Джо Горес - Gone, No Forwarding

Hawkley stepped to the Golden Gate curb from his nephew’s car at 9:31 A.M. — tall, lean, aged but not frail, skin like tough old leather. Looked exactly like the folksy cracker-barrel attorney whose image he tried to create. He and Delaney shook hands.

“A pleasure I assure you, Mr. Delaney. My nephew Norbert has been telling me wonderful things about your conduct of the State’s case in this hearing.” He turned slightly to the second man emerging from the back seat. He was big, muscular, square of body and of head. “Mr. Delaney. Mr. Pivarski.”

Christ, thought Delaney, the guy looks like a Polish joke. “Delighted, Mr. Pivarski.”

“Yeah.” The voice grated like a diesel changing gears.

Delaney turned back to Hawkley, who was just ordering Franks to put the car in the Civic Center Parking Garage and return. He said, “We’ve got a half-hour before the hearing, Mr. Hawkley. I’d very much appreciate a chance to take Mr. Pivarski through his testimony before his appearance on the stand, and to do it where the opposition won’t disturb us.” He gestured down wind-blown Golden Gate at the Larkin intersection a long half block away. “We could go up the street for a cup of coffee...”

“An excellent suggestion,” said Hawkley.

Norbert Franks pulled out into traffic, making a battered six-passenger Checker Cab wait, as the three tall men, two bulky and one thin, started down Golden Gate Avenue toward the coffee shop.

“You get a good look at him?” demanded Benny Nicoletti from the back seat of the Checker Cab.

The linen-truck driver, a much paler and thinner man than he had been a year before, nodded. He was facing backwards in the jump seat opposite Nicoletti. There were three more large and competent men in the car besides them and the driver. Nicoletti clicked on the safety of the riot gun lying across his knees as the car turned downhill on Hyde Street. “Well?”

“Yeah.” The linen-truck driver’s eyes were rimmed with fatigue and something else that was probably long-standing fear.

“That’s a positive make?”

The driver said formally, “That’s the guy I saw coming out of the motel room with the shotgun and the satchel.”

“That’s him but that can’t be him,” said Nicoletti. “Okay, maybe he’s got a twin brother,” he added drily. He raised his voice. “Mike. Drop me at Market Street, will you?”

“Hey, what about me?” yelped the witness. “You promised—”

“You’re on your way to the airport,” said Nicoletti as the cab started slowing to let him out. “You don’t need me to wave good-bye.”

He stood on the curb watching the cab drive off, then he started wandering. He had to think. It had all been too easy. The big cop began strolling along with his hands in his pockets. Hawkley wasn’t dumb. What if he’d noticed that suddenly his tap on Kearny’s phone dried up of anything useful except that Nicoletti’s witness was going to leave on Friday and wouldn’t be around on Monday for a look at Pivarski in the flesh? What would that mean?

He walked a little faster, his feet keeping pace with his brain. That would mean Hawkley wanted them to I.D. Pivarski as the killer. Did that make any sense at all? Sure, if the real killer looked a lot like him and...

Nicoletti was striding right along now, unmindful of the fall nip in the air despite the bright October sunshine. Then he slowed.

Then why pick somebody like Pivarski, who had an airtight alibi? Because Pivarski was the only one available? But Hawkley couldn’t have known the witness would identify Pivarski from his driver’s license photo. Nicoletti had slowed to an amble. Of course Hawkley had fought damned hard to keep Pivarski off the stand at the hearing. But he hadn’t fought to keep out the fact that Pivarski had been at DKA’s Oakland office at the time Fazzino had been hit, so what good did keeping Pivarski himself away from the hearing do? If he indeed had actually wanted Pivarski I.D.’d by the witness?

Nicoletti realized he was standing mid-block on Fulton Street beside the old Federal Building. Standing stock still. Probably ought to go on up to the hearing, see what happened up there.

He started walking slowly along, hands in pockets, slouching. Now, what if Hawkley really hadn’t wanted to keep Pivarski from testifying at the hearing, but had merely seemed to...

So of course Ballard got stopped by the Highway Patrol.

“May I see your operating permit, please, sir?”

Ballard extended his wallet.

“Please remove it from the plastic cover and hand it to me.”

Silent manipulations by a seething Ballard, silent perusal by the CHP officer of that sacred ikon of modem life, Identification.

“I’m sure, Mr. Ballard, that you realize this is a fifty-five-mile-an-hour zone by state law. Your vehicle was clocked by our radar as traveling in excess of seventy miles an hour...”

While Johnny Delaney got down to business. “Mr. Pivarski, I would like you to cast your mind back to the events of last November fifth.”

The square, ugly face was made uglier by concentration. “The day I went to dem collection agency bastards in—”

“Mr. Pivarski, please do not anticipate counsel’s questions.” The Hearing Officer’s face was distressed, as if he had a gas pain.

“Uh... okay, Your Honor.”

Delaney started again. “You left work early that day, did you not, Mr. Pivarski, to see your attorney?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” He pointed at the Complainant’s counsel table. “Mr. Norbert Franks. Him. Right there.”

“And he instructed you...”

Kearny sat listening while the big dumb bastard methodically and ponderously, like a fat man going to the toilet, took away from him his license to practice his profession. Sentence by sentence. He was too dumb to be lying yet he had to be lying.

“Yeah. So I took my two hundred simoleons and that letter he give me, and I went to them collection agency bastards in Oakland. Daniel Kearny Associates.”

“To whom did you speak there?”

“Some queer.”

Delaney looked at the Hearing Officer and raised his shoulders slightly. “Um... a Jeffrey L. Simson?”

“I dunno his name. He took me back to the slant broad.”

The Hearing Officer looked at the ceiling and then down at his hands. He cleared his throat. “By ‘slant broad’ I take it you mean an Oriental female, Mr. Pivarski?”

“A slant or a Buddha-head. They all look the same to me.” He looked back at Delaney. “She took my two hundred bucks and signed my letter, and I left.”

“This is the letter you have testified previously your attorney gave you to—”

“Dat’s right.”

“Would you recall the name of the Oriental lady who...”

Hec Tranquillini listened with something akin to awe. He had been able to show Simson’s testimony was tainted, but this big ape’s? The trouble was, he was too dumb. Trying to dig his fingers into a crack in that dim-witted testimony would be like trying to get a handhold on polished marble. He was almost too dumb to be true.

“No, no, it wasn’t no collection, I’m tellin’ you. It was just money for them to hold, like... uh... a guy holdin’ your dough in a bet in a bar, y’know? Till we see which way all the court stuff come out. Just to keep ’em off my back for a while.”

“Previous testimony in this court indicates that you never returned the countersigned letter to your attorney, Mr. Pivarski.” Delaney beamed solicitously at him. “Is this true?”

The hulking witness looked uncomfortable for the first time. “Yeah, well, y’see, I figgered wasn’t no use runnin’ all the way out to Concord with it, y’know, I mean, he charges by the hour, sets a timer the minute you walk through the front door...” He looked doggedly over at Franks. “So I figured to mail it to him. But... well... I’d folded it up in my shirt pocket, y’know, a’ then I went bowling an’ the next day I sent the shirt to the laundry an’...” He looked around sheepishly at the Hearing Officer. “Guess I should of hung on to it, huh?”