Gone, No Forwarding

Twenty-Five

It was eight at night before Cliff Brown appeared at the three-decker in Roxbury; a slight, black man with big feet he pointed out as he walked. His receding poll and horn-rim glasses gave him a spuriously intellectual look.

“Johnny Mack?” He shook his head. He smelled companionably of beer and cigars. Down the hall, a TV blared. “California.”

Heslip had a foot in the door. He was wearing shades to get the slightly menacing effect of a hooded falcon. “I heard different.”

“You heard wrong.” He gestured with his cigar. His voice was high-pitched and breathless, like a jackleg preacher shouting after parishioners on the street. “And if you don’t move that foot outta my door you gonna need a surgeon to sew it back on the ankle.”

“We heard Johnny Mack was livin’ with you.”

Brown came out on the porch a couple of feet, and Heslip stepped back. “Okay, that was four-five months back. But he lef, said he was goin back to California.”

“What about his woman? Verna take her dollar-a-day habit back to California, too?”

“Never heard of her.”

And Brown stepped nimbly back and slammed the door in Heslip’s face. Through the frosted glass panel, which was decorated with scrolls and fountains, he could hear Brown’s high-pitched sneering laughter. Chagrined, Heslip grunted, and went up the exterior stairway to the third-floor porch outside sister Ethel’s place. He had seen her going off somewhere an hour before; maybe her man knew something she didn’t.

He turned the knob and pulled the door back hard toward the hinges, then put his shoulder to the shellacked wood framing the glass panel, just where it met the door frame, and shoved violently. The door flew open and Heslip was in a hallway that ran back to the head of interior stairs leading down through the building. Opposite the head of the stairs was a varnished oak door leading into Ethel’s apartment.

Heslip knocked. After about forty-five seconds, a heavy-set black man wearing a striped shirt and maroon slacks and slippers opened the door. “How’d you git inside this buil—”

Heslip crowded against him and was inside. With a heel he hooked the door shut behind him. He didn’t know what degree of crime he was committing, since he knew nothing of Massachusetts statues; but he knew it was some sort of breaking and entering — at night, a dwelling, unarmed. The heavyset man gave before Heslip’s shove, then stood against the far side of the hall and let out a long, sad breath.

“After cash, there ain’t any. Movables, there’s the TV set and me.”

Heslip had his hands thrust deep in his topcoat pockets because he had no gloves and didn’t want to leave fingerprints. But he realized that with the shades and his bulky muscularity and those hands which could be holding guns in the pockets, he would pass as muscle.

“No rip-off,” he said. He let his head swivel theatrically to check down the hall toward the unlighted kitchen, up the hall toward the living room where a TV murmured, “You sittin’ the kids?”

The heavyset man stiffened slightly. His eyes went to the rear bedroom adjacent to the doorway where they stood. “Now you leave them kids outta whatever—”

“You sittin’ em?”

He sighed again, and nodded. He had a subdued but massive dignity. Heslip liked him but had to reduce him so the thought of resistance would seem remote to the man. “Your wife, Fat Stuff?”

“No need...” Heslip moved his right arm slightly. The man sighed again and the stiffness went from his stance. “Church.”

“We want a little chat with Johnny Mack, Stuff.”

“Is this... bad?”

“Don’t be worryin’ about his soul, if that’s what you mean.”

The heavyset man thought about it for a while. Heslip let him. He was in as deep as he could get anyway, if anything went wrong. He pushed a little more in the direction he wanted to go.

“No argument with you an’ yours, Stuff. Just think of us as a cloud cross the face of the moon.”

Another sigh. “He’s living with his brother Willy.”

“Where?”

“Don’t know the exact address. Few streets over on Madison. Ethel and Willy don’t get on even more than Ethel and Cliff don’t get on.”

“Cliff and Willy close?”

“Christmas and Easter — you know.”

Heslip nodded and gestured down the hall toward the kitchen. “I’ll use the back stairs. Gotta tell my man out back that we has drawn a blank covert.” He used a tight grin he figured went with his dark glasses and the theatricality of his entrance. “You go on back an’ watch that TV, and tell yourself your phone is out of order for an hour or two. Dig?”

“I got a woman and kids I care more about than pimps and drug pushers. Go with God, brother.”

Heslip used his grin again. “Just so I go, right, blood?”

On his way out of the apartment to the rear stairs, he took the key from the kitchen door. It was a simple three-tumbler, not a cylinder lock, and he hoped the key might be joggled around to open Clifford’s back door, below.

Ten minutes later, when a commercial sent Cliff Brown down to the kitchen for another beer, Heslip was waiting. As Cliff started in from the hall, Heslip’s open left hand collided with his face and sent him windmilling across the room backwards to slam up against the old-fashioned porcelain sink with the slanted tile drainboard beside it.

Heslip advanced, his right hand jammed in the coat pocket, bunched and slightly raised in the best Bogart tradition, one knuckle pressed against the cloth to approximate a gun.

“I told you we had business with Johnny Mack.” He let his voice rumble deep in his chest. “Now, without I get brother Willy’s address, we gonna have business with you first.”

At about the same time, Ballard was making a score of his own, although he didn’t know it at first. He hadn’t had a decent cup of coffee all day, and his hours in various Sacramento offices — county recorder, tax assessor, vital statistics, registrar — had been fruitless. Greenly was pure, pure, pure. So when the little green Toyota zipped over into a tow-away zone on Broadway just off Twenty-fourth Street, Ballard didn’t expect anything except someone getting a ride home. Not even when the someone was a hefty mid-twenties girl with a pretty face and meaty thighs.

But the ride wasn’t home. Instead, up onto the freeway at the massive interchange of 99 and 80, then west on Interstate 80. That was when Ballard’s hopes started to rise, especially when they went off on West Capitol Avenue where all the rendezvous motels were located. But their destination was a costly anonymous steak house, not one of the hot-sheet joints which flanked it. They had cassis and soda in the lounge while Ballard — who had never heard of cassis and soda — had a Miller’s at the bar, and while they ate filet mignon with mushroom caps in the dining room, Ballard had another Miller’s at the bar, to wash down two sacks of pretzels.

No hand-holding or meaty thigh-massaging before, during, or after the steaks. Greenly was about as romantic as a doctor treating a virus. And it was short of nine-o’clock when Ballard front-tailed them back up onto the freeway for the run back into Sacramento proper. Still, it was something. And it got better.

Because Greenly stayed on Interstate 80 to where it swung north and cut through the California Exposition grounds, where the state fair was held each year, Ballard was behind him again by the time he took the Arden Way exit to Howe Avenue and, a few blocks north, a modem apartment building two stories high and half a block long, shaped like a motel. The green Toyota went into stall 23 and Greenly and the girl went upstairs.

Ballard was standing in front, in the driveway, when lights went on in a second-floor apartment. He went up and checked the door — Apartment 23 — and then down to check mailboxes. Madeline Westfield.

Who held Greenly there for under two hours. The tailjob back to Bartley Drive put Greenly into bed yet again before midnight. And, Ballard was sure, to sleep. He would have spent his sexual energy on Madeline. For the wife, the tale of a late-night budget session or the weekly poker game with the boys. For Ballard, back at his motel, a message to call Dan Kearny at 8 A.M. at a number Ballard didn’t recognize. Left for him two hours earlier.

Which meant that about the time Ballard had watched Madeline Westfield’s bedroom lights go out, Kearny had been ringing Benny Nicoletti’s doorbell. It was an old dark Victorian on Elizabeth Street below Diamond Heights. Kearny had never been there before. There were fancy frosted glass panels on either side of the door with Nicoletti’s initials on them. A plain-faced woman answered.

“Come in, Mr. Kearny.” She shook hands firmly. “We’ve talked on the phone enough times so I feel I know you. Benny’s down in his shop.”

Kearny stopped at the bottom of the stairs in surprise. There was a full woodworking shop — lathe, drill press, circle and band and jig saws, an electric planer, lots of hand tools.

“When the cops retire me, I’ll be a cabinetmaker,” said Nicoletti. His heavy body was draped in a brown smock and his forearms were speckled with wood shavings. “I’m trying to turn four exactly similar table legs, and if you don’t think that’s a bitch...”

Kearny looked around for an ashtray.

“Use that coffee can for your butts. What couldn’t keep until morning?” There was only curiosity, not rebuke, in his voice.

“My office is bugged,” said Kearny.

“Bugged?” Nicoletti, who had just sat down on the edge of the tool bench, bounced to his feet. “You ain’t suggesting I—”

“The equipment is too good for you boys.”

Benny was pacing the pathway of uncluttered concrete between the various power tools by the time Kearny stopped talking. He was even smoking one of Kearny’s cigarettes. “So they know who our witness is, and they know we’ve brought him down from Canada. They know he’s pointed a finger at Pivarski’s DMV photo, but that don’t matter because he might be able to I.D. the actual killer if he ever saw him face to face. So my bet is they want him, and want him bad, just for insurance.”

Kearny stubbed his third cigarette. “Anyway, I told you about it.” He stood up and yawned. “I hope your operation is as leakproof as you think it is.”

“Me and two other guys know where he is, that’s all.” He was pacing again, thinking aloud. “What say we use the bug to feed ’em false information? You game?”

“False information such as what?”

Twenty minutes later Kearny left, to Mrs. Nicoletti’s profuse apologies for not getting the chance to pour some coffee down him. From a gas station he called Ballard’s Sacramento motel and left a message that he wanted to be called at 8 A.M. The number he left was that of a suburban pay phone a quarter of a mile from his house in the East Bay town of Lafayette. He doubted that even Hawkley’s busy little legions had started bugging pay phones at random.

Heslip had fallen asleep in his rented Pinto outside 428 Madison Street, the address he had coerced out of the terrified Clifford Brown. He hadn’t wanted to fall asleep, but here it was the wee hours of Friday morning and his head hadn’t hit a pillow since those few hours in Fleur Lisette’s bed some forty-eight hours back.

Not that he would miss anything. Willie Brown wasn’t about to be home during the hours from dusk to dawn, if then: the neighbors had confirmed what Ethel’s husband had suggested with his remark about pimps and drug pushers. Johnny Mack would be the pimp in question; Willie, the drug pusher. Johnny Mack was intermittently there — the same could be said of Willie — but Verna wasn’t. And no baby had been seen.

He could have gone looking, but he didn’t know this town. Didn’t have a photo of Verna, not even a good description of Johnny Mack. This address was all he had, so he had to make this address work for him. Couldn’t even call DKA, find out how the hearings were going. Couldn’t call Corinne except at work, if there...

And he fell asleep, even freezing his butt off because he couldn’t chance a telltale exhaust that would alert careful dope dealer eyes. People who dealt in dope had careful eyes, or they passed quickly from the street scene to prison, or to the morgue, or into the sad hollow dreams they sold to the unwary.