Джо Горес: Mostly Murder: A Short Story Collection

“I was on the phone with her when she — fainted.”

“Okay. The sergeant’ll wanna talk with you anyway.”

She was on the floor by the phone stand, her head back and her mouth open. Her skin was very pale; the beautifully luminous eyes were shut. A tracheal tube was down her throat so that she could breathe. The skirt had ridden high up one sprawled thigh, and Ballard pulled it down.

“Is she... will she—”

The intern was barely older than Ballard, but his hair already was thinning. “We’ll give her oxygen in the ambulance.” He opened his hand to display a bottle. “Unless she had something in here besides what’s on the label, she should be okay.”

Ballard glanced around the tiny two-roomer. There was a rumpled wall bed with a careless pile of paperbacks on the floor beside it; he could picture her cooped up there day after day, while her depression deepened. Above the flaked-silver radiator was a large brown water stain from the apartment upstairs; it was a room where dreams would die without a whimper.

Ballard backed off; instead of talking to the detective in charge he would call her folks so that their own doctor could be at the hospital to prevent it being listed as an attempted suicide.

That afternoon DKA closed the file on the Mayfield case. She was released from the hospital a few days later and returned to 31 Edith Alley. Without really knowing why, Ballard went over there one Tuesday evening to see her; she refused to come out of the bedroom, and he ended up in the living room, drinking tea with Vikki Goodrich.

“She’s grateful for what you did, Larry. But, as far as anything further—” She paused delicately. “Hank Stuber will be out tomorrow.” She paused again, her face suddenly troubled. “She’s going to surprise him and pick him up in my Triumph; he doesn’t know about the Continental. After that I guess she’ll be — well, sort of busy.”

Leaving the apartment, Ballard told himself that ended it Yet he sat behind the wheel of his car for a long time without turning the ignition key. Damn it, that didn’t end it! Too much raw emotion had been bared...

Thursday, June 30th: 8:15 a.m.

Each short journalistic phrase in the Chronicle, read over his forgotten restaurant eggs, deepened his sense of loss, his realization that something bright in his life had been permanently darkened.

Police officers, answering a call late last night to 31 Edith Alley, were greeted by Miss Victoria Goodrich, 24, a case worker with San Francisco Social Services. The hysterical Miss Goodrich said that her roommate, Jocelyn Mayfield, 23, and Harold P. Stuber, 38, had entered the apartment at eight p.m. Stuber had been drinking, she said; by ten p.m. he had become so abusive that he struck Miss Mayfield. According to Miss Goodrich he then departed, and Miss Mayfield locked herself in the bathroom.

At eleven p.m. Miss Goodrich called for police assistance. They broke down the locked door to find Miss Mayfield on the tile floor in a pool of blood. Both wrists had been slashed with a razor blade. The girl was D.O.A. at San Francisco General Hospital. Stuber, an unemployed bartender who was released only yesterday afternoon from the county jail, is being sought on an assault charge.

Ballard thought, I’ve never even seen the son-of-a-bitch I could pass him on the street and not even know it. He felt a sudden revulsion, almost a nausea, at his own role in the destruction of Jocelyn Mayfield. Half an hour later he slammed the Chronicle down on Kearny’s desk.

“Stuber said he’d leave her if we took the Continental while he was in jail. He left her, all right.”

Kearny looked at him blandly. “I’ve already seen it.”

“If we hadn’t taken the car—”

“—she would have killed herself next month or next year over some other deadbeat. She was an emotional loser, Ballard, a picker of wrong men.” He paused, then continued drily, “It’s the end of the month, Ballard. I’d like to review your case file.”

Ballard dropped his briefcase on the littered desk. “You know what you can do with your case file, Kearny? You can take it and—”

Kearny listened without heat, then reached for his cigarettes. He lit one and sneered, through the new smoke, “What will you do now, Ballard — go home and cry into your pillow? She’s going to be dead for a long, long time.”

Ballard stared at him, speechless, as if at a new species of animal — the square pugnacious face, the hard eyes which had seen too much, the heavy cleft chin, the nose slightly askew from some old argument which had gone beyond words. A long slow shudder ran through the younger man’s frame. Work — that was Kearny’s answer to everything. Work, while Jocelyn Mayfield lay with a morgue tag on her toe. Work, while scar tissue began its slow accretion over the wound.

All right, then — work. Very slowly he drew his assignments from the briefcase. “Let’s get at it then,” he said in a choked voice.

Dan Kearny nodded to himself. A girl had died; a man had had his first bitter taste of reality. And in the process DKA bought themselves an investigator. Maybe, with a few more rough edges knocked off, a damned good investigator.

I’ve thought about it a lot, man; like why Victor and I made that terrible scene out there at San Quentin, putting ourselves on that it was just for kicks. Victor was hung up on kicks; they were a thing with him. He was a sharp dark-haired cat with bright eyes, built lean and hard like a French skin-diver. His old man dug only money, so he’d always had plenty of bread. We got this idea out at his pad on Potrero Hill — a penthouse, of course — one afternoon when we were lying around on the sun-porch in swim trunks and drinking gin.

“You know, man,” he said, “I have made about every scene in the world. I have balled all the chicks, red and yellow and black and white, and I have gotten high on muggles, bluejays, redbirds, and mescaline. I have even tried the white stuff a time or two. But—”

“You’re a goddamned tiger, dad.”

“—but there is one kick I’ve never had, man.”

When he didn’t go on I rolled my head off the quart gin bottle I was using for a pillow and looked at him. He was giving me a shot with those hot, wild eyes of his.

“So like what is it?”

“I’ve never watched an execution.”

I thought about it a minute, drowsily. The sun was so hot it was like nailing me right to the air mattress. Watching an execution. Seeing a man go through the wall. A groovy idea for an artist.

“Too much,” I murmured. “I’m with you, dad.”

The next day, of course, I was back at work on some abstracts for my first one-man show and had forgotten all about it; but that night Victor called me up.

“Did you write to the warden up at San Quentin today, man? He has to contact the San Francisco police chief and make sure you don’t have a record and aren’t a psycho and are useful to the community.”

So I went ahead and wrote the letter because even sober it still seemed a cool idea for some kicks; I knew they always need twelve witnesses to make sure that the accused isn’t sneaked out the back door or something at the last minute like an old Jimmy Cagney movie. Even so, I lay dead for two months before the letter came. The star of our show would be a stud who’d broken into a house trailer near Fort Ord to rape this Army lieutenant’s wife, only right in the middle of it she’d started screaming so he’d put a pillow over her face to keep her quiet until he could finish. But she’d quit breathing. There were eight chicks on the jury and I think like three of them got broken ankles in the rush to send him to the gas chamber. Not that I cared. Kicks, man.