14
I signalled to Sadie for another round. “This’ll do me,” I said. “I’ve got things on tonight, I can’t be pissed.”
Sunday nodded, then he tapped himself on the forehead.
“Got a message for you. Forgot with all this boxin’ business going on. From Penny. She wanted to get in touch with you. Reckoned she saw Noni.”
“Where?”
“I dunno. Not around here. Penny moved out the other night and went into town somewhere. She phoned me and wanted to talk to you. She’d forgotten your last name. I said you’d be in the book. Are you?”
I didn’t answer. Sadie came with the beer and I drank automatically although thirst had long since been defeated. It sounded odd, help from an unexpected quarter at this stage of the game. Again I got the feeling that events were being stage-managed, directed from on high but why and by whom I didn’t know. Noni on the loose fitted in with the feeling I had that she wasn’t in direct danger, but the further involvement of Penny I hadn’t anticipated. Images of the two girls, black and white, formed in my mind. The black girl, young and clean, nursing a corroding hate of the white girl with the murky past. Sunday snapped his fingers in front of my face.
“Hey! Hey Hardy! You there man?”
I came out of it. “Yes. Just thinking. Did she say where she’d seen her? Noni?”
“No, we didn’t chat. Seemed like it was just then, this morning about ten, but that was just a feeling. Listen, you’ve got to take it easy with Penny, Hardy.”
“What do you mean?”
He drank some beer and pulled on his thin cigarette. It burned fiercely and unevenly down one side and he flicked the ash off into a beer puddle. Williams was sitting massive and still beside him. I thought I had never seen a man so passive but it was a menacing passivity, like a reservoir of emotion, dammed up, able to be burst.
“Penny’s got a lot of guts, you know?” Sunday said jerkily. “She’s real determined. Anything she wants she goes after and nothin’ stops her. Some people down here say she’s a bit cracked.”
“I could see she was out of the ordinary. Why cracked though?”
He leaned back in his chair and expelled smoke through the battered gristle and bone that had once been a nose. My feeling was that Sunday saw himself as a leader, a wise and respected man, and was building up that role little by little every day. That was the way it was done and one mistake could ruin it all. He knew me for what I was, a functionary, a weapon of white society and he wanted to keep me trained on my own kind, but he needed to reveal a little of what he knew to hold me that way.
“Down here there’s three kinds, much the same as up in town. There’s the ones that don’t give shit. Just get pissed, do what they have to do and die. There’s the whingers and bludgers who moan about bein’ black and disadvantaged and do fuck all about it. Then there’s the goers who try to change things, don’t piss their brains away, don’t whinge.”
“You’re a goer?”
“Bloody oath I am. Penny is too, but in a different way. She’s a bit of a loner, reckoned she wouldn’t take any government money. Make it on her own then hit the whites for everything she could, that was her idea. She was starting to study law. Get the idea?”
“I think so. Why do you talk as if this was all in the past?”
“Well, that’s the trouble. She used to go on with all this stuff, get people’s backs up too, but a lot knew she was talking sense. Then she fell for Ricky… bad – you know? And Ricky’s nothing special, bit of a no-hoper like his Dad. Penny reckoned she could reform him but he didn’t pay any attention, and people laughed at her then. I mean Ricky just didn’t fit in with Penny’s ideas about life. That made Penny crazy on the subject of Noni. You probably saw that yourself?”
“Yes.”
“She’s been heard to say she’d kill her.”
I let out a breath. “That’d be all we need. I better call my answering service to see if she’s left a message.” I was pretty sure there’d be no message. What Penny wouldn’t trust to Sunday she wouldn’t leave with an impersonal recorded voice. I got up to go to the phone and something Sunday had said came through the channels again. I leaned over him resting my hands on the table.
“Don’t take this wrong, it’s all in confidence, but what did you say about Ricky’s father?”
“Said he was a bit of a no-hoper. Right Ted?”
Williams nodded and there was something collusive in that nod. I had the feeling that whatever information I got about Ricky’s father, it wouldn’t be the whole story.
“He did some time,” Sunday went on. “Small stuff. He’s dead now.”
“Sure of that?”
“Must be. Vanished years ago.” He opened his hands.
“Were he and Ricky close?”
Sunday sighed and I knew I was pushing it. “No,” he said.
“How was that?”
“Dunno. Ricky’s old man went off him when he was a nipper. Happens.”
“Not often.”
Sunday shrugged.
“Have you ever heard of a man called Joseph Berrigan?”
“No.” He enveloped the word in smoke.
“You don’t seem sure.”
“It rings a bell. Can’t place it though. Something to do with Ricky.”
I shook my head. “Jesus, this is getting complicated.” I went over to the bar phone and rang my service but there was no message. I got money out and reckoned up with Sadie. The bar was starting to fill up and my fighting hand was throbbing and the beer had made my thinking thick and sluggish. I felt that one more piece of information might make the pattern clear to me, might explain why a girl was running with a man who’d raped her. And fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money to be still missing. Age would not weary it nor the years condemn.
“What’s this about, Hardy? Where’s Noni?”
“Kidnapped, Jimmy, that’s the way it looks anyway.”
Sunday traced a design in the spilt beer. “Always thought it was wrong, Noni and Ricky and that. What’s her chances, Hardy?”
“I don’t know. Is there anything you can think of that might help?”
“You don’t think one of us done it do you?” Williams said gruffly.
“No, but there’s missing pieces everywhere. Ricky, he’s a real mystery.”
“Why?” Sunday snapped. “Flash young bloke, bad boxer, good fucker who liked white meat.”
“So I’ve heard. What was wrong with his boxing? Ted here said it was too much bed not enough sleep.”
“Not altogether,” Sunday said. “That was part of it. You see him fight Ted?”
“No. Just in training, sparring.”
“Yeah, well he was fast enough, his legs were alright and he was game but his left was no good, stifflike. He was in a car crash when he was young, got spiked through here.” He indicated the left side of his chest.
He seemed about to say something more but he stopped himself. I was aware again of their suspicion of me. They held back as a matter of experience and pride. Pride is a hard quality to deal with in an investigation – it holds secrets and distorts facts.
“One last thing Jimmy,” I said slowly. “Where do you put Ricky in that list of yours?”
“Ricky doesn’t go on a bloody list,” Williams said harshly. His emergence from passivity gave his words unusual force. “Rick was different, he had… power.”
“Power,” I said.
“Yeah, some people say he was a bit mad after that accident.” He was sorry as soon as the words were out and ended lamely. “He wasn’t mad, he had power.”
I nodded and knew I had all I was going to get. Sunday gave me the Sharkeys’ telephone number and I said I’d be in touch. Williams grunted goodbye without committing himself.
The rain was a fine mist, veiling the buildings and traffic. I hunched my shoulders against it and ran for a bus stop. After a half hour wait I caught a passing taxi. The alcohol, the tension and the fresh air had done strange things to my brain. I felt I had two heads: one of them was thinking about Sunday, Coluzzi, Moody and boxing; the other about Noni, Berrigan, blackmail and bank robbery. I tried to switch off the first head as we ripped along the freeway back to the second head’s problems.