Chopper Unchopped (120 page)

The Press was screaming. It made front page every time he was taken in and let go.

Keith Kerr wasn’t impressed. He was Skinny’s uncle and he was sitting in the lounge room of his home in Lithgow Street, Abbotsford, talking to Peter Thorpe and Kevin Toy.

‘My bloody nephew gets his heart and lungs kicked out his arsehole, my sister-in-law is nearly turned into a vegetable and Blueberry Hill and his mates are laughing,’ he spat. ‘It’s even up time.’

Peter Thorpe nodded. Kevin Toy sat quietly. He looked thoughtful.

‘He’s got a birthday party coming up in about a week. The fourth of November. He’ll be 17,’ he said.

Keith Kerr shook his head. ‘Seventeen years old. Holy Hell, he’s a freak. Best street fighter in Richmond at 17 years old – it’s bloody hard to credit.’

‘Yeah,’ said Peter Thorpe. ‘Once in 20 years one comes along, rare as hen’s teeth. Goodfellow was the same, he could flog half of Melbourne by the time he was 16 years old. Harris Morrison, Kingdom West, Kane. They were all freaks.’

‘Ya right,’ said Keith. ‘And they’re all dead.’

‘Yeah, well,’ said old Keith Kerr. ‘We may have to give Billy Blueberry a bit of a helping hand, fate wise.’

‘HAPPINESS for me,’ said Blueberry Hill to Bobby Mick, ‘would be to own a thousand-room hotel and to find Chief Inspector Graeme Westlock dead in every room. Ha ha. The bugger’s been picking on me ever since Stavros. It’s not fair.’

‘Yeah,’ said Bobby Mick. He wasn’t big on conversation. Especially since his face had been cut up with Skinny Kerr’s beer bottle. The scars didn’t do a lot for Bobby’s good looks, nor his good nature, not that he had started out with much of either.

The two tough teenagers were standing in the piano bar of the Chevron Night Club on St Kilda Road. It was 4.30 on a Sunday morning. They were about to finish up and go and meet Leigh Kinniburgh at the Cadillac Bar in Carlton when the shooting started.

Blueberry Hill didn’t notice Bobby Mick fall dead to the floor. All he felt was a heavy punch and a red hot pain in his neck. He turned, and like some insane wild machine started swinging sledge hammer punches into the head of the man carrying the gun. Peter Thorpe fired one more wild shot into the darkness as he fell to the floor, dying.

Then Billy started to kick the bouncers at the club as they stepped in and tried to restrain him. He was pissing blood from a .38 bullet wound to the neck, but they found themselves facing an onslaught of punches that rendered two bouncers unconscious and two others running for their lives.

The self-defence laws are pretty clear. A man who kills another man with his fists after being shot in the neck is pretty hard to prosecute successfully. But Chief Graeme Westlock was most happy to formally charge Blueberry Hill with the murder of Peter Thorpe as Hill lay in bed at the Alfred Hospital, conveniently located behind the Chevron Night Club.

A week later, before Billy checked out of hospital, the Director of Public Prosecutions dropped the case against him. A gunman murders an unarmed youth, then tries to kill a second, but gets punched to death, and the police charge the man who was defending his life after being shot in the neck. It seemed to some in Richmond that the police and newspaper vendetta against Blueberry Hill had taken on comic proportions.

Mr Mario Bonanno QC, Director of Public Prosecutions, personally went to visit Billy Hill in hospital to tell him that the murder charge was no more. The Press went crazy.

‘Blueberry Hill Beats It’ … ‘Murder Charges Dropped’ … ‘Teenage Tough Guy Gets Off Again.’

When Billy Hill walked out of hospital he was 17 years old. It was the 17th of November. He had missed his birthday party, but Leigh Kinniburgh and the Richmond boys had arranged a big piss up at the French Knickers Hotel at the corner of Church Street and Victoria Street, Richmond. The joint was Billy’s favourite hangout.

You don’t have to be told. The Press found out about it and took a hidden camera into the hotel to film Blueberry drinking with well-known Richmond criminals, professional boxers, football players, gangsters and gunnies, strippers and prostitutes.

The next day the morning paper carried photos and a headline that ran ‘Birthday Thrill For Blueberry Hill’. That was all right, but the story underneath it went on to condemn local authorities for allowing Billy Hill to indulge in underage drinking. Such criticism was not considered fair play in Richmond social circles, but what could a poor boy do but cop it sweet.

‘I mean to say,’ said Billy’s Auntie Muriel, ‘if they can’t hang ya for murder Billy, ya gotta expect ’em to try and pinch ya for underage drinking. Ha ha.’

Billy Hill sat at the kitchen table and spread a lavish helping of marmalade onto his morning toast – the first of a dozen slices he knocked off every day. Tea and marmalade on toast was Billy’s breakfast routine. Meanwhile, he read the morning paper and that big, gap-toothed smile slid across his dial.

‘It must be a slow news day, Auntie M,’ he snorted. ‘Underage drinking indeed. They gotta be kidding. Too young to drink. What a lot of flap doodle. I’m not too young to get pinched on murders when I’m only defending me bloody self.’

‘Too right,’ said his Auntie Muriel. ‘That’s perfectly correct, Billy.’ She was very supportive of her nephew and would not hear a bad word said about him. How dare the police and press pick on a young innocent lad. It was a bloody disgrace.

Muriel was a well built, attractive 32-year-old woman. She had the same rich dark olive complexion as Billy, the same light-brown, almost blonde hair and the same vivid green eyes. She was the baby sister of William Hill, Billy’s dad, the dad Billy had never ever known because he had vanished before Billy was born.

Muriel was not only his auntie but his late mother’s best friend. When Jeanie Hill died, Muriel was delighted to take charge of the little boy. Muriel worked in a flower shop in one of Richmond’s best-known streets, but she knew her way around. She was a former prostitute and stripper but had given it all up to care for young Billy. She’d gone from horns to thorns.

What the Tax Department didn’t know was that Muriel Hill actually owned the florists’ shop that she supposedly only worked for. Muriel was no fool. She had inherited two houses in Lennox Street and had bought two more houses as well as the shop. But no-one knew this, not even Billy.

Muriel had given up hawking the fork when she was 25. But, unlike most other working girls she’d looked after her money, and now it was looking after her. And Billy.

She truly loved young Billy and it was fair to say Blueberry Hill loved his Auntie M more than anybody else in the world, now that his mum had gone. Not that it was much of a contest. Billy didn’t like many people.

‘You should eat more than marmalade on toast, Billy,’ she told him. ‘But I like marmalade on toast,’ said Billy.

‘You should let me cook you ham and eggs,’ said Auntie M. ‘Your father always liked me to cook him ham and eggs.’

‘Well,’ said Billy with a sneer, ‘I hope that wherever that prick is he is enjoying his ham and eggs. As for me, I like marmalade.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Auntie M, frightened that she had upset him. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry, Billy.’

Blueberry Hill reached over and gave his auntie a big marmalade-covered kiss on the mouth. She giggled, happy that he was no longer cross at her mention of the long-vanished father and brother.

BILLY didn’t go outside the front door until about midday. He had a luncheon appointment with his la de dah lady lawyer at Rhubarb’s Bar and Restaurant in Gertrude Street, Fitzroy.

Anita Von Bibra had been with him since the Stavros fiasco and their relationship had come along very nicely since then. There was trouble coming his way and a pre-bloodshed legal chat with Madam Von Bibra was a must. The lunchtime restaurant meeting in the courtyard at Rhubarb’s had become a regular event.

Anita Von Bibra was a wealthy, south of the river socialite barrister, who lived with her property developer husband in a $3.5 million mansion in South Yarra. At least, that was what they’d paid for it in the property boom in the 1980s, when every yuppie in town used lines of credit the way they used lines of coke. By the time the 1990s came around, the Von Bibra shack was probably only worth a flat $3 million. Life can be cruel like that, but it seemed to Billy that Anita was bearing up bravely.

She cruised about town in a Mercedes sports coupe worth 100 grand. She was old enough to be Billy’s mother, but he was only 17 and she was very well preserved, and looked thirty-something. She was a neat, petite, elegant lady with long hair dyed jet black, big sparkling dark eyes and a wide smile that gave some people ideas when they looked at her lips.

Anita had once been a model, and still had the body and legs to prove it. She was only five feet nothing tall, hence the high heels that added at least four to five inches to her height. She always wore a well-cut suit with the shortest skirts she could get away with cut tight around a wiggle of an arse that looked like two apples tied in a silk scarf.

Her only drawback was a shrill high-pitched squeal of a voice that could travel across a court room and burst the eardrums of an already half-deaf judge. Even when she whispered her voice could travel 100 metres on a windy day. She was quite famous in legal and criminal circles for her outrageous conduct, and the Press loved to hate her.

Anita’s running public battle with the Director of Public Prosecutions had caught the attention of the national media after she screamed at him from the steps of the Melbourne Supreme Court, ‘Hey Mario, if I’d sucked off the Attorney General at the last law society dinner I’d be a QC too, ya dog.’ She was a toff with a knockabout sense of humor and a painter and docker’s vocabulary.

One of her best-known cases had involved defending a notorious con man. The police crown witness was a well-known Italian criminal. Anita was claiming that the crown witness had stolen her client’s cheque book. In her summing up to the jury she made one of the outrageous throwaway remarks that had caught the media’s attention a few times before.

‘Well, ladies and gentlemen,’ she said, ‘if this case has taught us anything, it is that none of us can ever trust a dago with our cheque book.’

She had been married three times and made a small fortune on each divorce. Why she bothered defending every psychopath from Richmond to Collingwood was a mystery. She certainly didn’t do it for the money. The truth was Anita was a lounge-chair left winger – and anyone who knew her could tell she got a bit of a thrill dealing with young tearaways like Billy Hill. She couldn’t help going for that James Dean rebel without a cause stuff: tattoos, muscles, scars, and the whiff of violence.

‘If I don’t fight for the little Aussie battler, who will?’ she’d scream at the Press and anybody else who’d listen.

The trouble was, obviously, that Anita’s idea of the little Aussie battler was every head-banging, gun-toting psychopath and raving mental case in Melbourne. Oh, and Billy Hill. Except that he was different. He didn’t carry guns.

BILLY walked into the restaurant and out into the courtyard at about 12.30 pm. Anita called out to him, ‘Billy! Here I am.’ It was a fair bet they heard her in the next suburb.

Her diamond rings flashed and glittered in the sunlight as she waved her hand. Billy walked over and sat down.

‘What?’ Anita pouted like a bad soapie actress. ‘No kiss hello?’

Billy reached over and kissed his lawyer on the cheek. Anita didn’t invite all her clients to lunch, very few of them in fact, but she had a genuine soft spot for Blueberry Hill. Lunch proceeded and Anita’s legal advice flowed freely.

‘Billy, as long as they hit you first or they use a weapon and you use your fists, we can plead self defence till the cows come home and win hands down every time. But we have to be able to show we were acting in the defence of our own life or the life of another. If we do that we can kill the Queen of England and beat the blue.’

Billy looked thoughtful. ‘I think I’ve got some shit coming up with old Keith Kerr and Kevin Toy and that lot from Collingwood,’ he said.

‘Hmmm,’ Anita mused. ‘The ghosts of Christmases past and all that. Skinny Kerr and his mother come back to haunt you?’

Billy nodded. ‘Yeah,” he said. ‘That’s what that shit in the Chevron was all about.’

‘I knew that,’ she answered. ‘Strangely enough, I defended Peter Thorpe on a rape blue 10 years ago. I spent three months telling a jury he was innocent. We won the case. I took him back to my chambers for a celebratory drink and he belted me in the mouth, bent me over my office desk and committed a foul rudeness upon my person.’

‘What could I do? I’d just spent three months telling the world he was innocent, and there were no witnesses? You’re the first person I’ve confessed that to, Billy. And I’m bloody overjoyed to know the low dog is dead.’

For once, Billy looked shocked. ‘Fair dinkum, Anita,’ he said, his voice full of genuine sympathy and concern.

Anita took the boy’s hand, touched.

‘Not to worry, Billy,’ she said with a wink. ‘Being upended over the office desk wasn’t the point. The bloody ingratitude of the low bastard, that’s what hurt me. He certainly had a different idea of how to handle a hand-up brief.’

Billy was quite shocked at some of the remarks Anita made. In matters sexual Billy was a total innocent. Anita was a woman of the world, and some of the things she said made him blush red. She took a certain delight in teasing the lad, sitting with her legs crossed in front of him with her short skirt sliding around and rippling in the breeze, accidentally on purpose giving him a gander at the upper thighs that had made Anita a hot item in the bikini-modelling caper when she was at law school. Billy was very correct where the ladies were concerned. He might have been a bareknuckle killer, but Anita’s well-honed instincts told her he was a virgin. The prospect of correcting that small matter for him filled her with a certain evil delight. It was a little fantasy she indulged in after the third drink. Which is one of the reasons alcohol is rather popular, even if not many people would own up to it. But Anita’s plans for a little extra-curricular tutoring in client-lawyer liaison would have to wait. Billy had other things on his mind. He went back to Richmond with his head buzzing with plans, as well as a few belts of champagne Anita had pushed at him. Between that and Anita’s mini-skirt, it had been a very good lunch indeed.