Bad Debts by Peter Temple Read Free Book Online

cops?’
    ‘Didn’t hear about it till after Danny was inside.’
    ‘Why didn’t your mate tell the cops at the time?’
    Vin blew two flat streams of smoke out of his nostrils. ‘Cause he was hoping Danny’d get about fifty years. Danny was a dog. There’s lots of people hoped they’d throw the fucking key away.’
    ‘Dog for who?’
    ‘Drug squad. He’d dob anyone, every little twat he heard big-noting himself in a pub.
    Jacks’d pay him off with a couple’ve hits.’
    ‘He was on smack?’
    ‘On anything.’
    Two men in donkey jackets and woollen caps came in from the street. Vin looked them over carefully while draining his glass.
    I signalled for two more beers.
    ‘One of his Jack mates was talking to him near the pub that night,’ Vin said.
    ‘How do you know that?’
    ‘Same way. My mate. Saw Danny with this cunt Scullin in a car down the road. Danny come in, full of dough, drinking Jim Beam, in and out of the pisshouse, gets off his face.
    They kicked him out round eleven. Then my mate sees him lying behind a bench, he’s drunk another half of JB.’
    ‘That was a quarter past eleven?
    32

    ‘Thereabouts.’
    ‘You reckon your mate would talk to me? For a fee?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Why’s that?’
    ‘Dead. OD’d on smack.’
    ‘The cop’s name’s Scullin?’
    ‘I forget.’
    ‘Where did Danny keep his car?’
    ‘Garage behind his nanna’s house.’
    ‘That’s in Collett Street?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Fair way from Clifton Hill.’
    ‘Fucking A.’ He finished his beer. ‘Got to go.’
    I said, ‘Thanks for your help.’
    ‘You got nothing from me, mate. Is that right?’
    ‘It’s right.’
    Vin McKillop looked back at me before he went out the door. There was still nothing showing in those boxer’s eyes but he wasn’t going to forget my face.
    7
    We went to Ballarat in the big BMW, Harry driving through Royal Park and on to the Tullamarine Freeway like the late James Hunt on cocaine. The day was fine, thin cloud running west. In ten minutes we were passing through Keilor, the beginning of a huge sprawl of brick veneers nominally divided into suburbs with names like Manna Gum Heights and Bellevue Hill. These were the places where teenage dreams came to die.
    ‘Heights,’ said Harry in wonder. ‘Flat as the paper under the lino.’
    33

    I was in the back, reading the Age. Cam was in front, fiddling with the laptop.
    ‘Wootton tells me you put the squirrel grip on one of his commissioners, Jack,’ Harry said.
    ‘Not without difficulty,’ I said. Harry knew Wootton well. He used him for big jobs.
    ‘More buggers doin a runner these days, seems to me. Probably time for another Happy Henry.’ Harry turned to look at me while accelerating passed a tradesman’s ute with two cattle dogs on the back, barking into the wind. I paled.
    ‘You know about Happy Henry, Jack?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Hidden history of the turf,’ Harry said. ‘Commissioner called Happy Henry Carmody.
    Happy shot through on a big punter, Baby Martinez, came from Manila, Hawaii, somewhere like that, got into a few duels with the books. Silly bugger, really. Happy did a bit of work for him, came highly recommended too. Then one Satdee Happy had a kitbag of notes owed to Baby, thought bugger it, Baby’s just some dago’ll cop it sweet, go home and weep under the palm trees.’
    Harry looked around again.
    ‘Baby’s friends come on Happy up in Brisbane. The dickhead, it took so long to get there in his Falcon, he thinks he must be in a foreign country. He’s tossin Baby’s dough around, whores, cards, buyin drinks for the cops and politicians and the like.’
    There was a pause while Harry groped for the Smarties box. In the interests of self-preservation, Cam found it for him.
    ‘Anyway, next thing Happy’s up in the little hills they got there, nailed to a blue gum.
    Five feet off the ground, they say. Six-inch nails. Like Jesus Christ.’
    ‘Fuck,’ said Cam.
    ‘Not again either,’ Harry said. ‘Cut