Dead Skip

Twenty-five

Not entirely away: it had been the sudden intensity of the pain that had made reality go mushy. He realized he was on his hands and knees against the wall. His head hurt as well as his back; must have rammed headfirst into the wall on the way down.

“Blood,” he got out. It was the first thing that came to mind. “I’ll be pissing blood for a week.” He’d read that about kidney injuries in a detective story once.

“Not for a week,” said Rodney Elkin in an almost apologetic voice. “I want you to go into the dining room ahead of me. The light switch is to the left of the door.”

“I don’t know if I can get up,” said Ballard. His mind had started to work again, a little. The kidney pain had lessened.

“You’ll get up.”

He got up. He hiked himself upright against the wall. His eyes were coming back into focus; he could see Elkin standing well away from him, wearing a topcoat. Tall, physically strong, decisive, good-looking, kinky. Especially kinky. Use that some way? The big revolver from the kitchen drawer now in his left hand. Of course. With shells in it now.

Heslip, facing his attacker, had been struck on the right side of his head. Elkin, talking on the phone at JRS Garage, had switched the receiver to his right hand to write notes of the conversation.

“Move it!” snapped Elkin.

Ballard moved it. The gun was shaking in Elkin’s hand. Panic again. Panic might make the gun go off. He used the wall to get to the dining room, leaning against it and sliding along. Go in fast, slam the door, dive out the still-open window...

It wasn’t like TV, not at all. Away from the wall, he tottered. He hurt. Moving, he had to clench his teeth to keep from throwing up. He couldn’t have moved fast if his life depended on it. Christ, his life did depend on it!

He still couldn’t move fast. He sat down on one of the oak dining chairs, gingerly. Jeezuz, that back!

What had Elkin done to Giselle?

Elkin was sweating, holding the gun. Moisture from the fog glistened on his very black, very curly hair. His nose was too big for him to be truly handsome, Ballard thought. So why in hell hadn’t Cheri Tart mentioned that nose? Or those extra-long mod sideburns? None of this would have happened if she’d mentioned things like that.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do about you, Ballard.” He chewed his lip nervously. “I really don’t.”

“Buy me off.”

Elkin gave a short tight laugh full of a sort of despair. He went around drawing the shades, closed the window through which Ballard had entered. He looked like a tennis player, a basketball player, maybe; he didn’t look like a murderer. He sat down on the edge of the big oak table, began swinging one leg. His shoes were very brightly polished. His eyes looked sick. “Buy you off with what?”

“The money you embezzled. The money you killed Charles Griffin for — so you could blame him for stealing it.”

But Elkin just shook his head, his face almost placid. Ballard suddenly realized: he had to prime himself. Work himself up, as he probably had done with Griffin. As he had done with Bart. As he would do with Larry Ballard unless... Would going down on his knees and pleading for his life do any good? Ballard knew he would do it if he thought it would save him.

“I didn’t steal any money,” said Elkin.

Ballard almost bought it, the way he said it. But if not for money, then why... “Heslip didn’t die. He’s out of the coma, he can identify you.”

That shook Elkin, visibly. He said, “I don’t believe you.”

“Odum can identify you, too. And Cheri...”

His face went pale. “That whore! Don’t talk to me about her!”

Use it. Work on it. Mr. Kink. “I saw your trophy room upstairs.”

Elkin leaped to his feet, eyes wild. Jesus! Ballard had pushed the wrong button. But now he understood. Everything. Too late he understood it. The furniture had been sold from under Cheri merely to spite her, purely and simply. And Griffin had died, here in this house on February 9, because of Cheri.

As if reading his thoughts, Elkin said, “Chuck was an accident, really.” He sank back on the edge of the table; some of the wildness left his eyes. The muzzle of the gun wavered slightly. Ballard would roll suddenly out of the chair, keep rolling, a moving target, then dive right out of the window, shade and curtains and glass and all...

Bullshit.

“It was an accident. He came over here the night after that bitch over in Concord... Anyway, he was accusing me of wild things, things she’d said. A cheap whore like that, a topless dancer showing everything she’s got to anyone, but when I... But... Anyway, he... he was standing in the living room, by the fireplace, he said... He believed what she said about me! He... he said if I ever went near her again he... he was bigger than I am, a lot heavier, he lifted weights all the time, so I picked up the poker and I hit him. Just to knock him down. But it was turned wrong and... the end of it went right into his forehead, right into his skull above his eye. He just fell down dead. An accident...”

Where in hell was Giselle? Obviously Elkin knew nothing about her. Had she for Christ sake fallen asleep or something in the goddamn car? His back was killing him... “So you had to make it look as if Griffin had been embezzling. To explain why he disappeared.”

“That’s it,” he said. His face was working. He transferred the revolver to his right hand, flexed his fingers, returned it to his left. “Since it happened, I’ve been going down to JRS after supper, some nights, to work on the tallies and receipts to make it look as if he’d been stealing for quite a while.”

“On Tuesday you took the W-2 out of Leo’s desk after he showed it to Heslip,” said Ballard.

“But it was too late. Somehow, from that California Street address, your man got to Odum. On Tuesday night he came by on his way back from the East Bay to tell us what he had learned about Griffin. I was the only one there. After he left I stayed there a while, thinking. I knew Odum had given him a description of Griffin — he kept staring at me while he was there...”

“Because the description fit you,” said Ballard. “Because you had posed as Griffin to Odum. Why did you? Why San Jose and—”

“What else was I going to do?” he demanded in an aggrieved voice. “I could hide his body in the cellar, but I couldn’t put his car down there. I couldn’t put it in a JRS Garage, either — someone would have recognized it. So I rented a house down in San Jose, as far away from the city and the East Bay as I could get, and left it in the garage. But then your company came around looking for it.”

It was ironic: if he had just left it parked somewhere by Griffin’s house, a DKA man would have spotted it, grabbed it, and the investigation would have ended right there. Instead, he had brought in Odum as a way to get rid of it.

“And then Odum didn’t keep up the payments,” Ballard said.

“And here you are.” His voice had roughened, coarsened, deepened. Working himself up to it? No. Please... “You had to keep going. You wouldn’t let me alone.”

Oh Jesus Christ, this was it. It couldn’t be, he was only twenty-six years old, he couldn’t die yet, Jesus, he was going to shit his pants or something...

Elkin took a deep breath. His hand raised the heavy revolver.

And the front door slammed.

The gun muzzle wavered. Elkin’s face had become frantic with indecision. When whoever it was came through the door, Ballard would lunge for the bourbon bottle on the sideboard, throw it...

Heavy careless footsteps tramping down the hall, heavy as doom. Elkin whispered furiously at Ballard as if they were fellow conspirators, “Who...”

A hard-faced, compact, bleak-eyed man in a dark topcoat came through the door, stopped. His hands were in his coat pockets. Elkin swung the muzzle of the revolver toward him, but the man was unaffected. His eyes went from one of them to the other and back. Ballard was on his feet.

“Rodney Elkin?” said the hard-faced man.

“I’m... Elkin.” The gun was wavering; he didn’t know who to point it at. If Ballard had been himself he could have taken him then. He didn’t even try.

“Inspector Ed Gough, Homicide, SFPD,” said the bleak-eyed man. Ballard had a sudden totally irrational urge to start laughing. “You are under arrest for the murder of Charles M. Griffin on the night of Wednesday, February ninth. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to counsel. If you cannot afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you. If you choose—”

“But... I have a gun!” exclaimed Elkin. He had gone into an oddly theatrical half-crouch, like a Western gunfighter on a Hollywood sound studio street.

“So do I,” said Gough. “And I know how to use mine.” He looked over at Ballard as if Elkin’s revolver did not exist. “Who the hell are you?”

“La... Larry Ballard,” he said in a carefully controlled voice.

“You a friend of his?”

“Private investigator.”

“Give me your belt,” said Gough.

“I have a gun!” yelled Elkin. He looked as if he wanted to cry; all three of them, oddly, knew that the time he could have used it had already passed.

“Don’t make me take it away from you, sonny. We’ve had a police accountant going through the books at JRS two nights a week since sometime in April. Spectrographic analysis of the inks in the ledgers show some entries were altered, others put in at different times since Griffin was murdered, trying to make it look as if the entries predated his disappearance. We’ve got an eyeball witness to Griffin coming to this house on February ninth. We’ve got an eyeball of you at the San Jose house in March. We’ve got an eyeball of someone answering your description putting a black man into a Jaguar on Golden Gate Avenue at one-fifteen a.m. on Wednesday morning. The witness got a partial make on the license plate. Should I go on?”

The three men stood looking at one another with a strange intimacy in the unused dining room. Finally Elkin gave a little sob and laid the revolver on the oak table. His hands were shaking so badly that the steel clattered against the wood. He no longer looked like an athlete: he was just a lanky, frightened man with a nose that was big enough to keep him from being truly handsome.

Gough stepped forward, scooped up the revolver, dropped it into a coat pocket. “Turn around,” he said. Elkin did. Gough made impatient gestures at Ballard. “Your belt. I got roped into a big drug bust down in the Haight on the way up here, I don’t have any cuffs with me.”

Ballard gave him the belt. Ballard’s face ached from being kept impassive. As Gough lashed Elkin’s hands behind him, the faint far wail of a siren came from down toward Stanyan. Gough nodded.

“That’ll be a prowl car.” He grabbed the tall murderer’s shoulder in an ungentle grip. “Let’s go. We’ll meet them out in front.”

Ballard followed them to the front door. The fog had thinned; as they went down the front walk, Giselle’s tall golden-haired form appeared on the sidewalk. Gough went by her without a glance; she turned and stared after him as if she had never seen a cop before. Then she burst out laughing.

“Where the hell have you been?” Ballard yelled at her.

Giselle quit laughing and ran up the walk. “Larry! Are you all right?”

He put a hand to his kidney and groaned. Actually, it didn’t feel too bad; but he had to go to the bathroom and was afraid to. If blood came out... “I was almost killed!” he exclaimed. “Why in hell didn’t you blow the horn when Elkin showed up?”

She gestured after Ed Gough. “He got in the car with me about fifteen minutes after you left. He’d had the same idea as you, to search for the body. But since you were already inside, he said let you find it. But then Elkin showed up. He told me to run for a phone, and then he followed Elkin right up the walk and into the house. No gun, no nothing. He looked awfully damned good doing it, Larry.”

So the bastard had been in the house when Ballard had been attacked, probably had been hiding out of sight at the foot of the stairs to the second floor, just inside the front door. Had let Ballard get slammed in the kidneys and hadn’t done a damned thing. Had then slammed the front door from the inside and come down the hall at the crucial moment.

An SFPD radio unit squealed into Java from Masonic, red lights turning, siren dying. Two uniformed cops jumped out.

Ballard turned and started down the hall. “There’s a bottle of bourbon in the dining room.”

Ten minutes later the front door slammed and familiar aggressive footsteps came down the hall.

“How did you know Elkin was the one?” demanded Ballard as Dan Kearny alias Ed Gough came into the room.

“When I was driving back in the T-Bird,” said Kearny, “I realized Griffin seemed to be two men — one who attacked Bart coldly and viciously, the other who was Cheri’s gentle soul drinking too much out of grief about his mother’s death. Then I finally caught on that somewhere along the line a substitution had been made, a phony for a real Griffin. It had to be after Cheri and before Odum. So...”

“So,” said Giselle, “as soon as you realized you had two different psychological descriptions, you started looking for two different physical descriptions, right?”

“I finally started to think about the evidence instead of just walk around it. When I did that, Elkin stuck out like a broken thumb. Only he talked with Griffin when Griffin called in sick on the tenth and eleventh of February. He was the one who started the talk that Griffin might have been embezzling. He was the one who told Larry that Griffin had said the mother’s will was out of probate — nobody else heard Griffin say that. He fit Cheri’s description of Griffin’s kinky friend. Even getting rid of the furniture in the California Street house — if that wasn’t Griffin, it had to be somebody who knew Griffin wouldn’t be around to object. So then I went back and asked Odum the two questions I should have asked him in the first place.”

“For a description of Griffin,” said Ballard. “But what was the second?”

“Whether Odum gave the description to Bart. He did.”

“And Bart caught up with the description on the wrong person. He thought it was just a coincidence, but he wanted to ask me about it because it bothered him.”

“Well,” said Giselle. She looked at her watch, but said, “What’s the penalty for impersonating a police officer, Dan?”

Kearny stopped at the door, grinned. He had to get down to Fifth and Bryant to sign the murder complaint against Elkin so he could be held without bail. “I liked the stuff about the spectrographic analysis of inks, myself. You ought to get out of here if you don’t want to get stuck for the rest of the night. They’ll be coming with a warrant to bust up that cellar floor. Damned good job, you two. Take the day off.”

“It’s Saturday,” said Giselle. “We aren’t supposed to work anyway.”

“Then take Sunday off, too.”

“Why didn’t you call yourself Joe Friday?” asked Ballard coldly.

“You know I always use street names for my aliases,” said Kearny with great dignity. “Bush. Franklin. Turk. Gough. One of these days I’ll have to work something up with Golden Gate in it.”

They stared at the empty doorway, listened to Kearny’s energetic footsteps pound back down the hall. The front door slammed.

Ballard shook his head in wonder. “The son of a bitch probably will, too.”

Giselle laughed. Then she said, “Looks like you’re stuck with running me over to Oakland after all.”

Ballard used a four-letter word. Then, gritting his teeth, he used Elkin’s bathroom. No blood. Which cheered him so much that he took the bottle of bourbon with him. Maybe he could sneak it into the hospital in the morning. Bart liked bourbon, and Corinne Jones would take a sip of it from time to time. Especially when she had something to celebrate.