by Joe Gores
“So how do we find out?” asked Ballard.
“We go see his parole officer. If he was sent up two years ago and is out now, he’s out on parole.” He looked at his watch. “Three-thirty, plenty of time for you to get down to Parole and Community Services Division in Oakland. It’s on Grove just off West Grand. And remember: you’re a repo man looking for a car you think Odum is driving.”
“Nothing about Bart getting whacked on the head or—”
“Absolutely not.” Kearny made a face. “Even the coffee is lousy here. A pure and simple repossession. Your lever is the fact that guys on parole are supposed to get prior permission from their PO before they even drive a motor vehicle, because of insurance problems. Come at him right, the PO ought to come up with Odum’s address.” He paused a second. “Anything strike you as interesting about this Odum character?”
“I was wondering if he could be the kinky cat who was trying to play games with Cheri in February—just before Griffin took off.”
“Or was taken off,” said Kearny. Ballard stopped dead in the act of snapping shut his attaché case. “February,” said Kearny. “It all happened in February. Better find out whether Odum had been released on parole before February eighth, the night Cheri had her bout with the flashlight kink.”
“What did you mean about Griffin maybe being taken off?”
“Look it over. Nobody’s seen him, that we’ve talked to, since February ninth.”
“He called Cheri in March,” Ballard pointed out.
“If she’s telling the truth, somebody called her. From a phone in a bar, sounding drunk, with music being played loudly in the background. So loudly that she says she had trouble understanding him.”
Ballard felt . . . cheated. As if somebody had taken his case and turned it upside down. He had been concentrating on Griffin so hard that if it turned out he wasn’t it after all . . .
“He sold off his furniture, rented the place in San Jose . . .”
“Neither of which makes sense, not for Griffin. A newspaper ad sold the furniture—and the buyers were instructed to pay Cheri with checks she couldn’t cash. The Midfield Road house was rented by phone, with a cashier’s check deposit against the rent which was mailed in.”
“He identified himself to the bank as Griffin—”
“Only verbally. Nobody checks ID when you buy a cashier’s check, why should they? You’re paying for it in cash. Which brings us right back to our ex-con, Howard Odum. He seems to be driving Griffin’s car; we know he’s diverting Griffin’s mail.”
Ballard thought about it for a while. Finally he said, “If Griffin wasn’t an embezzler, then why should Odum—”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t an embezzler. What was that figure Elkin gave you? Thirty thousand bucks might be missing? Let’s assume for a second that it is; what does Griffin do with it? Bank it? No way. Safe-deposit box? Risky. Probably bury it in the back yard in a bunch of fruit jars or something. In the middle of this, his old lady dies. He’s cut free, he starts buying, spending, boozing. Boozing heavy, according to the Concord cops—three HBD accidents in three months. He gets drunk one night with an ex-con named Odum, a hard-nose, maybe, just out of stir with a hard-on against humanity, lets something drop . . . You can take it from there.”
Ballard looked at his watch, stood up. “Four o’clock. I have to get going. Did you check with Giselle about how Bart is?”
“No change as of two hours ago. Call me as soon as you get back on this side of the hills. And if you do get an address on Odum, don’t go up against him alone. You got that?”
“Loud and clear,” said Ballard. He meant it. He didn’t want some son of a bitch putting him over a cliff. Not even in a Jaguar.
In the late afternoon wind, the plastic streamers over the tired old iron on the used-car lot whipped and danced. The place looked like an antique auto show. Ballard made his left turn from West Grand into Grove. It was 2229, an old tan-brick building, three stories, which stood alone among the razed weedy redevelopment lots.
“Let’s try the unit supervisor first,” suggested the switchboard operator behind the window inside the front door. She was a motherly sort, perhaps chosen for that quality. After working several keys and punching in and out of half a dozen sockets, she said, “Down the corridor to the right, far as it goes, then turn left and it will be the first door on the right at the bottom of the stairs. Mr. Savidge.”
The halls were big, friendly, creaking, painted an institutional pale yellow. The offices were high-ceilinged; the Venetian blinds badly needed restringing. He wondered if the atmosphere was deliberate or had just happened; it probably was soothing to just-paroled convicts.
Mr. Saul Savidge was waiting at the door of his office with a handshake and a grin; a vaguely pear-shaped black man who confounded current terminology by being decidedly brown. He had a narrow mustache and short straightened hair combed back so severely that it made his head look too small for his face.
“Better take the straight-back instead of that swivel,” he warned. “The shower upstairs leaks on the swivel.”
Shower? Then he remembered the sign by the front entrance about the Crittendon Home, a halfway house for cons. He took the uncomfortable straight-backed chair closest to the battered wooden desk. On the wall was a printed sign, WARNING—THIS ROOM IS OCCUPIED BY A SEX MANIAC, and a tapestry sampler of Martin Luther King succoring a black man in shackles.
“I’m lucky to be assistant unit supervisor,” said Savidge. “It gives me a one-man office. Tough to get a parolee to tell you his troubles when the cat at the next desk is hauling some poor bastard out in chains for parole violations.”
Ballard explained what he wanted.
Savidge nodded thoughtfully. “Howie hasn’t registered that T-Bird with me and he hasn’t asked permission to drive it. How long has he had it, do you know?”
Ballard saw his opening. “How long has he been out?”
“Just after the first of the year . . .” He consulted a file. “Uh-huh. January fifth.”
“This was just last week,” said Ballard quickly. “Our informant, who knew Odum before his arrest and knew he was out, saw someone in our T-Bird he thought was Odum. It might not have been him.”
Savidge nodded again, again thoughtfully. There was a disconcerting steel beneath the affable exterior that reminded Ballard that he was, after all, dealing with a law officer and not a social worker.
“All right, Mr. Ballard, I’m going to cooperate with you on this even though, as I’m sure you know, I’m under no legal compulsion to give you any information whatsoever.”
“I realize that, sir.”
“I’m cooperating because there is a possible parole violation involved here, and because if there is, it belongs in Odum’s file. I carry a case load of seventy-five men, it’s hell just trying to keep up with what each one is doing.” He got a rueful look on his face. “The rules say they must ‘maintain gainful employment’—so what do you find for a sixty-five-year-old man with an eighty-five IQ who’s only good at exposing himself to little girls?”
Ballard didn’t try to answer. He was there only for Odum’s address. He got it.
“1684 Galindo Street, Concord. That’s a rooming house run by the widow of an ex-con, actually. Odum has room four.”
Ballard stood up and stuck out his hand. “You’ll hear from me about Odum in a day or two.”
“I’ll appreciate that.”
Outside, Ballard stopped under one of the sidewalk elms, drew a deep breath. He was damned happy he wasn’t an ex-con on parole.
And pretty soon, they’d make Odum damned unhappy that he was.
SEVENTEEN
AFTER BALLARD left to interview the parole officer, Kearny called Oakland Control and had one of the girls look up 1377 Mount Diablo Street in the cross-directory. The entry read: Beaghler, Robert, wife, Sharon, occupation: auto mechanic; which checked with what Ballard had learned from Sharon, that her husband was named Bob and tha
t the last name began with B-e-a-g. If the directory hadn’t come through, he still would have had the utilities companies, garbage collection, voter registration records, real estate plot registrations, the postman—and, if you didn’t care whether word got back to the subject, the neighbors.
While Ballard fought the freeway traffic to Oakland, Kearny sat on a quiet side street in Concord with the windows open and let his mind play with the case. There was still something bugging him about their new reconstruction with Odum as the villain. It was the sort of feeling that made you suddenly turn around and go back up to the house you had just left, and ask that one more question which broke the case.
For one thing, why would Odum, posing as Griffin, sell that furniture? Spite? And if not Odum, why would Griffin? He sure as hell didn’t need the money. And, having sold it, why would he ask Cheri to send the checks to a San Jose address he had gone to great lengths up to that time to keep secret? That had been in March. In April, Odum had turned up with the car. Any connection?
Almost 5:30, where was Ballard? He couldn’t go lean on Sharon yet: he wanted Beaghler home for that. She had been lying to Ballard, of course; she would have an address on Odum, it would not be the one the parole officer had. If Odum was their boy, he’d have a bolt-hole, a place the Adult Authority didn’t know about. Too easy for the PO to make an unannounced visit, because when you were on parole, your legal residence was still a prison cell. And prison cells could be searched, any time, without any warrant or forewarning.
And if you happened to be sitting on thirty thousand bucks, say, you really wouldn’t want the parole officer dropping by, would you? Especially not if you had killed someone to get that money.
Still, pegging Odum for it was just a hunch, nothing more. And look at some of the sour horses he had backed on hunches, down through the years. And after his lecture to Ballard about facts . . .
The radio sputtered, lapsed into silence, then Ballard’s voice came through, choppy and distant.
“. . . residence address . . . 10-4?”
“Repeat that address, over.”
There was a blast of static, then Ballard’s voice came on clear and thin, as if he were yelling down from a third-floor window. “1-6-8-4 Galindo Street . . . Concord . . .”
“All right, I’ll meet you there. Outside, across the street . . .”
The rider’s door opened and Kearny slid in. Ballard was parked across still-busy Galindo and down the block from 1684, a rambling old California residence which would have been built when the street was a country dirt road. Since World War II it had been encapsulated by a growing Concord; now it was a rooming house, soon it would be razed as standing on property too valuable for it.
“Any activity?” asked Ballard. He had seen Kearny’s parked car when he had circled the block.
“A number of guys in and out, all men. Any of them could have been Odum, seeing that we don’t know what he looks like.” He glanced at Ballard. “The parole officer didn’t have his picture?”
“I didn’t ask.” Ballard’s voice just missed being defensive. It had been a long, hot, frustrating day, although the sun was low now, the air was cooling, neon signs were winking on. “I was supposed to be interested in a car, remember?”
“Just asking,” said Kearny cheerfully. “I checked all the street parking, and got a look in the garage out behind the house. Nothing. The garage used to be a stables back when. I also went up to check on Odum’s room.”
He stopped there. Ballard fidgeted, finally asked, “And?”
“Locked. With a note on the door that Denny is over at Mary’s.”
“Whoever the hell they are,” grumbled Ballard.
Kearny opened his door. “Let’s go find out.”
As they started up the walk to the old stately frame building, a man brushed past them. Odum? Ballard turned to look down the walk at the retreating back with a returning sense of frustration. Dammit, this place had to give them a lead to Griffin or, if Kearny was right, the man who had killed him and then had attacked Bart.
Had to; they didn’t have any other leads left. And fewer than eight of their original seventy-two hours left.
Bart. Was he still lying there, unmoving? Unthinking? With his brain gouged by a depressed hunk of bone so he would always lie there, unmoving, unthinking?
There was no answer at the heavy hardwood door with the cheap metal 4 screwed to the panel. The note about Denny and Mary was still there.
“So now what?” asked Ballard in a voice heavy with fatigue. Kearny looked as fatigued as a diesel engine. Never missed a trick, the bastard, and never missed letting you know that he was taking it, either.
“Now we go talk to the landlady,” he said. “Naturally.”
The trouble with people was that they continually refused to fit into their neat little categories. Widow of a con, ran a rooming house full of ex-cons. If she was old, granny with a steel hatpin up her sleeve, right? If she was young, blowzy and full-blown, with meaty knees and the wrong color lipstick, right?
Wrong.
She was at first glance young, and she was close to chimerical—if Ballard had known the word. Dreamlike came to his mind when she opened the door. He didn’t recognize the music this let out into the hall, but it was also rarefied, classical, all strings and violins, and so forth. By the lines in her face she was obviously well past forty, yet the face had an almost luminous serenity that was ageless. Even Kearny, Ballard noticed, was affected. His right hand actually started a motion as if he were going to take off the hat he wasn’t wearing and almost never did.
“Good evening, gentlemen. Can I help you?”
The voice suggested that helping people was her only role in life. Kearny’s voice was an obsequious rumble, like sounds from a bowling alley heard in the street outside.
“We’re . . . terribly sorry to bother you, ma’am. We’re trying to get in touch with the tenant in room four.”
“Howie. Oh, I hope . . . He isn’t in trouble?” Her eyes pleaded with this oddly assorted pair of hard-faced men.
Kearny should have answered, soothingly, that they were friends of good old Howie, and were interested in buying that new T-Bird he had. Instead, Kearny was affected enough to say, “We certainly hope not also, ma’am.”
Ballard realized whom she reminded him of: Billie Burke in The Wizard of Oz. The good witch of whatever direction she was from. North?
Kearny said, “Do you know anyone named Denny, ma’am? Or Mary?”
“I’m Mary.” Her eyes widened. “Oh dear, is that note still on Howie’s door? Denny put that there on—goodness, that must have been on Tuesday evening . . .”
Tuesday evening? It was fitting together. It was all fitting.
“And you haven’t seen Mr. Odum since then?”
“He is in trouble,” she said sorrowfully.
Kearny’s voice was almost glutinous. “I’m afraid he probably is. Would you know if Mr. Odum is . . . um . . . seeing a young lady?”
Ballard barely stifled a snort of self-disgust. He should have thought of that himself. A charming, good-looking con-man just out of Quentin wasn’t going to remain celibate very long—as proved by Sharon; but he wasn’t going to confine himself to a risky, hit-and-miss liaison with a married woman, either. Still, he was glad it was Kearny asking questions. He was glad he didn’t have to hurt this gentle being who had created a quiet warm little world for herself and her charges.
Mary bobbed her head on its slender white swanlike neck. “Well, yes, I believe Howie does have a young lady with whom he can . . . well, you know, talk and things . . .” She trailed off, then added sorrowfully, “It must get so lonesome for those poor boys there in prison, without anyone of the opposite sex to make them want to act like gentlemen . . .”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Kearny. Ballard hated the unction in his voice, necessary as it was to get Odum’s whereabouts out of this sweet and gentle lady. “Now, if we could just have the young lady’s name . . .”
Kearny was still laughing when they got back into Ballard’s car. Ballard was stiff with rage.
“When she dies,” said Kearny, “I’d like to mount her and hang her on the wall at DKA. Just as a reminder.”
“Over a sign reading Cheer Up, She Might Still Be Alive,” snarled Ballard.
Dammit, there was nothing to laugh about. There went their last lead down the drain. They didn’t have a thing. Not a thing.
“I’ll go over to Beaghler’s place for one last check,” said Kearny cheerfully. “You stake out this place in case the T-Bird shows.”
It wouldn’t, of course, thought Ballard; they both knew that. He burst out, “What gets me, Dan, is that goddamn woman covering up for Odum with his parole officer! Hell, I’ll bet she’s got hot goods in the garage from jobs her tenants have pulled with her furnishing the alibi.”
“Probably,” said Kearny with a grin. He started to get out.
“ ‘Why, it couldn’t have been little Howie, Mr. Parole Officer,’ ” said Ballard mincingly. “ ‘Howie was drinking tea and eating crumpets with me at the exact instant that . . .’ Oh, shit!”
EIGHTEEN
AT EXACTLY 7:07 P.M., a black hand jerked convulsively on the white sheet. Corinne Jones’ head snapped up, her mouth popped open in excitement and disbelief. It had been sixty-six hours.
Heslip sighed, stirred, tried to roll over. Corinne was already clawing the bell at the head of the bed which was to bring the nurse. It did, fast. And the doctor.
Heslip moaned, made a sort of clucking sound in his throat, and began a regular even grating sound. The little mod medic, Whitaker, far from being alarmed at the sound, seemed delighted. He laid a hand on Corinne’s arm in a gesture that should have been avuncular but which somehow came off closer to a caress. He chuckled softly.
