Final Notice

Eighteen

The clerk of Department 2, Municipal Court in and for the County of Los Angles, looked up from his docket book and nodded. He was into his forties and smoked a pipe that smelled like cherry-tree cuttings. A comfortable-looking man, as Kearny had found many pipe-smokers to be.

“Here it is. Fazzino, Philip. Picked up just about midnight on October twenty-ninth...”

“Monday night?” asked Kearny.

It was 9:15 on Thursday morning. Last night had been Halloween, and he’d just remembered, the kids had been giving their big party. He’d been on the road with Ballard and had forgotten all about it.

“Monday. That’s right, sir. Penal Code 647S.”

“Drunk and Disorderly?” demanded Kearny sharply. It was a false note. He didn’t see Fazzino letting himself that far out of control.

“Um... no, as a matter of fact. Drunk in and around a Vehicle.”

“Drunk driving?” asked Ballard.

“He wasn’t driving, a cabby was. Fazzino got in a beef with him over the fare. There was a scuffle, officers were called in...” He stuck the pipe back between strong yellowish teeth and consulted the docket, then took it out to say, “Bail, three hundred fifty bucks, deposited by a young lady at eleven o’clock Tuesday morning.”

“Miss Wendy Austin?”

He nodded to Kearny. “Yes. Pleaded not guilty, hearing is set for later this month.”

Ballard was ready to go, figuring they’d got it all here, but Kearny paused over his thank-yous. “Isn’t there a bail schedule posted for this sort of misdemeanor?”

“Oh, sure. If he’d had the cash with him...”

“Thanks again.” They started out, then Kearny made a disgusted face and turned back once again. “Could we have that cabdriver’s name and address?” He lowered his voice to a confidential rumble. “Between you and me, our client doesn’t remember anything.”

The pipe-smoker laughed and gave them the information. Jacob Christie, 1463 Hosmer Lane. The kicker was in the city.

Santa Barbara, California. A hundred-mile taxi ride.

The booking sergeant was also in his forties but did not smoke a pipe. He had the face of a man with an ulcer who hates milk.

“No way, sonny,” he said to Ballard. Kearny was letting the young detective have this one, but it wasn’t working out. “You want to see the Property Receipt Log, you gimme something from a judge.”

Ballard could imagine Kearny leaning against the corridor wall outside the room, a cigarette smoldering between his fingers and a wise-ass expression on his face.

“Well, Sergeant, you see... Well, Mr. Fazzino felt he had more money than he got back.”

“He figures we stole it, huh?” The sergeant thrust an unpleasant face across the desk at Ballard. “A court order, kid. Period.”

“Shove it,” said Ballard. But he said it under his breath as he left the office.

Kearny unstuck himself from the wall to fall into step with him. Grinning, of course, the son of a bitch. “You really handled that one beautifully, Larry.”

“That sour bastard—”

“Mr. Fazzino felt he had more money than you gave back to him,” said Kearny in a fair imitation of Ballard’s voice. “Why didn’t you just call him a thief?”

“Why do we want to see the property list anyway?” demanded Ballard irritably.

“Because Fazzino spent a night in jail.” He put out a detaining hand to a pleasant-faced black cop going by with two styrofoam cups of coffee. “Could you direct us to the office of the property custodian?”

It was one floor down, behind a closed door which had a thick glass pane to waist level, with crisscrossed steel wires embedded in the glass.

Kearny paused outside it. “Let me handle this one, Larry.”

As Ballard watched, a look of boredom came into Kearny’s eyes. His shoulders drooped fractionally, left a little lower than the right as would befit a man who did a lot of thankless paperwork. He dangled an unlit cigarette from one corner of his mouth to soften his rock-hard jaw. His coat hung open. His hand smeared ashes down his lapel.

They pushed through the door. Inside was a narrow stuffy room bisected by a plain wooden counter. A man sat behind the counter in a swivel chair. Behind him the walls were lined with plain wooden bins crammed with possessions. The room smelled vaguely of dirty laundry. The door at the far end had what looked like a good lock on it.

Kearny flopped his license photostat open on the counter while barely stifling a yawn. The man behind the counter looked at it without curiosity; only his uniform suggested he was a cop.

“Yeah?”

“Sergeant Barton said you’d maybe still have the property itemization on Fazzino. Philip Fazzino. Monday, the twenty-ninth.”

“I ain’t supposed to show the itemizations to just anybody...”

“We got a client,” said Kearny. He leaned on the counter, and this time his yawn got the better of him. “Fazzino’s attorney. He’ll spend a buck.”

The custodian looked at Kearny quizzically. He was into his sixties, with baby-blue eyes and fine silky white hair. “You’re the tiredest man I ever seen,” he said. He leaned closer. “Barton really send you down here?”

Kearny grinned sleepily. “Told us to go to hell.”

The custodian grinned back and reached under the counter. “He’s a pistol, ain’t he? Got an ulcer. You say you cover expenses?”

Kearny said he did. The old cop shuffled paper, came up with an itemization form with Fazzino, Philip typed across the top. He also dropped a sheet of scratch paper and a pencil on the counter. Kearny copied things down. When he was finished, he gave back the pencil and a green and white crumpled oblong he had previously palmed from his money clip.

Outside, he handed his scrawled list to Ballard. “Anything grab you right off, Larry?”

“Leather wallet, personal papers, BankAmericard, Mastercharge, American Express, Diner’s Club... He isn’t going to run out of credit cards, is he?”

“Keep going.”

“Leather folder of keys, handkerchief, pocket comb, car keys with plastic tab, penknife, thirty-six cents in change...” His eyes widened abruptly. “Six hundred seventy-eight dollars in paper...”

“His bail was three hundred fifty bucks,” said Kearny.

“And he had nearly twice that in his pocket. That means—”

“Yeah. He wanted to spend the night in jail.”

Cabdriver Jacob Christie came through the garage from his Santa Barbara house, a big paunchy man with a huge square head and close-cropped thin gray hair and a very wide mouth that grinned easily. Two fingers were missing from his left hand.

He didn’t mind answering questions, hell no. Fazzino? Hell yes, he remembered him. Wanted to go to Los Angeles, Christie made him call the central dispatch office of Santa Barbara Taxi Company and work out a price beforehand.

“He sat in the back seat the whole way. We didn’t make much time — he kept wanting to stop for a drink, had me wait outside. Carpinteria. Ventura. Oxnard. Camarillo—”

“You remember the names of the bars in those towns?”

The big man grinned. “Most of ’em, I guess, if I sat down and thought. Hell, I was getting pretty thirsty myself by that time.”

The trouble had started after Thousand Oaks. Christie, checking the rear-view mirror, had seen Fazzino drinking straight out of a pint bottle.

“Told him nix in my cab, I’d lose my license the HP stop us. He didn’t like that, clammed up the rest of the way to L.A.”

“What kind of booze was it?”

“How the hell would I know?”

“Not the brand,” said Kearny.

“Oh. I’d guess vodka. Couldn’t smell it, anyways, that’s why I didn’t catch on any sooner. In L.A. we went off the Hollywood Freeway at Alvarado Street. He was getting nasty by then. Said he wanted out at a little bar on Beverly Boulevard. I says I want my money before you go in, that’s when he started to cut up rough.”

They’d gotten into a tugging and shoving match by the curb, and Fazzino had fallen down twice. Someone had called the police.

“He take a swing at the cops?”

“Naw, I was handling him pretty easy, even if he had twenty years on me.” The big man laughed in reminiscence. He had a huge laugh that seemed to well up out of his hard semisphere of gut. “Used to be Shore Patrol in the Navy, I ain’t forgot it all.”

The police had wanted him to hang around and give evidence in the morning, and he fully intended to when he hit the street. But then he put his hand in his windbreaker pocket.

“He’d went and stuck a hundred-dollar bill in my pocket. Musta done it when we was hassling, close as I can figure. Well, hell, that covered the charge and then plenty, so I just come back home.”

It was worth another ten, Kearny said, if the big cabby would write out a list of all the bars he could remember. It took him only ten minutes.

“One last question,” said Kearny. “Where did you pick him up?”

“Big motel down on State Street. The Pepper Tree.”

Interstate 280 runs south from San Francisco down the spine of hills which separates the peninsula from the sea, parallel to the Bayshore freeway but several miles west of it. The afternoon was so warm that Giselle was trailing her arm out the open window. The white concrete abutments and roadways had a stark beauty all their own.

“Do you realize, Bart, that I’ve never been on this freeway before?”

He cast a quick glance at her. “You ought to learn how to drive.”

They had just passed Crystal Springs Road off-ramp, between San Bruno and Millbrae. Giselle was leaned back against the seat, her face troubled. To their left, far away and far below them, San Francisco airport stretched slim fingers into the bay from which toy jetliners rose with marionette precision.

Heslip decided to ask it. “What are you going to do about him?”

Giselle gave him a quick, shocked flash of very clear blue eyes. All he gave her was a profile. “Do about whom?”

“Don’t shuck me, chile.”

“It... shows that much?”

“I can hear violins whenever he calls you on the phone.”

Giselle’s exquisitely honed face was almost haggard; she spoke with a sort of forceful weariness that brought his head around again. He hadn’t realized just how badly it had been chewing at her.

“Bart, it’s such a mess! I... when I’m away from him I hate myself for what I’m doing to his wife and kids. For what I’m doing to him. But then he touches me...” She shivered, and quickly delved in her purse for one of her not-now-so-rare cigarettes. In a few moments the acrid smolder of tobacco stung Heslip’s nostrils. “He’s asked me to marry him.”

Heslip was very carefully watching the road again. Hillside Avenue in Burlingame, almost there. He could tell her some things about Gilmartin he’d uncovered while investigating him, but hell, it never did any good. They didn’t believe you until it was too late, then were p.o.’ed at you for telling them.

“He told his wife yet?”

“He’s afraid she’ll suicide.”

Heslip just kept from grunting. Now there was a laugh. If the wife knew of Gilmartin’s endless shack-ups, she wasn’t letting it interfere with her own round of bridge, bowling, her kids, her home...

“Next off-ramp,” he said.

She stubbed out her just-lit cigarette, turned her mind with obvious relief to the folded-open road map on the seat between them. “Black Mountain Road? That one?”

“Then we double back to Chateau Drive.”

“Got it.”

It was richly wooded, lush country being eaten away by expensive subdivisions. Chateau dropped them down the face of the ridge, carefully landscaped estates to the right, the Hillsborough Reservoir to the left. Below them were the emerald-green fairways of the Burlingame Country Club.

“Floribunda,” he said.

“Okay. Take a left on...” Her eyes suddenly widened. “Were going to Padilla’s place?”

“His widow’s.” Heslip pulled abruptly off the street under a wide-spreading walnut tree. Fallen nuts crunched under the car’s tires. “Thing is, me and Nucci’s chauffeur, old black cat named Jeter, are buddies, and he told me...”

Sally Prichard, the Nuccis’ housekeeper, had been abruptly fired after hearing parts of an argument between Nucci and Mrs. Louisa Padilla and a slim handsome wavy-haired man Sally had never seen before.

“Fazzino?” asked Giselle tightly.

“The description fits.”

And the timing was interesting, too. It was just after Padilla’s death, when the transfer of his stock to Fazzino had been proposed. Louisa Padilla had screamed a number of things containing “damned” and “murder” and “evil” at the slim wavy-haired man.

“Of course. They’d need her permission for the transfer, wouldn’t they?” Giselle looked over at him keenly. “You going to tell me how you want to play this?”

“You figured I stopped here to put the make on you?”

Dan Kearny and Larry Ballard were at the Tree House, Ballard feeling dejected and Kearny shoveling in a wedge of cherry pie. Every now and then, working a case and forgetting to eat, he got a sudden craving for sweets.

“I would have been surprised if he had registered here, Larry.” Kearny made his points with the tines of his fork against the rim of the plate. “He doused Bart’s tail at eight thirty-seven on Monday morning, right?”

“Right.”

“Even if he drove like hell, he couldn’t have gotten here much before three on Monday afternoon. Three hours later he calls for a cab to take him to L.A. — so why would he have needed a room? He gets into a brawl with his cabby...”

It was Ballard’s turn to wave silverware. “Which doesn’t make sense, either.”

“No? The key is the fact that Christie thought he was drinking vodka because he couldn’t smell it. What else can’t you smell besides vodka?”

“I don’t...”

“Water. He didn’t even hit Christie — just scuffled with him before the cops showed up. Docile when the fuzz arrive, you follow me? They couldn’t even give him an alcohol-level test, because he wasn’t driving. The clincher is the hundred-dollar bill in Christie’s pocket. Christie was paid. The cab company was paid. Everything carefully set up to make sure it was just a minor misdemeanor rap that could at worst net him a fine.”

Ballard capitulated with a shrug. “Okay. So?”

So they drove south through the afternoon sunlight, hitting several bars in the stretch to Oxnard — where they quit. At four bars he was remembered, because he had been drinking plain ginger ale in each.

“His first real screw-up,” commented Kearny thoughtfully as they emerged from the Neon Jungle. The sun was close to the horizon. “He didn’t figure anybody to get this far, so he didn’t bother to fake it by buying drinks with booze in them.”

“Dammit,” said Ballard, “if it was all one big damned charade, why? He had to have a reason, he didn’t just...” He stopped with an odd look on his face.

Kearny nodded at him over the car roof. “You finally got it, huh? Fazzino took the cab to L.A. and faked getting drunk so he could get into a fight and get busted on a misdemeanor. He wanted to get busted because he wanted Wendy Austin to come down and bail him out.”