The next day wasn’t productive. I did a lease for a landlord who had come in off the street and put a couple of extra penalty clauses in Laurie Baranek’s agreement. At home, I slumped on the old leather sofa in the everything room with the Danny McKillop file and a bottle of Huon Falls Lager. I lived in half of the top of a small converted boot factory near Edinburgh Gardens. I’d owned the whole building in the good times and had managed to hold on to a quarter. No, to be accurate, a suburban lawyer, the fittingly named Prudence Webb, of Moloney, Hassan & Webb, had held on to a quarter for me when I was bent on liquidating all my assets, including myself, after Isabel’s death.
The answering machine played two clicks from callers who didn’t want to speak, a message from a lawyer about a witness, and my sister, Rosa, twice. She is the only woman named for a communist heroine ever to live in the old-money belt of Toorak. Impregnating my mother with her was one of the last things my father did on earth. What Bill Irish, stonemason, footballer, socialist, would make of Rosa is hard to say. She grew up in total privilege in my mother’s parents’ mansion in Toorak, doted on by four adults, one of them my mother’s nanny, recalled to service at sixty-five.
I read the whole file again. What was clear was that the evidence against Danny at his trial was overwhelming. A witness put him about three blocks from the scene within minutes of the collision. He was found asleep behind the wheel of the car that killed Anne Jeppeson: there were blood and clothing fragments on it belonging to Anne Jeppeson. The witness had taken the registration and the police had identified it as belonging to Danny and gone to his house. The witness had later picked Danny out of a line-up.
In his statement to the police, Danny said he had started drinking at around 3 p.m. on the day. He remembered nothing after about 10 p.m., when he was still in the Glengarry Arms in Punt Road. He had no idea how the evidence of the collision came to be on his car. He said the same in his interview with me at Pentridge.
I put the file down and stared at the shadows on the ceiling. From my notes, it appeared that I’d had no hesitation in advising Danny to plead guilty. I’d certainly made no effort to establish whether there was any other possible explanation for the circumstances. Why should I have? Danny didn’t offer any alternative account, his record was terrible and the police case was a prosecutor’s dream.
I was fetching another beer when the phone rang. It was my sister.
‘Aren’t you ever at home?’ Rosa said. ‘Doesn’t that machine of yours work? I need your advice. Phillip wants to marry me.’
‘Who?’
‘Phillip. Phillip? How many men do you think I’m seeing?’
‘It’s not a question of number,’ I said, ‘it’s a question of sequence. Which one is Phillip?’
She sighed. ‘Jack, you met him at dinner. The investor. With the sexy mouth. You brought that Sydney tart.’
‘She speaks warmly of you too. What sort of advice were you after?’
There was a pause. ‘Do you think I should?’
‘Marry him?’
‘Yes. Marry him.’
‘No.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘I think you should hold out for a less than one hundred per cent shit. What happened to Kevin? He seemed to have a lot of decent Catholic guilt. For a currency speculator, that is.’
She sighed again. ‘Jack, Jack, Kevin is a two hundred per cent shit. He’s got a little computer thing, you can see what’s happening to the dollar and the yen and the fucking zloty. He goes to the toilet in restaurants and looks at it. Can you believe that? I know it for a fact. The rest of them are in there snorting and admiring each other’s cocks and Kevin’s drooling over his little money meter. His wife left him for a nightclub bouncer, all of twenty-two, I believe. Can you blame her?’
‘I can’t find it in my heart to, no,’ I said.
‘The men I meet,’ she said, ‘if they’re not married and on the prowl, they’re gay or they’re going to a group to come to terms with their female side or they can’t shut up about their inner child. I suppose that’s why Phillip looks like such a find.’
I said, ‘It’s Phillip’s inner shark that worries me.’
I gave her some more excellent advice and we arranged to meet for lunch. Then I made some grilled ham and tomato sandwiches and got back on the couch. I clicked on the box and caught the end of the last segment on ‘This Day’. An ABC-type person with fair hair, spots and little round glasses was standing in front of a high diamond-mesh fence with a suave-looking man in a dark suit. Behind them you could see what looked like the beginnings of a vast gravel pit and beyond that an expanse of greasy water and the city skyline.
‘Mr Pitman,’ the spotty man said, ‘as the Minister responsible for seeing the Yarra Cove development through the Cabinet, how do you react to some people’s unease over a six hundred million dollar development being approved without public consultation?’
The Minister smiled. He had a thin, sly face with high cheekbones. Something about it said cosmetic surgery. His full head of dark hair was the kind that doesn’t move in the wind. ‘Well, Andrew,’ he said, ‘I don’t know who these people are you’re referring to. Perhaps your colleagues at the ABC. Or at the Age. There are always some people who want to knock anything the government does. But they’re not the people who elected us to government.’
‘But-’ said Andrew.
‘The people who elected the Saunders government to power,’ Pitman went on, ‘want this State to come back to life. They lived in the Gulag created by the previous government quite long enough. It’s projects like this they want to see come to pass. Projects like this that inject huge amounts of capital and energy into this State.’
Andrew made a few other feeble attempts to put Pitman on the defensive. Pitman ignored them and kept to his line about what the people wanted.
Finally, Andrew gave up and said, ‘Within twelve months, this,’ he pointed at the gravel pit, ‘will be Yarra Cove, a huge six hundred million dollar marina, waterfront shopping and entertainment precinct and, arguably, Melbourne’s smartest new address. But will the Saunders government’s lack of concern for public consultation over projects that change the face of the city set a precedent for future developments? Andrew Leonard for “This Day”.’
After that I had a choice between television entertainment on the themes of a) child abuse, b) parent abuse, and c) tree abuse. Failing these, there was a documentary on the drinking problem in Lapland. I failed all of these, killed the telly and fell asleep over chapter three of Eugene Marasco’s In the Absence of War.
Some time in the small hours, startled by something in a dream, I awoke and staggered to the bed proper. But sleep had fled. I lay and thought about Danny, one-time police informer, addict, convicted hit-and-run killer, born-again model employee, husband and father. If his cousin’s mate, dead of smack, had told the truth, a policeman could have given him an alibi. And therefore the star witness was lying. The witness’s name was Ronald Bishop.
I put on the light, got the file from the lounge, and read Ronald Bishop’s statement again. It was a model of its kind: Ronnie Bishop didn’t have any doubts about what he saw. I put off the light and fell asleep with the strange career of Danny McKillop turning in my mind.
In the morning, I rang Barry Tregear at home to catch him before he left for work. A woman said he’d left but she would pass on a message. I gave her my name. About ten minutes later, he rang. From the noise, he was on a mobile phone.
‘Ronald Bishop?’ he said. ‘Morton Street, Clifton Hill. I’ll see what I can do.’
I had breakfast at Meaker’s on Brunswick Street, a street which boasted trams and, at each end, a church spire. Sometimes, when a freak wind lifted the pollution, you could see the one from the other. Brunswick Street had been a grand thoroughfare once and a long passage between rundown buildings and hopeless shops for a long time after that. In the eighties, the street changed again. Youth culture happened to it. The old businesses-clothes-pressing sweatshops, drycleaners, printeries, cheap shoe shops, the gunsmith, dim central European coffee and snooker cafes-closed down. In their place, restaurants, coffee shops, delicatessens, galleries and bookshops opened. Suddenly it was a smart place to be.
Meaker’s had been in Brunswick Street since before it was smart. It had changed hands several times and moved once but nothing had really changed. Well, nothing except the appearance of the customers. And the staff. There was a new waitress today. She was probably in her late twenties, tall and raw-boned with scraped back hair and an amused, intelligent look.
‘I’m Sharon,’ she said when she put down the tray holding the Cholesterol Supercharge: eggs, bacon, sausages, fried tomato. ‘The cook says you’re Jack.’
‘So what do you do?’ I asked her when she brought the coffee. It was assumed in Brunswick Street that waiting on table was not one’s vocation.
‘I’m an actor,’ she said. ‘In the theatre. Don’t you recognise me?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but I don’t get to the theatre much these days.’
‘What about you?’ she said, wiping the table.
‘I’m a bishop.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Is that a crook you’ve got in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?’
I could see she was going to be an asset to the place. Not as religious as one would have liked, but an asset.
I didn’t have anything in the legal line to do, so I put in five hours at Taub’s. Charlie was making the boardroom furniture for a Perth mining company’s new Melbourne office. It was what the business pages call an ‘emerging miner’. Usually, your emerging miner wants a table shaped like Australia minus Tasmania, chairs like breaking waves. This outfit hired a decorator who convinced them that big business in Melbourne favoured a more traditional look. A Charlie Taub look, in fact. The decorator was married to Charlie’s grandson: the extended family has its uses.
I spent the early part of the day trying to get Charlie to tell me what I was doing. He’d got out of the habit of doing drawings. ‘What for do I need drawings?’ he said. ‘I don’t make anything I haven’t made before.’
‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘I haven’t made this table before. All I’ve got is some measurements on this piece of paper torn off the side of the Age. I’d like to have some idea of how what I’m doing fits into the plan you’ve got in your head. That’s a lot to ask?’
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.’