Bad Debts Part 7

It's nice that there's a special occupation for the a.n.a.l retentive. It's called librarianship. The thin man with the silly little cornsilk moustache gave me a smile of pure dislike and went away. I was sitting at a table in the Age library on the fourth floor of the paper's hideous building on Spencer Street. A message from Steve Phillips, the a.s.sistant editor, had preceded me but that had only made me more unwelcome. I went back some distance with Phillips. In the early '80s I'd got his teenage son off a drugs charge. I'd been recommended by a reporter called Gavin Legge for whom I'd obtained extremely lucky verdicts on a bunch of charges arising from his birthday party at a fashionable restaurant called Melitta's.

Mr Silly Moustache took all of ten minutes to produce the file. I slid the fiche onto the platen, switched on and, as always, found that it was upside down. When I'd corrected this, I zoomed across to the end and worked backwards.

The last clipping was a short item from 1986 about the setting up by her parents of the Anne Jeppeson Memorial Scholarship at Monash University. It was to go to a student studying politics. Before that came the court reports I'd already seen in my file on Danny, then the report on Anne's death. It was a page three story, with a picture of the scene and an inset photograph of her. She had short hair and a snub nose and she looked smart and formidable. A quick look at the headlines on the rest of the clippings suggested that this was the case. I wrote down the bylines on those stories that had them.

Anne Jeppeson had been a campaigner for public housing and public housing tenants. At the time she was killed she was involved in trying to prevent the closing down of a public housing estate called Hoagland in Yarrabank.

I leaned back in the upright chair and closed my eyes. Ronnie Bishop had helped send to jail the man accused of killing a woman campaigning against the closing of a public housing estate. Why would he lie to do that? Public-spiritedness? It didn't sound like Ronnie Bishop.

I asked SM whether I could get the Jeppeson file photocopied. He looked at me as if I'd asked for a colonic irrigation.

'Would it help if I went through Steve Phillips?' I said sweetly.

'It'll take half an hour,' he said. 'There isn't anyone to do it now.'

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 s.h.i.t this time?'

Legge was in his early forties, with greying curly hair and small features being overwhelmed by pudge. Behind thick-lensed designer gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.ses 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 starf.u.c.ker. 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 p.i.s.sfizz 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 p.i.s.s too. b.l.o.o.d.y machines. Christ knows why we put up with it. f.u.c.king 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 b.i.t.c.h.'

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.

'h.e.l.lo,' 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?'

'Touche,' 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 embarra.s.sed, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," 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 gla.s.s. 'Hoagland was her chance for real fame.'

I said, 'My memory's pretty vague about that period. I read the clippings today. It's not clear how she got into the limelight.'

'She was a natural for the part from the moment it leaked out that the government was going to knock down the Hoagland Housing Commission flats. Do you know Yarrabank?'

'Vaguely. I had a client from there once. Stabbed someone in a park. His best friend, I think it was.'

'That's what Yarrabank friends are for,' said Linda. 'It's s.h.i.tsville. Maybe it's going to be Venice when the Premier's mates are finished with it, but it was darkest s.h.i.tsville then.'

I suddenly connected. Yarra Cove-the new development I'd seen the sly-faced Planning Minister, Lance Pitman, and the spotty ABC reporter going on about on TV-was on the site of the old Hoagland housing estate. There was a freeway on one side and once there'd been collapsing warehouses on the riverbank, filthy docks all around. There was a munitions factory there in the forties, a battery factory burnt down there in the early sixties. Christ knows what the soil pollution level was.

'How did a Housing Commission block ever get there?' I asked.

'One of the great mysteries of our time. They've shredded the files and composted the bits. People say the land was bought from a mate of the then Housing Minister for about ten times its value and the buildings were put up by another mate for about five times the going rate. The story goes the three of them bought half of Merimbula with the proceeds.'

'How did they get anybody to live there?'

'No choice for some people,' she said. 'That or under a bridge. And the Commission shunted in their problem cases from all over. Move to Hoagland and we'll forget about the three years' rent owing and the fire and the explosion and the missing hot water system. That sort of thing. It was a h.e.l.lhole. The cops called it the Leper Colony, LC for short.'

'Small, though?'

'Couple of hundred inmates. Small by Housing Commission standards, fifty flats, three three-storey walk-ups. When it leaked out that the government planned to close it, the Ministry said the place was so wrecked it was cheaper to build new flats than to fix it. But Yarrabank was not the place to build them. The place to build them was on land the Commission had bought on the outskirts of Sunshine.'

'Not from the same mate?' I said.

'One day we'll know.'

'What did the residents think?'

'Well, you'd have thought that even Sunshine would look like Surfers Paradise from Hoagland. But we don't actually know what the residents thought because Anne Jeppeson came on the scene like Batwoman and after that all we knew was what the Fight for Hoagland action committee thought. Well, what Anne Jeppeson said the committee thought. All the media attention was on her. It was the Anne Jeppeson Show.'

'What was her background?'

'Strictly middle cla.s.s. Deep suburbia. Volvo in every drive. Private school. Did politics at Monash. Worked for the Footscray Legal Service for a while. Tried to organise pieceworkers in the rag trade, then she got together a bunch of leftier-than-thou people and founded Right to a Roof. She organised a lot of squats in empty mansions in Toorak, that sort of thing. Great TV pictures.'

Linda finished her drink. I poured some more. 'Anyway, when Hoagland turned up, she st.i.tched together a big coalition of left groups. Christ knows how. They were people who hated one another. She got about five thousand people out for a demonstration, got the Building Workers' Alliance to black-ban the Sunshine site, talked the public service unions into running stop-works. She was all over the papers, TV. The camera liked her. Joan of Arc come back in tight jeans and boots.'

'And then she got killed.'

Linda nodded. 'Without her, the whole Hoagland protest fell apart. Fight for Hoagland didn't actually exist without her. No-one really gave a s.h.i.t about Hoagland, least of all the tenants. They came out and said: "Please G.o.d, can we move somewhere else?" Suddenly the Housing Commission discovered it had empty flats all over the place. Hoagland got flattened inside a month.'

I said, 'So it wouldn't be likely that she was killed to stop her obstructing Hoagland's closure?'

Her eyes flicked around the room and came back to me. A little smile. 'Bit of an extreme step for the Housing Com-mission to take, don't you think?'

I told her how the witness against Danny had abandoned his old Renault and taken off in a sports car for a new life in Perth after the trial.

She listened with her chin on her hand. 'What does that suggest to you?'

'I don't know. I'm told Danny was unconscious near a pub miles from his car about half an hour before the car hit Anne Jeppeson. I'm groping around.'

'Why would anyone pay Ronnie Bishop to tell the lies that sent McKillop to jail?'

'Well, maybe it was the only way they could get the verdict,' I said.

'Are we talking about the cops?'

I poured some more wine. You don't get much waiter-pouring at Donelli's. 'It's possible. A drug squad cop called Scullin knew both Danny McKillop and Ronnie Bishop.'