Джо Горес: Gone, No Forwarding

She found the summary paragraph. “ ‘The conduct by respondent alleged in Paragraphs III through VII above is grounds for disciplinary action against respondent under the provisions of sections 6930 and 6947(k) of the Business and Professions Code in conjunction with section 6863 of the Business and Professions Code.’ ” She looked at Kearny. “So what do we do about it?”

“First, we call Hec Tranquillini and ask him to hustle his bustle down here. Maybe we can just pay Pivarski the money and the State’ll back off.” He gulped coffee he’d let get cold and lit the cigarette he’d taken from the pack earlier. “But I doubt it. So we’d better find out who was working in the Oakland office on November fifth who might have witnessed the transaction.”

“It’d be so easy if Kathy were still... still...”

“But she isn’t. And, short of a stance, she isn’t going to be.” He gestured at the Summons and Complaint. “One break we got, the deputy attorney general who’ll serve as prosecutor at the hearings is Johnny Delaney. The sweet deal I gave him on that Kawasaki for his kid last year...”

“Dan, leave the wheeling and dealing on this to Hec.” Kearny shrugged. “Sure. Now, you get started on those Oakland-office employment records. I want ’em all — inside men, outside men, skip-tracers, collectors, file clerks...”

“What do I do with the names once I’ve got ’em?”

“Which investigator should we bring in on this? Of O’B, Ballard and Heslip, which one has the lightest workload?”

After a long pause Giselle said unwillingly, “Larry. He was up the coast after abalone over the weekend and called in sick yesterday. Bart handled his hot ones while he was gone.”

“Why the hesitation?”

“He didn’t...” She paused, unwilling to impeach Ballard’s character, but then the image of Kathy dead in her coffin rose up within her. “Dan, he didn’t even show up for Kathy’s funeral.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know she’s dead.”

Giselle was silent again for a long moment, then felt a great weight lift from her mind. Of course, that had to be it! She said eagerly, “Okay, I’ll get on the radio and bring him in.”

Now, as taught long ago to Ballard by the master, Patrick Michael O’Bannon, ducking a radio summons was child’s play. One merely monitored without responding. But Ballard’s problem was ducking the phone, with its hypnotic ringing, while he was still at home. This had entailed taking the top off the baseplate and wrapping electrician’s tape around the clapper. Thus, when the phone was turned to loud, the clapper struck only one bell and rang as if soft. On soft, it didn’t make a sound.

But that system worked not at all when one passed out beside the phone after forgetting to turn it to SOFT.

The scream crashed into Larry Ballard’s ears. He sprang from the easy chair in a shambling run to ram headfirst into a wall. He fell down. The scream crashed again. He crawled upright against the wall, staggered back across the room to turn down the phone. Bending over made him want to vomit. Panting shallowly, he leaned his forearms against the mantel of the fake fireplace. Something horrible and bright was worming through the frayed lace curtains.

Sunlight. Ballard peered at himself in the speckled mirror above the mantel. His eyes were too bloodshot to tell whether one pupil was dilated or not, but even without that he knew it was a brain tumor. What else could make a head hurt like that? Unless...

He squinted at the front bay window again, which looked across Lincoln Way to the fog-haunted reaches of Golden Gate Park. He could see! Could it just be... a hangover ?

He staggered back to the chair and collapsed into it, to sit with the now dead phone in his lap as he tried to piece together the previous day and night.

Maria had married someone else. Oh God, the agony, the betrayal! So he’d gotten drunk Monday night. Yesterday... yes, he’d called in sick to nurse that hangover. Last night, out and around. Drinks. A whole lot of drinks. Oh pain. Oh woe. Oh agony. Oh...

Giselle looked out of Kathy’s city-grimed bay window at the grade school across Golden Gate Avenue. Not Kathy’s window anymore. Her window. Oh damn, damn. Three weeks ago the fall term had begun. Maybe she ought to go back, get her teacher’s credentials...

Kearny buzzed on the intercom. “How’s the list coming?”

She regarded the masses of paper strewn across the desk. Personnel folders. Payroll records. Old collection and field-investigation reports. “I think I’ve isolated everyone who could possibly have been working out of Oakland that day. But I can’t raise Larry.”

“Dammit, let’s get off the ground on this thing.”

Why is he so uptight? she wondered. So Kathy was gone, all they needed was someone else who’d been there that day to substantiate their version of events. Right? Then she had to smile to herself a little as she reached for the phone again. In just about every tough private-eye novel she’d ever read, some cop ended up threatening to take away the detective’s license.

Now the State was doing it to them. In real life.

Ballard sat up abruptly in the big saggy chair. He’d just peed in his pants. Then he realized it was the vibrations from the silenced phone in his lap as it tried to ring. He yawned. Man, that was the end of boozing for a while. Say, six or seven years. How did O’Bannon manage it a couple of nights a week? That must be one tough Irishman. He picked up the phone.

“Can you come in right away?” asked Giselle’s voice flatly.

“Ohh-h-h,” he groaned. “I am not a well man.”

“There’s a big flap on. Dan wants you on special assignment for a couple of days.”

As if by magic, his brain tumor was receding. “Flap about what?”

“He’ll want to tell you himself.”

Better and better his head felt. “On my way.” Then, trying to ungrump her, he asked, “By the way — who died?”

She told him, in a sudden hysterical burst of words. Which made it the unfunniest remark of his life.

Hector Tranquillini — Ettore in front of Italian judges because, insomma, it couldn’t hurt — had the sort of thick-lipped joviality Al Capone supposedly possessed. He stood, however, only five-four in his high-heeled boots and weighed only one hundred and forty-five pounds after a heaping plate of Mama’s pasta. He had thinning black hair and black marble eyes, which could snap like a hard frost. They were snapping now. “Just because you government boys have been busting it off in people ever since California joined the Union, don’t think you’re going to keep on doing it.”

Jack Delaney beamed across the plain wooden table. He was a very big Irishman with freckles and gray-shot red hair who out-weighed Tranquillini by a hundred pounds but was bright enough to be afraid of him in a law court. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

“Look, Hec, Kearny got caught trying to steal second and got tagged out. It’s simple as that. If DKA’ll plead guilty—”

“Now my client is a thief? Before the hearing?”

“Hector, Hector, that was just a figure of speech.”

But Tranquillini had bounced to his feet. Before hanging out his shingle in the heart of the Tenderloin because he could afford only Tenderloin rents, he’d been a tax attorney for the IRS. For his first two years of private practice he’d not had a client, not one, who wasn’t a hooker. He still had a lot of hookers, but now he had DKA, too. And he knew all there was to know about being legally nasty.

“Figure of speech?” He was at the corner where he knew the concealed pickup was. To the wall he thundered, in case the tape was turning; “I HOPE YOU’RE GETTING THIS ALL DOWN!”