Final Notice

Nineteen

The living room was forty feet long and thirty feet wide and sunken three steps below the rest of the house. The carpet was a Bokhara, although neither Heslip nor Giselle knew that. Windows twelve feet high stretched from floor to ceiling, really a row of tall narrow glass doors with wrought-iron handles. Although the sun was low enough to be into the trees, swimming-pool reflections still danced against the glass.

They hadn’t found out shit. Heslip was letting it build. The old woman was overweight and fiftyish and dressed in stiff black cloth fifty years out of date.

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said thickly.

“You said Flip Fazzino was an evil man,” persisted Heslip. He was sunk in a soft chair but his hands were empty. They had been offered neither coffee nor a drink. Let it build.

“That was soon after my husband died...” She made an excited gesture. She had a heavy Italian face and accent.

“You used the words ‘damned’ and ‘murder’ in talking about him.”

“Bart,” said Giselle, “take it easy. Mrs. Padilla is...”

It burst out. Heslip was on his feet. His voice was thick with scorn. “Why are we wasting time with this dried-up old bitch? She knows goddam well her goddam husband was a cheap goddam hood who—”

“Bart!” cried Giselle, her face slack with shock.

The old woman was also on her feet, eyes flashing. “Get out of my house.” When neither of them moved, she cried, “Get out of my house!”

“I hate the goddam guineas,” snarled Heslip. “They come into the black community, screw our women, peddle dope... anything for the buck. Look at her!” He jabbed a furious finger at the old woman. “She’s got it all now. The house, the business...”

“That’s enough!” Giselle’s eyes were flashing.

A very good-looking youngster, about twenty, with very black hair curling down to his shoulders in the current style, appeared at the head of the three marble stairs. He wore skimpy swimming trunks and was dripping water on the floor. His eyes were black, liquid, filled with intense emotion. Heslip gave a coarse laugh.

“So that’s the way it is,” he said to the old woman.

Her eyes went from him to the boy and back again. She suddenly paled as she caught his implication. “Madre di Dio,” she breathed, “you cannot believe...”

Giselle cried, “The boy’s her nephew!” Her face was very white.

Heslip had his back to the side windows. The sun had faded from the pool outside, leaving its surface like lead. His face was nearly in silhouette, congested with blood, the cords of his throat swelling dangerously. “I see. Okay for spooks to screw in the family, but when whitey—”

“Stop it, right now, you ni— Just... Leave her alone!”

“Since when do you give me orders, honky?”

“Since right now.” Giselle’s lips were bloodless, her eyes burned like flames. “Get out of here you... you...”

The old woman was crying. The boy had backed away from the naked emotion in the room.

The veins stood out on Heslip’s temples. “Go ahead, you were going to say it!” he panted. All his attention was on Giselle now. “It almost came out, didn’t it?”

“All right, you... nigger! There! Nigger nigger nig—”

Heslip seized a handful of her heavy blond hair. He jerked her head back, and with his lips drawn back to show pink gums, snarled down into her face. He hurled her sideways against the arm of the chair. At the head of the stairs he checked as if about to strike the slender Italian boy. “You want some of that, wop?”

The boy backed away from the madness in his eyes. Heslip stormed out the heavy oak front door. When he was gone, there was only the sound of the old woman’s sobs.

Giselle got wearily to her feet, crossed the room to put a comforting arm around the aged meaty shoulders. She stared dully in the direction the black man had gone. “And they wonder why,” she said in a tired voice.

The sun was dying redly behind the clouds ruffled across the edge of the Pacific. Ballard rolled up his window. He scowled into the gathering darkness ahead of their head-lights. “So all the way down here she knew I was behind her.”

“You couldn’t have lost her if you’d wanted.”

Ballard drove in silence for a while. “Alibi?” he ventured.

“Has to be. Because he knew Chandra was going to get it, and knew he’d be a prime suspect, you follow me?”

“It seems awfully elaborate...”

“He’s a chess player, they’re supposed to have intricate minds, aren’t they? Besides, where could he get a more convincing witness than a private eye assigned to him as a tail?”

“I hate the idea of being used by that bastard to...” Ballard shrugged helplessly. “What do we do now?”

“Find out where he left his car. Since he rode back up with Wendy Austin in the Jag, the Ford ought to still—”

“Hell, Dan, the Gran Torino? It’s in the garage up at Pacific Street. I saw it there on Tuesday night when—”

“Goddamn!” exclaimed Kearny. He started to throw his cigarette out the side-vent window, remembered they were in fire country and killed it in the ashtray with a vicious stab. “Dammit, Larry, your report didn’t say anything about it. You sure?”

Ballard flushed under the implied rebuke. The hell of it was, he had forgotten to put it in the report. “I’m sure,” he said.

“Okay.” Kearny didn’t seem inclined to push it any further. “Then it went into that garage a few minutes after he doused Bart’s tail.”

“That explains why Wendy left the house for the boutique so early that morning,” exclaimed Ballard. “To draw the surveillance off so we wouldn’t see him putting it in there.”

They were approaching the southern outskirts of Santa Barbara again. The radio was faintly beating out country rock. Ballard had to grin. Kearny was happy: he had more digging to do. Find out how Fazzino had gotten to Santa Barbara, if he hadn’t driven. Check terminals at this end, have Giselle start checking carriers at the other end.

Not that he was wrong, of course. Ballard knew that facts were what broke cases, every time. He pulled off at the modest motel Kearny indicated, where the twin-bed tariff was ten bucks a night less than at the Pepper Tree. He went to phone DKA from the room as Kearny signed them in.

When Kearny came into the unit a few minutes later, Ballard was just hanging up the phone, an odd look on his face. “Giselle and Bart are down the peninsula somewhere. Kathy took the instructions.”

“So what’s bugging you?”

“Kathy said that Pete Gilmartin was waiting there for Giselle.” He met Kearny’s cool gray eyes. “What’s he sucking around for?”

“Giselle’s an attractive woman,” rumbled Kearny. He was busy removing toilet articles from his attaché case, whistling as he scattered soap and razor and toothpaste across the narrow glass shelf above the sink. Maybe Larry’d come up with a way to shake Giselle loose before DKA got hurt through her confusion over divided loyalties. Or before, he surprised himself by thinking, she herself got badly hurt emotionally.

“Academy Award level,” said Heslip modestly.

“You’re lucky tomorrow night’s my regular hair appointment, or it’d cost you five bucks for a set.” Giselle was fussing with her rumpled blond hair in a rear-view mirror tipped to an outrageous angle. They were cruising north through near-darkness and scattered post-rush traffic. She gave the hair a final poke and looked over at Heslip. “That old woman was really broken up, Bart.”

“How many junkies got hooked so she could do her crying in an eighteen-room house?”

Watching Heslip straighten the mirror, Giselle realized that he was good, better by far than she had believed. Larry never could have carried off that scene with Mrs. Padilla.

She said, “How did you know that us calling each other names was going to open her up?”

He grinned over at her. They both felt very good, as you always did when you tried something tricky and it worked. “Classical police technique. One interrogator gets so nasty that the other one seems like a friend by comparison.”

“I mean the black-white thing.”

“When Fazzino wanted to make a payoff to Chandra by leaving money on the seat of her big ol’ Cadillac, where’d he choose to do it?”

Giselle started to laugh. “South Park.”

“You got it, baby. He figured that nobody’d notice a red Caddy convertible in a black slum area, ’cause everyone knows all them spade cats layin’ around on welfare drive only Cadillacs. I figured maybe she’d think the same way — in stereotypes.”

“I don’t blame her,” said Giselle. “Next time I baby-sit my cousin’s kids, I’m bringing you over to scare them into bed.” She shrugged. “The old lady opened up, Bart; the trouble is that her reason for kicking up about Fazzino was purely personal. You’re going to laugh when I tell you...”

Fazzino had dropped around to the house one Sunday afternoon the previous spring with Wendy Austin in tow. Padilla hadn’t been able to keep his eyes off the girl. Reading between the lines, Padilla probably had a weakness for that sort of blonde. Wendy was never back to their house, but a series of telephone calls came. Four of them, Louisa Padilla remembered. She was sure they were from Wendy, and Padilla always told her to get off the line.

“Wendy having an affair with Padilla?” asked Heslip, frowning against the traffic of San Francisco’s Ingleside District. They’d just crossed the county line. “Why would she? Fazzino’s her style.”

“Because Fazzino told her to?”

“And pretended it was behind Fazzino’s back? Hey, I like that.”

Padilla, each time, would tell his wife he had to go out on business. He would be gone all night. He’d gone through the same rigamarole on the night he was killed. It was a foggy night, his car had missed a turn and gone off the highway and into the Pacific.

Heslip maneuvered the car up and over the long curving ramp which would transfer them to the San Francisco skyway. He drummed the wheel with thoughtful fingers. “She tell any of this to the police?”

“Why would she? Her husband’s death was an accident. No, what she was blaming Fazzino for was not keeping control of his woman the way a good Italian man should. She thinks her husband died after just leaving Wendy, and that therefore he was in a state of mortal sin and was damned.”

Eternal hellfire for shacking up with a chick? Heslip thought about it. After all the years of strong-arm, dope, prostitution? Hell, you wanted to damn him for something, you’d have to get in line.

“You’re right, Giselle,” he said. “I’m going to laugh.”

Back at DKA they found Gilmartin sitting on the edge of Jane Goldson’s desk, swinging an impeccably polished shoe. He was alone in the office. They came in together, laughing.

“Gotcha!” exclaimed Pete. He came erect and grinned whitely and took both her hands in his. He nodded distantly to Heslip. “Out with the sinister black undercover investigator until all hours.”

“H... hi, Petie,” Giselle got out inanely. She felt blood rush to her face almost guiltily. She hadn’t thought of Pete for the past two hours. “Wh... where’s Kathy?”

“A fine greeting. She’s in the back office. Some sort of call on some unlisted phone a couple of minutes ago...”

Heslip scooped up memos and copies of reports from his In box, said easily, “How’s it going, Pete?” and to Giselle, “See you in the morning, doll,” and was gone.

Gilmartin stared after him with thoughtful eyes. “I... didn’t know you worked in the field with... uh... Heslip.”

“He thought this one would need a woman’s touch,” she said lightly. She broke loose, swirled toward the middle office. “Let me check my desk and we’ll be off.”

Gilmartin sauntered over to stand in the doorway and watch her read Kathy’s note on Ballard’s call. His lean handsome face was thoughtful. “Uh... I guess you’ve known Heslip for a long time, huh?”

“Ah... six years,” she said absently. She nodded and laid down the note. “Tomorrow for that.”

They went out through the front office and down the hall to the stairs. Giselle didn’t stop to say goodnight to Kathy; on tricky skip-tracing calls, the slightest false note — like a door opening in the background — could ruin the illusion you were trying to create.

“You know, Giselle,” said Gilmartin as they started down the stairs. “Uh... some colored guys... uh...” He labored to find words. “They... uh... some of them think that because a white girl is, um, civil with them, that she wants... she’ll let them...”

Giselle stopped abruptly on the stairs. “Bart?” She started to laugh. “Petie, don’t be silly! Bart is a friend!”

“A black friend,” amended Gilmartin. “There’s a difference.”

When they had gone, the door of the rear office opened and Bart Heslip stuck his head out and stared thoughtfully after them.