Джо Горес - Gone, No Forwarding

“What was Fazzino doing back in San Francisco?” asked Kearny. He didn’t like knowing that whoever had pulled the trigger, it had been Dan Kearny who had sort of pointed the shotgun. “I would have thought this was the last place he’d show up, knowing...”

Nicoletti got animated. “Money. The Feds have traced him and Wendy back to a little Mexican village, Zihuatenejo, where they laid low for a year while trying to buy Argentinian citizenship. Once that came through, they flew up here as Adán and Elena Espinosa. Flip went to a safe deposit box at Golden Gate Trust, drew out a satchelful of what hadda be cash.”

“And they were watching the box?” asked Kearny. “After a year?”

“A bank v-p named Nucci had a notify flag on it. We can’t prove nothing, but Nucci probably made a phone call to somebody when Flip checked out the box. Whoever he notified blew Flip away and took the money. And just so nobody would make any mistakes about why the hit was made, a penny was shoved up...” He looked over at Giselle and actually colored slightly. “A penny was placed on Fazzino’s body. An old mob trick to mark a betrayer.” So live with it, Kearny thought to himself. He deserved to die and the State couldn’t touch him. So live with it. But to change the subject, he said in a dry voice, “Have we come to the favor yet, Benny? I’ve got to be in the hearing again tomorrow, and the work I’ve got piled up on my desk as it is...”

“It’s about the hearing, as a matter of fact.” Nicoletti cleared his throat. “Y’see, Dan, we figure Hawkley must know we got a witness somewhere to that Fazzino hit, can maybe I.D. the triggerman. So he’s been keeping Pivarski under wraps so we can’t get a formal line-up on him—”

“But he also has to know Pivarski isn’t the triggerman,” said Kearny. “The time element won’t let him be. So why wouldn’t he just let your witness see Pivarski and get it over with? The witness will say, hey, that isn’t the guy, and—”

“What if our witness says, hey, that is the guy?”

Giselle said suddenly, “That’s what I’d say if I was the witness. Then they wouldn’t have any more reason to try and kill me.”

“We still want our witness to see Pivarski,” said Nicoletti stubbornly. “He’s agreed to come down from Canada for it, on our promise he won’t have to testify in open court...”

“And you want him at the hearing, posing as one of our field men, if the Hearing Officer rules that Pivarski has to testify,” said Kearny sourly. Then he shrugged. “Okay, Benny, I’ll let you know if Pivarski’s going to show up.” His voice thickened. “But if he does, for Chrissake don’t let a bunch of rosy-faces from the FBI come sucking around. Hawkley’d spot them from across town.”

“Right you are,” said Nicoletti. He was suddenly on his I feet in an easy movement that belied his appearance of soft I bulk. He nodded, and slid open the glass door. “Thanks, I Dan.”

And was gone. Giselle stood up, ready to go upstairs and get back to work. “I still don’t see why Hawkley wouldn’t just let the witness I.D. Pivarski and get it over with,” she said.

“Hawkley likes to play games,” said Kearny thoughtfully. “And until this license hearing, I doubt he had any way of proving that his client wasn’t over in San Francisco shooting Fazzino. Which makes me feel that, somehow, he’s I behind the State’s move after our license. I just don’t see I how he could have set it up.”

“And I don’t see what good it would do us even if he is,” said Giselle. “We’re still in a lot of trouble.”

Kearny nodded. “What we need is an eyewitness who’ll support the version of events that’s in Simson’s deposition. And at the moment, that’s Bart Heslip’s problem.”

New Orleans — Nawlens, as the locals called it. The sinking city, built on a marsh so they had to bury their dead above ground. Heslip’s folks had moved to San Francisco from Baton Rouge, the state capital, a couple of years before he’d even been born, but his ma had talked about Louisiana a lot and until the day she’d died had put chicory in her coffee.

Coffee. Ballard should be here, not me, he thought. Man would go insane over this coffee. Hot and black, like a good woman. He chuckled to himself, and drained his cup. Old Corinne catch him thinking about hot black women, she’d take his head off. ’Cause she could never get it through her head that she was the only woman he ever thought about. Now, here he was on a trip like she always was after him for them to take, and she wasn’t along! Damn, he missed her.

“More coffee?”

He smiled up at the white waitress. He was in a chain drug store on Canal Street, without even a motel room yet because he didn’t know where, or if, he would want to stay.

“Can you tell me where the topless places are located?”

She filled his cup. “Y’all fum outta town. Ah can tell by y’accent.” Heslip smothered laughter. “Most places ah on Bourbon Street. In the Vieux Carré? But most of the Nigra gahls dance in the cheapah places. On the sahd streets.”

A Nigra gahl was who he was looking for, in a cheap topless joint, after talking with the old black lady, Mrs. Delbert, who ran the broken-down rooming house from which Verna had sent her postcard to Sally. It was just a few blocks from Canal Street where he now was, by the Superdome, next to the William Guste Housing Project. Heslip had posed as Samuel Rounds, Verna’s brother and a deacon of the Four Square Gospel Church of Oakland, California.

“Your sister was here from around Christmas to early March, Deacon Rounds. Went off ’thout any forwarding. Left with a man...” She stopped suddenly at the implications of her own words. Deacon Rounds cast his eyes heavenward.

“I know my poor sister lost her way,” he said piously. “Like to broke our poor mother’s heart. Uh... was she using...” He found the word. “Anything?”

“You mean drugs? Could have been, now you mention it, Deacon Rounds. I never saw no indication, but then I wouldn’t...”

“She ever mention he... our father? It was here in New Orleans that he abandoned Momma and us kids, fifteen years ago.”

Mrs. Delbert shook her head sadly. Then brightened. “One thing was, around mid-February she all of a sudden told me she’d got a job. She was happy ’bout that.” Her eyes misted with remembrance. “She was a good girl, Deacon Rounds. Such a good girl in her heart.”

“What was the job?”

Her face clouded again. “Topless dancing in one of those I clubs over there in the Old Quarter. Told her a job at Woolworth’s was a lot better than showing her body to lustful men—”

“Better than giving her body to them, Mrs. Delbert,” said the Deacon. “You wouldn’t remember the name of the club where she worked, would you?”

The old black lady shook her head regretfully. Heslip thanked her and shook hands with her and started down off the stoop. When he reached the sidewalk, she called suddenly after him. “Fleur.”

He paused on the cracked, uneven concrete. “Fleur?”

“The girl who got her the job at that topless place. Fleur. Skinny little thing with freckles all over her face, light enough to pass, almost...”

So here he was, drinking coffee and bracing himself for a long night of ducking in and out of topless joints, asking for Fleur or Verna, trying to dredge up a lead. But it sounded as if Verna never did find her father — if that was indeed who she’d been looking for — and Johnny Mack Brown had moved her on elsewhere.

He looked out and saw he’d coffee’d away the daylight; ornate streetlights had begun to glow on the center islands of Canal Street. He signaled the waitress. “How far is Bourbon Street?”