Dead Skip

Ten

Valencia Sheet Metal Works was on Mission just south of the angled Valencia Street intersection. An old building in an old neighborhood which had witnessed successive streams of Micks, Wops, Portagees, Spies, and Spades; each group, in the fullness of time, moving out and up and being magically transformed into Irishmen, Italians, Portuguese, and Spanish-Americans. The blacks, mainly, were still there; but they were beginning to eye with disdain the illiterate Hong Kong Slants. Thus they passed, one after the other, in that curious upward mobility which seems to characterize American ethnic groups.

Ballard, who was not even subconsciously aware of any racial debts, was concerned only with spotting the yellow Roadrunner and avoiding the punk in the dune buggy who ran the red from Valencia Street.

No Roadrunner, of course. Virginia Pressler would be driving that. Hemovich, if he had wheels at all, would be herding some heap of tin that had slid out of the bottom end of the Blue Book years before.

Valencia Sheet Metal Works was a big monolithic-pour concrete building with dirt-opaqued, thickly wired windows, and huge loading doors wide and high enough to admit interstate semis. Inside, screeching saws bit through metal; galvanized steel dust lay over everything; weird truncated modern sculptures which were actually made-to-order duct-work crowded the shop area.

“Who?” shrieked the little Chicano Ballard had picked as not possibly being anyone named Hemovich.

“Ken!” Ballard bellowed. “Kenny Hemovich—”

“Oh. Heem. Ken.” He pointed across the cavernous room to a lathe beside which a skinny kid wearing a Giants cap and new leather gloves was lethargically stacking sheets of galvanized steel. “On the duct-work tin.”

Ballard mouthed thanks made silent by the shrieking saws, then went up the wooden office stairs as soon as the Spanish-American turned away. At the head of the stairs was a tiny, cramped, but blessedly soundproofed office with a wooden counter behind which two harassed-looking females labored. One was young and blond and typing on an old manual, the other was older and doing bookwork.

“’Nye help you?”

“I need Kenny Hemovich’s home address,” said Ballard. When the ledger woman made a movement toward the intercom page system, he added quickly, “He’s out on one of the trucks, I checked. I’m taking over the payments on that yellow Roadrunner of his, and he wants me to pick it up tonight, before the bank repossesses it or something. Only all I’ve got is the old address.”

“We just got the new one ourselves,” said the blond girl.

She gave Ballard an unexpectedly brilliant smile; when she bent over to get the personnel folder from the bottom drawer of a file cabinet, he watched with a quick faint stirring of lust as her miniskirt rode up almost to her buttocks. Glancing away, he caught the ledger woman watching him watching, and winked at her. Also unexpectedly, she bent her gray head over her bookwork and started to giggle. The curve of cheek he could see turned bright crimson.

The blonde came back to the counter. “Here it is,” she said happily. “5-0-7 Nevada Street. I’ll write it out for you.”

When she handed him the slip of scratch paper, her fingers rested on the back of his hand. Again, that brilliant smile. Maybe she hadn’t been so unaware of the miniskirt after all. Ballard went away. Ledger was still giggling.

Before getting back under the wheel, he removed his sport jacket. Hot afternoon for May; the Mission District got more sunshine than most other areas of the city. Maybe he should have asked the blonde for her phone number. He bet the shop-men all hung around the bottom of the steep open stairs when she went up to the office each morning, if she always wore skirts that short. He got the radio going.

“SF-6 calling KDM 366 Control.” When Giselle’s voice told him to go ahead, he said, “I’ve got a res add on Hemovich. 5-0-7 Nevada Street, San Francisco. I’m going over there now to check it out. After that I’ll try to beat the rush hour across the Bay. Over.”

“10-4. We’ll inform Oakland Control that you’ll be in their area this afternoon, over.”

“Ashcan that. They always try to rope me in on one of their lousy repos. Last time I got two ice-picked tires out of it.”

In a very la-di-da accent, Giselle said, “A-ten, a-four, a-Roger, a-Wilco and out. Your Majesty.”

Ballard clipped his mike, grinning, and started out Mission toward Cortland Avenue, which gave easiest access to Nevada. That Giselle.

The 500 block was a steeply slanted street sliding over an arm of Bernal Heights toward the incredible maze of overpasses and underpasses, ramps and cloverleafs which marked the confluence of the Interstate 80 and Interstate 280 traffic streams. Houses crowded down the hill waist-to-shoulder, all of them needing paint, all of them with garages on the ground floor, short steep drives, and tiny slanted squares of lawn just big enough to blow your nose on.

The Pressler-Hemovich shack-up was apparently still too tender for the permanence of house purchase contracts; 507 was a stucco bungalow that looked like a rental property. If old man Pressler didn’t blow Kenny-baby’s head off, Virginia probably would get sick of mindless all-night humping and adolescent pimples, and eventually go home to papa and the kids.

The garage was locked but empty. Ballard checked the mailbox, saw a window envelope from the San Francisco Department of Social Services addressed to Hemovich. His lip curled unconsciously. Nineteen years old, on welfare. At least Virginia had gotten him off his dead butt and back to work. A woman, like a dope habit, was expensive to support. Even a working woman.

Ballard opened the trunk of his car, found a piece of thin copper wire, looked about and saw no window shades or drapes or curtains flapping. He clipped a short piece of wire and stuck it in the lock of the garage door. He drove off grinning. Poetic justice, that — although he didn’t believe that Hemovich had clouted Bart over the head. Not after seeing the kid in person. The attack on Bart had required a deadly decisiveness that Hemovich just didn’t have.

Of course, maybe Virginia Pressler did. She was smart, obviously strong-minded. Could she also be murderous?

To hell with them. Nothing to be done about them until tonight anyway. Which left Griffin, and the East Bay. But down on the freeway the cars were already clotting up even though it wasn’t yet four o’clock.

Why not wait until after six, use the time to drive out to Trinity and see Bart? He hadn’t been there since his first visit yesterday morning. Yesterday? God, it seemed like a week since he’d stared down at that dark, still face on the pillow, with Corinne sobbing in the background.

He pulled the car over and stopped beside a sidewalk pay phone near a small neighborhood shopping area. He sat in the car for a few moments. The hell of it was that he didn’t want to visit the hospital, either. Didn’t want to see Bart just lying there.

He had to pull out of it. But according to Whitaker, every hour that he stayed in the coma meant...

Had to get the mother that did it. Had to. If he hadn’t connected by the end of the seventy-two hours, and Kearny cut him off, he’d have to quit his job and keep looking. There was no other way to go.

He got out of the car, got the phone number from the telephone book, asked to have Whitaker paged. The girl on the switchboard said he had already left the hospital. She switched Ballard to the third floor, this time to a nice-sounding nurse who had heard of Florence Nightingale.

“No, gee, I’m terribly sorry to have to say he’s still in coma, no change at all in his condition.”

“His, ah... Miss Jones wouldn’t be around, would she?”

“I’m sure she’s in his room. That poor girl has barely been out of this place since... just a sec. I’ll send an aide to get her.”

When Corinne’s voice came on the phone it was flat and exhausted, limp as a home permanent in the rain. Trying to compensate, Ballard put as much spurious warmth as he could into his own. “Hi, kid! This is Larry—”

“I know who it is. Why haven’t you been around to see Bart?”

A lump of black meat lying on the bed... How do you give that as a reason to the girl who loves him? “Well, ah, Corinne, I’ve, ah... they said at the office that there’d been no change...”

“Don’t you even care enough to come see him?”

“It isn’t that, kid. You see, I—”

“Or do you feel that he’s all done anyway, so what the hell’s the difference?”

“You know that isn’t it, kid. It’s just... well, I’ve only got about one more day to find out who did it—”

“Who cares?” she asked in a bone-weary tone.

“I care, I... Look, Corinne, you need sleep, food — the nurse tells me you’ve barely been out of the hospital since he was brought in. When was the last time you ate a meal?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. This morning sometime. Last night. I don’t know, what difference does it make?” She suddenly burst out, “Oh, Larry, he just lies there! Why can’t they do something?”

“I guess Bart has to do it himself, from what Whitaker said. He will do it, Corinne. He’s never backed down from a fight yet.”

“Please come over here, Larry.” Her voice held an almost wistful note through the fatigue. “I need you. Bart needs you.”

Ballard looked at his watch. “All right, kid, I’ll try to make it. I’m way out in the Mission right now, I can’t guarantee anything, but—”

“Thanks a lot, sport,” she said flatly.

He cursed, once, hung up the already dead phone. Back in the Ford, he dug out his maps for Southern Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. Shit, he just couldn’t hack it there at the hospital. And he couldn’t really take the time, anyway. Only about thirty-four hours left to his deadline.

Then he thought, guiltily: How many hours does Bart have left?