Джо Горес: Dead skip

“I hear that Kathy’s sick again,” said Ballard, just to say something.

“She is. It worries me. She’s too young for all the troubles she has.” Kathy Onoda, the Japanese-American office manager, was just twenty-eight. Giselle was two years younger, the same age as Ballard.

He sat down in the client chair, gingerly, awaiting Kearny’s eruption. All of the signs were there: Giselle, long-faced, unsmiling; the ashtray overflowing with half-smoked butts; Kearny’s coat over the back of his chair; Kearny himself hunched forward in a watching attitude as if the Derby were being run on top of his desk.

Ballard cleared his throat. “Bart’s got another ticket. Can’t we do something about that new meter maid?”

“What time did you see Bart last night?” asked Kearny. He shook out a Lucky, offered the pack, regarding the younger man through the smoke with narrowed eyes.

“I didn’t — just talked with him on the radio about twelve-thirty. He said he’d be here, writing reports — he had sixteen of ’em to do. But he was already gone when I got here at one-twenty-five.”

“Was the Jag he repo’d here? Were the burglar alarms set?”

Ballard hesitated. Bart was his best friend, he didn’t want to give wrong answers.

“Well?” Kearny was a hard-driving forty-four, a compact, blocky man with cop’s eyes, a massive jaw, and a slightly flattened and bent nose which helped mask the cold shrewdness of his face. He had been a private investigator for over a quarter of a century, managing Walter’s Auto Detectives, until he had founded DKA almost ten years before.

“I didn’t notice about the Jag. The door was locked but the alarms were off. Why? What—”

“Bart’s in the hospital,” said Giselle.

“Hospital?” Ballard stood up abruptly, remained erect for several seconds, then with a slightly foolish look, sat down again.

“He creamed that Jaguar,” said Kearny mildly.

“That’s silly, Dan. He picked it up early in the evening, it was here when I was by at ten-thirty.” He looked over at Giselle, who was leaning against the filing cabinet with her arms folded. “Is he hurt bad?”

“He totaled the goddamn Jag!” Kearny burst out. He slammed the desk so hard with an open palm that his dice box full of ballpoint pens jumped a full inch in the air. “One of the new V-12 hardtop coupes and he totaled it. Joy-riding like some damned teen-ager—”

“Bart wouldn’t do that!” exclaimed Ballard hotly. “He—”

“Almost twelve thousand owing on it — hell, we picked it up because the subject’s insurance had been canceled. Our insurance is probably primary over the bank’s VSI. And you know what that means?” He leaned forward to angrily smear out his cigarette, his left hand automatically reaching for the pack again. “That means DKA probably is going to have to eat that son of a bitch. Our coverage is good only during recovery, in transit, and in storage. Pissing around up on Twin Peaks at three in the morning isn’t gonna be nobody’s idea of being in transit.”

Ballard shook his head doggedly. He looked over at Giselle, said again, “Is Bart all right, or—”

“No. He’s in a coma, they think he’s got a skull fracture. He—”

Ballard stood up. “Which hospital?”

“You aren’t going to do any good over there right now, Larry.” Kearny looked up from lighting his cigarette. “Visiting hours don’t start until eleven, you’ve got reports to type. I see you didn’t get any in last night.”

Ballard took a deep breath as if barely controlling himself, but said almost plaintively, “Dan, he had to have taken that car out for something besides a joy ride.” Then, seeing the look on Kearny’s face, he added hastily, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll type the damned reports.”

When Giselle left Kearny’s office ten minutes later, Ballard followed her outside. Another batch of kids was capering and shouting in the fenced playground across the street, their cries as full of spring as geese V-ing north.

“How do you like that guy?” he demanded bitterly. “More worried about the damned Jag than he is about Bart.”

“Twelve thousand bucks, Larry. And Bart was driving the car.”

“I’m not so sure of that, either,” said Ballard darkly.

She shrugged. Even in the current shoe styles she was only an inch or two shorter than his five-eleven-and-a-half. She had a short straight nose and a small mouth and blue eyes as clear as mountain water.

“There isn’t any alternative, Larry. He was there, the car was there, and nobody else was.”

“And both of ’em totaled? I’d like to hear what the Accident Investigation Bureau cops have to say.” He started to turn away, but Giselle’s voice stopped him. Her eyes were flashing, suddenly.

“Bart’s not out at County General, you know, Larry,” she snapped.

“Huh?”

“Of course Dan’s worried about getting stuck for that Jag. But Bart’s at Trinity Hospital in intensive care, a single-bed room with a private nurse as necessary. If you think all that’s covered by the DKA health plan, you’d better hope you never get sick enough to test your theory.”

“You mean that Kearny—”

“This morning, as soon as he got word. DKA’s going to be picking up a lot of medical on this no matter what finally comes out about the Jaguar.”

“Now you’ve made me feel like a bastard,” said Ballard sheepishly.

“I sincerely hope so.”

Dr. Arnold Whitaker was mod. Bright red vest under a mustard sport jacket; psychedelic tie with a knot the size of a golf ball; the flowing sandy mustache of a World War II RAF pilot.

“No use going in to see him.” He had a quick pattering voice, like mice in the attic. “Just a lump of black meat lying there in the bed at the moment. Poor pulse, respiration so bad we did a tracheotomy. Deep coma. Depressed fracture is my initial diagnosis; the skull x-rays ought to be up soon to confirm that. We’ve also done an EEG—”

“EEG?”

“Brain-wave study.” He shot a cuff to check a watch gleaming with enough chrome to plate a bumper. “If there’s nothing else...”

“I’d like to speak with Miss Jones.” When the medico didn’t react to her name, Ballard added, “Corinne Jones? His fiancée? She’s supposed to be in there waiting beside his bed.”

“Do you resent my letting her into the room and not you? I assume she’s been sleeping with the man. I assume you haven’t.”

They were on the fourth floor of Trinity Hospital, a former old people’s rest home which was in the process of being converted into a seventy-bed hospital.

Ballard, still hoping to get into the room, asked, “What are his chances of recovery, Doctor?”

Whitaker looked at his watch again, said “Damn!” explosively under his breath, said, “From which injuries? The fractured skull, the cracked ribs, or the bruised knees?”

“Bruised knees?”

“From the dashboard. Common when the auto has gone over a cliff or embankment. Sometimes their feet are knocked right out of their shoes, leaving the shoes still tied.”

“The fractured skull,” Ballard said, then added as the thought struck him for the first time, “There isn’t anything inconsistent with an auto crash, is there?”

“Um.” Whitaker considered it, eyes agleam with interest. Finally he shook his head regretfully. “No. The fracture is on the side of the skull away from the driver’s doorpost, but he probably received the injury when he was thrown from the car. He was damned lucky it didn’t roll on him.” Then he added cheerfully, almost to himself, “Of course, nothing in the injuries rules out the proverbial blunt instrument. But the concept is rather fanciful.”