Dead Skip

by Joe Gores

  “Benny Nicoletti,” he introduced himself. He had a surprisingly high, squeaky voice, and his face missed meekness only by the eyes. They were cop’s eyes. He stuck out a hand and Heslip took it. “I met you at Dan Kearny’s.”

  “Sure,” said Heslip. “Good to see you again.”

  A sandy-haired giant, a full head taller than Heslip, came around the back of the car. His jaw jutted, his eyes were muddy and utterly flat, like twin pools of stagnant water.

  “This is my partner, Sandy MacLashlin,” said Nicoletti. “Bart Heslip, Mac. Dan Kearny’s man.”

  MacLashlin nodded without removing his hands from his pockets. He was chewing on a toothpick. Heslip drew back his own hand quickly, annoyed with his own slight anger at MacLashlin’s snub.

  “I hear this Matthews got a white chick with him.” MacLashlin had a flat-planed, savage face. “Any white girl shacks with a boog . . .” His eyes were intense on Heslip’s face; he spat noisily into the gutter.

  “You sure she’s still living with Matthews?” said Nicoletti.

  “She was Friday, when I got the lead.” Heslip’s voice was sullen.

  Nicoletti nodded. “We’ll try to take him on the street, Bart, so we don’t have to impound the car. You got an eyeball of him?”

  “No, just of the girl, from the guy who spotted the car.”

  Walking away, Heslip found that his hands were fisted at his sides like rocks gathered for a stoning. Remember, baby, he’s just a little old hater. Maintain cool. But in the car he slammed his fist into the dashboard several times. Oh, how he wanted to open up the side of that MacLashlin’s jaw like a can of tomato sauce and spread those big white Mr. Charlie teeth around.

  Time passed without a person moving on Page Street, not anyone at all. Twice a prowl car went by. It was getting light. At six thirty MacLashlin appeared, walking down Cole. Even giving him fifty pounds, Heslip decided, he could take the big man. He’d won 39 out of 40 fights, 37 by K.O.; in the service he’d fought all the way up to heavy just to find opponents, and he still worked out three times a week. MacLashlin opened the door to hike in his solid backside, tossing away a chewed toothpick.

  “Little bar up the street here, The Alpine, opens at six a.m.” He belched. “I gotta spend my Sunday waiting for some boog to show up, may as well enjoy myself, huh, Heslip?”

  “Whatever you say, Inspector.” Heslip stared straight ahead.

  “You sure this Matthews isn’t a friend of yours?” When Heslip didn’t respond, he leaned closer; his grin was sour with cheap bar whiskey. “Bet you make it with the white chicks, huh?” His tone harshened. “Matthews made it with some runaway fifteen-year-old while she was high on pot. White girl from Piedmont. Rich folks. They signed the complaint.”

  Heslip met the muddy eyes. “Maybe you plan on having him resist arrest a little bit if he shows up?”

  MacLashlin nodded judiciously. “Maybe something like that.”

  “I’m here to repossess a car, Inspector.”

  “Keep it that way.”

  Heslip watched him out of sight. He slid lower in his seat and breathed deeply to relax, to thrust MacLashlin from his mind. When would Matthews be back? Larry had done a damned good job spotting that car. Good man, Larry. Had almost quit over the Mayfield case two months ago, but Mr. Kearny—

  His door was wrenched open, nearly spilling him into the street. Dan Kearny’s cold gray eyes were regarding him from a yard away.

  “Nice nap, Heslip? Eight o’clock. They shoot sentries for that.”

  “Just dozed off this second, Dan.” He shot a surreptitious look at the Dart. “The girl’s still in 1718 Page, and the car is right—”

  “I saw it.” Kearny had climbed in; he leaned forward to punch the dash lighter. He was a stocky, compact man with a flattened nose, thinning curly hair, and a jaw to crack gravel. As he’d done for three years, he offered a cigarette; Heslip refused it as he’d done for three years. Pungent smoke filled the car.

  “Nicoletti’s partner is riding me, Dan. Hard.”

  Kearny looked up sharply. His face was square and pugnacious and his eyes were chipped from flint.

  “If you’re going to start something, do it on your own time.”

  “Nothing like that.” But Heslip knew he wasn’t sure. He went into his dialect routine. “Boss, Ah sure as hebbin thought this yere was ma own time. Ah mean, it bein’ de Lawd’s day an’ all dat.”

  Kearny started to grin. “Quit clowning. Do you think this stakeout will nail Matthews?”

  “I think I should just ask her when he’s coming back. Hell, if he’s pushing pot and acid in The Haight-Ashbury, Dan, she’s used to spade cats coming around to make buys.”

  Kearny drew thoughtfully on his cigarette, then nodded and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “Right. I’ll go talk to Benny about it.”

  Heslip waited. You had to hand it to Kearny. Seven years before, at 36, he’d founded DKA with one car, a field man named O’Bannon, an old Victorian building on Golden Gate Avenue which once had been a bawdy house, and a Japanese secretary named Kathy Onoda who now was office manager. By specializing in frauds, defalcations, and embezzlements—and in the recovery of the chattels or money involved—Daniel Kearny Associates blanketed the state of California.

  Page Street was waking up. A Spanish woman went by with a small girl, obviously going to Mass. Three hippies went by, just as obviously not going anywhere. Their steps were languid, their violently unconventional dress merely another sort of conformity. Long greasy hair and unkempt beards; an ancient poncho, a red-lined evening cape, a serape; dirty ski cord trousers; two pairs of boots, one set of thonged leggings; tiny jingling bells on one ankle and golden hoops in pierced ears. Heslip was invisible to them: he was with it, cool, he dug, because black cats always were with it, cool, and dug.

  Kearny returned. “Benny says wait until ten o’clock, and see him afterwards so he knows what happens. MacLashlin didn’t like it.”

  “He’s afraid I’ll tip off the Jensen chick to the stakeout.”

  Kearny nodded and went away.

  Foot traffic increased; a few cars went by Sunday-slow. His rearview mirror was twisted so he could see the Dart without turning. Two old duffers appeared in it, standing on the corner in the sun with their arms folded on their chests. One of them gestured at a group of passing hippies.

  “Look at ’em,” he said aggrievedly. “They don’t do nothing. All day they don’t do nothing. They walk up and down the street.” He thought for a moment. “They don’t do as much as I do, and I don’t do nothing.”

  Heslip rolled up his window, locked the car, and crossed Page Street. The VW bus behind the Dart had Idaho license plates and was a sunburst of red, yellow, tan, brown, orange, blue (two shades), black, and green rectangles of varying sizes. On the back was an ornate red and gold sign, Make Love Not War, and on the side was painted the single purple word, Rejoice. A pilgrim newly arrived in Mecca. They descended on The Haight-Ashbury in droves, seeking free love, symbiotic relationships, acid, pot, and the ultimate turn-on that would congeal mankind into a quivering jelly of love.

  Heslip lifted a lip unconsciously. You made it on your own, baby, or you didn’t make it.

  Four small Negro kids were sprawled across the sidewalk like the spokes of a wheel, their hub an open comic book. A middle-aged white woman emerged from a well-kept apartment house to glare at Heslip, sniff at the children, and flounce down the street. On the next stoop three Negro women exclaimed over a box of candy; behind them a white man in bedroom slippers cursed some electric doorbell wires he was twisting with a linesman’s pliers.

  The stairwell to 1718 Page was smeared with small dirty handprints. Heslip knocked firmly on the door at the head of the stairs. A white girl opened it. Gloria Jensen. Her file said 26 but she looked 35. Her eyes were pouched, her black hair filmed and lifeless; the broken-bottle scar on her cheek was recent enough to have been a gift from Floyd Matthews.

  Three years before she wou
ld have been truly striking; now only the full, ripe body thrusting out against her striped sailor’s jersey and hip-huggers made any pretense at youth. Her bare feet were gray with ancient dirt.

  “You want who, dad?” Her intonation and voice-timbre were an unconscious copying of Negro speech patterns.

  “Floyd here?” He broadened his vowels into, “Flauid heayh?”

  She moved back from the door, conned. “Like what’s the gig?”

  “I’m Rejoice.” He accented the first syllable of the word he’d borrowed from the VW bus. “Rejoice Jackson. My—” He checked suddenly, suspiciously. “Okay to talk?”

  “Like sure. Come on in, man, but Floyd’s not here, y’know?”

  There were no rugs, no curtains, no stove, no refrigerator, no furniture apart from a wooden table and two chairs, one leaning up against a wall at a disconsolate angle. Two mattresses were side by side under a dirty swirl of sheets like old mashed potatoes. For decoration there were several bright, mildly pornographic “psychedelic” posters in the hippie style of Wes Wilson and The Family Dog.

  Heslip took the sturdier-looking chair, the girl the other. On the table stood a typewriter with manuscript paper piled beside it.

  “Word is that Floyd’s a cat with good acid,” he said cautiously.

  “Like he’ll be back in an hour. We gotta be cool, the fuzz want bust him on a 226B.” Her face became indignant. “Bum rap, y’know? She like begged him. We’ve got some speed, and some real gone grass at ten dollars a lid, but acid—” She shook her head.

  Speed: dexedrine, benzedrine, methedrine. Grass: marijuana. Favored “head” drugs of the hippies, who scorned heroin, opium, barbiturates, alcohol, and tranquilizers as “body” drugs which were depressants, turning the user off rather than on.

  “I need acid, man, like twenty tabs at least.” Two thousand milligrams of lysergic acid diethylamide, eighty bucks’ worth; plenty to interest a small-time retail pusher like Matthews. He added, “Say, Floyd doesn’t have a connection for the Big H, does he?”

  “He wouldn’t touch the Heavy, Rejoice. He just wants to help people turn on.” She gestured proudly at the typewriter. “He turned me on to acid because I’m a writer, y’know?” Her nervous fingers were weaving febrile air pictures. “He gave me a tab right in this room. I started freaking freely, I could hear him talking but my mind was going out and coming back between his syllables, like fly casting, y’know? I’d read Huxley, I wanted it to be the writing experience, like an experiment sort of thing, y’know?”

  Her face and voice had become agitated; she hugged herself abruptly, as if she were cold. “But I just wasn’t capable, y’know? I mean Floyd said I was coming out with these great things, these great insights, but it just wasn’t me.” She was silent for a long moment, then she shuddered. “It was a bad trip. Since then I just blow pot.”

  Heslip stood up abruptly, filled with pity. “Yeah. Like, ah, gotta trip around a little, dig? Maybe I run into Floyd, I dig him by what he’s wearing y’know?”

  “Sure. Ah—Kelly green ski cords and a like olive-green velour shirt with short sleeves. I mean very distinctive.”

  Emerging into bright sunshine was like leaving the smells of a sickroom: the slightly fermented sweetness of pot, ill-disguised with incense; the sharp urinous reek of a toilet carelessly unflushed for a week; the acrid chalkiness of spilled milk, soured on cabinet tops. As he often did after catching up with a bad skip, Heslip had a sense of unreality: he knew more about Gloria Jensen than her mother, probably more than the wig-picker she’d consulted in 1966 . . . whom she’d sat behind in eleventh-grade English; her graduate sociology grades at Berkeley; the doctor who’d been supplying her with birth-control pills since her Tijuana abortion the year before; which garage had an unsatisfied $42.38 repair lien on the Dodge Dart.

  He sat down on the steps of an old Victorian, out of sight of the apartment, and waited until Inspector Nicoletti walked up to join him.

  “Matthews is expected back by noon. Wearing green ski cords and a short-sleeved olive-green velour shirt. Whatever the hell that is.”

  “My wife was talking one day, said it looks like a cheap velvet,” said Nicoletti in his deceptive squeak. “Think she burned you?”

  “No chance. I know the type—civil rights, pot, social protest.”

  “I just bet you do.” MacLashlin had left the stakeout car; his eyes were bloodshot and his breath reeked of stale whiskey. “Why’d you take so long up there, Heslip?”

  Heslip let it pass.

  MacLashlin belched suddenly, explosively. “This boy a pusher like we heard?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that, Inspector.”

  MacLashlin turned to his partner. “I think he burned the stakeout to her, Benny. I think I’d better go up there and sniff around.”

  “She’d make you as fuzz in ten seconds,” said Heslip flatly.

  Nicoletti said mildly, “She doesn’t have to let you in, Mac. Officially we don’t know she exists. Anything you found in a search would be inadmissible as evidence anyway.”

  Heslip left them still discussing it, and went back down Page Street to a stoop just three cars away from the Dart. Sitting in the sun he clenched and unclenched his fists.

  A hippie came to roost like a chunky stork on the white fire hydrant on the corner and opened a paperback book titled Leisure—the Basis of Culture. He wore his hair in long yellow unkempt curls; he had a sleeping bag slung on a leather strap over his right shoulder.

  Twenty minutes later Heslip saw MacLashlin cross Page toward 1718. He started up with an audible curse, then settled back. He knew that to the girl, MacLashlin would have FUZZ emblazoned across his chest in letters three feet high. To hell with him. His concern was the “repo”—the car. The blond hippie on the fire hydrant threw him a puzzled look and returned to his reading. After eight minutes MacLashlin left again.

  A black man clacked by in pointy narrow shoes which flashed in the sunlight like knife blades. He was tall and meaty, slightly stooped, wearing a full mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. Heslip glanced up casually, then did a double-take. Kelly green ski cords. Olive green short-sleeved shirt that looked like velvet. Heslip stood up. Good old Floyd Matthews had come home.

  Matthews had the car key in his hand, but continued on past the Dart toward 1718. Good. Ten paces beyond it. Fifteen. The car was out of it.

  At the far end of the block Inspector Nicoletti’s screaming jacket was crossing Page. MacLashlin’s bulk was just rounding the corner on the odd-numbered side of Page. Both men moved casually, so the intercept would be just before Matthews reached the apartment.

  Then the window facing Matthews on the near-side bay was thrown up. Gloria Jensen’s face appeared, white and tense.

  “Fuzz!” she shrieked. “Split!”

  The big Negro spun like a halfback and raced toward Heslip, almost before the second word had left the girl’s mouth. MacLashlin was clearing the parked cars across Page, his revolver dwarfed in his huge paw, but he was half a block behind. Nicoletti, sprinting, his pistol out, was even farther away. Neither man could shoot. ­Matthews would be around the corner and away before they could catch him.

  Not Heslip’s business.

  So he jammed a foot between the running man’s legs.

  Matthews went down, skidded, came up snarling. Heslip was between him and the corner. Face contorted, Matthews whipped out a switchblade and lunged, all in a single movement, so fast it was a blur.

  Heslip, on his toes like a bullfighter, saw the blade flash by an inch from his belly, and chopped a short hard left into the big man’s unprotected midsection. His face went gray, he faltered: and then the leather strap of the blond hippie’s sleeping bag was flipped over Heslip’s shoulders from behind. He was jerked off his feet by a vicious snap of the leather.

  Heslip’s body was momentarily supported by the strap. His knees pumped to his chin, then shot straight out like pistons. His heels caught Matthews above the
heart with a force that smashed the big man against the apartment building like a swatted fly. The switchblade went flying.

  As it did, Heslip heaved his weight forward against the strap. He went down, hard, and the blond hippie was flipped clumsily over his head, right into MacLashlin’s arms. The big hands fielded him expertly, whirled him, and slammed him up against the side of a parked car. Heslip darted forward, pumped fists into Matthews until the man’s eyes rolled up and he sagged down the wall. Heslip danced back waiting for the count.

  Inspector Nicoletti trotted up, panting. Heslip’s head ached. It wasn’t good to let go like that, to lose control; but the first blow had transferred all his frustrated rage at MacLashlin to the luckless Matthews.

  MacLashlin had frisked and cuffed his blond prisoner. He said disgustedly, “Hell, he don’t even know Matthews. Just heard someone yell that we were fuzz, so he decided to help out against us.”

  Heslip realized there hadn’t been sight or sound of Gloria Jensen since her Paul Revere act. She probably was very busy flushing her ex-lover’s pharmacopoeia down the toilet. Maybe now she’d go visit her family in Carmel for a while. She’d have to walk.

  Nicoletti snapped the cuffs on Matthews and jerked him ungently to his feet, ignoring his moans, and they trundled the two cuffed men to their car and thrust them into the rear seat.

  “I guess that’s it,” said MacLashlin in a satisfied voice. Nicoletti was radioing for a cruiser to take the prisoners in for booking.

  “Not quite.” Heslip’s voice was soft. “You an’ me got a li’l frien’ly sparrin’ to do. No badge. No gun. No uniform, baby.”

  “Fight you? You crazy, boy?” MacLashlin had an odd look in his eyes. “I’m a policeman on duty. Benny and me—”

  Nicoletti said abruptly, “You’re on your own till the squad car comes, Mac.”

  Crimson shot into MacLashlin’s face. Heslip put a hand in the middle of the big man’s chest and pushed, almost contemptuously. The muscles whitened along MacLashlin’s jaw as his eyes darted from one to the other. Suddenly the tension left him.