Convinced by Danny that his client was a pillar of society as well as a regular but quiet supporter of charity – the Salvation Army and in particular the Parramatta Boys Home – the jury contended that the prosecuting QC and the police had not proved Bryan Penman’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt and acquitted he, whom the legal profession privately believed, almost to a man, to be guilty of murdering his wife.
The murder trial had made the headlines for weeks, but for Danny the best moment came when a legal wag told journalists, off the record, that ‘The best way to secure a divorce in Sydney is to murder your wife and hire “Nifty” Dunn to get you off.’
Two major newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald and the afternoon Daily Mirror, ran the anonymous quote, to the consternation and anger of women everywhere, and Danny immediately recognised that his moment had arrived. He realised that the unnamed barrister’s use of the sobriquet ‘Nifty’ would serve him well in the future. Secretly delighted with the new nickname, he threatened to sue the newspaper for attempting to sully his recently acquired reputation. Furthermore, he demanded, in the name of the nation’s women, that the papers name the barrister who was supposed to have made the remark. Both papers refused to reveal their source, so Danny took out an injunction to force them to do so. Rival newspapers eagerly latched onto his nickname, giving Danny ‘Nifty’ Dunn the publicity he’d hoped for, and then some. The matter was eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed but considerable sum. Danny was not only extremely well paid for the acquittal by his grateful client, but the money from the newspapers allowed Landsman, Dunn & Partners to purchase a ten-year leasehold on chambers in the heart of Phillip Street, the most prestigious legal address in Sydney.
In later years, when he had achieved considerable power, he would look back with gratitude on that first experience with the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Mirror. It taught him that threatened litigation, if used judiciously, was a powerful weapon against one’s enemies, as well as nosey investigative journalists, although Danny knew by heart the ancient Chinese military maxim: keep your friends close and your enemies closer still.
Nifty Dunn, by making himself conspicuous, had succeeded in the first principle of disguise: that is, to allow people to see you for what you do and not for who you are. ‘Nifty’ was a splendid nickname, encompassing his dress sense and his sharp, quick mind. It was a great word to hide behind, and it attracted paying customers. After all, who wouldn’t want a nifty lawyer conducting their defence? If some of his clients were not among the more morally upstanding citizens, they were nevertheless entitled to vigorous representation by the one-eyed lawyer with the panel-beaten face who in every other way looked as if he had just stepped out of the pages of Tailor & Cutter.
While his face was never going to be his fortune, it was a huge improvement on the mangled wreck it had once been, and was sometimes likened to that of the RAAF fighter pilot and now senator John Gorton, who, like Danny, had both his cheekbones and his nose smashed when his Hurricane was shot down by the Japanese and crash landed. Danny’s face, with its missing eye now covered by one of the eye patches Billy du Bois had given him as a parting gift when he left New Orleans, had a certain raffish air that made it ideal for a criminal lawyer.
If it’s true you are known by the company you keep, then Danny was building a somewhat questionable reputation in respectable legal circles. He’d successfully represented the notorious and now ageing Tilly Devine, the madam and sly grogger, on a tax-evasion problem. Kate Leigh, the equally notorious madam, hadn’t paid up to the bag man from the Premier’s Department and so had been raided by the police. This case was hurriedly dismissed on technical grounds. Danny and Helen both thought brothels should be legalised. Politicians, from the premier down, were supplementing their salaries with bribes, and the working girls and women had no protection other than their pimps. The whole system was corrupt.
Perc Galea, an SP bookmaker among other things, had his case dismissed when a key witness to the mysterious disappearance of a colleague left unexpectedly for an overseas trip. (Danny had nothing to do with this and didn’t take the credit, although it looked like another win for Nifty.) Lennie McPherson approached him without success, for Danny hated standover men above almost all things. They always reminded him of Captain Riley forcing Glossy Denmeade to surrender his boots; he turned down the job.
Abe Saffron, known as Mr Sin, asked Danny to represent him after he’d been raided by the police for illegal gambling. Danny won the case by proving it was a social game among friends and that no money had changed hands. He had no real objections to illegal gambling, having grown up in a community where gambling was part of the local culture, and he considered the draconian laws a conspiracy between the church, politicians and wowsers. Gambling, like grog, had been part of the Australian ethos since the First Fleet, and, to his mind, the sooner it became legal the better off everyone would be, especially those with an urge to have a flutter on the gee-gees or chance their luck at the gaming tables. The six o’clock swill – where men chug-a-lugged half a dozen middies in the last fifteen minutes before closing and went home, often to beat the living crap out of their wives and children – had to be abolished.
Danny lived by his own moral code, and his bigger cases paid for the battered wives and rape victims he took on at no cost. As a child growing up in Balmain he had constantly been aware of kids coming to school with black eyes, split lips and broken noses, claiming they’d run into a door or some such bullshit explanation that nobody believed for a moment. As Danny had been a natural leader in the playground, they’d fess up to him that the old man had come home pissed and beaten them up. He also learned that for every battered kid there was usually a battered mum and even sometimes a sister who had been sexually abused. The boys eventually grew up and could defend themselves, but the women remained vulnerable. Helen’s indignation at this cruelty to her sex and Brenda’s frequent reports of incidents she’d heard at shandy soirees had helped to deepen Danny’s sympathy for these women into something of an obsession. But from the very beginning his support of women had got him into strife with the magistrates and judges who presided over rape cases. Men themselves, they allowed victims to be harried by the defence until it seemed that the women’s morality was on trial; often the victims were accused of complicity or, in Balmain language, of being ‘cock teasers’. Not surprisingly, there was a disproportionally high rate of acquittals from juries reluctant to convict in the face of the judge’s or magistrate’s obvious bias when summing up. In many cases involving domestic violence, the husband would be let off with a warning, on the usually spurious grounds that the court did not want to ‘deprive the family of its breadwinner’.
There was, however, one aspect of these cases of violence against women that concerned Danny deeply, because he found himself emotionally involved. Some of the wife-beaters and child abusers he was taking action against were ex-servicemen suffering from the same demons as Danny – the same depression and irrational anger. These men often mistakenly took to alcohol to ease their suffering, frequently with disastrous consequences for their families. At such times Danny was reminded of how tenuous was his own mental health, and he resolved to continue to try and control his mood swings by staying as far away from the grog as possible and burying himself in work.
Danny knew he’d had quite enough of swimming after the first five years of early-morning laps at Balmain pool, which he’d taken up at the behest of Bullnose Daintree and Sammy Laidlaw, his one-time junior-team trainers at the Tigers. His health had greatly improved, and he knew he needed the daily exercise to avoid his back seizing up on him, but still he declared himself bored witless from tapping the ends of the pool a hundred times each and every morning. While his old coaches had long since given up supervising his exercise, Sammy, with Bullnose always in tow, would drop round to the baths once a week to give Danny a massage. No one could remember when or if the payment for Sammy’s
massage service had been negotiated. Six schooners each at the Hero was just something that had been quickly understood, by some sort of osmosis, even though Bullnose did nothing but talk while Sammy worked on Danny’s back. Bullnose, in particular, was a veritable mine of information, but both of them seemed to know all the gossip, business, politics and domestic scuttlebutt on the peninsula. In fact they were a source of information that would one day become important to Danny. Bullnose, whom most regarded as not very bright, had almost total recall of any conversation he’d ever heard. It was an uncanny ability, and with his minor gift for mimicry he was often able to reproduce what he had heard fairly exactly, complete with pauses and inflections. It was as if he were a human recording machine.
However, the drinking rules for the pair were clearly delineated by Brenda, who stipulated that they could partake of their grog in one sitting, as they often did, leaving the pub almost legless, arms about each other’s shoulders in mutual support, or over the entire week, but they couldn’t carry over their entitlement to the following week, a thought that had obviously never occurred to them. Six schooners each was known to be their limit in one drinking session, after which they would famously fall down and, worse still, soon be snoring, unable to be roused. Both were widowers, their families grown and departed, and they lived together in rented accommodation near the harbour’s edge. Because it was downhill from the pub, they could usually get home under their own steam, even with six schooners sloshing around in each distended belly. While they talked about everyone and everything, they never referred to the place where they lived, which Danny suspected was a boarding house, and obviously a pretty grotty one.
It was not long after the Penman case that Danny finally declared himself heartily sick of swimming laps. As a young bloke he’d played polo for the action it involved; swimming laps was too dull. ‘Sammy, I’m going crazy, mate. Do you realise I’ve touched the ends of the pool thousands of times over the past few years. And in between those touches nothing happens; I don’t see anyone or feel anything, except salt water up my nostrils. I reckon I’ve swum halfway round Australia!’
‘Shit eh! Halfway round Australia. When d’ya reckon you’ll get back?’ Bullnose exclaimed, obviously impressed.
Sammy sighed. ‘Ain’t nothin’ else I can recommend, mate. Nothin’ better fer yer back, bodyweight-wise, than swimmin’. No weight-bearin’, see?’
‘There has to be something . . . something almost as good? Just for a change,’ Danny said desperately. ‘I’m going crackers, Sammy.’
‘Mate, halfway round Australia, that’s fuckin’ impressive,’ Bullnose persisted, ‘especially seein’ yiz got a crook back.’
Sammy stopped working and thought for a moment. ‘Yiz could always try rowin’, mate. Y’know, on the rowin’ machine in the club gym.’
‘Yeah, row the other half. Swim halfway, row halfway. I bet that ain’t never been done before. Bloody good thought, Sammy,’ Bullnose said, excited.
‘I can’t see that a rowing machine would be any better, except on a cold winter’s morning. It’s the same old thing, going nowhere, just a
lot more repetition,’ Danny said. ‘On the other hand it would make
a change. There would be people to talk to.’
‘What about fair dinkum rowin’, yer know, mornin’s on the harbour,’ Sammy replied. ‘See things, take an interest, no two days the same . . . harbour traffic, I-talians goin’ out in their fishin’ boats, a bloody good workout to boot. Couldn’t be better. Beat the shit outa swimmin’ up ’n’ down.’
‘Yeah? But what about a boat?’
‘Well, ya see Wee Georgie Robinson’s got this skiff fer sale,’ Bullnose said disingenuously.
‘I see, and you guys get a commission if you sell it?’ Danny laughed.
‘Mate, two birds with one stone,’ Sammy replied pragmatically, quickly adding, ‘Wouldn’t have a bar of it if I didn’t think it’d work fer yer back, mate. That comes first. Bloke’s got a professional rep to maintain.’
‘What, for massage or honesty?’ Danny laughed again.
‘Jeez, Danny, we would’n’ betray yer trust, mate,’ Bullnose insisted, looking hurt. ‘Others maybe, but we’s bin mates a long time, since you was a nipper.’
‘How much?’
They both spoke simultaneously:
‘Twenty (Sammy) Twenty-five (Bullnose) Quid,’ they finished in unison.
‘Tell you what. I’ll give you fifteen, sight unseen,’ Danny said, knowing he’d have to ask Brenda for the cash as he and Helen were only just managing to get by.
‘Done!’
Danny was taking a chance; the price of a skiff could go as low as five pounds if it was in poor shape, but Wee Georgie Robinson had a reputation on the peninsula for good, well-maintained sailing boats and skiffs. He worked wearing felt carpet slippers – ‘Mate, yer don’t wear hob-nailed boots when yiz working with good wood. Mark it wid a dirty big scuff or dent. Ya gotta treat it wid respect or it don’t let yiz work it nice ’n’ clean.’ He’d also famously been a member of the Balmain premiership side of 1915, so, by definition, if he couldn’t be trusted, then no one could, Danny decided.
From the first morning Danny pulled the skiff into the water off Wee Georgie Robinson’s boatshed ramp, having negotiated a cheap weekly rent to berth it there, he knew things were on the up and up. He simply loved being on the harbour in the early mornings, even when the weather was foul. The only time he didn’t go out was on those rare mornings in winter when you couldn’t see three feet in front of you through the fog. Sammy had been right – after four months of rowing, his back was in even better shape and there was never a time when he didn’t feel rewarded by having been out on the water at first light.
One bitterly cold and blustery Monday in July, when he’d come back from his row chilled to the bone, Brenda called him to say that Billy Scraper had committed suicide by hanging himself from a rope suspended from the arm of a dock crane nearly fifty feet above the ground. Danny knew that he must have been sober on that dark, blustery, moonless Sunday night to have climbed along the arm of the crane, secured the rope, slipped the noose around his neck and jumped. His body had been discovered as dawn broke, swinging like a pendulum high above the grey harbour water.
Brenda asked Danny to attend the funeral, which would take place after the coroner’s inquest, and offered to hold a wake for Billy at the pub. ‘Most of the people around here say it’s good riddance to bad rubbish,’ she said quietly. ‘I doubt many will attend. He’s upset everyone who ever tried to help him.’ She sighed. ‘Darling, please make the effort.’
‘Of course I will, Mum.’ There was no need for her to urge him, for while Billy wasn’t an ex-prisoner of war, he’d suffered facial injuries similar to Danny’s – worse, in fact – and there could be no thought of Danny not attending.
Billy Scraper was a prime example of a man who chose to use booze to try to kill the deep psychological pain he felt. Danny had Helen to talk to when things got bad, and that helped, even though she sometimes didn’t fully understand what was going on in his head, but poor Billy had had no one to turn to.
Danny was once again made aware of how little people understood the effects of shell shock or war nerves, as the condition was still being called. While people like Dr Craig Woon, now a psychiatrist and practising in Sydney, were beginning to see it as causing extensive and lasting psychological damage, officially it was still being dismissed as a temporary condition, a state of shock brought on by battle fatigue. People, especially those from Balmain, expected you to get over it and get on with your life, to stop whingeing. Danny understood this and played the game, but his real self had gone into hiding, and by exposing only the public face of a high-profile criminal lawyer, he had managed to conceal from most people the damage he’d suffered, except for those like Helen and Brenda who knew him for what he was – a damaged soul. But Billy had
let the booze get to him and you can’t do your hiding behind an empty booze bottle.
Billy’s face was an altogether different matter. It was something with which the people of Balmain could sympathise. Billy Scraper had been saddled with a terribly mutilated and fiercely ugly face. Danny had suggested that Brenda start a fund to raise the money needed for Billy’s boat fare to England. She’d done this by upping the cost of a middy of beer by a penny, and by tuppence for a schooner. In a year, with a bit of a shortfall made good by Brenda herself, they’d raised sufficient money to send Billy to the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead for treatment by the famous New Zealand plastic surgeon Professor McIndoe.
Billy had already spent a year at the Queen Victoria Hospital burns unit after he’d been dragged from the wreck of his burning bomber. But before the long and gruelling series of operations could be completed, he’d elected to return to Australia. Now, with his burns healed, the authorities would not consider plastic surgery for what they regarded as purely cosmetic purposes, nor were they prepared to send him back to England. He could breathe and mumble, which, as far as officialdom was concerned, made him fit to be released into society.
Billy returned from the pub-sponsored trip eighteen months later after multiple skin grafts, with eyelids that now effectively closed, a mouth capable of forming recognisable words and a new nose formed from his own tissue. Almost miraculously, or so it seemed to the Balmain locals, the doctors had grown skin for the nose while it was still attached to Billy’s shoulder, then cut it away once the blood supply was established in the new site. Like Danny, Billy was never going to be pretty, but he could now appear in public among adults, although he still often frightened small children.
The Story of Danny Dunn Page 32