lines. Even the cheap production couldn’t dim the beauty and optimism in the young woman’s face. I assumed Mark Alessio had sent it but there was no accompanying note. I put the clipping in the file I’d opened with my meagre notes and a short newspaper article on the Coroner’s finding of death by misadventure.
I exhausted all the avenues I could think of and reported my failure to Wesley. I submitted a list of the people I’d talked to along with my expenses. He surveyed the document gloomily.
‘I can see you’ve put in the time, Cliff. That’s terrible about the girl. I wish we’d known about her, but I guess Clinton was still too angry about what his sister said. I think Mandy backed her up as well. Shit.’
‘He took it hard it seems. Well, you said he’s like that. The thing is, if someone intelligent and resourceful really wants to hide, he or she can. All I can say is that there’s absolutely no indication that he was suicidal or that he ran into trouble. That’s not to say that he won’t.’
‘Explain.’
We were in the gym. I’d done a work-out after missing several sessions and it’d been hard. I was beginning to see that this exercise business was a lifelong commitment and I’d never been good at things like that.
I towelled off and stretched to ease my aching shoulder muscles. ‘All the signs are that he set out to expose the people who’d given Angela the steroids. The word that came up was destroy. That’s a tough word. I know bugger-all about it, but I’m told there’s big money in performance-enhancing substances.’
Wesley snorted. ‘Tell me about it. I saw it all when I was into body-building. But they’re sleazes, those guys. Losers.’
‘Maybe then,’ I said. ‘Not now, I suspect. Some of these athletes are earning really big bucks and their contracts require them to keep on performing. It’s a forcing house for drug abuse. If Clinton goes in boots and all against that sort of money he’s headed for trouble. The people behind it are organised, you can bet, and have muscle protection.’
‘And you’ve got no idea of where he might’ve looked.’
‘None. Do you?’
Wesley shook his head. ‘In London, in the old days, sure. But not here. I could ask around but that’d be difficult in my line of work. You know what I mean. We have to be squeaky clean.’
‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask around.’
Wes wrote me a cheque. Before he handed it to me he said, ‘What if I hired you to look into this steroid business? If you found out where that girl had got the stuff we could deal with it and maybe Clinton…’
‘You’re grasping at straws, Wes. I could spend month on it and come up with nothing. I know you’re making a quid here, but you wouldn’t want to be shelling out a grand a week.’
‘You mean you don’t want to do it?’
‘I’m just saying, let’s not formalise it. I’ll ask around, but I mean it’d be unprofessional to make a contract. It’s outside my field of competence.’
‘Clinton’s got no competence at all as an investigator of any bloody thing. The way you tell it the next I’ll likely to hear of him is that he’s dead in a ditch.’
‘Do you remember how it felt-the first girl you were crazy about?’
‘Yeah, madness.’
‘The chances are that’s the story here. A lot worse of course, given what’s happened. But you get over it. He’ll turn up. As I say, I’ll keep an ear out.’
I took the cheque and I continued to do my work-outs and have my massages. But the atmosphere had changed. Wesley was morose and I felt that he thought I’d given up on his son. I didn’t feel that I had, but I didn’t feel good about it either. I made some enquiries about likely steroid pushers and came up with nothing. After four or five weeks I stopped going to the gym.
Three months later I finished a remunerative and happily uneventful bodyguarding job. I was contemplating a short springtime holiday on the central coast on the strength of a respectable bank balance for once. I was tossing up about locations and wondering if I might be able to persuade Terry Kenneally to come with me. It depended on whether she could take a break from tennis coaching and how she’d feel about an indecent invitation from someone she hadn’t heard from in six months. I rated my chances as only fair or worse. I consulted the touring map and I’d decided on Nambucca Heads and was about to call Terry when the phone rang.
‘Hardy? This is Morton Grace from Campbelltown.’
Morton Grace-an impossible name to forget. ‘Yes, Sergeant.’
‘D’you remember a kid named Mark Alessio, student at the university here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Had any contact with him since?’
I said I hadn’t, then I remembered the anonymous newspaper clipping, but I let the answer stand. ‘Why?’
‘He was killed in a hit and run the day before yesterday. A witness says it looked deliberate. Station wagon. We found your card in his wallet. I thought you might know what he’d been up to.’
I remembered giving him the card and the money, remembered his distress and determination. I felt the weight of it-two bright, promising young people dead and one missing.
‘Hardy, you there?’
‘Yes. He fancied himself as an investigative reporter. He was interested in the death of a student athlete. Maybe he found something out. Have you got any leads other than the station wagon?’
‘Thanks, Hardy.’ He rang off. I put the phone down and folded up the map.
Call it what you like, guilt, conscience or simply reluctance to leave a job undone, but I figured I’d feel better if I put in some more work on the Clinton Scott disappearance. It was of long standing by this time and now I had a starting point. I rang the university, got through to the sports centre and asked to speak to Kathy Simpson.
A man answered the phone. ‘She’s not on right now.’
In the old days you could ask institutions for people’s phone numbers and addresses and get them, not any more.
‘I see. When will she be on?’
‘Let me check. Ah, she took a two-day sickie. Should be on again this evening.’
I thanked him and rang off. I was grasping at straws the way Wesley had wanted me to. I was sure that Kathy had steered Mark Alessio to me. He’d smirked slightly when I named her and he’d responded by saying he couldn’t reveal his sources. Kathy’s taking two days off tended to confirm the connection. It was a bit stronger than a straw, a stick maybe.
I spent the afternoon in the new Glebe branch of the Leichhardt library fumbling my way around on the Internet looking for information on steroids. I discovered that all anabolic steroids, although they travelled under a variety of names, were essentially synthetic versions of the male hormone testosterone. The material was abundant and somewhat contradictory. Some sources insisted that moderate use of steroids was completely safe and enhanced recovery from injury, muscle building, aerobic fitness and that the increased muscle mass boosted confidence and the competitive spirit. The pro-steroid people said that negative reactions-baldness and testicle atrophy in men, hairiness and interference in menstrual cycles in women-were completely reversible when the steroid-taking stopped or was reduced. I waded through the psycho-medical jargon in a long article which concluded that studies of the effects of steroids on human moods were inconclusive.
The anti-steroid brigade was strident and vociferous. One article simply listed scores of adverse side-effects that had been detected in athletes using steroids and regarded that as Q.E.D. Another writer said that the supposed beneficial effects were illusory or temporary at best. It was claimed that some of the side-effects, particularly the masculinisation of women, were irreversible. The moral aspect came into play for some analysts who insisted, with athletes like Carl Lewis, that steroid-users were nothing more than cheats and should be treated accordingly. ‘They should be treated the way a golfer at the Augusta Masters who threw his ball out of a bunker would be-banned!’
What both camps agreed on was the danger involved in using black-market steroids produced under questionable conditions and likely to be adulterated. A sober medical study detailed the ways steroid use could kill you. The liver and the heart were viewed as particularly vulnerable. Damage to the liver could run from jaundice to a kind of hepatitis and the formation of tumours, both non-cancerous and malignant. Steroid use could cause the
