Peter Temple: Bad Debts

‘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.

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 while 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.