Dead Skip

Two

At 8:27 A.M. Larry Ballard parked his company Ford in front of the elementary school playground, yawned, and pulled a dozen folded case sheets from above his visor. Report-typing time. Erg.

Carrying them and the attaché case containing his Current, Hold and Contingent folders, he locked the car and started across Golden Gate Avenue. A screaming phalanx of little black kids burst from the school into the blacktopped playground. His eye caught a fluttering beneath the windshield wiper of Heslip’s Plymouth; grinning, he went back to feed his own meter. Then the grin faded. Odd that it would be parked in the same place it had been the night before, when he had come in at 1:25 and hadn’t been able to find Bart.

On impulse he checked the basement before going upstairs to Clerical. The Jaguar that Bart had picked up last night was gone. Had it been gone at 1:25? He just hadn’t noticed. Marty Rossman came out of his cubicle, tall and wavy-haired; he had never lived down once yelling “May Day! May Day!” over the car radio when four angry Samoan lads had started tipping over his car in the housing project out off Geneva Avenue.

“Bart Heslip down here, Marty?”

Rossman shook his head. “Haven’t seen him. Kearny is taking off heads this morning.”

“Hell, and I’ve got reports to write.”

Ballard slipped back outside and then in the adjacent door to climb the narrow creaking stairs to the second floor. In the 1920s this old charcoal Victorian which housed DKA (Head Office, San Francisco, Branch Offices in All Major California Cities) had been a specialty whorehouse; recently it had been designated a California Landmark by the State Historical Society. Such are the uses of fame.

At the head of the stairs he turned hard left, toward the front office which overlooked the avenue through unwashed bay windows. Two new assignments and five memos from the skip-tracers, as well as three close-outs, were in his box on Jane Goldson’s desk.

“Bart up here, Jane?”

“No. Should he be?”

Jane was the setup and switchboard girl, with a marked English accent which Kearny felt lent the place a touch of class. He might even have been right. She also had remarkably good legs under remarkably short skirts; a slight open-faced girl with brown, perfectly straight hair all the way down to the small of her back.

“He’s not downstairs and his car is outside. And the Jaguar he picked up last night is gone.”

“Maybe he’s taking it back to the dealer.” She suddenly frowned. “He picked that one up, did he? Bit odd, actually, that he didn’t leave a note on my desk about it.”

Carrying his attaché case and the In basket contents, Ballard clattered downstairs and back into the basement. The sliding mirrored door to Kearny’s cubbyhole at the far end was shut, but that didn’t mean anything; it was one-way glass so Kearny could see who wanted in. Besides, Ballard was going to have to ask him if he’d seen Bart, no matter what sort of mood he was in.

Ballard’s intercom rang before he could set down his attaché case. “Larry? Come in here right away.”

Ballard walked back, pushed the button beside Kearny’s door; when the buzzer sounded, he went in. Standing behind the desk, where she could read over Kearny’s shoulder, was Giselle Marc. She still had on her coat: a tall, wickedly lean blonde with an exquisitely boned face and the sort of brains that traditionally go with thick horn-rims, thick ankles, and a thick personality. She had only the brains.

“I hear that Kathy’s sick again,” said Ballard, just to say something.

“She is. It worries me. She’s too young for all the troubles she has.” Kathy Onoda, the Japanese-American office manager, was just twenty-eight. Giselle was two years younger, the same age as Ballard.

He sat down in the client chair, gingerly, awaiting Kearny’s eruption. All of the signs were there: Giselle, long-faced, unsmiling; the ashtray overflowing with half-smoked butts; Kearny’s coat over the back of his chair; Kearny himself hunched forward in a watching attitude as if the Derby were being run on top of his desk.

Ballard cleared his throat. “Bart’s got another ticket. Can’t we do something about that new meter maid?”

“What time did you see Bart last night?” asked Kearny. He shook out a Lucky, offered the pack, regarding the younger man through the smoke with narrowed eyes.

“I didn’t — just talked with him on the radio about twelve-thirty. He said he’d be here, writing reports — he had sixteen of ’em to do. But he was already gone when I got here at one-twenty-five.”

“Was the Jag he repo’d here? Were the burglar alarms set?”

Ballard hesitated. Bart was his best friend, he didn’t want to give wrong answers.

“Well?” Kearny was a hard-driving forty-four, a compact, blocky man with cop’s eyes, a massive jaw, and a slightly flattened and bent nose which helped mask the cold shrewdness of his face. He had been a private investigator for over a quarter of a century, managing Walter’s Auto Detectives, until he had founded DKA almost ten years before.

“I didn’t notice about the Jag. The door was locked but the alarms were off. Why? What—”

“Bart’s in the hospital,” said Giselle.

“Hospital?” Ballard stood up abruptly, remained erect for several seconds, then with a slightly foolish look, sat down again.

“He creamed that Jaguar,” said Kearny mildly.

“That’s silly, Dan. He picked it up early in the evening, it was here when I was by at ten-thirty.” He looked over at Giselle, who was leaning against the filing cabinet with her arms folded. “Is he hurt bad?”

“He totaled the goddamn Jag!” Kearny burst out. He slammed the desk so hard with an open palm that his dice box full of ballpoint pens jumped a full inch in the air. “One of the new V-12 hardtop coupes and he totaled it. Joy-riding like some damned teen-ager—”

“Bart wouldn’t do that!” exclaimed Ballard hotly. “He—”

“Almost twelve thousand owing on it — hell, we picked it up because the subject’s insurance had been canceled. Our insurance is probably primary over the bank’s VSI. And you know what that means?” He leaned forward to angrily smear out his cigarette, his left hand automatically reaching for the pack again. “That means DKA probably is going to have to eat that son of a bitch. Our coverage is good only during recovery, in transit, and in storage. Pissing around up on Twin Peaks at three in the morning isn’t gonna be nobody’s idea of being in transit.”

Ballard shook his head doggedly. He looked over at Giselle, said again, “Is Bart all right, or—”

“No. He’s in a coma, they think he’s got a skull fracture. He—”

Ballard stood up. “Which hospital?”

“You aren’t going to do any good over there right now, Larry.” Kearny looked up from lighting his cigarette. “Visiting hours don’t start until eleven, you’ve got reports to type. I see you didn’t get any in last night.”

Ballard took a deep breath as if barely controlling himself, but said almost plaintively, “Dan, he had to have taken that car out for something besides a joy ride.” Then, seeing the look on Kearny’s face, he added hastily, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll type the damned reports.”

When Giselle left Kearny’s office ten minutes later, Ballard followed her outside. Another batch of kids was capering and shouting in the fenced playground across the street, their cries as full of spring as geese V-ing north.

“How do you like that guy?” he demanded bitterly. “More worried about the damned Jag than he is about Bart.”

“Twelve thousand bucks, Larry. And Bart was driving the car.”

“I’m not so sure of that, either,” said Ballard darkly.

She shrugged. Even in the current shoe styles she was only an inch or two shorter than his five-eleven-and-a-half. She had a short straight nose and a small mouth and blue eyes as clear as mountain water.

“There isn’t any alternative, Larry. He was there, the car was there, and nobody else was.”

“And both of ’em totaled? I’d like to hear what the Accident Investigation Bureau cops have to say.” He started to turn away, but Giselle’s voice stopped him. Her eyes were flashing, suddenly.

“Bart’s not out at County General, you know, Larry,” she snapped.

“Huh?”

“Of course Dan’s worried about getting stuck for that Jag. But Bart’s at Trinity Hospital in intensive care, a single-bed room with a private nurse as necessary. If you think all that’s covered by the DKA health plan, you’d better hope you never get sick enough to test your theory.”

“You mean that Kearny—”

“This morning, as soon as he got word. DKA’s going to be picking up a lot of medical on this no matter what finally comes out about the Jaguar.”

“Now you’ve made me feel like a bastard,” said Ballard sheepishly.

“I sincerely hope so.”