Final Notice

Twelve

Wayne E. Hawkley’s law offices were in Concord, an East Bay community some twenty miles east of Oakland. A quiet side street in a quiet town, drowsy in the late-fall heat; a town caught unprepared for the scores of miles of subdivisions which had sprung up around it since World War II.

Kearny parked across from the one-story cinder-block building, then sat in the wagon for a few moments, staring at the red-brick façade and the plate-glass windows reflecting afternoon sunlight. Six months ago he’d wanted only an address from Hawkley. Now he wanted much more — and was going to have a tough time getting it.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Kearny.” The lean dark intense secretary wore rimless glasses and still had good legs and still showed a lot of them.

“You’re very good, Maddy,” he said.

A smile curved the girl’s thin lips without touching the eyes behind the bland glasses. “You’re very good yourself, Mr. Kearny, remembering a lowly secretary’s name. But it’s Ms. Hawkley except to friends.”

“Is the old gentleman available?”

He watched her slender back disappear down the passageway to her grandfather’s private office. He wished that he had her backstopping Giselle. Giselle. Dammit, if only he’d mentioned Gilmartin’s steady stream of shack-ups to her sometime, just in passing. A hell of a good banker, Gilmartin, pragmatic and very bright. But a sexual son of a bitch despite his wife and two sons.

Or perhaps because of them?

Anyway, Giselle would rip her guts out thinking she had led him astray from home and family. She just wasn’t the kind for casual flops in the pad with a married man.

“Right this way, please, Mr. Kearny.”

Old Wayne Hawkley still smoked long expensive cigars and still drank the best bourbon there was. He was just bringing the bottle and two shot glasses from the drawer of the old-fashioned roll-top desk when Kearny was ushered in.

He stuck his cigar in his mouth to free a hand for Kearny’s, took it out again to say, “That’ll be all, Maddy.”

Clear blue eyes that were at least a generation younger than the lean brown face regarded Kearny sardonically through old-fashioned spectacles. The thin lips quirked. “I was wondering when you’d honor us with a visit.”

“That so?” Kearny sat down, thinking that he’d have to chew out Heslip and Ballard for missing the tags Hawkley had put on them.

“Once I appeared to represent Mr. Garofolo, I figgered it was just a matter of time.”

So. No tags, just foresight. Kearny knew that under the sparse shoe-polish-black hair a computer brain to challenge his own was flashing away. He drank, Hawkley poured. Wild Turkey died an easy death.

The lawyer said mildly, “I am on retainer to Garofolo’s employer, you know. It’s only natural, when he’s in trouble...”

Kearny got out his filtered Camels. The Surgeon General had finally scared him that much. Time went by. They sipped and smoked.

Hawkley finally sighed. “I take it you’ve discovered my client’s youthful indiscretions.”

Kearny set down his empty shot glass. “He’s an enforcer,” he said. On the wall behind the roll-top desk was Hawkley’s framed certificate announcing that he had been admitted to the California State Bar in 1927. “So I thought I’d drop around, find out if I should send my family out of town.”

Hawkley made an abrupt, almost alarmed gesture with one big, gnarled hand. “Now dammit, Mr. Kearny, ain’t no need to take that tone. You know very well that your Mr. Dorsey was mistaken for—”

“For me?”

Hawkley stared at him almost blankly for several seconds. The “ain’t” was artful, Kearny knew, something developed originally for the juries which had become habitual. Old-fashioned watch chain across the lean belly, carefully calculated folksiness, the slips in grammar — all programmed for jury-appeal.

“I declare,” said Hawkley at last. He leaned back to laugh in genuine delight. It was not an old man’s laugh, though he had to carry at least as many decades as the century. “May I be frank, Mr. Kearny?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Well, between you and me, Jerry Garofolo sometimes does favors for a friend who has a modest financial undertaking—”

“Jesus!” burst in Kearny. “Being frank? He’s an enforcer for a shylocker — six bucks a week for every five, with lots of sweet loans to push the vigorish up.”

“I prefer financial undertaking,” said Hawkley dryly. “In any event, Mr. Garofolo and his associate not only had the wrong man — Mr. Dorsey did bear a superficial resemblance to the... um... delinquent debtor — but they used much more force than the occasion required...”

Which bothered Kearny. The old bastard sounded as if he was telling the truth when he said that Ed Dorsey was hit by accident, pure and simple, by a couple of the syndicate’s loan-shark enforcers. It explained why nobody from the Mafia was taking any interest in Kearny’s field men. But it didn’t explain what Chandra had on the syndicate worth five thousand bucks. It didn’t explain the threatening phone call. It didn’t explain Fazzino’s paying off Chandra personally. Hawkley could be lying of course, but...

A possible way to find out. “I’d be interested in knowing whether Garofolo’s going to show up for his trial.”

“Jump bail?” Hawkley looked shocked, much too shocked to actually be shocked. “Padilla Trucking has put up a $35,000 cash bond to ensure—”

“Is he?”

Hawkley drew a deep breath. “He... um... accepted an assignment overseas on the day of his release on bail.”

So the syndicate would eat the thirty-five thou. Which meant he had been on mob business, which, goddammit, just didn’t make sense. Yet.

“You’ve eased my mind a good deal,” he said to Hawkley untruthfully.

The range of hills between Oakland and Contra Costa County meant that neither San Francisco nor Oakland Control could reach the small radio unit in Kearny’s car. He reached home in Lafayette fifteen minutes after leaving Hawkley’s office, and went straight through to the bedroom. In the closet was a big radio sender/receiver with a range almost equal to that of KDM 366 Control in San Francisco. He called Giselle.

“Any word from our contact downtown, over?”

“Negative, SF-1.”

“Have him call me here if he has anything.”

Kearny changed into old clothes to go out and mow the lawn. He wondered unhappily whether he might have to yank Giselle off the case entirely. Intensely loyal people, once deflected from the person or organization which had their loyalty...

And what was more calculated to confuse a girl of relatively little sexual experience than an intense love affair with a lot of nice gooey guilt mixed up in it?

He went up the hall past the empty kids’ rooms and through the big kitchen, remembering that brooding look Ballard had sent after Giselle and Gilmartin. There was a nonphysical intimacy between Ballard and Giselle which might be useful...

The phone rang. He answered it on the first ring; Jeanie had planned to take the kids down to get decorations for the Hallowe’en party on the way home from school and wasn’t home yet.

“Dan? I didn’t find nothing on that little Austin girl for you here,” came Benny Nicoletti’s soft, almost apologetic voice.

“That tells us something in itself, Benny.”

“But I did get sort of a line on her. Just for the hell of it, I took a look through the Juvenile Court Index — those records are sealed, the Index just tells you who’s been sealed, you understand? There ain’t no way to get into the file itself without a court order; but I gotta contact or two in the juvie probation setup. One of ’em thinks he remembers it was something to do with skin-flicks. Thinks she was maybe seventeen at the time, the filmmaker got busted for Contributing under W and I six hundred.”

W&I 600: a statute of the Welfare and Institutions Code.

“Dependent Children, Benny?”

“That’s it. He can’t remember what happened to the girl, probably probation under control of the parents or something. Maybe three, four years ago. Like I said, otherwise she’s clean.”

Kearny stood in abstraction after thanking him and hanging up. Benny was being damned accommodating all of a sudden, bending rules he’d usually only bend in the interest of what the SFPD saw as justice.

Time to quit using him as a bird dog. What the hell was the name of that friend of Bart’s who... Yeah, Bob McDade, that was it. Get Bart to ask him if he’d ever heard of Wendy Austin. They had to establish the connection between Fazzino and Chandra; it could be through the girl. McDade, who was into that whole porn-movie scene, might know something about her.