Final Notice

Seventeen

Ballard stifled a yawn as he drove slowly by 2416 Pacific Street. It was 8:35 P.M. The rain had lessened to a fine mist. The Jaguar was just passing beneath the opening garage door, its reflected headlights silhouetting their heads and gleaming off the dark side of the Gran Torino.

After turning in a driveway down the block, Ballard cut his lights and drifted to the curb across from the house. Fazzino and the girl were just emerging with their suitcases. The door rattled down automatically behind them. Lights sprang up behind the curtained windows less than a minute after they mounted the front steps.

Ballard fought a brief battle with duty, lost, and flipped on the radio to call the office. Probably nobody there this time of night, but at least he ought to make the gesture before going home and getting a shower and falling into bed and...

“This is KDM 366 Control.” Not Kearny. Giselle. “What’s your 10–20, Larry?”

“Pacific and Steiner. What are you doing there?”

That was when she told him about Chandra.

“You’re watching the house from two-thirty on,” said the Homicide inspector in obvious disbelief. “Nobody in and nobody out, and yet—”

“That’s the way it happened,” insisted Heslip doggedly.

The interrogation was going on in the kitchen. From down the hall came the white blip of a flash camera before the technicians zipped up what was left of Chandra in a canvas bag.

“Sure. Only at six-o-three you’re told she just phoned your office. Just. At six-o-six you enter the house and find the old lady spread around the front room like somebody dropped the jam jar.”

“What were you working on?” asked the other Homicide cop. He was also big, salt-and-pepper to his partner’s baldness, but despite that, nearly interchangeable with him. Big men who worked well together because they had worked together for a long time.

“I don’t know,” said Heslip.

“This is a homicide, Heslip. As in Murder One? That I-don’t-know shit don’t go with us.”

“It’s all I’ve got. I was told to come over here and watch the house. Nobody in or out unless I was there. Nobody went in or out.”

“She suicided?” demanded the first cop savagely.

A uniformed patrolman came down the hall. Everyone was waiting for some solid facts from the M.E. The kitchen had a white-tiled drainboard and a gas stove with a black stovepipe probably as old as the house.

“Keep talking,” yawned the second cop. “I love to hear an educated nigger talk.”

“Spell ‘educated’ for me.”

“I don’t think I can,” said the cop in a surprised voice.

Heslip yawned himself, not a phony one like the cop’s. Those all-night stakeouts took it out of you. “Why not call my boss and talk to him?”

“Yeah.” The first cop turned to the patrolman. “Yeah?”

“That door at the end of Edith Alley doesn’t lead to an apartment at all, Inspector. It leads to a garden, just on the other side of the fence around this yard.”

“Yeah!” Both Homicide men were on their feet, almost in unison. The one who’d tried to get Heslip sore to see if he’d spill anything said, “On the front with the back wide open. Beautiful!”

“One of my better days,” said Heslip modestly. “Mind if I come along for a look?”

“Come along. We can always shoot if you try to run.”

“We’d probably miss him,” said the first cop sadly.

It was nine in the morning and Kearny’s cubbyhole was crowded with too many people. Benny Nicoletti was raging, which had caught Giselle entirely by surprise. She’d taught Benny’s daughter to type skip letters and how to handle the complicated DKA phone system, and had always thought of him as a big old teddy bear.

Right now he was more like a grizzly.

“Dammit, Dan, why didn’t I know about those hundred-dollar bills until this morning?”

“Tell me what they’re evidence of, Benny, and I’ll apologize.”

“They indicate a payoff—”

“Evidence, Benny.”

“Ballard saw Fazzino in and around her car in South Park—”

“Evidence, Benny,” repeated Kearny implacably.

“All right, goddammit, no evidence,” he admitted darkly, his cold eyes incongruous in his round mild face. “But goddammit, I cooperate with you, knowing damn well that attack on old Ed Dorsey has something to do with mob business, and what happens?”

Kearny looked up from lighting a cigarette. He seemed unperturbed by Nicoletti’s outburst. “What happens, Benny?”

Nicoletti swept an arm to indicate Ballard and Heslip, leaning against the filing cabinets behind Kearny’s desk in identical poses, arms crossed on their chests.

“An old lady I don’t know nothing about gets beat to a goddam pudding in her house with one of these clowns camped on her doorstep. And the other one furnishes an airtight alibi for the guy most likely to have hit her.”

“Or have had her hit,” amended Kearny. “Any muscle in from outside?”

“Not a whisper,” said Nicoletti in a milder voice. “Could be some pro we don’t know nothing about, of course, but there’s just no word on the street, Dan. None at all.”

“What about Garofolo?” asked Heslip suddenly.

Nicoletti shook his head. “Long gone. Jumped bail, his bondsman’s eating the thirty-five thou. Who actually took the phone call from the old broad?”

“I did,” said Giselle. “Clocked it in at five fifty-nine.”

“And talked how long?”

“About two minutes. She said she wanted to turn in the car, she’d gotten the final notice. Would one of our men come and pick up the keys? She’d tell him where the car was parked. Goodbye.”

“Say, six-o-two or three, you get Heslip on the radio. He answers right away?”

“Instantly.”

He looked back at Heslip. “You found her at six-o-six?” He nodded to the big inspector. Nicoletti nodded to himself. “So whoever done it had enough time, all right. Just enough time.”

“To do... all that?” asked Giselle faintly.

Nicoletti nodded. He seemed unable to visualize the welter of sodden flesh and pulverized bone that Bart’s terse description had made vivid to her. Or maybe violent death no longer had any emotional impact on him.

“It don’t take long, lady. The lab is still sorting it out, but they figure something like a cane. That length and diameter, anyway, maybe weighted. Thirty, forty blows. Would take maybe a minute, two minutes even if he stopped to rest.”

“Not very professional,” said Kearny thoughtfully.

“Yeah. Lots of emotion, looks like. Last ones must of been like whackin’ a mud puddle with a stick.”

Giselle made a small noise in her throat and stood up quickly. “Anyone for coffee?”

“I gotta get back to Sixth and Bryant,” said Nicoletti. “Dan, I expect to get anything you come up with on this. Anything.”

Kearny asked almost irritably, “What the hell would that be, Benny? Fazzino was a hundred and fifty miles down the pike when she got it. If he hired it done, you’ll come up with it a lot quicker than we ever could.”

“Yeah. I expect to get anything you come up with. Anything.”

When he was gone, there was silence in the cubicle. Giselle caught herself wondering, and was immediately ashamed of herself for the thought, whether Petie could meet her that night. If only he would tell his wife about them, so...

“Bart, what did the Homicide cops turn up in Edith Alley last night?” Kearny asked, breaking her reverie.

“Not much. One old Italian chick saw a couple of spades going down the alley at maybe four o’clock, out at four-twenty. Some young chick coming back from the laundromat on the corner of Greenwich and Grant at five forty-five met an old man with a limp coming out of the alley. It was still misting then, but she sat under cover on her front steps playing with a cat named Red Rooster until six-thirteen. She has the times so exact because she was waiting for her clothes to come out of the dryer. Nobody in or out of the access door at the end of the alley during that half-hour.”

The door at the end of Edith, which Kearny had thought went into the building that blocked off the alley, actually led down to a small garden. The building really fronted on Greenwich Street. Directly behind the garden, and separated from it by the fence, was Chandra’s yard. Because of the slope of Telegraph Hill, both the garden and Chandra’s yard were in effect terraces, so the fence that was only neck-high at the back of the garden was twelve feet high on Chandra’s side.

Climb over the fence, drop the dozen feet to Chandra’s yard, cross to the back door completely hidden by foliage, go in, do it. Use one of the numerous gnarled old trees to climb back out again. Simple.

Except that it had happened between Chandra’s hanging up after her call to Giselle — 6:01 — and Heslip’s entering Chandra’s house — 6:06. And Heslip had been covering the Greenwich side and the girl in Edith Alley had said no one had gone in through the alley side between 5:45 and 6:13...

Kearny realized that Ballard had asked him a question. “Huh?”

“I was wondering what we do now.”

“We dig. Louisa Padilla. Wendy Austin. Who is she? Where did she come from? Who owns Funky Threads? What was Fazzino doing in L.A...”

And what was the significance of the fact that still no syndicate troops were showing in this thing? And behind everything, Wayne Hawkley, the smooth old attorney. How much did he know — or not know — about what was going on?

But first, Los Angles. With Larry Ballard.