Gone, No Forwarding

One

Kathy Onoda was twenty-nine years old when she died of a massive blood clot on Saturday, October 15. The funeral was on Monday; because she had been a Buddhist, it was at night. On his way there, Dan Kearny picked up Giselle Marc at her apartment just off the MacArthur Freeway in Oakland. Giselle was a tall, lithe blonde whose high cheekbones and sensuous mouth often made men overlook the intelligence which animated her clear blue eyes.

Usually clear. Tonight they were red with crying. She settled back against the seat and sighed, and then snuffled. “Why Kathy? She was so alive and so... so vital...”

“What can I tell you? Her number was up? We worked her too hard? She worried about her kids too much because after nine years of college her old man’s idea of going to work was filing for food stamps?” Kearny was a compact, hard-driving fifty, with a jaw to batter down doors and gray eyes hard enough to strike sparks. “Twenty-nine goddam years old.”

He cut across the Oakland flatlands to the Nimitz Freeway. Giselle was snuffling again but had forgotten her handkerchief. Probably cogitating upon some poem about death she’d read in college, Kearney thought. He hadn’t had time for college; he’d been knocking off hot cars for Walter’s Auto Detectives down in L.A. at an age most kids, then, still wore knickers.

“You’re the new office manager,” he said gruffly.

Giselle asked wearily, “Does a raise go with it?” then wailed, “Oh! Dan, why did she have to die?”

The Alameda tube was clad in gleaming pale tiles crusted with engine dirt. Yellow emergency phones studded the right wall at regular intervals. Giselle looked over at Kearny curiously. What was he thinking? Feeling? Kathy had been with DKA since the start.

Weep not for the silent dead, their pains are past, their sorrows o’er.

What was she feeling so smug about? Her M. A. in history, her six years of university? As of a few moments before, she was office manager for a very hard-nosed detective agency specializing in skip-tracing, repossessions and embezzlement investigations. None of which suggested sensibilities that Dan Kearny didn’t have.

Kearny turned on Buena Vista and started looking for a place to park. Alameda, which lived off the Naval Air station, had somnolent mid-thirties streets once you cleared the industrial clutter along Webster Street. Streaming up the walk to the white frame building which housed the Jodo Shinshu Universal Church were dozens, hundreds of Japanese, with a sprinkling of non-Orientals. Kearny caught a flash of O’Bannon’s red hair, the ebony gleam of Bart Heslip’s tough impassive face as they drove by. He had to go three more blocks to find a parking place.

“Popular girl, Kathy.”

Giselle merely nodded. Her eyes were leaking again. Lucky she was here to step into Kathy’s shoes at the agency, Kearny thought. Then he felt a stab of guilt. Kathy’d really hated the Oakland office, but that’s where the troubles were and he’d kept her there, month after month. And now she was gone, like your fist when you open your hand.

One DKA hand who wasn’t mourning Kathy was Larry Ballard. Letting himself into his stuffy two-room apartment after a long weekend of skin-diving, he didn’t know she was dead. He dropped wet suit, crowbar, flippers, mask and snorkel on the floor, put the twelve cleaned abalones in the fridge and tore the tab off a cold beer. The phone was balanced on the arm of his big saggy living-room easy chair. Ballard dialed.

“Hi, beautiful. Larry.”

“Oh, Larree!” Maria Navarro’s voice was oddly tense, almost frightened. “I... tried to call you Saturday.”

“Up the coast after abs, baby. I’ll bring you over half a dozen in an hour.”

“Oh, Larree, no! I—”

“One hour exactisimo.”

He went, whistling, through to the bedroom to undress, sipping his beer on the way. He was just under six feet tall, conditioned like an athlete, with a thatch of sun-whitened hair and even features saved from male beauty by hard, watchful eyes and a slightly hawk nose.

The phone started to ring. Ballard ignored it. Maria, to say don’t come — she’d refused to see him since That Night, three weeks before, when he’d finally gotten her into bed after two years of trying. And her with two kids from a busted marriage.

The phone stopped ringing, then started again.

Ballard whistled his way down the hall, nude, to the bathroom he shared with the Japanese couple in the rear apartment. He dropped a five-flavor Cert with that sparkling drop of retsin, then stepped into the shower. What was he complaining about? A woman so hard to get into bed probably would be a pretty good long-haul sort of woman, ¿no es verdad?

Their seats were in a crowded anteroom set up to handle the overflow from the church proper where the coffin, banked by hundreds of flowers mingling their scents with the heavy drugged odor of as many joss sticks, was located. A saffron-robed, shaven-headed monk spoke in Japanese, the next eulogist in English. There were many eulogists. Giselle let her mind wander through her memories of Kathy. The infectious laugh. The high-pitched voice switching from perfect English to regional accent to Japanese singsong without missing a syllable.

Ah, so sorry prees, me poor rittre Japonee girr trying to make riving in new countree...

And they’d fall all over themselves on the phone, giving her what she wanted to know. She could be anyone on that instrument, from a lady minister to a Southern slut.

Aftah one nahght with li’l ol’ me, shugah, youah goin’ to want it every nahght...

And inevitably she’d turn the dead skip everyone else had thought was gone for good. And she’d clap her hands with that joyous laugh, and sometimes kick one foot high into the air from behind her desk, showing a careless length of nyloned thigh as she exclaimed ritually, “Got that son of a bitch!”

Giselle realized that Kearny had thrust a handkerchief into her hand. She had begun crying again, silently but uncontrollably. She used the handkerchief.

Kearny stood up. “Let’s get it over with,” he muttered.

The bad part. With the eulogies finished, the mourners were to queue past the open casket. Ahead of them she saw O’Bannon’s flaming hair. O’B and Kathy had been the two original DKA Associates. And there was a glum-faced Bart Heslip. For him, no more Kathy to giggle extravagantly at the filthy jokes he’d picked up out on the street.

But where was Ballard... Larry Ballard? After all the time Kathy had taken to turn him into a top investigator! The least that bastard could do was show up for her funeral.

Ballard, in his ignorance, had showed up at Maria Navarro’s second-floor flat in a shabby white Mission District stucco with varicolored Algerian ivy twining up over the front. From the street-level door he called up the stairwell, “Only thirty seconds late!”

“Larree, no...”

Maria was petite, five-two perhaps, wearing a short skirt and tight blouse. Ballard balanced his package of abalone on the newel post at the head of the stairs. She avoided his kiss with incipient panic in her huge Latin eyes.

“Hey, baby, I made certain with Certs—”

He was ripped away, slammed headfirst into the wall, spun about to see a hard brown fist coming at him.

“¡Hijo de la ftauta!”

Ballard slipped the punch and drove the heel of his hand at the enraged brown face. He missed.

“Federico! No! j¡Está un amigo!”

“...’way from esposa mía, man!”

Ballard gaped. “Your wife?”

Unfortunately, when he gaped he quit moving. Federico didn’t. Ballard tried to roll with it, but this carried him up against the newel post and then down the stairwell after his dislodged abalone.

“Hey! Ouch! Ugh! Uh! Oh!”

In a Western, the stunt man would have stood up and brushed himself off after the director had yelled “Cut!” But when Ballard finally moved it was like a half-squashed bug. He had realized with horror that his back had burst open and spilled part of him out on the stairs. At each movement he I could feel himself squishing around under him. Oh, God! A cripple in his twenties!

“Larree?”

Hot dam, how about that? Just the abalone. Maybe not even broken bones. Maybe bring that leg over there and... ah! Now. This arm will go down...

“Larr-eee?”

He paused in his unsnarling. “Yeah?”

“You are oh-kay?”

He opened some more, like a carpenter’s rule unfolding. He got a hand on the stair rail. “I’m dandy.”

She said, aggrieved. “Larr-eee, I was sola, you took advantage. Mías hijas need father, you no marry me, and Federico...”

Ballard was on his feet. He had a goose egg on one side of his head. His nose leaked blood. His jaw creaked when he opened his mouth. He needed a drink. “Yeah, swell,” he croaked. “Congratulations.”

He limped out into the night, tenderized abalone in hand, thinking. This is it, this is the end. Never again. He was never going to mess around with another Catholic as long as he lived.

Giselle was shocked to see Kathy’s two Japanese-doll daughters alone in the front pew, watching the proceedings with fathomless shoebutton eyes. “Dan,” she hissed, “where in God’s name is their father?”

“Probably out shopping for a new missus.”

Then she was at the casket. Directly above it was a full color life-size portrait of Kathy. She was laughing and alive and vibrant. She didn’t have a care in the world.

Three feet below was the waxen dead face of the real girl. What made it worse was that the laughing Kathy and the still-faced corpse both wore the same dress, the yellow brocade number with the scoop collar that Kathy had bought to be sexy at last December’s DKA Christmas party.

Giselle turned away, abruptly nauseated. The memories, the overwhelming heaviness of flowers and incense... Then she realized that Kearny had brought her outside, where she could gulp in great breaths of fresh air.

“Little close in there,” he said conversationally.

“That was... the worst experience... of my life. That color photo... those little girls sitting there all alone...”

He shrugged. “They better get used to it. Poppa isn’t going to be around much, not without Mommy’s paycheck to keep him there. Probably the only deadbeat Jap in the history of the world, and Kathy had to marry him.”

Terrific. Trust Kearny to give Kathy the worst possible epitaph. Could anyone, ever, get any more gross than he?