watch the others. The men on the floor were stripped to their athletic supports and they lay in a line with the soles of their feet touching.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Green.

  “A bet,” he said grudgingly. He addressed one of the men on the mat. “What is it this time Carl, five hundred?”

  Carl put his hands out behind his head and took a grip on a medicine ball. “Seven fifty,” he grunted. Green shrugged. “Fifty against,” he said.

  “You’re on, Leo,” said one of the watchers, a tall, heavily muscled citizen with a widow’s peak of slick black hair. Kurt and one of the other body-builders got their bets down and Carl’s companion flipped himself up into a squatting position, still keeping his feet braced against Carl’s.

  “Carl’s betting he can get the medicine ball up to where Saul can touch it and back above his head seven hundred and fifty times. It’s murder on the laterals, want to bet?”

  “No,” I said but despite myself I was interested. Carl looked to have the equipment for the job; his stomach was quilted with muscles and his neck and arms were grotesque storehouses of power.

  The mirror cleaner had let the fluid dribble down the surface and there were bubbles of spittle beside his mouth which was slack and open; fat clustered around his neck and sat in a great roll around his waist under a stained T shirt. Apart from me he was the only man in the room without perfect muscle tone.

  Carl came up in an easy, oiled movement with the medicine ball outstretched, Saul patted it and down he went and up, and down and up like a machine set to stamp out a thousand identical parts. After a hundred, great ropes of veins stood out in his neck and forehead and sweat ran in the clefts around his perfectly defined muscles. At two fifty his breath was coming in short gusts and I was betting mentally against him; everyone in the room was riveted except the mirror-gazer who kept on pumping and admiring the result. I glanced across and saw Ronnie, on tip-toe, looking over the partition. A man came past her and up to Green but I was too interested in the contest to notice him: Carl had passed five hundred now and the spectators were counting, softly, rhythmically, five sixty-one, five sixty-two, sixty-three . . .