Bad Debts ji-1

by Peter Temple

  He went off grumbling to the office and came back in ten minutes with several school exercise book pages. On them were detailed working drawings of an armoire designed to contain bottles, glasses and television and video equipment, a boardroom table, very severe, and a chair, equally spare.

  ‘You want drawings, I give you drawings,’ he said.

  I went around the corner to Flash Advanced Telecommunications, prop. G. Bertoli, former telephone-repair person, and made two copies.

  Barry Tregear rang at noon while I was reading the Age and eating the corned beef and gherkin on rye sandwich I’d brought from home. He couldn’t find any trace of a Ronald Bishop.

  I knocked off at 1.30 p.m. and drove around to the address in Clifton Hill, no more than a few kilometres away. Morton Street was close enough to Collingwood Football Ground to hear the sobbing when Carlton beat them. Fitzroy used to beat them once upon a time but it would take divine intervention these days.

  The bourgeoisie had long since occupied most of this once deeply working class area pinched between two main roads and a freeway. Morton Street, however, had the unloved look of a trench fallen to the rentiers.

  Ronald Bishop had once lived at number 17. But not even the house still lived at number 17. It had been extracted like a tooth, its earthly remains some blackened broken bricks where a fireplace had stood and a mound of damp ashes that had saved the demolishers the trips to the tip. I knocked at number 19. No-one was home or admitting to it. I trudged off to number 15.

  The bell didn’t work. I tried tapping and then gave the door a couple of thumps. The door was wrenched open and a large red-faced man in his sixties glowered at me. He was wearing a dirty blue nylon anorak zipped up to the neck and black tracksuit pants with a stripe, possibly white once, up the side.

  ‘Don’t fucken hammer my door,’ he said. ‘Whaddafuck d’ya want?’

  I apologised and gave him my card.

  ‘So?’ he said, not noticeably impressed.

  ‘I’m trying to find out about someone who used to live next door,’ I said. ‘About twelve years ago. Were you living here then?’

  ‘Depends,’ he said. He ran both hands through his long, greasy grey hair.

  ‘We have a standard fee of twenty dollars for useful information,’ I said.

  ‘Who’s the someone?’

  ‘Ronald Bishop.’

  ‘Come inside,’ he said.

  I followed him down a passage dark as a mineshaft into a kitchen that smelled of sour milk and burnt fat. All surfaces were covered in dirty plates, open tins, takeaway containers, empty cigarette packets. The gas stove had a baked and blistered topping of spilt food.

  ‘Garn!’ the man shouted at a huge tabby cat walking on tiptoe across the littered table. It floated its flabby body across to an impossibly small perch on the sink.

  ‘Wanna beer?’ he asked.

  ‘That’d be good.’ There was no knowing how he would take a refusal.

  He took two cans of Melbourne Bitter out of an old fat-bodied fridge. The light inside wasn’t working. We sat down at the table. I couldn’t find anywhere to put my can down so I held it on my lap.

  ‘So what, he’s inherited some dough?’ he said. He gave the can the suck of a man who measures out his days in tinnies.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ I said. ‘His family’s trying to get in touch with him. Did you know him when he lived next door?’

  ‘Fucking poof,’ he said. ‘Bloody lucky he got outta here alive. We was just about to give him a hammerdrill up the arse when he pissed off.’ He wiped spit from his lower lip with his thumb and took a packet of Long Beach Lites out of the anorak. ‘Smoke?’

  ‘No thanks. What made you like him so much?’

  He gave me a suspicious look over the flame of the plastic lighter. ‘Bloody house was fulla kids. Sleepin all over the place. He used to come back here in the bloody middle the night, half a dozen kids in the car. Street kids they call ’em now. Bloody drug addicts. Should lock ’em away. You wouldn’t believe the bloody racket they made.’

  ‘So Ronald was trying to help them, was he?’

  He looked at me with utter scorn. ‘Where the hell’ve you been? He was tryin to root ’em. Tryin and bloody succeedin. Half of them’s so off their faces they wouldn’t know if a gorilla rooted ’em.’

  He took another measure of beer, dragged on the cigarette and tapped ash into a catfood can.

  ‘And how long was he here?’

  ‘Would’ve been about a year. Been a bloody lot shorter if I hadn’t been…’ He scratched his neck. ‘I only come back a coupla weeks before he pissed off. Bloody Moira put up with him, Christ only knows women. Used to talk to the little cunt over the fence.’

  ‘He just left, did he?’

  ‘Showed up one day in a white Triumph sports. Y’know the kind? They don’t make ’em any more. TR something. Just packed his case, buggered off. Left the old Renault standin out there. Coupla them kids took off in it. Never come back, neither.’

  ‘He didn’t leave because of you?’

  He shook his head. ‘I hadn’t got round to him yet. He just pissed off. Reckon the cops were on him.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Two come round there a couple times.’

  ‘What, uniform cops?’

  ‘No. Plain clothes.’

  ‘You sure?’

  He had another suck on the can. ‘I know the one,’ he said.

  ‘You know his name?’ I had a big swig of my beer.

  ‘Scullin. His name’s Scullin. He grew up round Abbotsford.’

  ‘So the cops came around twice and then he left?’

  He nodded. ‘More than twice. Coupla times. Told Moira before he pissed off some bullshit about he’d won some money, something like that. I reckon it was drugs.’

  ‘Anyone else around here know him?’

  He thought about it, smoke seeping out of his nostrils. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Bloke on the other side’s dead.’

  I drained the can. ‘This is helpful,’ I said, getting up. ‘Much obliged.’ I took out my wallet, found a twenty and offered it. He took it and put it under the catfood can.

  At the front door, I said, ‘Well, thanks again.’ He gave me a little wave.

  I was at the gate when he said, ‘I’m just thinkin. Remember the bloke on the other side, Greek he was, tellin me one day he read where Ronnie dobbed in some hit-and-run bloke.’

  I paused. ‘When was that?’

  He spat on to the path. ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Was it while he was living here?’

  ‘Must’ve been. Bloke said he remembered Ronnie gettin in a car all smartened up. Then he read where he dobbed this other fella. That’s what the Greek said. Don’t get time to read the paper myself.’

  ‘That’s useful,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

  9

  I went back to my office, made some black tea and sat in the client’s chair. Where was Ronnie Bishop now? Last seen tooling off in his Triumph, fresh from doing his civic duty in the matter of R. v. McKillop. And where was a policeman called Scullin, whose circle included the accused and the star witness?

  Barry Tregear didn’t need to think about the name Scullin.

  ‘Martin Scullin. I know Scull,’ he said. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘No problem. He might be able to help me with something.’

  ‘You still farting around with that McKillop business?’

  ‘On and off.’

  ‘You’ve missed Scull today. By about six years. He took the package. Gone fishing.’

  ‘What about a number or an address?’

  ‘Big ask. I’ll have to talk to the man. What do you want to see him about?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘Tell him it’s about an old dog of his, Danny McKillop.’

  ‘Where’d you get that?’ Tregear asked.

  ‘Widely known at the time.’

  ‘I’ll get back to you. Where are you?’

  I gave him the num
ber.

  I gave the R. Bishops in the phone book a quick run-through. There were only two Ronalds and neither of them had ever lived in Morton Street. I rang an estate agent called Millie Vincent I’d had dealings with and asked her to check the Landlords’ database for Ronald Bishop. She rang back in twenty minutes.

  ‘They’ll drum me out of the trade for doing this,’ she said. ‘A Ronald Arthur Bishop rented a house in Prahran in 1984–85. Then a Perth agent ran a check on him for a property in Fremantle in late ’85.’

  She gave me the name of the agent.

  I got through to a man called Michael Brooke. He got the impression I was a fellow real estate agent and told me a Ronald Bishop had been the tenant of a house in Walpole Street, Fremantle. ‘Then he bought it at auction in, oh, ’86 or ’87. Paid a bit over the odds then but it’s turned out to be a smart buy. By the way, he calls himself Ronnie Burdett-Bishop now. Moved upmarket.’

  R. A. Burdett-Bishop was in the Perth phonebook.

  No-one answered at the first two attempts. The phone rang for a long time before a low-voiced male answered on the third try.

  ‘Could I speak to Ronnie, please,’ I said.

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘An old acquaintance suggested I call him.’

  There was a pause. ‘Ronnie’s in Melbourne.’

  ‘That’s where I’m calling from. Is there some way I can get in touch with him here?’

  There was another pause. ‘Who did you say you were?’

  ‘My name’s Jack Irish,’ I said. ‘I’m a lawyer. You’ll find me in the Melbourne phone book.’ For some reason, this statement sometimes had a reassuring effect on people.

  ‘Well, I’d like to help you,’ the man said. ‘My name’s Charles Lee. I’m a friend of Ronnie’s. I’m keeping an eye on his house. No-one seems to know where Ronnie is at the moment…’

  ‘You don’t have a Melbourne address for him?’

  ‘Um, you could try his mother. Would you like her number?’

  I wrote it down, said thanks and goodbye, then dialled it. No-one at home.

  It’s nice that there’s a special occupation for the anal retentive. It’s called librarianship. The thin man with the silly little cornsilk moustache gave me a smile of pure dislike and went away. I was sitting at a table in the Age library on the fourth floor of the paper’s hideous building on Spencer Street. A message from Steve Phillips, the assistant editor, had preceded me but that had only made me more unwelcome. I went back some distance with Phillips. In the early ’80s I’d got his teenage son off a drugs charge. I’d been recommended by a reporter called Gavin Legge for whom I’d obtained extremely lucky verdicts on a bunch of charges arising from his birthday party at a fashionable restaurant called Melitta’s.

  Mr Silly Moustache took all of ten minutes to produce the file. I slid the fiche onto the platen, switched on and, as always, found that it was upside down. When I’d corrected this, I zoomed across to the end and worked backwards.

  The last clipping was a short item from 1986 about the setting up by her parents of the Anne Jeppeson Memorial Scholarship at Monash University. It was to go to a student studying politics. Before that came the court reports I’d already seen in my file on Danny, then the report on Anne’s death. It was a page three story, with a picture of the scene and an inset photograph of her. She had short hair and a snub nose and she looked smart and formidable. A quick look at the headlines on the rest of the clippings suggested that this was the case. I wrote down the bylines on those stories that had them.

  Anne Jeppeson had been a campaigner for public housing and public housing tenants. At the time she was killed she was involved in trying to prevent the closing down of a public housing estate called Hoagland in Yarrabank.

  I leaned back in the upright chair and closed my eyes. Ronnie Bishop had helped send to jail the man accused of killing a woman campaigning against the closing of a public housing estate. Why would he lie to do that? Public-spiritedness? It didn’t sound like Ronnie Bishop.

  I asked SM whether I could get the Jeppeson file photocopied. He looked at me as if I’d asked for a colonic irrigation.

  ‘Would it help if I went through Steve Phillips?’ I said sweetly.

  ‘It’ll take half an hour,’ he said. ‘There isn’t anyone to do it now.’

  I said I’d come back and went looking for a caffeine jolt.

  I came upon the drinks machine without warning, which made it impossible to avoid my former client Gavin Legge. He looked up from stirring his styrofoam cup. The smile of a professional greeter appeared on his face.

  ‘Jack Irish,’ he said. He put down the cup and stuck out a small hand. ‘Great to see you. Who’s in the shit this time?’

  Legge was in his early forties, with greying curly hair and small features being overwhelmed by pudge. Behind thick-lensed designer glasses his eyes were slitty. All his stories in the paper seemed to involve free travel and free eating and drinking. He also dropped a lot of names. At the time I was defending him, one of his mercifully unneeded character witnesses said of him, ‘For a free sausage roll and a couple of glasses of plonk, Gavin Legge will get six mentions of anything you’re selling into the paper.’

  ‘Using the library,’ I said. ‘Maybe you can help.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ He was eager to please. As well he might be, given that it had taken me a year to get any money out of him.

  I put the coins in the machine and pressed for white coffee. I got out my notebook and found the three bylines on the Jeppeson stories. ‘These people still around? Sally Chan? Matthew Lunt?’

  ‘Jeez, you’re going back a bit. Chan went to Sydney about ten years ago and Lunt’s dead.’

  ‘Linda Hillier?’

  ‘Return of the starfucker. Came back to Melbourne a few months ago. She works for PRN, Pacific Rim News, it’s a financial news outfit. Just around the corner. Want to meet her?’

  ‘Wouldn’t mind. I saw your byline on a story about Yarra Cove.’

  Legge whistled. ‘Now those boys know how to treat the media,’ he said. ‘Nothing but the French at the launch. Non-vintage but the French. Like the good old days. It’s been local pissfizz at these things for years.’

  ‘Only the fittest have come through,’ I said. The machine started spitting out my drink.

  Legge took a sip of his coffee and pulled a face. ‘This stuff tastes like piss too. Bloody machines. Christ knows why we put up with it. Fucking useless union. Follow me.’

  We left the building and walked up two blocks towards the city centre. Pacific Rim News had the fourth floor of a small office block. A security man gave us labels and we went into a huge room full of formica desks and computer terminals.

  Legge said, ‘I still owe you that lunch. What about tomorrow? It’s on the paper. I’m reviewing a new restaurant. They fall over themselves.’

  ‘Don’t you do these things incognito?’

  ‘Certainly do. But I gave them an anonymous tip-off.’ He laughed, an unpleasant gurgling sound.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I’m out of town tomorrow. Some other time would be nice.’

  Linda Hillier was in a corner of the room where several desks seemed to have formed a huddle. She had been alerted and watched us coming, a pencil crosswise in her mouth between toothpaste-commercial teeth. When we got to her, Legge said, ‘Linda Hillier, I want you to meet Jack Irish, the lawyer who kept me out of jail for punching that food bitch.’

  Linda Hillier removed the pencil from her mouth. She was in her mid-thirties, shiny brown hair, a full mouth, dark eyes and a scattering of faded freckles. She wasn’t good-looking but she was handsome.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Next time tell us what you’ll take to throw the case.’

  ‘Jack’s interested in something you covered when you were a young groupie,’ Legge said.

  ‘That far back?’ Linda said. ‘When you were still married to that nice plump girl from Accounts? The one who was sweet enough to blow all th
e Age copyboys at the Christmas party?’

  ‘Touché,’ said Legge. ‘I can’t stand around all day talking about old times. Jack, I’ll ring you about lunch.’

  We watched Legge walk off. I noticed that all the men in the room were frozen into poses suggesting deep concentration while all the women seemed to be typing. Could it be that the men were transmitting thoughts to the women, who were typing them up? I suggested this to Linda Hillier. She looked at me speculatively.

  ‘Thoughts?’ she said. ‘Most of these guys couldn’t transmit herpes. What’s your interest in history?’

  ‘I’m interested in the Anne Jeppeson hit-and-run,’ I said. ‘Remember her?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I saw your byline on some stories in her file.’

  She said, ‘Is this a legal matter?’

  ‘No. I don’t practise much anymore.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Live off my wits,’ I said. ‘Gamble. Drink.’

  She smiled, an attractive downturning. ‘Then you’ll be keeping much the same company as before. Well, what can I tell you about Anne Jeppeson?’

  ‘Did it cross anyone’s mind at the time that she might have been deliberately run down?’

  ‘By that drunk? Was he capable of forming an intention?’

  ‘What I mean is, did anyone think he might have been used to kill Anne Jeppeson?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard anyone suggest that.’ She paused and looked at me intently. ‘Hang on a minute. It’s just come back to me. Didn’t you appear for the driver?’

  I nodded. ‘Not with any distinction. He came out of jail a few years ago. New person, good job, wife and kid. Then a cop shot him dead in Brunswick last Friday.’

  ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I read that the bloke’d done time for hit-and-run. I didn’t make the connection.’

  The phone on her desk rang. She talked to someone in monosyllables for a while, then put the phone down. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m under the gun here for a while. I’ve got to file a story for Hong Kong in about eight minutes.’