Джо Горес - Dead skip

What will you do now, Ballard — go home and cry into your pillow? She’s going to be dead for a long, long time.

What would he do if Bart died? Or ended up with a fifty-card deck?

He was doing it. Running down the bastard responsible.

The Concord police department and municipal court shared quarters at Willow Pass Road and Parkside Avenue. Ballard passed the Dukum Inn en route. In daylight it looked old and shrunken and dispirited, like an aging swinger getting up in the morning with his teeth still in the water glass. In front of the white-plaster court building were spaces reserved for police and sheriff’s deputies, and a few green fifteen-minute meters for people paying parking fines. Ballard U-turned to a one-hour meter across the street. Since Emily Tregum had suggested Griffin might be in jail, he had to check.

The desk sergeant was red-headed and Ballard’s age, with freckles on his nose and the backs of his hands; he should have used Scope that morning.

“I’m sorry, sir, we can’t give out arrest records here. I would suggest you try at the Contra Costa county jail over in Martinez. If this Griffin is in jail there now, they’ll tell you.”

“Do you have any records of an auto accident that involved Griffin last Christmas Eve?”

A girl wearing hair curlers and very hot hotpants came in to lean on the counter next to Ballard, unabashedly listening to them. She was twenty pounds overweight for even lukewarm hotpants.

“This was in Concord?” asked the cop.

“I think so.”

Coming back with a folder a few minutes later, the desk sergeant veered over to the far end of the counter from the overweight girl.

“Nosy little drip,” he said in a cheerfully quiet voice when Ballard joined him. “December twenty-fourth, a two-car accident with a vehicle driven by a Miss Wanda Moher.”

“You have an address on her?”

“Let’s see, a... 3-6-8-1 Willow Pass Road, Concord.”

“Thanks a lot, Officer.” Ballard started to turn away, then remembered to ask, “Was anyone cited in that?”

“Your friend Griffin. Drunk driving, violation-of-right-of-way. His trial was scheduled for last February eleventh; what the outcome was I don’t know.”

As Ballard went out the door, the cop already was turning to the overweight, underdressed girl, automatically reaching under the counter for a complaint form. In one of the reserved-for-police spaces was a maroon and white Mustang with the driver’s window open and the key in the ignition. Ballard repressed a shudder. She was going to make someone a dreadful wife one of these days.

The Hacienda Apartments were double-tiered around an open inner court, like a motel, California ersatz and instant stylish, individualized as canned martinis. Across Willow Pass Road, towering far beyond the intersecting patterns of TV aerials and high power lines, were the serrated smog-dimmed outlines of Mount Diablo. Ballard wondered what it had been like here when it was only rolling empty golden hills.

The mailboxes were set against the oh-so-rustic redwood slat fence which shielded the fishbowl-sized swimming pool. Wanda Moher was not listed. He found a door in the fence under a sign reading Manager , went through. Manager seemed at first to be a trio of yapping miniature poodles; then a birdlike woman in shorts with desperately skinny yet flaccid legs appeared behind them in the screened doorway. She chirped at them, cawed at Ballard.

“Wanda Moher moved out three days ago.” She craned over his head at the second tier of apartments across the court. “Eighteen-C, two over from the head of the stairs. She came in half an hour ago to get the rest of her stuff, she might still be there.”

Exteriors were pale-pink stucco with red-tiled roofs; interiors were bland as oatmeal, computer-designed so everything was built in except the tenants. Wanda was a very short, quite pretty girl who could not have weighed over ninety pounds, standing in the middle of the littered room with the dazed look of a homeowner after the fire engines have departed. Her straight nose and long straight upper lip gave her a surprisingly rabbitlike face.

“I’ve never met a real detective before,” she said, “but I love Agatha Christie...”

Ballard, who only read Richard Stark, said he was looking for a Mr. Charles M. Griffin. The transformation in Wanda Moher was startling. Her eyes flashed as much as a rabbit’s eyes can flash.

“I hope he’s in trouble good! Anything I can do to help you...”

“Start with the accident,” he suggested.

It was only 11:30 in the morning, Christmas Eve morning to be exact, and she was driving down to Oakland for some last-minute shopping. Her mother... Anyway, here came Griffin, completely drunk, zooming out of this parking lot beside a bar , and...

“That would be the Dukum Inn?” Ballard asked, on a hunch.

“Gee, it’s got a reputation with you fellows, huh?” Then her eyes got very big and she nodded wisely. “Of course! Topless!”

Her car had sustained over four hundred dollars’ worth of damage — the subject’s third such offense in less than four months. The police, she said, had told her they were determined to get him off the road this time.

“Did he lose his license at the February court date?”

“He never showed up. His lawyer got some sort of continuance for more time or something until next month. But the man who put up the money for his bond or whatever it was had to pay up. In cash.”

“Do you know who that would be?” asked Ballard.

She shrugged, momentarily outlining small, very pointed breasts under her pale pastel blouse. “Maybe my insurance agent would know. His name is Harvey E. Wyman and he’s right here in Concord.”

At 1820 Mount Diablo Boulevard, as a matter of fact. She knew because it was right next door to Moneyfast Finance, where her mother had a loan. She could be reached in future at her mother’s house at 1799 LaCalle Street, in that subdivision out beyond...

One-fifteen. And breakfast had been a cup of the DKA office coffee, which always tasted as if someone had brewed a dead rat in it. And of course they’d been out of Pream. They were always out of Pream. Somebody, probably Kearny, kept an empty jar there to fool you, but Ballard could never remember ever having found anything in it. Unless that was where they kept the rat between pots.

Since 1820 Mount Diablo Boulevard was less than three miles from Miss Moher’s non-stop mouth, he would check it before lunch. He doubted if the insurance agent would know very much — his name, maybe, if he was having a good day — but it was worth a stop.

It was a very bright and sunny two-person office, decorated in primary colors. Wyman’s empty desk was in the back by the wide picture window. At a much smaller desk in the center of the room a pleasant-faced middle-aged woman was talking on the phone. When she was finished, Ballard learned that Mr. Wyman was expected back within the hour. She would not feel right about going into Miss Moher’s file without Mr. Wyman’s knowledge and permission. He did understand?

Ballard understood. “I’ll grab a sandwich and be back in — oh, thirty, forty minutes.”

That would be fine. There was a coffee shop around the corner on Concord Boulevard. The cheeseburger and fries he had were so incredibly bad — even the pickle was soggy — that he was partially prepared for the coffee. But only partially. After tasting it, he really expected to find a tadpole in the bottom of his cup.

When he caught himself falling asleep over it, he went out to the car to bring in the Griffin file to review. A hole became immediately apparent. He’d forgotten to check at the Concord courthouse when he had been at the police department. He would go back there after he’d finished with Wyman, find out who the bail bondsman was who’d gotten burned, get the name of Griffin’s lawyer.