Final Notice

Twenty-six

Pete Gilmartin reached across the narrow table to take the raven-haired girl’s hand. He conveyed it reverently to his lips. She giggled. She had rich pouty lips and eyes swimming in mascara. Bart Heslip, perched on a bar stool off to one side, noted without interest that her skirt didn’t quite cover her panties.

This instead of Giselle?

Gilmartin raised his lips from the pudgy fingers. He gazed into what were probably the eyes in the midst of all that make-up. “To think, Shirlee, you’ve been with the bank for weeks and I didn’t notice...”

She giggled. “Oh, Mister Gifrnartin—”

“Call me Petie,” he said. “We’ll have some more sparkling burgundy and then we can order. The escargots are especially fine here...”

His eyes shifted beyond her in search of the waiter, and his voice left the sentence hanging. Heslip, sloshing bourbon with a reckless toss of the head and timing his move, caught Gilmartin’s eye casually, did an exaggerated doubletake, then raised his drink in loose-lipped salute.

Then he turned away. Had that bastard.

Gilmartin, impeccable as always except for the artistic curl of dark hair across his forehead, appeared at Heslip’s elbow.

Heslip finally realized he was there. “Pete, ol’ pal! Don’t tell me you do your drinkin’ here!”

“Only... ah...”

Heslip dug a conspiratorial elbow into the banker’s side. “Only when you got a little stuff lined up, you sly dog? Them motels is soo-o-o handy...”

A tourist trap tucked between two hot-sheet joints in Lombard Street’s Motel Row. Old Petie-baby could pick ’em. Beds available at the drop of an innuendo, no chance of running into anyone he knew. Until tonight.

“I’d... ah... ask you to join us, but you know how it is...”

Heslip swung around so his back was to the bar and screwed up his face into a drunken wink. “Yeah, man!” he boomed in a head-turning basso. “Does I ever know how it is!” He roared with laugher and rammed the elbow into Petie’s side again. “Wouldn’t think of intrudin’ — though in a way you owes me one, you surely does.”

“I... don’t understand.” Petie-baby fidgeted. “Ah... I...”

Elbow. “You know, man! Giselle! Why, fo’ you come along, man, mess it up, I was gettin’ close to that stuff...”

“Giselle and... and you?”

Barton Heslip, big drunk buck nigger, too insensitive to catch the atavistic horror in the white man’s voice.

“Man, Ah figgered she wanted it, an’ you know how us coons is, cain’t never get ’nough...”

Gilmartin was staring at him in undisguised fascination. “You... you’re joking.”

Heslip gave his field-nigger-into-Marse Rhett’s-liquor-chest chuckle. “Never joke ’bout no nookie, man. I can smell a white chick wants black...” He broke off and his eyes suddenly popped wide open, so white showed all the way around the pupil. “Hain’t fair. There’s you, got a wife t’home an’ G’selle waitin’ down to DKA for you to show up ’n’ also that stuff over there at the table, an’ Ah hain’t got none! Big ol’ banker type, s’posed to be leadin’ one of them exemplary lives, no scandals or nothin’...”

Gilmartin’s face had suddenly gotten very still. “What do you mean by that?”

“Jes’ what Ah said. If them people down there t’ the bank was to hear ’bout how you carry on, they’d—”

“Now see here, Heslip, I...”

Heslip winked and almost fell off his stool. “Didn’t say Ah was gonna tell nobody, did Adi? Jes’ said if they was to hear...”

Gilmartin looked almost angrily over his shoulder at the black-haired girl, who was fidgeting nervously in her chair. He looked back at Heslip, drummed his fingers on the bar. Finally he shrugged to himself. “I told her what you were after,” he muttered obscurely. Then he turned on his white-toothed, charming grin. “You want a free field with Giselle, friend? You’ve got it.”

Heslip merely blinked drunkenly, slouched there on his stool as Gilmartin turned away toward the phone booth next to the coat-check counter. Heslip lifted a lip unconsciously. Give them what they wanted to believe, they’d believe it — every time. Rough on Giselle, maybe, but better now than after more weeks of ripping her guts out with inappropriate guilt. He wondered what sort of line Gilmartin was giving her before he cut her loose. There was a pretty good chance, he thought, that Giselle might not swallow it.

He set down his almost untouched drink, no trace of unsteadiness in his movements, and padded noiselessly past the gesticulating banker’s immaculately clad back and out into the rain.

Larry Ballard felt clutching fingers close around his throat as his attacker’s weight bore him to the floor. He tore an arm free in the dark, swung his wrench blindly with all his strength. It connected with a sickening crunch. Sudden terror in his soul, he crouched in the dark beside the motionless body. He’d just crushed a skull. He’d killed a man.

A sudden blaze of light filled the warehouse. With a sardonic laugh, Fazzino stepped off the bottom step of the steel ladder to the catwalk from which the attack had been launched.

“I think you subdued him,” he said.

Ballard forced himself to look at the silent figure on the floor. It was a clothes mannequin. The top of its plaster head was smashed in. The clutching fingers, breath in his ear, the weight dragging him to the floor...

Imagination.

The girl started laughing nastily.

He whirled toward her. “Wha... Where’s... where’s Bridget?”

Wendy Austin stood over him, hands on hips, legs set wide like a girl in a bondage magazine. All she needed was a mask and a whip. Short-skirted dress of black leather, black tight-laced boots which came to her knees. Above them those incredible thighs rose like taut white columns. Her face was lovely and composed.

“You’d like it, wouldn’t you?” she asked softly. “That’s why you went after my poor old Jew-nosed sister, isn’t it? Oh, she called me and told me you’d been around.” She leaned toward him. “You banged her, didn’t you?” When he didn’t say anything, her eyes got suddenly hot and furious. “Didn’t you?”

Ballard managed to get to his knees. Poor Bridget, still trying to protect little sister, when all little sister was interested in was putting her down. And where was Bridget? And...

“Answer me!” yelled the beautiful blonde. “Admit it! That holier-than-thou bitch let you do it, didn’t she?”

Without waiting for an answer, she drove the blunt toe of a leather boot into his crotch, hard. He was just coming erect; he gave a strangled yelp and grabbed himself and went down to his knees again. She aimed a second kick at his head, but Fazzino dragged her away, spitting and snarling like a cat, before she could connect.

“Let go of me! I’ll make a soprano out of that bastard, I—”

Fazzino’s hand cracked against the side of her face like a pistol going off. He said, in a low intense voice, “Goddammit, I went along with this charade against my better judgment...”

She was backing away from him, the red print of his hand very clear against her pale features. Her face was murderous. “Lay another hand on me, and...”

She stopped there, abruptly. Ballard couldn’t see Fazzino’s face, but something in his expression had made her mouth go slack with fear.

Fazzino said, pleasantly, “We have a plane to catch.”

Ballard, still huddled on the floor, listened to them leave and tried to get back his breath. Jesus, he hurt.

But he wasn’t ruptured, he decided as he got very carefully out of the Chevy in the rain. Just a sore set of knockers. He started to let himself into the DKA garage, then paused with the key in the lock.

I went along with this charade. Why? Rubbing Ballard’s nose in the fact that he’d tailed a goddam clothes mannequin all the way from Santa Barbara to San Francisco while Fazzino was off committing murder? But dammit, that fact made flaunting the dummy a damned dangerous game, didn’t it? Fazzino wasn’t the sort to let even a girl he was obviously hung up on, like Wendy, talk him into...

Ballard finished turning the key and went in.

Probably he’d had to go along with the little bitch. She knew it all, could finger him for two killings. Maybe had something laid away in a safe-deposit box somewhere. Or maybe he was so hung up on her that he couldn’t bring himself to think of a third killing to make himself safe.

Yet. But Wendy wouldn’t be the sort of girl to wear well...

In his cubicle, he picked up the phone and dialed Bridget’s number in El Granada. Maybe Fazzino’d had no choice, but why in hell had Bridget gone along with phoning him to set him up? Warn Wendy, okay, she’d as much as told him she was going to do that. But setting him up with that phone call...

“Hello?”

Ballard jerked and hung up the phone in a quick reflex action.

“If a man answers, hang up?”

It was Giselle. Her eyes were red but her pale face was composed. She was massaging her upper arms as if she were cold, leaning against the doorframe and staring at him. Ballard stared back. She’d been right, literally right. But that meant... Holy Christ! Of course. He thrust the phone toward her.

“Call for me, Giselle. If a man does answer, ask if he’s Hiram Shapiro. If he is, you hang up.”

She did. She asked. She hung up.

“Hiram Shapiro,” she said. “What does that mean?”

Ballard hesitated. It fit all right, but... it was so damned obvious. Why hadn’t anyone else — Kearny, for instance-come up with it?

So instead of answering, he said, “Why are you hanging around here at eight o’clock on a Friday night?”

Giselle let out a long sigh. Eventually she’d have to tell him. “Larry, you...” She stopped. She plunged ahead. “You know about... Pete Gilmartin and me?”

“Guessed.”

“I was supposed to meet him here tonight after work. He didn’t show up. Half an hour ago he called.” She stopped again.

Ballard looked at her. “And?”

“He told me his wife had just tried to commit suicide. He got there just in time...”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Only I could hear music in the background. Faintly.” Anger had entered her voice and her face had gotten a surprised expression as she realized how angry she was. “Maybe it’s all the years in a profession where you’re lied to all the time — or maybe it’s just that... I knew. Anyway, after he’d hung up I called his house. His wife answered. I could hear the kids laughing in the background.”

“Did you—”

“No.” An almost fiercely happy look came over her face. “But I still might, that son of a bitch. I might call back and—”

“That’d hurt her more than him,” Ballard said quickly, uneasily. It bothered him to see that sort of cold, calculated anger in Giselle. Against it he said, almost harshly, “Look, forget all that right now. I found out something tonight—”

“And me feeling guilty about that rotten bastard’s wife and kids all these weeks!” She snorted and tossed her heavy mane of pale hair. “Go ahead,” she snapped.

He told her about the scene in the warehouse, but first explained what he thought was the significance of Hiram Shapiro’s being home, obviously reconciled with Bridget. By the time he was halfway through she was listening, intently, and she burst in with the probable meaning of the phone call from Bridget before he even got to it. She even went beyond that, with the sudden ghost of a smile.

“I get the feeling that you and Mrs. Shapiro did a little more than just talk about her sister.”

Ballard started to say something, finally just nodded almost morosely, and then said, “To hell with it, let’s go get a drink.”

“A lot of drinks,” said Giselle. “And I won’t talk about Gilmartin and you won’t talk about Bridget.”

Ballard stood up. Very carefully. “I’ll talk about Catholics,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been out with one again.”