Джо Горес: Dead skip

“Yes.” In the doorway, Ballard paused. “Thanks, Dan.”

Through the one-way glass they watched him cross the basement to Heslip’s cubicle. Giselle cleared her throat. “It was good of you to go along with Larry so he could get it out of his system, Dan, but you were awfully rough on him. He could be right, you know. It isn’t like Bart to—”

“He is right,” said Kearny. He shook out cigarettes for them.

“What?” Giselle gaped as one hand groped behind her for the chair Ballard had vacated. She sat down without taking her eyes from Kearny. “You mean that all the time—”

“Larry’s involved, emotional on this. I had to get him thinking like a cop again.” He mimicked Ballard’s voice. “I think . Jesus!”

Giselle feathered smoke through her nose, felt a quick stir of anticipation. This was it, one of those rare moments for which she stayed on at DKA despite her M.A. in history and the offer of a teaching fellowship from S.F. State. The hunt. It got into your guts, twisted them; and Kearny was the best hunter there was. She waggled her fingers at him.

“Give,” she said. “Tell me what I missed. What Larry missed.”

Kearny put his elbows solidly on the desk. “All right, the call came in at three-thirty, at home. Operating assumptions: Bart Heslip wouldn’t joy-ride a repo; if he did, he wouldn’t be drunk; if he was drunk, he still wouldn’t smash it up.”

“But just assumptions,” said Giselle quickly. “No facts.”

“No? I talked with the driver and the steward in the Park Emergency Hospital over by Kezar Stadium, and they gave me what you and Larry just heard Waterreus say: the booze in the Jaguar was Scotch.”

“Ri-i-ght,” said Giselle, chagrined. “And Bart never, not ever, drank anything but bourbon. When he drank anything at all.”

“That made me go up to Twin Peaks to look it over at five o’clock this morning.” His gray eyes gleamed in the rough granite face. “The only place a car could go over, he went. The only place , you follow me? So then I came down to the office. And Bart’s car was parked across the street where it still is.” He paused. “Unlocked.”

Giselle sat up straight, suddenly. “Bart would never—”

“Exactly. Ballard missed that, too. And something else he missed. Look at this.”

He opened his desk drawer, flopped a trifolded sheet of paper on the desk. Pink report carbons were stapled face-out to the back of it. Harold J. Willets. Scrawled across the front was Heslip’s notation, Repo, with the date beneath it.

“Lying alongside the curb outside the front door,” said Kearny.

“He could have dropped it, not noticed...”

He shook his head to the question in her voice. “No way. What do all our men do when they call in a repo? They write down the cop’s name and shield number. Here it is, see? Delaney, 7-5-8.”

“What time did Delaney log in Bart’s call?”

“One-oh-one A.M. I talked with Delaney; he said they joked back and forth, Bart sounded perfectly sober then. Ballard got here at one-twenty-five. That means that in a little over twenty minutes, Bart had to take off in a repo — to buy a quart of Scotch, let’s say — in such a hurry that he left his own car unlocked, and left the office locked but didn’t bother to set the alarms.”

Giselle shook her head. “That just doesn’t make it, Dan.”

“Now it gets cute. What was he going to do until Larry got here?”

“Type reports.”

“Sixteen of them, remember. That’s what he told Larry on the radio. We both know he always writes his notes on the face of the last report carbon stapled to the assignment sheet. We also know that he keeps those case sheets which are ready for reports over his car visor. He had the Willets assignment sheet with him because he’d just phoned it in to the cops, you follow me? But—”

“But he would need the others from over the visor,” said Giselle in excitement, “and he would go out to get them...” She ran down. “But how do we know he was carrying the Willets assignment in his hand when he went out?”

“Because I found it in the gutter. Right where he would drop it if he got sapped as he came out the door. If he hadn’t been carrying it, it would still be on his desk with the condition report. Or it would be missing.”

“Missing?”

“The rest of them are missing.”

Giselle’s eyes went wide with shock. “All of his case assignments are missing?”

“No, not all. I think all of those he worked yesterday — the ones that would have been over the visor. We know he picked up three cars last night, right? Well, no assignment sheets were over the visor ready for reports, none of those three repo assignments were in his briefcase. And none of those that were in the briefcase have notations of work done yesterday. Yet he told Larry he worked sixteen of them.”

“So I’d better go through all of the open files, type a list of the ones Bart was carrying, compare that with the list of case assignment sheets Larry finds in Bart’s folders—”

“Right,” said Kearny. “Another thing Larry missed. He spent twenty minutes with that doctor, never asked him whether there was alcohol in Bart’s bloodstream. I asked when I called over there; all the Scotch was down the front of his shirt.”

“If we remind the police of that—”

Kearny shook his head. “The cops have it as an accident, let them keep it that way for a while. Somebody tried to knock off one of my men, Giselle. Somebody panicked on some case after talking with Bart sometime yesterday, and acted damned fast to take him out. Then he grabbed all of those case assignments to mask which one he was really after — actually, of course, he was after Bart’s notes on the back of it. He couldn’t know that our routine is so standardized we’d realize the assignment sheets were missing. So then he locked up after running the Jag out, forgot to lock Bart’s car door, didn’t know about the burglar alarms. Strictly a panic operation all the way, but he almost got away with it. Almost. We’re going to find that bastard, and—”

Ballard burst into the cubicle, almost stuttering with excitement. “Dan! Giselle! Every single damned one of Bart’s case sheets that he worked yesterday is missing! That means—”

“All except this one,” said Giselle dryly.

He grabbed it out of her hand. “Yeah! Dirt, grease, oil on it...” He looked at Kearny. “In the gutter out in front?”

Kearny nodded.

“Then he did get it here. Went out to cross the street to his car for the other assignments, and—”

“You had seventy-two hours as of two o’clock this morning to convince me,” said Kearny. “Twelve of them are already gone.”

Sixty-eight. That was how many cases Giselle and Ballard, working together, finally were able to confirm as being carried by Heslip at the time the Jaguar had gone off Twin Peaks.

Current: active files on which work would have to be done. There were thirty-seven of them, ranging from two months old to those assigned to Heslip the day before, and which still needed their twenty-four-hour first report.

Hold: eleven of them. Open cases, still active and still in the area, but cases on which the clients had advised DKA that the subjects were in the process of working out arrangements with them.

Skip: fourteen skips. When the subject had left the area covered by the field agent — literally, “skipped out” — he became the responsibility of the inside skip-tracers (usually girls) who worked the files by phone. The field agent held these files in abeyance until new leads had been developed.