Final Notice

Twenty-five

“Giselle, do me a favor, will you?” grunted Benny Nicoletti. “Don’t do me no more favors.”

A week had passed; it was Wednesday and it was raining. It was raining as if it had decided not ever to stop raining. The roof was leaking in the little kitchen behind Giselle’s office, so her conversation with the big soft-voiced cop was punctuated with the splat splat splat of water into a saucepan.

“You mean the Fazzino case?”

“I mean there ain’t no Fazzino case, doll,” he said in his patient, high-pitched voice. “We’re still working on the Chandra hit, but between you an’ me, everybody s pended Fazzino.”

“But, Benny!” she wailed. “All the information we gave you—”

“Was real pretty. You must of sat up nights working that all out. It’s pretty but it ain’t police work.” He stood up abruptly; his wet raincoat had smeared the papers on the corner of her desk. “If it makes you feel any better, I like all them detective novels with masterminds an’ tricky plots an’ all that. But we can’t move on this, Giselle — and by us I mean both the SFPD and the San Mateo county sheriff’s office.”

“You could get search warrants—”

“We can’t show no probable cause, Giselle. Sure, that accident could of been a setup — but how do you prove it?”

“If someone saw Padilla with her at the sister’s house...”

“Nobody did. Me and one of the Half Moon Bay cops personally spent two days questioning everyone, I mean everyone, on Columbus Street. Nothing. Always at night, always foggy...”

“Okay, what about the old man in Edith Alley? If he was Fazzino—”

“Now, there’s another beauty. There’s thirty-nine family units, as our friends down to Social Services would say, in that alley, and we talked to everybody in ’em. Twice. That old man was all we come up with, and he was fifteen minutes too early to of done any business at Chandra’s. Nobody was home in either of those two end flats during anywhere near our time span—”

“So you mean that’s it? You just...” She threw up her hands. “At least you could give it to the D.A. and see if there’s anyone there with a little more imagination...”

“I dumped the whole thing in the lap of Paddy O’Dea, one of the assistant D.A.’s, on Monday. He studied it until today.”

“And he said?”

“The same thing my lieutenant said when I showed it to him.” He shook his head sadly. “You ain’t hearing that kind of language out of me, doll.”

And the rest of Wednesday was no better.

Kearny, doing three weeks of accumulated billing, which he hated, chewed her head off when she mentioned Chandra. Pete Gilmartin had to baby-sit, since it was his wife’s bowling night. He wouldn’t be able to see her until Friday evening after work, when he’d pick her up at DKA.

So riding home on the bus over to Oakland, with somebody’s umbrella dripping water down her neck, she had a horrible thought pop into her head. What the hell had ever happened to the wife’s suicidal tendencies? Which was such a nasty thing to wonder about, she felt worse than ever.

Thursday. Another winner. Still raining, and then old Ed Dorsey ambled in to waste her morning. Finally out of the hospital and home to listen to his wife’s instant replay, he was raring to go, old Ed reported. But one look at his eyes told her he’d never be out in the field again. Whatever edge he’d had was gone, poor old bastard. More depression. Please, Friday, come! I need Petie!

Meanwhile, Bart Heslip, whose caseload was building up again and who thus didn’t have time to think much of Chandra or Fazzino, knew something about Friday that Giselle didn’t. Garnered from Golden Gate Trust office gossip when he’d been picking up assignments. So he’d been thinking of Giselle and Gilmartin a lot, had finally decided that Friday was the night. Corinne disapproved violently; Kathy Onoda thought it was necessary surgery.

On Thursday night Larry Ballard compromised his principles by taking out Maria Navarro again. He left her place with such an aching groin that he swore off Catholics for all time.

He couldn’t sleep, so at four in the morning he drove up to Marin and made a very tricky and quite illegal repo from a private estate in Ross. The bastard took a shot at him — it sounded like a shot, anyway — so he got out in such a hurry that he left his company Plymouth parked half a mile down the road.

He came back to get it on Friday morning, and found all four tires ice-picked. A lot of hassling around in the rain, and then on the drive back to the city he realized the son of a bitch had sugared his gas tank, too. That was it for the Plymouth, not worth a motor overhaul with 103,000 very tough miles on her.

He drove a repo home that evening, while Kearny tried to figure out a way to not give him that nice juicy Minnesota Oldsmobile as permanent wheels. He had a hamburger steak over on Judah Street, was home by six-thirty brewing some of his superb coffee to kill the taste while making up reasons why it was necessary to call Bridget Shapiro.

A few minutes before seven the phone rang and it was Bridget’s voice. “Mis... Mister Ballard?”

Mister? After their hours together...

“Bridget! I was just going to call you. I—”

But she was speaking in a low, quick, almost tearful voice. “Oh, Larry, I need... Can you come to me, right away?”

“I’m on my way.”

“Oh, not to the house,” she cut in quickly. “I’m in San Francisco and I... I’m frightened...”

“Where, Bridget?”

“Where Green dead-ends up against Telegraph Hill, there’s a red-brick warehouse. Left-hand side. The door will be... Oh!” Her mouth was very close to the phone. “Come quickly, Larry! I’m so frightned!”

He didn’t own a gun. He settled for an eight-inch Stillson wrench. Out in wind-swept Lincoln Way, driving rain slashed at his face, instantly pasted his blond hair to his forehead, popped glistening from his old black leather jacket. Jesus, what a night!

When he’d run across the gleaming blacktop to the old Chevy, he remembered it had no radio. No way to call Bart in on this. Coax the old bastard into sputtering life, then through the sodden streets to the rain-swept Western Addition.

The financial district was developed: few cars moved, fewer pedestrians. It was a cloudburst, gutters overflowing, cars stalled with wet plugs or points. Left into Sansome. Only ten blocks now; he’d left the apartment only fourteen minutes before. Rain beat in the open window at him, cold against his jaw, the goddam heater didn’t work and he had to keep the window open so the windshield didn’t fog.

Sansome and Broadway. Fuming at the long light, two more blocks. It turned green. Start, slam on brakes, stand on the horn at the bastard running the red from Broadway to the skyway on-ramp.

He swung off Sansome into Green, stopped with his lights illuminating the red-brick face of the warehouse. Small, old, two-storied, probably pre-quake, no sign on it at all. Through the sheeting rain he could see a huge padlock on the double overhead door behind the concrete loading dock.

Peer harder through the rain. Yeah, an access door beside it, could be unlocked. A light fixture over it, old-fashioned metal bracket, but the bulb was either broken or burned out or missing.

So what the hell was he waiting for?

He muttered a curse at himself and reached under the dash for his flashlight. Son of a bitch. It was still in the Plymouth. For luck he checked the glove compartment in case someone had screwed up and left one in there. Nothing, of course.

He cursed again, nervously, then got out of the car and shut the door behind him without slamming it. Tense in the gut. Scared, that was the trouble. Water sliding down the gutter ran into his shoes. A car swooshed by on Sansome in a splatter of muddy water.

Otherwise, only the rain. Beyond the warehouse rose the tan shale face of Telegraph Hill.

With the wrench held firmly in his right hand, Ballard climbed the concrete stairs to the metal-edged loading platform. The wind-danced streetlight back on the corner skittered his shadow against the bricks. He turned the knob of the access door and silently pushed.

It swung open on spice-fragrant near-darkness. The streetlight laid its widening wedge of light across the floor and up the sides of stacked cartons with import labels on them. For the first time he wondered what Bridget was doing in a warehouse.

More crates behind the door stopped it from swinging any wider.

“Bridget,” he called softly. His voice seemed lost in space.

But she answered almost instantly. “Larry? Oh, thank God!”

He stepped quickly through the doorway. He could see, by the light filtering through the high windows of the immense two-story brick box, that narrow passageways led off between the stacked cardboard crates. To his right was a wide-open space in front of the loading doors.

“Over here,” she called. “Beyond the doors.”

He saw her silhouette against the stacked cartons. He started toward her.

That’s when a dark shape was launched from the catwalk above the double doors, directly onto Larry Ballard’s back.