Джо Горес: Gone, No Forwarding

“I told that goddam Hawkley it wasn’t going to work,” he said, and started edging his way toward the door.

Bart Heslip hung up the phone, his heart singing. Yeah, man! Wasn’t any other woman anywhere, ever, like his Corinne. Get this hearing finished up, get Verna over to Oakland for a one-day reunion with her mother and brother, then home to Corinne. Who was right now in the process of taking the rest of the day off.

Tomorrow to get Verna back to Harlem and himself back to Boston to see if he could point a finger at the two hit men who had blown up Johnny Mack Brown and probably messed up Fleur Lisette in New Orleans. Today and tonight was for him and Corinne. Especially tonight.

He turned from the phone, whistling cheerily, and saw Larry Ballard coming through the doors from McAllister Street. Must have parked in the Civic Center Garage, his mind registered, even as he exclaimed, “Larry! What in the hell—” While Ballard was exclaiming, “Bart! Where in the hell...”

“Just in from Boston with little Verna, who’s upstairs testifying right now.”

Ballard began, “Hey, that’s terrific!” and then suddenly froze stock still. “Verna? She’s here? Holy Christ!”

“Hey, what’s the matter? What...”

“Greenly has a girlfriend who—”

“And him a married man, too. Tsk, tsk.”

“Christ, Bart, she works in the Department of Motor Vehicles.” He paused for an instant. “In the Driving License Picture Section!”

With a common impulse, both men raced for the stairwell. At this time of day the stairs would probably be quicker than the elevator at the other end of the hall. Heslip sputtered out their mutual thoughts as they ran down the corridor, ducking slower pedestrians like bikers weaving through freeway traffic.

“They had a pipeline into Benny’s investigation into Flip Fazzino’s murder... When the call was going to go out for DMV photos of the Teamster local’s members...”

Ballard jerked open the stairwell door, sputtering disconnected thoughts as he did. “Greenly was ordered to get someone in the section... to switch the hit man’s photo with that of Pivarski... He did...”

“So the Pivarski who’s upstairs in that hearing room right now is not the Pivarski who was in the Oakland office last year.”

They charged up the stairs two at a time.

When Wayne Hawkley emerged from the first floor men’s room he found his way blocked by a big, sloppy-looking man who matched his own six-three in height and outweighed him by at least seventy-five pounds. “The hearing room is back that way and upstairs, counselor,” said Benny Nicoletti. He had never met Hawkley, but had seen him in surveillance photos often enough. Always fruitlessly until — maybe — right now.

“I am an attorney and I have a very important—”

“Upstairs, pal.” Nicoletti flashed his badge with one hand and began steering Hawkley back toward the elevators with the other.

“I’m going to have that shield, you... you...”

“Inspector Benny Nicoletti, Police Intelligence. That last name has two t’s, counselor, for when you make your complaint. Meanwhile, we’re going back upstairs.”

By chance they had an elevator to themselves. Hawkley tried again to object, but Nicoletti cut him short. “Y’see, counselor, I been walking and thinking. And I decided that you knew we were going to give our witness to the Flip Fazzino hit an eyeball of Pivarski. I also decided that you made such a fuss about keeping Pivarski from showing up at this hearing because you really wanted him to show up.”

“That’s ridiculous,” sputtered Hawkley.

“Wanted him to show up according to your timetable. I don’t know why, but...”

The elevator doors opened and Nicoletti dragged his reluctant companion into the hall. “... course if I’m wrong, I’ll apologize and you can go after my badge. But first we’ll see what’s happening in the hearing—”

A gun went off somewhere down the hall. Nicoletti made a magically quick movement at great variance with his bulk, and a Police Positive with a four-inch barrel appeared in his hand.

“You bastard!” he grated, dragging Hawkley forward, “if someone got shot...”

Dan Kearny got shot.

He sat down abruptly on the floor, one shoulder feeling like someone had slammed it in a car door, and stared stupidly at the blood running down off his lax fingers to the floor. How much blood, he wondered hazily, was there in a fifty-year-old fool who had been so stupid as to try and be a hero? He’d made a grab for the gun and it had swung around to look at him from a muzzle as big as a rain barrel, and then the rain barrel had spoken and Kearny had sat down.

The professional killer who had taken out Flip Fazzino and seven others over a ten-year career swirled the fingers of his left hand through Giselle Marc’s long blond hair and jerked her to her feet. She yelped with pain and then went white with shock as he rammed the muzzle of the .38 up under her chin. “She gets the next one,” grated the pseudo-Pivarski, and kept moving. No one else did. Verna was almost placid in the witness chair, the Hearing Officer had disappeared behind his desk, Hec Tranquillini was frozen half out of his chair, and John Delaney was holding Norbert Franks by the throat so Franks was unable to leave with his confederate.

Kearny finally understood most of it, as he watched the killer sliding out the door with Giselle. He wanted to throw a chair at the gunman, but was just too tired. The blood was puddling under his hand now. Pretty soon it would reach his thigh and ruin his suit pants. Blood was very hard to get out.

Or get back, once it was lost.

Sleepy.

But his brain seemed to work pretty well, even if the rest of him was sliding away.

Hawkley finds out there’s an eyewitness to the Fazzino hit who thinks he can l.D. the killer. The killer therefore needs an absolute alibi. Among his not especially bright nephew’s clients is somebody who has an alibi. He was in the DKA office making a payment at the time of the Fazzino hit. He looks a little like the hit man. Maybe the fact that his payment was being made to the office of Dan Kearny, who originally blew the whistle on Fazzino, is what triggers the idea of a substitution in Hawkley’s mind.

So he gets his nephew to push for a misconduct hearing with the Professional Standards Bureau. Easy, when the auditor is already in your pocket. At the hearings, if it comes to that, he can always try to get the phony Pivarski to testify on a day when none of the witnesses to the real Pivarski’s payment are scheduled to testify. The real Pivarski himself? Bought off or dead.

Kearny looked back at the doorway. His mind had been running so fast that he could still see part of Giselle’s back as she was dragged into the corridor by the killer. Poor Giselle. Ought to help her but... so tired...

So then Nicoletti turned up the witness. It was getting hot. And then Kathy died of natural causes. Suddenly the whole thing was necessary and would work. One witness dead, a second with a bad memory and willing to petjure himself anyway, a third disappeared.

So he tried it. And until the missing witness showed up, unexpectedly, on the day he brought the phony Pivarski in to testify, everything was working for Hawkley. Still was, since Hawkley had skipped clean, and the killer had just disappeared into the hall — clean. Enough to make you weep.

Suiting actions to thoughts, Dan Kearny put down his head and wept. Wept with physical weakness while cursing himself inwardly for what he thought was will-power weakness. And there was, at one side, Hec Tranquillini, using a belt as a tourniquet and saying the wound looked more bloody than bad, and on the other, the little black girl — what was her name — Verna Rounds, that was it, comforting him. Because, although Kearny didn’t know it, if there was one thing Verna had learned in the past months it was how to care for frightened little fellers who had started crying.