Gone, No Forwarding

Ten

Corinne Jones worked for a travel agency on Sutter and Stockton. Visit exotic lands. See the pyramids across the Nile. Whopping discount on all air fares, so she could see the world cheap with a companion of her choice. Except he would never take a vacation. First Bart had been a professional fighter, now a private eye. In four years he’d taken one week off. Total. Still, he was her man, and that was that.

Some dude in a gold Eldorado convertible honked at her as she was walking up Sutter Street after work. From the corner of her eye she could see he jumped sharp in a powder-blue Edwardian-cut and wore a big-brimmed crimson pimp’s hat. He honked again. She refused to turn her head. She was a beautiful woman and knew it, with café-au-lait skin and a profile right off an Egyptian wall painting.

“Hey, baby, whut’s happenin?”

She speeded up, heels clop-clopping with an angry sound. Heads turning, mouths laughing. It was almost a rout. And then as she came up to the 450 Sutter Building’s garage, the Eldorado bulled right across the sidewalk and stopped where she almost walked into the side of it. The top was down.

“I swear, baby, you the hardest mink I ever see to give a ride home to.”

She stared in amazement at Bart Heslip’s grinning face under the wide-brimmed hat, then jerked open the door and got in. “You bastard. Oh, you rotten bastard!” she exclaimed.

Heslip had backed out into Sutter Street again, ignoring the angry horns and shouted curses behind him. He wore four-inch clogs and a pink ruffled shirt with froths of lace at the wrists.

“This’s class, right, baby?”

“You just pick this thing up?”

“O’B grabbed it three days ago. Dude’s out of Dee-troit, owes fourteen big ones on it.”

“If Kearny finds out you’re driving around in it...”

Heslip took a left down Grough, heading toward her apartment. Corinne relaxed against the pale leather upholstery, stirred by faint envy of whoever had been driving it.

“What about those clothes?”

“The Apeman lent them to me.” The Apeman was a dealer who lived upstairs from Heslip and spent most of his bread on clothes.

“Bart Heslip, you’re working!”

“I gotta get a line on a pimp calls himself Johnny Mack Brown.”

Corinne, an old-movie buff because of so many nights alone in front of the tube hoping Bart could come over, had to laugh. “You can’t be serious!”

“He is. Used to work out of Oakland, now he’s dropped out of sight. Maybe working some girls in the topless joints out in North Beach. First I gotta find him, then I gotta ask him some questions. And the only dude he’s going to tell anything to—”

“No you don’t!” she yelped. She’d seen where he was headed. Much too late, of course.

When Ballard pulled into the lot of the Mint Condition, that all-night place on Duboce and Market a little ways from the old government mint, it was nearly midnight, and he’d checked out Queen Ferdinand’s street for the car and apartment for him or Simson three times already. And realized he’d missed supper.

Only as he turned into the lot, he was looking right at Simson’s car. He could hardly believe it, but there it was: 1974 Gremlin, white, with the license number Bart had gotten from their tame cop. He tried to remember Simson from last year’s DKA Christmas party. All he could come up with was a sort of slender guy with brown hair.

How about phoning inside the restaurant from one of the pay phones out here? He could see through the window, and... But what if the state people had warned him against talking with anyone from DKA? Better try to spot him on a casual walk-through.

He’d never been in the Mint Condition at night before. It was a revelation. All races, shades and shapes of gay were there now the sun was down. The most common shape was slim, hipless as a teen-age girl whose breasts have not yet developed, clothes skin-tight, pants without pockets because pockets destroyed that seductive line of thigh and buttock, tops mainly striped $40 French tank tops or tailored shirts with plunging necklines.

Ballard took a turn through the place. Voices high and hyper with excitement, tinkling laughter; most of them beautifully groomed, the skin a little too tight over the cheekbones, the eyes a little too glittery with ready passion, the hands a little too ready to touch and caress. In the bar, absolute contrast: three hackers in studded black leather, obvious rough trade, drinking their beer and waiting for someone to buy the hard night’s sodomy they offered.

Nobody quite like his vague memory of Simson. But in the booth on the far side of the circular dining room, Ferdie Diamond. Queen Ferdinand indeed. A sari of gleaming white picked out with gold thread. A BB-sized diamond at the edge of one nostril awink with a turn of the head. A dozen glittering red rhinestones pasted along the outer edge of each eyelid, accented with red eyeshadow. Jammed hip to hip with five others in a four-person booth.

Ballard went back outside. No use making a play in there, Ferdie probably knew everyone in the place. Obviously he was driving Simson’s car, so equally obviously he knew where Simson was. Ballard drove out of the lot and parked in the yellow zone across the street from the restaurant. From there he could see Ferdie in the booth, and could see just the trail of the white Gremlin around the edge of the building.

He settled down behind the wheel and turned the radio to KNEW-91. His dashboard clock showed a new day had begun. He waited.

As he drove, Ferdie Diamond kept casting covert glances at the shuddery brute beside him. Where had the scary darling been, that he’d met him only tonight? A bear of a man, with a gravelly voice, and cheeks that would always need a shave, and a mop of coal-black hair growing low on his forehead. Deep-set eyes, a straight bar of brow above them. Positively Neanderthal.

A little shiver of delight ran through Ferdie under his sari. He felt suddenly weak as he thought of being under the Neanderthal man in bed. He backed into the open parking space three doors down from his apartment house. Another parking ticket in the morning, because he just knew he wouldn’t be up early.

“Here we are.”

Neanderthal didn’t speak, he rumbled. “You’re very kind to offer me a nightcap.”

“Let’s hope it’s an... experience neither of us will forget.”

“It will be.”

That was too much for Ferdie. A little moan of anticipation escaped him as he turned blindly toward the big, rough-voiced man. Their mouths met as a thick-fingered hand slipped up Ferdie’s thigh under the togalike robe toward his groin. The hand tightened. And tightened. Ferdie’s moan of pleasure turned to one of pain.

“Aw, Jesus H. Christ!” Ballard burst out aloud.

Queen Ferdinand and his boyfriend were parked across the street, four spaces up, and they were kissing, for Chrissake!

But then the door on the rider’s side opened and the black-haired guy got out with Ferdie right behind, still gripped tenderly in the big man’s grasp. Writhing in passion even after they were out of the car into the deserted midnight street. Passion? Or pain? From where Ballard set, the embrace looked more like a choke-hold.

Diamond was getting mugged. Right there on the street. Ballard started his hand toward the horn, to scare the guy off, when the two men turned in abruptly at the Queen Anne and disappeared into the shadows beneath the building.

Ballard was out of his car, eight-inch Stillson wrench from the floor of the back seat in hand. He stood on the sidewalk, breathing quickly and shallowly, trying to pierce the shadows with his gaze. Back there in the dark the big guy could be wringing Diamond’s neck as easily as he would a chicken’s. Ballard ran silently and obliquely across the street. The narrow concrete passageway under the house was ripe with garbage but otherwise empty. At the far end, a staircase of narrow rough plank stairs.

Sure. Up to Diamond’s apartment, clean him out, leave him trussed up and broke. Or broke up. Or dead.

Ballard went up the stairs to the second floor. The door there opened into an interior hallway. No time to think, because if he stopped to think he’d call the cops. That guy looked mean. But, he told himself, Ferdie was his only link with Simson.

Okay, then. Down the silent carpeted hallway to Apartment 5. When he pressed an ear against the door, he could hear the rumble of the big guy’s voice.

“... cut it outta your nose, fruiter-boy, unless...”

Ballard got a flash of the bastard sawing through Ferdie-baby’s nostril with a big Bowie knife. Another flash of the same knife sinking up to the hilt in Ballard’s gut. Oh, wonderful. Just what he needed right now was a vivid imagination.

He dragged the head of the Stillson wrench down the door with a clawing noise on the wood. The voice stopped.

“I saw you, Ferdie, with that gorgeous hunk,” Ballard trilled. “Let me in. Let’s share.”

Ear back to the door. Furious rumbling whisper. Ferdie’s terrified voice from beyond the door. “Go away!”

Ballard dragged the wrench down again. “Stop teasing,” he said. And stepped quickly back across the hall. Braced himself. Watched the doorknob until it turned.

His shoulder hit the door and smashed it wide. He ran right across the room and knocked over the portable bar with a terrific crash of glasses and bottles. At the same time he caught one confused glimpse of Ferdie reeling back, his nose spread all over his face by the door, and the black-haired guy, unhurt, coming toward him like a cat.

Ballard whirled toward him, letting the wrench lead his movement. It caught the black-haired guy on the right arm. The knife went flying as the elbow shattered like glass. The man screamed, doubled over holding it, every aggression washed away by pain. Ballard tapped him on the back of the head with the wrench, although every nerve and fiber screamed to bury the wrench in the skull up to the handle.

The big guy went down, hard, on his face.

Ferdie was sitting in the middle of the floor, his gown up around his waist like a two dollar hooker in an alley showing a prospective trick what she had. What Ferdie had was male genitals and no underwear.

“Cover yourself up, you disgusting creep,” said Ballard.

Ferdie was beyond modesty or coquetry. Blood from his busted nose leaked from between the spread fingers held up to his face. “By dode,” he moaned. “By dode id brokend.”

The tough-looking landlord from that afternoon appeared in the doorway, a dangerous glint in his eye and a baseball bat in his hand.

“Call the cops,” said Ballard.

The man’s eyes took in the scene as his nose twitched to the raw stink of the broken liquor bottles. He nodded and disappeared.

“By dode,” moaned Ferdie.

Ballard looked at him and blew out a long disgusted breath. And said coldly, “Where’s Simson?”