Джо Горес: Gone, No Forwarding

Their seats were in a crowded anteroom set up to handle the overflow from the church proper where the coffin, banked by hundreds of flowers mingling their scents with the heavy drugged odor of as many joss sticks, was located. A saffron-robed, shaven-headed monk spoke in Japanese, the next eulogist in English. There were many eulogists. Giselle let her mind wander through her memories of Kathy. The infectious laugh. The high-pitched voice switching from perfect English to regional accent to Japanese singsong without missing a syllable.

Ah, so sorry prees, me poor rittre Japonee girr trying to make riving in new countree...

And they’d fall all over themselves on the phone, giving her what she wanted to know. She could be anyone on that instrument, from a lady minister to a Southern slut.

Aftah one nahght with li’l ol’ me, shugah, youah goin’ to want it every nahght...

And inevitably she’d turn the dead skip everyone else had thought was gone for good. And she’d clap her hands with that joyous laugh, and sometimes kick one foot high into the air from behind her desk, showing a careless length of nyloned thigh as she exclaimed ritually, “Got that son of a bitch!”

Giselle realized that Kearny had thrust a handkerchief into her hand. She had begun crying again, silently but uncontrollably. She used the handkerchief.

Kearny stood up. “Let’s get it over with,” he muttered.

The bad part. With the eulogies finished, the mourners were to queue past the open casket. Ahead of them she saw O’Bannon’s flaming hair. O’B and Kathy had been the two original DKA Associates. And there was a glum-faced Bart Heslip. For him, no more Kathy to giggle extravagantly at the filthy jokes he’d picked up out on the street.

But where was Ballard... Larry Ballard? After all the time Kathy had taken to turn him into a top investigator! The least that bastard could do was show up for her funeral.

Ballard, in his ignorance, had showed up at Maria Navarro’s second-floor flat in a shabby white Mission District stucco with varicolored Algerian ivy twining up over the front. From the street-level door he called up the stairwell, “Only thirty seconds late!”

“Larree, no...”

Maria was petite, five-two perhaps, wearing a short skirt and tight blouse. Ballard balanced his package of abalone on the newel post at the head of the stairs. She avoided his kiss with incipient panic in her huge Latin eyes.

“Hey, baby, I made certain with Certs—”

He was ripped away, slammed headfirst into the wall, spun about to see a hard brown fist coming at him.

“¡Hijo de la ftauta!”

Ballard slipped the punch and drove the heel of his hand at the enraged brown face. He missed.

“Federico! No! j¡Está un amigo!”

“...’way from esposa mía, man!”

Ballard gaped. “Your wife?”

Unfortunately, when he gaped he quit moving. Federico didn’t. Ballard tried to roll with it, but this carried him up against the newel post and then down the stairwell after his dislodged abalone.

“Hey! Ouch! Ugh! Uh! Oh!”

In a Western, the stunt man would have stood up and brushed himself off after the director had yelled “Cut!” But when Ballard finally moved it was like a half-squashed bug. He had realized with horror that his back had burst open and spilled part of him out on the stairs. At each movement he I could feel himself squishing around under him. Oh, God! A cripple in his twenties!

“Larree?”

Hot dam, how about that? Just the abalone. Maybe not even broken bones. Maybe bring that leg over there and... ah! Now. This arm will go down...

“Larr -eee?”

He paused in his unsnarling. “Yeah?”

“You are oh-kay?”

He opened some more, like a carpenter’s rule unfolding. He got a hand on the stair rail. “I’m dandy.”

She said, aggrieved. “Larr-eee, I was sola, you took advantage. Mías hijas need father, you no marry me, and Federico...”

Ballard was on his feet. He had a goose egg on one side of his head. His nose leaked blood. His jaw creaked when he opened his mouth. He needed a drink. “Yeah, swell,” he croaked. “Congratulations.”

He limped out into the night, tenderized abalone in hand, thinking. This is it, this is the end. Never again. He was never going to mess around with another Catholic as long as he lived.

Giselle was shocked to see Kathy’s two Japanese-doll daughters alone in the front pew, watching the proceedings with fathomless shoebutton eyes. “Dan,” she hissed, “where in God’s name is their father?”

“Probably out shopping for a new missus.”

Then she was at the casket. Directly above it was a full color life-size portrait of Kathy. She was laughing and alive and vibrant. She didn’t have a care in the world.

Three feet below was the waxen dead face of the real girl. What made it worse was that the laughing Kathy and the still-faced corpse both wore the same dress, the yellow brocade number with the scoop collar that Kathy had bought to be sexy at last December’s DKA Christmas party.

Giselle turned away, abruptly nauseated. The memories, the overwhelming heaviness of flowers and incense... Then she realized that Kearny had brought her outside, where she could gulp in great breaths of fresh air.

“Little close in there,” he said conversationally.

“That was... the worst experience... of my life. That color photo... those little girls sitting there all alone...”

He shrugged. “They better get used to it. Poppa isn’t going to be around much, not without Mommy’s paycheck to keep him there. Probably the only deadbeat Jap in the history of the world, and Kathy had to marry him.”

Terrific. Trust Kearny to give Kathy the worst possible epitaph. Could anyone, ever, get any more gross than he?

Sure. It happened the next night, as she and Kearny were leaving the Berkeley flatlands home of the grandmother who was going to end up taking care of Kathy’s kids. Kearny had delivered a check to the bereft woman from a nonexistent DKA retirement fund. As they stepped out into the surprisingly mild late-fall evening, a voice hailed them. “Hey, Dan! Dan Kearny!”

The man coming across the narrow strip of lawn wore a topcoat and a broad smile on his face. Kearny, his mind still with Kathy’s kids, didn’t catch on until the newcomer’s left hand slapped a thin sheaf of folded papers into Kearny’s outstretched right, announcing, “You have been legally served in the matter of the Accusation brought against Daniel Kearny Associates by Thomas V. Greenly, Supervising Auditor for the Private Investigation Agency Licensing Bureau of the State of California.”

Kearny thrust the papers into a pocket without opening them. His face was the stormiest Giselle had ever seen it. “I have an office for this sort of thing.”

The man snickered. “Fat chance I’d have of serving you there. But I figured those orphaned kids would get you out in the open.”

Kearny let out a deep breath and turned away. But Giselle, in passing the process server, stepped on his foot, hard, before she even knew she was going to do it. He started hopping on the other foot, yelling, “Filthy... filthy bitch...”

Kearny’s thick hand closed around his collar and spun him around. The hand began shaking him like someone emptying a trash bucket. “ What was that?”

“I said I’m a member... of the staff of the Attorney General... for the State of California. If you assault—”

“I see,” said Kearny.

As he turned away, his left foot happened to pass through the space occupied by the foot the process server had on the ground, a maneuver sometimes known as a judo foot-sweep in martial-arts parlance. This left the process server, who was still holding the foot Giselle had stepped on, without any feet on the ground. His head bounced against the sidewalk with a sound like a wet dishrag slapping a drainboard.