Gone, No Forwarding

Twenty-Nine

Benny Nicoletti’s Sunday brunch was held in the Chief’s deserted conference room at the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street because the Chief didn’t work on Sundays but his secretary did, and he owed Nicoletti a couple of favors. No record was kept of the meeting, and there was no way anyone could have bugged it beforehand. Kearny came in the front entrance of the Hall fluttering a traffic citation, then left the elevator at the wrong floor. Nicoletti came in from Harriet Alley through the police garage. Tranquillini used the rear entrance off Harrison Street by the Coroner’s office.

Last to arrive was Johnny Delaney, who knew only that he and his wife had returned from a movie the night before to find a uniformed patrolman waiting on the front stoop. Delaney was merely asked to meet with the head of the Police Intelligence Unit at the Chiefs office the next morning. Being no fool and a bit ambitious, Delaney had expressed total delight at this opportunity to blow his Sunday. “Inspector Nicoletti? Johnny Delaney of the Attorney General’s Office. Pleased to meet you.”

As they shook hands, Nicoletti said, “I have a favor to ask. I think you know Dan and Hec.”

Delaney, seeing them for the first time around Nicoletti’s formidable bulk, stopped dead. “What the hell is this?” he said angrily.

“First you listen, then you talk.”

“First I walk,” snapped Delaney, turning back toward the door.

“Your ass is on the line,” said Nicoletti to his back.

Johnny Delaney swiveled slowly, his lips drawn back into a truculent sneer. “According to who, Nicoletti?”

“Information received, as the feller says.”

“You exceeded your brief, Johnny-me-bhoy,” said Tranquillini in his irritating way, “when you conned Dan into paying Pivarski so you could try to use it against him at the hearing.”

“There was nothing illegal about that,” said Delaney defensively. Without realizing it, he had turned back and was pulling back a chair from the conference table.

“How about ethical?”

Delaney colored slightly.

“The point is, Johnny,” said Kearny, “that I know DKA ain’t guilty of anything. So I’ve had my men out, checking around.”

The easy anger of his Irish heritage thickened Delaney’s voice. “On me?”

“On Greenly. Who’s on the take.” Delaney said nothing, so Kearny continued, “Unless you’ve got another way of explaining how he could be behind in his house payments from gambling up to five months ago, then suddenly turning into A-l pay — without quitting gambling. That he keeps a safe-deposit box under a phony name and a mistress on the side. That he’s dropping markers with bookies all over Sacramento.”

Delaney finally sighed, like a man who had just laid down a heavy load. He hadn’t been sleeping too well because of going along with Greenly; he was almost glad to hear the man was dirty. “Dan, I want you to know that I made that offer in good faith. And urged Greenly to drop the charges if you paid. But he said...”

“If Dan didn’t believe that,” said Tranquillini coldly, “you wouldn’t be here.”

“How about you, Hec?”

Tranquillini shrugged, his face devoid of emotion. “I always felt it was Greenly’s idea. But I told you at the hearing what I felt about it. I’m going to bust your ass for it, John. Not today or tomorrow, maybe. But sometime... in some courtroom...”

“Meanwhile,” said Nicoletti, “let me tell you about this favor I want to ask.”

But first he laid everything out for Delaney. The hit on Fazzino, the fact that Pivarski had been I.D.’d from a driver’s license photo as the hit man, the fact that he couldn’t be because he’d been in Kearny’s Oakland office at the time of the murder.

“And we’re even more sure of that now than we were before,” said Nicoletti, including Kearny and Tranquillini in his remarks. “I’ve had men out digging. Pivarski was delivering plaster that day to a subdivision site down in Fremont. He delivered his last load there just in time to get out to Concord to Hawkley’s office, then down to the DKA office by about five-thirty. We checked on the deposit Simson made to the bank. They don’t log-in deposits, but they do have a rule that any deposit made after five o’clock is recorded as a transaction on the following banking day. The one Simson made on November fifth was recorded the following Monday — the eighth.”

“So where do I come in?” asked Delaney.

“I want you to meet Hawkley and Pivarski at the Golden Gate entrance of the State Office Building tomorrow morning, rather than inside, and maybe take them up the street to a coffee shop to discuss Pivarski’s testimony ahead of time.”

“I’d do that anyway,” said Delaney. “But why—”

“My witness is in town even though we’re sure Hawkley thinks he left for Canada on Friday. We want him to get an eyeball of Pivarski.”

“Why? If you’re sure Pivarski isn’t the man—”

“Mainly because Hawkley has worked so hard to keep us from getting an eyeball of him.”

Delaney was silent for a time. Finally he shrugged. “Okay. As long as you guys all understand that I think

DKA is guilty as charged, and that I’m going to do my damndest tomorrow to take away their license to operate.”

Nicoletti made a grandly dismissive gesture. “Fine with me.”

Kearny looked glum. Tranquillini nodded.

“And as long as you understand, Johnny, that I’m going to roast your witness’s butt in a way you wouldn’t believe.”

Harris House was a five-story brownstone in the 100-block of West 122nd Street in Harlem. Bart Heslip had gotten off the bus from Boston at the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue, had wired his flowers to Rosalind Parton, and then had walked the Sunday-sparse streets up to 122nd just to get the kinks out. At the front door he was told that Mommy Harris was off at church with the older among her fifty charges, and that he should come back at eleven.

As he was finishing a cup of coffee around the corner, he saw a fiftyish-looking slat-thin black woman, followed by a Pied Piper gang of kids, trooping by the direction of Harris House. He finished his coffee and followed.

Ten minutes later he sat with Loretta Harris, the woman’s daughter, in her paneled, crowded office of the ground-floor hall of Harris House. Through the half-open door could be heard the muffled confusion of half-a-hundred kids freed by the Lord’s day from weekday restraints. “Bart Heslip, sure. Rosie Parton called this morning. Thinks she’s tough, that one, woman of science, detached, medical.” She gave a rolling peal of laughter. “Soft as butter. My mother will be either out in the kitchen seeing what the cook’s up to for Sunday dinner, or on the second-floor babies’ suites.”

Going up the stairs to the nursery after striking out in the kitchen, Heslip felt a growing sense of anticipation. In the past ten days he’d come to have a puzzled regard for Verna Rounds. Started out as an ignorant little file clerk, so ignorant she got recruited into whoring, got knocked up and clapped up and on heroin — and could you get any dumber than that? Then quit the profession, lost a baby, cold-turkey’d her habit, and now was an assistant in the damndest orphanage Heslip had ever seen.

An orphanage where the kids had living parents who were off straightening themselves out, kids who’d been born junkies, kids who now got love and attention from a sixty-five-year-old black woman he was about to meet. He thrust his head around the doorjamb, “Mrs. Harris?”

The thin woman he’d seen on the street had as warm a smile as her daughter’s fleshier one. Her face had the tremendous dignity certain black faces got with age and righteousness, yet was youthful and humorous despite the network of wrinkles around the deep-set eyes. “Call me Mommy, most everyone does.”

“Bart Heslip.”

“About Verna. Yes. Come on in, let’s walk and talk a bit.”

They walked and talked the length of the babies’ suite, which ran the length of the house. At the front were cots for the two- and three-year-olds being made up or changed by a couple of chattering assistants. Heslip had noted all the assistants were black.

“The girls who work here, are they...” He paused.

“Ex-addicts?” Mommy shook her head. “Ex-addicts have been through detoxification and withdrawal, but they still have to live in residences where they can get constant advice and attention and see a psychiatrist when they need one — at least once a week. We just don’t have time for that around here. The kids take all our attention.” She gave a sunny smile. “And all our love.”

“Then Verna must be different,” said Heslip.

“Oh, she is, she is. Her baby had died, for one thing, and she needed someone to care for outside herself, bad as a body can need. Also, she didn’t need any rehabilitation. She’d done that for herself, along with Rosalind’s help.”

At the rear of the house was a bright, sunny room where the very small children who still needed cribs slept. The walls were vivid with nursery wallpaper; the floor was atumble with toys and stuffed animals and dolls. Some toddlers were going down a small, bright, metal slide in the middle of the room. Others played with toys, one was crying, a little girl was bashing a little boy over the head with a big red sausagelike balloon, both of them crowing gleefully.

Keeping minimum order was a slim black girl with big warm eyes and a patient face and her hair worn in the sort of bun that Mommy wore. Mommy stopped to hug a little girl who was trying a variety of dresses on a brand-new-looking doll, one after another without first removing the previous one.

“My, isn’t that a pretty doll?” Mommy marveled.

“That fum my mama,” said the girl.

“Just as beautiful as can be. But not as beautiful as you.” They went on. Mommy said to Heslip, “Her mother quit the street, and has a job as a secretary while she studies window-decorating. In another year she’ll be able to take Elaine home with her.”

“They look pretty much like any other kids,” said Heslip.

“Oh, the kids aren’t the problems. It’s the mothers. They don’t know how to take care of children, and I think drug addiction dulls the maternal instincts, bums out the ability to reach out toward someone else. Even your child. We not only have to train the mothers to care for their kids, we have to teach them how to love their kids, too.”

“That makes Verna even more unusual.”

They were beside the slide where the assistant was making the children take orderly turns.

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” said Mommy Harris. “Verna, this is Mr. Heslip from San Francisco, who I told you about.”

They were drinking strong, fresh coffee at one of the long tables where the children and the help ate all their meals family-style. Heslip had laid out the whole thing for both women, but Verna did not seem to have assimilated what he had said. When she spoke, it was only of kids under her care. “Oh, I have the terriblest time knowin’ whut to do, and that’s the very truth,” she said. Her adoring gaze rested on Mommy’s face for a moment. “But I’m leamin’.”

“Big trouble is,” said the older woman, “around here we get thinking these kids are like other kids. But they aren’t. Not emotionally.”

“Highs an lows,” said Verna. She had a habit of fixing her gaze on Mommy Harris even when speaking to Heslip. “They ain’t — aren’t — as even as other kids. Don’t get somethin’ they want, off they go. Cryin’, canyin’ on somethin’ awful.” She added, in quick defense, “Cain’t blame ’em none. Not after what they been through. They ain’t ever had nuthin’. Not ever, long as they’ve lived.”

Heslip had trouble believing this girl had ever been a whore and a junkie. She didn’t have any of the ghetto brashness other black girls of her background had. But he sensed a steel core inside that he’d sensed in her fat old mother out in Oakland, and that was the salient feature of Mommy Harris. Who smiled her abrupt brilliant smile and stood up.

“Time for chores, my goodness.” But when Verna started to rise also, she put a hand on the younger woman’s shoulder. To Heslip, she said, “I’m just a bug for a clean house, and when you have fifty little ones a clean house is hard to come by.” To Verna she said, “Take all the time you need, honey,” and shook hands with Heslip and was gone.

There was a moment of constraint between Verna and Heslip. Then he said, “You love it here, don’t you?”

“Ain’t leavin’ till they th’ow me out.” She drank the last of her coffee and shook her head. “The urge fo’ that shit, it still get so strong sometimes when I’m lyin’ alone at night. But I get up an’ go into that babies’ suite, an’ I walk up an down lookin’ at them little tots wouldn’t have no chance wasn’t fo’ Mommy bein’ there for ’em like Doctor Parton was fo’ me, an’ then I go back to sleep like a baby.” She met his eyes and sighed. “So you figure it’s somethin’ I know ’bout that Friday afternoon? Mos’ a year ago?”

“That’s the only thing that makes sense,” said Heslip. “Friday, November fifth, last year. Do you even remember it?”

She remembered it, and went through the whole thing without a word of prompting from Heslip. Her memory was so vivid because it was her first time on the switchboard and she made a mess of it. And she remembered Pivarski (“that dude Pee-somethin”) because she couldn’t pronounce his name.

“And you saw the whole transaction?” asked Heslip.

“Was standin’ in the doorway blowin’ bubbles.”

“Did Pivarski give Kathy anything? A—”

“Give her two hundred dollars.”

“Anything else? Oh... an envelope or a letter or—”

“Wasn’t anything like that, Mist’ Heslip. He paid her, she give him a receipt, he got up an lef.”

“Where was Jeff Simson all this time?”

“Out at his desk where he b’long.”

Heslip drank the final gulp of cold coffee, then sat frowning at the bright gold and white curtain beyond Verna’s head. Afternoon sun poured into the room, backlighting her face. Jesus, nothing there. Nothing at all. A totally routine collection. Did it justify jeopardizing her life by asking her to go back with him? Why didn’t he just stand up and walk out of there and go back himself and tell them he couldn’t find her?

“All of that he’p any?” she asked. “That gonna be of any use Mist’ Kearny an’ Miss Giselle an’ all, to keep their license fo’ ’em?”

Heslip didn’t answer, poised on the knife-edge of decision.

“Cause I gotta a lot of work to do, an’ if I ain’t up there, Mommy Harris, she just pitch in an’ do my share herse’f.”

Heslip stared at her. And finally said, “What do you feel you ought to do, Verna?”

Ballard had planned to be waiting outside the proper window in the Department of Employment office when it opened at eight-thirty on Monday morning, so he could find out where Madeline Westfield worked. But when he came out to get into his car at six-thirty, he had of all things a flat tire. Fixing it involved him in commuter traffic, especially once he was on Interstate 80 beyond Bay Bridge, so it was nearer nine-thirty when he thrust his head through the opening and asked his question of the woman who had left forty-seven minutes early on Friday. She answered with one of her own.

“This Madeline Westfield is a civil service employee of the State of California?” She was a flattened-down-forty, with dark hair and a bright nylon scarf knotted about her muscular neck. She asked her question as if expecting to catch him in an indiscretion.

“That’s my understanding, yes, ma’am.”

A minute of page-turning and she had it. And told him.

What? his mind shrieked. She worked where? In which section?

He lit out running for a phone, before remembering that he couldn’t phone because of the bug on the DKA phone. He checked his watch. Nine twenty-six. The hearing started at ten. If he drove like hell, he surely would be there before Pivarski had testified and departed. Wouldn’t he? Hec Tranquillini planned a minute cross-examination. Man, so inevitable, so logical, when you thought it through. It was the only place she could have worked for Greenly to have had to seek her out and subvert her.

Hawkley stepped to the Golden Gate curb from his nephew’s car at 9:31 A.M. — tall, lean, aged but not frail, skin like tough old leather. Looked exactly like the folksy cracker-barrel attorney whose image he tried to create. He and Delaney shook hands.

“A pleasure I assure you, Mr. Delaney. My nephew Norbert has been telling me wonderful things about your conduct of the State’s case in this hearing.” He turned slightly to the second man emerging from the back seat. He was big, muscular, square of body and of head. “Mr. Delaney. Mr. Pivarski.”

Christ, thought Delaney, the guy looks like a Polish joke. “Delighted, Mr. Pivarski.”

“Yeah.” The voice grated like a diesel changing gears.

Delaney turned back to Hawkley, who was just ordering Franks to put the car in the Civic Center Parking Garage and return. He said, “We’ve got a half-hour before the hearing, Mr. Hawkley. I’d very much appreciate a chance to take Mr. Pivarski through his testimony before his appearance on the stand, and to do it where the opposition won’t disturb us.” He gestured down wind-blown Golden Gate at the Larkin intersection a long half block away. “We could go up the street for a cup of coffee...”

“An excellent suggestion,” said Hawkley.

Norbert Franks pulled out into traffic, making a battered six-passenger Checker Cab wait, as the three tall men, two bulky and one thin, started down Golden Gate Avenue toward the coffee shop.

“You get a good look at him?” demanded Benny Nicoletti from the back seat of the Checker Cab.

The linen-truck driver, a much paler and thinner man than he had been a year before, nodded. He was facing backwards in the jump seat opposite Nicoletti. There were three more large and competent men in the car besides them and the driver. Nicoletti clicked on the safety of the riot gun lying across his knees as the car turned downhill on Hyde Street. “Well?”

“Yeah.” The linen-truck driver’s eyes were rimmed with fatigue and something else that was probably long-standing fear.

“That’s a positive make?”

The driver said formally, “That’s the guy I saw coming out of the motel room with the shotgun and the satchel.”

“That’s him but that can’t be him,” said Nicoletti. “Okay, maybe he’s got a twin brother,” he added drily. He raised his voice. “Mike. Drop me at Market Street, will you?”

“Hey, what about me?” yelped the witness. “You promised—”

“You’re on your way to the airport,” said Nicoletti as the cab started slowing to let him out. “You don’t need me to wave good-bye.”

He stood on the curb watching the cab drive off, then he started wandering. He had to think. It had all been too easy. The big cop began strolling along with his hands in his pockets. Hawkley wasn’t dumb. What if he’d noticed that suddenly his tap on Kearny’s phone dried up of anything useful except that Nicoletti’s witness was going to leave on Friday and wouldn’t be around on Monday for a look at Pivarski in the flesh? What would that mean?

He walked a little faster, his feet keeping pace with his brain. That would mean Hawkley wanted them to I.D. Pivarski as the killer. Did that make any sense at all? Sure, if the real killer looked a lot like him and...

Nicoletti was striding right along now, unmindful of the fall nip in the air despite the bright October sunshine. Then he slowed.

Then why pick somebody like Pivarski, who had an airtight alibi? Because Pivarski was the only one available? But Hawkley couldn’t have known the witness would identify Pivarski from his driver’s license photo. Nicoletti had slowed to an amble. Of course Hawkley had fought damned hard to keep Pivarski off the stand at the hearing. But he hadn’t fought to keep out the fact that Pivarski had been at DKA’s Oakland office at the time Fazzino had been hit, so what good did keeping Pivarski himself away from the hearing do? If he indeed had actually wanted Pivarski I.D.’d by the witness?

Nicoletti realized he was standing mid-block on Fulton Street beside the old Federal Building. Standing stock still. Probably ought to go on up to the hearing, see what happened up there.

He started walking slowly along, hands in pockets, slouching. Now, what if Hawkley really hadn’t wanted to keep Pivarski from testifying at the hearing, but had merely seemed to...

So of course Ballard got stopped by the Highway Patrol.

“May I see your operating permit, please, sir?”

Ballard extended his wallet.

“Please remove it from the plastic cover and hand it to me.”

Silent manipulations by a seething Ballard, silent perusal by the CHP officer of that sacred ikon of modem life, Identification.

“I’m sure, Mr. Ballard, that you realize this is a fifty-five-mile-an-hour zone by state law. Your vehicle was clocked by our radar as traveling in excess of seventy miles an hour...”

While Johnny Delaney got down to business. “Mr. Pivarski, I would like you to cast your mind back to the events of last November fifth.”

The square, ugly face was made uglier by concentration. “The day I went to dem collection agency bastards in—”

“Mr. Pivarski, please do not anticipate counsel’s questions.” The Hearing Officer’s face was distressed, as if he had a gas pain.

“Uh... okay, Your Honor.”

Delaney started again. “You left work early that day, did you not, Mr. Pivarski, to see your attorney?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” He pointed at the Complainant’s counsel table. “Mr. Norbert Franks. Him. Right there.”

“And he instructed you...”

Kearny sat listening while the big dumb bastard methodically and ponderously, like a fat man going to the toilet, took away from him his license to practice his profession. Sentence by sentence. He was too dumb to be lying yet he had to be lying.

“Yeah. So I took my two hundred simoleons and that letter he give me, and I went to them collection agency bastards in Oakland. Daniel Kearny Associates.”

“To whom did you speak there?”

“Some queer.”

Delaney looked at the Hearing Officer and raised his shoulders slightly. “Um... a Jeffrey L. Simson?”

“I dunno his name. He took me back to the slant broad.”

The Hearing Officer looked at the ceiling and then down at his hands. He cleared his throat. “By ‘slant broad’ I take it you mean an Oriental female, Mr. Pivarski?”

“A slant or a Buddha-head. They all look the same to me.” He looked back at Delaney. “She took my two hundred bucks and signed my letter, and I left.”

“This is the letter you have testified previously your attorney gave you to—”

“Dat’s right.”

“Would you recall the name of the Oriental lady who...”

Hec Tranquillini listened with something akin to awe. He had been able to show Simson’s testimony was tainted, but this big ape’s? The trouble was, he was too dumb. Trying to dig his fingers into a crack in that dim-witted testimony would be like trying to get a handhold on polished marble. He was almost too dumb to be true.

“No, no, it wasn’t no collection, I’m tellin’ you. It was just money for them to hold, like... uh... a guy holdin’ your dough in a bet in a bar, y’know? Till we see which way all the court stuff come out. Just to keep ’em off my back for a while.”

“Previous testimony in this court indicates that you never returned the countersigned letter to your attorney, Mr. Pivarski.” Delaney beamed solicitously at him. “Is this true?”

The hulking witness looked uncomfortable for the first time. “Yeah, well, y’see, I figgered wasn’t no use runnin’ all the way out to Concord with it, y’know, I mean, he charges by the hour, sets a timer the minute you walk through the front door...” He looked doggedly over at Franks. “So I figured to mail it to him. But... well... I’d folded it up in my shirt pocket, y’know, a’ then I went bowling an’ the next day I sent the shirt to the laundry an’...” He looked around sheepishly at the Hearing Officer. “Guess I should of hung on to it, huh?”

“Just two more questions, Mr. Pivarski,” said Delaney. “First, what time did you arrive at the Kearny offices?”

“Maybe five-thirty, around there.”

“Leave?”

“Like quarter to six, ten to six, like that.”

“Thank you, Mr. Pivarski.” He turned to Tranquillini. “Your witness, counsel.”

And thought, let’s see you discredit this baby, Hector, as Tranquillini bounced to his feet and strode to the bench.

“Your Honor, there is a point or two in this witness’s testimony upon which I would like to confer with my client. If we might have a brief recess...”

The Hearing Officer looked at his watch. “I hope we can conclude these proceedings before the noon recess, Mr. Tranquillini. So I can give you no more than ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes is fine, Your Honor.” Tranquillini beamed.

And almost took Dan Kearny’s head off in the hall, which is where they had to confer since there was no time to go elsewhere.

“Dan, what the hell am I supposed to use to open this guy up? He’s lying, he’s got to be, unless Kathy Onoda just pulled a monumental goof, in which case we’re dead. Get me some goddam ammunition!”

“For Chrissake, Hec, don’t you think we’re trying?” snapped Kearny. “You can’t get information where there isn’t any. You can’t find people when there isn’t any trail to follow.”

“What the hell about Ballard up in Sacramento? It can’t be too tough to find out where some chick is working, for Chrissake.”

Kearny looked uncomfortable. “Larry was supposed to be back down here forty-five minutes ago. Something must have—”

“What about Heslip and this file clerk? Unless we get something, you can kiss your ass goodbye as far as operating an investigation agency in this state is concerned. We can appeal, and keep appealing, but do you have any idea what that’s going to cost you?”

“The last time we heard from Heslip was—”

“Who dat takin’ my name in vain?”

And there was a fatigued, travel-worn Bart Heslip beside them, his clothes wrinkled and his face unshaven, but Bart Heslip all the same. And he was not alone.

“Bart!” exclaimed Kearny. “How in the hell—”

“Red-eye special into San Jose. Didn’t want any welcoming committees, the way these boys have been playing. May I present—”

“Verna Rounds!” cried Giselle, coming from the ladies’ room just in time to embrace the black girl she had hired as file clerk over a year before.

“Miss G’selle,” mumbled Verna at the floor. “Sure mighty good to see you.”

Tranquillini was moving in on her like a mother hen getting a wing over a frightened chick. “Oh, little lady, are you beautiful!”

“What she’s got to say oughtta save the DKA license,” said Heslip. “Pivarski got a receipt, he didn’t have any letter, the money was applied to the account in his presence, and Kathy even worked out a payment schedule for the rest of his delinquency.”

Tranquillini was already moving her toward the hearing room. “That’s all I have to know,” he chortled. The rest, except for Heslip, followed. He held back.

“I’ve gotta call my Corinne and let her know I’m home and that I’m okay. I’ll be in after a couple of minutes. That poor lady hasn’t heard from me since...”

But the pay phone at the end of the hall was busy, so he went down to the McAllister Street entrance where he knew there was a bank of pay phones which couldn’t all be busy.

Tranquillini rose as the Hearing Officer returned to the bench.

“Your Honor, I have no questions of Mr. Pivarski at this time, although I would like the right to recall him at a future time if it seems necessary. Instead, we have a—”

“I believe I stated I would like to conclude this hearing by the noon recess, counselor,” said the Hearing Officer a little testily.

“Your Honor, we finally have located the other witness who was present in the Daniel Kearny Oakland office on the day and time in question. Miss Verna Rounds has just arrived from the East Coast to testify. Since it will be familiar ground, I do not believe her testimony will be extensive.”

“Very well. Miss Verna Rounds, please take the stand to be sworn. Mr. Kasimir Pivarski is directed to remain.”

For the first time, tall, courtly Wayne Hawkley was getting to his feet. But it was not to object to his client being told to remain. He merely bent and squeezed the arm of his nephew, Norbert Franks, and then spoke softly in the younger attorney’s ear.

“Norb, danged if I didn’t forget a phone call I promised to make before noon. You can hold the fort here for a minute?”

“Sure, Unc.” Franks grinned and gave him the thumb-and-forefinger O.K. circle.

Hawkley walked with stately stride from the room. Sure, Unc. That simpering, stupid fool! He didn’t even comprehend what the appearance of Verna Rounds on that stand would lead to. Well, the old fox Wayne Hawkley knew. And was getting out while he could. The one good feature of this whole sorry spectacle would be not having to listen to idiot Norbert any more.

Get the car out of the lot with the spare set of keys he always carried. A quick trip to the Oakland safe deposit box for his traveling money, the first flight from the Oakland airport to New York, thence to Montreal and from there to Switzerland. He could decide which of the three passports with the traveling money he would use first once he was airborne. His wife would keep the house, live on the joint bank accounts, and not even miss one of her weekly bridge parties. His daughter Maddy, she would take over the law offices and get rid of that idiot Norbert...

So concerned was he with his plans that as he entered the elevator he did not even notice the slouching, bulky man who began to get off and then stepped quickly back in so as to be riding the cage with him down to the McAllister Street exit.

In the hearing room Verna Rounds had been sworn and Tranquillini had started her through her testimony. “I understand that you were operating the switchboard at the Kearny offices in Oakland on the afternoon of Friday, November fifth of last year. Is that correct, Miss Rounds?”

“Yessir, you’re right.”

“Was a Mr. Pivarski discussed?”

“Oh, yessir! Miss Kathy, she tole me—”

“That is Kathy Onoda, the DKA Office Manager?”

“Yessir. Miss Kathy, she tole me ’bout four o’clock that he was due between five an’ to make a payment of two hundred dollars, an’ that I was to bring him right in.”

“What time did he actually arrive?”

“Mr. Pee-somethin’ he come in just ’bout five-thirty.” The Hearing Officer leaned forward to interrupt. “I didn’t catch the name you spoke, Miss Rounds.”

Verna looked at her hands and then at the floor, embarrassed for the first time during her testimony. Finally she looked over at him. “I’m sorry, sir... uh... Your Honor. I caint pronounce that man’s name nohow.”

“You mean Mr. Pivarski?”

“Yessir. I always jus’ called him Mr. Pee-somethin’.”

The Hearing Officer masked a smile. “I see. Please proceed, Mr. Tranquillini.”

Tranquillini waved a hand at the opposing counsel table.

“When this gentleman came into the office, what happened?”

Verna shook her head, a stubborn light coming into her eyes. “Was Mr. Pee-somethin’ come in, like I tole you. He said he—”

“Mr. Pivarski,” agreed Tranquillini. “The gentleman seated at the table over there.”

Verna looked at the man calling himself Pivarski. She shook her head. “That ain’t him,” she said. “Ain’t ever laid eyes on that dude in my life before.”

For the first time in his life Hector Tranquillini was stopped dead. His mouth dropped open and he gaped. He turned to gape at the man known as Pivarski. The man known as Pivarski was on his feet and taking a snub-nosed Python .38 revolver adroitly from his left armpit with his right hand.

“I told that goddam Hawkley it wasn’t going to work,” he said, and started edging his way toward the door.

Bart Heslip hung up the phone, his heart singing. Yeah, man! Wasn’t any other woman anywhere, ever, like his Corinne. Get this hearing finished up, get Verna over to Oakland for a one-day reunion with her mother and brother, then home to Corinne. Who was right now in the process of taking the rest of the day off.

Tomorrow to get Verna back to Harlem and himself back to Boston to see if he could point a finger at the two hit men who had blown up Johnny Mack Brown and probably messed up Fleur Lisette in New Orleans. Today and tonight was for him and Corinne. Especially tonight.

He turned from the phone, whistling cheerily, and saw Larry Ballard coming through the doors from McAllister Street. Must have parked in the Civic Center Garage, his mind registered, even as he exclaimed, “Larry! What in the hell—” While Ballard was exclaiming, “Bart! Where in the hell...”

“Just in from Boston with little Verna, who’s upstairs testifying right now.”

Ballard began, “Hey, that’s terrific!” and then suddenly froze stock still. “Verna? She’s here? Holy Christ!”

“Hey, what’s the matter? What...”

“Greenly has a girlfriend who—”

“And him a married man, too. Tsk, tsk.”

“Christ, Bart, she works in the Department of Motor Vehicles.” He paused for an instant. “In the Driving License Picture Section!”

With a common impulse, both men raced for the stairwell. At this time of day the stairs would probably be quicker than the elevator at the other end of the hall. Heslip sputtered out their mutual thoughts as they ran down the corridor, ducking slower pedestrians like bikers weaving through freeway traffic.

“They had a pipeline into Benny’s investigation into Flip Fazzino’s murder... When the call was going to go out for DMV photos of the Teamster local’s members...”

Ballard jerked open the stairwell door, sputtering disconnected thoughts as he did. “Greenly was ordered to get someone in the section... to switch the hit man’s photo with that of Pivarski... He did...”

“So the Pivarski who’s upstairs in that hearing room right now is not the Pivarski who was in the Oakland office last year.”

They charged up the stairs two at a time.

When Wayne Hawkley emerged from the first floor men’s room he found his way blocked by a big, sloppy-looking man who matched his own six-three in height and outweighed him by at least seventy-five pounds. “The hearing room is back that way and upstairs, counselor,” said Benny Nicoletti. He had never met Hawkley, but had seen him in surveillance photos often enough. Always fruitlessly until — maybe — right now.

“I am an attorney and I have a very important—”

“Upstairs, pal.” Nicoletti flashed his badge with one hand and began steering Hawkley back toward the elevators with the other.

“I’m going to have that shield, you... you...”

“Inspector Benny Nicoletti, Police Intelligence. That last name has two t’s, counselor, for when you make your complaint. Meanwhile, we’re going back upstairs.”

By chance they had an elevator to themselves. Hawkley tried again to object, but Nicoletti cut him short. “Y’see, counselor, I been walking and thinking. And I decided that you knew we were going to give our witness to the Flip Fazzino hit an eyeball of Pivarski. I also decided that you made such a fuss about keeping Pivarski from showing up at this hearing because you really wanted him to show up.”

“That’s ridiculous,” sputtered Hawkley.

“Wanted him to show up according to your timetable. I don’t know why, but...”

The elevator doors opened and Nicoletti dragged his reluctant companion into the hall. “... course if I’m wrong, I’ll apologize and you can go after my badge. But first we’ll see what’s happening in the hearing—”

A gun went off somewhere down the hall. Nicoletti made a magically quick movement at great variance with his bulk, and a Police Positive with a four-inch barrel appeared in his hand.

“You bastard!” he grated, dragging Hawkley forward, “if someone got shot...”

Dan Kearny got shot.

He sat down abruptly on the floor, one shoulder feeling like someone had slammed it in a car door, and stared stupidly at the blood running down off his lax fingers to the floor. How much blood, he wondered hazily, was there in a fifty-year-old fool who had been so stupid as to try and be a hero? He’d made a grab for the gun and it had swung around to look at him from a muzzle as big as a rain barrel, and then the rain barrel had spoken and Kearny had sat down.

The professional killer who had taken out Flip Fazzino and seven others over a ten-year career swirled the fingers of his left hand through Giselle Marc’s long blond hair and jerked her to her feet. She yelped with pain and then went white with shock as he rammed the muzzle of the .38 up under her chin. “She gets the next one,” grated the pseudo-Pivarski, and kept moving. No one else did. Verna was almost placid in the witness chair, the Hearing Officer had disappeared behind his desk, Hec Tranquillini was frozen half out of his chair, and John Delaney was holding Norbert Franks by the throat so Franks was unable to leave with his confederate.

Kearny finally understood most of it, as he watched the killer sliding out the door with Giselle. He wanted to throw a chair at the gunman, but was just too tired. The blood was puddling under his hand now. Pretty soon it would reach his thigh and ruin his suit pants. Blood was very hard to get out.

Or get back, once it was lost.

Sleepy.

But his brain seemed to work pretty well, even if the rest of him was sliding away.

Hawkley finds out there’s an eyewitness to the Fazzino hit who thinks he can l.D. the killer. The killer therefore needs an absolute alibi. Among his not especially bright nephew’s clients is somebody who has an alibi. He was in the DKA office making a payment at the time of the Fazzino hit. He looks a little like the hit man. Maybe the fact that his payment was being made to the office of Dan Kearny, who originally blew the whistle on Fazzino, is what triggers the idea of a substitution in Hawkley’s mind.

So he gets his nephew to push for a misconduct hearing with the Professional Standards Bureau. Easy, when the auditor is already in your pocket. At the hearings, if it comes to that, he can always try to get the phony Pivarski to testify on a day when none of the witnesses to the real Pivarski’s payment are scheduled to testify. The real Pivarski himself? Bought off or dead.

Kearny looked back at the doorway. His mind had been running so fast that he could still see part of Giselle’s back as she was dragged into the corridor by the killer. Poor Giselle. Ought to help her but... so tired...

So then Nicoletti turned up the witness. It was getting hot. And then Kathy died of natural causes. Suddenly the whole thing was necessary and would work. One witness dead, a second with a bad memory and willing to petjure himself anyway, a third disappeared.

So he tried it. And until the missing witness showed up, unexpectedly, on the day he brought the phony Pivarski in to testify, everything was working for Hawkley. Still was, since Hawkley had skipped clean, and the killer had just disappeared into the hall — clean. Enough to make you weep.

Suiting actions to thoughts, Dan Kearny put down his head and wept. Wept with physical weakness while cursing himself inwardly for what he thought was will-power weakness. And there was, at one side, Hec Tranquillini, using a belt as a tourniquet and saying the wound looked more bloody than bad, and on the other, the little black girl — what was her name — Verna Rounds, that was it, comforting him. Because, although Kearny didn’t know it, if there was one thing Verna had learned in the past months it was how to care for frightened little fellers who had started crying.

Without any need, because out in the hall the killer had, on coming from the hearing room, happened to look the wrong way first. He looked to his left, up toward the elevators, instead of to his right, over toward the stairwell. He saw a very bulky Benny Nicoletti dragging that goddamned screw-up Hawkley with him, and he saw a Police Positive in Benny Nicoletti’s right hand, pointed up the hall right at him.

And at Giselle, but he didn’t think of that. Being a killer, he would have fired instantly if the roles had been reversed. He didn’t know Nicoletti would not shoot as long as Giselle was endangered. There was no way he could comprehend such softness. When he pointed a gun at someone who also had a gun pointed at him, his gun went off.

So he whirled toward Nicoletti to blow him away, but in so doing jerked his gun away from Giselle’s face.

Which meant that Bart Heslip, crossing the hall silently from the stairwell in desperate preparation for an attempt to wrest the gun from his hand, could attack without endangering Giselle.

Bart Heslip hit the gunman in the kidneys with the hardest punch he had ever thrown in his life. He’d won thirty-nine out of forty professional fights, almost all of them by knockouts, and this was the hardest punch he’d ever thrown. Because he knew all about kidney punches. He’d suffered one in the fight he had lost. He’d finished the fight — and lost it by a split decision — and had gone home and urinated blood for a week afterwards.

The killer of eight men, struck in the kidneys as Heslip had been, screamed and fell on the floor. As he did, Larry Ballard came down on his gun arm with both feet, crushing his wrist and pulverizing his fingers so he wouldn’t be shooting any guns with that hand anymore once he got out of prison. If the men he was going to spill his guts about to stay out of the gas chamber would let him live long enough to get out of prison.

Heslip and Ballard said in unison to Giselle, “You okay?”

“He almost tore my hair out by the roots,” she said crossly. And then, remembering that Dan Kearny had been shot, fainted. Both men caught her before she could hit the floor.

As Nicoletti, still dragging counselor Hawkley with him, came up with a pleased look on his face. “I don’t know what happened in there, but it must have been dynamite.”

“A girl happened,” said Heslip. “She is dynamite.”

And he thought of Corinne, and knew there was one who was even more dynamite than Verna, at the same time Ballard thought the same thing about Yana, the gypsy girl.

Nicoletti nodded, still grinning, and slapped the cuffs around the elegant wrists of Wayne Hawkley — until a few moments before, the rich and brilliant counsel for the mob.