It took me a couple of days to clean up a few other matters before I got around to visiting Leichhardt. The young woman at the address Kevin had given me, a neat single-storey terrace not far back from Norton Street, remembered Kevin’s call and could only say she knew nothing about former residents.
‘I think it had been a rental property in the past,’ she said. ‘Tess and I had a lot of repairs to do when we bought it.’
I got the name of the agent she’d bought through, thinking they might have had the letting of the house beforehand, and thanked her.
‘Does the house have a history?’ she asked. ‘Like a criminal past?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Oh, you look like a policeman or… something.’
I rewarded her with an enigmatic smile.
Ten-plus years ago, when Marie O’Day was there, Leichhardt was already gentrifying, with properties turning over quickly as people took their capital gains elsewhere and new residents moved in, renovating and restoring. None of the houses in the vicinity looked as if they were owned by old-timers who knew everything that went on in the street. I knocked on a few doors and got confirmation of that impression. As a last gasp I tried the corner store at the end of the street, one of the few survivors. The proprietor was an elderly Italian with limited stock, just hanging on. I bought some things I didn’t need and asked him how long he’d had the shop.
‘Twenty years, mate.’ His accent was pure Italo-Australian.
I showed him my PEA licence. ‘I’m looking for a woman who used to live at number 76. Her name’s Marie.’
He shook his head. ‘They come and they go.’
‘Good-looking woman, darkish maybe, with a child.’
He sparked up. ‘Oh, si, Marie, with the kid. I couldn’t never get the name right.’
‘Siobhan.’
‘Yes. I called her honey because of the colour of her hair. Beautiful hair.’
‘She was in here a lot, Marie?’
‘Most days. Nice woman. No trouble. She do something wrong?’
‘No. I don’t suppose you know where she went when she left here?’
He rubbed his hands together and looked around at his meagre stock. ‘I’m trying to remember. Some people say, “Carlo, I’m off to Queensland”, and I say, “Take me with you”-for a joke, you understand. But no, Marie, she just…’
‘What?’
‘Si, I remember. Her cousin paid her bill. I let her have a little bit of credit because she always paid when she got her pension. But I didn’t see her to say goodbye, ciao -she used to try to speak Italian. But this man came in and paid. He said he was her cousin.’
‘What did he look like?’
Carlo squared his shoulders and set his fists in front of him. ‘Qui cosa!’
‘A soldier?’
‘No.’ He drew his index fingers across above and through his eyebrows. ‘With the scars. Like you. A boxer.’
Trueman’s Gym in Erskineville retains the name although Sammy Trueman died years ago. It has undergone periods of prosperity and adversity, renovation and neglect. Now, with boxing in Sydney on the upswing, partly due to the charisma of Anthony Mundine, the gym had attracted a respectable number of wannabe fighters paying respectable fees for the facilities. Footballers use it and some actors, waiting for the follow-up to Cinderella Man.
For generations the gym has served as a poste restante address for fighters and trainers often too down on their luck to afford proper accommodation. A couple of sports journalists drop in regularly in search of colour for their columns. I go there once in a while just to stay in touch with the business I had thought of taking on professionally until a hard left hook from Clem Carter in an amateur six-rounder convinced me otherwise. I’d done some work for a couple of the trainers and managers over the years, scaring off touts and persuading promoters to pay what they owed.
Wally Tanner was one of those trainers and I knew he hung out at Trueman’s, always on the hunt for a promising fighter. I didn’t think he’d trained Jimmy O’Day, but O’Day had certainly put in time at Trueman’s and there was a good chance Wally would know something about him.
In the old days a boxing gym smelled of tobacco smoke, sweat and liniment, now it’s just the sweat and liniment. It was early in the afternoon, not the best time when most of the fighters have jobs and only get to the gym after they knock off, but Wally was there watching a couple of heavyweights plodding around the ring.
He nodded to me. ‘Gidday, Cliff. Look at these no-hopers. It’s a disgrace to let ‘em in a ring.’
‘As they say-they’re slow but they can’t hit.’
‘That’s right. Haven’t seen you for a while. What brings you around?’
‘D’you remember Jimmy O’Day?’
Wally turned disgustedly away from the ring to watch a skipper and a kid working on the speed ball. They didn’t please him either. ‘Sure I do. He was a good boy-good, not great. Why?’
‘I’m trying to locate a cousin of his named Marie. I’m told they were pretty close at one time.’
Wally was an old school racist. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘well they’re like that, aren’t they? Especially when one of ‘em’s got any cash. Jeez, they bled Dave Sands dry. Lionel too, I reckon.’
‘Any idea where Jimmy is now?’
‘Be in Redfern, wouldn’t he?’
‘Come on, Wally, keep up. There’s Aborigines in parliament, in the law, in business.’
‘Not ex-boxers. The money goes and they get on the grog.’
‘Have it your way. I’ll ask someone else.’
‘Hang on, don’t get shitty. I don’t know anything about a cousin, but I did hear that Jimmy was doin’ something. What was it? Oh, yeah-he’s got a band. They play country music’
‘What’s the name of the band?’
‘Dunno. I just heard someone mention that Jimmy was the leader. I suppose he plays the guitar and sings. Don’t they all play the guitar and sing, the leaders?’
‘Mick Jagger didn’t play guitar, though I gather he does a bit now.’
Wally would’ve spat into the sawdust in the old days, now he just sneered. ‘That ponce. Big in the bedroom, but I’d like to see him inside the ropes.’
‘The man’s over sixty.’
‘So am I, and I can still go a bit. Better than them two.’ He turned away to watch the cumbersome sparrers and I left him to it.
It was a lead of a sort, and what you always dread in the early stages of an investigation is the absolute dead end. Avoid them for a while and you can start to make progress if you know your business.
I don’t buy many CDs these days after replacing a lot of my seventies vinyls and cassettes. I don’t really keep up much since Cold Chisel and Dire Straits, though I quite like The Whitlams. With country music I mostly preferred the women-Patsy Cline, Lucinda Williams. I’d bought Kasey Chambers’s first album at Hot Music at the Cross and that’s where I went next.
The place is distinguished from many others by having staff who know about the stuff they sell and how to get it if it’s not in stock. The young woman I approached had a fair amount of silverware in her face, a lot of eye makeup and an indoor pallor.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘do you happen to know about a country music band with a leader named Jimmy O’Day?’
‘Would that be James O’Day?’
‘Could be.’
‘Well, sure-they’re called the Currawongs. Want to hear them? They’ve got two albums.’
She put a disc on and gave me the headphones. I’m no great judge of country, but the music sounded tight
