Final Notice

Thirteen

Wendy Austin was an incredibly beautiful girl. Her blue eyes looked up into those of the black man standing beside the bed; her full lips, bright and gleaming, were parted in anticipation and her tongue came out over her small white even teeth. Her blond hair made a glistening halo on the pillow.

Then his naked black body covered hers; her arms tightened about his shoulders as her full breasts cushioned under his weight. Her beautifully sculpted legs accepted him.

Wendy Austin began to talk. A stream of almost clinically scatalogical terms spewed from her, dainty at first, then becoming coarser as she urged him on to greater effort and sweat darkened the sheet beneath her. Finally her fingernails began raking thin bloody gashes down his back.

“She was seventeen then,” said Bob McDade.

The moving Technicolor images on the beaded screen faded as the room lights came up. Bart Heslip was sweating. He went to the heavily screened window of the projection booth to look down through dirt-crusted glass at Sixth Street. A white drunk was standing on the sidewalk below, head back, drinking muscatel. It was three in the afternoon.

“Baby, ain’t she something?” persisted McDade to his back.

McDade was a big black man, coal-black, with a fuzzy Afro and wearing the extreme in hip clothes. A knife scar ran down across his throat beneath his shirt collar. He was still alive because years ago Heslip had kept a thumb pressed on the artery during a wild-ass ride to the hospital.

“We made four of those with her, three, three and a half years ago. Each time she took us all on afterwards — me, the cameraman, the sound man—”

“What’d you pay her?”

“Same as everybody — twenty-five a picture. Wanta see the rest of ’em?”

“I couldn’t take it,” said Heslip truthfully, feeling a faint revulsion.

Bob McDade had come out of the government housing projects at Hunter’s Point, same as Heslip, had started out making quickie pornos in pads rented from landlords who knew the tenant would be at work for the afternoon. Now he owned two skin-flick houses, a grocery/liquor store three doors away, a men’s clothing store, a $60,000 house over in Richmond and an expensive Danish wife to whom he was unfaithful with every girl appearing in one of his films.

“You still showing these?” asked Heslip.

McDade’s face closed up like a fist. “Don’t jive me, man. You ain’t that goddam dumb.”

“Maybe not.” Heslip started for the door, then turned to point at the film. “But you are.”

“Sheeit, baby, private stock, purely — for my own solitary sorrowful gazin’ an’ rememberin’.”

“Know where I can find her now? It’s important.”

McDade said thoughtfully, “No idea, man. I remember she was takin’ voice and elocution and dancing lessons... Hell, I remember her wanting us to do one with her as Marilyn Monroe, she had that voice down perfect, and...”

“Thanks a lot, baby,” snapped Heslip.

“Man, I told you I dunno! Maybe, you really need to find her, you got to act, or somebody...”

“Don’t jive me, man,” said Heslip softly. “Maybe Flippo would like to see this print.”

Pure terror spasmed McDade’s face. He came quickly to the door and grabbed Heslip’s arm. “You ain’t seen this, man! Promise me! He know I still got these, it be my black ass, surely.”

Heslip went away without promising. McDade owed him, then came around with that I-dunno shit. Let him sweat it for a day or two.

Giselle leaned back in her chair and blew smoke out through her nostrils. She had smoked more in the past few days than in the whole month. It was that damn Kearny and his ability to reach into her mind and grab out what she was thinking. What made it worse, she didn’t know what she was thinking; everything was a whirl and a muddle. She hated it, yet could hardly wait for the workday to end so she could get to Rocca’s to meet Peter. And then...

Other, more intimate images of the inevitable end of the evening flooded over her, making her body feel heated with anticipation.

How in hell had it happened to her? So suddenly, so completely? Pete’s lovely wife, and the two boys, seven and nine years old — three months ago she’d spent half the company picnic walking those kids around the Lafayette Reservoir. If there were someone she could talk to...

Larry? She would completely panic trying to tell him about it. Bart? O’B? Nobody. No...

Kearny came in with his empty coffee cup dangling from a finger.

“Mr. Gilmartin phoned,” Giselle said formally as the telltale flush mounted her cheeks. “He’s giving us a re-open on Chandra.”

“The hell! You sure?” Kearny seemed thunderstruck.

“With a Hold until a week from Wednesday. He’s going to send out Final Notice on Friday if she doesn’t pick up the delinquent payment this week.”

“Dammit, Giselle, it just don’t reach.” Kearny was pacing. “If you see Pete tonight, ask him if this is his idea or Nucci’s.”

“He already told me. Nucci’s.”

“Did Bart find out if Fazzino had ever seen those films of his girl friend?”

“He asked McDade that.” Giselle suddenly found herself giggling. “He said McDade turned white.”

Just then Heslip’s voice came over the radio: “SF-3 calling KDM 366.”

“This is KDM 366. Go ahead.”

“Subject appears headed toward vicinity Grant and Greenwich.”

“10-4. Stand by.” She released the Transmit button. “He’s tailing Wendy Austin, and she—”

“I heard.” Kearny’s voice betrayed no excitement, but the gray eyes were alive with it. “There’s our link, Giselle. Wendy Austin. How long does somebody work out at a dance studio like that?”

“A serious student, about two hours.”

“Okay. Tell him that if she—”

Heslip’s voice broke in again. “Subject just parked on Lombard Street by Julius Alley. That’s a confirm on the destination.”

Kearny had been quietly smoking behind the wheel of the station wagon for twenty minutes when the beautifully shaped blonde unlocked the Jaguar. She was wearing only a black leotard and black tights under her open coat, giving him a glimpse of her remarkable body as she got into the low-slung sports car. She had her street clothes over her arm. No showers in that place?

As Kearny trudged up narrow Grant Avenue, Heslip’s Plymouth passed him going down. Neither man gave a flicker of recognition. Far below, the lights of the piers jutting out from the Embarcadero had been blotted out by a fog bank that had the horns crying out in the bay.

Lights inside Chandra’s studio made the uneven brush strokes stand out on the glass of door and window. He went in. Light classical music came from a cheap portable record player set on a straight-back chair in one corner. Chandra was nowhere around.

“I’d like to talk with someone about lessons for my daughter,” he told a limber serious-faced girl who was standing with her head down, panting.

“That’d be... Chandra, but I guess... she bugged out...” She caught her breath. “Sometimes she splits for half an hour or so...”

But just then Chandra emerged from a curtained doorway in the plasterboard partition which stretched across the back of the studio. The curtain was a faded green. Chandra herself was a small broad figure in black leotard and tights. She had the legs and hips of a dock worker, oddly combined with a fluid grace so ingrained as to be unconscious.

“Support, Norman!” she cried. A man and woman had just flitted by in tandem, the woman wearing a long split skirt over her leotards and tights. The man had better legs. Chandra cried after them, “You’re not giving her enough support for her pirouette, Norman!”

“The unmannerly bastard,” said Kearny. “I waited until Wendy left before I came in.”

“Oh!” She had whirled to stare up at him from vividly faded blue eyes. “You startled me!” Then her gravelly voice belatedly added, “Wendy who?”

“Fazzino’s girl friend. Anywhere we can talk? Your car’s going to be assigned to us again in ten days.”

Her face momentarily sagged. “But I just...” Then she caught herself. “I’ll... take care of it by then.”

“Don’t do it, Chandra. Give it up.”

She realized she wasn’t going to get rid of him, so she heaved a long-suffering sigh. “The dressing room, then.”

They crossed to the partition. The studio was shabby, dingy, the floor unswept.

“They come to dance, not make beds of roses and a thousand fragrant posies,” she said defensively to his unspoken distaste. Then she shot an almost coquettish look at him, as if assessing his reaction to her quote.

He gave a heavy, sardonic chuckle. “Don’t try to con me, lady. Hell’s Kitchen — remember? I don’t give a damn about fragrant posies, but does it have to smell like a hamper full of old jockstraps?”

“People sweat and sweat gets stale. At least I scrub the shower stall down with Lysol twice a week — that’s more than most of ’em do.” She stopped so abruptly at the curtain that Kearny bumped into her. She yelled, “Watch your turn-out! Your turn-ou... that’s better.”

A slight flat-chested girl holding one of the bars along the wall with one hand, while doing what looked to Kearny like deep knee bends, changed the position of her feet. Chandra nodded approvingly.

The cubicle was empty. Bare hooks were screwed into the walls at about chin-height over the single long gray wooden bench. The back partition ended short of the left wall, so it was possible to walk around the end of it.

Chandra faced Kearny defiantly. “I have no intention of giving up my car,” she said.

He sat down on the bench. Even sitting, he didn’t have to look up at her very much. “What do you have on them and how did you get it?”

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

“Cut it out, Chandra,” he said in a pained voice. “It has to be heavy for a five-thou first bite. You got panicky when the bank said they were assigning the car to a repo agency, and hit Fazzino for another five hundred. Now you’re thinking of trying it again. Don’t.”

Anger, fear, curiosity — all were fighting in her lined face. He realized that she was a little girl trapped in an aging body. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

“This isn’t a game, Chandra!” he snapped. “One man’s already in the hospital, and—”

A lean muscular girl with unexpectedly large and slightly sagging breasts came from behind the rear partition, her head buried in a fuzzy towel. Water beaded her totally nude body. Her face emerged as she lowered her arms, and she saw them for the first time. She had beautiful copper-colored hair. “Sorry,” she said vaguely.

She reached for underclothes, making no attempt to cover her well-shaped dancer’s body in the meantime. The muscles of her belly and thighs had good separation.

“About half the kids wait to shower when they get home,” said Chandra as if in explanation of the redhead.

Like Wendy Austin, thought Kearny. He stood in the doorway, looking stolidly out at the dance floor. For himself, not for the redhead. To her, a stray man in the dressing room was just another set of clothes like those hanging on the hooks. He counted a dozen dancers and four or five people in street clothes waiting for them to finish.

“Who’s in the hospital?” Chandra demanded when the red-haired girl, now dressed and wearing an old raincoat, had departed.

Kearny told her: who, and how, and — as far as DKA was concerned — why. When he had finished he stood in front of her, legs set, hands thrust deep into his topcoat pockets.

“Don’t try pushing them again, Chandra. You know damned well they’re the sort that pushes back. Just give up the car and—”

“I won’t!” she exclaimed. In a quieter voice, she went on, “It’s beautiful, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever... Why, to me, that car is...”

“Is it worth dying for?” he asked softly.