Dead Skip

Thirteen

It was 9:37 A.M. Fridays were always busy, with the banks open until six o’clock, and all the paper work to clear up before the weekend. Too damned much paper work, most of it waste motion just to satisfy the state. Yesterday, two hours arguing premiums with the insurance company. Last evening, another hour spent looking over that property on Eleventh Street yet again. Too crowded here at Golden Gate, that was the truth.

Dan Kearny took an impatient turn around the cubicle, ran a hand through his graying hair, stared with distaste at the mountains of files on the desk.

Gray hair. And billing. Hell, he ought to be glad that he had the business to bill.

His pleasantly tough, slightly battered face, with the nose just a bit awry from a fist or a bottle or a steering wheel — depending on which story he was telling that week — suddenly brightened. Come in tomorrow, the office was quiet on Saturdays, get the work out. Which would mean that today...

He bent over the desk, lit a cigarette as he buzzed Giselle on the intercom. “Let’s take a ride,” he said when she answered.

Outside, he stood on the sidewalk with his arms folded, his cigarette drifting smoke up into the morning overcast which would lift by noon.

Right here, Wednesday morning, Heslip had gotten it. No doubt about that; and after the carefully detailed hour with Ballard this morning, not a hell of a lot of doubt about who had done it. Griffin. Looked tired as hell, Ballard, carrying his head as if he had a stiff neck from the clout Corinne Jones apparently had given him. Well, being tired didn’t hurt field agents. Kearny had never minded the all-night, round-the-clock, week-long sessions he’d put in himself in the thirty years since he’d started grabbing cars for old man Walters as a tough kid of fourteen.

Kearny grinned to himself at the memory, then thought: Where the hell is that girl? You spent half your life waiting for some woman or another. He threw away his butt and shook out another cigarette.

Wild and woolly days then, five bucks a repo, investigate on your own time. Weekends, fighting club stags until he’d enlisted at sixteen, lying about his age and getting away with it. Probably one of the reasons he’d always had such a soft spot for Bart Heslip.

Well, times had changed.

But the subjects hadn’t. People still defrauded, defaulted, embezzled — money or goods or chattels. They cheated their employers or their wives, skipped out, dropped out of sight, just plain dropped out. Skid row or hippie commune, juice, pills, grass, acid, skin-popping or mainlining skag — the old-time cons had used a better name for the white stuff, shit.

It usually came down to money. Somebody wanted more than he had, or wanted what it could buy. Somebody else would spend some to get back his chattels, or his missing daughter, or the embezzler who had nickel-and-dimed the books (Griffin, at least, thought big).

And you went after them — for money. You found them, most of them. Damned tough to stay out of the way of an agency like DKA if it really wanted you. You had to change your name, dye your hair, keep your kids out of school, quit your union or your profession, tear up your credit cards, abandon your wife, not show up at your mother’s funeral, run your car into a deep river, quit paying taxes, get off welfare.

Because every habit pattern was a doorway into your life, a doorway that the skip-tracers and field agents with the right key could open. The right clue, he supposed, in the detective-story sense.

A few made it, of course, the dead skips who became invisible men. Charles M. Griffin had done it so far, might have done it indefinitely if he hadn’t ventured out to clip Bart Heslip over the head.

Now they had him outside the burrow, were running him hard.

Giselle came down the stairs, long lovely legs flashing under the hem of her fashionably short skirt.

“I’m sorry, Dan. Todd from the bank was on the phone.”

“Problems?”

They began walking down Franklin toward Kearny’s parked Galaxy wagon with the long whippet aerial. Giselle shook her head, made a face that emphasized little smile lines at the corners of her mouth which would have been dimples in a fleshier face.

“No problems. Todd didn’t get his promotion to V-P, and was looking for someone to hold his hand.”

Kearny opened the rider’s door for her; the tall blonde slid in past him in another flash of wickedly long shapely legs. Kearny was aware of her as a woman, but only as it related to her ability to do her job. She’d started out typing skip-letters while she was still in high school, now had her own license and wasn’t far behind Kearny himself in understanding what the detective business was all about.

As for making a pass at her, he’d as soon have made one at his own five-year-old daughter. Sex was for home, and maybe sometimes for a convention where the booze snuck up on you and knocked your judgment awry.

“Where are we going, Dan’l?” Her eyes sparkled; getting out of the office was rare enough to be a treat.

“First to the hospital, to see Bart.”

She instantly sobered. “Will he make it?”

“He’ll make it.” His voice carried utter conviction; no way to tell whether it was mere ritual or was really believed.

Kearny went up Franklin, eyes busy on license plates. He had a phenomenal memory for plate numbers, probably spotted more cars off the skip-list than all the field men put together.

“How was your session with Larry this morning?”

“You’ve been reading his reports?” When she nodded, he went on, “He knocked them off one by one, a beautiful job.”

“All except friend Griffin.” Unconsciously, she repeated his own thought of a few minutes before. “The invisible man. Think Larry’ll connect before your deadline?”

“He’s busting his back trying.”

He parked on Bush just off Divisadero; they got on the big, slow, lumbering elevator inside the hospital’s rear ambulance entrance.

“This is the first time you’ve been here, isn’t it, Dan?”

He nodded. “No sense in sitting around staring at a man in coma.”

“Corinne Jones wouldn’t agree.”

“Corinne Jones wouldn’t agree if I said black was beautiful.”

In the room they found the same scene Ballard had, except that the drapes were pulled back to let in some sunlight. Bart’s eyes were closed, but Kearny noted the tracheal tube was gone from his windpipe. Glucose dripped from an upside-down bottle suspended above the bed.

“Has there been any change at all?” asked Giselle.

But Corinne Jones, rising from her chair beside the bed, seemed to see only Kearny. Her face quirked in a sneer Ballard would have recognized from the night before. “Well, well, well! Sherlock Holmes! The great man himself!”

Kearny looked at her for a moment. He rubbed the side of his nose. He turned to Giselle and said, “Why don’t you go see if you can find Dr. Whitaker.”

“Oh, you’re so smooth!” exclaimed Corinne. “So bland! You pay for a private room, you think that absolves you of—”

“He should be somewhere around the hospital this time of day,” said Kearny inexorably, his heavy voice overriding Corinne’s. He’d never learned how to back off from anything, including upset women.

When Giselle hesitated, stiff-faced, Corinne said in her tight furious voice, “He’s gonna whup the nigger, don’t you see? He don’t want any witnesses.”

Giselle went, fast enough so it was just short of fleeing. Her face was white. She’d never been able to handle personal emotions stripped of their insulation.

Kearny looked blandly at the black girl, his hard square face completely without expression, his gray eyes opaque as a snake’s. “Now, what seems to be troubling you, Miss Jones?”

She told him, at length. Some of it was four-letter, some of it inchoate, some of it obscene, some brilliant, some silly. All of it was cathartic. She paused for breath, her eyes flashing and her fine full bosom heaving beneath the fuzzy beige sweater she wore.

“Have a cigarette,” suggested Kearny.

She burst out crying.

He lit up, went to the head of the bed to stare down at Heslip. When she began working on her eyes with her handkerchief, he said, as if he could see her with his back turned, “What it boils down to is that I’m a son of a bitch for giving Bart a job.”

“That isn’t a job, it’s a disease! All of you — scavengers! Picking on the poor and the out-of-luck and the defenseless—”

Kearny turned to look at her. “Bullshit,” he said pleasantly.

“You wouldn’t say that to me if I was a white woman!” she cried.

Kearny leaned across the bed, talking in a sudden harsh tight voice that drove her back by its very intensity. “Did you ever stop to think just how goddamn sick guys like me get of that black beauty, black power, downtrodden blacks crap? My people didn’t keep slaves, lady. They came over here in a cattle boat back around the turn of the century. I don’t hire people because of their color. Bart works for me because he’s damn good at what he does. Period.”

“What he does is brutalizing.”

“What about keeping what you don’t pay for? Stealing credit cards? Ripping off companies that sell things people need? Embezzling? Pilfering cargoes you’re hired to unload? Cheating on welfare? These are uplifting? The rotten bastard who did this — he’s a poor misunderstood little feller who had to hit Bart because he used to piss the bed at night? Grow up.”

Corinne said, in an almost normal voice, “Then you do believe that it wasn’t just an accident!”

“I...” It stopped him dead for a moment. Women, there was just no way to ever tell what they were going to come up with. He fought back a grin. He said, “I believe it. And I’m going to get the son of a bitch who did it.”

“Larry’s going to get him, not you! You can’t even give him another man to help him work those cases.”

After clouting Ballard alongside the head a few hours before. He smiled bleakly. “Speaking of Ballard, keep your hands off him. He’s walking around with his head on one side like he’s just gone a fast ten with Clay.” He made an abrupt elaborate bow. “Pardon me. Ali.”

“Go to hell,” she said. But the corners of her mouth were trying to quirk. Good stuff in her; she just had too short a fuse.

The door opened and Giselle came in, followed by mod little Whitaker. He came only about breast-high on the tall blonde, but seemed to be enjoying the view at that level. Today he was a symphony of red, green, and pale blue, which made him look remarkably like a Fillmore Street pimp. All he needed was Tiger’s razor, Kearny thought.

“Sounded like a lively discussion in here,” he beamed.

“Looks like another nice day, Doc,” said Kearny in his crushingly bland voice.

At the JRS Garage, Giselle stayed in the car while Kearny went in. Leo Busilloni was there, much as Ballard had described him, along with Danny Walker, the senior of the three partners. Like Leo, he wore white coveralls; it was not a company where the executives sat around handling correspondence.

“What I don’t understand is why he moved to San Jose,” said Leo. He said it as if Kearny had just made an indecent suggestion to him.

“I doubt if he ever did.”

“I don’t follow that.” Danny had a broken-grating whiskey voice and was smoking a vile stogie that looked like a sawed-off shotgun. “Your man was at the house last night, you say...”

“Misdirection, I think,” said Kearny. “There was no reason for him to call up the topless dancer and give her the address if all he wanted to say was that he wouldn’t be seeing her again.”

“He wanted the cash from selling the landlady’s furniture,” said Leo promptly.

Kearny shook his head. “I guess, but it sounds almost like he was doing it for spite. It sure as hell makes no sense in relation to an embezzlement — but without an embezzlement, and a damned big one, nothing else he’s done since February makes sense...”

Which should have been that. He had passed on the information about the will not being out of probate, as Ballard had asked, had also learned that no audit had been planned previous to Griffin’s disappearance. They wouldn’t even be planning one now if Elkin hadn’t insisted after getting stuck with Griffin’s job and seeing how screwed up the records seemed.

Back at the office, he sat down to the billing while Giselle went back upstairs. Five minutes later he was on his feet again, pacing. Corinne Jones had been right, he hadn’t given Ballard much help in finding Griffin. If there were two men in the field, working different addresses simultaneously, DKA could pick that bastard’s nose for him a lot sooner. Maybe even within Kearny’s phony deadline. Yes, two good field men...

It never occurred to Kearny that DKA might not turn Griffin. Hell, he’d been in town Wednesday morning, hadn’t he? Which meant that he had left tracks, somewhere in the Bay Area.

Kearny called Giselle on the intercom. “Type me up an assignment sheet on Griffin. I’ll contact Larry direct once I’m on the other side of the Oakland hills where he can pick me up. Don’t alert Oakland Control that I’ll be in their area; I’m available only for the Griffin case today.”

Giselle quickly typed up a duplicate case assignment on Charles M. Griffin; she realized she was humming while she did it. Now Larry Ballard was going to find out what work was. And digging. And hanging in there until a case broke. Kearny was moving in. Which meant it was going to be a long hard day today, a long hard night tonight — and little Giselle was going to be sitting right here on the squawk box taking the whole thing in.

Because these were the hours she lived for: when the jaws began to close.