Джо Горес - Gone, No Forwarding

“Then Verna must be different,” said Heslip.

“Oh, she is, she is. Her baby had died, for one thing, and she needed someone to care for outside herself, bad as a body can need. Also, she didn’t need any rehabilitation. She’d done that for herself, along with Rosalind’s help.”

At the rear of the house was a bright, sunny room where the very small children who still needed cribs slept. The walls were vivid with nursery wallpaper; the floor was atumble with toys and stuffed animals and dolls. Some toddlers were going down a small, bright, metal slide in the middle of the room. Others played with toys, one was crying, a little girl was bashing a little boy over the head with a big red sausagelike balloon, both of them crowing gleefully.

Keeping minimum order was a slim black girl with big warm eyes and a patient face and her hair worn in the sort of bun that Mommy wore. Mommy stopped to hug a little girl who was trying a variety of dresses on a brand-new-looking doll, one after another without first removing the previous one.

“My, isn’t that a pretty doll?” Mommy marveled.

“That fum my mama,” said the girl.

“Just as beautiful as can be. But not as beautiful as you.” They went on. Mommy said to Heslip, “Her mother quit the street, and has a job as a secretary while she studies window-decorating. In another year she’ll be able to take Elaine home with her.”

“They look pretty much like any other kids,” said Heslip.

“Oh, the kids aren’t the problems. It’s the mothers. They don’t know how to take care of children, and I think drug addiction dulls the maternal instincts, bums out the ability to reach out toward someone else. Even your child. We not only have to train the mothers to care for their kids, we have to teach them how to love their kids, too.”

“That makes Verna even more unusual.”

They were beside the slide where the assistant was making the children take orderly turns.

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” said Mommy Harris. “Verna, this is Mr. Heslip from San Francisco, who I told you about.”

They were drinking strong, fresh coffee at one of the long tables where the children and the help ate all their meals family-style. Heslip had laid out the whole thing for both women, but Verna did not seem to have assimilated what he had said. When she spoke, it was only of kids under her care. “Oh, I have the terriblest time knowin’ whut to do, and that’s the very truth,” she said. Her adoring gaze rested on Mommy’s face for a moment. “But I’m leamin’.”

“Big trouble is,” said the older woman, “around here we get thinking these kids are like other kids. But they aren’t. Not emotionally.”

“Highs an lows,” said Verna. She had a habit of fixing her gaze on Mommy Harris even when speaking to Heslip. “They ain’t — aren’t — as even as other kids. Don’t get somethin’ they want, off they go. Cryin’, canyin’ on somethin’ awful.” She added, in quick defense, “Cain’t blame ’em none. Not after what they been through. They ain’t ever had nuthin’. Not ever, long as they’ve lived.”

Heslip had trouble believing this girl had ever been a whore and a junkie. She didn’t have any of the ghetto brashness other black girls of her background had. But he sensed a steel core inside that he’d sensed in her fat old mother out in Oakland, and that was the salient feature of Mommy Harris. Who smiled her abrupt brilliant smile and stood up.

“Time for chores, my goodness.” But when Verna started to rise also, she put a hand on the younger woman’s shoulder. To Heslip, she said, “I’m just a bug for a clean house, and when you have fifty little ones a clean house is hard to come by.” To Verna she said, “Take all the time you need, honey,” and shook hands with Heslip and was gone.

There was a moment of constraint between Verna and Heslip. Then he said, “You love it here, don’t you?”

“Ain’t leavin’ till they th’ow me out.” She drank the last of her coffee and shook her head. “The urge fo’ that shit, it still get so strong sometimes when I’m lyin’ alone at night. But I get up an’ go into that babies’ suite, an’ I walk up an down lookin’ at them little tots wouldn’t have no chance wasn’t fo’ Mommy bein’ there for ’em like Doctor Parton was fo’ me, an’ then I go back to sleep like a baby.” She met his eyes and sighed. “So you figure it’s somethin’ I know ’bout that Friday afternoon? Mos’ a year ago?”

“That’s the only thing that makes sense,” said Heslip. “Friday, November fifth, last year. Do you even remember it?”

She remembered it, and went through the whole thing without a word of prompting from Heslip. Her memory was so vivid because it was her first time on the switchboard and she made a mess of it. And she remembered Pivarski (“that dude Pee-somethin”) because she couldn’t pronounce his name.

“And you saw the whole transaction?” asked Heslip.

“Was standin’ in the doorway blowin’ bubbles.”

“Did Pivarski give Kathy anything? A—”

“Give her two hundred dollars.”

“Anything else? Oh... an envelope or a letter or—”

“Wasn’t anything like that, Mist’ Heslip. He paid her, she give him a receipt, he got up an lef.”

“Where was Jeff Simson all this time?”

“Out at his desk where he b’long.”

Heslip drank the final gulp of cold coffee, then sat frowning at the bright gold and white curtain beyond Verna’s head. Afternoon sun poured into the room, backlighting her face. Jesus, nothing there. Nothing at all. A totally routine collection. Did it justify jeopardizing her life by asking her to go back with him? Why didn’t he just stand up and walk out of there and go back himself and tell them he couldn’t find her?

“All of that he’p any?” she asked. “That gonna be of any use Mist’ Kearny an’ Miss Giselle an’ all, to keep their license fo’ ’em?”

Heslip didn’t answer, poised on the knife-edge of decision.

“Cause I gotta a lot of work to do, an’ if I ain’t up there, Mommy Harris, she just pitch in an’ do my share herse’f.”

Heslip stared at her. And finally said, “What do you feel you ought to do, Verna?”

Ballard had planned to be waiting outside the proper window in the Department of Employment office when it opened at eight-thirty on Monday morning, so he could find out where Madeline Westfield worked. But when he came out to get into his car at six-thirty, he had of all things a flat tire. Fixing it involved him in commuter traffic, especially once he was on Interstate 80 beyond Bay Bridge, so it was nearer nine-thirty when he thrust his head through the opening and asked his question of the woman who had left forty-seven minutes early on Friday. She answered with one of her own.

“This Madeline Westfield is a civil service employee of the State of California?” She was a flattened-down-forty, with dark hair and a bright nylon scarf knotted about her muscular neck. She asked her question as if expecting to catch him in an indiscretion.

“That’s my understanding, yes, ma’am.”

A minute of page-turning and she had it. And told him.

What? his mind shrieked. She worked where? In which section?

He lit out running for a phone, before remembering that he couldn’t phone because of the bug on the DKA phone. He checked his watch. Nine twenty-six. The hearing started at ten. If he drove like hell, he surely would be there before Pivarski had testified and departed. Wouldn’t he? Hec Tranquillini planned a minute cross-examination. Man, so inevitable, so logical, when you thought it through. It was the only place she could have worked for Greenly to have had to seek her out and subvert her.