Final Notice

Twenfy-one

Reports littered Kearny’s desk in numbers to challenge the butts in his ashtray. And right now Ballard was down the peninsula, Heslip was downtown and Giselle was upstairs on the phone, amassing more facts which would pile more reports on his desk.

He entered them with the same sense of adventure that a furniture salesman from Peoria would feel on entering his first topless and bottomless bar. After the third cigarette was ground out in his ear by a drunk and the third drink poured into his lap by a topless waitress getting her butt pinched, the furniture salesman might be disenchanted with the Broadway night-life scene. But Kearny never got his fill of reports.

Reports, even crummy reports by field agents who couldn’t have found out what happened to the toilet paper in the rest rooms, held an endless fascination for him. Hidden even in those would be strands which, wound together, would hang the poor dumb bastard you were after. And these were superb reports, written by three investigators who knew how to dig and how to tell you what they had found out.

Take Heslip at Wendy’s Funky Threads. He goes in trying to learn why Wendy went to work early on October 29, not knowing Ballard had figured out she wanted to draw the surveillance from the house. Because Wendy comes in lugging a display dummy and spots him there, they learn she’s scared about something.

Eventually they’d find out what.

Look at Giselle’s work on timetables to Santa Barbara. The only Greyhound from San Francisco getting to Santa Barbara before 6:00 P.M. was the 8:30 A.M. bus. Seven minutes too early. Fazzino had ditched the tail at 8:37. Trailways didn’t run to Santa Barbara, and Amtrack’s single daily train took eight hours and left at 8:15 A.M. If their assumption that he’d driven down in a rental car proved wrong, she’d already eliminated everything but the airlines.

Valley Air had two possibles: a 3:30 San Jose flight and a 3:00 Oakland flight. Air West had one daily, from San Francisco at 1:15 P.M. Another possible. The best of the lot was the United 9:25 flight from San Francisco.

The buzz of his intercom brought his thoughtful gray eyes down from the ceiling. He saw that his cigarette had burned itself down unsmoked, so he shook another from his pack as he picked up. Giselle.

“Dan, something just occurred to me. You need a valid California driver’s license to rent a U-drive car. Fazzino wouldn’t use his own. Maybe he could get a forged license pretty easily, but what if he would be in an accident? Wouldn’t a little checking show that it was a phony?”

“I’ll be damned. That’s right, Giselle.” He paused to fire up the cigarette. “And unless I’m wrong, that’s a felony in this state. I doubt if our boy with the genius IQ would chance that.”

“Take somebody with him as a driver?” she asked dubiously.

“Why would he go through all that when he could just catch a plane down? Giselle, get hot on the passenger lists for those flights that are possibles.”

“Will do.”

Were they wrong about the plastic-tabbed car keys? Well, time — and investigation — would tell.

He went back to the reports. Great job by Heslip on the Widow Padilla. He remembered his cigarette, got in a couple of puffs and started chuckling. Padilla damned for adultery with Wendy Austin? How many men hit for the Mafia? How many crushed with his phony trucking scheme? How many girls screwed casually down through the years, like washing his hands? How many more girls pandered to how many civil servants he’d wanted to bribe or discredit?

Good point, to check with the California Highway Patrol on the car wreck that had killed Padilla. The CHP knew its stuff; still, such accidents were among the easiest to fake.

Kearny leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He wondered what Ballard was finding down in El Granada.

Her sister.

The same pale sheen of hair, the same long smooth legs left bare by the scantiest of hotpants. Older, thicker, Bridget Shapiro, with a bold nose just very slightly hooked that gave her face a predatory cast Wendy’s escaped. The same piercing eyes — without the hardness. Seven or eight years older than Wendy.

“Can I help you?”

“I...”

A child, perhaps four, appeared beside her to lay a hand on her mother’s bare brown thigh. She was eating bread and jam. Child and mother each wore garish red polish on the nails of their bare toes.

“I’m looking for your sister, Wendy.”

“Mmm. Friend of hers?”

Ballard had walked up to the door of the weather-beaten frame bungalow knowing only that Bridget Shapiro had cosigned an auto note for Wendy back in 1968, probably when the girl had turned sixteen and could get a license. Girls like Wendy, girls in a hurry for everything they could get, would have stuck their co-signer for the payments. A flash of ID, I’m a detective...

But because this was the sister, Ballard tried a different tack. He was suddenly flustered, shuffling. “Yes, ah, do you... I... ah, you knew she used to make... ah...”

“Pomies. Sure.” The bold-eyed woman laughed abruptly, a good hearty, honest, three-drinks-in-the-middle-of-the-morning laugh. “C’mon in.”

He followed her into the living room. Tract house, Readers Digest condensed books and a set of encyclopedias filling the built-in bookshelf, furniture by the room from Levitz.

She pointed at the couch. “Drink?”

Would it help to open her up? The room was cool and dim, the child’s bread and jam had left a smear of strawberry on the tanned flesh of Mommy’s thigh. A lot of woman, Mommy.

“Sure. Vodka if you have it.”

“With?”

“Tonic?”

She nodded and disappeared through the far doorway, daughter in tow. Ballard listened to the rattle of ice cubes. Minutes passed. She came in alone with two drinks.

“Time for her nap.” She sat down beside him, leaned forward far enough to click glasses with him and show the ripe curves of unbrassiered breasts down the front of her sleeveless scoop-necked blouse. “Cheers.”

They drank. Her laugh this time had subtle undertones. She could handle the booze, probably a lot better than he could.

“You were in one of those pornies with Wendy, weren’t you?”

“I... ah... Well, two, actually, and I’ve been away and...” Something dark moved behind the blue eyes. Bridget Shapiro raised her drink to look into it intently, as if trying to see through the ice-laden whiskey to some reality hidden from him. “She was good, huh?”

“Good?”

“You need another.”

She drained hers, making Ballard follow suit. Ten o’clock in the goddamned morning, O’B should have had this assignment. She was back in the kitchen. More ice. Gurgle of things into glasses. So damned much like her sister, without the formica surface. Sharp erotic fantasies from following Wendy now being transferred to Bridget. Dangerous. Mrs. Bridget.

“A good screw,” she said from the doorway.

Her answer to her own question of a couple of minutes before spoke so directly to Ballard’s fantasies that he didn’t have to fake the blush this time.

She came into the room thoughtfully. “Even under the lights with a camera crew watching? And he comes back three years later? The girl must have something.”

She spoke more to herself than to him. She handed him his drink with sudden decision, and drained hers in one long draught. “Drink it,” she ordered harshly.

He drank. “Ah... your... What about... ah... Mr. Shapiro?”

“There isn’t any Mr. Shapiro any more. Not for me. He sends me money every month, but—” She broke off to demand furiously, “You think I’m going to bed with you, is that it?”

“No, I... I didn’t mean—”

She dropped her glass on the floor and leaned down, still standing, to push her face against his, hard. Her teeth grated against his, her tongue found his. Ballard got his drink put down on the end table and got to his feet without either of them breaking the contact. They went down the hall together toward the bedroom without another word, hand in hand, like Jack and Jill going up the hill.

What they found at the top wasn’t a pail of water.