Gone, No Forwarding

On the way from Harlem, Bart Heslip switched cabs three times, and then caught a plane from Newark because he was afraid they might be watching Kennedy and La Guardia. Six hours until the plane landed at San Jose, fifty miles south of San Francisco. He hadn’t called ahead to tell Dan Kearny he was coming, because of the phone taps.

Sleep began to wash over him. He knew who’d hired them. He even knew what they were trying to do. But why?

It had to go back to that rainy Friday in November, almost a year ago which he now knew had been

The premature rains had dumped 3.6 inches of water on the Bay Area before easing off to allow a patch of honest-to-God blue sky to appear around noon on Friday, November 5. Finally you could wait at the curb for a light to change without getting a wet lap from passing autos. You could drive across the Bay Bridge without being bounced into the next lane by gusting winds. Down at San Francisco International, in fact, Western’s 1:50 P.M. flight from Mexico City touched the rain-slick runway only ten minutes behind schedule.

Adán Espinosa, who had chosen a Friday flight because of California’s late bank-closing hour, was well pleased as he slapped his credit card and Mexican driver’s license down on the Avis counter near the lower-level luggage carousels.

“You are to be holding a late-model Fairlane for me,” he said in heavily accented English.

“Your reservation is right here, Mr. Espinosa.”

She ran his contract through the BankAmericard franking machine, checked the deductible insurance as directed and gave him the keys. “It will be right outside at—”

“I know, señorita.” Espinosa winked at her. He was a lean, swarthy mid-thirties, with a bad complexion and a drooping bandido mustache. “I am in this country often.”

“Thank you for driving Avis.”

“We try harder.” He winked again, “¿no es verdad?”

He turned to the exquisitely shaped woman standing beside the four matched Samsonites. “Elena,” he said. She turned hot black eyes on his flat gunmetal ones and touched a hand to her gleaming black hair. Espinosa hooked the arm of a passing porter. “You. The Samsonites.”

Kasimir Pivarski looked like a Polish joke. Plaster dust outlined the seams and lines of his flat, broad middle-European face. He had a thick trunk, arms, legs, hands. An A’s baseball cap was backward on his thick brown hair. He slapped clouds of plaster off his pants and resolutely opened the door of his stake-body truck.

“Listen, dammit,” said the job foreman, “we need another two dozen sacks of plaster here this afternoon so Monday we can—”

“I tole you, I’m knocking off early. I gotta check in with my lawyer an’ then see some bastards at a collection agency in Oakland before six o’clock.”

“That still leaves you time to—”

Pivarski spat a glob of plaster-thickened saliva on the bare subfloor boards at the foreman’s feet, then heaved himself up into the cab of the truck unbothered by the foreman’s enraged glare.

Kathy Onoda, office manager of the collection-agency bastards at the Daniel Kearny Associates Oakland office, looked at the clock and sighed. Four o’clock. Two hours yet. She was an ice-slim Japanese woman with an ice-pick mind, classical features and straight black hair maned down over her shoulders. She stood up and went to the door of the office.

“Jeff.” A nondescript brown-haired man, doing phone collecting at a desk midway down the main office, looked up. “I thought I told you an hour ago to bring me the tabbed legal file on Kasimir Pivarski.”

She returned to the desk wondering why so many closet gays made good inside collectors. Maybe because they got a chance to be bitchy without personal exposure. Not, she realized, as bitchy as she was being. It was being stuck over here in the East Bay for a month trying to pull this Oakland operation together, when her work as general office manager for DKA’s statewide operation piled up on her desk over in San Francisco.

Jeff Simson came into the officer with the Pivarski file. “You could be a little nicer,” he said petulantly.

“Yes, I could be.” Kathy sighed. “Sorry, Jeff.” Then, as he left, she opened the file of the truck driver with the 5:30 appointment.

Espinosa checked Elena into a Fisherman’s Wharf motel, then drove the rented Fairlane across San Francisco’s roller-coaster hills to park in the Alhambra Theater white zone on Polk Street. Almost ten blocks from the bank, but why be stupid, right?

He turned in at Golden Gate Trust, thinking that Wen... Elena probably had been in a cab for the Union Square shops before he was out of the motel lot. Let her. Nine months of waiting with nobody else for company besides the enchilada-eaters had gotten to him, too. But now the papers had been approved in Buenos Aires. Argentina. A country to stay alive in.

The girl behind the safe-deposit window said, “Do you wish a private booth, sir?”

He signed the entry slip. “Please.”

In the closed booth he began transferring the banded bundles from the dark-green metal box to the leather satchel he had carried from the Fairlane. Outside, the girl was dialing the internal number of Arthur P. Nucci, Vice-President for Personal Loans.

“Mr. Nucci, you wanted to be notified when box 6237 was signed out.”

Nucci was a pudgy, fussy man in his late forties who fostered a conservative-banker image at odds with his life style. Stall him, they’d said. “I see that tab is a year out of date.” Call us, and stall him. “Apparently some estate tax question that has been settled.” We’ll do the rest. “Bring that card up right now, Darlene, so I can void that notation.”

“Yes, sir. As soon as—”

“I said now,” snapped Nucci. “Use the elevator.”

His heart thundering in his chest, he clattered down the interior stairs as Darlene started up in the elevator. He pushed the pebbled-glass stairwell door ajar. Espinosa, looking about for the missing girl, was a profound shock: he was the wrong man! Then Nucci realized, of course — he would have altered his appearance. On the stairwell pay phone Nucci dialed the number memorized months before.

“There in five minutes,” said the unknown voice. “Can you stall him that long, Mr. Nucci?”

“I already have arranged it.”

“What does he look like?”

“A Mexican.” He described Espinosa’s clothes. “And carrying a leather satchel.” He hung up, sweating profusely. It was 5:22 P.M.

At 5:22 Verna Rounds, the pretty-faced black file clerk, showed up in the doorway. Kathy Onoda looked up at her. Why was it she could never sleep at night, but get her into the tag end of a rotten day in the rotten Oakland office, and—

“That dude phone up, Pee-somethin, he’s in the outer office.”

Kathy had kept Verna late to work the switchboard because the PBX girl, Rose Kelly, would be late back from her doctor’s appointment.

“Kasimir Pivarski?”

Verna was chewing bubble gum. “That’s the dude.”

“Send him in.”

Verna slopped splay-footed away. Poor Verna. Giselle Marc had hired her on that job-training thing she’d doped out with the welfare people, and now, when Verna had just about learned that it was the sharp end of the pencil that made those marks on the paper, she’d given notice because she was tired of working for what she referred to as chump change.

Verna reappeared, trailed by a mobile Polish joke. Kathy gestured the big truck driver to a chair. Verna leaned in the doorway with her arms folded, blowing a bubble.

“Lissen,” said Pivarski belligerently, “you shit-heels took my goddam car two years ago, you got no call come around now...”

“You ignored repeated calls and letters concerning this delinquency, sir.” Then Kathy explained what a deficiency judgment was. “Even though your car was repossessed and resold, the resale price was $789.35 less than the contract you signed with General Motors Acceptance Corporation. When you didn’t appear at the court hearing, we were awarded a Judgment by Default. To get you into our office we placed a Writ of Attachment on your wages—”

“Yeah, well, I’m here now.” Pivarski grubbed in the breast pocket of his faded blue workshirt with cold-chisel fingers. The chisels brought out folding money. “Two hundred bucks.”

Kathy counted it and read aloud as she wrote the receipt:

“ ‘Two hundred dollars received on account from K. Pivarski, November fifth, 5:46 P.M.’ ” She looked up to break Verna’s Bubble-Yum catatonia. “Ask Jeff to come in, will you, please?”

Five minutes later the Polish joke had departed with a payment schedule worked out for the remainder of his delinquency, and Jeff Simson was waiting beside Kathy’s desk as she made out the bank-deposit slip for the trust account.

“This is on your Pivarski file. Run it down the street to the bank before the six o’clock close, will you?”

It was 5:56 P.M.

At 5:56 P.M. Elena gently kicked the bottom of the motel-room door. Espinosa, lying on the bed in his shorts with a drink balanced on his bare chest and the TV turned to the Channel 4 news, yelled at her without turning his head, “Use your goddam key!”

More gentle kicks. Jesus. Women. She could have had the cab driver carry her packages to the door for her. He swung his bare feet to the rug and set his drink on top of the bureau.

He swung the door open, saying, “Wendy, why in the hell—”

“Goodbye, Phil.”

The bulky, swarthy man in the heavy topcoat pulled both triggers at once from three feet away. Assorted bits of Espinosa were blown against the side of the dresser by the sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun.

The killer stepped unhurriedly across the threshold to roll the eviscerated corpse over onto its face. He jerked down the boxer-style shorts and shoved a shiny new penny up between the buttocks with a quick jabbing motion. The body had voided in death, so he wiped his middle finger on the shorts before crossing the room to pick up the leather satchel.

Screams started behind him as he walked across the blacktop to his stolen car, but he ignored them. His tires yelped his escape against the damp blacktop. A linen-truck driver, just about to deliver fresh towels to the motel, exclaimed aloud, “Holy Christ! I know that guy!”

Then he looked around quickly: a screaming woman, eyes tight shut, and a snot-nose kid eating a slice of pizza. He jumped back into his truck and accelerated away without bothering to leave the towels, turning in the opposite direction from that taken by the murderer.