Джо Горес - Dead skip

What had Elkin done to Giselle?

Elkin was sweating, holding the gun. Moisture from the fog glistened on his very black, very curly hair. His nose was too big for him to be truly handsome, Ballard thought. So why in hell hadn’t Cheri Tart mentioned that nose? Or those extra-long mod sideburns? None of this would have happened if she’d mentioned things like that.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do about you, Ballard.” He chewed his lip nervously. “I really don’t.”

“Buy me off.”

Elkin gave a short tight laugh full of a sort of despair. He went around drawing the shades, closed the window through which Ballard had entered. He looked like a tennis player, a basketball player, maybe; he didn’t look like a murderer. He sat down on the edge of the big oak table, began swinging one leg. His shoes were very brightly polished. His eyes looked sick. “Buy you off with what?”

“The money you embezzled. The money you killed Charles Griffin for — so you could blame him for stealing it.”

But Elkin just shook his head, his face almost placid. Ballard suddenly realized: he had to prime himself. Work himself up, as he probably had done with Griffin. As he had done with Bart. As he would do with Larry Ballard unless... Would going down on his knees and pleading for his life do any good? Ballard knew he would do it if he thought it would save him.

“I didn’t steal any money,” said Elkin.

Ballard almost bought it, the way he said it. But if not for money, then why... “Heslip didn’t die. He’s out of the coma, he can identify you.”

That shook Elkin, visibly. He said, “I don’t believe you.”

“Odum can identify you, too. And Cheri...”

His face went pale. “That whore! Don’t talk to me about her!”

Use it. Work on it. Mr. Kink. “I saw your trophy room upstairs.”

Elkin leaped to his feet, eyes wild. Jesus! Ballard had pushed the wrong button. But now he understood. Everything. Too late he understood it. The furniture had been sold from under Cheri merely to spite her, purely and simply. And Griffin had died, here in this house on February 9, because of Cheri.

As if reading his thoughts, Elkin said, “Chuck was an accident, really.” He sank back on the edge of the table; some of the wildness left his eyes. The muzzle of the gun wavered slightly. Ballard would roll suddenly out of the chair, keep rolling, a moving target, then dive right out of the window, shade and curtains and glass and all...

Bullshit.

“It was an accident. He came over here the night after that bitch over in Concord... Anyway, he was accusing me of wild things, things she’d said. A cheap whore like that, a topless dancer showing everything she’s got to anyone, but when I... But... Anyway, he... he was standing in the living room, by the fireplace, he said... He believed what she said about me! He... he said if I ever went near her again he... he was bigger than I am, a lot heavier, he lifted weights all the time, so I picked up the poker and I hit him. Just to knock him down. But it was turned wrong and... the end of it went right into his forehead, right into his skull above his eye. He just fell down dead. An accident...”

Where in hell was Giselle? Obviously Elkin knew nothing about her. Had she for Christ sake fallen asleep or something in the goddamn car? His back was killing him... “So you had to make it look as if Griffin had been embezzling. To explain why he disappeared.”

“That’s it,” he said. His face was working. He transferred the revolver to his right hand, flexed his fingers, returned it to his left. “Since it happened, I’ve been going down to JRS after supper, some nights, to work on the tallies and receipts to make it look as if he’d been stealing for quite a while.”

“On Tuesday you took the W-2 out of Leo’s desk after he showed it to Heslip,” said Ballard.

“But it was too late. Somehow, from that California Street address, your man got to Odum. On Tuesday night he came by on his way back from the East Bay to tell us what he had learned about Griffin. I was the only one there. After he left I stayed there a while, thinking. I knew Odum had given him a description of Griffin — he kept staring at me while he was there...”

“Because the description fit you,” said Ballard. “Because you had posed as Griffin to Odum. Why did you? Why San Jose and—”

“What else was I going to do?” he demanded in an aggrieved voice. “I could hide his body in the cellar, but I couldn’t put his car down there. I couldn’t put it in a JRS Garage, either — someone would have recognized it. So I rented a house down in San Jose, as far away from the city and the East Bay as I could get, and left it in the garage. But then your company came around looking for it.”

It was ironic: if he had just left it parked somewhere by Griffin’s house, a DKA man would have spotted it, grabbed it, and the investigation would have ended right there. Instead, he had brought in Odum as a way to get rid of it.

“And then Odum didn’t keep up the payments,” Ballard said.

“And here you are.” His voice had roughened, coarsened, deepened. Working himself up to it? No. Please... “You had to keep going. You wouldn’t let me alone.”

Oh Jesus Christ, this was it. It couldn’t be, he was only twenty-six years old, he couldn’t die yet, Jesus, he was going to shit his pants or something...

Elkin took a deep breath. His hand raised the heavy revolver.

And the front door slammed.

The gun muzzle wavered. Elkin’s face had become frantic with indecision. When whoever it was came through the door, Ballard would lunge for the bourbon bottle on the sideboard, throw it...

Heavy careless footsteps tramping down the hall, heavy as doom. Elkin whispered furiously at Ballard as if they were fellow conspirators, “Who ...”

A hard-faced, compact, bleak-eyed man in a dark topcoat came through the door, stopped. His hands were in his coat pockets. Elkin swung the muzzle of the revolver toward him, but the man was unaffected. His eyes went from one of them to the other and back. Ballard was on his feet.

“Rodney Elkin?” said the hard-faced man.

“I’m... Elkin.” The gun was wavering; he didn’t know who to point it at. If Ballard had been himself he could have taken him then. He didn’t even try.

“Inspector Ed Gough, Homicide, SFPD,” said the bleak-eyed man. Ballard had a sudden totally irrational urge to start laughing. “You are under arrest for the murder of Charles M. Griffin on the night of Wednesday, February ninth. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to counsel. If you cannot afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you. If you choose—”

“But... I have a gun!” exclaimed Elkin. He had gone into an oddly theatrical half-crouch, like a Western gunfighter on a Hollywood sound studio street.

“So do I,” said Gough. “And I know how to use mine.” He looked over at Ballard as if Elkin’s revolver did not exist. “Who the hell are you?”

“La... Larry Ballard,” he said in a carefully controlled voice.

“You a friend of his?”

“Private investigator.”

“Give me your belt,” said Gough.

“I have a gun!” yelled Elkin. He looked as if he wanted to cry; all three of them, oddly, knew that the time he could have used it had already passed.

“Don’t make me take it away from you, sonny. We’ve had a police accountant going through the books at JRS two nights a week since sometime in April. Spectrographic analysis of the inks in the ledgers show some entries were altered, others put in at different times since Griffin was murdered, trying to make it look as if the entries predated his disappearance. We’ve got an eyeball witness to Griffin coming to this house on February ninth. We’ve got an eyeball of you at the San Jose house in March. We’ve got an eyeball of someone answering your description putting a black man into a Jaguar on Golden Gate Avenue at one-fifteen a.m.on Wednesday morning. The witness got a partial make on the license plate. Should I go on?”