Final Notice

Four

Having left Kearny and the old lady nose-to-nose over the red Caddy, Ballard emerged from the DKA basement into weak noon sunshine and blustery wind. Low clouds which would be fog by nightfall scudded by overhead. One thing you could say for San Francisco, you always had wind. And the rains could start any time.

He drove out toward Howard to find a parking place near Avery Printing. The same fat girl was banging the electric typewriter in the reception area. She had what looked like the same pimples on her chin.

“Gee, you just missed Mr. Schilling. By about four minutes.”

“Did you give him the business card I left?”

“Um... Mr. Avery had that, um...”

She stood up suddenly and went to the window. Ballard went with her, wondering what they were supposed to be doing besides not answering his question.

“He left such a little bit ago, I thought maybe we could still see him. Like if he was caught in traffic or something, you know...”

The door from the shop area opened and a girl in a long-sleeved velour jersey and Levis staggered out with six boxed reams of paper. Ballard glanced at her, and asked the secretary, “What color is Mr. Schilling’s car, do you remember?”

“White.”

“Bob Schilling? Was he just here?” The new girl put her load of paper down on the counter beside the front door. She was very good-looking. “I thought he was still in the...” She stopped abruptly, looking beyond Ballard at the secretary.

Ballard took his time about glancing back at her himself. “Will you give Mr. Schilling this card? It is important.”

“I’ll put it right here beside the typewriter so I don’t forget,” said the fat girl. She wrote Schilling across the face of the card in big crisp letters.

Ballard nodded and smiled, and winked at the girl in jeans — who was still standing beside her paper with an embarrassed look on her face. Long black hair and light-blue eyes and tawny skin, a really great-looking chick. He glanced back as he started down the stairs: nothing wrong with her backside, either, even in jeans.

That other fat lying bitch, he thought, just missed him by about four minutes, then tipping off the good-looking one before she spilled it, I thought he was still in the

The what?

Ballard pulled into the big drive-in where South Van Ness and Mission crossed, to order a cheeseburger and coffee. He couldn’t stomach that battery acid in the office.

He chewed hamburger absently as he sorted through assignments, setting up his “swing.” An experienced investigator will always arrange the day’s work by address, so he doesn’t run all over town spinning his wheels instead of working his cases.

still in the

Maybe it did help. It told him where Schilling wasn’t. Nevada, for instance. Or L.A. No place involving a proper name.

still in the

Something commonly known, a “the” which was also a place. What place was a... what about an institution? A “the” which would keep a guy like Schilling, whose personal life seemed to be going to hell anyway, away from Avery Printing for a recognized, apparently fixed time. Something like thirty days in the county jail, for instance? That would certainly explain why he had dropped so completely out of sight.

He switched on the ignition and the two-way radio came alive, then paid the carhop and called Giselle with his idea.

“I’ll get at it, Larry.” He could picture the slim blonde in the crowded middle clerical office where the big radio transmitter was: a better investigator than he would ever be, he knew, though she was just his age. She added, “And here’s another one: hospitals.”

He clipped the mike back on the dash. Jails and hospitals were her work on the phone, not his in the field.

“Because he was turned down by the Air Force,” said Bart Heslip to Corinne Jones. “He flunked the physical, so he embezzled seven thou from Fidelity. You explain it, I can’t. Over five grand in a paper bag in the Roosevelt Hotel safe, and he acted almost glad we’d caught up with—”

“Glad? The man is so scared he throws up on himself, and you say he was glad? You terrorized—”

Heslip rolled his eyes heavenward. “Here we go again.”

They were having coffee at one of the small high round lacquered tables in the Fatted Calf on Sutter, half a block from the travel agency where Corinne worked. She was a full-bodied woman in a wool knit suit, very chic, her flesh tones a warm café au lait against Heslip’s blackness.

“No, honey, we aren’t going anywhere again. I know — it’s what you do, if it kills you. But I still think—”

“I figured you’d be glad Dan put me on this kind of case instead of—”

“Which only lasted five days, and—”

Heslip broke out laughing. He drank coffee. “Ain’t either of us ever going to finish a sentence.”

“What are they going to do to him?”

“Slap his wrist. Fidelity’s made a gross recovery of five thou in cash, DKA’ll take half of that, so they’ll hook Gondolph for another four and a half and come out even.”

“That isn’t fair! He only took—”

“Lady, he stole — not took. They could go for Grand Theft. Instead, they’re going to let him get another job and pay them back out of his salary. I’m hoping DKA gets more of this kind of case and that I get to work ’em. The repo end is getting tougher all the time, the way the courts—”

“About time, too,” said Corinne in her end-of-discussion voice. Her heart-shaped face, Hamitic in cast rather than Bantu, missed true beauty — if at all — by the narrowest of margins.

Looking at her across the table, Heslip vividly remembered coming out of the coma at Trinity Hospital, after three days in the dark un-world where nothing lived or moved. That face above him, drawn with worry and sleeplessness, those eyes looking down at him with more naked love and pain and delight in them than most men are blessed with in a lifetime.

“But don’t let it make you cocky,” he said obscurely.

When she looked puzzled, he reached across the table to touch her lips with his fingertip. She was gradually coming to accept the fact that he was a detective, as he had once come to accept the fact he’d never be middleweight champ of the world.

He said mildly, “We’re in the age of the deadbeat, baby.”

She sighed. “Tomorrow I s’pose you’ll be back after them again.”

“I s’pose. But chasing Gondolph was fun. Know how he blew the two thou he went through? Being bi-i-ig man in a couple of crummy Tenderloin bars. And on hookers. Little and blond and cuddly and with them Dixie vowels.” He shook his head. “I can’t understand guys that pay for it.”

“That’s ’cause you don’t have to.” An utterly bawdy look flashed at him from the corners of her magnificent eyes. “Speaking of that, lover, what time you plan to come over tonight?”

“There’s an idea!” he exclaimed. “Yeah, man, there’s an idea!”

“Only if you show up early.”

Heslip checked his watch. “I’ll beat you home, baby,” he promised.

He didn’t.

Giselle Marc hung up the phone and leaned back in her swivel chair to massage her temples. She was a tall, lithely built blonde whose aura of wicked sensuality made a lot of men miss the fact that her mental attractions at least equaled her physical ones. Because Kearny hadn’t been fooled, she’d been able to develop into a damned good man-hunter. On the wall behind her desk were her three framed licenses: private investigator, repossessor, collector. Not bad for a girl with a master’s degree in history from SF State.

So. Hospitals next. No less than eighty-four entries in the San Francisco book, although many of the rest homes and convalescent homes could be eliminated without a call.

The jail idea had been a bust. No record in the county jail down in San Bruno. No record with SFPD or the sheriff’s office. Not in the morgue. Negative at the U.S. marshal’s office, their contact at the FBI, the...

The phone rang.

Giselle sighed. It was 5:20; from the line it was coming in on, probably a client with a bitch. Most client complaints eventually filtered through to her.

“Oh! Hi, Pete!” she exclaimed. Unconsciously she leaned closer to the phone. She liked Pete Gilmartin, liked him a lot. Then she said “Oh!” again, and “Don’t tell me we’ve got more grief on that Chandra car.”

“Can’t I just be calling my favorite private eye to say hello?”

“It would be the first time.”

He laughed. “Matter of fact, I am calling about the Chandra file. The high mucky-mucks liked DKA’s work on it so much that they told me to hand more assignments to you people. Can the Great Dan K come up here in person to pick them up?”

“Anything for you, Petie-boy.”

“Anything?”

“In a business way.”

Gilmartin sighed gustily, then said “Huh?” to someone beside his desk. He came back to Giselle. “Tell the Great White Father to be here by five forty-five sharp, or we’ll give ’em to the competition.”

She had just delivered the message to Kearny, who’d come up for a cup of coffee from the dark little kitchen behind Giselle’s office, when the radio said: “SF-7 calling San Francisco KDM 366.”

“This is KDM 366, go ahead.”

Giselle left “Control” off because SF-7, a new man named Dunford who’d come highly recommended from an agency in Seattle, had put “San Francisco” in front of the call letters. It was an alerting signal. She was aware of Kearny at her elbow, stirring his instant coffee.

“Is Mr. Bush of the bank’s legal department there?”

Kearny took the mike. “This is Bush. What’s the problem?”

“Are you familiar with the Norman Twiggs file, sir?”

“I certainly am.”

Giselle was already flicking through the CAL CIT Open tub beside her desk, to flop the TWIGGS file under Kearny’s nose. Dunford had explained to Mr. Twiggs that the radio had a direct tie-in to California Citizens Bank, and he wanted Mr. Bush to talk to Mr. Twiggs, since Mr. Twiggs wouldn’t surrender his car. It was a drill Kearny had worked out to help cool potentially explosive situations where the field agent felt he was in trouble.

“Mr. Twiggs, I have to say frankly that I don’t understand your attitude...” Kearny went on at length, his eyes roaming the unfamiliar file for facts to support the idea that he was intimately acquainted with the subject’s delinquent contract. “...signed with you in good faith, Mr. Twiggs, and you have reacted with a threat of force to the bank’s legal representative...”

Kearny released the Transmit button to let Twiggs stammer hesitantly into the unfamiliar microphone. He turned to Giselle. “Better call Ed Dorsey on the intercom; tell him to get up to the bank for me. He can use my station wagon. The keys are over the visor.”

It was 5:31 P.M.

At 5:34 Bart Heslip parked in front of the primary school across from DKA. That side of the street was tow-away in the mornings but not the afternoons. Ed Dorsey came from the DKA basement and turned toward Franklin. Heslip locked the Plymouth, thinking that Kearny ought to transfer that old fart into inside skip-tracing, where he could do all his work on the phone. He wasn’t worth a damn on the street.

The lights came on as Heslip crossed toward the curb where a few months before he had been struck down with a blackjack. Three days of coma. He unconsciously fingered the tiny scar at the base of his throat where the tracheal tube had been.

He reached the curb. Two bulky men walking briskly up from Franklin had just come abreast of Dorsey, who was opening the door of Kearny’s station wagon. One of the men hit Dorsey in the face. Heslip saw the glint of the horn-rim glasses flying off. Dorsey went over backward into the cyclone fence that separated the sidewalk from the blacktop parking lot flanking it. He screamed. The scream seemed to cut Bart Heslip off at the knees. The second man drove a fist into Dorsey’s stomach.

Concussion. Three days in coma.

The first man slammed Dorsey face-first into the fence. It made a spronging sound against his face.

No metal plate in Heslip’s head, but almost.

Fists were thudding into Ed Dorsey’s kidneys.

One more blow, Dr. Arnold Whitaker had said. One more traumatic shock to Heslip’s skull, and it would have been...

Dorsey was down on his hands and knees where a heavy shoe could snap his head back. A haze of bloody spray flew up off his face, as if he were a fighter taking an uppercut under the lights. His upper plate arced into the gutter like a fighter’s dislodged mouthpiece.

And Heslip was suddenly a fighter again, not a man afraid another concussion would turn him into vegetable soup. Nine seconds had passed. He dropped his attaché case and charged.

The stompers looked up, startled. They ran. Heslip was smaller, faster, in superb shape as always. The first reached their car, parked at the corner with the motor running for a quick left uphill into Franklin no matter what the three-way traffic light said. The second shot a quick look back and ran into a parking meter. It spun him halfway around, so that a rock-hard left hook could smash into his short ribs.

“Gugnh!” he said in response to the hook.

It was his only comment for a number of hours, because he was hit eight times in the face before he could fall down. As the stolen car spun into Franklin and was gone, the man it had abandoned received a broken nose, a detached retina in the left eye, and lost three teeth. He swallowed a fourth tooth and got a hairline jaw fracture when his chin hit the pavement.

Dan Kearny dragged away the black detective, who was still clubbing vicious lefts and rights, a few moments later. Up in the deserted clerical offices, Giselle Marc was already phoning for an ambulance.