Gone, No Forwarding

Four

Ballard had never really liked the East Bay. No there there, as Giselle had once told him some lesbo writer back in the twenties had put it. Like going to L.A. or drinking a low-cal beer or eating chow mein: when you thought about it afterward, you realized that nothing very much had happened.

Before riding the creaking single elevator to the top floor of the narrow three-story building a block off Oakland’s Broadway, he stopped to look at the list of names Giselle had given him. Giselle. Wow. He’d apologized to her for that stupid mark, but he still wasn’t sure she was over being sore at him. And Kathy. He couldn’t think about Kathy. Not yet. Him out getting drunk while she was being buried. Talk about stupidity. No. The names. Concentrate on the names and on keeping the investigation quiet.

Ballard pushed open the glass-paneled door with Daniel Kearny Associates on it in black letters. Slightly offset below this was the name of the defunct outfit from whom DKA had picked up a lot of quasi-worthless finance papers, including the Pivarski headache. ZIPPY COLLECTIONS. No wonder they’d gone bust.

“May I help you, sir?”

Ballard had passed the field agents’ narrow office, afternoon-deserted, and had started for the closed hardwood door beyond. The field-agent secretary who doubled as PBX girl — Rose Kelly’s job until she’d quit the previous December — came to her feet when she saw he wasn’t going to stop. She was a big slow tranquil brunette obviously too nice for the job.

“Ballard.” He shook hands with her. “San Francisco. To see Irene Jordon back in Collections. I know the way.”

It was a long narrow room with half a dozen waist-to-ceiling windows in the left-hand wall which let in enough October sunshine to make Ballard squint his hangover-sensitive eyes. At the far end was the plush private office, empty now, where Kathy would have relieved Pivarski of his two hundred bucks. Irene Jordon was machine-gunning out a letter at the first desk with dazzling speed. She was a fat girl with a bad complexion and two uncles who had gone into local politics. The connections made her doubly valuable to DKA.

She looked up at him and grinned. “Hi, beautiful.”

Ballard winced. “I said that to a girl the other night, and her husband threw me down the stairs.”

“That’s what husbands are for. What brings you slumming?”

“You.”

They went down the block to a cafeteria that sold, at that time of day, mostly coffee and pie while setting up for supper. Ballard had tea; he trusted few people’s coffee but his own.

He ran the scam on her which he and Giselle had dreamed up to explain the investigation. “Pivarski is claiming that he slipped on a loose rug in our office and injured himself. An attorney has talked him into suing and we need any eyeball of him entering and leaving the office.”

“How much of a stink is he making?”

“Enough so they sent me over here.”

“November fifth, huh?” mused Irene. Her acne-blotched moon face was thoughtful. She was having a hot-fudge sundae. “What time’d he come in?”

“Between five-thirty and six, by the time-stamp on the payment receipt Kathy gave him. If you can remember whether—”

“Kathy. My God, wasn’t that terrible about her?” Ballard, more keenly aware than she of just how terrible it was, agreed shortly and steered her back to November 5. “We’re also interested in anyone who heard him and Kathy talking while he was making the payment.”

“What use would that be to DKA in an insurance hassle?”

Yeah, a very sharp chick. If her uncles had her brains, they’d be fighting over which one should run for governor rather than grafting retirement incomes out of local government.

“We want to know if he said anything about slipping on the way in. If he didn’t, and didn’t slip on the way out, we can tell him to go pound salt.”

She sighed. “I don’t remember him at all, but I wouldn’t. All the Legals are typed over in San Francisco.” She wiped the last trace of her sundae from her lips, and studied her wallet calendar. “I left at five that night, so I was gone before he got there.”

“You sure? The office was open until six...”

She poked a stubby finger at the calendar for the previous year. “Rose and I alternated late Fridays, and it was her week. She would have been there until about six-fifteen. I imagine Jeff Simson or Donna Payne would have been in the office, too. Kathy liked to keep one collector late on Fridays.”

On the way back to the office Ballard asked whether she and Rose had kept up, but they hadn’t. Nothing in common except work. And when he went back upstairs with her he found the two outside investigators, Norm Ponts and Simon Costa, in the field agents’ room one-fingering reports of their day’s activities. Neither one had ever heard of Pivarski, or had the slightest recollection of whether he had been in the office on that Friday nearly a year before. Ballard thanked them and went off to look for Donna Payne.

It was a new experience, looking for someone who wasn’t trying to avoid him. New, and frustrating. Because Mr. or Ms. Honest John was just as hard to find, in our mobile society, as Mr. or Ms. Deadbeat. People seemed to get lost just sort of by accident. Like Donna Payne, with whom he had started because she had been fired on August S, only about ten weeks before, and because her given residence address was just a couple of miles from the Oakland office.

Mather Street featured old frame houses set against the hills off Oakland’s Broadway. The street curved around the face of the hill; the house Ballard wanted had a steep lawn and concrete stairs leading up from the street.

When he rang the bell a woman wearing slacks and a sweatshirt opened the door. “The apartment’s been rented. I meant to take down the sign, but what with one thing and another...”

“I’m looking for Donna Payne.”

“Moved.”

Ballard leaned against the door without seeming to, so she could not shut it. She had the bloated face and pasty color of a gin drinker.

“No forwarding?”

Her eyes looked slightly unfocused but her breath was innocent of gin. Vodka, maybe? “Maybe she went back to Nevada.”

“Where in Nevada?” Nothing in the file on Nevada.

“Her car had a Nevada license.”

Very cautiously, like a fisherman with a nibble, he asked, “You wouldn’t remember the license, would you? Or the kind of car she drove?”

“The license, no. The car... You wait right here.”

He waited. You never knew. Across the street, a black-and-white alley cat was on the hood of his DKA Cutlass, washing its face as if using the windshield as a make-up mirror.

The vodka drinker returned with a twelve-year-old boy. “Tell him.”

“Austin Marina GT two-door coupé. Red. Pin stripes painted outside. Tach. Walnut-finish instrument panel. Whitewalls. Heated rear window.”

He turned away to go back into the house. Ballard said to his back, “What do you do? Sell used cars for a living?” But he was alone on the porch.

In the car he called KFS 499, Oakland Control, and told them to relay to Giselle he needed a “previous res and work add” on Payne. Then he consulted his list. Rose Kelly, the PBX operator had been living at 15321 Redwood Highway when her W-2 was mailed to her in January. Santa Rosa, fifty miles north. He’d save that for last, if he missed on Payne and Simson.

Oh, and on the file clerk. Verna Rounds. No file clerk would stay around for an extra hour of work on a Friday, but on the other hand, she lived just a couple of miles away, off MacArthur Boulevard in North Oakland. Get her off the list before heading back to the city and Jeff Simson’s listed residence address on Twenty-fourth Street in the Mission District.