Gone, No Forwarding

Twelve

The house at 15321 Redwood Highway in Santa Rosa was so thoroughly empty that Ballard wondered if it was waiting for the wrecker’s ball. Few of these little frame houses remained; now it was high-price motels, gas stations, shopping centers and the sort of businesses that line freeway access roads.

He stood in the bright morning sunlight going through the Rose Kelly file. One damn reference listed. A Jack Gunne at 301 Second Street, Eureka. Not even a phone number. He could see it all now. Eureka, 235 miles north. Was Dan Kearny going to expect him to drive all the way up there to talk with this Jack Gunne? Dan Kearny sure as hell was.

One of the boxy little postal vans with the steering wheel on the wrong side pulled up beside the mailbox, then started off.

“Hey, wait a minute!” yelled Ballard. He came up to the open window. “I’m looking for Rose Kelly.”

“She moved.”

“I know. You see, I’m her brother and I came up from Riverside expecting to spend the weekend, and—”

“Got married,” said the postman.

Ballard retrenched quickly. “Thing is, I’ve been to sea with the merchant marine for half a year. After I spent a couple of days with my girlfriend in Riverside, I thought I’d come up and see Rose. I didn’t know she was going to marry him so quick. Uh... what’s her new name now she’s married?”

“I figger a brother’d just know that.”

And off he putted. Ballard muttered a naughty word under his breath and looked around for other informants. Local store? The shopping center half a mile down the road. Neighbors? Closest to the south was a motel that covered four acres, had a pool, a sign forty feet high, and free color TV in every room. Sure. They’d know their neighbors the way Ballard knew conceptual nuclear physics. What about up the road?

MADAME AQUARRA KNOWS ALL. SEES ALL. TELLS ALL.

So what else was there to do at eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning in Santa Rosa? Listen to the sun shine?

Madame Aquarra knew, saw and told all in a stucco box of a house from the thirties. High-peaked roof with green shingles, narrow windows, the front door with an old-fashioned brass thumb latch instead of a knob. Set back from the road in an unkempt lot with a couple of fossil automobiles buried in the summer weeds. A sign above the thumb latch, enter. Ballard did.

The street noises were instantly gone, replaced by a faint scent of incense. A foyer was created by thick ceiling-to-floor plum-colored curtains on three sides. Those on the right parted.

“What wisdom do you seek?”

Maria Navarro ceased to exist. Raven wings of utterly black hair framed the face. Hurt liquid eyes as black as the hair, eyes that looked right through his blue ones to the back of his head. Small mouth and full lips, slightly tipped-up nose.

“Madame Aquarra knows all.”

Cloud castles came tumbling down. A gypsy — and the gyps, the rom as they called themselves, were 100 percent bad news 100 percent of the time to the gadjos, non-gyps.

“Does she know a forwarding address for Rose Kelly?”

“Madame Aquarra knows all.”

She stood aside and he entered past her. Part of him reacted to the touch of her breast against his arm, the rest of him wanted to put a hand on his wallet to keep her from lifting it. She was dressed in a faded floor-length ivory-colored gown with lace over the tight bodice. The room behind the drapes was cool and dim.

“Look, do you have a forwarding for the woman or—”

“Quiet... please.”

The girl sat down at a round table in the middle of the room which had the first real crystal ball on it Ballard had ever seen. Black plush reached from the table to the floor all around. Ballard sat down across from the gypsy girl.

“The crystal concentrates the inner sight.” She spoke without looking up, her hands tented against her forehead to shadow the eyes. When they did gleam blackly up at him, they were like the eyes of an animal trapped in its burrow. “I see... flowers. Not sad flowers. Happy flowers.” Her eyes dropped again. “I see... yes. White. A... some sort of ceremony...”

“Do you see the postman in there?” asked Ballard. “He told me Kelly got married before she moved out.”

The girl raised her head. “That will be fifteen dollars.” He stood up in disgust and headed for the door. She was there before him. “That will be fifteen—”

“Send me a bill.”

“You mocked my inner sight. You destroyed the vibrations of the third eye. You—”

“You tried to tell fortunes without a license,” he intoned. “How about it? You have anything on the chick lived next door? I’m a private investigator hired by an insurance company to find her.”

The girl suddenly started to laugh, a laugh full of what sounded like genuine gaiety. Ballard mistrusted it because she was a gyp, and all investigators learned to never trust gyps.

“She moved out on May fifth. We never knew the name of the man she married.” The gypsy girl shrugged. “Check the bars. She drinks a lot.”

Ballard went by her into the foyer. She put a hand on his arm as delicately as a cat seeking attention.

“You are a detective? Truly?”

“Sometimes I wonder,” he said. “Who are you when you aren’t being Madame Aquarra?”

“Yana.”

“Yana what?”

“I am always here.” She opened the front door, so Ballard could do nothing but go through it. To his back she said, “Rose had a brother in Carlotta named Roy Shelby.”

He turned back to her, utterly surprised, but the door was shutting in his face.

“Remember Yana,” said her voice through it.

The door was shut. Firmly. He trudged back to his car, still dazzled by the black light of those eyes. What had that been all about? Something to think about during the 235 bloody miles north to Eureka to get hold of Jack Gunne at 301 Second Street. Unless Carlotta, where her brother lived, was...

No. A flyspeck on the map only about twenty miles south of Eureka — and several miles off into the boonies. Before starting north, he used a pay phone at the shopping center to confirm what he’d already felt in his bones: neither Jack Gunne in Eureka nor Roy Shelby in Carlotta had listed phones. He started driving.

Bart Heslip parked and carefully locked his car. Even at two in the afternoon you didn’t leave your car open in the Western Addition. They called Hickory a street, but it was really an alley that ran for six blocks between Oak and Fell. The middle couple of blocks had been pretty badly chewed up when they had put the skyway in years before, but where he was, just off Webster, was residential.

If dilapidated single-car garages and the backs of rundown apartment houses were residential. Ghetto-land, baby. Ninety-nine percent black, so old Redevelopment probably was eying it and licking thin whitey lips. Man, they’s houses there, an’ people, an’ everything. Quick, tear it down.

Old Redevelopment, he liked them empty weedy lots.

His shoe skittered an empty beer can across potholed blacktop. A startled rat dashed from the noise into a garage. Heslip went up sagging wooden stairs to 578 Hickory. The door was unpainted, slicked here and there with spots and splotches of old varnish. Where the bell should have been was a perfectly round hole with a couple of taped-off wires hanging out of it.

The door rattled under his fist as if a little more force would put a knuckle through it. He heard the protesting creak of bedsprings. Something female yelled something unintelligible, then cleared its throat with a long dragging sound like a power mower starting up.

“Johnny Mack sent me, Sally,” he called through the door.

More creaks. A series of grunts. The door was tugged open a foot, and a broad ebony face, almost ferocious in its ugliness, looked out. He could see a fuzzy once-pink robe below it.

“Why that snotty bastid sendin you around?”

“He said you could hip me to where Verna’s at.”

She stared at him for long moments, then finally dragged the door wider. She had small, nasty, bloodshot eyes and a nose flat enough to have been hit with a board. Her mouth was wide and very pink when she opened it. “Well, c’mon in. You look big enough to handle it.”

Heslip had to step around the edge of the once-expensive opened-out hide-a-bed to do it without touching her. A burst of stuffing at one corner suggested a live-in cat or a long-ago stabbing. The place stank of sleep and cheap wine. In one corner was a pile of laundry ripe enough to culture yeast.

“You ain’t interested in no Verna, is you, baby?” she simpered. “You tryna turn me out, ain’t you?”

Heslip sat down at a chrome-and-plastic chair by the breakfast table jammed into a corner of the room. “Verna,” he said flatly.

“Then whut you cornin’ round runnin’ a game on me this time of the mornin’?”

“It’s two in the afternoon.”

“Mornin’ to me.” She jerked a thumb at the door. “You cute, but I ain’t in the mood.”

Heslip laid a $20 bill on the table besides the remains of a pizza someone had used as an ashtray. Sally wet her lips. Somehow the pink robe had fallen open. “I’m gettin in the mood, baby.”

In the dim light he could see the heavy sag of dark-areolaed breasts, the rounded swell of soft gut and the darker pubic triangle between the pastel edges of soiled cloth. They excited him like watching traffic signals change.

“Verna,” he repeated.

Humanity abruptly contorted her face, surprising in its intensity. “Verna ain’t gonna cop no trouble fum you? You swear you ain’t de heat?”

Heslip flicked the $20 bill so it drifted to the floor. Sally looked at it, avarice gleaming in her yellow-balled eyes.

“If I was a pi-i-g, momma,” he said contemptuously, “would I be cornin’ around with no cabbage like this?”

The eyes stared beadily at him for a moment longer, then she stooped and snatched up the bill. Heslip made no move, so she shoved it in the pocket of the robe and went to the closet. She talked as she rummaged. “Knew you wasn’t from no Johnny Mack, not when you started askin’ me bout Verna... She talked him into goin’ back east somewheres to fin’ someone... Sent me this here card...”

She returned with a picture postcard of a church. Heslip checked the postmark for time and city of origin.

“January. New Orleans.” His eyes followed the childish scrawl. Jonny got me a room im workin, this heres a nice town. Aint found still looken. Write, love Verna. He looked up. “Answer it?”

“I been busy,” she said almost defiantly.

“Sure.”

Heslip doubted he would be chasing Verna Rounds anymore. Dan Kearny just wasn’t going to need her that bad. Not all-the-way-to-New-Orleans bad.