Джо Горес - Dead skip

“He hasn’t?” asked Ballard.

“Naw, he never did. Didn’t any mail come, either.”

“How did he get in touch with you about taking over the equity in the car?”

“He, ah, through a newspaper ad. Just a phone number, it gave, in the Concord paper. I hadda go down to San Jose to see the car. Some tract house, I can’t remember the address—”

“1545 Midfield Road?” asked Ballard.

“That’s it. After we closed the deal, he, ah, asked me to pick up his mail for him. He said he didn’t trust the post office. I didn’t want it to come to my rooming house, you know, Savidge has that address, so I thought about Sharon right away. I hadn’t met Gloria then yet. Then I forgot to tell Sharon for a couple of weeks...”

Which explained the returned letter which had given Kearny the Beaghler address, the returned W-2 which had led Ballard to it.

“Can’t I... ah... keep the car until—”

“No,” said Kearny flatly. “Of course, we’ll give you our personal receipt for both the car and the registration slip. I’m sure you can work something out later with the bank. And meanwhile, Mr. Odum, we’ll clear you on the car with Savidge.”

“That’s right,” said Ballard, on cue. “I’ll tell him that my informant was mistaken, that it wasn’t you driving it after all.”

Odum finally shrugged, even grinned wryly. Ballard could see, suddenly, how he had been able to hang paper around a series of East Bay bars. He had a gold tooth right in front; that tooth, with the wide grin and the glasses and the shaggy hair, gave his face a sort of witless charm that suggested he was too dumb to steal.

“Uh... Mr. Savidge won’t have to know about...” He stopped and jerked a thumb at the Toronado and the blonde waiting inside it.

“Our little secret, Mr. Odum,” said Kearny soothingly.

He surrendered the keys; they helped him carry his tool kit over to the Toronado. The tools were the only possessions he had in the car. Gloria Rouse started hassling him angrily as soon as Kearny and Ballard had retreated out of earshot. Ballard called the cops to report the repo; just before he left the booth, the argument ended and the Toronado laid twin streaks of rubber taking off.

“Seven’ll get you ten it was her three hundred bucks,” said Kearny. “In fact, he probably got the whole five bills from her and then just told her he’d sent the other two hundred to the bank.”

Ballard agreed. To take even as small a game as Odum, Gloria Rouse would just naturally have to sweeten the pot with money. She was absolutely the ugliest woman he had ever seen, at least from the neck up. He actually found it hard to believe that somebody, sometime, hadn’t stuck her in the dog pound by mistake. Maybe somebody had. Maybe that’s where Odum had gotten her. Went in for a collie, came out with Gloria Rouse.

Kearny was still staring pensively after the departed car. “Well, what do you think? Still like little Howie as that topless dancer’s weirdo with the flashlight? What did she call him? Tall? Dark? Handsome? This guy looks like he’s been in a closet for twenty years.”

“Odum must have something , Dan. Sharon Beaghler—”

Kearny shook his head impatiently. “She’ll drop her pants for anything that can get stiff. Just the fact that her old man doesn’t like Odum would be enough to turn her on to him.”

“So we’re right back where we started? It was Griffin all along? And we don’t have lead one as to where Griffin is — except that he was supposed to have left the country. Who don’t we have extradition treaties with any more?”

“Not quite back where we started.” Kearny got into the T-Bird. “We’ve got this. And we’re pretty sure Odum is out of it. And we know that if Griffin left the country, he came back — at least somebody knocked Bart on the head. I’ll drive down to Concord to my wagon, throw this on the tow bar, and bring it in tomorrow morning. You’d better go home and get some sleep.”

“Big deal,” grunted Ballard, with a terrible sense of anticlimax.

How could they have missed so badly? As he began the fifty-mile drive to San Francisco, Ballard mentally reworked the other five cases he had closed in his search for Bart’s attacker. Had he screwed up on one of those? Or had the attacker actually come from some other case entirely? Or from some incident in Bart’s life that nobody — maybe not even Bart — would know about?

Or were the police right after all? Had Bart taken out the Jag for some unknown personal reason and gone off Twin Peaks by accident?

No, dammit, he couldn’t accept that. There had to be something he had missed or misinterpreted in the Griffin file, something even Kearny had missed or misinterpreted, something that would lead them to...

He realized that he had listened twice to his own name being called on the radio by an unfamiliar voice.

“Uh, yeah, this is SF-6. Over.” Panic nibbled at him. Bart...

“Are you Larry Ballard?”

“10-4. Larry Ballard. Go ahead, please.”

“This is Dunlop Jensen, NFS. Giselle Marc of KDM 366 asked me to relay a message to you from San Francisco, over.”

NFS. News Forwarding Service. Ballard remembered Giselle talking about this guy. A house-bound cripple who lived up in the hills behind Oakland and made a living monitoring scores of local radio bands, picking up reports of fire, robberies, emergencies, relaying them to Bay Area TV stations for a per-item fee and to emergency services gratis.

“Did you read my last transmission, SF-6? Over.”

“Loud and clear, NFS. Go ahead with the message from KDM 366.”

Ballard was amazed his voice was so even. Dread was clutching at him. Giselle wouldn’t be on the DKA radio at midnight unless something had happened. Bart... dead? Or maybe worse, Bart waking up with mashed potatoes where his brains had been? Since Oakland Control would be shut down and SF Control hadn’t been able to reach them here, far beyond the East Bay hills, Giselle had used Dunlop Jensen as a relay.

“Here is the message,” came Jensen’s voice. “ ‘Bart is sitting in with a full deck.’ KDM 366 said you would know what this meant.”

What it meant? Jesus, Jesus, it meant Bart was awake and all right! It meant...

“10-4! Message received and understood. Do you drink bourbon, over?”

“Anything I can get, SF-6.” There was immediate warmth in the voice at Ballard’s personal question. “I’ve got the original hollow leg. Two of ’em, in fact. Literally.”

“Giselle and a bottle and I will be up on Sunday.”

“I’ll be here,” said Jensen happily, and signed off.

Ballard’s foot went down, sending the Ford toward the Bay Bridge at a speed that would have gotten him a ticket if the CHP unit patrolling that stretch of freeway hadn’t been stopped for coffee in the all-night café at Orinda Village.

The T-Bird had no citizens’ band, so Kearny did not hear the exchanges between Ballard and Dunlop Jensen. He was loafing along at a sedentary sixty, listening to KEEN Radio’s country and western out of San Jose, tapping time against the steering wheel with his fingers. If some of Ballard’s frustration at the dead end in the Charles M. Griffin investigation also burned in his gut, he gave no outward sign of it. He had been around a long time, knew himself well enough to control impatience.

Not that knowing yourself helped a hell of a lot in the detective business. Knowing other people was the secret, knowing enough to ease off on Parker, to ease off on Hawkley, to keep pushing on Griffin. He’d never ease off on that son of a bitch because, unlike Ballard, he had no momentary fears that they might have gotten the wrong case.