Джо Горес - Dead skip

Heslip had started the Kenneth Hemovich case with a given work address of 1680 16th Street. This turned out to be a private home where nobody had ever heard of the subject. Cute. The given residence address had been 644 Mount Vernon Avenue. Not much better: a black woman with eight children and a TV addiction. She hadn’t removed her eyes from the twenty-six-inch color screen, Heslip’s report stated, during the entire interview.

At least she knew the subject, had even seen him three times with Virginia Pressler, the thirty-two-year-old girl friend. The Mount Vernon woman had cared for the three Pressler children (eleven, nine, and eight) until three weeks before, when old man Pressler had come and abruptly taken them away.

Hemovich and Virginia Pressler were living together as man and wife “in the sight of man but not before the Lord God Almighty,” she told Heslip. She didn’t know where they were living together. Written neatly across the face of this gold report carbon, in Giselle’s hand, was the address where Ballard now was: 191 Stillings Avenue. Ballard’s blood quickened. Had she gotten it verbally from Heslip? Had Bart been here last night to learn... what?

Ballard went up the street, his shadow dancing long and thin before him. The under-the-house garage was locked, but he could see through the mail slot that a car was in there. His flashlight could give him the color, blue, but not the make. The file carried no color for the Hemovich Roadrunner.

When he stepped back out on the sidewalk, a voice called from the totally dark doorway of the house. “Hey, what the hell you think you’re doing?”

“Looking for Ken,” Ballard said promptly.

“Hemovich? You a friend of his?”

Something in the voice tensed his gut muscles. Choose right, you might crack the case. Wrong, you blew the whole file. The gut muscles had to serve for intuition. “Hell no. I want to repossess his car.”

After a moment the porch light went on. Ballard went up to the door. The voice said, “I figured that son of a bitch would get into trouble with somebody ’sides me pretty soon. Ran off with my wife...” Which explained where Giselle had gotten the address: from the Polk Directory .

“Wouldn’t know where they’re living, would you, Mr. Pressler?”

The door opened wider, on a sour-faced man dressed in robe and slippers, spike-haired from sleeping. His eyes gleamed briefly, but he shook his head. “Ginny works down at Kearny and California, big insurance company. Homestead.”

“How about Hemovich?”

“Sheet-metal work when he’s working. He ain’t working often.”

“You wouldn’t remember the color of that Roadrunner, would you?”

“Wouldn’t I? Yeller. Yeller as a damned canary.”

It was chilly; Ballard could see their respective breaths in the porch light.

Pressler suddenly chuckled. “When I heard you at the garage door, thought it was him, tryna get at the kids again. Ginny wants ’em so bad she can taste it — the bitch.” His face closed up like a fist; he brought a double-barreled shotgun out from behind the door frame. “He comes around next time, I’m gonna blow his head off. Right off. A burglar, y’see?”

Ballard saw. And hauled his ass out of there.

Timothy Ryan, 11 Justin Drive.

Nothing had been done on this assignment by Heslip — unless it had been done the night before. Given information: the subject was twenty-one years old, white, just married, had quit his job at Southern Pacific Railroad yard, so no work address was known. The client was a two-bit Mission District auto and accessory dealer who specialized in old cars for conversion to dune buggies, drag cars, rods, and the like. He had sold the subject the 1956 Chevrolet, then had financed racing flats, chrome rims and lugs, a chromed engine head, and virtually all the vehicular ornamentation known to man to bring it to a total contract price of $1,989.81.

The subject had paid for three months, then had quit.

Perhaps when he had gotten married?

Justin Drive was in a small cozy residential area on the fringes of Bernal Heights. No lights were on in the house, the ’56 Chevy was nowhere around, and he was too tired to care whether he woke people up or not.

“I’m not going to open this door!” warned a quavery female voice.

“Unless Tim Ryan’s there, I wouldn’t want you to.”

“We’re the Greers.”

“Don’t know the Ryans?”

“No, we’ve just been here a week, we... what?” She turned from the door; her voice timbre and intonation were definitely Negro. No Ryans here. Her voice came back, “... husband says Mr. Ryan moved in with his father-in-law. A Mr. Harrington. Out on some street comes in right where San Jose and Ocean come together...”

Back out Mission toward Daly City, south through a night-emptied city. Phone booth... whoops. A total of 123 Harringtons with residential addresses. Back to the car for the city map. Streets where San Jose and Ocean intersected... Yeah. Geneva, Seneca, Oneida, Delano, Meda, Otsego. Back to the phone book. There it was.

Patrick Z. Harrington, 61 Oneida Street.

They were old single-residence dwellings, mostly stucco, mostly set back from the street behind narrow lawns. Concrete drives led to under-the-house garages. A standard construction of the 1920s and ’30s, the houses rubbing shoulders as did most houses in San Francisco; it was a city of long, narrow building lots.

The garage door was shut but not locked; it went up with only a subdued spronging of well-oiled hinges. Four-year-old Chrysler Imperial, black and dusty. He noted the license number out of habit. Raw data collected as you came into a case often broke it later on.

The door opened immediately when he touched the bell, despite the TV squawking softly in the background. Hell. Dead end again. A stooped middle-aged black man peered at him from the doorway.

“Late for socializing, son,” he said softly.

Ballard tried to put apology into his voice. “I must have been given the wrong address, I wanted a Harrington who has a son-in-law—”

“I’m a Harrington, son. Patrick Z. No son-in-law, though.”

Hell again. He couldn’t help asking it anyway. “What’s the Z stand for?”

“Zebediah.”

That figured. He rubbed his jaw to keep from grinning. Wait until he gave O’Bannon the needle about this one. Harrington. Ryan. “Do you know a Tim Ryan?”

“Stepson. My wife’s boy by her fust husband, they’s a difference between son-in-law and stepson. He ain’t even married. Tim’s off to work now, works at an all-night gas station down on Geneva Avenue somewheres. Don’t rightly know which one, a Union, I think.” He leaned forward to peer at Ballard critically. “This about that car of his?”

Again, instant decision. Again, let the gut reaction decide. You didn’t last in this business very long without developing a feel for the cases you were on. “That’s it. Big John’s Used Cars had to hire an independent detective agency because your boy ran their man off with a machete...”

“Hell, son, know what that feller said? Right to Tim’s face? Said, ‘Ain’t no broke coon gonna default on no car payments to us.’ Now, I ask you.”

Ballard grinned and shook his head. It figured. Everything else the client had given them had been wrong, why not that, too? He’d probably find the 1956 Chevy was actually a 1908 Stanley Steamer with a smokestack or some damned thing.

“You go drive up and down Geneva,” said Harrington. “Cain’t be too many stations open all night. Tim don’t want what he ain’t paid for.”

Ballard thanked him, turned away, then stopped and turned back. “Can I ask you a question, Mr. Harrington?”