Final Notice

Twenty-seven

Dan Kearny got the word about phone calls on Saturday afternoon from a rather blear-eyed Giselle, and as a result — surprise, surprise — spent a bad weekend. He should have seen it himself, of course, it was the only logical conclusion, but he hadn’t. And now, having had it pointed out to him, he suddenly had the answer to the second thing that had been puzzling him all along.

But Christ, that meant that he could...

It was the knowledge of what he could do that kept him awake on Saturday night. He finally got up and paced the bedroom floor, smoking innumerable cigarettes, until his slender black-haired wife, Jeanie, woke up and asked him what was the matter.

“Nothing. Go to sleep,” he said absently.

“Is there anything...”

He went over and sat on the edge of the bed to pat her hand, still absently. “No. Nothing. Just a business problem. Go to sleep.”

Which took care of Saturday and half of Sunday, until the kids banging around woke him up to a headache. By Sunday night he still hadn’t made his decision, but he had hold of it: he had decided to decide, if that makes sense.

So he slept well Sunday night, was clear-eyed and clear-minded and ready to convince Giselle that the case was closed when he got to the office on Monday morning. It was very necessary to do that.

“I was going to call Benny with it,” she said, “then I thought you’d probably want to do it yourself.”

“Nobody calls Benny with it.”

“But, Dan—”

“It’s just another thing we can’t prove,” he said heavily. “And even if we could, all they have to do is deny it.”

“But—”

“This whole thing is closed, Giselle. Absolutely, totally and finally. Got that? Tell the others, DKA is off the case. Now, I’ve got billing to get out and I’m sure you’ve got some work to do. If you don’t, I’ll find you some.”

But after watching her leave with an angry swing of the hips, Kearny didn’t turn to his billing. Instead he lit a cigarette and thought to himself that she’d been like the old, pre-Gilmartin Giselle just then. Well, she’d probably gotten sick of him at last.

“Quit screwing around, Kearny,” he said aloud in the silent little cubbyhole. He sighed and stabbed out the cigarette.

He’d read Ballard’s report about Friday night, so he called Fazzino’s office to find out if he had gotten back from his plane flight. He had, as Kearny had expected. Next, a long-distance call to a toll-free number, where he talked persuasively with a supervisor for ten minutes to get the confirmation he wanted.

Which meant he’d made up his mind. The confirmation wasn’t any good for court, as he’d told Giselle, but now he was going to have to act. He’d dug old Chandra too much to let it go. The other one, good riddance, but they shouldn’t have killed Chandra. On a practical level, Fazzino shouldn’t have indulged Wendy in her little joke on Ballard Friday night. That kick in the crotch was going to cost them.

Fazzino should have remembered that when you play chess with human pieces, they are liable to make some moves of their own.

Next he called a Concord number and asked for another number in the exclusive Piedmont area of the Oakland hills. A number that would be good that night, if necessary.

Finally he just sat in the little cubbyhole, quietly smoking and thinking a number of private thoughts. Taking a step he’d never taken before, on several different levels. But necessary. At five o’clock he opened the middle drawer of his locked filing cabinet, stood staring into it for quite a while before reaching in. Not since he’d been a twenty-two-year-old field agent in Bakersfield.

He waited for dark, reflecting that nobody else at DKA could ever know about it. No one. His decision, solely. His responsibility.

It was dark and it was raining. The falling water took on substance as it passed through the streetlights, so his eyes could follow individual drops until they plunged into darkness. The gutters were full again.

Kearny tossed away his cigarette, stuffed his hands into his raincoat pockets, and walked stolidly out into it. His wagon was parked just about where it had been the evening Ed Dorsey had been attacked. Now the rain had swept the streets clean of people.

Left up Franklin, over the hill and down rich Pacific Heights, the big car drifting easily with the sparse wet-Monday-evening traffic. He was in no hurry. He had as long as it would take. Beyond 2416 Pacific he parked and got out again. Here the arched trees overhead gave the rain a muted sound, as if it were awed to be falling on wealth. He had seen the house often in reports, had a total familiarity with it.

“May I come in?” he asked Wendy Austin politely when she opened the massive oak door. “My name is Dan Kearny.”

“Go screw yourself.”

He pushed past her into the hallway to stand with his hands in his coat pockets, puddling water on the hardwood parquetry. Her lovely face was as hard as the floor, sullen in repose, as if genuine emotion were a language foreign to it.

“Flip will want to see me,” he said.

“A lot of guys lost an ear or the end of a nose for using that name in the old days, Kearny.”

Fazzino was in the archway, dressed in slacks and a pastel shirt with a cashmere cardigan over it that would have cost more than Kearny’s suit.

“It isn’t the old days,” he said flatly. “I’ve got some things to say.”

Fazzino made a studiedly weary bow to usher him in.

“Thanks.” He added to the girl, who had made no move to take his coat, “No, no, that’s all right, I’ll keep it. I’m not staying.”

“You’re goddam right you’re not staying,” she snapped.

The living room was gorgeous, running the width of the house from above the garage to the far end. Forty feet long, Kearny guessed, at least half that wide. The paintings looked like originals; the furniture was elegant, old-fashioned, period. A few feet inside the door he leaned his backside against the edge of the rather spindly-legged white antiqued table which held the brass French-style telephone.

Fazzino sat down in one of the half-dozen easy chairs scattered around the huge room. The girl sat on the arm. She had truly beautiful legs. Fazzino idly put an arm around her waist.

Kearny looked at them. “I’m blowing the whistle on both of you.”

“This is your big speech?”

“Two things bothered me from the beginning. First was Chandra’s phone call to Giselle about five minutes before Heslip found her body. It kept you in the clear even after we realized you weren’t in the Jag that Ballard was tailing, because it came fifteen minutes after you were seen leaving the alley in your little-old-man disguise.”

Fazzino said lightly, “In case you’re wearing some sort of recorder, Kearny, I want to state categorically that I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A yawn lurked just behind his words.

“But then Ballard got the phone call Friday night from her sister.” Kearny looked at the girl for the first time. Totally cool, so he’d been right about their weekend plane flight. “That, and using the mannequin to rub our noses in the fact we’d come up empty, were both bad mistakes.” Fazzino showed interest. A spark glowed behind the usually flat black eyes. The egoist, the chess player. Not bothered, interested — as he might be by a chess gambit he’d never seen before.

“Why was the mannequin a mistake?”

“Because it shows you’ve seen our file, and the only place you could have done that was in the D.A.’s office. Since you let Wendy have her fun with Ballard on Friday night, that must have been the day you learned there isn’t any evidence for the D.A. to take into court.”

Fazzino chuckled. “There isn’t, is there? I was in a car down south of Soledad when Chandra died. Under oath, your man Ballard would have to testify to that. As for this nonsense about phone calls—”

“Flip! Flip!” said Kearny chidingly. “Didn’t you know they record the long-distance numbers called from pay phones?”

He’d finally gotten to the girl. “Phil,” she said angrily, “make him leave.”

“I like him. He’s cute.”

And getting cuter, Kearny thought. She said what she thought he was. He said, “No good as evidence, of course, Flip, but a call was placed to DKA at five fifty-nine on the evening of Tuesday, October thirtieth, from a phone booth near a gas station just off the freeway south of Soledad. We also know that it was little Wendy here doing her famous Chandra impression for Giselle. Just as last Friday she did her famous Bridget impression for Ballard.”

“As you say,” Fazzino drawled, “no good as evidence.”

“My people caught on because Bridget reconciled with her husband on Friday. He was home with her that night. She wouldn’t have been calling Ballard, not even to set him up for a kick in the balls.”

“Phil, make him get to hell out,” she said. “He gives me the creeps.”

“We should have had it all the time,” said Kearny inexorably. “When we first got a line on little Wendy from a porny-film producer, we found out she was a fantastic mimic. You needed that phone call to Giselle. You wanted Chandra’s body found at an exact time, a time one of our men would have to swear he was tailing you a hundred fifty miles away. It was your bad luck that a witness in the alley could swear nobody could have got in to kill Chandra between her phone call and Heslip finding her. That made Chandra’s phone call impossible, since she obviously was killed.”

Fazzino sounded genuinely amused. “How could I be so sure that Chandra would accommodatingly wait at home, alone, to be hit? I mean, if I planned all this I would have had to be sure—”

“The final notice from the bank that you arranged. It gave her until Wednesday morning to get her account current. She’d phone you, of course, demand another five hundred bucks or so — and you’d tell her to be home alone all afternoon Tuesday and you’d come in the back way and give it to her.” He laughed without mirth. “You did.”

The girl was finally on her feet, eyes blazing. “Throw him out!” she shrieked at Fazzino.

Kearny just looked at her. “Don’t you realize, honey, that sometime he’ll have to take you out, too? You’re the weak link. You can testify.”

Fazzino chuckled and drew the raging girl back down to the arm of his chair. He turned her hand so the glint of gold caught Kearny’s eye. “My divorce became final Friday,” he said pleasantly. “We flew to Vegas. A simple but moving ceremony. So if there’s nothing else...”

“There is — just one thing,” said Kearny. “The second fact that has bugged me right from the start.” He paused. “No soldiers.”

The girl laughed as if he had said something funny, a jeering laugh because she didn’t understand. Fazzino didn’t laugh. He understood. His eyes tightened fractionally. Kearny casually took his butt off the edge of the table.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Fazzino’s voice had tightened too.

“No soldiers?” Kearny showed his teeth in a grin that had nothing to do with amusement. “No regime, no crew — no heavies, you follow me? Nobody following us around when they should have been crawling all over us.”

Fazzino was very good. He almost carried off his blasé pose. Kearny took a casual step to one side so he was beside and to the right of the ornate little table which held the phone. Only a slight hoarseness in Fazzino’s voice betrayed him. “I understand it was a capo and a soldier who... mistakenly roughed up an old man outside your office...”

“Thinking he was a debt-welsher. Yeah. That’s what Hawkley told me: a routine enforcement job where they got the wrong guy.” That had scored. “You didn’t know Hawkley and I knew each other? Maybe you should have had some soldiers tailing me.”

Fazzino didn’t answer. He licked his lips nervously.

“But you couldn’t risk that, could you, Flip? Not after one of the soldiers you sent after me got busted. I kept thinking, Mafia hit on Padilla, organization hit, even after Hawkley said the Dorsey beating was a simple case of mistaken identity. I knew it wasn’t. I’d been threatened. Yet Hawkley believed what he told me. So what did that make Padilla? A private kill, unauthorized, because you wanted to be West Coast top dog. You couldn’t risk using any organization people on Chandra any more than you had on Padilla, because they thought Padilla really was an accident. So now—”

“Now what?” demanded Fazzino instantly, although the knowledge already was in his face.

“Now I tell them that it wasn’t.”

“Phil, what’s he talking about?”

“People who don’t need the kind of proof a jury does, honey,” said Kearny very quietly.

“Look, Kearny, anything you want I can... can give you...”

“An old lady’s life back?” He shook his head. “Final notice, huh, Flip? All the same a banker or a bookkeeper...”

His left hand picked up the receiver, laid it beside the phone, and began dialing the Piedmont number he had gotten that afternoon. Fazzino started up from the easy chair in a single clean swift movement.

“I think not,” said Kearny.

Fazzino stopped moving. The detective’s right hand had come out of his raincoat pocket with the S&W .41 Magnum four-inch he had a permit for but hadn’t carried in years. The hammer was back. His face said he’d use the gun if Fazzino made him.

“Look, Kearny, we can work something out.” Fazzino’s eyes were sick. “Hang up the phone! We don’t need this, you and me! We can—”

Kearny said into the phone, “Counselor Hawkley, please.” He looked at Fazzino and the girl. His tongue felt clumsy around the words. “Hawkley? Dan Kearny. I’ve run across some information that might interest your clients back East...”

They sat together in the big useless expensive living room — with stunned faces, like people at an accident, listening to Kearny talk. Maybe they could run fast enough and far enough, he thought. He almost hoped they could. But he didn’t really believe it.