Dead Skip

by Joe Gores

  “But . . . I have a gun!” exclaimed Elkin. He had gone into an oddly theatrical half-crouch, like a Western gunfighter on a Hollywood sound studio street.

  “So do I,” said Gough. “And I know how to use mine.” He looked over at Ballard as if Elkin’s revolver did not exist. “Who the hell are you?”

  “La . . . Larry Ballard,” he said in a carefully controlled voice.

  “You a friend of his?”

  “Private investigator.”

  “Give me your belt,” said Gough.

  “I have a gun!” yelled Elkin. He looked as if he wanted to cry; all three of them, oddly, knew that the time he could have used it had already passed.

  “Don’t make me take it away from you, sonny. We’ve had a police accountant going through the books at JRS two nights a week since sometime in April. Spectrographic analysis of the inks in the ledgers show some entries were altered, others put in at different times since Griffin was murdered, trying to make it look as if the entries predated his disappearance. We’ve got an eyeball witness to Griffin coming to this house on February ninth. We’ve got an eyeball of you at the San Jose house in March. We’ve got an eyeball of someone answering your description putting a black man into a Jaguar on Golden Gate Avenue at one-fifteen A.M. on Wednesday morning. The witness got a partial make on the license plate. Should I go on?”

  The three men stood looking at one another with a strange intimacy in the unused dining room. Finally Elkin gave a little sob and laid the revolver on the oak table. His hands were shaking so badly that the steel clattered against the wood. He no longer looked like an athlete: he was just a lanky, frightened man with a nose that was big enough to keep him from being truly handsome.

  Gough stepped forward, scooped up the revolver, dropped it into a coat pocket. “Turn around,” he said. Elkin did. Gough made impatient gestures at Ballard. “Your belt. I got roped into a big drug bust down in the Haight on the way up here, I don’t have any cuffs with me.”

  Ballard gave him the belt. Ballard’s face ached from being kept impassive. As Gough lashed Elkin’s hands behind him, the faint far wail of a siren came from down toward Stanyan. Gough nodded.

  “That’ll be a prowl car.” He grabbed the tall murderer’s shoulder in an ungentle grip. “Let’s go. We’ll meet them out in front.”

  Ballard followed them to the front door. The fog had thinned; as they went down the front walk, Giselle’s tall golden-haired form appeared on the sidewalk. Gough went by her without a glance; she turned and stared after him as if she had never seen a cop before. Then she burst out laughing.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Ballard yelled at her.

  Giselle quit laughing and ran up the walk. “Larry! Are you all right?”

  He put a hand to his kidney and groaned. Actually, it didn’t feel too bad; but he had to go to the bathroom and was afraid to. If blood came out . . . “I was almost killed!” he exclaimed. “Why in hell didn’t you blow the horn when Elkin showed up?”

  She gestured after Ed Gough. “He got in the car with me about fifteen minutes after you left. He’d had the same idea as you, to search for the body. But since you were already inside, he said let you find it. But then Elkin showed up. He told me to run for a phone, and then he followed Elkin right up the walk and into the house. No gun, no nothing. He looked awfully damned good doing it, Larry.”

  So the bastard had been in the house when Ballard had been attacked, probably had been hiding out of sight at the foot of the stairs to the second floor, just inside the front door. Had let Ballard get slammed in the kidneys and hadn’t done a damned thing. Had then slammed the front door from the inside and come down the hall at the crucial moment.

  An SFPD radio unit squealed into Java from Masonic, red lights turning, siren dying. Two uniformed cops jumped out.

  Ballard turned and started down the hall. “There’s a bottle of bourbon in the dining room.”

  Ten minutes later the front door slammed and familiar aggressive footsteps came down the hall.

  “How did you know Elkin was the one?” demanded Ballard as Dan Kearny alias Ed Gough came into the room.

  “When I was driving back in the T-Bird,” said Kearny, “I realized Griffin seemed to be two men—one who attacked Bart coldly and viciously, the other who was Cheri’s gentle soul drinking too much out of grief about his mother’s death. Then I finally caught on that somewhere along the line a substitution had been made, a phony for a real Griffin. It had to be after Cheri and before Odum. So . . .”

  “So,” said Giselle, “as soon as you realized you had two different psychological descriptions, you started looking for two different physical descriptions, right?”

  “I finally started to think about the evidence instead of just walk around it. When I did that, Elkin stuck out like a broken thumb. Only he talked with Griffin when Griffin called in sick on the tenth and eleventh of February. He was the one who started the talk that Griffin might have been embezzling. He was the one who told Larry that Griffin had said the mother’s will was out of probate—nobody else heard Griffin say that. He fit Cheri’s description of Griffin’s kinky friend. Even getting rid of the furniture in the California Street house—if that wasn’t Griffin, it had to be somebody who knew Griffin wouldn’t be around to object. So then I went back and asked Odum the two questions I should have asked him in the first place.”

  “For a description of Griffin,” said Ballard. “But what was the second?”

  “Whether Odum gave the description to Bart. He did.”

  “And Bart caught up with the description on the wrong person. He thought it was just a coincidence, but he wanted to ask me about it because it bothered him.”

  “Well,” said Giselle. She looked at her watch, but said, “What’s the penalty for impersonating a police officer, Dan?”

  Kearny stopped at the door, grinned. He had to get down to Fifth and Bryant to sign the murder complaint against Elkin so he could be held without bail. “I liked the stuff about the spectrographic analysis of inks, myself. You ought to get out of here if you don’t want to get stuck for the rest of the night. They’ll be coming with a warrant to bust up that cellar floor. Damned good job, you two. Take the day off.”

  “It’s Saturday,” said Giselle. “We aren’t supposed to work anyway.”

  “Then take Sunday off, too.”

  “Why didn’t you call yourself Joe Friday?” asked Ballard coldly.

  “You know I always use street names for my aliases,” said Kearny with great dignity. “Bush. Franklin. Turk. Gough. One of these days I’ll have to work something up with Golden Gate in it.”

  They stared at the empty doorway, listened to Kearny’s energetic footsteps pound back down the hall. The front door slammed.

  Ballard shook his head in wonder. “The son of a bitch probably will, too.”

  Giselle laughed. Then she said, “Looks like you’re stuck with running me over to Oakland after all.”

  Ballard used a four-letter word. Then, gritting his teeth, he used Elkin’s bathroom. No blood. Which cheered him so much that he took the bottle of bourbon with him. Maybe he could sneak it into the hospital in the morning. Bart liked bourbon, and Corinne Jones would take a sip of it from time to time. Especially when she had something to celebrate.

  FILE #2: STAKEOUT ON PAGE STREET

  In “Stakeout on Page Street” I was trying to fictionally combine three real elements: staking out a parked car; the tensions between black and white in our nation at the time; and The Haight-Ashbury District during San Francisco’s Summer of Love—flowers in the hair, and all that. The Haight, then, was a colorful and outré scene that was still relatively unknown outside San Francisco.

  In real life, I had spotted the car off the hot-sheet after learning it had been picking up parking tickets on Clement Street. I had also learned that the cops were after this dude as a child molester—in the parlance of the day, a “dicky-jerker.” This guy liked ’em young, eight, ten ye
ars old. (I had to make the boy into a girl and increase her age to 15 to keep Fred Dannay from having a heart attack when he read the story.)

  We knew where the car was, but we didn’t know where the subject was. And we couldn’t ask around about him for fear it would get back to him. We wanted to help the cops, but if they grabbed him in the car, they would impound it and we would miss our repo. If we grabbed the car, on his return he would know something was wrong and would rabbit.

  So I staked out the car for 27 hours straight. If he came back to it, I had to finger him for the cops in such a way that they would grab him on the street while I was grabbing the car.

  This stake-out did not occur in The Haight-Ashbury in the late ’60s, but a decade earlier in the Richmond District near Golden Gate Park (his favorite kid-hunting grounds). Neither of the real cops was a racist: I created MacLashlin as a foil for Bart Heslip. And I made the subject black so Bart would have to deal with a racist cop at the same time he had to deal with a black man gone bad enough to give the cop an excuse to hold on to his racism.

  Benny Nicoletti, the good-guy cop, went on to appear in a couple of the DKA novels as an old friend of Dan Kearny’s; indeed, he plays a pivotal role in Gone, No Forwarding.

  The title is an obvious homage to Raymond Chandler’s “Pickup on Noon Street.”

  Barton Heslip carried their drinks over to his rather broken-down couch and switched off the floor lamp; the streetlight outside, filtered through ancient lace curtains, was kinder to the apartment. Lou Rawls was soulin’ from the record player.

  “What you put in these drinks, honey?” Corinne’s black eyes gleamed suspiciously from her heart-shaped face, less black than his. She was strikingly pretty, with high cheekbones and a wide warm mouth. Heslip could feel her body heat through the knobbly weave of her suit.

  “Bourbon, baby. Just bourbon.”

  “It tastes more like kerosene.”

  “I didn’t notice you offering to kick in for the bottle, baby.”

  She giggled and burrowed into the crook of his arm. “Bart, how come you to ever quit fighting?”

  “I looked in the mirror one morning and heard those angel wings flapping. Ears getting thick, scar tissue forming around the mouth.” He shrugged. “I decided that was all she wrote.”

  He tightened his arm around her shoulders and she came to him urgently, face raised, lips parted, eyes burning hungrily.

  The phone shrilled.

  After the fourth ring Heslip groaned and padded on stockinged feet across the room, moving with the easy grace of the trained athlete. His exaggerated breadth of shoulder and depth of chest made him seem much bigger than his 158 pounds. He was almost plum-black, with kinky hair and the inevitable thin mustache. His tight-clipped head seemed too small for the muscular column of his neck.

  “Yeah?” he growled into the phone.

  “Bart? Larry Ballard. Listen—”

  “You listen, cat; it’s past two thirty in the Sunday ayem.”

  “Bart, I spotted this car from the skip list and tailed it until the guy parked. 1965 Dodge Dart, green, license Baker, X-ray, Eddy, 1-9-9. But you see, my skip list is a month old, and I thought—”

  Heslip’s face was that of a boxer just before the bell. His voice was thin with excitement. “Was a Negro cat driving it? Young stud about our age, maybe with a chick who has long black hair?”

  “Yeah. He was a Negro. She went into an address on Page Street, in The Haight-Ashbury, and he took off walking.”

  “You cut back to that car and take out the coil wire so it won’t start—but don’t move the car. It’s registered to a Gloria Jensen, and the cat is Floyd Matthews. Wanted by the cops for statutory rape. If he knew we’d caught up with the car, he’d think the cops had, too, and he’d cut out. Oh, and you’d better call Mr. Kearny at home on the radio.

  “Two thirty in the morning?”

  “He’ll know how to contact the cops handling the case. I’ll be in my car in five minutes; radio your location.” He started to hang up, then added, “You should have taken out the coil wire before you called me.”

  He padded into the bedroom, unmindful of the girl on the couch. If the car was gone—Larry had been a Daniel Kearny Associates’ field agent for only three months; Heslip had been with DKA three years. Larry had ridden with him as a trainee, and a close friendship had developed between them.

  Heslip riffled through his SKIP folder, found the Gloria Jensen assignment. Delinquent seven months, now being handled on a contingent basis; they would be paid for their investigation and their expenses only if the vehicle was recovered. A voice brought him up short.

  “Hey, lover boy, you disremember something?”

  “Huh?” Then he laughed and crossed to the couch and switched on the floor lamp. Corinne Jones slammed her highball glass down on the coffee table bitterly.

  “I didn’t mean no damned floor lamp, lover. I meant me.”

  Heslip, flipping through the mass of reports and memo carbons stapled face-out to the back of the assignment sheet, spoke without looking up. “Sorry, honey, but this is a hot one and—”

  “Lover, you got a hot one right here.” Then she also laughed; it was deep rich laughter which lit up her whole face. “I swear, Barton Heslip, once we’re married you’re gonna get yourself a new job.”

  “I like this one, honey.”

  He sat down on the couch to lace his shoes. It was an old argument between them, but O’Bannon assured him it was one carried on as a running dialogue between every married field investigator and his wife. Something had chased the laughter from Corinne’s face.

  “And I s’pose here goes our picnic tomorrow—today, rather.”

  Heslip was pulling on his dark windbreaker. “This’ll just take a couple of hours. You get some sleep, I’ll be right back.”

  She grunted and uttered a very distinct Anglo-Saxon noun as he waggled his fingers at her and slid through the front door, out into the chill San Francisco morning, just three minutes after hanging up the phone. The narrow, high-shouldered old Victorian houses seemed drawn up against the cold Pacific mist. Down in the Bay the foghorns were bawling at one another. He coaxed his company Plymouth into life, flicked on the radio, and drove toward The Haight-Ashbury.

  The radio blared unintelligibly. He adjusted the squelch and Ballard’s voice came in: “SF-6 calling SF-3. Come in, Bart.”

  Heslip depressed his mike’s red TRANSMIT button. “Go ahead.”

  “Affirmative on that coil wire; my 10-20 is Page and Cole. I have instructions from Mr. Kearny, over.”

  “Tell me when I get there,” said Heslip. “SF-3 clear.”

  It was nearly three a.m., but The Drug Store coffeehouse on Haight and Masonic was jammed with teens and post-teens, juveniles up to forty years old; white, black, and brown; bearded, long-haired, miniskirted, ponchoed; acid-heads, pot-blowers, freak-outs; the tuned-in, turned-on, dropped-out, unwashed hippies of The Haight-Ashbury. Psychedelphia.

  Two years before, the district had been scheduled for a bisecting freeway; the hippie head-count had risen as the rents had fallen. Heslip didn’t know what the subject and Matthews were doing there, since he had turned up their liaison only this past Friday; the cops didn’t have it yet. This put DKA in the enviable position of being able to do a favor for the police, which never hurt.

  He identified Ballard’s Ford on the corner of Page and Cole by its tall whippet aerial. A spark glowed carelessly from the front seat as he drove by, parked on Cole, and walked back.

  When he opened the door, Ballard said, “The Dart’s two up from the corner, across Page—in front of that VW bus painted all those screwy colors. She’s in 1718 Page, at the far end of the block.”

  Heslip punched him lightly on the arm. “I could see your cigarette when I came up the street.”

  “Not from that apartment—I’ve kept it cupped in my hand.”

  Ballard was a lean man, conditioned like a basketball player, his hard blue eyes oddly at
variance with his mid-twenties face. He was dressed in slacks and a white shirt and a windbreaker. Heslip went into his detachable accent, which was useful in getting information from newly arrived southern Negroes who would mistrust a well-spoken black man nearly as much as they would a white one.

  “What if de boss man come up de street behin’ de car an’ see dat cigarette like Ah done, huh?”

  Ballard shrugged and grinned. “What do you expect at three in the morning? Saul Panzer? Dan says an Inspector Benny Nicoletti will be here to stake out the apartment, and you’re supposed to stake out the car. Apparently Matthews is a travel agent for the hippies.”

  “A pusher, huh? Visit heaven on a sugar cube.” Which would explain their presence in The Haight-Ashbury; this was obviously his market area. “You gonna hang around for the fun?”

  “Can’t. I was leaving for Eureka when I spotted the Dart; I’ve got to be there at noon to pick up that black ’67 T-Bird for Cal-Cit.”

  “Better split, cat; you got close to six hundred miles, half of ’em dragging a tow. You did a damned good job of spotting on this Dart.” He opened the door as Ballard started the engine. The street was totally deserted. “What does the subject look like?”

  “Black hair worn long and pressed flat. Miniskirt and white stockings with knit designs. Heavy three-color sweater. Wild figure, but I didn’t get a look at the face.”

  “Where’s the coil wire?”

  Ballard brought it out from under the seat and Heslip stuck it in his jacket pocket, and watched Ballard out of sight. Then he sauntered across Page and past the green Dodge Dart. Man! He’d wanted this car for five months, and here it was.

  He kept right on, past 1718 Page—a tiny frame building with an empty store on the ground floor, a single apartment above. Its pale green paint was flaking. Next to the building was an alleyway stuffed with boxes of trash and super-market bags full of garbage. None of the windows in the twin bays had drapes or shades. No lights showed anywhere.

  A black Mercury stopped on the corner of Clayton and a heavily built man in his early forties got out to block Heslip’s way. He wore slacks and sports shirt with a screaming herringbone jacket that would have made him look like a Fillmore Street pimp, except he was white.