Dead Skip

by Joe Gores

  If the murderer wasn’t in the phone book, had an unlisted number, say, he’d have to go all the way back downtown to the DKA office, get the city directory and hope that . . .

  No. Here he was, 27 Java Street.

  Java Street? Hell. Ballard didn’t know where Java Street was. And if it wasn’t within walking distance of Twin Peaks, say twenty minutes walk at the outside . . .

  He needed a city map. Had one down in the car . . .

  “Sir, you’re going to have to leave—”

  “Huh? What? Oh. Yeah.” He flipped the phone book shut on top of the counter, turned away, organizing his face into a belatedly casual expression for Giselle’s sharp eyes. “Sure. Thanks.”

  “. . . don’t really want you to bother with running me home,” Giselle was saying to Corinne.

  “It would be really no bother, Giselle.” Corinne looked suddenly exhausted, blasted, as if by release from the tension which had sustained her.

  “I’ll have Larry drive me across the Bay.” Giselle had never learned how to drive; none of the field agents had the patience to teach her. Her very blue eyes were narrowed slightly, fixed on Ballard with intense speculation. “He won’t mind, will you, Larry?”

  “Mind what?” he said, trying to duck out of it. Dammit, it would kill an hour altogether, going and coming.

  “Driving me over to Oakland tonight.”

  “I’m, ah . . . pretty exhausted myself, Giselle.” He started a fake yawn, ended up with a real jaw-creaker that wasn’t faked at all. He was damned tired, but he had to get into that house, the proof that Griffin was dead might be there somewhere. “If you’re short cab fare . . .”

  “I will not ride a cab, Larry Ballard, when you’re here with a perfectly good DKA car burning DKA gas . . .”

  “As long as Corinne offered—”

  “I’m riding with you,” she said with finality. “Corinne is going home and going to sleep. She hasn’t slept for days.” Corinne was looking from one to the other with an unbelieving look on her face.

  “I don’t understand you people,” she said weakly. “I really don’t understand anything about you.”

  “Lots of times I don’t understand us myself,” said Giselle.

  Corinne smiled her brilliant smile. “But I’m sure glad he’s going to drive you home. All of a sudden, I’m just dead.”

  What the hell, he’d just have to swallow that extra hour’s delay. He’d dump Giselle, come back. Java Street had to be close enough to Twin Peaks for it to have worked; nothing else, nobody else fit. Heslip, after all, had turned around.

  He grabbed Giselle’s arm. “Well, c’mon, you’re in such a rush to get home.”

  Giselle went with him meekly. Too meekly. He should have known.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THEY RODE down in the elevator silently, each busy with his own thoughts. The outside air was wet, the wind penetrating, so Giselle shivered despite the London Fog waterproof she had on over her wool skirt and short-sleeved sweater. She and Ballard walked Corinne to her car; the stop lights on the corner of Scott half a block away were red and green blobs through the fog.

  “ ‘When shall we three meet again?’ ” Giselle asked rhetorically.

  Corinne stuck her head out of the place where the Triumph’s window had been until six months before, when some mother-of-a-car-booster had smashed it out for a big score: a pack of Winstons in the glove box. “ ‘In thunder, lightning, or in rain,’ ” she quoted back with a flash of perfect teeth in her dark face.

  Ballard watched the taillights recede into the soup, then walked back to his Ford, held the door for Giselle, and started the heater as soon as the motor was running. “Soon as we warm this up we’ll get you over to Oakland.”

  “Thanks a lot,” she said.

  The sarcasm of her tone was lost on Ballard. He was thinking of the San Francisco map over Giselle’s visor. Could he get it down, casually, look up Java Street? No, dammit, he’d have to wait until he dumped her off. If she knew where he planned to go, she’d go all DKA official on him or—worse yet—want to go along.

  Giselle shivered. She was feeling very Bardish that night. “‘Tis now the very witching time of night, and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world.’ ” She paused, breathed out. “See? It’s cold enough to see your breath.”

  “You talk too much,” said Ballard.

  “That’s because I’m scared. I don’t get out into the field all that often, and when I do, it usually isn’t after a would-be murderer.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he snapped.

  But she already had reached up for the map he had been eying wistfully a few moments before. She opened it and looked over at him sweetly. “Which street is it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Her blue eyes were very direct and challenging even by the fog-dimmed streetlights. “Get off it, hotshot. I’ve been in this business a lot more years than you even if we are the same age. So don’t try to con me. You let Whitaker herd you out of that room as meek as a lamb—which means you thought something Bart said had given it to you. Outside, you made a beeline for a phone book to look up an address. When we got into the car just now your hands were shaking, you wanted to reach for that map so badly. So . . . what street is it?”

  Ballard stared at her, silently raging, then sighed. “Java.”

  “Java . . .” She consulted the index, folded the map open to the appropriate coordinates by the overhead light he had switched on. “It is one block long, runs between . . . Masonic and Buena Vista Avenue West.”

  “Dead-ends in Buena Vista Park?” demanded Ballard, finally able to visualize the street. He had been afraid it would be way to hell out in the Mission District with Brazil and Persia and Russia and France.

  “That’s the one. But what difference does the area make if . . . Of course!” she exclaimed. “It would have to be within walking distance of Twin Peaks, wouldn’t it?”

  Ballard nodded. “So he could walk home after putting Bart over the edge in the Jaguar. Couldn’t tow the Jag up there—somebody might remember. Couldn’t call a cab, same reason—or even walk down to where he could catch a cruiser . . .”

  “Dan had me check out every cab company’s trip sheets for Wednesday A.M.,” Giselle said thoughtfully.

  Trust Kearny. He didn’t miss many. “And?”

  “None at all from anywhere reasonably near Twin Peaks during the right time span.” She paused. “Why are we just sitting here?”

  “Oh. Sorry.” He started the car. “I’ll get you home and—”

  She neatly twitched the key from the ignition and sat back with it in her hand as the Ford ca-chunked to a stop in the middle of Bush Street.

  “Uh-uh, hotshot. I’m going with.”

  “Like hell you are.”

  “You aren’t enough man to put me out of this car.”

  He stared out the windshield, rubbed his hand down over his whisker-bristled face. Damn, he was tired. Well? Either she went along or he didn’t go tonight. What the hell, she was better than most men he knew at this business. Better than him, come to think of it, in everything except the occasional physical stuff. And who knew what he would find at Java Street? He didn’t even know if the guy was married or single. He might have a shack-up there for the night, might be throwing a party, might . . .

  He put out his hand, wordlessly. Wordlessly, she laid the key in it. He was suddenly glad to have the bright, rangy blonde beside him in the car. “It was something Bart said,” he told her. “I still don’t know how the killer got on to Bart, but—”

  “You keep saying killer. Bart isn’t dead.” He realized how far behind in the case she was; she knew nothing of his and Kearny’s day in the East Bay. Then her eyes widened. “I . . . see. So you think Charles Griffin is . . .”

  Ballard jogged the Ford over to the 000 block of Masonic; the big dark silent Sears store hulked dimly through the ranks of fog marching up from the
ocean.

  “Buried in the basement of 27 Java Street,” he said. “Or somewhere on the property. I hope. Because without him we don’t have any proof of anything, not even now.”

  “We can show the murderer to Cheri Tart,” Giselle suggested.

  “Identify him as Mr. Kink with the flashlight? What good would that do?”

  But what about showing him to Howard Odum? He must have posed as Griffin in San Jose while getting rid of the car. The car had been the weak point all along. It had to disappear to make Griffin’s disappearance plausible; he hadn’t realized he could have just abandoned it on the street.

  Java Street.

  Narrow, almost an alley between two fog-swept and night-deserted streets. At the far end, as Ballard turned off Masonic, was the dark steep mass of Buena Vista Park rising ghostlike into the mist. He turned off the engine; the silence was very loud. A gout of fog swept densely across the windshield, momentarily blotting out everything beyond the nose of the car as if it were a ship which had buried its prow in a monstrous gray sea. He’d killed lights and motor and ghosted up to the far curb thirty feet beyond the address.

  “I just hope I can recognize fresh concrete if I see it.”

  Giselle shivered. “How do you plan to get us in?” With the motor and heater killed, the wet cold was seeping quickly through her.

  “Bust something if I have to. I’ll take a tire iron. And that’s singular, Giselle.”

  “What am I supposed to do? Sit in the car and listen to the radio?” she demanded bitterly.

  “Use your head. I need somebody covering me.”

  She thought about it. Finally she sighed. He was right. “I’ll try to raise Dan on the radio, or any of the other field men. And if I see anyone fitting the murderer’s description—”

  “A long blast on the horn. Just one. And lock the doors. This guy seems to panic and then make decisions fast—and act on them even faster.”

  “I’ll scream a real scream,” said Giselle coolly.

  Ballard got out, got a tire iron from the trunk. The fog was so thick that to the watching Giselle, it turned him into a mere dim moving form by the time he reached the far curb.

  Giselle switched her attention to the house. No lights, of course, or they would have abandoned the plan. It was a massive square white wood structure with broad front steps leading up to an arched pillared entryway with a wide heavy wood door. She counted the steps. Eleven of them.

  In the process she lost Ballard. Well, he’d probably go around to the back, through the heavy bushes which flanked both sides of the house. A double lot, of course, most of these old houses had that. Three stories, the windows on the second floor very big, those on the third, narrow garret-type openings. And on the right-hand front corner of the house a round three-story turret, made of wood and shingles, with a peaked roof like a dunce cap. Curved tall windows, curtained, looking down from the turret.

  She looked quickly ahead, toward the park, over her shoulder. Nothing lived except swirling fog. She switched on the ignition, watched the red light glow from the radio. It was comforting, familiar; she didn’t feel as brash as she had when Larry had been there.

  “KDM 366 Control calling SF-1. Come in, Dan.”

  No response, not that she expected any. Kearny would be home in bed in Lafayette, the T-Bird tucked into the Kearny double garage. Kearny had a radio unit in a converted closet off the bedroom where he and Jeanie slept, but a mobile unit wouldn’t reach that far. Only SF and Oakland Controls.

  Still, she conscientiously tried him twice more. No answer.

  “KDM 366 Control calling any SF unit.”

  Again, nothing. Nobody out at 2:00 A.M. on a Saturday, which wasn’t surprising. Not this early in the month. Besides, Larry and Bart were the best DKA nighthawks anyway, the ones who took chances, who thought it was fun as well as a job. Bart was in the hospital and Larry was inside the house at 27 Java Street by now. Had been gone long enough to be inside. Breaking and entering.

  Giselle shook her head. Just as good she hadn’t gotten Kearny, really. If he knew what Ballard was doing, he’d skin Larry alive. And skin Giselle Marc, too. She knew better, knew the consequences of this sort of unplanned action if anything went wrong.

  Emotionally involved on this one, all of them. Running around in circles from the beginning, ignoring the facts, ignoring the evidence. And because of it, working from a massively wrong premise right from the beginning, from the first note Larry wrote on the case. Even before that, from the verbal she had gotten from Heslip on Tuesday afternoon.

  They had assumed that Griffin had disappeared because he had embezzled a large sum of money from JRS Garage. Which was wrong, dead wrong. Larry had realized that as soon as he knew who the murderer was.

  No, Griffin had disappeared because he hadn’t embezzled any money. And because his mother had died and he had started drinking heavily. (She and Ballard were wrong in this reasoning, but they weren’t to know that until it was too late.)

  Anyway, she thought, because they were involved in the case personally, and were working from a wrong assumption, they had ignored the most obvious evidence that Griffin wasn’t an embezzler and never had been. His chronically delinquent auto payments. A man smart enough to embezzle a large sum of money would have used some of it to keep his account current and thus not draw attention to himself needlessly.

  She drew her coat tighter around her. Cold in the car, without the motor or the heater on. But she couldn’t run them, couldn’t even smoke. Not on a deadly serious stakeout like this one.

  Movement froze her. Then she gave a nervous little giggle. A gray-and-white-striped tomcat had run across the street from her side and into the bushes on the edge of the property at 27 Java.

  She tried Kearny again on the radio, tried the other SF field men. No answer. Nobody abroad this night except a gray-and-white cat, chased or frightened out from under Ballard’s car . . .

  Chased or frightened by what?

  And then she realized, just too late, that she hadn’t pushed down the lock button on the driver’s side after Larry had gotten out. She lunged across the seat, but as her fingers grazed the door, it was jerked open and a dark bulky shape came into the car at her. She didn’t even have time to scream, let alone hit the horn ring.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  BALLARD PAUSED in the shadows of the dripping bushes that flanked the walk. No lights showed in the house, but that didn’t mean nobody was home. It was two o’clock in the morning. The bars were just closing and . . . He gave a little snort. Just seventy-two hours since Bart had gotten it, and here he was, at the killer’s house.

  Why, really? Because he wanted to close this one out all by himself? Partially. But also because the murderer might find out that Bart Heslip was still alive. If Griffin was buried here, the killer might have left traces he would hide or obliterate, not knowing that Bart was permanently blacked out on what he had seen when he had been struck.

  He shot one glance between sodden leaves back at the car. Just a dim shape across the street. From behind, Giselle’s head would be hidden by the high-backed seat. It made him feel rather secure to know Giselle was there to warn him with a horn blast if anyone fitting the murderer’s description showed up.

  Ballard boldly mounted the broad front steps, eleven of them, and gently turned the front doorknob. Locked, of course. It wasn’t the foolhardy maneuver it seemed; he knew his rubber-soled shoes made little noise on the steps or the porch itself.

  Door locked, no garage to give possible access. Around in back, then.

  The lot wasn’t a great deal wider than the house, even though it was a double, but the property was deep. He had to use his flashlight three times on the journey along the side of the house to keep from tripping over bushes or roots. The ground rose sharply under his feet; a hillside lot, backed up against the broad base of Twin Peaks.

  The back door was also locked, although the wood of the frame was so old that it almost gave when he laid hi
s weight against it. Ten seconds with his tire iron would have had it open, but they would have been noisy seconds.

  Better to try the windows first. Because of the slope of the lot, the sills of the rear windows were at waist-level rather than far above his head as they had been at the front.

  The third one he tried was unlocked.

  But it was stuck. He worked on it with the tire iron, digging it into the wood and gently prying upward, and within a few moments it had broken free. He pushed up the bottom half, then melted back into the bushes behind the house.

  Ballard had prowled houses before, of course; nobody spent very long in the investigation game without an occasional crude illegal-entry job—through attached garages if nowhere else. Usually it was just curiosity, the almost unnatural interest in delving behind people’s façades that most detectives seemed to have.

  Curiosity. What killed the cat. And he was dealing with a killer.

  No lights went on, no second-story windows went up, no pale questing faces appeared. After two minutes Ballard moved in again. If anyone was there, he was asleep. Or lying in ambush.

  Ashcan that, Ballard. Time to do it.

  He wiped his hands down his pant legs before swinging a leg up over the sill, then went in under the white lacy curtains that covered the opening. When he straightened up he was in a disused dining room. A single stab of flashlight showed a heavy oak table, big captain’s chair at the head and lesser chairs ranged down the sides. An immense oak sideboard with a collection of bottles on it. Behind it, a big mirror with an ornate frame.

  Ballard wiped his hands again. He was totally illegal now, totally vulnerable. If the bastard walked in on him now and shot him, the cops couldn’t do a damned thing about it except sweep him up and cart him away.

  Better not to think about that. If the killer wasn’t in here, asleep, Giselle would give warning if he showed up.

  He crossed the room by the flashlight, switched it out before opening the door. The air in the hall was fresher; the dining room, then, was usually shut up. Which suggested a man living alone. He wished he’d had time to research this guy a little.