Dead Skip

Twenty-three

They rode down in the elevator silently, each busy with his own thoughts. The outside air was wet, the wind penetrating, so Giselle shivered despite the London Fog waterproof she had on over her wool skirt and short-sleeved sweater. She and Ballard walked Corinne to her car; the stop lights on the corner of Scott half a block away were red and green blobs through the fog.

“ ‘When shall we three meet again?’ ” Giselle asked rhetorically.

Corinne stuck her head out of the place where the Triumph’s window had been until six months before, when some mother-of-a-car-booster had smashed it out for a big score: a pack of Winstons in the glove box. “ ‘In thunder, lightning, or in rain,’ ” she quoted back with a flash of perfect teeth in her dark face.

Ballard watched the taillights recede into the soup, then walked back to his Ford, held the door for Giselle, and started the heater as soon as the motor was running. “Soon as we warm this up we’ll get you over to Oakland.”

“Thanks a lot,” she said.

The sarcasm of her tone was lost on Ballard. He was thinking of the San Francisco map over Giselle’s visor. Could he get it down, casually, look up Java Street? No, dammit, he’d have to wait until he dumped her off. If she knew where he planned to go, she’d go all DKA official on him or — worse yet — want to go along.

Giselle shivered. She was feeling very Bardish that night. “ ‘Tis now the very witching time of night, and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world.’ ” She paused, breathed out. “See? It’s cold enough to see your breath.”

“You talk too much,” said Ballard.

“That’s because I’m scared. I don’t get out into the field all that often, and when I do, it usually isn’t after a would-be murderer.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he snapped.

But she already had reached up for the map he had been eying wistfully a few moments before. She opened it and looked over at him sweetly. “Which street is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Her blue eyes were very direct and challenging even by the fog-dimmed streetlights. “Get off it, hotshot. I’ve been in this business a lot more years than you even if we are the same age. So don’t try to con me. You let Whitaker herd you out of that room as meek as a lamb — which means you thought something Bart said had given it to you. Outside, you made a beeline for a phone book to look up an address. When we got into the car just now your hands were shaking, you wanted to reach for that map so badly. So... what street is it?”

Ballard stared at her, silently raging, then sighed. “Java.”

“Java...” She consulted the index, folded the map open to the appropriate coordinates by the overhead light he had switched on. “It is one block long, runs between... Masonic and Buena Vista Avenue West.”

“Dead-ends in Buena Vista Park?” demanded Ballard, finally able to visualize the street. He had been afraid it would be way to hell out in the Mission District with Brazil and Persia and Russia and France.

“That’s the one. But what difference does the area make if... Of course!” she exclaimed. “It would have to be within walking distance of Twin Peaks, wouldn’t it?”

Ballard nodded. “So he could walk home after putting Bart over the edge in the Jaguar. Couldn’t tow the Jag up there — somebody might remember. Couldn’t call a cab, same reason — or even walk down to where he could catch a cruiser...”

“Dan had me check out every cab company’s trip sheets for Wednesday A.M.,” Giselle said thoughtfully.

Trust Kearny. He didn’t miss many. “And?”

“None at all from anywhere reasonably near Twin Peaks during the right time span.” She paused. “Why are we just sitting here?”

“Oh. Sorry.” He started the car. “I’ll get you home and—”

She neatly twitched the key from the ignition and sat back with it in her hand as the Ford ca-chunked to a stop in the middle of Bush Street.

“Uh-uh, hotshot. I’m going with.”

“Like hell you are.”

“You aren’t enough man to put me out of this car.”

He stared out the windshield, rubbed his hand down over his whisker-bristled face. Damn, he was tired. Well? Either she went along or he didn’t go tonight. What the hell, she was better than most men he knew at this business. Better than him, come to think of it, in everything except the occasional physical stuff. And who knew what he would find at Java Street? He didn’t even know if the guy was married or single. He might have a shack-up there for the night, might be throwing a party, might...

He put out his hand, wordlessly. Wordlessly, she laid the key in it. He was suddenly glad to have the bright, rangy blonde beside him in the car. “It was something Bart said,” he told her. “I still don’t know how the killer got on to Bart, but—”

“You keep saying killer. Bart isn’t dead.” He realized how far behind in the case she was; she knew nothing of his and Kearny’s day in the East Bay. Then her eyes widened. “I... see. So you think Charles Griffin is...”

Ballard jogged the Ford over to the 000 block of Masonic; the big dark silent Sears store hulked dimly through the ranks of fog marching up from the ocean.

“Buried in the basement of 27 Java Street,” he said. “Or somewhere on the property. I hope. Because without him we don’t have any proof of anything, not even now.”

“We can show the murderer to Cheri Tart,” Giselle suggested.

“Identify him as Mr. Kink with the flashlight? What good would that do?”

But what about showing him to Howard Odum? He must have posed as Griffin in San Jose while getting rid of the car. The car had been the weak point all along. It had to disappear to make Griffin’s disappearance plausible; he hadn’t realized he could have just abandoned it on the street.

Java Street.

Narrow, almost an alley between two fog-swept and night-deserted streets. At the far end, as Ballard turned off Masonic, was the dark steep mass of Buena Vista Park rising ghostlike into the mist. He turned off the engine; the silence was very loud. A gout of fog swept densely across the windshield, momentarily blotting out everything beyond the nose of the car as if it were a ship which had buried its prow in a monstrous gray sea. He’d killed lights and motor and ghosted up to the far curb thirty feet beyond the address.

“I just hope I can recognize fresh concrete if I see it.”

Giselle shivered. “How do you plan to get us in?” With the motor and heater killed, the wet cold was seeping quickly through her.

“Bust something if I have to. I’ll take a tire iron. And that’s singular, Giselle.”

“What am I supposed to do? Sit in the car and listen to the radio?” she demanded bitterly.

“Use your head. I need somebody covering me.”

She thought about it. Finally she sighed. He was right. “I’ll try to raise Dan on the radio, or any of the other field men. And if I see anyone fitting the murderer’s description—”

“A long blast on the horn. Just one. And lock the doors. This guy seems to panic and then make decisions fast — and act on them even faster.”

“I’ll scream a real scream,” said Giselle coolly.

Ballard got out, got a tire iron from the trunk. The fog was so thick that to the watching Giselle, it turned him into a mere dim moving form by the time he reached the far curb.

Giselle switched her attention to the house. No lights, of course, or they would have abandoned the plan. It was a massive square white wood structure with broad front steps leading up to an arched pillared entryway with a wide heavy wood door. She counted the steps. Eleven of them.

In the process she lost Ballard. Well, he’d probably go around to the back, through the heavy bushes which flanked both sides of the house. A double lot, of course, most of these old houses had that. Three stories, the windows on the second floor very big, those on the third, narrow garret-type openings. And on the right-hand front corner of the house a round three-story turret, made of wood and shingles, with a peaked roof like a dunce cap. Curved tall windows, curtained, looking down from the turret.

She looked quickly ahead, toward the park, over her shoulder. Nothing lived except swirling fog. She switched on the ignition, watched the red light glow from the radio. It was comforting, familiar; she didn’t feel as brash as she had when Larry had been there.

“KDM 366 Control calling SF-1. Come in, Dan.”

No response, not that she expected any. Kearny would be home in bed in Lafayette, the T-Bird tucked into the Kearny double garage. Kearny had a radio unit in a converted closet off the bedroom where he and Jeanie slept, but a mobile unit wouldn’t reach that far. Only SF and Oakland Controls.

Still, she conscientiously tried him twice more. No answer.

“KDM 366 Control calling any SF unit.”

Again, nothing. Nobody out at 2:00 A.M. on a Saturday, which wasn’t surprising. Not this early in the month. Besides, Larry and Bart were the best DKA nighthawks anyway, the ones who took chances, who thought it was fun as well as a job. Bart was in the hospital and Larry was inside the house at 27 Java Street by now. Had been gone long enough to be inside. Breaking and entering.

Giselle shook her head. Just as good she hadn’t gotten Kearny, really. If he knew what Ballard was doing, he’d skin Larry alive. And skin Giselle Marc, too. She knew better, knew the consequences of this sort of unplanned action if anything went wrong.

Emotionally involved on this one, all of them. Running around in circles from the beginning, ignoring the facts, ignoring the evidence. And because of it, working from a massively wrong premise right from the beginning, from the first note Larry wrote on the case. Even before that, from the verbal she had gotten from Heslip on Tuesday afternoon.

They had assumed that Griffin had disappeared because he had embezzled a large sum of money from JRS Garage. Which was wrong, dead wrong. Larry had realized that as soon as he knew who the murderer was.

No, Griffin had disappeared because he hadn’t embezzled any money. And because his mother had died and he had started drinking heavily. (She and Ballard were wrong in this reasoning, but they weren’t to know that until it was too late.)

Anyway, she thought, because they were involved in the case personally, and were working from a wrong assumption, they had ignored the most obvious evidence that Griffin wasn’t an embezzler and never had been. His chronically delinquent auto payments. A man smart enough to embezzle a large sum of money would have used some of it to keep his account current and thus not draw attention to himself needlessly.

She drew her coat tighter around her. Cold in the car, without the motor or the heater on. But she couldn’t run them, couldn’t even smoke. Not on a deadly serious stakeout like this one.

Movement froze her. Then she gave a nervous little giggle. A gray-and-white-striped tomcat had run across the street from her side and into the bushes on the edge of the property at 27 Java.

She tried Kearny again on the radio, tried the other SF field men. No answer. Nobody abroad this night except a gray-and-white cat, chased or frightened out from under Ballard’s car...

Chased or frightened by what?

And then she realized, just too late, that she hadn’t pushed down the lock button on the driver’s side after Larry had gotten out. She lunged across the seat, but as her fingers grazed the door, it was jerked open and a dark bulky shape came into the car at her. She didn’t even have time to scream, let alone hit the horn ring.