Джо Горес - Dead skip

When Giselle hesitated, stiff-faced, Corinne said in her tight furious voice, “He’s gonna whup the nigger, don’t you see? He don’t want any witnesses.”

Giselle went, fast enough so it was just short of fleeing. Her face was white. She’d never been able to handle personal emotions stripped of their insulation.

Kearny looked blandly at the black girl, his hard square face completely without expression, his gray eyes opaque as a snake’s. “Now, what seems to be troubling you, Miss Jones?”

She told him, at length. Some of it was four-letter, some of it inchoate, some of it obscene, some brilliant, some silly. All of it was cathartic. She paused for breath, her eyes flashing and her fine full bosom heaving beneath the fuzzy beige sweater she wore.

“Have a cigarette,” suggested Kearny.

She burst out crying.

He lit up, went to the head of the bed to stare down at Heslip. When she began working on her eyes with her handkerchief, he said, as if he could see her with his back turned, “What it boils down to is that I’m a son of a bitch for giving Bart a job.”

“That isn’t a job, it’s a disease! All of you — scavengers! Picking on the poor and the out-of-luck and the defenseless—”

Kearny turned to look at her. “Bullshit,” he said pleasantly.

“You wouldn’t say that to me if I was a white woman!” she cried.

Kearny leaned across the bed, talking in a sudden harsh tight voice that drove her back by its very intensity. “Did you ever stop to think just how goddamn sick guys like me get of that black beauty, black power, downtrodden blacks crap? My people didn’t keep slaves, lady. They came over here in a cattle boat back around the turn of the century. I don’t hire people because of their color. Bart works for me because he’s damn good at what he does. Period.”

“What he does is brutalizing.”

“What about keeping what you don’t pay for? Stealing credit cards? Ripping off companies that sell things people need? Embezzling? Pilfering cargoes you’re hired to unload? Cheating on welfare? These are uplifting? The rotten bastard who did this — he’s a poor misunderstood little feller who had to hit Bart because he used to piss the bed at night? Grow up.”

Corinne said, in an almost normal voice, “Then you do believe that it wasn’t just an accident!”

“I...” It stopped him dead for a moment. Women, there was just no way to ever tell what they were going to come up with. He fought back a grin. He said, “I believe it. And I’m going to get the son of a bitch who did it.”

“Larry’s going to get him, not you! You can’t even give him another man to help him work those cases.”

After clouting Ballard alongside the head a few hours before. He smiled bleakly. “Speaking of Ballard, keep your hands off him. He’s walking around with his head on one side like he’s just gone a fast ten with Clay.” He made an abrupt elaborate bow. “Pardon me. Ali.”

“Go to hell,” she said. But the corners of her mouth were trying to quirk. Good stuff in her; she just had too short a fuse.

The door opened and Giselle came in, followed by mod little Whitaker. He came only about breast-high on the tall blonde, but seemed to be enjoying the view at that level. Today he was a symphony of red, green, and pale blue, which made him look remarkably like a Fillmore Street pimp. All he needed was Tiger’s razor, Kearny thought.

“Sounded like a lively discussion in here,” he beamed.

“Looks like another nice day, Doc,” said Kearny in his crushingly bland voice.

At the JRS Garage, Giselle stayed in the car while Kearny went in. Leo Busilloni was there, much as Ballard had described him, along with Danny Walker, the senior of the three partners. Like Leo, he wore white coveralls; it was not a company where the executives sat around handling correspondence.

“What I don’t understand is why he moved to San Jose,” said Leo. He said it as if Kearny had just made an indecent suggestion to him.

“I doubt if he ever did.”

“I don’t follow that.” Danny had a broken-grating whiskey voice and was smoking a vile stogie that looked like a sawed-off shotgun. “Your man was at the house last night, you say...”

“Misdirection, I think,” said Kearny. “There was no reason for him to call up the topless dancer and give her the address if all he wanted to say was that he wouldn’t be seeing her again.”

“He wanted the cash from selling the landlady’s furniture,” said Leo promptly.

Kearny shook his head. “I guess, but it sounds almost like he was doing it for spite. It sure as hell makes no sense in relation to an embezzlement — but without an embezzlement, and a damned big one, nothing else he’s done since February makes sense...”

Which should have been that. He had passed on the information about the will not being out of probate, as Ballard had asked, had also learned that no audit had been planned previous to Griffin’s disappearance. They wouldn’t even be planning one now if Elkin hadn’t insisted after getting stuck with Griffin’s job and seeing how screwed up the records seemed.

Back at the office, he sat down to the billing while Giselle went back upstairs. Five minutes later he was on his feet again, pacing. Corinne Jones had been right, he hadn’t given Ballard much help in finding Griffin. If there were two men in the field, working different addresses simultaneously, DKA could pick that bastard’s nose for him a lot sooner. Maybe even within Kearny’s phony deadline. Yes, two good field men...

It never occurred to Kearny that DKA might not turn Griffin. Hell, he’d been in town Wednesday morning, hadn’t he? Which meant that he had left tracks, somewhere in the Bay Area.

Kearny called Giselle on the intercom. “Type me up an assignment sheet on Griffin. I’ll contact Larry direct once I’m on the other side of the Oakland hills where he can pick me up. Don’t alert Oakland Control that I’ll be in their area; I’m available only for the Griffin case today.”

Giselle quickly typed up a duplicate case assignment on Charles M. Griffin; she realized she was humming while she did it. Now Larry Ballard was going to find out what work was. And digging. And hanging in there until a case broke. Kearny was moving in. Which meant it was going to be a long hard day today, a long hard night tonight — and little Giselle was going to be sitting right here on the squawk box taking the whole thing in.

Because these were the hours she lived for: when the jaws began to close.

When Ballard had hit the East Bay that morning, he hadn’t known that Kearny would be in the field before noon. He didn’t know anything about closing jaws, or care. He’d spent the drive over picking at the deadline, only fifteen hours away, and at the fact that he was no closer to Griffin than he had ever been. Another thing that niggled: he had forgotten to mention either to Kearny or in his report that the T-Bird had been in a wreck in December. Not that it made much difference; the car had been on the street since then.

Was Kearny going to take him off the case tonight after the deadline passed, if he hadn’t turned Griffin by that time? Then Ballard would have to quit DKA and go on his own. Especially after last night with Corinne. The only way he’d ever square things with her was to have the son of a bitch standing beside the bed in handcuffs when Bart woke up. If Bart woke up. Dammit, Bart had to wake up.

And meanwhile, he still had today. Had to think the way Kearny would think, work the leads the way Kearny would work them. He still remembered Kearny on the Mayfield case, when Ballard had been with DKA for only a month, taking apart a welfare worker named Vikki Goodrich to get an address. And later, after Jocelyn Mayfield had killed herself and Ballard had wanted to quit the detective business, going after Ballard the same way.