Gone, No Forwarding

Twenty-Seven

Dan Kearny dialed and when a hard male voice answered, asked for Benny Nicoletti. Nicoletti was out. Kearny left his name and number. Seven minutes later the unlisted phone rang — the line wasn’t run through the switchboard.

“I got your message.”

“Pivarski is going to be there on Monday,” said Kearny. “The Hearing Officer made it official.”

“Monday!” exclaimed Nicoletti. “I thought this afternoon was when they were supposed to—”

“Delaney conned him into waiting until Monday. Said Hawkley couldn’t have his client there until after the weekend.”

“Those bastards gotta have a pipeline!” exclaimed Nicoletti angrily. “After the weekend! Hell, that’s exactly...” He paused. “Look, Dan, not on the phone. Can you come over to the Hall?”

“No way. After Monday I might not have a license, I’m getting out all the billing I can today, so—”

“Okay. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Kearny hung up and looked at his watch and blew out a deep breath. Right on schedule. The bastards had better be listening. When Nicoletti’s bulky form filled the open doorway a few minutes later, Kearny actually was immersed in the billing. He looked up. “I don’t know why I ever agreed to cooperate with you guys,” he said crossly to the big cop. “Shut the door.”

Nicoletti did.

Kearny said, “Okay, what couldn’t you tell me on the phone?”

Nicoletti leaned forward confidentially. By so doing, he brought his head closer to the bugged phone. “Dan, there’s gotta be a leak in the Department. What tipped me was your saying they insisted Pivarski couldn’t show at the hearing until after the weekend. See, we got him down here early in the week, told him it’d be a day, two days, for us to set up an eyeball of Pivarski for him. Now all of a sudden it’s going on a week. So just yesterday he told us that was it, back to Canada Friday night — tonight — if he isn’t shown Pivarski in the flesh today.”

He leaned back and sighed gustily. “I’ll do my damndest between now and tonight to talk him into staying until Monday, but I think we’re dead. Jesus, what a mess.” He stood up and shook hands with Kearny, winked and grinned and said, in a very worried voice, “I’ll let you know if we can get him to change his mind.”

When he was gone Kearny lit a cigarette. So, if the tapes were turning, this would take the pressure off Nicoletti’s witness. And on Monday morning when Hawkley finally brought Pivarski in thinking there was no chance of him being eyeballed by the linen-truck driver, he would get a surprise.

Ballard was singularly unsurprised to learn the resident manager of Madeline Westfield’s apartment house could tell him little of the tenant in Apartment 23. That was par for the course. But the manager, Mrs. Garnison, wasn’t. She was the rarest of landladies, one who didn’t give a damn. She was an imperious, iron-haired fifty-five, with iron in the spine and an open mind.

“Madeline? In a place like this, one of my oldest tenants. She’s been here nearly two years, I’d have to look it up if you need an exact date.”

“Two years is fine.” Ballard had said he was from a bank to which Ms. Madeline Westfield had applied for credit.

“Banks want to know a lot more than they have to.” She was knitting, her large, shapely, capable hands moving with bewildering speed, clicking the needles in a syncopated counterpoint to her words. She never looked down; some inner computer seemed to know when those hands had taken the needles to the end of a row.

“Well, she wants to finance a very expensive car through the bank, and they want to be sure she can handle the payments. Can you confirm where she works?”

“Last I knew...” She was squinting. She started to shake her head, then her face cleared. “Sure. When she took the apartment, she was working for United Parcel Service.”

Ballard nodded sagely. “That agrees with our records. Now, how can I put this, Mrs. Garnison? Personal data. Do you know of any personal habits that aren’t... well, that might interfere...” He let his tut-tut expression speak for him. “Any special boyfriends or...”

She shook her head vigorously. “Mister, she could run a football team through that apartment for all I know or care, long as their cleats don’t scar the floors.”

That was that from Mrs. Garnison. He used the same pay phone that he had used that morning with Kearny to call the retail credit agency he’d asked to get a complete rundown on Greenly’s credit.

“Oh, hi, Mr. Ballard, I’m glad you called. We just got that data you requested. As we told you yesterday, his current rating is top of the heap. But the computer tells us that as recently as five months ago his credit was very spotty. Bad pay on credit cards and retail accounts, paid the late penalty on his house note for seven months out of an eleven-month period. Classic picture of a man getting into financial trouble. Then he got healthy and has stayed that way ever since.”

Ballard felt a rising excitement. Greenly was beginning to come together in a picture very different from the one he presented to the casual observer.

“Anything in the derogs to suggest what his problem was?” Derogs were raw data, derogatory reports collected in the field from friends, associates or neighbors by the retail credit checking firm. They did not go into client reports.

“Um...” Ballard could hear papers being shuffled. “A number of informants said he liked poker and the ponies. Gambling.”

“Women?”

“Steady family man, by all reports.”

More and more, Madeline Westfield was beginning to look like a charade played for Madeline’s benefit. Greenly, in financial trouble through gambling, is subverted by mob money for some purpose. What? No idea. But something involving DKA in some way. To get what the mob needs, he has to seduce Madeline Westfield. He goes through the motions, gets what he needs.

So the something has to do with Madeline’s job. What in hell could an employee of United Parcel Service have that someone out after DKA could need? Answer: Madeline was no longer employed at UPS. So one of Ballard’s jobs was to get her current employment. And in Sacramento he was pretty sure it was in state government. And not in Professional and Vocational Standards, because then Greenly could have gotten what he needed on his own.

Ballard caught Interstate 80 back downtown, and got off at Fifteenth Street. Greenly banked at the Bank of Tokyo on Broadway and Fourteenth. Time to try to fake his way into a look at Greenly’s account. See if five or six months ago heavy cash deposits had suddenly begun. See if cash payments to Madeline Westfield had begun. He was sitting outside in the Cutlass trying to work up the nerve to pass himself off as a state investigator when he had an inspiration. One of those inspirations recognized — if not always understood — not only by detectives private and public, but by scholars, researchers, and genealogists among others. The sudden rush of feeling that made you tum around and go back to ask the final question and break the case. The phone call you hadn’t planned to make, the public record book you reached for when the one you really wanted was out, the name you looked under in a phone book that had no rational connection with your subject but was the name he was hiding under, all the same.

For Ballard it was a word. Gambling. And an absolute knowledge that Greenly, as an accountant himself, would never run dirty money through his bank account. And finally, the fact that it was Friday, and people need extra cash over the weekends.

Thus he was parked on O Street off Seventh at 12:06 when Greenly emerged from the Business and Professions Building. So sure had Ballard been that he’d already fed the meter an hour’s worth of change, so he had only to get out and saunter along half a block behind the spare figure moving through the noontime lunchers, strollers, and window-shoppers from the adjacent government offices.

Right into a savings and loan company eight blocks from Greenly’s office. Since Ballard’s face meant no more to Greenly than a cantaloupe, he was close by when Greenly strode back to the safe-deposit window and read the number off his key to the girl. “Box eleven eighty-seven, please.”

“Yes, sir.” The bright-faced girl riffled through the signature file, compared it with the name Greenly had written on the slip. “Right this way, Mr. Maling.”

Ballard, standing at the closest customer table, wrote “1187” on the back of a withdrawal slip, along with “Maling,” and put the folded slip in his pocket. Greenly shortly emerged from the gate into the big, steel-gleaming vault. Several minutes and three blocks later, Ballard watched Greenly, in a quasi-skid-row area a detour away from his office, enter, in turn, a cigar shop and a Chinese laundry.

Since he was stuffing no cigars in his pocket as he emerged from the cigar store and carried no shirts under his arm from the Chinese laundry, Ballard deduced that he had been placing bets with cash gotten from the safe-deposit box. Not a bad trick for a feller whose sole source of income, according to retail credit, came from his salary with the State of California.

The rest of the day was anticlimactic. Out at the huge echoing United Parcel Service warehouse on Shore Street in West Sacramento he learned that Madeline Westfield had left her job as a package sorter nineteen months before, when her Civil Service job as a clerk-typist for the State of California had come through. No idea where she had landed as a clerk-typist, except that it was indeed with the State.

Back downtown, for miles and hours of red tape from office to office, until he was brought to the cubicle of the lady who could tell him where Madeline was now employed — the lady in this cubicle in the Department of Employment on Eighth Street. Only it was empty. Its occupant had left forty-seven minutes early for the weekend and no, nobody else could help him because, see here, mister, this is Friday and we have to clear our desks. Come back Monday, fellow. Who do you think you are?

Nobody, my friend. Nobody at all. Just a taxpayer.

Ten minutes before the streetlights went on, a purple hog with two black men and three white women in it pulled up in front of 428 Madison Street. Heslip came erect behind the wheel of the Pinto, happily jerked from his thoughts by the arrival. They had not been pleasant thoughts because his mind, unbidden, had kept returning to the venomous, weak, hurt, frightened voice of Fleur. God almighty, her nose cut off, an ear gone — could a plastic surgeon fix things like that?

Whatever it cost, DKA was going to pay for it, either out of the health plan or out of pocket.

And then the Cadillac showed up. Behind the wheel was a hard-faced dude wearing a wide-brimmed hat and smoking a cheroot. That would be Willy. The pusher. The other man got out, with one of the girls. Dressed in funky plaid threads and a floppy cap. He would be Johnny Mack. Peanut butter. Off the wall.

The purple hog whispered away as Johnny Mack and the girl, who looked like she was right off the Greyhound, went up the front steps. No hairdo for the girl, a skirt to cover her knees instead of barely covering her pudenda. Yeah. Johnny Mack would be taking her application, recruiting her to his string with a tumble in the sack. As they went through the front door he was all over her, squeezing and touching and loving up.

By this time Heslip was out of the Pinto and halfway across the street. As he reached the sidewalk the streetlights went on, casting his abrupt, moving shadow around his ankles. He looked up and down the street — and froze.

In the next block two bulky men were getting out of the Chrysler. For the first instant he recognized only the stance: the set of the feet, the way the arms were held, the slight arrogance in the tilt of the head. That edge of contempt that physical competence gives one. It is a stance with no innocence. Heslip had some of it himself from his years in the ring, which was why he could successfully pose as muscle when the need arose.

In the next instant he recognized the men — the ones who had tailed him from Fleur’s house to the airport in New Orleans. Sure to have been two of the four who attacked Zeb Rounds. Also sure to have been those who slashed up Fleur Lisette.

Here in Boston. Here, now.

Heslip was taking the outside stairs of the three-decker two at a time. He was sure Johnny Mack was taking the girl to the upstairs flat. If the two strongarms caught up with him, they would have Verna next. Johnny Mack would be a slender reed.

Johnny Mack was at the door of the third-floor flat, key in hand and free arm around the giggling, clinging girl, when Heslip kicked in the outside door and came through from the porch. Johnny Mack thrust the girl toward Heslip and backed up against the wall with his hands out toward Heslip, palm first. “You want Willy Brown,” he babbled. “I ain’t him. Ain’t even a friend, jus bummed the borrow of his apartment fo—”

“You,” Heslip snapped at the girl. “Out of this.” He saw she was stoned on weed. He grabbed an arm, almost threw her across the hall at the interior staircase by which she and Johnny Mack had just come up. “Downstairs, and if you’re smart, get a bus back to Podunkville and stay there.”

With a drug-tranquilized look, she shrugged and went down the stairs. As she disappeared from sight, she started to giggle. Heslip crowded Johnny Mack up against the door frame and bunched both muscular hands in the lapels of his suitcoat. “Where’s Verna? Fast and quick.”

“Man, I don’t know where that bitch—”

Heslip slammed the back of his head against the edge of the frame so hard he cried out. “There’s two men on the way up who cut the nose off a girl in New Orleans for giving them that answer. Talk, goddam you!”

Johnny Mack split wide open as Heslip had expected. “I ain’t seen her since she had the baby, like three months ago. Only heard she’d been in the hospital after she was gone—”

“Which hospital?”

“Boston Lying-In.”

“Doctor who?”

Johnny Mack was almost crying with tenor. “Man, how in hell’m I gonna know...”

Heslip slapped the keys to the Pinto into Johnny Mack’s hand. More than anything else, he had to keep this dude out of the hands of the strongarms. They’d get the hospital lead and go from there to Verna. “It’s a red Pinto on the other side of the street down near the corner. Go through the apartment and use the rear stairs to the alley. Go around to the car. Wait in it for me. If they spot you, take off with the car. Otherwise, wait — or I’ll find you and splinter your elbows. Go!”

Johnny Mack went. As soon as the apartment door clicked shut behind him, Heslip started pounding on it and shouting. “Open up there!” he yelled. “Goddammit, Verna, I know you’re in there. Open that door, or...”

From behind the locked door he heard the distant slam of the rear door. Johnny Mack on his way down the back staircase. Heslip hoped the bastard wouldn’t steal his car, but it was better than letting the strongarms get him.

“Verna Rounds, I know you’re in there!” He yelled. He smashed his fists against the door. “You and that pimp of yours!”

Silence, within and without. He was silent himself, listening. Nothing. He went to the stairwell, leaned down, listened. Nothing. Had the bastards shucked him, and been waiting at the foot of the back stairs to grab Johnny Mack?

Heslip went up the hall to the outside door he’d kicked in, and out onto the front porch. From there he could see down the three flights of wooden stairs to the street. It had gotten darker while he’d been inside, but he could see the men weren’t on the stairs.

At the railing he leaned out to crane down the street and saw Johnny Mack running across toward the parked Pinto, where he stopped to fumble at the unlocked door.

Heslip leaned out further yet to look up the next block at the Chrysler New Yorker. He almost fell over the railing. The Chrysler was gone. Gone? But then... he knew the two men had been the same ones who...

He looked back to the Pinto. As he did, it dissolved into a fireball. The thud of concussion sent a shock wave of air against his face. As he stared in horror, frozen for the moment there on the third-floor porch, the realization rose up like vomit in his throat: the killers hadn’t been after Verna Rounds. They had been after Bart Heslip.