‘At the top,’ I said.
‘Goodonya.’
In Parkville, joined by Lyn Strang in a black 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.