Gone, No Forwarding

Seventeen

“Sign here,” said the uniformed property clerk.

“Yessir,” said Sammy Rounds. He didn’t add any smart-ass remarks, either. His night and day in a holding cell had scared all that jive right out of him. He could write little else but his name, but he wrote that gladly, and gladly submitted to the embrace of those massive mammy arms which went around him as he emerged from the meshed enclosure.

“Samuel...” said the fat black woman.

He was even crying and not caring until, among the indifferent loungers in the basement of the Oakland Municipal Building, he saw a face which was not indifferent.

He pulled away. “Whut he doin’ here?”

The fat frantic black woman in the cheap cotton dress and black cloth coat turned to look, still snuffling, one pudgy hand still clutching her son’s arm as if afraid he might be ripped away. “Wasn’t for Mr. Heslip, you’d still be in there.”

Sammy snuffled defiantly. “Don’t need no he’p.”

Heslip got them up the stairs and out to the car and drove them home. It had taken him a number of hours to find out Sammy had been busted during a drug-store burglary the night before, locate Mrs. Rounds trying to make her quasi-hysterical way through the legal complexities of getting her fourteen-year-old son out of city jail after he’d convinced the authorities he was eighteen.

“Samuel,” the fat woman exclaimed as they came through the door of the run-down frame house, “you go straight to your room and get down on your knees and give thanks to God that you are home.”

“Aw, ma—”

“I don’t need no sauce from you, boy. Now!”

Sammy nowed. Her powers had miraculously returned as she had entered home territory, and Sammy knew that tone of voice and that glint in those usually loving brown eyes. He nowed. As she stared down the hallway after him, big tears started running down her cheeks. “Whut’m I gonna do?” she moaned. “Ain’t got no man to set him straight. The street’s gonna get him, same as Verna. Once we was a family...” She heaved a vast sigh. “That boy’s fourteen, can’t barely read, can’t write much ’cept his name.”

“At least he’s out of jail,” said Heslip the pragmatist. What the hell, it was a start, wasn’t it?

She looked at him with shrewd eyes, and then led the way to the kitchen. “Thanks to you. And now de note comes due, don’t it?”

Heslip sat at the battered wooden table as Emmalina Rounds brought over steaming cups of coffee. Ham hocks and lima beans simmered on a back burner of the aged gas stove. Ghetto smells familiar to him from his childhood. He leaned forward to lay his DKA I.D. on the table. “I’m from Daniel Kearny Associates. Where Verna used to work? We’re in trouble with the State and we need Verna’s help.”

Her mouth set in a tight line. “Whut a little nigger girl—”

“Hey, I’m on your side, okay?” He pocketed his I.D. “I didn’t turn her into a prostitute.”

“You know ’bout that?”

He drank his coffee. It was thick, and rich with chicory of all things. God, he hadn’t had chicory coffee in nearly ten years, since his mother had died. Emmalina was wiping her eyes. “I’d hoped that job’d be Verna’s chance. That Japanese woman she worked for, Verna liked her jus’ fine. But—”

“She’s dead now,” said Heslip. “That’s why we need Verna.”

“Dead?” She was shocked.

“Of a blood clot at the age of twenty-nine.” He felt a sympathetic tightness in his own chest. “Died in her sleep.” He paused for a moment. “Do you know where Verna is, Mrs. Rounds?”

She stared at him from deep-set eyes infinitely sad; the bones of her face were somehow starkly apparent despite the heavy overlay of flesh. “Verna ain’t anywhere you can reach her.” She leaned forward with a shocking swiftness to hiss, “Dope.” With a vast effort she added, “Heroin,” and then burst out, “Whut’m I gonna do?”

Hope she dies young, Heslip thought. A black junkie whore had maybe as little future as anyone except a terminal cancer patient could have. A Big Ben alarm clock on the refrigerator ticked away the seconds as Emmalina Rounds took the cups over to the stove for a refill. She returned to carefully lower her yard-wide bottom into her chair. She sighed as if she’d heard his silent reply.

“All I really know is that she was with a pimp name of Johnny Mack Brown, who was workin her out of some motel—”

“The Bide-A-Wee on MacArthur. She left almost a year ago.”

“Come home cryin for money...” Her right hand unconsciously massaged the inside of her left elbow. “Like somebody had hit her in the arm. But the bruise couldn’t hide them needle marks.” She heaved a shuddery sigh. “Stole my purse when she lef, her own mother’s purse who raised her in fear of de Lord...”

Heslip stood up and finished his coffee on his feet. “I have to catch a plane for New Orleans, Mrs. Rounds. Your daughter was there in January, looking for someone. Do you know—”

“New Orleans?” Her face was confused. “Lookin’ for someone? That’s where her daddy lef me. most fifteen years ago when Verna was ’bout five and I was big with Samuel...”

Involuntarily, looking down at her own vast bulk, she burst into full-throated, indomitable laughter. Heslip, writing Corinne’s name on the back of his business card, had to join in. “I don’t know where I’ll be staying, but this woman at this phone will always be able to reach me.” He handed her the card. “Anything you can find out about your ex-husband would help, because he’s probably who she went looking for. He can probably tell me where she is, if he’s still in New Orleans.”

Ballard was still in Santa Rosa, where he had no business being, and in a steaming tub which had turned him lobster red, where he’d been for over an hour. He’d decided his night in the ditch had earned him a night of recuperation at a motel with a forty-foot sign outside. The fact that the motel happened to be a few hundred yards down the Redwood Highway from Madame Aquarra’s fortune-telling scam was nobody’s business, certainly not Kearny’s.

“Dammit, Larry.” Kearny burst out when Ballard rang the DKA San Francisco number which didn’t go through the switchboard, “where in the devil are you?”

“Santa Rosa. I’ll be in first thing tomorrow morning.”

“How sure is Rose Kelly that she wasn’t on the switchboard?”

“I saw her packet of birth-control pills myself. Dated November fifth. If she missed work for the doctor’s appointment, she wouldn’t be apt to mistake the time of the appointment. Why?”

“Jeff Simson says she was on the switchboard that night.”

“If their stories don’t agree, my money is on Rosie.”

He hung up and tried to talk himself out of what he knew damn well he was going to do. Married to a mean gyppo bastard, Rose Kelly had said. But God! Those eyes! That mouth! Beautiful and sad, and who could resist a combination like that? Not Ballard.

He got out of the tub and got dressed and drove the five blocks to Madame Aquarra’s. The place looked shut up tight, but when he touched the bell a gypsy woman as sleek as an otter opened the door. She was gaudy in a parrot’s reds, yellows, blues, and greens — and jangled as she moved. A mustache downed her upper lip. Oily black hair coiled in heavy braids around her head.

“Madame Aquarra knows all.”

The mother-in-law, obviously. And beside her a massive mongrel about the size and apparent temperament of the Hound of the Baskervilles in that Christopher Lee movie that popped up on Creature Feature every once in a while. Ballard built an instant role. “We’ve been getting beefs about fortune-telling being done without a license at this address.”

She didn’t ask who “we” was: his suit, his stance, his dark car with the long aerial all spelled cop. Her eyes went flat and uncomprehending and her Romany accent thickened to near unintelligibility. The dog at her side growled softly. “But ve half been doing noddinks dat—”

“Complaints are against a...” Ballard turned to read from a blank page of his pocket notebook by the dim streetlight. “Female gypsy in her early twenties who—”

“Dere iss no vun here by dat description.”

The door started to shut, but Ballard thrust out his jaw and one foot. The jaw stopped her, the foot stopped the door. The dog gave a vicious snarl, but Ballard’s voice crackled with ice. “Trot her out here, lady, or I’ll make this mitt camp so sick it’ll need an iron lung to stay alive.”

He turned and swaggered down the steps to stand with his back to the place, hands shoved deep into his suitcoat pockets in a cop’s stance of habitual arrogance. Yana’s voice spoke behind him with practiced hesitancy. “Officer, my mother-in-law tells me I have broken the law...”

He turned. “Hello, Yana.”

“You must be crazy!” she exclaimed in recognition. “Do you know what will happen if—”

“If your husband comes out? I’m a cop interrogating a suspect.”

“My husband and father-in-law are traveling with the carnival now. But that one...” She made a gesture toward the house. It was a despairing and forlorn gesture. At the same time, she brushed up against him. “You are now threatening to take me down to the station. I am trying to excite you with the promise of what I might give you.”

Ballard put his hands on her shoulders and thrust her away. Her flesh was arousing under his fingers. “You really think she’s watching?”

“She is watching.”

“Can you get away for a while?”

“You think I am easy because I am a gypsy?” she asked coldly.

“A drink. A drive. A movie. A hamburger. A pizza,” he said irritably. “How the hell do I know?”

“You must take me with you, then.” She made pleading gestures. Ballard shook his head. She moved in to lay a suggestive hand on his chest. “I will go in and tell her you are taking me away, but that I will try to seduce you enough on the way so I will not be arrested or booked.”

Ballard jabbed a dictatorial finger at the house. Yana dropped her hands in resignation and, head lowered, retreated sadly back up the stairs. Ballard made a tough-guy silhouette again and wondered if six gypsies would come bursting out to hold him down while the Hound of the Baskervilles bit his balls off. But Yana returned.

He shoved her unceremoniously into the Cutlass, thankful for the police-like CB antenna and the car’s plain dark color. He drove half a block without lights so the rear plate wouldn’t be illuminated in case the mother-in-law wanted to get his license number.

“Where to?” he asked, braced for more defensiveness. But she laughed deep down in her throat and stretched her arms high above her head to emphasize a marvelous bustline.

“Why, your motel room, of course,” she said.

Why, ah... of course. Oh Ballard, you devil you!