Final Notice

Twenty

The next morning Dan Kearny had an idea. A hell of a good one, as it turned out, but he didn’t get it until they stopped for coffee at the Tree House a few minutes before ten o’clock. Then he sat up straight in the booth, said, “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” and started asking Ballard questions.

By that time they had been to the train station and the bus station. They had been to Yellow Cab and Santa Barbara Taxi Company and Goleta Cab and Courtesy Cab and...

And nothing.

Nobody named Fazzino had called a cab any time on that Monday. Nobody of his description was remembered anywhere. That was when they stopped for midmorning coffee.

“Of course, we haven’t checked the cab companies in Goleta, and we haven’t checked out at the airport,” Kearny pointed out.

The man was indefatigable. Ballard was already getting glassy-eyed. “What do we do after we find out nobody in Goleta remembers him?”

“Then we start back up to the city,” said Kearny cheerfully. “We follow your route exactly, checking out every place they stopped, even for a second...” That was when he paused and sat up straighter and said, “I’ll be a son of a bitch.” Then he added, “Describe Fazzino getting into his car and driving it away.”

Ballard leaned back in his seat, puzzled. “Christ, Dan, he just... Everything he did? Exactly?”

“That’s right.”

“He’d walk up to the driver’s side, open the door—”

“You mean he never locked the car.”

“Oh. Okay, he’d take his keys out of his pocket, unlock—”

“Which keys?”

Ballard looked at him as if he were nuts, then, in painfully simple and precise English, said, “The keys for the Gran Torino, Dan. He would remove his leather key case from his pocket, and unzip the leather key case, and from the other keys in the leather key case he would separate the ignition key for the Gran Torino and he would—”

Kearny triumphantly slapped a sheet of paper open on the table, loudly enough to turn heads. It was Fazzino’s personal-property list. “Item seven.”

“That’s...” Ballard looked up quickly. “Car keys with plastic tab.”

“Yeah. Such as are given out by rental-car agencies. Now, they could have been spare keys for the Jaguar, but the odds are he’d carry those in his leather key folder also. He left the Gran Torino in San Francisco and drove down in a U-drive.”

“And we’ve got Giselle wasting time checking airlines.”

Kearny was already sliding out of the booth. “We still aren’t sure. Let’s check the U-drive agencies for cars turned in on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth.”

When they went out to the car, he wasted another five minutes making Ballard describe exactly what Fazzino and Wendy had done when they left the Tree House that Tuesday afternoon. Ballard figured it was going to be a hell of a long drive up to San Francisco at this rate.

Because she didn’t want her friends to know she worked a straight job, the girl got off the bus wearing tattered jeans and a see-through blouse — a little soiled around the cuffs and neck — that made it obvious she wore no bra. No shoes, either. A leather vest with three hand-rolled Zig-Zags tucked in the shallow pocket. They contained only tobacco, in case some zealous pig wanted a cheap drug bust off her, but they were groovy for blowing minds.

She was just in panties and putting on her workaday bra when Heslip came through the door of the boutique.

“We aren’t open until ten,” she snapped.

Being modest about your body was mere Establishment hypocrisy, but they weren’t supposed to stare, for Chrissake. And you couldn’t put a spade down for being uncool; spades had been oppressed, they didn’t know any better.

“Last Monday I saw Wendy in here at eight-thirty.”

“No way, man,” she said disdainfully.

She straightened and tugged and adjusted and was part of the straight world in a suede mini and a $50 Pucci original print and square-toed La Piuma shoes. She didn’t know it, but Heslip had seen that metamorphosis from grub to butterfly twice before and knew she lived in a commune out in the Haight.

“Wendy wouldn’t be caught dead in here before ten o’clock.”

As if to make a liar of her, the door from the storeroom was bumped open by Wendy Austin’s elegant rear. She came through it backward, lugging a male mannequin as big as she was and in a shocking state of undress. It was 9:57.

“See?” beamed Heslip. “She was here all the time.”

“That goes through to the garage,” said the girl. “She wouldn’t be caught dead...”

Wendy Austin turned, saw Heslip, and went wide-eyed with anger. So she knew him.

He gestured at the clothes dummy. “Somebody castrated him,” he said politely.

She hurled the unoffending figure behind the counter and advanced on them, her face stiff with rage — and with something else he recognized but was surprised to see in those glacial blue eyes. Terror. Blind terror.

“What’s this black bastard doing in my store?” she demanded of the open-mouthed salesgirl.

“Buying a nightie. I’m divine in red.”

“Get out, jig.”

“You used to like us when you were making movies, Wendy-baby.”

He shut the door gently on her shocked silence, and swung down the arcade to Union Street. Too bad she’d come in early enough to catch him trying to get a line on her 8:30-morning, but he’d learned something, seeing the fright in her eyes for just an instant before she’d snapped down the shutters.

Intriguing. Except he didn’t have the faintest idea which raw nerve his presence had touched.

As Heslip was being booted from Funky Threads, Giselle was talking on the phone with a Mr. Warren Dotson Oates, who also sold clothes. Rather, tailored and then sold clothes, for men only, at exorbitant prices. Exorbitant to Ms. Leonora Wynters, whom Giselle had chosen to be for this call.

“Eight hundred dollars for a suit?” She didn’t have to feign the shock in her voice.

“Not for a suit,” said Oates in a pained voice. “For two suits.”

Eleven days before, Fazzino had spent nearly an hour in the Royal Clothiers on Sutter just off Montgomery. The previous Friday he had returned to pick up a bulky flat box. On Monday he had deliberately lost Heslip and had disappeared. Giselle was routinely running it down, just as Heslip was routinely checking up on Wendy’s early morning at the boutique.

“That’s still four hundred dollars each.”

“Plus accessories. And Royal suits are not bench-made, Miss Wynters. No cut, make and trim at Royal Clothi—”

“Mizz,” said Giselle.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Mizz Wynters. Not miss. Mizz. Em-ess, Mizz. I am a liberated modern woman, Mr. Oates.”

“I see. Anyway, Mr. Fazzino has never questioned our—”

“I am not Mr. Fazzino. I am—”

“Yes, quite. A liberated modem woman—”

“I was about to say an auditor. Hired by the corporation to make sure all expenditures are legitimate.”

“Legitimate?” He had the voice of a man who wore a Guards mustache. “Miss Wynters, to suggest—”

“Mizz. What are the accessories?”

He heaved a long sigh into the phone. “Mizz Wynters. Matching shirts, matching ties, specially selected by Mr. Fazzino as to pattern, fabric and color. Identical, of course—”

“Identical?”

“The suits themselves were identical.”

Nothing, Giselle thought as she hung up sixty seconds later. So he usually bought one at a time like anyone else, but Oates had pointed out it had been an especially fine bolt of cloth, and...

No call from Larry and Dan yet, either. No word from Bart.

But... Ah! In the morning mail a full retail credit report on Wendy Austin, going back to her first revolving charge account at Sears in 1968. Two months later she had bought a junker, and to finance it, had gotten as co-signer a Mrs. Bridget Shapiro of Columbus Street in El Granada. By the map, the proverbial wide place in the road, a couple-three miles north along the Coast Highway from Half Moon Bay.

With quickening interest she saw that El Granada was also only about five miles from Devil’s Slide, where Padilla had gone off the road to his death on the foggy night of Sunday, July 22. If he had been meeting Wendy Austin behind Fazzino’s back, they’d have needed a place to rendezvous...

Later for that. Right now they had what she’d hoped for, somebody from Wendy’s past. Nobody of the seventy-odd Austins in the San Francisco phone book had ever heard of Wendy. But Bridget Shapiro on Columbus Street in El Granada had. And yes, there was a listing for a Hiram Shapiro at that address in the San Mateo County book.

Let Larry handle the interview. He was good with women if he didn’t have to push them around.

The Santa Barbara airport was actually several miles north of the town, in the Beach Park area of Goleta off Sandspit Road. Still squinting from the brightness outside, they walked into the cool dim interior to find the ground-floor strictly functional, with the cocktail lounge and coffee shop tucked away upstairs.

“We do it here or we don’t do it,” said Ballard.

They’d been all over Santa Barbara drawing blanks. Airways. Avis. Flightline. National. Nothing anywhere.

Out here were Budget, Hertz and Avis shoulder-to-shoulder in a tiny incestuous office just to the left of the terminal door. The two girls and the man who handled the three desks were drinking coffee in fine camaraderie when Kearny stepped up to the counter.

“On last Monday,” he began, “did anyone...”

Fifteen minutes later they were on the road north again. Nobody had returned a car at any time on Monday. A Mallory Rickerts had rented a station wagon on that day, at 11:23 A.M., and had returned it at about two-thirty the next day. Fazzino had been asleep in the Jaguar somewhere between Goleta and Pismo Beach at the time, but they’d noted Mallory Rickerts’ name anyway.

He was from the Bay Area — San Carlos — and he had paid cash for the car rental. In the age of BankAmericard and Mastercharge that was unusual, though certainly not unique, but there had been one other remarkable fact. The cash he had used for a deposit, and later as payment for the rental, had been a crisp new one-hundred-dollar bill.