by Joe Gores
Standing in her open doorway, Etty Mae even sang, in a cracked contralto, about it being a quarter to three without anyone in the place except you and me . . .
Then, for a solid hour, Bart sat in an antimacassar-covered easy chair that Etty Mae said had been her husband’s favorite, while she poured iced tea into him and regaled him with everything that had happened in her life and on television for the past twenty years.
Bart finally got her on to the murder next door, and she was equally voluble. This time he egged her on.
“So you saw this woman go up on Poteet’s porch and lost sight of her, and then she came out and you—”
“The first night I never did see her come out.”
“Wait a minute. You’re telling me you saw her twice ?”
Etty Mae nodded. “The night before the murder she stopped right under the streetlight and went up on his porch, just like the next night when she killed him. More iced tea, Mr. Heslip?”
“No thank you, ma’am,” he said hurriedly. “Did you tell the cops about her being here two nights in a row?”
For the first time, Etty Mae looked uncomfortable.
“To tell the truth, Mr. Heslip, I can’t rightly say that I did. With all the excitement, it just sort of slipped my mind.”
He had been right. He really needed a mug shot of Yana Poteet. “And you could pick her out of a lineup if you had to?”
“Absolutely. I watched her twice with my binoculars.”
Bart used the pay phone next to the restrooms at the Jack in the Box three blocks from Etty Mae’s house to call Giselle.
“Yana was down here the night before.”
“Are you sure it was Yana? If she can prove she was up here on either of those two nights, she’ll have a murder alibi!”
“How’s she gonna do that? The cops won’t listen, they’re convinced she’s guilty. And we don’t know where she is.”
“Yes we do! Larry’s got her staked out. We’ll get a chance to talk to her before the cops do.”
The receptionist, and Harvey Parsons, the hostile embalmer, came out of Brittingham’s Funeral Parlor at 5:00 P.M.. But no Yana. By five-thirty Larry was starting to sweat it. At six, he went in to find Brittingham in his private office.
Larry said, “We spoke last night. I—”
“Of course. Mrs. Henderson’s nephew. You wanted to meet Ms. Thatcher.” His prim features tightened in anger. “She just walked off this afternoon and left Mrs. Hennessey’s face half-made-up.” He glared at Ballard. “I won’t take her back.”
“Sure not,” agreed Larry. “But if you have her residence address maybe I can reach her there.”
“The Columbine Residence for Women.” As Ballard headed out the door, Brittingham stood up to almost shout after him, “I won’t take her back. You tell her that!”
She wasn’t there to tell. Stern-faced Mrs. Newman rang Miss Thatcher’s room, but there was no response. A chunky Latina maid in a blue uniform coming by with a blue plastic bucket full of cleaning materials stopped beside them.
“She is no here.” She made a zooming motion with one hand. “Her mother die, she fly away.”
Stern-faced Mrs. Newman become sterner of face.
“I think that answers your question, young man.”
She pointed to the door and Larry left. Yana must have seen him at Brittingham’s after all, and just walked out while he was getting back to his truck to stake the place out. His only consolation was that he was getting less and less sure he wanted to find her for the other Gypsies.
Halfway down the mountain, Dan took a stab at it.
“So this whole thing is about that orangutan?”
“Dat orangutan, or Old Man uff de Forest, iss now very rare in de vild. If vun vanted one in its true, native, totally unspoiled state—”
“One wouldn’t want Freddie,” said Dan. “Freddie uses a computer. And I swear he tried to sign something to me.”
“You know dot American Sign Language?” demanded the Baron.
“A deaf girl worked for DKA after school for a couple of summers. The hand movements looked familiar, that’s all.”
Knottnerus-Meyer considered him carefully.
“I vas vatching through dot observation vindow. Unt I know some sign language . . .” He paused, then added with an entirely straight face, “I belief dot ape signed, ‘HELP. I AM BEING HELD PRISONER.’ ”
thirty-eight
O’B finally admitted it: he was having a dry spell in more ways than one. He was off the booze, and he hadn’t repo’d one single car since the Panoz up in Sonoma. At almost the end of May, he was dead last on the repo board in the upstairs office. That had never happened before. Drastic measures were needed, so he was at the DKA office primed for shameful work. It was that or go have a drink, and he wasn’t going to do that.
Long before Jane Goldson arrived at 7:30 A.M. to open locks, switch off alarms, and check the fax and e-mail for overnight assignments, he planned to poach new REPO ON SIGHT assignment sheets from the other guys’ In boxes on her desk. Go grab the cars, up his monthly average, and blandly say they must have been given to him by mistake.
He reached greedy fingers for a juicy new Integra in Trin’s In box, and an angry voice yelled at him from the stairs that led down from the second floor above Jane’s desk.
“Hey, what the hell you think you’re doing there, man?”
Morales vaulted over the railing to grab the repo order out of his hands. Trin grubbed in his box for his other assignments, memos, close-outs, gold-colored copies of the skip-tracers’ work on his various cases, and stormed out. O’B drank six Dixie cups of cold water from the cooler, then meekly followed.
“He’s not a bad man,” said a woman’s determined voice.
She was standing on the sidewalk outside, a little thing in her early 40s, not over five-three, wearing a cloth coat against the morning chill. Her sharp nose had a red tip, her hair was stringy, her eyes close-set, her thin lips determined.
“Of course he’s not,” said O’B heartily, knowing she sure didn’t mean Morales. “What’s the old devil up to these days?”
“As if you didn’t know,” she said almost coyly. Then she was serious again. “The temptation was just too much for Joel, you see. He figured that after a while the big man would stop looking. But he never did. He never said anything, he was just there, waiting, watching, leaving those cards with DKA on them.”
The big man had to be Ken Warren, and this had to be Meg Doman, wife of Joel Doman, ex-UpScale salesman. Meg Doman was rummaging in her purse, still talking.
“You’d think, him being a used-car salesman and all, that wouldn’t bother Joel. But he’s sensitive to pressure. He was going to pieces. So this morning I just did it.”
Her fisted hand came out of her purse convulsively—to press a set of keys into O’B’s open palm. Now that he looked, the car was squatting right in front of the closed sliding doors to DKA’s storage lot: 1990 Jag XJS convertible, champagne over black, just 75,000 miles on the clock, listed retail at $17,995.
“Faith and BeJaysus,” breathed O’B. His long drought was finally broken. He even drove Meg Doman home.
Larry’s descriptions—big and tough—had been apt. When Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern stormed up to Giselle at ten-thirty and badged her, she unobtrusively flicked open the intercom key, hoping Kearny was back from the bank to listen in. Rosenkrantz sat down on the corner of her desk, started idly swinging his leg.
Guildenstern snapped, “Where’s that fucking Larry Ballard?”
“Don’t use foul language in front of me,” Giselle said, hoping to upset their interrogation rhythm.
“Few days ago, Ballard worked us for everything we had on Ephrem Poteet,” said Rosenkrantz indifferently. “Said he hadn’t seen the wife, Yana, for something like six or seven years.”
“Why would he lie?”
Guildenstern leaned across the desk. “Larry lies when he says ‘Hello.’ We start going up Yana�
�s backtrail, and whadda we find? We find his footprints all over our case.”
Sure enough, it was time for the first joke. Rosenkrantz asked, “How did Pinocchio find out he was made of wood?”
“Don’t,” Giselle warned. “You’re treading on thin ice.”
Rosenkrantz was undeterred. “His hand caught fire.”
“That’s the first time,” she said icily.
“Next,” said Guildenstern, “we find out at Marine World in Vallejo that Heslip was asking a lot of questions about Poteet. So we call Harry Bosch down in L.A., and guess what? There’s Heslip’s big number nines all over Harry’s case. Cops don’t like P.I.’s mixing in murder, so we—”
“Has Yana been charged with murder?” she interrupted.
“That’s police business,” snapped Guildenstern. “This outfit is in a lot of trouble for obstructing our investigation.”
Rosenkrantz asked, “Why are blondes like dog turds?”
Giselle was suddenly as formidable as El Capitan. “I told you not to do that. That’s twice.”
“The older they are, the easier they are to pick up.”
“That’s the third time,” she said, and threw her cup of cold coffee in his face. He jumped off the desk, bellowing. Guilden-stern got out his handcuffs.
“You’re going down for assaulting an officer, sister.”
“And you’re going down for sexual harassment, brother.”
Sexual harassment. The magic words. The two cops’ eyes met. Rosenkrantz stopped wiping his face with a wad of Kleenex from the box on her desk. His partner’s handcuffs disappeared as Dan Kearny appeared in the doorway.
“You’re supposed to drink that stuff, not swim in it.” He turned away, gesturing. “You can clean up in the bathroom.”
Giselle punched out Larry’s cell phone number as she flipped the intercom switch to listen.
Sitting beside Dan’s desk, a dried-off Rosenkrantz jerked his head at the back room. “What’s biting her? PMS?”
Guildenstern asked, “What do you get when you cross a pit bull with a woman who’s having PMS?”
“You’re treading on thin ice,” said Kearny. “What I want out of you guys is why you’re harassing the help on a referral out of L.A. All you’ve got on Yana is a very shaky eyewitness.”
“You’re wrong. We got a hell of a lot more than that,” said Guildenstern, peeved at not getting to tell his joke.
“Knowing you guys ain’t exactly dummies,” said Rosenkrantz, “we wondered why you was all of a sudden so interested in two old guys up and died of natural causes—Eduardo Moneo in Vallejo and Brian Glosser here in the City. So we got secret exhumation orders on ’em. Purple foxglove poisoning, both of ’em—Digitalis purpurea. That spells a Murder One warrant for Yana.”
Kearny’s private phone rang. He snatched it up. Ballard.
“I’m at Ray Chong Fat’s. Giselle just clued me in on the phone. Should I wait or run?”
“Take your time,” said Kearny. He hung up. “Ballard, checking in. He’s at the Chinese store down the street, drinking soda pop.” He shook his head piously. “I like to protect my men, but Murder One is something else. I guess he’s all yours.”
Rosenkrantz sighed. “We better go piss in his Pepsi.”
They went out the door behind Kearny’s desk. Giselle appeared from the back room to flop down in his client’s chair.
“Why are you throwing Larry to the wolves?”
“Who’s the wolf and who’s getting tossed to who?” said Dan.
Giselle suddenly grinned. “Tossed to whom,” she said.
* * *
English letters and Chinese characters spelled out PEKING GROCERY STORE—CHINESE DELICACIES above the door of the narrow storefront. An apparently carefree Larry Ballard emerged eating an egg roll and slupping a soft drink from its aluminum can.
“Hold it right there!” bellowed a heavy voice.
Rosenkrantz, playing good cop, said, “How do you know you’ve met the woman who gives the best head in the world?”
“You’re treading on thin ice,” Larry said.
“Knock off the shit, Ballard!” Guildenstern roared. “You conned us at Beverly’s bar, how you hardly knew Yana Poteet—”
“I told you I hadn’t seen her for years. I hadn’t, and anyway, DKA didn’t want her yet. Then the Gyppos hired us to look for her, sure, but the only one had any suggestions at all was her brother, Ramon.” Larry stuffed the rest of his egg roll into his mouth, said contemptuously, “A few worthless mail drops in the Presidio.” He finished his Pepsi in one long swig, belched, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Then I got lucky. I maybe spotted Yana in Sutter Street.”
“You spotted her or you didn’t,” sneered Guildenstern.
“I wasn’t sure, she was disguised. Brown wig, glasses . . .” He was gesturing, intense, selling it. “I lost her in the crowd. I started canvassing the businesses along Sutter, and finally found out she was doing makeup and hair on corpses at Brittingham’s Funeral Home under the name of Becky Thatcher.”
Guildenstern was ominous. “Was working there?”
“Yeah, past tense—and don’t blame me she’s gone. Brittingham told me she was living at the Columbine on—”
“We know it,” said Rosenkrantz.
“Gone from there, too. No forwarding. End of story for the moment, but I still think I’m going to find her and—”
“No you aren’t.” Guildenstern’s voice was flat. “DKA is out of it, O-U-T. We got a Murder One warrant out on her now.”
Larry was genuinely shocked. “You mean L.A.’s got a—”
“No. We do. Find out from your boss why.”
As they strutted away, Rosenkrantz asked his partner, “What do you think of that shit?”
“I think we got an expert snow job. I think they maybe even know where she is and are helping her hide from us.” He paused. “Why is it so hard to pronounce ‘fellatio’?”
Rosenkrantz opened his mouth, then shut it again.
“You’re treading on thin ice,” he warned.
thirty-nine
Each morning, Geraldine Tantillo put a paper bag containing an apple and an orange and a small carton of Nancy’s Organic Non-Fat Yogurt into the fridge at JeanneMarie’s salon. Each noon she got it out and walked down to the end of Spruce Street to sit on the Presidio Wall under a tree to eat as slowly as she could. She had read somewhere that after twenty minutes the stomach feels full with only a little food in it.
Today her good resolves were nullified when tall, blond, handsome Larry Ballard fell into step beside her.
“Geraldine, how does the Cliff House sound for lunch?”
The Cliff House! It sounded incredible.
They ate crab sandwiches in the upstairs bar overlooking Ocean Beach, a broad swatch of pale sand with long wide white lines of breakers marching in to smash and smoke below them. Black-clad surfers, miniaturized by distance, rode the foaming waves on their boards. Beach and breakers stretched away to the south until they merged with hazy blue sky at the horizon.
“Ah—have you heard anything from Yasmine Vlanko?”
“No.” Excitement made her almost breathless. “Have you?”
His question was the reason for the lunch, a long shot at best, but he’d had to try. Larry sighed and shook his head.
“No. But if you run into her, Geraldine, please tell her DKA has some information she’ll really want to have.”
* * *
The three of them sat in the closed electronics shop, drinking Turkish coffee from small brass handleless cups.
Rudolph Marino looked very Rom in a bright red shirt with full sleeves and a kerchief around his neck. He seldom had the luxury of this preferred style of dress anymore; lately, his Angelo Grimaldi persona had almost taken him over. Staley was dressed as a shopkeeper in flannel shirt and polyester pants and his comfortable bedroom slippers. Willem was dressed, as always, like a European businessman. His only concessions to American i
nformality were his loosened necktie and the suit jacket hung over the back of his chair. Staley was telling them about Ballard’s finding and losing Yana.
“She must of got out before he even got to his truck.”
Willem was the first to react.
“Working at a mortuary, handling corpses? You were right to make her marime. She has no respect for traditional values.”
But Rudolph was impressed. “She sure knows where to hide.”
“DKA can’t look for her anymore. The San Francisco cops issued a Murder One warrant for her,” said Staley. “Turns out she murdered two old men up here besides Ephrem down inL.A.”
All three men crossed themselves. Willem recovered first.
“Well, DKA has served its purpose. And I have important news. Robin Brantley in Hong Kong betrayed me—he told Marr that I am planning an assault on Xanadu. Marr hired a German expert for advice on further security measures.” An expression that could almost have been a smile played around Willem’s lips. “I have it on good authority that this German told Marr his security at Xanadu was deplorable, and that Marr rejected that conclusion.”
They drank coffee and looked at one another with veiled, knowing Gypsy eyes. Staley said, “So you will be busy.”
Lulu burst through the door from the kitchen.
“What is this I heard you say? That Yana has killed two old men besides poor Ephrem? What if she—”
Staley chuckled. “I got you to protect me, Lulu.”
“This is no joke! You got her declared marime, she’s got the second sight—that jookli is dangerous in every way!”
Staley heaved himself to his feet to go help his wife put away the groceries.
“She’s on the run, she ain’t got time to worry about us.”
At seven that evening Geraldine puffed her way up the long climb to her tiny apartment. After losing nearly twenty pounds to her five flights of stairs, she was almost getting a waist.
