Bad Debts

by Peter Temple

  ‘You could’ve gone back to Hay,’ I said.

  Barry grew up somewhere out on the endless plains around a town called Hay in New South Wales. His father hadn’t come back from World War II, along with half of the other fathers of the kids in his school.

  ‘Fuck Hay,’ said Barry. ‘Bloke offered me half a motel outside Lismore. Was in Licensing with me. Turned it down like a stupid prick. He sells out a couple of months ago, doubles his money. And I’m still driving around in the fucken rain, member of an elite group. Number eight on the new Commissioner’s Top Ten shit list. Is that judgment or fucken what?’

  He took a savage bite of his Big Mac.

  A lot of work had drifted my way in the old days because of Barry. He’d been in Consorting and then Major Crimes, squads closed down now but once home for hard men all but indistinguishable from the criminals they spent most of their time with. I’d had plenty of clients who’d come in and said variations on ‘Barry Tregear reckons y’might get me a fair shake’.

  I said, ‘You’ve got an ex-cop for a Police Minister now. He’ll see you old blokes right, won’t he?’

  Barry took in about eight chips and chewed thoughtfully. ‘Garth Bruce is a cunt. And he’s got selective amnesia. You hear him sprouting all that shit about getting rid of the old culture in the force? Mate, I’m part of the old culture and fucking proud of it,’ he said around the potato.

  ‘What exactly is the old culture?’

  ‘The dinosaurs left over from when it didn’t count if you took an extra ten bucks for the drinks when you put in for sweet for your dogs. When you had to load some cockroach to get it off the street. Public fucken service. We’re the ancient pricks think it’s okay to punch out slime who dob in a bloke who’s walked out on the wire for them to fucking Internal Affairs. That’s us. That’s the old culture.’

  I said, ‘They got all of you on armed robbery now?’

  Barry finished the chips, drained the Coke, put everything away neatly in the recyclable brown paper bag, opened his window and threw the bag out into the carpark. ‘The ones they’re hoping will take a bullet,’ he said. ‘We’re out there doing the in-progresses. When I done this line of work years ago, only the mad dogs fired on you. Now it’s all fucken mad dogs. They all fire on you. Chemical war’s going on inside their heads. The stuff come in the nose is fighting with the stuff come up the arm. Cause for concern, I can tell you.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘Shit. I’ve gotta get moving. What’s your interest in this McKillop?’

  ‘Ex-client of mine. Wife reckons he thought someone wanted to kill him.’

  Barry sighed. It triggered off a burp. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘I’m all wind. Listen, short story is this Quinn, drug squad, he got a call just before seven Saturday night, there’s a handover set for the yard of the Trafalgar, 7 p.m. There was a bit of stuffing around, they didn’t get there till quarter past.’

  He burped again and patted his pockets. ‘Never got a bloody Quikeze when you need one. Anyway, they hang around for a bit, no-one in sight, reckon they’ve missed the boat. Then they take a stroll through the cars, one from each end, and this cunt pops up with a .38 pointing at Martin, Quinn’s offsider. So Quinn, who’s behind this guy, puts four in him. Dead on arrival. There’s about five hundred bucks’ worth of smack in his car. End of story.’

  ‘And McKillop?’

  ‘Form.’

  ‘Not since.’

  ‘Well shit’s shit.’

  ‘Wife can’t believe it. Kid, job. Says he’s been absolutely straight.’

  Barry gave a snort. ‘That’s what Mrs Eichmann said.’ He rubbed his stomach.

  ‘What if Quinn went out, knocked him and planted the gun and the shit?’ I said.

  Barry gave me a long look, shaking his head. His eyes were light green, with little dark flecks. ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Jack, he’s an officer with sixteen years’ service. You take my meaning?’

  ‘No.’

  He got out of the car and leaned in. ‘He’d have knocked him somewhere less public. Mate, I got to go. I’m further up shit creek if I don’t get to town in about five minutes.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch. Buy you a drink,’ I said.

  Barry put his head back in the window. ‘Drinks, mate, drinks. You’re dealing with the old culture here.’

  ‘Danny’s dead,’ the old woman said through the small opening. ‘Who’re you?’

  I was standing on the leaking porch of a weatherboard house in Richmond. I’d got the address from a prison officer I knew from the days when I visited clients in Pentridge. The prison records had Mrs Mary McKillop, aunt, as Danny McKillop’s next of kin. I looked her up in the phone book: it was the number Danny had left on the machine. Sue McKillop hadn’t known the aunt was alive and had no idea how to find the cousin she’d mentioned.

  ‘Mrs Mary McKillop?’ I said.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she repeated. ‘Whad’ya want?’

  ‘I’m a lawyer. I’d like to talk about Danny.’

  ‘Danny’s dead. Bugger off.’

  The two-inch opening closed with a crack. I stared at the door’s peeling green paint for a while, thinking about trying again. I could still smell the ancient fumes of boiled cabbage and cat piss and decaying ceilings that had leaked out when the door opened. That decided the issue. But as I turned the door opened a sliver.

  ‘Try next door.’

  The door closed again.

  I tried the house to the right. A thin woman in her forties with lank, dead hair answered my knock. She blinked at me as if unaccustomed to light.

  ‘I’m making inquiries about Danny McKillop,’ I said.

  She looked at me for a long time, then she put her hands in the pockets of her pink housecoat. ‘He’s dead. Was in the paper.’ Her voice was toneless.

  ‘It’s his cousin I’d like to talk to.’

  She looked at me in silence.

  ‘It’s about the accident Danny went to jail for. It’s possible he didn’t do it.’

  She waited.

  ‘There might be some compensation.’

  She cleared her throat. ‘You’d better talk to Vin. He’s Danny’s cousin. He’s not here.’

  ‘Is he Vin McKillop?’ I said.

  She nodded.

  ‘Do you know where I could find him?’

  She thought for a while, then said, ‘Suppose he’s working. Only time he gets up before twelve. Dennis Shanahan in Edge Street’ll know.’

  I found Dennis Shanahan in the phone book. A woman said he was demolishing a building in Abbotsford, Joseph Street.

  There were three middle-aged men, a teenage boy and a lean brindle dog with a studded collar on the site. I could see them all from across the road. One man was sitting in the cab of a truck behind the shell of the single-storey building, the second was prising out a window with a crowbar, the third was feeding a fire of old timbers in the back corner. The teenager was cleaning bricks with a hammer and chisel. The dog was watching him. A portable radio somewhere in the ruin was putting out ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ at full volume.

  I crossed the road and walked along a plank bridging the exposed floor beams to the first doorway in the passage. A smell of poor lives hung over the place: cooking fat, yellow feet, burnt ironing boards and blocked drains.

  ‘I’m looking for Vin,’ I shouted to the window remover. He made a gesture with his thumb without looking around.

  I guessed the man in the truck would be the boss, so I tried the man at the fire. I couldn’t get close: the heat was intense. It didn’t seem to bother the man feeding it. He was short, heavyset, with dark curly hair and sideburns, probably in place since Elvis. The same could be said for his jeans and the grime on his hands and under his nails. His nose was flattened and slightly askew and a big piece of right eyebrow was gone.

  ‘Vin McKillop?’ I said.

  He had a length of two-by-four hardwood in his right hand, poking the fire. He looked up at me without expression. Boxer’s
eyes. ‘Who wants him?’

  ‘I’m a lawyer,’ I said. ‘It’s about Danny McKillop. I know he’s dead but I need to talk to someone who knew him.’

  The man threw his two-by-four into the flames.

  ‘What about him?’ he said.

  ‘It’s about the accident. The woman’s death.’

  He picked up another splintered piece of wood. ‘He done the time,’ he said flatly.

  ‘I’m trying to find out if he done the crime.’

  The man spat into the flames. ‘What’s it to you if he done it or not done it?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ I said. ‘Can you spare me a bit of time? There’s an interview fee.’

  ‘I’m on the job.’

  ‘Take half an hour unpaid. I’ll pay you for that too.’

  Vin McKillop positioned the wood carefully on the fire and rubbed under his nose with a forefinger. ‘There’s a pub around the corner,’ he said. ‘Cost you twenty bucks.’

  The pub was empty except for two old men sitting at a formica table in a corner looking at nothing. The place smelt of stale beer and carbolic. I got two beers and sat at a table near the door. Vin came in and went straight through the door marked GENTS. When he came back, he stood at the bar. He was making some kind of point. I picked up the beers and went over to him.

  ‘Cheers,’ I said.

  Vin didn’t say anything. He just picked up the glass and drank three-quarters of the beer. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what’s the fee?’

  I had a fifty-dollar note ready. I put it on the bar. Then I put a twenty on top of it.

  Vin put the money in his top pocket. He took a cigarette out of the same pocket without revealing the pack and lit it with a plastic lighter. He took a deep drag and let the smoke run out his nostrils. I felt like asking him for one. ‘You a Jack?’ he said.

  ‘No.’ I took out a card and held it up for him to read. He looked at it.

  ‘Need glasses,’ he said. ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘It says I’m a lawyer.’ Vin couldn’t read.

  ‘Danny don’t need a lawyer now.’

  ‘There’s his wife and child,’ I said. ‘Had you seen him recently?’

  ‘Seen him when he come out. Didn’t know him. Lost about a hundred pounds.’

  ‘What kind of work did he do before he went in?’

  ‘Nothin.’ Vin drained his beer and signalled the barman with a big, dirty finger.

  ‘Surprise you when he hit the woman that night?’

  Vin flicked his cigarette stub into the trough at our feet. It lay there smoking. He lit another one. ‘Yeah, surprised me.’ He held his cigarette hand just above the counter and drummed with his thumb.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘What’s it matter? Cunt’s wormfood now.’

  Vin’s beer arrived. I paid.

  ‘It matters. Why were you surprised?’

  He drank half the beer and wiped his mouth on his cuff. ‘Hadn’t been near the car for months. He was on a year suspended for pissed driving. Fat prick was shit-scared of doing time.’

  ‘But he could’ve forgotten all that, he was so pissed.’

  Vin scratched an armpit. ‘Yeah, well, that could be right if you can work out how a bloke that’s so legless he’s passed out in Punt Road about quarter past eleven can get sober enough to go home and get his car and drive about thirty blocks to cream some bitch at twenty to twelve.’

  ‘Danny didn’t mention that before the trial.’

  ‘Fucking right.’

  ‘How do you know where he was at quarter past eleven?’

  ‘Mate of mine saw him.’

  ‘You didn’t tell the cops?’

  ‘Didn’t hear about it till after Danny was inside.’

  ‘Why didn’t your mate tell the cops at the time?’

  Vin blew two flat streams of smoke out of his nostrils. ‘Cause he was hoping Danny’d get about fifty years. Danny was a dog. There’s lots of people hoped they’d throw the fucking key away.’

  ‘Dog for who?’

  ‘Drug squad. He’d dob anyone, every little twat he heard big-noting himself in a pub. Jacks’d pay him off with a couple’ve hits.’

  ‘He was on smack?’

  ‘On anything.’

  Two men in donkey jackets and woollen caps came in from the street. Vin looked them over carefully while draining his glass.

  I signalled for two more beers.

  ‘One of his Jack mates was talking to him near the pub that night,’ Vin said.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Same way. My mate. Saw Danny with this cunt Scullin in a car down the road. Danny come in, full of dough, drinking Jim Beam, in and out of the pisshouse, gets off his face. They kicked him out round eleven. Then my mate sees him lying behind a bench, he’s drunk another half of JB.’

  ‘That was a quarter past eleven?

  ‘Thereabouts.’

  ‘You reckon your mate would talk to me? For a fee?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Dead. OD’d on smack.’

  ‘The cop’s name’s Scullin?’

  ‘I forget.’

  ‘Where did Danny keep his car?’

  ‘Garage behind his nanna’s house.’

  ‘That’s in Collett Street?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Fair way from Clifton Hill.’

  ‘Fucking A.’ He finished his beer. ‘Got to go.’

  I said, ‘Thanks for your help.’

  ‘You got nothing from me, mate. Is that right?’

  ‘It’s right.’

  Vin McKillop looked back at me before he went out the door. There was still nothing showing in those boxer’s eyes but he wasn’t going to forget my face.

  7

  We went to Ballarat in the big BMW, Harry driving through Royal Park and on to the Tullamarine Freeway like the late James Hunt on cocaine. The day was fine, thin cloud running west. In ten minutes we were passing through Keilor, the beginning of a huge sprawl of brick veneers nominally divided into suburbs with names like Manna Gum Heights and Bellevue Hill. These were the places where teenage dreams came to die.

  ‘Heights,’ said Harry in wonder. ‘Flat as the paper under the lino.’

  I was in the back, reading the Age. Cam was in front, fiddling with the laptop.

  ‘Wootton tells me you put the squirrel grip on one of his commissioners, Jack,’ Harry said.

  ‘Not without difficulty,’ I said. Harry knew Wootton well. He used him for big jobs.

  ‘More buggers doin a runner these days, seems to me. Probably time for another Happy Henry.’ Harry turned to look at me while accelerating passed a tradesman’s ute with two cattle dogs on the back, barking into the wind. I paled.

  ‘You know about Happy Henry, Jack?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hidden history of the turf,’ Harry said. ‘Commissioner called Happy Henry Carmody. Happy shot through on a big punter, Baby Martinez, came from Manila, Hawaii, somewhere like that, got into a few duels with the books. Silly bugger, really. Happy did a bit of work for him, came highly recommended too. Then one Satdee Happy had a kitbag of notes owed to Baby, thought bugger it, Baby’s just some dago’ll cop it sweet, go home and weep under the palm trees.’

  Harry looked around again.

  ‘Baby’s friends come on Happy up in Brisbane. The dickhead, it took so long to get there in his Falcon, he thinks he must be in a foreign country. He’s tossin Baby’s dough around, whores, cards, buyin drinks for the cops and politicians and the like.’

  There was a pause while Harry groped for the Smarties box. In the interests of self-preservation, Cam found it for him.

  ‘Anyway, next thing Happy’s up in the little hills they got there, nailed to a blue gum. Five feet off the ground, they say. Six-inch nails. Like Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said Cam.

  ‘Not again either,’ Harry said. ‘Cut it off, put it in his shirt pocket like a little cigar. Was a wh
ile before any of your commissioners’ minds went wanderin again, can tell ya.’

  Harry chuckled to himself for a while. Then he said, ‘Give us a rundown on the field in this Topspin bugger’s race, Cam.’

  While Cam talked, consulting the laptop, Harry kept a steady thirty kilometres over the speed limit and we covered the 110 kilometres in sixty-five minutes. It wasn’t raining in Ballarat and the locals were standing out on the pavements, looking at the sky in amazement. Many of them had the pale, staring look of people newly pushed out of institutions. Someone once said that nobody went to live in Ballarat; you had to be committed by a magistrate.

  Dowling Forest is on the other side of town, at the foot of a round, bald hill. By the time we got there, thin and steady rain was falling.

  ‘That’s more like it,’ said Harry. He’d said nothing since the Happy Henry story, listening to Cam in silence. He parked well back from the gate and took over my newspaper.

  Cam locked the laptop into its housing under the dashboard.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, big hands on his thighs.

  Harry reached into his Donegal tweed jacket with his right hand and came out with an envelope about a centimetre thick. ‘I’ll give you the nod,’ he said. ‘Yokels lined up, I take it.’

  ‘Better be,’ Cam said. He put the envelope in the inside pocket of his trenchcoat and set off briskly.

  I got the Sakura Pro FS100 out of the boot, loaded it, hung it around my neck, put on my Drizabone and followed. Harry was on the car phone.

  We were in Ballarat for two reasons. The first was a three-year-old filly called Topspin Winder running in the third. She had started five times and her best run was a seventh place at her first outing. After four runs, she’d been given an eight-week rest. When she’d reappeared at Pakenham the week before, she’d run eighth.

  I bought a race card and wandered into the huge barn of a betting ring. Most of the city bookmakers were fielding, trying to keep afloat until the Spring Carnival could rescue them. It was five minutes before the second race and there was a fair amount of action by country standards. I went out onto the grandstand. Over to the right, the members were snug behind glass. Out here it was all streaming eyes and snuffling noses.