Bad Debts Page 5

  The second looked a mediocre affair on paper and it proved to be one of those races where it’s a pity something has to win. Or come second. Or third.

  ‘Not much pace in that,’ said the caller.

  ‘Putting it bloody mildly,’ said the man next to me. ‘First time I’ve seen the whole field trying to throw a race.’

  I went back through the betting ring to the mounting yard.

  Cam was near the hot dog vendor, eating something wrapped in paper. As I looked around, Harry rounded the corner of the stalls. The small man stopped and patted his raincoat pockets, looking down.

  When he looked up, he nodded briskly to himself, as if he’d found what he was looking for. Then he set off in the direction of the carpark.

  Cam crumpled up the greaseproof paper and shot the ball into a bin a good three metres away. He set off for the betting ring. As he entered the large opening, he patted a thickset man in a greasy anorak on the arm.

  I didn’t waste any time checking the odds. Topspin Winder was showing 40-1 with the book nearest the entrance and I took it. I invested a modest $50, not enough to scare anybody. By the time I’d finished my circuit, Cam’s team of punters had struck terror into the numbers men: Topspin was down to 15-1.

  Then the second wave hit the bookies—a panic rush of Topspin’s connections, caught napping by Cam’s troops and now jostling with the dumb money that was always on the alert for a plunge. The market went into freefall, ending up on 6-1.

  On my way to have a look at the beast concerned, I passed Cam, leaning against the mounting yard fence. He was smoking a little cigar and reading the card. Nothing in that Aboriginal/Scottish/Italian face suggested anything other than mild boredom.

  Topspin was equally impassive. I’d seen her at her previous three appearances and had grown rather fond of her. She was small, calm, unprepossessing. Her form to date had not prepossessed the racing press either; in the Age that morning, Ron Pevsner assessed her odds at 50-1 and Bart Grantley gave her a rating of two out of ten.

  Topspin Winder had come to Harry’s attention in her first outing, over 1600 metres in pouring rain at Moe. The small horse missed the start completely, then appeared to stumble about ten metres out. By the time the jockey got things organised, the closest horse was twelve lengths away, vanishing into the mist. Cam was out on the fence and for some reason he put the watch on Topspin at the 200-metre mark. About 500 metres out, there was a bad fall, two horses going down in the mud. Topspin was too far back to be affected and ran seventh out of the remaining thirteen, about eight lengths behind the winner. What interested Harry was Cam’s estimate that she took under 60 seconds to cover the 1000 metres to the 1200 mark. And that in the excitement over the fall, no-one said anything about it.

  We hadn’t seen that speed again. In her next three races, all 1600s, Topspin was ridden by another jockey, a leather-faced veteran of the inland circuit called Marty Bacquie. The horse seemed to be trying but she kept getting caught in the middle of the herd, boxed in half a dozen lengths off the pace, and flagging badly over the last two hundred or so. At her last appearance, at Pakenham, I filmed Bacquie talking to the trainer after the race and Harry brought in his trusted lip-reader to look at the video. The trainer was saying nice things to Marty. And that was why we were in Ballarat.

  There were twelve horses in race three, 1200 metres. The best performed, Quigley’s Pride, had one win and nine places from nineteen starts. Second best was Extension Date with one win from five. After that it was winter. There were no more than a hundred people on the grandstand. I took my usual place out on the eastern edge. Harry was down in the front row, undistinguished in his elderly raincoat and hat. No sign of Cam.

  They came out of the gate in a good line. Topspin had a new jockey today, Lance Wallace, a New Zealander in his second season in the big time, rider of several upsets in the past year.

  A horse called Denaderise took the front and opened up a two-length lead. I knew Denaderise. This was her role in life. She had about 500 metres in her.

  At the 600, Quigley’s Pride, specialist placegetter, was a length off Denaderise. There was no pace in it. Topspin was lying well back, perhaps eighth or ninth, nothing outside her.

  At the 700, Wallace moved the horse further out, almost to the centre of the track. Denaderise was gone, slipping backwards. Extension Date took over the lead, on the rails, moving well. Quigley’s tucked in behind, losing a little ground as they approached the 800. Outside them a horse called Under the Gun, a 15-1 shot, came into contention.

  With 200 metres to go, Under the Gun’s jockey used the whip and the animal surged past Extension Date, seeming to draw Quigley’s Pride along. At the 150, Under the Gun was the winner, stride lengthening, towing Quigley’s Pride away from Extension Date.

  The race caller was saying, ‘It’s Under the Gun now coming away, Quigley’s Pride hasn’t got the finish to stay with him, Extension Date being left…’

  Something had gone badly wrong in our calculations. And, presumably, in the connections’ calculations, too.

  And then, very smoothly, no whip, hands and heels, Lance Wallace and Topspin Winder began their run down the outside. The little horse gave no great impression of speed; the other horses seemed to slow down.

  The caller went into overdrive, ‘Down the outside Topspin Winder, she’s mowed down Extension Date, fifty metres to go she goes up to Quigley’s Pride, no resistance there for the plunge horse. It’s Under the Gun and Topspin Winder, Under the Gun Topspin Winder, metres to go it’s Topspin Winder pulling away, Topspin Winder by three-quarters of a length…’

  I looked across at Harry. He was having a little swig of Glenmorangie from the flat silver flask he took to the races on cold days.

  I filmed the fourth race, a Class 1 handicap over 1600 metres. This was the second reason we were in Ballarat. My attention was on Red Line Value, a new object of Harry’s attention. It went well early, weakened and finished in the middle of the field, making a little ground in the closing stages.

  Cam and Harry were in the BMW when I got there. Harry gave me a small smile. ‘I think we might have a look at the Dom when we get home,’ he said.

  We parked a block away from the Peter Lalor Hotel in the middle of Ballarat. Cam went off. He had a date with the commission agent who had organised the team of punters.

  ‘Collectin’ can be the hardest part,’ Harry said. ‘Still, the boy’s got a look about him keeps the buggers honest. They know a bare-knuckle man when they see one. What’d ya make of that Red Line?’

  Cam was back inside fifteen minutes. On Harry’s orders, we stopped at McDonald’s on the way out. Harry ordered two Big Macs.

  ‘Take over the helm,’ he said to Cam. ‘Got to get outside these snacks. Man gets weak up here in the glaciers.’

  The second hamburger didn’t make it to the city limits. ‘Now that’s what I call food,’ Harry said. ‘Not a word to the wife. She reckons you eat the stuff, you end up needin one of them coronary overpasses or whatever.’

  He found a Willie Nelson tape and pushed it into the system. ‘Give us the sums, Cam,’ he said, tilting his seat back. ‘Moonlight in Vermont’ flooded the car.

  ‘Well,’ Cam said, ‘we unloaded it, but it’s no great average. Round 10-1. Some of these books see a go coming if you put down fifty bucks. It’s getting hard to find someone in the bush’ll take a decent-size whack.’

  ‘Tens are fine,’ Harry said. ‘Thing didn’t require millions. You don’t want to nuke the bastards. We want ’em there next time.’

  I had no idea how much money they were talking about. I’d been part of five betting plunges with Harry and Cam and I had no idea of the sums involved. I was happy that way too.

  Harry’s head peeped around the side of his seat. ‘Get that fifty on at something decent, Jack?’ He set the figure for personal bets.

  ‘At the top,’ I said.

  ‘Goodonya.’

  In Parkville, joined by Lyn Strang in a b
lack dress, not small but rippable, we drank two bottles of Dom Perignon. Harry excused himself for a while early on and when he came back said, ‘Fair bit of satisfaction in the combinations.’ This meant he had done well in the coupling of Topspin Winder with other horses in other races.

  Cam and I left at 7.45 p.m. At the door, Harry shook hands with both of us and slid an envelope into my jacket pocket. I opened it at home: $6000 in fifties. I went downstairs in search of company. Dom Perignon excites the blood.

  8

  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.<
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  ‘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.