I said I’d come back and went looking for a caffeine jolt.
I came upon the drinks machine without warning, which made it impossible to avoid my former client Gavin Legge. He looked up from stirring his styrofoam cup. The smile of a professional greeter appeared on his face.
‘Jack Irish,’ he said. He put down the cup and stuck out a small hand. ‘Great to see you. Who’s in the shit this time?’
Legge was in his early forties, with greying curly hair and small features being overwhelmed by pudge. Behind thick-lensed designer glasses his eyes were slitty. All his stories in the paper seemed to involve free travel and free eating and drinking. He also dropped a lot of names. At the time I was defending him, one of his mercifully unneeded character witnesses said of him, ‘For a free sausage roll and a couple of glasses of plonk, Gavin Legge will get six mentions of anything you’re selling into the paper.’
‘Using the library,’ I said. ‘Maybe you can help.’
‘My pleasure.’ He was eager to please. As well he might be, given that it had taken me a year to get any money out of him.
I put the coins in the machine and pressed for white coffee. I got out my notebook and found the three bylines on the Jeppeson stories. ‘These people still around? Sally Chan? Matthew Lunt?’
‘Jeez, you’re going back a bit. Chan went to Sydney about ten years ago and Lunt’s dead.’
‘Linda Hillier?’
‘Return of the starfucker. Came back to Melbourne a few months ago. She works for PRN, Pacific Rim News, it’s a financial news outfit. Just around the corner. Want to meet her?’
‘Wouldn’t mind. I saw your byline on a story about Yarra Cove.’
Legge whistled. ‘Now those boys know how to treat the media,’ he said. ‘Nothing but the French at the launch. Non-vintage but the French. Like the good old days. It’s been local pissfizz at these things for years.’
‘Only the fittest have come through,’ I said. The machine started spitting out my drink.
Legge took a sip of his coffee and pulled a face. ‘This stuff tastes like piss too. Bloody machines. Christ knows why we put up with it. Fucking useless union. Follow me.’
We left the building and walked up two blocks towards the city centre. Pacific Rim News had the fourth floor of a small office block. A security man gave us labels and we went into a huge room full of formica desks and computer terminals.
Legge said, ‘I still owe you that lunch. What about tomorrow? It’s on the paper. I’m reviewing a new restaurant. They fall over themselves.’
‘Don’t you do these things incognito?’
‘Certainly do. But I gave them an anonymous tip-off.’ He laughed, an unpleasant gurgling sound.
‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I’m out of town tomorrow. Some other time would be nice.’
Linda Hillier was in a corner of the room where several desks seemed to have formed a huddle. She had been alerted and watched us coming, a pencil crosswise in her mouth between toothpaste-commercial teeth. When we got to her, Legge said, ‘Linda Hillier, I want you to meet Jack Irish, the lawyer who kept me out of jail for punching that food bitch.’
Linda Hillier removed the pencil from her mouth. She was in her mid-thirties, shiny brown hair, a full mouth, dark eyes and a scattering of faded freckles. She wasn’t good-looking but she was handsome.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Next time tell us what you’ll take to throw the case.’
‘Jack’s interested in something you covered when you were a young groupie,’ Legge said.
‘That far back?’ Linda said. ‘When you were still married to that nice plump girl from Accounts? The one who was sweet enough to blow all the Age copyboys at the Christmas party?’
‘Touché,’ said Legge. ‘I can’t stand around all day talking about old times. Jack, I’ll ring you about lunch.’
We watched Legge walk off. I noticed that all the men in the room were frozen into poses suggesting deep concentration while all the women seemed to be typing. Could it be that the men were transmitting thoughts to the women, who were typing them up? I suggested this to Linda Hillier. She looked at me speculatively.
‘Thoughts?’ she said. ‘Most of these guys couldn’t transmit herpes. What’s your interest in history?’
‘I’m interested in the Anne Jeppeson hit-and-run,’ I said. ‘Remember her?’
She nodded.
‘I saw your byline on some stories in her file.’
She said, ‘Is this a legal matter?’
‘No. I don’t practise much anymore.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Live off my wits,’ I said. ‘Gamble. Drink.’
She smiled, an attractive downturning. ‘Then you’ll be keeping much the same company as before. Well, what can I tell you about Anne Jeppeson?’
‘Did it cross anyone’s mind at the time that she might have been deliberately run down?’
‘By that drunk? Was he capable of forming an intention?’
‘What I mean is, did anyone think he might have been used to kill Anne Jeppeson?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard anyone suggest that.’ She paused and looked at me intently. ‘Hang on a minute. It’s just come back to me. Didn’t you appear for the driver?’
I nodded. ‘Not with any distinction. He came out of jail a few years ago. New person, good job, wife and kid. Then a cop shot him dead in Brunswick last Friday.’
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I read that the bloke’d done time for hit-and-run. I didn’t make the connection.’
The phone on her desk rang. She talked to someone in monosyllables for a while, then put the phone down. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m under the gun here for a while. I’ve got to file a story for Hong Kong in about eight minutes.’
I took a chance. ‘Can we talk outside hours?’
She gave me a questioning look. ‘You mean tonight?’
I hadn’t had a date in two years. ‘If you’re free,’ I said.
There was a pause. We looked at each other in a new way.
She said, ‘Ring me here at seven. We can fix something.’
It was raining outside. I didn’t mind much.
10
Linda Hillier said she’d be finished by eight. We agreed to meet at Donelli’s in Smith Street, Collingwood. It was owned by Patrick Donelly, an Irishman who wanted to be an Italian and who owed me money.
Linda was wearing a tailored navy jacket. I watched her hanging up her raincoat. She was taller than I remembered. Then I remembered I’d never seen her standing up. She felt my eyes on her and turned her head to look straight at me across the crowded room. For some reason, I felt embarrassed, as if I’d been caught looking down her dress. She came across and I stood up and pulled out a chair.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘This is a nice way to end a real pain of a day.’
I poured her some of the house white, the menus came and we inspected them for a while. When we’d ordered the same things, she said, ‘Gavin Legge rang up and told me about your wife. I’m sorry.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘what else can I tell you about Anne Jeppeson? I’ve been thinking about her since you left. I talked to her the morning before she was killed. She was like a happy attack dog. “I’m going to get the bastards,” she kept saying.’
‘You weren’t one of her admirers?’
She thought for a moment. ‘There were things about her I admired. But, no, I wasn’t one of her admirers. She had this deep contempt for the media and this equally deep need to be the subject of its attention.’
‘You had dealings with her before the Hoagland business?’
‘Long before. She cultivated me when she was trying to market herself as a barefoot paralegal in Footscray. It wasn’t enough for justice to be done. Anne Jeppeson had to be seen to be doing it.’ Linda drank half her glass. ‘Hoagland was her chance for real fame.’