"Bad Debts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Temple Peter)

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 torturing 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 cops?’

‘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.