Dead Skip

Twenty-four

Ballard paused in the shadows of the dripping bushes that flanked the walk. No lights showed in the house, but that didn’t mean nobody was home. It was two o’clock in the morning. The bars were just closing and... He gave a little snort. Just seventy-two hours since Bart had gotten it, and here he was, at the killer’s house.

Why, really? Because he wanted to close this one out all by himself? Partially. But also because the murderer might find out that Bart Heslip was still alive. If Griffin was buried here, the killer might have left traces he would hide or obliterate, not knowing that Bart was permanently blacked out on what he had seen when he had been struck.

He shot one glance between sodden leaves back at the car. Just a dim shape across the street. From behind, Giselle’s head would be hidden by the high-backed seat. It made him feel rather secure to know Giselle was there to warn him with a horn blast if anyone fitting the murderer’s description showed up.

Ballard boldly mounted the broad front steps, eleven of them, and gently turned the front doorknob. Locked, of course. It wasn’t the foolhardy maneuver it seemed; he knew his rubber-soled shoes made little noise on the steps or the porch itself.

Door locked, no garage to give possible access. Around in back, then.

The lot wasn’t a great deal wider than the house, even though it was a double, but the property was deep. He had to use his flashlight three times on the journey along the side of the house to keep from tripping over bushes or roots. The ground rose sharply under his feet; a hillside lot, backed up against the broad base of Twin Peaks.

The back door was also locked, although the wood of the frame was so old that it almost gave when he laid his weight against it. Ten seconds with his tire iron would have had it open, but they would have been noisy seconds.

Better to try the windows first. Because of the slope of the lot, the sills of the rear windows were at waist-level rather than far above his head as they had been at the front.

The third one he tried was unlocked.

But it was stuck. He worked on it with the tire iron, digging it into the wood and gently prying upward, and within a few moments it had broken free. He pushed up the bottom half, then melted back into the bushes behind the house.

Ballard had prowled houses before, of course; nobody spent very long in the investigation game without an occasional crude illegal-entry job — through attached garages if nowhere else. Usually it was just curiosity, the almost unnatural interest in delving behind people’s facades that most detectives seemed to have.

Curiosity. What killed the cat. And he was dealing with a killer.

No lights went on, no second-story windows went up, no pale questing faces appeared. After two minutes Ballard moved in again. If anyone was there, he was asleep. Or lying in ambush.

Ashcan that, Ballard. Time to do it.

He wiped his hands down his pant legs before swinging a leg up over the sill, then went in under the white lacy curtains that covered the opening. When he straightened up he was in a disused dining room. A single stab of flashlight showed a heavy oak table, big captain’s chair at the head and lesser chairs ranged down the sides. An immense oak sideboard with a collection of bottles on it. Behind it, a big mirror with an ornate frame.

Ballard wiped his hands again. He was totally illegal now, totally vulnerable. If the bastard walked in on him now and shot him, the cops couldn’t do a damned thing about it except sweep him up and cart him away.

Better not to think about that. If the killer wasn’t in here, asleep, Giselle would give warning if he showed up.

He crossed the room by the flashlight, switched it out before opening the door. The air in the hall was fresher; the dining room, then, was usually shut up. Which suggested a man living alone. He wished he’d had time to research this guy a little.

The hell of it was, he was scared. Heart thumping.

Light from the street came through the heavy etched glass half-panel of the front door despite the fog. By it, Ballard could see that the hallway ran straight back through the house to the kitchen in the rear. He stood in front of the dining-room door, mouth-breathing. No sound, not anywhere in the house. No feel of anyone in the house.

The kitchen was old-fashioned, with a wooden drainboard flanking the stained porcelain sink. Water heater, new icebox, new electric stove. He opened a couple of drawers at random. Silverware. Knives. A heavy-caliber blued-steel revolver. A homeowner’s weapon. Ballard checked it. No shells. He left it there. A tire iron was a better weapon than an empty gun.

Peanut-butter jar open on the table beside the toaster. Small plate, butter-smeared knife, coffee cup with a half-inch of mud in the bottom, everything seen in circular segments by his moving flashlight.

Breakfast remains; so he hadn’t eaten supper here. Hadn’t returned from work, maybe. Which suggested the probability that Ballard had the place to himself but might not for much longer.

So get moving.

The door which opened off the hall beside the kitchen door showed utter blackness and stairs going down. Cellar. Where he wanted to go, after making sure he was alone. Burning sensation between the shoulder blades. He worked his shoulders to ease it. Tension.

Past the dining-room door. Next, same side of the hall, the study. Empty. Next, living room. Empty. Old, heavy, cumbersome, perhaps valuable furniture. Antiques, probably. Probably inherited along with the house. A baby grand piano. Well dusted. Probably had a woman in once a week. He sure as hell could afford it.

The stairway to the second floor was just to the left of the front door as you entered from the street. Wide hardwood treads, so solid they didn’t creak though they must have been there at least half a century. The banisters were also hardwood, polished by generations of hands.

On the second floor the hall ran across the width of the house rather than down its length. Six doors opened off it, three on each side. So dark that Ballard had to use his flashlight, first to guide himself to each door and then to guide his hand to the knob. He was sweating profusely. If anyone was here, on this floor was where they would be.

Bathroom. Empty. Modern fixtures, all redone. Men’s toilet articles. Across the hall to the street-side room. A bedroom, fixed up into a study. New, modern furniture, bright colors, vinyls and naugahyde, Swedish modem desk and chairs. Money had gone into it. Well, he had money, right?

Middle rear, another bedroom, unused. Must have been his as a kid, pennants on the wall, street signs, faded photos of Forty-Niners who had retired. The Lion, Hurricane Hugh, Y.A. An odd monument to an innocent past.

Middle front room, very careful opening the door, single flash of the light to show it was a bedroom with a big unmade king-size bed. Ballard made a quick check of the two walk-in closets. Lots of clothes, all men’s clothes, good ones. Ten pairs of highly polished shoes. He went to the window, checked the street by carefully drawing aside the curtain. He could see the roof of his car. The fog was as thick and wet-looking as before. Everything serene. Everything muffled.

Final rear room was a darkroom, a hell of a good one — all the chemicals, a Zeiss enlarger that looked new, storage racks with photo paper. A photography buff, too.

Which left the sixth door. Ballard tried this cautiously: locked. He looked at the join between frame and door. Dried. A gap there. He inserted the spatulate end of his tire iron and exerted steady gradually increasing pressure against the lock. It gave. The door was open. Spiral stairs led up, which made it the entrance to the third-floor turret room. What the hell. Better make sure.

He checked his watch. It was 2:17. He had been inside less than fifteen minutes. It seemed like fifteen hours.

These stairs creaked, so he took his time on them, tried to stay on the outside edge, against the wall. The treads were not hardwood, uncarpeted, unswept. Not a place the cleaning lady was allowed to come, which quickened Ballard’s pulse and made him move with great caution. Jimmying the door had made some noise, even if not much.

The door at the top of the stairs was closed but unlocked. When he eased it open, enough light came through the filmy curtains on the narrow curved windows to show him the place was empty. He went in, saw it was a photo gallery. He crossed the room to the wall, suddenly stopped dead when he realized what the big blow-up photos were of.

He had found Cheri’s kinky cat with the flashlight.

Ballard risked his own flashlight for about thirty seconds. They gave him a queasy feeling, just because there were so many of them. All of the walls, floor to ceiling, scores of them colored, these probably cut from Swedish or German porno magazines, and hundreds of black-and-whites, developed and enlarged in the darkroom downstairs.

Good old Kinky: on these naked girls he had used a camera and a flashbulb instead of a flashlight. Blow-ups, cropped so that only the essential female flesh was left, starkly, crudely exposed.

Kinky indeed. Ballard pulled the door shut behind him, went right down the front stairs to the ground floor. He was glad to be out of the turret room. If only there had been a breast or two depicted, a full nude, above all a face. Even an ugly face, even a Gloria Rouse face. But no. Not for Kinky. For him, the apparently numerous chicks who weren’t as selective as buxom, lusty Cheri Tart.

As Ballard opened the cellar door, lights swept the front of the house. He froze. He waited. A car door slammed. He waited some more.

No horn blast from Giselle.

Someone going to a different house, then. It would be a bitch to get trapped in the basement, but the house was empty, and with Giselle on watch he would get at least some warning. But he was glad to have the tire iron in his hand. He turned on the flashlight and went down the steep narrow stairs.

The basement was a mess, the floor loaded with the sort of junk that always seems to accumulate in basements. In one of the front corners a wooden bin which once would have held coal. Above it, a small high window to which the coal chute would have been fitted. An old house indeed. Coal abandoned long ago, of course, for the big natural-gas furnace which dominated the corner of the basement under the kitchen.

Ballard’s light jumped nervously about, went by and then suddenly returned to and steadied on a washtub leaned on edge against the wall. There was dried concrete around the edges of the washtub, as if it had been used to mix up a small amount of mortar. The light moved again, this time laid its white O on a full bag of Portland cement, with a half-bag set on top of it, upright, with the top scrunched down. Ballard realized that he had not really believed he would find anything down here. Of course, he hadn’t found a new section of concrete, but...

He found it five minutes later.

It was under some old homemade wooden shelves with two-by-two framing and triple widths of one-by-eight pine planking for shelves. Unpainted, crowded with ranks of antique Mason jars, empty and waiting under their coating of thick dust for the home canning that would never be done again. What had caught his eye were the scuff marks made on the floor by the stubby vertical two-by-two legs, as if the shelves had been walked end-for-end out from the wall not too long ago.

Ballard got down on his belly and shone the light under the bottom shelf sagging six inches off the floor. The light, laid flat across the concrete that way, easily picked out the rough join of a rectangle of new concrete with the older, smoother, more professional floor.

Seven feet long. Two feet wide.

Stupid? No. Why would he ever have been suspected? Who would ever come down here to look? And after a few years it wouldn’t have looked so raw, so new... So here he was, Chuck Griffin, a pretty nice guy by all accounts. He hadn’t walked out on Cheri after all. He hadn’t embezzled and been murdered for it, either. Murdered, thought Ballard erroneously, to disguise an embezzlement he had discovered.

Ballard followed his dancing circle of light up the dusty stairs to the closed door at the top. Time to get out before...

Closed door.

He switched off the flashlight abruptly, stood on the stairs in the total blackness, breathing with his mouth open. He had left the door standing open when he had come down, on the theory that it would make it a little easier to hear if Giselle had sounded the horn. But she hadn’t. And he’d had the house to himself when he’d come down here. Therefore, he still did. So cool the nerves.

He switched on the light, gingerly climbed the rest of the way. Sure. The door wasn’t closed tight, actually; it merely had drifted shut by itself. But it still took a conscious act of will to gently push it open enough to edge an eye out for a quick look down to the front door.

The hall was empty, of course.

Ballard went the rest of the way out of the cellar, started down the hall and froze after two steps.

The front door was ajar.

He could see the thin line of light from the narrow crack, laid across the floor at an angle and standing a few inches up the wall.

The door had been locked when he had tried it from the outside.

But that meant...

He heard the grunt of effort and at the same instant his body arched and he yelled in pure agony as he was slammed in the kidney. The floor came up at him as his mind screamed, through the pain, He got Giselle first...

Things went away.