Chopper Unchopped (164 page)

Westlock went inside, and Jan flashed Holliday a smile and a wave as she shut the door. It was enough to make his heart skip a beat.

“Thanks for coming over, Mr Westlock,” Jan said. “I was about to go to the gym.” Westlock couldn’t help but notice the joggers on her feet and the stretchy leggings that ladies wear on TV when they do all that funny jumping about stuff. The black and white aerobics outfit was stretched tight around a body that was trying to burst out of it all. Her light brown hair was in a bun, and there was a slightly Chinese look to her eyes. She was a tall and very athletic young lady, and Westlock could see by the way she moved that she was a dancer.

“Well, Jan my girl, what can I do for ya?”

Jan Farrell blushed crimson and went all coy and shy and moved about in a way Westlock knew was meant to sexually provoke him. She was pretty good at that sort of stuff.

“Mr Westlock, Frankie comes up for parole soon.”

“Yeah, I know” he said.

“Sit down please, Mr. Westlock. Can I get you a beer?”

Westlock sat down. “VB stubby,” he said, by way of reply. He wasn’t one to waste words, unless it was in a trivia quiz with Doc Holliday. As soon as he spoke the girl dashed to the fridge. She aimed her bum in Westlock’s direction as she bent to get the stubby.

She handed him the beer, then hopped on the couch with him. Instead of sitting, she was half kneeling, and she jiggled about as she spoke, constantly adjusting her tank top and pulling the waistband on her stretch leggings up a bit higher, and all the time wiggling inches closer to Westlock as she spoke.

“Look,” snapped Westlock, “cut out all that wiggling about nonsense and get to the bloody point, do ya want me to help Frankie with his parole, is that what ya want?”

Jan nodded.

“And what do I get?” said Westlock.

Jan smiled and pulled the top of her stretch tank top down to expose tits like ripe melons with cherries on the end.

Westlock lumbered to his feet. He didn’t look happy. “You gotta be kidding,” he said. “Ya can stick them two things back in ya bloody shirt for a start. I’m old enough to be your bloody father, young lady. Now, I’m leaving if that’s all this bullshit is about. No offence, Princess, but there are things I do and things I don’t do, and this sort of bullshit is one of the things I don’t do.”

With that the tough old cop began to walk down the hallway toward the front door.

“Wait,” said Jan, “I do have something.”

“What?” grunted Westlock, and kept walking. As he opened the door she yelled after him: “Bernie Bayen reckons Penny Mack is going to get you knocked.”

Westlock stopped dead and turned.

“Penny Mack? Ya mean Penny McMahon, Hector The Cannibal’s goggle eyed mate?” said Westlock.

She nodded. Westlock softly closed the door and padded back towards the girl. He looked most interested.

“Tell me more, my girl,” he said quietly. “Tell me more.”

DOC Holliday sat quietly in the car listening to the radio. Two politicians were in a heavy debate about gun control. After a while he couldn’t stand it, and turned it off.

“Ya feedin’ chaff to a dead horse, mate,” he grumbled to nobody in particular. “It’s like the barmaid and the butcher. It’s an ongoing joke that will never reach the finish line.”

Holliday was referring to the late great comic Roy Rene and the famous Stiffy and Mo routine with the barmaid and the butcher joke that Rene never got to finish.

“Gun control!” spat Holliday. “The more we try to control ’em the less control we have. We’ve lost that fight.”

Westlock stepped out the door of the weatherboard and got back in the car.

“Well,” said Holliday, “did ya stick it up her?”

“You can be a dirty minded bastard at times, Doc,” said Westlock, without a trace of a smile. “Come on, let’s get going.”

Holliday was curious, and kept at it. “What did she want, boss?”

“She wants me to support Frankie’s parole application,” said Westlock.

Holliday grinned “Oh yeah, are ya gonna?”

“She gave me a bit of info, so yeah, if it’s right, I’ll help Frankie.”

Westlock took a sly look at his mate. He could see Holliday was quite taken with the woman.

“Look Doc,” he said like a bloke offering to lend his lawnmower to his next door neighbour, “pop around and knock on her door tomorrow arvo, tell her I sent you, flash ya badge and tell her you’d like to help Frankie in his parole application and rah rah rah, blah, blah blah – and I’m sure you’ll be in like a rat in a drain pipe, which is appropriate, since you smell like a rat, and I reckon she’d pong like a drain pipe.”

Holliday roared with laughter. “OK, boss, I’ll do just that,” he spluttered. “Ha ha.”

THE following night Ray Peddy sat in a King Street night club talking to Bernie Bayen.

“I can’t understand it, Ray,” said Bernie.

“Can’t understand what?” said Peddy.

“James Dean,” said Bayen. “His whole legend is based on three movies, the only three movies he ever made.
East of Eden, Rebel Without A Cause
and
Giant
. I mean, three movies and some moody sissy queer boy becomes a legend.”

“Yeah,” said Peddy. “You’re not wrong. It don’t take much to become a legend.”

At that moment the two philosophers were joined by Jan Farrell. She was in her work uniform: stiletto shoes with heels that were offensive weapons, a tiny bikini bottom and nothing else but a smile that was grounds for arrest by itself. She swung her hips when she walked. There were twenty dollar, fifty dollar and some hundred dollar notes tucked under the bikini.

“Hi ya, Ray. Hi ya, Bernie” she said, putting her left arm around Bernie’s shoulder. The bent lawyer reached over and cupped one large boob and gave it a squeeze.

“C’mon, Bernie,” Jan pouted. “You know the rules, ya wanna play then ya have to pay.” With that, the lawyer tucked a hundred dollar note down the front of the bikini bottom.

“Well,” said Jan with a smile, “play away, then, sweetheart.” While Bayer fondled and nuzzled her she talked to Ray Peddy.

“Hey, Ray,” she said, “How do ya get a hundred fat cows into a tin shed?”

“I don’t know,” said Peddy with a grin.

“Ya hang a bingo sign out the front,” she chortled, and with that she expertly broke free of Bernie’s clammy hands and swung her hips away and in the direction of some American sailors.

“You’ve had ya hundred bucks worth, Bernie,” she laughed over her shoulder.

“Slut!” snarled Bayen. “Low pig dog slut.”

“Lawyer,” she responded with the greater insult.

“Take it easy, Bernie,” said Peddy. “Jan’s okay.”

Just then a gorgeous young girl wearing skin tight jeans, white runners and a brown snakeskin patterned leather jacket approached the two men. She was naked under the leather jacket except for a white bikini top with about enough material in it to make a decent bow tie. She wore her hair in a bun, and it was all held in place with a white head band.

“How’s it going, Ray?” she murmured.

“Shit,” said Peddy, looking surprised. “How ya going, Rachel?” It was young Rachel Fields. The Fields family lived next door to the Peddys in Francis Street, Collingwood. She was a uni student studying law. In spite of her looks, which she could have been arrested for on grounds of provoking riot, affray and disturbing the peace, young Rachel was famous as the only 19-year-old virgin in Collingwood’s history. Peddy nearly fell off his bar stool when he saw her.

“Jesus, Rach, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Oh, Jan reckons she can get me a job here,” said the young beauty.

“Ya bloody kidding?” said Ray. “You a table dancer?”

“Why not?” asked Rachel innocently. “It’s money for bullshit, and five more years at uni won’t pay for itself. I gotta eat, just like anybody else.”

Ray nodded doubtfully. “Yeah, well, you’re better looking than most of these cows,” he said, “but I dunno if it’s the sort of joint you should be hanging around.”

Rachel Fields may have been a prim and proper uni student with no sexual history, but she was hard core Collingwood through and through. Everything was either black and white.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” she said. “You wouldn’t wear half these maggots on a bloody brooch. Shit, look at the dogs,” she added contemptuously. “Half of ’em wouldn’t get a start in a brothel with a stocking mask and a bloomin’ shot gun.”

Bernie Bayen burst out laughing at the young sweet faced princess with the vocabulary of a drunken dockie.

“Anyway,” said Rachel, “what are you doin’ here Ray? Trying to get ya dick wet, I guess. Ha ha.”

Ray smiled. A dancer approached, giving Bernie a wide eyed “suck you off for sixpence” look. Rachel snapped at her. “Piss off, slag, or I’ll punch ya into the bloody wall and leave you there as a blinkin’ air vent.”

The stripper vanished. “Take it easy, Rach,” said Ray. “Ya going to have to be nice to people if ya going to work here.”

“Don’t worry,” said Rachel, “I’ll be nice, but I don’t cop shit.”

This comic exchange was interrupted by a second visit from Jan Farrell, who’d done the rounds of the room, working the mugs and fishing for more banknotes.

After hellos from Jan to Rachel and a bit of chit chat, Bayen and Ray Peddy got up to leave.

“Time is a thief, it robs us all,” said Bayen.

“How very profound,” said Jan. “You’re a posh bastard for a sexual pervert, I must say.”

“We gotta go,” say Ray.

“I’ll walk you out,” said Jan.

Just then the music changed and the girls started slow dancing to Gene Pitney singing
If I didn
’
t have a dime
.

Bayen finished off his drink and looked about. He was getting all philosophical again. “This is indeed a strange place,” he muttered. “What was it Paul Simon said about cartoons in a cartoon graveyard?”

But there were no takers for this one.

“C’mon Ray, let’s go,” said Peddy.

The two men walked up the stairs towards the door, with Jan Farrell between them. Then, as the three reached the open doorway, she stopped dead. “See ya, fellas,” she said brightly as the lawyer and his client stepped out into the night. A little too brightly.

As the pair walked down King Street a man in a black overcoat wearing a black full face balaclava got out of an old blue and white Holden Statesman. Peddy and Bayen froze, which made the job easier for the bloke in the balaclava. He produced a pump action shotgun from under the overcoat and without a word of warning or reason, opened fire.

The first shot hit Peddy. He felt as if he had been kicked in the guts by a horse. His stomach exploded into a white hot ball of pain. The second shot chopped a hole in Bernie Bayen’s chest, spraying a shower of shattered heart and lungs out behind him. Bernie fell to the footpath as if he was poleaxed.

The third shot sent Peddy’s left cheek bone and the top left side of his skull flying behind him in a bloody mess on the footpath. Amazingly, he was still standing.

The fourth shot ripped through Peddy’s chest like a chainsaw, punching out his heart and lungs, and finally dropping him. He was as dead as Phillip Grant “The Iceman” Wilson before he hit the pavement.

The gunman was about to pump a fifth round into Bayen for good measure – he’d never liked lawyers much – when a voice from behind the steering wheel of the Statesman growled “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

The gunman turned and as he climbed into the car he looked back to see Jan Farrell still standing in the club doorway. The gunman paused for a moment and nodded. Anyone watching would have noticed that Jan Farrell seemed to nod back. Then the gunman slammed the door and the driver gunned the old V8 down the road.

Doc Holliday pulled the balaclava off.

“Well, Graeme, that’s that,” he said.

“Piss on the dogs,” said Westlock righteously. “Plotting to kill police officers, indeed. I can tell ya, Doc, we gotta nip this sort of shit in the bud.”

“Yeah, well,” said Doc as he leant over and carefully placed the pump action on the back seat like a duck shooter with his favorite shotgun after a big morning in the swamp, “you’d think the pricks might have learned their lesson when Chuckles Bennett got his right whack at the city court that time.”

Doc was thinking ahead. “Now I reckon we fix that moll McMahon, too.”

“Dead right, we do,” answered Westlock. “They reckon she’s living with some mexy lookin’ galoot over in Yiannis Court, Springvale. BCI reckons she is buying the brothel in Carlisle Street in St Kilda.”

“Whatever,” said Holliday, “wherever she is, we will vanish that moll off the face of the earth. Ha ha. Stick her in a mineshaft in the hills somewhere.”

“Like that bloody St Kilda drag queen,” laughed Westlock. They had a very dark sense of humour.

In no time at all they had dumped the Statesman, walked a little way, picked up the Audi A4 and headed into Hanover Street, Carlton.

“Okay amigo,” said Westlock, “I’ll see ya tomorrow.”

“Via con dios, compadre” said Holliday, as he got out.

“Be careful of my sister’s car,” he added.

“Don’t worry about ya sister’s bloody car,” said Westlock cheerfully.

“Hey, Graeme,” said Holliday in a slightly more solemn tone of voice. “We did the right thing, didn’t we? Personally, I don’t care if the cow calves or breaks its bloody neck, but with the Royal Commission into police shootings we can’t afford any more Wild Bill bullshit.”

Westlock grinned. “Don’t worry, Doc,” he said. “We are so far in front, the Royal bloody Commission can’t hear the band playing. She’ll be sweet. Never argue with mugs, mate. We just tell ’em what they think they want to hear and leave out the sticky bits. Fair dinkum, Doc. It’s a doddle.”

“Okay, boss,” said Holliday.

As Westlock was about to pull away he called out, “Hey, boss! What was the name of General George A. Custer’s horse?”

Westlock smiled.

“Go on, Doc. Tell me.”

“Well,” said Holliday, “General George A. Custer rode a chestnut Morgan horse named Mister Simpson, after the man who gave it to him.”

Westlock looked at Holliday.

“Doc, there ain’t too many people outside of Collingwood who’d know the answer to a question like that. I’m impressed.”