Gone, No Forwarding

Three

Now, as taught long ago to Ballard by the master, Patrick Michael O’Bannon, ducking a radio summons was child’s play. One merely monitored without responding. But Ballard’s problem was ducking the phone, with its hypnotic ringing, while he was still at home. This had entailed taking the top off the baseplate and wrapping electrician’s tape around the clapper. Thus, when the phone was turned to loud, the clapper struck only one bell and rang as if soft. On soft, it didn’t make a sound.

But that system worked not at all when one passed out beside the phone after forgetting to turn it to SOFT.

The scream crashed into Larry Ballard’s ears. He sprang from the easy chair in a shambling run to ram headfirst into a wall. He fell down. The scream crashed again. He crawled upright against the wall, staggered back across the room to turn down the phone. Bending over made him want to vomit. Panting shallowly, he leaned his forearms against the mantel of the fake fireplace. Something horrible and bright was worming through the frayed lace curtains.

Sunlight. Ballard peered at himself in the speckled mirror above the mantel. His eyes were too bloodshot to tell whether one pupil was dilated or not, but even without that he knew it was a brain tumor. What else could make a head hurt like that? Unless...

He squinted at the front bay window again, which looked across Lincoln Way to the fog-haunted reaches of Golden Gate Park. He could see! Could it just be... a hangover?

He staggered back to the chair and collapsed into it, to sit with the now dead phone in his lap as he tried to piece together the previous day and night.

Maria had married someone else. Oh God, the agony, the betrayal! So he’d gotten drunk Monday night. Yesterday... yes, he’d called in sick to nurse that hangover. Last night, out and around. Drinks. A whole lot of drinks. Oh pain. Oh woe. Oh agony. Oh...

Giselle looked out of Kathy’s city-grimed bay window at the grade school across Golden Gate Avenue. Not Kathy’s window anymore. Her window. Oh damn, damn. Three weeks ago the fall term had begun. Maybe she ought to go back, get her teacher’s credentials...

Kearny buzzed on the intercom. “How’s the list coming?”

She regarded the masses of paper strewn across the desk. Personnel folders. Payroll records. Old collection and field-investigation reports. “I think I’ve isolated everyone who could possibly have been working out of Oakland that day. But I can’t raise Larry.”

“Dammit, let’s get off the ground on this thing.”

Why is he so uptight? she wondered. So Kathy was gone, all they needed was someone else who’d been there that day to substantiate their version of events. Right? Then she had to smile to herself a little as she reached for the phone again. In just about every tough private-eye novel she’d ever read, some cop ended up threatening to take away the detective’s license.

Now the State was doing it to them. In real life.

Ballard sat up abruptly in the big saggy chair. He’d just peed in his pants. Then he realized it was the vibrations from the silenced phone in his lap as it tried to ring. He yawned. Man, that was the end of boozing for a while. Say, six or seven years. How did O’Bannon manage it a couple of nights a week? That must be one tough Irishman. He picked up the phone.

“Can you come in right away?” asked Giselle’s voice flatly.

“Ohh-h-h,” he groaned. “I am not a well man.”

“There’s a big flap on. Dan wants you on special assignment for a couple of days.”

As if by magic, his brain tumor was receding. “Flap about what?”

“He’ll want to tell you himself.”

Better and better his head felt. “On my way.” Then, trying to ungrump her, he asked, “By the way — who died?”

She told him, in a sudden hysterical burst of words. Which made it the unfunniest remark of his life.

Hector Tranquillini — Ettore in front of Italian judges because, insomma, it couldn’t hurt — had the sort of thick-lipped joviality Al Capone supposedly possessed. He stood, however, only five-four in his high-heeled boots and weighed only one hundred and forty-five pounds after a heaping plate of Mama’s pasta. He had thinning black hair and black marble eyes, which could snap like a hard frost. They were snapping now. “Just because you government boys have been busting it off in people ever since California joined the Union, don’t think you’re going to keep on doing it.”

Jack Delaney beamed across the plain wooden table. He was a very big Irishman with freckles and gray-shot red hair who out-weighed Tranquillini by a hundred pounds but was bright enough to be afraid of him in a law court. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

“Look, Hec, Kearny got caught trying to steal second and got tagged out. It’s simple as that. If DKA’ll plead guilty—”

“Now my client is a thief? Before the hearing?”

“Hector, Hector, that was just a figure of speech.”

But Tranquillini had bounced to his feet. Before hanging out his shingle in the heart of the Tenderloin because he could afford only Tenderloin rents, he’d been a tax attorney for the IRS. For his first two years of private practice he’d not had a client, not one, who wasn’t a hooker. He still had a lot of hookers, but now he had DKA, too. And he knew all there was to know about being legally nasty.

“Figure of speech?” He was at the corner where he knew the concealed pickup was. To the wall he thundered, in case the tape was turning; “I HOPE YOU’RE GETTING THIS ALL DOWN!”

Delaney was also on his feet, visibly shocked. “Hec! Hey, cool down! What’s got into you? You know—”

“But remember,” Tranquillini bellowed at the corner, “I’m subpoenaeing the goddam tapes!”

“Hec, for God’s sake, man! You know this is just a routine accusation and hearing. No deep dark motives, no—”

Tranquillini hurled his copy of the Accusation on the table. “You call that routine?” he cried dramatically. “Over a couple of hundred lousy bucks Kearny didn’t pay on a point of law?”

“Which point of law is that?”

“Which one do you want? Was DKA to return all of the money? Or half of it? Because in accordance with state law, they’d remitted half the collected sum to their client. So is GMAC their co-defendant? Or is GMAC excluded from the suit because they’re big and powerful?”

“Hec, that money was never supposed to have been paid into the collection trust account. It was supposed to be held separate until the judge’s decision in the Pivarski countersuit.”

“And then the State would be after Dan’s license for being out of trust because he held the money out of the trust account.”

Delaney contrived a dazed look. “All we’re saying is that—”

“—that Kathy was stupid enough to take money under those circumstances. Do you really believe that?”

“That’s what’s alleged.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“Don’t cross-examine me, for Chrissake. I just work here.”

“Just a good German,” sneered Tranquillini. “It’s damn convenient for the State that Kathy isn’t around to testify as to what happened that day, isn’t it?”

“Aw, c’mon, Hec, you think Pivarski snuck into her bedroom and gave her a blood clot when nobody was looking? He and his attorney have stated under oath that she verbally agreed to hold the money until the judge’s decision came down. She didn’t.”

“They’re going to have to state it again under oath. To me.”

He stuffed his Accusation in his suitcoat pocket, meanwhile maneuvering Delaney out into the hall where no recorders could reach them. It was for this thirty seconds he had come. “Okay, Johnny, tell you what,” he said as if it had just occurred to him, “how about Dan pays the man back his money, plus costs and interest, and picks up his attorney’s tab? If Pivarski is satisfied with that, would the State butt out and drop charges?”

“I hadn’t thought of that, Hec. Have Dan give me a call after I talk with Greenly at the licensing agency. Maybe it’s a way around it for all of us.”

The two attorneys shook hands and parted. Tranquillini was due in court on behalf of a raven-tressed whore whose civil rights, he was claiming, had been violated after a routine soliciting bust by a prison matron’s discovery of an ounce of heroin in one of her body cavities. Delaney got on the horn with Tom Greenly, supervising auditor for the Private Investigation Agency Licensing Bureau, who had brought the charge against DKA.

“I think we should go with their offer, Tom,” said Delaney into the phone. “Any violation was inadvertent and in good faith. And if Tranquillini gets Pivarski on the stand, there’s no telling how it’ll come out. Pivarski is sort of a dim bulb, and Hec is—”

The phone squawked back. He listened. And listened. And finally hung up and stared out of his window down at

Golden Gate Avenue’s busy traffic. He’d worked long and hard, and honorably, for his own office with its own view.

After a while he stood up and put on his topcoat and departed for Rocca’s bar. Screw Tranquillini and his bullshit about good Germans. He just worked there, right? Did what he was told, right? What the job demanded, right? He was on the side of the angels.

But maybe he needed a couple of double Bushmills to keep on thinking that way.