Bad Debts

by Peter Temple

  The headline on a clipping dated 23 November 1984 said: WITNESS SAW JEPPESON DEATH CAR.

  The story read:

  The car that knocked down and fatally injured public housing campaigner Anne Jeppeson was seen swerving almost out of control three blocks from the scene, a court was told yesterday. The driver, Daniel Patrick McKillop, had a blood alcohol reading of 0.1 more than two hours later, according to evidence.

  Mr McKillop, 24, of Zinsser Street, Richmond, pleaded guilty in the County Court to a charge of culpable driving on 18 June.

  Anne Elspeth Jeppeson, 27, of Ardenne Street, Richmond, was killed instantly when she was struck by a vehicle outside her home on 18 June.

  Mr Ronald Bishop said he was driving along Freeman Street, Richmond, at 11.40 p.m. on 18 June when a yellow car came weaving towards him.

  ‘It almost hit the parked cars on my side of the street then it swerved across in front of me over to the other side and almost crashed into the cars there. The driver had to brake to avoid hitting them. It was almost out of control.’

  Mr Bishop said he saw the driver’s face clearly. He noted part of the car’s registration number and telephoned the police when he got home.

  Senior Constable Ivor Wilkins said Mr McKillop was found asleep behind the wheel of a yellow Ford Falcon belonging to him in the garage of his home. Mr Bishop later identified Mr McKillop as the driver of the vehicle he saw in Freeman Street.

  Senior Constable Lauro Martines, of the traffic alcohol section, said Mr McKillop’s blood-alcohol content was 0.1 per cent more than two hours after the accident.

  Dr Alfred Hone, of the police forensic laboratories, said blood and fragments of cloth found on Mr McKillop’s vehicle matched those of Miss Jeppeson.

  Mr McKillop was remanded for sentencing until 4 December.

  I found the clipping on 5 December under the headline: JEPPESON DEATH: DRIVER GETS TEN YEARS.

  The story said that Daniel McKillop had a previous conviction for driving under the influence and had just emerged from his licence suspension at the time of the accident. He had been drinking in two hotels earlier that evening and had no recollection of the accident. The judge said some harsh things about drunken drivers, expressed regret at the loss of a ‘courageous young woman with her life ahead of her’ and complimented Mr Ronald Bishop on his public-spirited behaviour. McKillop got ten years in spite of his lawyer’s plea that he was as much a victim as Anne Jeppeson: ‘an unloved boy who has drifted into multiple addictions’.

  I looked for his previous convictions. They took up half a page, mostly juvenile stuff. He had two convictions for drunken driving and was on a two-year suspension at the time of the accident. Somehow he’d never been to jail. The judge made up for that: McKillop got a non-parole period of eight years.

  All of this was complete news to me. I looked at the date again: November 1984. It was at the beginning of the forgotten zone, the year or so I spent drunk and semi-drunk after my wife’s death.

  I looked through the other files for 1984 and early ’85. There were only five or six after McKillop. I didn’t remember any of them either.

  I went back to Drew’s office. He was reading something, beer on the desk.

  ‘When I went off the rails back then,’ I said, ‘after Isabel’s death…Did you try to keep me out of court?’

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘I think you could say that,’ he said. ‘If it’s worrying you, I hijacked all the defended matters between that day and the day you quit. I don’t think you did any damage. Except to yourself.’

  ‘And the firm,’ I said. I felt a rush of gratitude towards this gangling, unemotional man.

  He put his glasses back on and reached for the beer. ‘Nothing permanent,’ he said. ‘We had a fair bit of goodwill to live off.’

  ‘This McKillop who was looking for me. Remember him?’ I offered him the file.

  He took a minute to look it over. ‘No, not him. The woman was a bit of a name on the left. Used to drink at the Standard with the free housing push.’ He handed the file back. ‘Danny got what was coming to him, Jack. Probably just in the shit again.’

  At the front door, Drew said, ‘I think I might take up seriously with Lorna.’

  I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Mate, first look up “holiday” in the dictionary. It’s an experience you might want to try. Want to come to the football on Saturday?’

  He screwed up his face. ‘We haven’t been to the football for a bit, have we?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘A lot of the same names still around though. Only it’s the sons.’

  ‘Fuck off. We’ll go. Have a steak afterwards. At Vlado’s.’ He paused. ‘Or Vlado’s son’s.’

  Why did Danny McKillop want to see me so badly? I’d again put off ringing the number he’d left on the machine until I had him placed. The phone rang for a long time before a woman answered. I asked for Danny. There was a long silence. I could hear heavy traffic.

  ‘Danny’s not here.’ The phone went down. I dialled the number again. The woman picked it up straight away.

  I spoke quickly. ‘Danny rang me. Left this number. Can you give him a message?’

  Again, I listened to the traffic for a while before she spoke. ‘Danny’s dead,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in ringing here.’ Click.

  I went to the window and watched the women from the pressing sweatshop across the lane on their smoko. They leant against the wall, laughing a lot, taking deep drags on their cigarettes. Then I looked up McKillop in the phonebook. There was a D. P. McKillop in Windermere Street, Northcote. I put my hand out to dial several times and withdrew it. Danny McKillop comes out of a black hole in my past, looks for me everywhere, and a few days later is dead. I opened the file I’d brought from Drew’s. Danny would have been in his late thirties. Died of what?

  When I finally dialled the number, a child answered, a girl, four or five perhaps.

  ‘This is Kirsty McKillop speaking,’ she said in precise tones. ‘Mum’s hanging up the washing.’

  ‘Could I speak to her please, Kirsty,’ I said.

  ‘Hold on. I’ll call her.’

  I heard her shouting, ‘Mum, a man’s on the phone, a man’s on the phone…’

  When she came on, the woman was out of breath. ‘Hello, Sue McKillop.’

  I said, ‘Mrs McKillop, sorry to bother you. Is that the home of Daniel Patrick McKillop?’

  I could hear her breathing. ‘Danny died, was killed on Friday night.’ Her voice was flat, slightly hoarse.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘My name’s Jack Irish. I was his lawyer once. He was trying to get hold of me last week, but I was away…’

  ‘Yes, well, thank you for ringing, Mr Irish.’

  ‘Forgive me asking, but how…’

  She didn’t let me finish. ‘A policeman shot him. Murdered him.’ She was making a statement of fact.

  ‘Where did it happen?’ I asked the question without thinking, and as I did a chill came over me.

  ‘In a pub carpark. In Brunswick.’

  ‘What pub was—’

  ‘The Hero of Trafalgar.’

  5

  I never blamed myself for my wife’s death. Not then or now. A client of mine, Wayne Waylon Milovich, shot and killed Isabel in a parking garage in La Trobe Street. When he’d done that, he taped a letter addressed to me to her forehead and went back to his car, a 1974 Ford Falcon with one hundred and thirteen unpaid parking tickets against its number. He then detonated two or three sticks of gelignite on his lap. The letter went: ‘Mr Judas Lawyer Did You Now My Wife Run Away And Took My Kids While I Rotted In Jail Were You Sent Me Because You Wood Not Listen To What I Was Telling You As Your Clynt You Bastard.’

  Deranged clients. It’s a risk you run. Isabel knew that. She practised family law, where practically all the clients are deranged to some degree. I didn’t blame myself. I just raged against fate. I couldn’t get that through to people. They kept telling me to stop torturin
g myself. They wanted me to blame myself. I wasn’t walking around drunk, crying in pubs, getting into fights with strangers because I was blaming myself. I was in a state of incoherent rage. I had lost someone who had cast a glow into every corner of my life. I was entitled to my feelings. Loss. Hate. Hopelessness. Worthlessness. Only the return of Isabel would have been enough.

  Isabel and I were very different. Her childhood was the opposite of mine: she grew up in a fierce tribe of children, all lovingly neglected by their parents, a musician and a painter. She had emerged from the chaos clever, funny, diligent, dreamy, sensuous, and with an affection and concern for other people that descended indiscriminately like warm summer rain. She came into my habitual gloom and dispelled it, dissolved it, with one endless, helpless laugh.

  After her death, I lost control for months. I would have put Wayne together again fragment by fragment just to tear him apart with my hands and teeth. I could not be still. I could hardly bear to sit down. I could not listen to music, read, exchange more than a few words with anyone. I slept only when hopelessly drunk; I woke within minutes, slick with cold sweat. All food tasted like dry oats and I did not eat for days on end. After I walked out on Andrew Greer, I drifted for months, driving without aim, drinking all day in sour little country pubs, lapsing into unconsciousness in the car or in some paper-walled motel room. I got arrested eventually in a sodden town in Queensland called Everton. Someone went through my wallet and got word to Andrew Greer. He pulled strings with a relative, a Cabinet Minister in the Queensland government, to get me off a variety of charges without a conviction. My car had vanished. We flew home together. I’d been in the cells for six days, hadn’t had a drink, was over the worst. I stayed at home for weeks, going out only to buy food, and then I began slowly to resume some sort of normal life.

  Sitting in my office, elbows on the tailor’s table, thinking about Danny McKillop brought the darkness of those times back to me. I wasn’t over Isabel. I would never be over Isabel. She had made things complete, and they would never be complete again without her. I felt the pang of her absence every day, and at those moments I sometimes uttered an involuntary groan and shook my head like a dog.

  Danny McKillop had been shot dead outside the pub where he was hoping I would come to meet him. I couldn’t just leave the matter there. I knew I should leave it there, but I couldn’t. At the worst time in his life, Danny had needed a sober lawyer. He had got me. Years later, he had turned to me again. And I didn’t show up. I must have got home around 6.45 p.m. Would I have gone to the Hero of Trafalgar if I’d listened to the messages on the answering machine instead of going to bed? Probably. I’d have cursed a lot, but I’d have got there by 7 p.m. Sydney Road was only minutes away at that time on a Saturday night.

  The phone rang. It was Drew.

  ‘Seen the Herald?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Daniel McKillop’s on page three.’

  I got the paper at the corner shop. A small item on page three said:

  Police have identified the man shot dead by police in the carpark of the Hero of Trafalgar hotel in Brunswick on Saturday night as Daniel Patrick McKillop, 34, of Northcote.

  Assistant commissioner Martin Doyle said the fatal shots were fired after Mr McKillop pointed a pistol at policemen who saw him behaving suspiciously in the hotel carpark shortly after 7 p.m.

  ‘A full inquiry into the circumstances of Mr McKillop’s death is in progress, but we have no reason to believe that the officers acted improperly, Assistant Commissioner Doyle said. ‘They feared for their safety.’

  Mr McKillop was released from prison several years ago after serving eight years for killing a woman in a hit-and-run accident.

  There wasn’t anything to do except see Danny’s widow.

  Sue McKillop was on the plump side, with short dark hair and an open face made to smile. Her eyes were red. She was wearing a green tracksuit.

  ‘You mind coming in the kitchen?’ she said. ‘I’m in the middle of Kirsty’s tea.’

  We went down the passage into a large, warm room that had a kitchen on one side and lounge chairs and a television on the other. The girl was in pyjamas with small roses on them in front of the television, watching a game show.

  ‘Kirsty, this is Mr Irish. Say how do you do.’

  Kirsty said it.

  I sat at a pine kitchen table and watched Sue McKillop cut toast into squares and pile on scrambled eggs from a pan.

  She found a small fork in a drawer.

  ‘You can eat in front of the TV tonight, darling,’ she said, taking the plate over to the girl and kissing her quickly on the forehead.

  When she came back, she sat down opposite me. ‘My dad’s coming from Queensland tonight,’ she said. ‘He’s nearly eighty. I told him not to. We’ll be all right.’

  I said, ‘What about Danny’s family?’

  She smiled, a wan lip movement. ‘We’re it. He was brought up by his nanna. She died while he was inside. There’s just a cousin.’

  ‘Danny left a message for me to meet him at the Trafalgar on Saturday night,’ I said. ‘I didn’t get it until Sunday. Why did he want to see me?’

  She moistened her lips. ‘He was scared. They waited for him outside here on Thursday night, but he parked around the corner and when he was walking towards the house he saw them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. Men. It’s from the accident. Something, I don’t know.’

  ‘The accident Danny went to jail for?’

  ‘Yes. He didn’t do that.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  She shrugged. ‘Someone told him he was fitted up. Someone who knew.’

  ‘Do you know who the person was?’

  ‘No. It was a woman. Danny said something about her husband dying.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘About a month ago. He changed all of a sudden. Got upset easily. Why do you want to know?’

  I hesitated. ‘I may be able to do something.’

  She hugged herself. ‘You can’t do anything. You can’t bring Danny back.’

  ‘You said the police murdered him.’

  ‘Danny never had a gun. And if he’d had one, why would he threaten the police?’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t know they were police.’

  She ran a hand through her short hair. ‘The policeman who came here said the men identified themselves to Danny as police.’

  ‘Danny been okay since he came out?’

  She looked me in the eyes. ‘Danny wasn’t a crim. He finished school in jail. He worked with a friend of mine at Marston’s. That’s how I met him. It’s a car part company in Essendon.’

  ‘He used to be on smack.’

  She shook her head. ‘In another life. He wouldn’t even drink more than two stubbies.’

  I believed her. One thing practising law gives you is a feeling for some kinds of truth.

  ‘When he saw the people waiting for him outside,’ I said, ‘what did he do?’

  ‘He went to a callbox and rang Col Mullens next door and Col came over and called me to the phone.’

  ‘Why didn’t he ring here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said he couldn’t come home because the house was being watched and he’d stay somewhere else for the night and sort it out on Friday. He was scared. I could hear it.’

  ‘Why didn’t he go to the police?’

  She shook her head and took a tissue out of her sleeve. ‘Danny reckoned the cops were in on it.’ She blew her nose. ‘Had to be the cops fixed him up for the accident, didn’t it? Did you know they gave him pills and stuff to take every day before the trial? Danny said he didn’t hardly know where he was.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that. So the men outside could have been cops?’

  ‘Suppose so.’

  ‘He didn’t say they were cops?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you told all this to the c
ops?’

  ‘Yes. Friday night when they come around here.’

  The girl came over with her plate. ‘Cream, please,’ she said, eyes fixed on me. Sue got up, took a tub of ice cream out of the fridge, put two scoops in a bowl and handed it to her daughter.

  ‘Would you like some?’ the girl said, showing me the bowl.

  ‘No thanks, Kirsty,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had my tea yet.’

  She nodded and went back to the television.

  Sue said, ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t offered you anything…’

  I shook my head. ‘That’s fine. What did Danny do after this woman phoned him about being fixed up for the hit and run?’

  ‘He said he was going to get the case opened again. The person who told him said there was evidence.’

  ‘And did he find any?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t know. He wasn’t a big talker, Danny. He’d sort of plan things in his head for weeks, just sit thinking, and then one day he’d just start doing something and he wouldn’t stop until it was finished.’ She looked around in pride and wonder. ‘Like this room. Danny built the whole thing in two weeks in his holidays. I didn’t even know he could knock a nail in.’

  ‘Great piece of work,’ I said. ‘Does this phone number mean anything to you?’ I read out the number Danny had left on the answering machine.

  ‘No. I don’t know that number.’

  I had other questions but suddenly I wanted to be out of the snug room that Danny McKillop had built for his little family and out in the cold, streaming evening. I gave Sue my card and left. The child came to the front door and waved at me.

  6

  ‘I should’ve taken the fucken package, Jack,’ Senior Sergeant Barry Tregear said.

  We were sitting in my car in the carpark of the Kensington McDonald’s, eating Big Macs. Barry Tregear also had two large French fries and a large Coke. He was a big man with a pear-shaped head, its summit and three upper slopes thinly covered in greying blond stubble. He always looked two slabs of beer away from fat, even when I’d first met him in Vietnam, but nothing moved when he walked.