Dead Skip

Sixteen

Excitement constricted Ballard’s chest. Parked on the crumbling, weed-covered concrete drive at 1377 Mount Diablo Street was a red car with a white convertible top and... Hell. Convertible. A dusty red Oldsmobile compact, not a T-Bird.

He turned in midblock, came back to park across the street. Beyond him was a great open scar where the houses had been razed and the earth scooped out for Bay Area Rapid Transit. In this minor moon crater were stacks of cement-reinforcing rod, coils of hose, stakes with yellow tags on them, parked trucks. The air was filled with dust, the staccato slap of diesel motors. Bulldozers and earth-movers crawled clumsily about like blind beetles seeking a way out.

The white-plaster house was small, L-shaped, one-story, with the pale-pink numbers 1-3-7-7 set in descending order down one of the four-by-four porch posts. Old, crummy, poorly kept-up. He was tense. The trail might lie here, despite the insurance agent’s belief that it was a dead address, and he might miss it.

He crossed the street under the shade of the thriving front-yard maple. Running along the left side of the property was an overgrown hedge; Ballard went down the narrow space between it and the side of the garage to cup his eyes and peer in a dusty cobwebbed window. An earth floor overflowed with meaningless debris, including an old brass bedstead, a ripped mattress, treadless car tires, three ruined tricycles.

He walked back, stood by the Olds to listen to the pop of diesels. In the front yard, knee-deep in weeds, were two big recently rained-on cardboard boxes of trash. The front porch was strewn with a miniature obstacle course of broken toys. Growing up across the front steps, when he waded over there, was a flourishing sweet-pea vine.

He rang the bell.

After a few moments a woman opened the door, giving him a momentary glimpse of a cluttered living room, a new color TV spewing afternoon bathos, a new round felt-topped table suitable for poker.

“If you’re selling someth—”

“Buying,” said Ballard.

That stopped her. She was in shorts and halter, barefoot, with her face carefully made up and brilliant toenails and fingernails. The halter revealed deep cleavage between full breasts; her legs were good, the bare belly between shorts and halter flat and hard. Her face was narrow and vixenish under gleaming brown hair.

“What are you buying?”

“Information about Griff.” No flicker in her wide brown eyes at the nickname. Hell. “Charles M. Griffin. I heard he’s staying here.”

She shook an almost regretful head. “Man, you heard wrong. I don’t know him.”

“How about your husband?”

She shifted her weight to throw out one hip in a deliberately sensuous pose. Her thigh brushed the back of Ballard’s hand. He drew the hand back quickly; she was trouble looking for a place to happen, and he didn’t want it to happen to him.

“I s’pose. If he knew him at work, like.”

“Maybe Griff is one of the poker players.”

“Poker?” She turned her head to follow his gaze to the table. “Oh. Poker.” She added quickly, “No. Never heard of a Griffin.”

Ballard gestured at the Olds compact, put a smile on his face. “When I drove up, I thought that was Griff’s car. He was driving a red and white T-Bird hardtop last time I saw him.”

She frowned, then exclaimed suddenly, “Wait a minute, that rings a bell. Red and white T-Bird hardtop. Loaded, power-everything, all the goodies — air, power windows, seats, steering, brakes. Sure. Howie Odum has been driving a car like that for a month or so. I had a ride in it last week...” She bit it off, like a child realizing it has just told a secret.

Last week! If Griffin’s car had been around then, Griffin himself must also have been close by.

“Where could I find Mr. Odum?”

Instead of answering, she said, “Griffin. Charles Griffin. That’s the name. Howie told me back in April, couple of weeks after he got the car, there might be some mail coming for that name, I should just hold it. He said he’d pick it up every now and then. But didn’t any come — unless my husband, he found it in the box and marked it unknown or something.”

From inside came the tentative, just-waking wail of a child. She looked at Ballard with a shocked, almost furtive expression. “Hey, man, you won’t be coming around here again, will you?”

“Not if I find Griffin.”

“For God’s sake, don’t say anything to my husband about Howie.” She put a hand on his forearm. “Please? He’d just kill me if he knew that Howie had been around. He... they aren’t friends any more.”

“I have to know Odum’s address,” said Ballard ruthlessly.

“Look, I don’t have it. Honest. I mean, there wasn’t anything wrong, me riding around with him in the T-Bird, we didn’t... you know.” Which probably meant they had. The kid squalled again in the background. “But I left the baby here alone and all, the other two were in school...”

“What bars does Odum hang around?”

“He doesn’t. He’s on... look, he got into trouble. With the Feds. He... you see, a couple, three years ago he got into a bind and well, he... forged some checks, including some of Bob’s. So you know, Bob and him don’t...”

“Odum’s trouble was connected with these forged checks?”

“Ah, look, I got to change the kid. I’ve leveled with you, you won’t get me in trouble with Bob, will you?”

“Of course not,” he said soothingly, “Mrs.—”

“Sharon Beag... ah, Sharon.”

He didn’t push. Names were easy to learn. Besides, he’d gotten all there was to get here. Odum would have been sentenced in Concord, if he’d been paper-hanging in local bars. He realized that she had started to shut the door, gave it one more try.

“You must have some idea where Odum’s living.”

Her eyes were made beady by peering through the narrow opening. “Maybe down around Oakland, Alameda, like that. He never really said... honest...”

The door was shut. Ballard went down the steps to flounder out across the rankly overgrown yard. He stumbled over a hidden wheelless coaster wagon and almost went down, cursing, expecting to flush a covey of quail.

In his mind, as he got into the car, two images suddenly came together. Sharon, bored mother of three who had kept her looks despite the babies, getting into the back seat of the T-Bird with Howie Odum, just-released convict. And Cheri over on California Street not a mile away, wrestling with Griffin’s kinky friend with the flashlight. Easy to see both men as the same man. Howie Odum. A writer of bad checks, which meant a con man, which meant plausible, smooth. And maybe tall and handsome. And just out of stir, perhaps sexually maladjusted because of it...

Odum, sure as hell mixed up with Griffin, driving his car.

Odum was the key.

Ballard pulled from the curb. The radio gave its usual warm-up squeergk, like water going down a drain, and then said to him in a very loud and clear Dan Kearny voice, “SF-1 calling SF-6. Come in, Ballard.”

He scrabbled at the clipped mike. That voice was much too strong and ungarbled to have come from Oakland Control on the other side of the hills.

“This is SF-6,” he said.

“I’ll meet you in that little coffee shop on Willow Pass and Mount Diablo Street in three minutes, over.”

“Don’t eat anything there,” said Ballard. “Their food is lousy.”

“10-4. SF-1 over and out.”

He struck the steering wheel happily with the heel of his hand. Dan Kearny was in the field! Kearny would have some ideas about finding Howard Odum. And through him, Charles M. Griffin. The jaws were closing. Then, as he pulled up beside Kearny’s Ford wagon in front of the coffee shop, he wondered: Now, how in hell did Kearny find out that I was on Mount Diablo Street?

“From the attorney, Hawkley,” said Kearny.

He added nothing about the odd can of worms he had opened in the Hawkley/Coogan relationship. They had been kicking around the case for forty minutes.

“Anyway, there’s nothing more to get at that address,” said Ballard. “I squeezed her dry. Since it was a Federal rap—”

“That I doubt,” said Kearny. Even more, he doubted that Ballard had squeezed Sharon dry. Larry just wasn’t that good with women. The best way was to push them fast and hard to where they started crying but before they got stubborn. It was an art. He went on, “The Feds come in only on interstate — Odum was probably just kiting checks in local bars and somebody blew the whistle. He was probably in Quentin, not Lompoc.”

“So how do we find out?” asked Ballard.

“We go see his parole officer. If he was sent up two years ago and is out now, he’s out on parole.” He looked at his watch. “Three-thirty, plenty of time for you to get down to Parole and Community Services Division in Oakland. It’s on Grove just off West Grand. And remember: you’re a repo man looking for a car you think Odum is driving.”

“Nothing about Bart getting whacked on the head or—”

“Absolutely not.” Kearny made a face. “Even the coffee is lousy here. A pure and simple repossession. Your lever is the fact that guys on parole are supposed to get prior permission from their PO before they even drive a motor vehicle, because of insurance problems. Come at him right, the PO ought to come up with Odum’s address.” He paused a second. “Anything strike you as interesting about this Odum character?”

“I was wondering if he could be the kinky cat who was trying to play games with Cheri in February — just before Griffin took off.”

“Or was taken off,” said Kearny. Ballard stopped dead in the act of snapping shut his attaché case. “February,” said Kearny. “It all happened in February. Better find out whether Odum had been released on parole before February eighth, the night Cheri had her bout with the flashlight kink.”

“What did you mean about Griffin maybe being taken off?”

“Look it over. Nobody’s seen him, that we’ve talked to, since February ninth.”

“He called Cheri in March,” Ballard pointed out.

“If she’s telling the truth, somebody called her. From a phone in a bar, sounding drunk, with music being played loudly in the background. So loudly that she says she had trouble understanding him.”

Ballard felt... cheated. As if somebody had taken his case and turned it upside down. He had been concentrating on Griffin so hard that if it turned out he wasn’t it after all...

“He sold off his furniture, rented the place in San Jose...”

“Neither of which makes sense, not for Griffin. A newspaper ad sold the furniture — and the buyers were instructed to pay Cheri with checks she couldn’t cash. The Midfield Road house was rented by phone, with a cashier’s check deposit against the rent which was mailed in.”

“He identified himself to the bank as Griffin—”

“Only verbally. Nobody checks ID when you buy a cashier’s check, why should they? You’re paying for it in cash. Which brings us right back to our ex-con, Howard Odum. He seems to be driving Griffin’s car; we know he’s diverting Griffin’s mail.”

Ballard thought about it for a while. Finally he said, “If Griffin wasn’t an embezzler, then why should Odum—”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t an embezzler. What was that figure Elkin gave you? Thirty thousand bucks might be missing? Let’s assume for a second that it is; what does Griffin do with it? Bank it? No way. Safe-deposit box? Risky. Probably bury it in the back yard in a bunch of fruit jars or something. In the middle of this, his old lady dies. He’s cut free, he starts buying, spending, boozing. Boozing heavy, according to the Concord cops — three HBD accidents in three months. He gets drunk one night with an ex-con named Odum, a hard-nose, maybe, just out of stir with a hard-on against humanity, lets something drop... You can take it from there.”

Ballard looked at his watch, stood up. “Four o’clock. I have to get going. Did you check with Giselle about how Bart is?”

“No change as of two hours ago. Call me as soon as you get back on this side of the hills. And if you do get an address on Odum, don’t go up against him alone. You got that?”

“Loud and clear,” said Ballard. He meant it. He didn’t want some son of a bitch putting him over a cliff. Not even in a Jaguar.

In the late afternoon wind, the plastic streamers over the tired old iron on the used-car lot whipped and danced. The place looked like an antique auto show. Ballard made his left turn from West Grand into Grove. It was 2229, an old tan-brick building, three stories, which stood alone among the razed weedy redevelopment lots.

“Let’s try the unit supervisor first,” suggested the switchboard operator behind the window inside the front door. She was a motherly sort, perhaps chosen for that quality. After working several keys and punching in and out of half a dozen sockets, she said, “Down the corridor to the right, far as it goes, then turn left and it will be the first door on the right at the bottom of the stairs. Mr. Savidge.”

The halls were big, friendly, creaking, painted an institutional pale yellow. The offices were high-ceilinged; the Venetian blinds badly needed restringing. He wondered if the atmosphere was deliberate or had just happened; it probably was soothing to just-paroled convicts.

Mr. Saul Savidge was waiting at the door of his office with a handshake and a grin; a vaguely pear-shaped black man who confounded current terminology by being decidedly brown. He had a narrow mustache and short straightened hair combed back so severely that it made his head look too small for his face.

“Better take the straight-back instead of that swivel,” he warned. “The shower upstairs leaks on the swivel.”

Shower? Then he remembered the sign by the front entrance about the Crittendon Home, a halfway house for cons. He took the uncomfortable straight-backed chair closest to the battered wooden desk. On the wall was a printed sign, WARNING — THIS ROOM IS OCCUPIED BY A SEX MANIAC, and a tapestry sampler of Martin Luther King succoring a black man in shackles.

“I’m lucky to be assistant unit supervisor,” said Savidge. “It gives me a one-man office. Tough to get a parolee to tell you his troubles when the cat at the next desk is hauling some poor bastard out in chains for parole violations.”

Ballard explained what he wanted.

Savidge nodded thoughtfully. “Howie hasn’t registered that T-Bird with me and he hasn’t asked permission to drive it. How long has he had it, do you know?”

Ballard saw his opening. “How long has he been out?”

“Just after the first of the year...” He consulted a file. “Uh-huh. January fifth.”

“This was just last week,” said Ballard quickly. “Our informant, who knew Odum before his arrest and knew he was out, saw someone in our T-Bird he thought was Odum. It might not have been him.”

Savidge nodded again, again thoughtfully. There was a disconcerting steel beneath the affable exterior that reminded Ballard that he was, after all, dealing with a law officer and not a social worker.

“All right, Mr. Ballard, I’m going to cooperate with you on this even though, as I’m sure you know, I’m under no legal compulsion to give you any information whatsoever.”

“I realize that, sir.”

“I’m cooperating because there is a possible parole violation involved here, and because if there is, it belongs in Odum’s file. I carry a case load of seventy-five men, it’s hell just trying to keep up with what each one is doing.” He got a rueful look on his face. “The rules say they must ‘maintain gainful employment’ — so what do you find for a sixty-five-year-old man with an eighty-five IQ who’s only good at exposing himself to little girls?”

Ballard didn’t try to answer. He was there only for Odum’s address. He got it.

“1684 Galindo Street, Concord. That’s a rooming house run by the widow of an ex-con, actually. Odum has room four.”

Ballard stood up and stuck out his hand. “You’ll hear from me about Odum in a day or two.”

“I’ll appreciate that.”

Outside, Ballard stopped under one of the sidewalk elms, drew a deep breath. He was damned happy he wasn’t an ex-con on parole.

And pretty soon, they’d make Odum damned unhappy that he was.