Gone, No Forwarding

Twenty-Two

If Zebulon Rounds had been white, he’d have been a good ole boy. But he was black, and what investigative ploy was going to work with a 250-pound black redneck?

Fleur hadn’t had the street address out in Kenner where he lived, near the airport, which was upper-crust black and had obviously been white a few years earlier. But she was able to recognize the house, where Rounds’ wife was out in halter and shorts trimming an honest-to-God magnolia tree. Also wearing a mouse under one eye and a swollen jaw, neither of which had come from an afternoon bridge game with the girls.

Posing as an insurance salesman, complete with clipboard and clear-glass horn-rims and a fruity manner, Heslip had been led out West End Boulevard to Bucktown and a dazzling white, crushed-shell parking lot near Lake Pontchartrain. It seemed that the uncharitable Mr. Rounds had, like Heslip, been a professional boxer. His career had led him, not to manhunting, but to part ownership of a rather fancy bar-restaurant catering to the tourist trade, which was built out over the water on concrete pilings. When Heslip pounded on the closed front door, it opened on a thin, white, dispirited face with a cigarette dangling from a lower corner of it.

“We’re closed,” said the face.

“Tell Rounds I’ll be waiting in the parking lot,” said Heslip. “Tell him it’s about his daughter.”

Five minutes later a hulking black man with massive shoulders and a strutting stride appeared, his eyes moving suspiciously from car to car until they spotted Heslip leaned against the fender of a Torino hardtop several stalls away from the rent-a-car where Fleur waited. Up close Rounds bore the marks of his former profession on his square, massive face. A flattened nose, thickened lips, scar tissue around the deep-set gorilla eyes. Maybe, Heslip thought, remembering the current wife’s battered appearance, Emmalina was lucky Rounds had dumped her years ago.

“I need your daughter’s address.” Heslip was still wearing the clear-glass horn-rims and carrying the clipboard, but the fruity manner was gone. “Your real daughter. Verna.”

Rounds’ eyes got even meaner than usual. He went into a half-crouch. “Lissen, Oreo, you got no call coming around...”

“Get off it,” Heslip snapped. “We know you never bothered to get unmarried from Emmalina, so your children by the woman you are living with now are illegitimate.” He curled his lips around the word. “Bastards, Rounds. Got it? Now, where’s Verna?”

Rage washed across Rounds’ features but there was also an underlying intelligence and caution Heslip hadn’t expected. This tempered that always smoldering rage, checked it, controlled it. “I ain’t telling you nothing.”

Heslip made a notation on his clipboard, holding it so Rounds could not see what he wrote. “That’s your choice, Rounds.” He looked up. “What’s your social secur... no. The computer has that.”

“What... what’re you writing there?” Much of the belligerence had drained from the big man’s voice.

“You’ll be...” He clicked his pen and pocketed it. “You’ll be served with a Summons and Complaint. Your attorney can explain...”

“Attorney? Summons and Complaint?”

“If it goes against you, you’ll lose the restaurant, of course. Convicted felons can’t be licensed for the on-premises sale of alcohol in this state.”

He turned and started to walk away. Rounds caught his arm.

“Convicted felon? What are you tellin’ me?”

Heslip shook his arm free and dissected him with icy bureaucratic eyes. “We don’t force cooperation, Rounds. That’s outside our constitutional brief. But when we find evidence of a felony committed by someone uncooperative, we feel no urgency to shield that person from the local authorities...”

“But I ain’t done anything!”

“Bigamy’s a felony, Rounds. I would think you’d know that.”

He started off again. Rounds kept pace, hunched and pleading. “Look, mister, it was Emmalina. She ran off, fifteen years ago. I would have gotten a legal divorce, I swear to you, but I couldn’t find her...”

“We have her statement to the contrary. The fact that she’s listed under ROUNDS, EMMALINA, in the Oakland, California phone book might influence a jury’s decision. Add petjury to the other—”

“Look, I tell you where to find Verna, what happens?”

“Our only interest is in contacting your daughter.”

Rounds shook his head in abrupt irritation. He said bitterly, “I know you bringin’ up all this stuff just to force me to talk. I want to know what happens to Verna if I tell you where she’s at.”

Once again Rounds had surprised him. The huge man’s ugly face was set in an agony of indecision.

“Nothing happens to her,” said Heslip. “We just need a statement from her.”

Rounds said softly, “Mister, that little girl got all the grief she can handle. Like to tore out my heart when she came into my home with tread marks on her arms and a pimp’s child in her belly.”

“It was our understanding you were hostile to your daughter,” he said in his cold bureaucratic voice.

“That first time she came to see me, you mean? Man, I have a wife and family that don’t know nuthin’ about Emmalina or Verna or the boy, Sammy. But she came to see me here, a bunch of times, and we got on fine. I gave her money to go North with that pimp...”

“Why North?” Heslip had almost forgotten his role.

“The pimp, he has relatives there, said they’d take care of her while she had the baby. She wrote a few times, it seemed to be working out. Then the letters quit cornin’.”

When he got back into the rent-a-car sixty seconds later, Fleur said eagerly, “Did we get anything?”

Heslip had to chuckle at her “we.” Emphasizing it, he said, “We got an address where she’s supposed to be. Or, least, was until about four months ago. One-ten Allerton Street, Roxbury, Massachusetts. Let’s find a phone and get me lined up with a flight to Boston, and then I’ll buy you dinner wherever you want.”

“Just over at Fontana’s,” she said, “is some of the best soft-shelled crab you ever ate.”

Not only the best, but the first.

Ballard had found Thomas Greenly listed in the Sacramento phone book; a $50,000-class house on Bartley Drive near William Land Park, not out of a civil servant’s honest reach these days. Greenly was third from the corner of Cavanaugh Way, so Ballard had to hit only those two houses before Greenly’s in his role as a census taker for the Polk Directory. The wife was obviously the one he had started with, one of the kids was in college and the other two in high school, all depressingly honest and aboveboard. No meat there for any conjecture of mob contacts, none at all.

Next stop, in on Sixteenth Street to 0, left to the 1000-block. The Business and Professions Building directory told him room 516, which he entered lugging half a dozen bulging legal-size files from the trunk of his car. His view through an open door from the secretary’s desk showed him the man from the anniversary photo the wife had proudly displayed. Medium height, lean, stooped, prominent Adam’s apple, dark hair receding from an accountant’s high brow.

“Hey, I’m really sorry” — scooping the files back up off her desk before she could open any of them — “I wanted 416. Only my second week on the job, I still get lost...”

Outside to park where he could see Greenly’s green Toyota, again, courtesy the talkative wife, and then he settled down to wait. Nothing on Greenly yet to think about or plan, so he thought about his night at the motel in Santa Rosa with Yana. What a woman! And so many contradictions. She couldn’t, for instance, read or write.

“Oh, I can recognize the shape of the letters that make up the name of the city — Santa Rosa, eh? — and I know numbers because we depend on the telephones a lot. But beyond that...”

He watched the first freshets of what would soon be a flood of departing civil servants start from the state buildings.

... beyond that, she had loved him and asked for nothing in return. She’d been sold to her husband for six thousand dollars when she’d been thirteen and her father had discovered she was sneaking into school on the sly instead of selling stolen flowers on street corners as she was supposed to be doing.

“I have miscarried seven times in the five years since then, because I have been unhappy. But now I am happy and you and me, we will make a very handsome baby.”

Which was not really what Ballard had in mind, but dammit! He had just caught a flash of the rear end of Greenly’s Toyota as it made a right into N Street off Seventh where Ballard was parked. He bulled across traffic to get seven cars behind it for a sedate inching back to Cavanaugh Way on Fifteenth Street. Ballard parked down the street and bored himself into a near-coma waiting for the house lights to go out.

When he finally left, nobody tailed Ballard to his motel.

When Heslip left Fontana’s, somebody tailed him back to Fleur’s place. At least he thought maybe somebody did. “You know anyone drives a white Monte Carlo Landau Coupe? I keep seeing the same car behind us.”

“Somebody jealous, you mean?” He nodded. “Jealous of a topless dancer?” She gave a great burst of laughter.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” said Heslip. He stopped at the curb and started to get out to go around and open her door.

“Yeah, I saw the way you couldn’t wait to get at me in that bed last night.” She grabbed his arm. “Don’t get out, you’ll miss your plane.” Her eyes were momentarily serious. “I’ll remember this day jus’ fine the way it is.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “That’s a lucky woman out there in San Francisco, Bart Heslip.”

She was out of the car and up the stairs with a wave of the hand. Quite a girl. He waved also, though she was already gone, then pulled out into traffic. And back to work, keeping an eye out for that Monte Carlo. It was dark, so he wasn’t sure until thirty minutes later, when he left I-10 at Williams Boulevard and could get a look at the car again under the streetlights.

Yeah. But why? Verna? Then who? And where and when and how had the men picked him up? Last night? This morning when they’d still been asleep at Fleur’s? Might explain the car locked when they’d come out. When and where. But how in the hell...

He went by the row of dilapidated taxis parked on the shoulder of Airport Highway waiting for radioed pickup calls from the terminal, checked in his rental car, and went up the escalator from ground level with the two men from the Monte Carlo so tight behind he was afraid they might try to stand on his step with him.

White, tough, not bright but dogged. How, for Chrissake, had they even known he was in New Orleans? What could Verna have that they wanted? Were they bird-dogging him to her, or trying to beat him to her? And how to shake them, notify Kearny of the tail, call Corinne to say he loved her...

Then he got a break. He noted, without seeming to, that his Boston flight would depart half an hour late. Gave him time to shake them. First, to the National Airlines desk on the second floor of the bright new modern building, for a one-way ticket to Miami on a flight leaving in three hours. Next, to an arcade restaurant with a second entrance from the corridor through the men’s room. Then, a table by the window to order a steak, pie, and coffee, with a three-minute discussion about the wine he would order.

While waiting for his supper, he went to the men’s room. The door, as he swung it open, reflected the images of his two tough-faced tails just settling down at the counter with coffee and pecan pie.

No, not bright. Not bright at all.

At Eastern he picked up the ticket he’d ordered that afternoon by phone, and made it through the airport security and onto the Boston-bound plane with a full sixty seconds before departure time. He slept most of the way to big, empty, echoing Logan International, where he found a pay phone from which to call Corinne. He gave a jaw-creaking yawn as he waited: at least he’d hit Boston clean.

“This is your handsome charming prince checking in,” he said.

“Bart!” Her voice became elaborately casual. “I thought I’d hear from you last night.”

“I’m sorry honey, it’s been a couple of hectic days.”

“Hectic days with Fleur?” She couldn’t keep the sudden venom out of her voice. Heslip’s mind raced against frightening thoughts.

“How in hell did you hear about Fleur?”

“So you did sleep with her!” she cried in despairing triumph. And hung up. And wouldn’t answer repeated rings. Damn, damn.