Dead Skip

by Joe Gores

  Ballard cleared his throat. “Bart’s got another ticket. Can’t we do something about that new meter maid?”

  “What time did you see Bart last night?” asked Kearny. He shook out a Lucky, offered the pack, regarding the younger man through the smoke with narrowed eyes.

  “I didn’t—just talked with him on the radio about twelve-thirty. He said he’d be here, writing reports—he had sixteen of ’em to do. But he was already gone when I got here at one-twenty-five.”

  “Was the Jag he repo’d here? Were the burglar alarms set?”

  Ballard hesitated. Bart was his best friend, he didn’t want to give wrong answers.

  “Well?” Kearny was a hard-driving forty-four, a compact, blocky man with cop’s eyes, a massive jaw, and a slightly flattened and bent nose which helped mask the cold shrewdness of his face. He had been a private investigator for over a quarter of a century, managing Walter’s Auto Detectives, until he had founded DKA almost ten years before.

  “I didn’t notice about the Jag. The door was locked but the alarms were off. Why? What—”

  “Bart’s in the hospital,” said Giselle.

  “Hospital?” Ballard stood up abruptly, remained erect for several seconds, then with a slightly foolish look, sat down again.

  “He creamed that Jaguar,” said Kearny mildly.

  “That’s silly, Dan. He picked it up early in the evening, it was here when I was by at ten-thirty.” He looked over at Giselle, who was leaning against the filing cabinet with her arms folded. “Is he hurt bad?”

  “He totaled the goddamn Jag!” Kearny burst out. He slammed the desk so hard with an open palm that his dice box full of ballpoint pens jumped a full inch in the air. “One of the new V-12 hardtop coupes and he totaled it. Joy-riding like some damned teen-ager—”

  “Bart wouldn’t do that!” exclaimed Ballard hotly. “He—”

  “Almost twelve thousand owing on it—hell, we picked it up because the subject’s insurance had been canceled. Our insurance is probably primary over the bank’s VSI. And you know what that means?” He leaned forward to angrily smear out his cigarette, his left hand automatically reaching for the pack again. “That means DKA probably is going to have to eat that son of a bitch. Our coverage is good only during recovery, in transit, and in storage. Pissing around up on Twin Peaks at three in the morning isn’t gonna be nobody’s idea of being in transit.”

  Ballard shook his head doggedly. He looked over at Giselle, said again, “Is Bart all right, or—”

  “No. He’s in a coma, they think he’s got a skull fracture. He—”

  Ballard stood up. “Which hospital?”

  “You aren’t going to do any good over there right now, Larry.” Kearny looked up from lighting his cigarette. “Visiting hours don’t start until eleven, you’ve got reports to type. I see you didn’t get any in last night.”

  Ballard took a deep breath as if barely controlling himself, but said almost plaintively, “Dan, he had to have taken that car out for something besides a joy ride.” Then, seeing the look on Kearny’s face, he added hastily, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll type the damned reports.”

  When Giselle left Kearny’s office ten minutes later, Ballard followed her outside. Another batch of kids was capering and shouting in the fenced playground across the street, their cries as full of spring as geese V-ing north.

  “How do you like that guy?” he demanded bitterly. “More worried about the damned Jag than he is about Bart.”

  “Twelve thousand bucks, Larry. And Bart was driving the car.”

  “I’m not so sure of that, either,” said Ballard darkly.

  She shrugged. Even in the current shoe styles she was only an inch or two shorter than his five-eleven-and-a-half. She had a short straight nose and a small mouth and blue eyes as clear as mountain water.

  “There isn’t any alternative, Larry. He was there, the car was there, and nobody else was.”

  “And both of ’em totaled? I’d like to hear what the Accident Investigation Bureau cops have to say.” He started to turn away, but Giselle’s voice stopped him. Her eyes were flashing, suddenly.

  “Bart’s not out at County General, you know, Larry,” she snapped.

  “Huh?”

  “Of course Dan’s worried about getting stuck for that Jag. But Bart’s at Trinity Hospital in intensive care, a single-bed room with a private nurse as necessary. If you think all that’s covered by the DKA health plan, you’d better hope you never get sick enough to test your theory.”

  “You mean that Kearny—”

  “This morning, as soon as he got word. DKA’s going to be picking up a lot of medical on this no matter what finally comes out about the Jaguar.”

  “Now you’ve made me feel like a bastard,” said Ballard sheepishly.

  “I sincerely hope so.”

  THREE

  DR. ARNOLD WHITAKER was mod. Bright red vest under a mustard sport jacket; psychedelic tie with a knot the size of a golf ball; the flowing sandy mustache of a World War II RAF pilot.

  “No use going in to see him.” He had a quick pattering voice, like mice in the attic. “Just a lump of black meat lying there in the bed at the moment. Poor pulse, respiration so bad we did a tracheotomy. Deep coma. Depressed fracture is my initial diagnosis; the skull x-rays ought to be up soon to confirm that. We’ve also done an EEG—”

  “EEG?”

  “Brain-wave study.” He shot a cuff to check a watch gleaming with enough chrome to plate a bumper. “If there’s nothing else . . .”

  “I’d like to speak with Miss Jones.” When the medico didn’t react to her name, Ballard added, “Corinne Jones? His fiancée? She’s supposed to be in there waiting beside his bed.”

  “Do you resent my letting her into the room and not you? I assume she’s been sleeping with the man. I assume you haven’t.”

  They were on the fourth floor of Trinity Hospital, a former old people’s rest home which was in the process of being converted into a seventy-bed hospital.

  Ballard, still hoping to get into the room, asked, “What are his chances of recovery, Doctor?”

  Whitaker looked at his watch again, said “Damn!” explosively under his breath, said, “From which injuries? The fractured skull, the cracked ribs, or the bruised knees?”

  “Bruised knees?”

  “From the dashboard. Common when the auto has gone over a cliff or embankment. Sometimes their feet are knocked right out of their shoes, leaving the shoes still tied.”

  “The fractured skull,” Ballard said, then added as the thought struck him for the first time, “There isn’t anything inconsistent with an auto crash, is there?”

  “Um.” Whitaker considered it, eyes agleam with interest. Finally he shook his head regretfully. “No. The fracture is on the side of the skull away from the driver’s doorpost, but he probably received the injury when he was thrown from the car. He was damned lucky it didn’t roll on him.” Then he added cheerfully, almost to himself, “Of course, nothing in the injuries rules out the proverbial blunt instrument. But the concept is rather fanciful.”

  “He’s a detective, Doctor. Detectives find out things.”

  “So do doctors—damned if I’ve ever figured out why.” He looked at the monstrous skin-diver’s watch again. “My wife gave me this, fantasies me as a scuba diver, I suppose. I imagine eventually we’ll only be able to make it in a bathtub full of warm salt water. If you want an opinion to support a thesis, here: the nature of the injuries do not preclude felonious assault with something like a sockful of sand or a leather-covered lead blackjack.”

  “Thanks, Doctor,” said Ballard. He added stubbornly, “I’d still like to see him, talk with Corinne.”

  Whitaker threw his arms wide in sudden resignation. “Oh, shit,” he said precisely. The gray head of a nurse behind the desk snapped up to reveal a pair of shock-widened eyes. “Go on in. Your presence isn’t going to make a damned bit of difference to the patient. You can keep your hands off the g
irl, can’t you? She’s very vulnerable at the moment.”

  Ballard almost got sore, grinned instead. “I’d better keep my hands off her. Bart’s a former professional fighter.”

  “Former is probably right, Mr. Ballard. He might well end up with a plate in his head from this, residual weakness or even partial paralysis on the left side is a possibility—if he doesn’t wake up a carrot.” He then added, as an afterthought, “If he wakes up at all.”

  The nurse was staring at them again, reprovingly: a large fleshy woman with eyes right out of Buchenwald and a heavy bosom as comforting as a bag of cement. “Doctor, you have no right to say—”

  “Shit,” said Whitaker again, very distinctly. Her face went pale. He turned back to Ballard, said, “Seventy-two hours is as long as I would give him in coma without serious permanent brain damage either causing it or resulting from it. I’d have a hell of a hard time keeping my hands off Miss Corinne Jones in a darkened room—even if her boy friend was Joe Frazier.”

  He nodded and strode abruptly away toward the elevator. Ballard crossed the hall and pushed open the door of Heslip’s room gingerly, half expecting to catch the nurse’s beefy shoulder in the small of his back. He paused for a few moments, blinking, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the semi-darkness which contrasted so sharply with the bone-whiteness of the corridor. Only a single small night light was on; with the curtains drawn and the door reclosed behind him, it was really quite dark.

  “Larry?” A dark figure rose from the chair on the far side of the bed. “Larry? Oh, thank God!”

  He held Corinne for a moment as she clung to him with convulsive strength. The beautifully female body was warm in his arms. He released her quickly and stepped back, disturbed a little at his physical reaction to her. His eyes had accustomed themselves to the dimness enough for him to make out her features. She had a heart-shaped face so strikingly pretty that she approached true beauty.

  “Rough, kid?”

  “It’s been so damned . . . lonely. Did you talk to the doctor?”

  Ballard nodded. There was another chair, which he pulled up next to hers. But instead of sitting down, he moved to the head of the bed to stare down at Bart’s still, grayish features under their absurd crown of bandage. Through his mind, like a sleep-learning tape under the pillow, reeled Bart’s words from the night before: I got something funny on one of the files. Probably just a coincidence, but I wanta ask what you think . . .

  “And?” prompted Corinne.

  “No change in diagnosis yet,” he said absently. It couldn’t be that . . .

  “What about . . . when he wakes up?”

  “Russian roulette. If he ever . . .” He caught himself belatedly, pulled his eyes from Heslip’s deathly still face to her. She was hunched over in her chair, crying silently. “Hey . . .”

  He sat down beside her, but she shook off the arm he tried to put around her. Anger glinted through her tears. “I hate that bastard! Hate him!”

  Ballard was confused. “Who?”

  “Kearny. Him, and the goddamn detective business, and—”

  “He’s paying for the room,” said Ballard. The tape had begun playing again. Something funny . . . probably just a coincidence . . . Something? No. Couldn’t be. Nothing. Still . . .

  “Big deal!” she exclaimed bitterly. “I’ve got a good job, I can manage Bart’s hospital bills, don’t need his charity. If it weren’t for Kearny there wouldn’t be any hospital bills. Wouldn’t—”

  “It could have happened against a ring post,” said Ballard.

  “He quit the ring almost four years ago . . .” She was crying openly by this time, without lowering her furious grief-stricken face or trying in any way to check the tears flowing down her cheeks.

  “Only because he found something he liked as well.”

  “Oh, go to hell!” she exclaimed fiercely. Then she pressed her face against his shoulder and squeezed his hand so hard that his fingers reddened with trapped blood. “Oh, Larry, I’m so damned scared!”

  The door opened to let a reedy red-headed nurse stick in a sympathetic face. “You’ll have to wait in the hall.”

  They stood up. Corinne left her purse on the narrow roll-away table beside the bed. There for the long siege, Ballard thought. Better not tell her that seventy-two hours was the outside limit Whitaker was giving for Bart’s unimpaired recovery. He held her hand as they went out; Whitaker was in the doorway. The dapper little doctor nodded.

  “Couldn’t keep your hands off after all,” he beamed.

  “What was that all about?” Corinne asked as they moved down the hall.

  “He’s got the hots for you,” said Ballard. “He and his wife do it in the bathtub, and he’s having a wish projection that you—”

  “But it doesn’t wash off!” she exclaimed.

  It was the tag end of a joke among the three of them that, recalled, gave her momentary pleasure. Then her face tightened, got angry again. They had gone to the end of the hall to look down on drab, deserted Bush Street from a large round porthole-like unglassed window beside the rear stairwell. Corinne’s emotions had always bubbled near the surface.

  “At least in the ring the other guy’s only trying to beat you, not kill you,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” demanded Ballard, more sharply than he had intended. It was too close to his own unformulated thoughts: something funny on one of the files. She was staring blindly down into the street, her face in profile severe of line like that Egyptian queen, Nefertiti, something like that—he’d seen her in an encyclopedia in high school, never had forgotten her.

  Corinne met his eyes. “Bart wouldn’t have been driving around in that Jaguar, Larry! What for? Cars don’t mean anything to him, to any of you. You deal with them all the time.”

  “Don’t tell me you think that somebody deliberately set him behind the wheel and then ran the Jag off Twin Peaks.”

  “Don’t you?”

  Ballard opened his mouth to say no, then closed it. Dammit, as she said, the only thing that made sense. He straightened away from the porthole, suddenly in a hurry. “I’d better, ah, get back to the office, kid. Giselle said to tell you how sorry she is, and how much she hopes that—”

  “Kearny didn’t send any kind words, did he?” Before Ballard could speak, she added, “Don’t bother to make anything up so I’ll feel good. The only thing that mean son of a bitch could do to make me feel good is drop over dead.”

  “Oh, hell, Corinne, make sense!”

  “You’re all the same, all of you!” she flared. “Giselle included. Look at you! Can’t wait around the hospital, hell no. You have to get back to work . . .”

  Start at the Taraval police station, get a look at the patrolmen’s report if he could, then up to Twin Peaks—and why, if it was a phony accident, Twin Peaks, that world-famous landmark which stuck right up from the center of the city? Did that have any significance? And after the accident site, down to the police garage under the Hall of Justice to check if the Jaguar had automatic transmission. Damned hard to work it with a straight stick . . .

  “If somebody did attack Bart,” he said belatedly, “I want to go after him.”

  “So even if you get him, what good would it do?” she demanded bitterly.

  “As much good as sitting here waiting for him to die.”

  When he was halfway down the hall, she caught up to hold him again and kiss him on the side of the face and wish him good hunting.

  One hell of a girl, Corinne Jones.

  FOUR

  THE BLACK-AND-WHITE parked in front of DKA had Accident Investigation Bureau lettered on the door, so Ballard went straight back to Kearny’s office. It was blue with cigarette smoke and just barely big enough to hold, after he had come in, four people. Kearny looked up sharply.

  “Where the hell have you been? I called the hospital—”

  “I had a couple of cases to work,” he said quickly.

  “You want some coffee, Larry?”

>   He shook his head at Giselle. As he had expected, the cop was Waterreus, a huge Dutchman with a round red face and a big laugh and the eyes of a wild boar. He dropped in or called in often enough so Ballard was pretty sure he was taking DKA bread under the table for turning hot cars for them off their skip-list.

  Waterreus nodded distantly, returned to the Xeroxed report resting on the upper of his crossed knees. “. . . three o’clock patrol found the Jaguar upside down on Twin Peaks Boulevard just about where Midcrest Way dead-ends.” He looked up. “Midcrest doesn’t actually come into the boulevard, it—”

  “I know the place.” Kearny knew most streets in the city.

  “Okay. It hadn’t been there when the patrol had gone through, oh, roughly an hour before. The injured man was a Negro male, head contusions, probably from doorpost, hell, I can skip all that crap . . . yeah. Here. Tracks down the side hill—which is maybe a hundred fifty yards high, maybe a forty-five-degree slope—these tracks indicate it went off on the next curve of the S, up above. Ah . . . subsequent examination showed it had not gone through the guardrail as first—”

  “It didn’t go through the guardrail?” Giselle asked, surprised.

  Waterreus looked up. “What? Oh. No. That whole street, right from where it leaves Portola Drive, is guard-railed on the downhill side with that heavy steel freeway fencing, two and a half feet high, eight-by-eight uprights sunk in concrete. Except right there at the top, where the boulevard divides in half to make a double circle of the peaks. There’s a little parking area on the right-hand side, and a little grassy knoll like, that comes down flush with the road. Maybe six, eight feet from where that guardrail starts.”

  It was Ballard’s turn. He said, “I know the place.”

  “Must of been goosing her, coming back around the circle,” said Waterreus, “and lost control. Hell, drunk like he was—”

  “Bart wasn’t drunk!” yapped Ballard, half rising.

  Waterreus looked up from his accident report again. “Whole interior of the car still reeks of Scotch. The bottle busted when the car rolled.”