Джо Горес - Gone, No Forwarding

“In the mail box. Yeah.” She was barefoot, and when she rubbed one bare sole against the inside of the other leg, it made a dusty mark on the pantleg. The bell-bottoms were frayed from being walked on. “We figured, since we didn’t know you, it wasn’t for us.”

“Sure.” Ballard gestured. “Why Journey?”

“Because he’s a trip!” she exclaimed.

“I’m trying to get hold of a former tenant. Jeff Simson?”

“The fruiter. Yeah.” She rolled bovine eyes. “We hadda repaint the bedroom. Him and his roommate had it painted purple.” She thought for a moment. “We feel fruiters, it’s sorta like some sorta perversion, y’know? Me’n Milf, we’re into Jesus. Jesus an’ CB.”

“Jesus and CB. I like it. Who collects the rent?”

“Green Realty over on Mission.”

It was just a block away, so Ballard walked over. The realty office was on the ground floor of a shabby office building where the upper floors were vacant. Bagged wine bottles decorated two corners of the entryway. Inside, the realty was small and crowded and smelled slightly like a store that sold religious articles.

The Chicano woman behind the desk was striking, her heavy body encased in black, her face serene but her eyes alive and snapping, her utterly black hair brushed with the gray of years at the temples. She had lightly accented English with a liquid vowel roll which gave Ballard a twinge of memory about Maria Navarro. Or whoever the hell she was now that she was married.

“We’re trying to get in touch with a former tenant at one of your rental properties on Twenty-fourth Street, a man named Jeffrey L. Simson.”

“He now lives out on Forty-third Avenue off Balboa,” she said instantly, without looking anything up.

“Has someone else been around asking?” Ballard said.

She shook her head, then suddenly crossed herself. “No. It is that one he roomed with. That Ferdinand Diamond. That one, he is damned, God have mercy on me for saying it.”

Ballard nodded. Diamond would be useful as a lead toward Simson. “The address for Simson out in the Avenues is no good.”

“Diamond is not that other one’s real name. It is because he wears a diamond in his nose, like a woman from Asia. And he wears a robe as Asian women wear, also.” She paused. “Damned.”

“You have a forwarding on him?” asked Ballard.

She gave him an address in the 3900 block of Twenty-fourth Street. Again, just a few block away. Right on the money, he thought. It was in that area Simson’s car had been piling up the parking tickets. Looked like Ferdie and Jeffy’d had a lover’s spat, had busted up their act, but now had moved back in together again.

The house was an old Victorian, a Queen Anne which had been converted into rental units. This part of Noe Valley had come intensely alive in the past few years as young hip people had come crowding in, opening restaurants, shops, clothing and book stores. It had the best weather in the Mission District, which had the best weather in the city.

Ballard found the chunky, tough-faced owner in the basement cleaning out trash.

“Diamond? Apartment five, second floor. Won’t get him until tonight, though. He works in some Polk Street leather shop.”

“How about his roommate? Jeff Simson?”

“Queen Ferdinand ain’t got a roommate. Just enough guys passing through his place to start a men’s room. Try tonight. After midnight.”

Corinne Jones worked for a travel agency on Sutter and Stockton. Visit exotic lands. See the pyramids across the Nile. Whopping discount on all air fares, so she could see the world cheap with a companion of her choice. Except he would never take a vacation. First Bart had been a professional fighter, now a private eye. In four years he’d taken one week off. Total. Still, he was her man, and that was that.

Some dude in a gold Eldorado convertible honked at her as she was walking up Sutter Street after work. From the corner of her eye she could see he jumped sharp in a powder-blue Edwardian-cut and wore a big-brimmed crimson pimp’s hat. He honked again. She refused to turn her head. She was a beautiful woman and knew it, with café-au-lait skin and a profile right off an Egyptian wall painting.

“Hey, baby, whut’s happenin?”

She speeded up, heels clop-clopping with an angry sound. Heads turning, mouths laughing. It was almost a rout. And then as she came up to the 450 Sutter Building’s garage, the Eldorado bulled right across the sidewalk and stopped where she almost walked into the side of it. The top was down.

“I swear, baby, you the hardest mink I ever see to give a ride home to.”

She stared in amazement at Bart Heslip’s grinning face under the wide-brimmed hat, then jerked open the door and got in. “You bastard. Oh, you rotten bastard!” she exclaimed.

Heslip had backed out into Sutter Street again, ignoring the angry horns and shouted curses behind him. He wore four-inch clogs and a pink ruffled shirt with froths of lace at the wrists.

“This’s class, right, baby?”

“You just pick this thing up?”

“O’B grabbed it three days ago. Dude’s out of Dee-troit, owes fourteen big ones on it.”

“If Kearny finds out you’re driving around in it...”

Heslip took a left down Grough, heading toward her apartment. Corinne relaxed against the pale leather upholstery, stirred by faint envy of whoever had been driving it.

“What about those clothes?”

“The Apeman lent them to me.” The Apeman was a dealer who lived upstairs from Heslip and spent most of his bread on clothes.

“Bart Heslip, you’re working! ”

“I gotta get a line on a pimp calls himself Johnny Mack Brown.”

Corinne, an old-movie buff because of so many nights alone in front of the tube hoping Bart could come over, had to laugh. “You can’t be serious!”

“ He is. Used to work out of Oakland, now he’s dropped out of sight. Maybe working some girls in the topless joints out in North Beach. First I gotta find him, then I gotta ask him some questions. And the only dude he’s going to tell anything to—”

“No you don’t!” she yelped. She’d seen where he was headed. Much too late, of course.

When Ballard pulled into the lot of the Mint Condition, that all-night place on Duboce and Market a little ways from the old government mint, it was nearly midnight, and he’d checked out Queen Ferdinand’s street for the car and apartment for him or Simson three times already. And realized he’d missed supper.

Only as he turned into the lot, he was looking right at Simson’s car. He could hardly believe it, but there it was: 1974 Gremlin, white, with the license number Bart had gotten from their tame cop. He tried to remember Simson from last year’s DKA Christmas party. All he could come up with was a sort of slender guy with brown hair.

How about phoning inside the restaurant from one of the pay phones out here? He could see through the window, and... But what if the state people had warned him against talking with anyone from DKA? Better try to spot him on a casual walk-through.

He’d never been in the Mint Condition at night before. It was a revelation. All races, shades and shapes of gay were there now the sun was down. The most common shape was slim, hipless as a teen-age girl whose breasts have not yet developed, clothes skin-tight, pants without pockets because pockets destroyed that seductive line of thigh and buttock, tops mainly striped $40 French tank tops or tailored shirts with plunging necklines.

Ballard took a turn through the place. Voices high and hyper with excitement, tinkling laughter; most of them beautifully groomed, the skin a little too tight over the cheekbones, the eyes a little too glittery with ready passion, the hands a little too ready to touch and caress. In the bar, absolute contrast: three hackers in studded black leather, obvious rough trade, drinking their beer and waiting for someone to buy the hard night’s sodomy they offered.