Dead Skip

by Joe Gores

  The hell of it was, he was scared. Heart thumping.

  Light from the street came through the heavy etched glass half-panel of the front door despite the fog. By it, Ballard could see that the hallway ran straight back through the house to the kitchen in the rear. He stood in front of the dining-room door, mouth-breathing. No sound, not anywhere in the house. No feel of anyone in the house.

  The kitchen was old-fashioned, with a wooden drainboard flanking the stained porcelain sink. Water heater, new icebox, new electric stove. He opened a couple of drawers at random. Silverware. Knives. A heavy-caliber blued-steel revolver. A homeowner’s weapon. Ballard checked it. No shells. He left it there. A tire iron was a better weapon than an empty gun.

  Peanut-butter jar open on the table beside the toaster. Small plate, butter-smeared knife, coffee cup with a half-inch of mud in the bottom, everything seen in circular segments by his moving flashlight.

  Breakfast remains; so he hadn’t eaten supper here. Hadn’t returned from work, maybe. Which suggested the probability that Ballard had the place to himself but might not for much longer.

  So get moving.

  The door which opened off the hall beside the kitchen door showed utter blackness and stairs going down. Cellar. Where he wanted to go, after making sure he was alone. Burning sensation between the shoulder blades. He worked his shoulders to ease it. Tension.

  Past the dining-room door. Next, same side of the hall, the study. Empty. Next, living room. Empty. Old, heavy, cumbersome, perhaps valuable furniture. Antiques, probably. Probably inherited along with the house. A baby grand piano. Well dusted. Probably had a woman in once a week. He sure as hell could afford it.

  The stairway to the second floor was just to the left of the front door as you entered from the street. Wide hardwood treads, so solid they didn’t creak though they must have been there at least half a century. The banisters were also hardwood, polished by generations of hands.

  On the second floor the hall ran across the width of the house rather than down its length. Six doors opened off it, three on each side. So dark that Ballard had to use his flashlight, first to guide himself to each door and then to guide his hand to the knob. He was sweating profusely. If anyone was here, on this floor was where they would be.

  Bathroom. Empty. Modern fixtures, all redone. Men’s toilet articles. Across the hall to the street-side room. A bedroom, fixed up into a study. New, modern furniture, bright colors, vinyls and naugahyde, Swedish modern desk and chairs. Money had gone into it. Well, he had money, right?

  Middle rear, another bedroom, unused. Must have been his as a kid, pennants on the wall, street signs, faded photos of Forty-Niners who had retired. The Lion, Hurricane Hugh, Y.A. An odd monument to an innocent past.

  Middle front room, very careful opening the door, single flash of the light to show it was a bedroom with a big unmade king-size bed. Ballard made a quick check of the two walk-in closets. Lots of clothes, all men’s clothes, good ones. Ten pairs of highly polished shoes. He went to the window, checked the street by carefully drawing aside the curtain. He could see the roof of his car. The fog was as thick and wet-looking as before. Everything serene. Everything muffled.

  Final rear room was a darkroom, a hell of a good one—all the chemicals, a Zeiss enlarger that looked new, storage racks with photo paper. A photography buff, too.

  Which left the sixth door. Ballard tried this cautiously: locked. He looked at the join between frame and door. Dried. A gap there. He inserted the spatulate end of his tire iron and exerted steady gradually increasing pressure against the lock. It gave. The door was open. Spiral stairs led up, which made it the entrance to the third-floor turret room. What the hell. Better make sure.

  He checked his watch. It was 2:17. He had been inside less than fifteen minutes. It seemed like fifteen hours.

  These stairs creaked, so he took his time on them, tried to stay on the outside edge, against the wall. The treads were not hardwood, uncarpeted, unswept. Not a place the cleaning lady was allowed to come, which quickened Ballard’s pulse and made him move with great caution. Jimmying the door had made some noise, even if not much.

  The door at the top of the stairs was closed but unlocked. When he eased it open, enough light came through the filmy curtains on the narrow curved windows to show him the place was empty. He went in, saw it was a photo gallery. He crossed the room to the wall, suddenly stopped dead when he realized what the big blow-up photos were of.

  He had found Cheri’s kinky cat with the flashlight.

  Ballard risked his own flashlight for about thirty seconds. They gave him a queasy feeling, just because there were so many of them. All of the walls, floor to ceiling, scores of them colored, these probably cut from Swedish or German porno magazines, and hundreds of black-and-whites, developed and enlarged in the darkroom downstairs.

  Good old Kinky: on these naked girls he had used a camera and a flashbulb instead of a flashlight. Blow-ups, cropped so that only the essential female flesh was left, starkly, crudely exposed.

  Kinky indeed. Ballard pulled the door shut behind him, went right down the front stairs to the ground floor. He was glad to be out of the turret room. If only there had been a breast or two depicted, a full nude, above all a face. Even an ugly face, even a Gloria Rouse face. But no. Not for Kinky. For him, the apparently numerous chicks who weren’t as selective as buxom, lusty Cheri Tart.

  As Ballard opened the cellar door, lights swept the front of the house. He froze. He waited. A car door slammed. He waited some more.

  No horn blast from Giselle.

  Someone going to a different house, then. It would be a bitch to get trapped in the basement, but the house was empty, and with Giselle on watch he would get at least some warning. But he was glad to have the tire iron in his hand. He turned on the flashlight and went down the steep narrow stairs.

  The basement was a mess, the floor loaded with the sort of junk that always seems to accumulate in basements. In one of the front corners a wooden bin which once would have held coal. Above it, a small high window to which the coal chute would have been fitted. An old house indeed. Coal abandoned long ago, of course, for the big natural-gas furnace which dominated the corner of the basement under the kitchen.

  Ballard’s light jumped nervously about, went by and then suddenly returned to and steadied on a washtub leaned on edge against the wall. There was dried concrete around the edges of the washtub, as if it had been used to mix up a small amount of mortar. The light moved again, this time laid its white O on a full bag of Portland cement, with a half-bag set on top of it, upright, with the top scrunched down. Ballard realized that he had not really believed he would find anything down here. Of course, he hadn’t found a new section of concrete, but . . .

  He found it five minutes later.

  It was under some old homemade wooden shelves with two-by-two framing and triple widths of one-by-eight pine planking for shelves. Unpainted, crowded with ranks of antique Mason jars, empty and waiting under their coating of thick dust for the home canning that would never be done again. What had caught his eye were the scuff marks made on the floor by the stubby vertical two-by-two legs, as if the shelves had been walked end-for-end out from the wall not too long ago.

  Ballard got down on his belly and shone the light under the bottom shelf sagging six inches off the floor. The light, laid flat across the concrete that way, easily picked out the rough join of a rectangle of new concrete with the older, smoother, more professional floor.

  Seven feet long. Two feet wide.

  Stupid? No. Why would he ever have been suspected? Who would ever come down here to look? And after a few years it wouldn’t have looked so raw, so new . . . So here he was, Chuck Griffin, a pretty nice guy by all accounts. He hadn’t walked out on Cheri after all. He hadn’t embezzled and been murdered for it, either. Murdered, thought Ballard erroneously, to disguise an embezzlement he had discovered.

  Ballard followed his dancing circle of light up the d
usty stairs to the closed door at the top. Time to get out before . . .

  Closed door.

  He switched off the flashlight abruptly, stood on the stairs in the total blackness, breathing with his mouth open. He had left the door standing open when he had come down, on the theory that it would make it a little easier to hear if Giselle had sounded the horn. But she hadn’t. And he’d had the house to himself when he’d come down here. Therefore, he still did. So cool the nerves.

  He switched on the light, gingerly climbed the rest of the way. Sure. The door wasn’t closed tight, actually; it merely had drifted shut by itself. But it still took a conscious act of will to gently push it open enough to edge an eye out for a quick look down to the front door.

  The hall was empty, of course.

  Ballard went the rest of the way out of the cellar, started down the hall and froze after two steps.

  The front door was ajar.

  He could see the thin line of light from the narrow crack, laid across the floor at an angle and standing a few inches up the wall.

  The door had been locked when he had tried it from the outside.

  But that meant . . .

  He heard the grunt of effort and at the same instant his body arched and he yelled in pure agony as he was slammed in the kidney. The floor came up at him as his mind screamed, through the pain, He got Giselle first . . .

  Things went away.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  NOT ENTIRELY away: it had been the sudden intensity of the pain that had made reality go mushy. He realized he was on his hands and knees against the wall. His head hurt as well as his back; must have rammed headfirst into the wall on the way down.

  “Blood,” he got out. It was the first thing that came to mind. “I’ll be pissing blood for a week.” He’d read that about kidney injuries in a detective story once.

  “Not for a week,” said Rodney Elkin in an almost apologetic voice. “I want you to go into the dining room ahead of me. The light switch is to the left of the door.”

  “I don’t know if I can get up,” said Ballard. His mind had started to work again, a little. The kidney pain had lessened.

  “You’ll get up.”

  He got up. He hiked himself upright against the wall. His eyes were coming back into focus; he could see Elkin standing well away from him, wearing a topcoat. Tall, physically strong, decisive, good-looking, kinky. Especially kinky. Use that some way? The big revolver from the kitchen drawer now in his left hand. Of course. With shells in it now.

  Heslip, facing his attacker, had been struck on the right side of his head. Elkin, talking on the phone at JRS Garage, had switched the receiver to his right hand to write notes of the conversation.

  “Move it!” snapped Elkin.

  Ballard moved it. The gun was shaking in Elkin’s hand. Panic again. Panic might make the gun go off. He used the wall to get to the dining room, leaning against it and sliding along. Go in fast, slam the door, dive out the still-open window . . .

  It wasn’t like TV, not at all. Away from the wall, he tottered. He hurt. Moving, he had to clench his teeth to keep from throwing up. He couldn’t have moved fast if his life depended on it. Christ, his life did depend on it!

  He still couldn’t move fast. He sat down on one of the oak dining chairs, gingerly. Jeezuz, that back!

  What had Elkin done to Giselle?

  Elkin was sweating, holding the gun. Moisture from the fog glistened on his very black, very curly hair. His nose was too big for him to be truly handsome, Ballard thought. So why in hell hadn’t Cheri Tart mentioned that nose? Or those extra-long mod sideburns? None of this would have happened if she’d mentioned things like that.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do about you, Ballard.” He chewed his lip nervously. “I really don’t.”

  “Buy me off.”

  Elkin gave a short tight laugh full of a sort of despair. He went around drawing the shades, closed the window through which Ballard had entered. He looked like a tennis player, a basketball player, maybe; he didn’t look like a murderer. He sat down on the edge of the big oak table, began swinging one leg. His shoes were very brightly polished. His eyes looked sick. “Buy you off with what?”

  “The money you embezzled. The money you killed Charles Griffin for—so you could blame him for stealing it.”

  But Elkin just shook his head, his face almost placid. Ballard suddenly realized: he had to prime himself. Work himself up, as he probably had done with Griffin. As he had done with Bart. As he would do with Larry Ballard unless . . . Would going down on his knees and pleading for his life do any good? Ballard knew he would do it if he thought it would save him.

  “I didn’t steal any money,” said Elkin.

  Ballard almost bought it, the way he said it. But if not for money, then why . . . “Heslip didn’t die. He’s out of the coma, he can identify you.”

  That shook Elkin, visibly. He said, “I don’t believe you.”

  “Odum can identify you, too. And Cheri . . .”

  His face went pale. “That whore! Don’t talk to me about her!”

  Use it. Work on it. Mr. Kink. “I saw your trophy room upstairs.”

  Elkin leaped to his feet, eyes wild. Jesus! Ballard had pushed the wrong button. But now he understood. Everything. Too late he understood it. The furniture had been sold from under Cheri merely to spite her, purely and simply. And Griffin had died, here in this house on February 9, because of Cheri.

  As if reading his thoughts, Elkin said, “Chuck was an accident, really.” He sank back on the edge of the table; some of the wildness left his eyes. The muzzle of the gun wavered slightly. Ballard would roll suddenly out of the chair, keep rolling, a moving target, then dive right out of the window, shade and curtains and glass and all . . .

  Bullshit.

  “It was an accident. He came over here the night after that bitch over in Concord . . . Anyway, he was accusing me of wild things, things she’d said. A cheap whore like that, a topless dancer showing everything she’s got to anyone, but when I . . . But . . . Anyway, he . . . he was standing in the living room, by the fireplace, he said . . . He believed what she said about me! He . . . he said if I ever went near her again he . . . he was bigger than I am, a lot heavier, he lifted weights all the time, so I picked up the poker and I hit him. Just to knock him down. But it was turned wrong and . . . the end of it went right into his forehead, right into his skull above his eye. He just fell down dead. An accident . . .”

  Where in hell was Giselle? Obviously Elkin knew nothing about her. Had she for Christ sake fallen asleep or something in the goddamn car? His back was killing him . . . “So you had to make it look as if Griffin had been embezzling. To explain why he disappeared.”

  “That’s it,” he said. His face was working. He transferred the revolver to his right hand, flexed his fingers, returned it to his left. “Since it happened, I’ve been going down to JRS after supper, some nights, to work on the tallies and receipts to make it look as if he’d been stealing for quite a while.”

  “On Tuesday you took the W-2 out of Leo’s desk after he showed it to Heslip,” said Ballard.

  “But it was too late. Somehow, from that California Street address, your man got to Odum. On Tuesday night he came by on his way back from the East Bay to tell us what he had learned about Griffin. I was the only one there. After he left I stayed there a while, thinking. I knew Odum had given him a description of Griffin—he kept staring at me while he was there . . .”

  “Because the description fit you,” said Ballard. “Because you had posed as Griffin to Odum. Why did you? Why San Jose and—”

  “What else was I going to do?” he demanded in an aggrieved voice. “I could hide his body in the cellar, but I couldn’t put his car down there. I couldn’t put it in a JRS Garage, either—someone would have recognized it. So I rented a house down in San Jose, as far away from the city and the East Bay as I could get, and left it in the garage. But then your company came around looking for
it.”

  It was ironic: if he had just left it parked somewhere by Griffin’s house, a DKA man would have spotted it, grabbed it, and the investigation would have ended right there. Instead, he had brought in Odum as a way to get rid of it.

  “And then Odum didn’t keep up the payments,” Ballard said.

  “And here you are.” His voice had roughened, coarsened, deepened. Working himself up to it? No. Please . . . “You had to keep going. You wouldn’t let me alone.”

  Oh Jesus Christ, this was it. It couldn’t be, he was only twenty-six years old, he couldn’t die yet, Jesus, he was going to shit his pants or something . . .

  Elkin took a deep breath. His hand raised the heavy revolver.

  And the front door slammed.

  The gun muzzle wavered. Elkin’s face had become frantic with indecision. When whoever it was came through the door, Ballard would lunge for the bourbon bottle on the sideboard, throw it . . .

  Heavy careless footsteps tramping down the hall, heavy as doom. Elkin whispered furiously at Ballard as if they were fellow conspirators, “Who . . .”

  A hard-faced, compact, bleak-eyed man in a dark topcoat came through the door, stopped. His hands were in his coat pockets. Elkin swung the muzzle of the revolver toward him, but the man was unaffected. His eyes went from one of them to the other and back. Ballard was on his feet.

  “Rodney Elkin?” said the hard-faced man.

  “I’m . . . Elkin.” The gun was wavering; he didn’t know who to point it at. If Ballard had been himself he could have taken him then. He didn’t even try.

  “Inspector Ed Gough, Homicide, SFPD,” said the bleak-eyed man. Ballard had a sudden totally irrational urge to start laughing. “You are under arrest for the murder of Charles M. Griffin on the night of Wednesday, February ninth. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to counsel. If you cannot afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you. If you choose—”