Bad Debts (12 page)

Tony said, ‘Rex tell you his name’s Dakota Dreamin? We call him Slim.’

The horse snickered as we approached. Tony stroked his nose and fed him something.

‘They say he was a deadset mongrel, kickin, bitin, but we never seen it. Like a lamb. Me girl looks after him, ten-year-old.’ He looked behind us and said, ‘Tom, shake hands with the gentlemen. This is me boy Tom, waggin school. He’ll give the horse a little hit out.’

The boy from the front door came up and shook hands awkwardly. Someone other than a barber had given him a recent haircut. He was going to be too big for a jockey.

We walked down a road between paddocks and over a small rise. Below us, invisible from the stables, was a training track. You could smell the watermelon scent of new-mown grass before you saw it.

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‘Two thousand four hundred metres,’ said Tony Ericson. ‘Got a twelve hundred metre chute over there.’ He pointed to the left. ‘Starting gate. Same grass as Flemington.

Bloke done it in the sixties. Went bang here. Used to have rails and all. Had sheep on it for twenty years but we mowed it and rolled it and it come up good.’

I looked at Harry. He had his hands in the jacket pockets of his leather-trimmed loden jacket and a faraway expression on his face.

He took a hand out and rubbed his chin. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘Pride of the district, I imagine.’

‘Don’t follow,’ said Tony.

‘Other people use this?’

Tony shook his head. ‘No trainers around here. We only cleaned it up bout a year ago.

Whole thing, that is.’

We all turned at the sound of hoofs. The boy, Tom, walked Dakota Dreaming up to us.

The horse shone like glass, groomed to a standard only achievable by ten-year-old girls.

It had pristine bandages on all legs. I knew enough about condition to know this creature was well advanced in his preparation to race.

Tony held the horse’s head. ‘Remember what I said. Take him out to the seven furlong.

I’ll give you a bang. Don’t push him. If he’s feelin strong at the three hundred, let him go.’

The boy nodded and took the horse off. On the track, they went into an easy canter.

We walked along to where a big tin lollipop painted red marked the finish. Cam lit a cigarette, held it in the corner of his mouth while he fiddled with his stopwatch. Harry took out a small pair of binoculars and hung them around his neck. Tony Ericson put a blank into a starting pistol.

‘Don’t he mind the gun?’ asked Rex Tie.

‘Can’t hardly hear it over there,’ said Tony. ‘He’s ready. Light’s flashin.’ He raised the pistol above his head, waved it. The boy’s right arm went up and down. Tony fired, a flat smack.

Tom set a nice pace, about what you’d expect for a frontrunner over 1400 or 1600

metres on a country track. The straight was about 350 metres. When they came around the turn, you could see that the going was soft and that the horse was not entirely happy.

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But the going wasn’t going to stop Slim putting on a show. At the 300-metre mark, you could see Tom urge the horse with hands and heels. It didn’t require much. With every appearance of enjoyment, the horse opened its stride, lowered its head and accelerated home. They went past the post flat out.

We stood in silence watching the boy, standing upright in the stirrups, slow the horse down.

Harry took off his hat and scratched his head. Cam was looking for a cigarette. Their eyes locked for a good three seconds.

‘What’s it say?’ asked Harry.

Cam found a cigarette and lit it with his Zippo.

‘For a stayer,’ he said, ‘smokin.’

15

Drew poured some red wine into our glasses, leant back and put his stockinged feet on the coffee table. ‘You want my advice?’

Harry and Cam had dropped me off at home but I didn’t go in. I’d been brooding all the way back from Hardhills and I felt the urge to talk to Drew. Once upon a time we’d talked to each other about all our problems.

I found him eating takeaway pizza over a pile of files in front of the fire in his house in Kew. The children were nowhere to be seen.

I said, ‘Well. Yes.’

‘Drop it. Forget Danny ever left the message. Take the gorilla’s advice about this Bishop too. You’ve touched a nerve somewhere.’

‘If I hadn’t been three-quarters pissed years ago I’d have tried to find out more about Danny’s movements the night of the hit-and-run,’ I said. ‘I might have kept him out of jail.’

Drew chewed for a while, studying the flames. Finally he said, ‘Bullshit, mate. Even if you’d been stone-cold sober and at the top of your form, it would never have occurred to you. You’d have pleaded him. You had to plead him. Since when do lawyers go looking for other explanations when the Crown’s got a case like that? Don’t kid yourself.

There was no negligence there. There’s nothing owing on your part.’

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We sat in silence for a while, looking at the flames. A wind had come up and every now and again it made a hollow sound in the chimney.

‘Remember that week fishing on the Delatite?’ Drew asked. ‘I reckon that was the best holiday of my adult life.’

‘You’ve never said that before,’ I said. ‘We caught about three fish.’

‘Didn’t matter a bugger. It was great. It’s all the kids seem to remember of their entire childhoods. Apart from the times I’m supposed to have been awful.’

I never thought about that trip. I’d curtained it off. It was the last holiday with Isabel.

‘It was good,’ I said. ‘Like being a kid again.’

‘Can’t get enough of that.’ Drew shifted in his chair. ‘Listen, Jack, Danny was probably knocked for some drug scam. This other bloke, from what you say, was a candidate for doing something unpleasant. If there are feral cops involved, the next thing is that you have an accident.’

I nodded. I knew he was right. It was too late to do the right thing by Danny McKillop.

The guilt that had taken me to Perth was pointless. With a sense of relief, I held out my wine glass.

‘We’ll just finish this drop in here,’ said Drew, ‘and then I want to show you a little 1978

shiraz off vines that were ninety years old then. Client gave me a case.’

I ended up sleeping in the spare room.

I put in the next day at Taub’s, cutting a taper on and hand-morticing the legs of the boardroom table. It was soothing work for someone not feeling all that flash. Charlie didn’t make tables any more unless he had to. Having me around meant he didn’t have to. ‘A table is pretty much a table,’ he said. ‘When you can’t make a complete ruin.’

My cabinetmaking began as a kind of therapy on my way back from self-destruction. I can see that now. At the time it just seemed to happen. I noticed Charlie’s workshop while looking at the old tailor’s shop that is now my office. I went in on impulse.

Sunlight was slanting in through the high windows, the air smelled of wood shavings and linseed oil and Charlie was at his workbench whistling while carving the back of a reproduction George III mahogany chair he was making to fill a gap in what the antique trade calls a long set. In that moment I fell in love with the idea of being a cabinetmaker. No such thought had ever entered my mind before. I knew absolutely nothing about woodwork. I went up to Charlie and said, ‘I’ll pay you to teach me something about making furniture.’

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Charlie had given me his interested look and said, ‘Three things let me tell you. Number one, see a doctor. Number two, I’m too old to have an apprentice. Number three, you haven’t got enough money.’

After I moved into my office, I began to hang around Taub’s, making myself useful where I could. Charlie seemed to like the company. And he couldn’t stop himself showing me how to do things.

Just before 4 p.m., the phone rang. It was switched through from my office. It was Mrs Bishop, Ronnie’s mother.

‘Mr Irish,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry to bother you but I’m so dreadfully worried about Ronnie.

I’ve been going over everything in my mind and I remembered him making a phone call. Well, I went to the phone, it’s in the passage, and looked at the little pad I keep there and there’s two numbers written down. By Ronnie.’

I said, ‘Good work, Mrs Bishop. Numbers mean anything to you?’

‘No. I don’t know them. I was going to ring them, but then I thought I’d ask you first.

Should I tell the police? Would they be interested?’

‘Let me ring them first,’ I said. ‘The police often take some time to get around to things.’

I took down the numbers and went around to my office. I had a feeling about the first number. My scratchpad was beside the phone and on it a number was circled.

The first number was Danny McKillop’s.

I sat down and dialled the second number. The phone rang two or three times and then a voice said, ‘Father Gorman’s residence.’

It was another sour day, full of wind and rain. It took a long time to get across the city to the address Father Rafael Gorman had given me. The urban planners wrecked the traffic flow when they turned Swanston Street, once Melbourne’s spine, into some kind of half-baked pedestrian mall. Urban planners are people who know best. They should make them all marry social workers.

I sat in the jams and listened to Claude Haynes, the afternoon man on the ABC, interview the Premier. Like most men on the ABC, Claude had started out to be a clergyman but tossed in the frock after going a couple of rounds with God in the seminary. I don’t know whether the experience of the religious life left these people sadder but it certainly left them believing they were wiser than anyone else.

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‘Premier,’ Claude said, making it sound like an assumed name, ‘the Opposition leader says you and your Planning Minister, Mr Pitman, are turning the State into a paradise for carpetbaggers and quick-buck artists. How do you respond to that?’

‘With a smile,’ said Dr Marcia Saunders, no trace of amusement in her voice. ‘Mr Kerr has no commercial experience and no commercial sense. He wouldn’t know a carpetbagger from the chairman of the Reserve Bank.’

Claude said, ‘Mr Kerr gave AM a list of what he called “Projects for the Pals” this morning—Yarra Cove, the Footscray Sportsdome, the new privately run remand centre and several others. He says they are all being developed by government pals. Are the developers your pals?’

‘Mr Kerr should know about pals,’ Dr Saunders replied. ‘He’s got where he is because of pals. If he’d had to rely on brains or ability, he’d still be teaching geography in primary school.’

With the delighted air of someone who thinks he’s trapped Wittgenstein in a logical error, Claude said, ‘That doesn’t answer my question: Are these developers your pals?’

There was a long silence. Then Marcia said, voice laden with menace, ‘Mr Haynes, you shouldn’t act as a frontman for these has-beens. If Mr Kerr has any evidence of favouritism, he should produce it. Let me assure the people of this State that this government doesn’t do favours. It assesses projects and people purely on merit. It follows all processes and procedures to the letter. The developments you’ve named are both sound commercial propositions and job creators for this State. The people behind them are highly experienced and astute operators who can be relied upon to do a good job. Are you suggesting anything to the contrary?’

Claude cleared his throat. ‘But are some of the developers supporters of your party?’

You could hear Marcia’s sigh. It combined disbelief with contempt. ‘Are you and Mr Kerr proposing that supporters of a governing party should be excluded from commercial life?’ she said. Each word was coated with scorn.

Claude’s tone went sugary. ‘I think you’re shooting the messenger here, Dr Saunders,’

he said. ‘I’m merely—’

‘Don’t try to hide behind the messenger argument,’ snapped Marcia. ‘You media leftovers from the sixties are seldom merely doing anything. But you might try to make your agenda a little less obvious.’

It went on like this. Claude kept trying to wrap himself in the rags of his dignity and Marcia kept tearing them off. I enjoyed Claude’s discomfort but there was something chilling about Dr Marcia Saunders, PhD in physical education from the University of 82

Kansas and former stockbroker. She wasn’t the same person who’d smiled down from the election billboards.

After half an hour of traffic snarl, I’d had enough. I did a savage left turn in the face of traffic into a one-way street. One crime led to another, I had a few altercations and near-misses but I got to Father Gorman’s address near Albert Park Lake with all the paint on.

I parked in a no-parking zone. Col Boon could knock a fellow cop and get the pension, he could beat parking tickets on this Celica.

Father Gorman’s address was an oddly tapering new building. The tenants weren’t short of space: there were eight floors and only six brass plates on the plinth outside. The one for the sixth floor said: Safe Hands Foundation.

The name meant something to me. I remembered as I reached the glass doors: Ronnie Bishop had once worked for the Safe Hands Foundation. Helping homeless children, his mother had said. Trying to root them had been the view of his former neighbour in Morton Street.

Thc tenants were fussy about who came to visit them. A security man with a snub nose, pale eyes and skin the colour of dirty underclothing kept me captive between two sets of glass doors while he wrote down my particulars on a clipboard. A tattoo peeped out from under his wristwatch. He wasn’t too flash at writing.

Then he wanted my driver’s licence.

‘I’m not trying to cash a cheque here, sonny,’ I said. ‘Just phone the man.’

Tight little smile. ‘The body corporate lays down the security procedures.’ Flat Queensland voice. Pause. ‘Sir.’

‘This isn’t Pentridge,’ I said. ‘Didn’t they retrain you for this job? Just phone.’

He held my gaze briefly, but I’d got him in one. ‘I’ll check,’ he said.

He made his call, came back, let me in, escorted me to the lift, up to the sixth floor, rang the bell on one of the two doors in the foyer, waited until a handsome dark youth opened the door. Through all this, he said nothing and exuded hatred.

‘Come this way,’ the youth said. His hair was drawn back tightly in a ponytail and he had the superior and slightly miffed manner of the waiters in most Melbourne restaurants.