Джо Горес: Dead skip

The three men stood looking at one another with a strange intimacy in the unused dining room. Finally Elkin gave a little sob and laid the revolver on the oak table. His hands were shaking so badly that the steel clattered against the wood. He no longer looked like an athlete: he was just a lanky, frightened man with a nose that was big enough to keep him from being truly handsome.

Gough stepped forward, scooped up the revolver, dropped it into a coat pocket. “Turn around,” he said. Elkin did. Gough made impatient gestures at Ballard. “Your belt. I got roped into a big drug bust down in the Haight on the way up here, I don’t have any cuffs with me.”

Ballard gave him the belt. Ballard’s face ached from being kept impassive. As Gough lashed Elkin’s hands behind him, the faint far wail of a siren came from down toward Stanyan. Gough nodded.

“That’ll be a prowl car.” He grabbed the tall murderer’s shoulder in an ungentle grip. “Let’s go. We’ll meet them out in front.”

Ballard followed them to the front door. The fog had thinned; as they went down the front walk, Giselle’s tall golden-haired form appeared on the sidewalk. Gough went by her without a glance; she turned and stared after him as if she had never seen a cop before. Then she burst out laughing.

“Where the hell have you been?” Ballard yelled at her.

Giselle quit laughing and ran up the walk. “Larry! Are you all right?”

He put a hand to his kidney and groaned. Actually, it didn’t feel too bad; but he had to go to the bathroom and was afraid to. If blood came out... “I was almost killed!” he exclaimed. “Why in hell didn’t you blow the horn when Elkin showed up?”

She gestured after Ed Gough. “He got in the car with me about fifteen minutes after you left. He’d had the same idea as you, to search for the body. But since you were already inside, he said let you find it. But then Elkin showed up. He told me to run for a phone, and then he followed Elkin right up the walk and into the house. No gun, no nothing. He looked awfully damned good doing it, Larry.”

So the bastard had been in the house when Ballard had been attacked, probably had been hiding out of sight at the foot of the stairs to the second floor, just inside the front door. Had let Ballard get slammed in the kidneys and hadn’t done a damned thing. Had then slammed the front door from the inside and come down the hall at the crucial moment.

An SFPD radio unit squealed into Java from Masonic, red lights turning, siren dying. Two uniformed cops jumped out.

Ballard turned and started down the hall. “There’s a bottle of bourbon in the dining room.”

Ten minutes later the front door slammed and familiar aggressive footsteps came down the hall.

“How did you know Elkin was the one?” demanded Ballard as Dan Kearny alias Ed Gough came into the room.

“When I was driving back in the T-Bird,” said Kearny, “I realized Griffin seemed to be two men — one who attacked Bart coldly and viciously, the other who was Cheri’s gentle soul drinking too much out of grief about his mother’s death. Then I finally caught on that somewhere along the line a substitution had been made, a phony for a real Griffin. It had to be after Cheri and before Odum. So...”

“So,” said Giselle, “as soon as you realized you had two different psychological descriptions, you started looking for two different physical descriptions, right?”

“I finally started to think about the evidence instead of just walk around it. When I did that, Elkin stuck out like a broken thumb. Only he talked with Griffin when Griffin called in sick on the tenth and eleventh of February. He was the one who started the talk that Griffin might have been embezzling. He was the one who told Larry that Griffin had said the mother’s will was out of probate — nobody else heard Griffin say that. He fit Cheri’s description of Griffin’s kinky friend. Even getting rid of the furniture in the California Street house — if that wasn’t Griffin, it had to be somebody who knew Griffin wouldn’t be around to object. So then I went back and asked Odum the two questions I should have asked him in the first place.”

“For a description of Griffin,” said Ballard. “But what was the second?”

“Whether Odum gave the description to Bart. He did.”

“And Bart caught up with the description on the wrong person. He thought it was just a coincidence, but he wanted to ask me about it because it bothered him.”

“Well,” said Giselle. She looked at her watch, but said, “What’s the penalty for impersonating a police officer, Dan?”

Kearny stopped at the door, grinned. He had to get down to Fifth and Bryant to sign the murder complaint against Elkin so he could be held without bail. “I liked the stuff about the spectrographic analysis of inks, myself. You ought to get out of here if you don’t want to get stuck for the rest of the night. They’ll be coming with a warrant to bust up that cellar floor. Damned good job, you two. Take the day off.”

“It’s Saturday,” said Giselle. “We aren’t supposed to work anyway.”

“Then take Sunday off, too.”

“Why didn’t you call yourself Joe Friday?” asked Ballard coldly.

“You know I always use street names for my aliases,” said Kearny with great dignity. “Bush. Franklin. Turk. Gough. One of these days I’ll have to work something up with Golden Gate in it.”

They stared at the empty doorway, listened to Kearny’s energetic footsteps pound back down the hall. The front door slammed.

Ballard shook his head in wonder. “The son of a bitch probably will, too.”

Giselle laughed. Then she said, “Looks like you’re stuck with running me over to Oakland after all.”

Ballard used a four-letter word. Then, gritting his teeth, he used Elkin’s bathroom. No blood. Which cheered him so much that he took the bottle of bourbon with him. Maybe he could sneak it into the hospital in the morning. Bart liked bourbon, and Corinne Jones would take a sip of it from time to time. Especially when she had something to celebrate.