Gone, No Forwarding

Six

Bart Heslip was a plum-black man with such an exaggerated breadth of shoulder that he looked like a light-heavy instead of his middle-weight hundred and fifty-eight pounds. As he typed reports in his field agent’s cubicle along the left wall of the DKA basement, his hard bony face and deep-set eyes gave away few secrets. Not that he was trying to keep any just then. He was pissed off with Larry Ballard and didn’t care if the whole world knew it. In fact, he stepped to the door of his cubicle and cupped his hands around his mouth. “I’m pissed off!” he yelled.

O’Bannon’s flame-topped head appeared in the doorway of the end cubicle. “Ah ha!” he exclaimed. “The primal scream.” His head disappeared and his typewriter began rattling again.

Which made Heslip look over at his own, an old IBM bought by Kearny at a bankrupt stock auction yea-many years back. The “E” key stuck, so his reports always began: Follow d to th giv n addr ss, cruis d th ar a, could not spot assign d v hicl.

Which made Heslip even madder. He strode resolutely back to Kearny’s private office and threw wide the sliding door with its one-way glass. Kearny was behind his massive blonde wood desk.

“Dan, I want—”

“Shut up! Get the hell out of here!”

“Oh,” Heslip agreed quickly, his head already jerking back like a turtle’s into its shell. He slid the door shut whisper-soft and tiptoed across the concrete to O’Bannon’s cubicle. The red-headed Irishman paused in his work.

“Oh,” Heslip told him.

“Yeah.” O’B’s freckle-massed features were ruddy with incipient alcoholism and his eyes were wise with a quarter-century of investigating every conceivable foible, weakness and perversion of human nature. “Ever since Kathy died.”

The door at the far end of the basement opened, and Ballard came through washed by sunlight so fierce he looked like an over-exposed black-and-white print of himself.

“You!” Heslip yelped. “I’m pissed off with you!”

Ballard came down the basement with his attaché case and turned in at his cubicle. “It’s going to be a scorcher,” he said.

Heslip went in and plopped down in Ballard’s spare chair. Like Heslip’s, the cubicle held a desk, a typewriter, a phone and a set of trays with the various forms demanded by their profession.

“You hear me talking to you, man?”

“I had a bitch of a dream last night, Bart.”

“You hear me telling you I’m pissed off with you?”

“I was out in the buffalo paddock at the park, and this huge goddam water buffalo charged me. An African water buffalo, they don’t even have any of them out there. I started running—”

“You dumped so much work on me, man, that Corinne is—”

“Then, you know the way it is in dreams, I was somewhere else. In a farmyard. Still running. With this water buffalo chasing me. I ran into the farmhouse and up the stairs and up the ladder to the attic room under the eaves.”

“How much time you need to get over a weekend of skin-diving?”

“And that buffalo right after me. So I went out the window to the roof. Here comes the buffalo.”

“Corinne is really on my case, man.”

“You know what that buffalo did when it caught me?”

Heslip was intrigued despite himself. “What?”

“He queered me!”

“Queered you? You mean...”

“Right there on that farmhouse roof. And the whole time I was yelling, ‘Not a buffalo! Not a water buffalo!’ ”

“You better come to Corinne’s to supper tonight, man, get your head on straight.”

“I think I woke up yelling it, Bart. I really do. ‘Not a water buffalo.’ ” Still worried of face, he said abruptly, “The State’s going after Dan’s license.”

Heslip’s mouth dropped open. “Whatever in heaven for?”

“It’s complicated. Something Kathy worked on over in Oakland. That’s why you still have my caseload. And why” — he was grubbing in his attach case for a manila folder — “you’re going to have to take another one for me, too.”

“This have to do with the State trying to punch Dan’s ticket?”

“Yeah.”

“Gimme.”

Giselle, having read Ballard’s reports of the previous day’s investigations, had been busy with the cross-directories. She got on the radio. “KDM 366 Control calling SF-6. Come in, Larry.”

“This is SF-6. Over,” came Ballard’s voice.

“I have a res add on Simson for you from the new criss-cross. Just confirmed with Information. Jeffrey L. Simson, 1950 El Camino Real, San Bruno. Over.”

“Ten-four,” said Ballard. “I’ll hit it on my way back in. I’m down by the Cow Palace now en route to Brisbane to talk with Mary McCarthy.”

A few years before it had been a grassy, deserted fold in the hills a mile short of the tough old village of Brisbane nestled up against the base of the San Bruno Mountains. Then an industrial park had been staked out, and over the years had been filled up by industry fleeing San Francisco’s rising crime and tax rates.

Ballard turned in off old Bayshore Boulevard and went down the rows of anonymously modem glass-and-synthetic buildings along Valley Drive until he found Royal Foods. It was indeed the scorcher he had predicted, so his shirt was sticking to his back as he got out of his car.

A uniformed security guard was waiting at a table inside the double glass doors. “ ’Nye help ya?”

“Mary McCarthy, please.”

“Which department?”

Ballard took a guess. “Credit.”

It was down the hall, third door on the left; there were only three people in the room and only one of them a woman.

“Ms. McCarthy?”

She was about Ballard’s age and wore a plain gold wedding band on her right hand. She had premature crow’s-feet around her quizzical, pale eyes, and brown hair cut in a soft bob; in truth, a somewhat pudgier woman of body than her thin face would suggest. Ballard gave her his name and whom he was looking for.

“Donna’s not in any trouble, is she?”

Ballard chuckled to show how little trouble Donna Payne was in. “We just need a statement from her about an insurance matter.”

After listening to his scam, Mary McCarthy reached under the desk for her purse. “I’ve been meaning to get in touch with her, but one thing and another...” Like the landlady and her for rent sign the previous day, Ballard thought, except this one wasn’t a boozer. She was thumbing through a small black address book. “Yes. It is 573 Ashley Avenue in San Carlos.”

Except that when Ballard called Information from a pay phone near the security guard’s table, he was told there was no listing for Donna Payne in San Carlos. Or anywhere else on the Peninsula south of the city. Another dead end? Getting into the Cutlass, he remembered he had not asked Mary McCarthy about the Nevada lead the boozing landlady had given him. Must be getting old.

His ma had named him Samuel after some dude in the Bible, and always insisted on the full name. Samuel Rounds. Showed respect, she said, because the original Samuel had been a prophet of the Lord’s. But out of the house he liked Sammy. He was only fourteen, but looked seventeen easy. The counterman at Fisher’s Ribs and Chicken, on Friday nights sometimes he’d let Sammy watch the crap game in the storeroom. He wouldn’t do that with no little kid, because that was one high-stakes game.

Sammy pulled back the plunger, delicately released it. The ball shot forward. Arced around. Began to bounce from bumper to bumper, clanging and lighting them up and clicking up points.

“You’re pretty good at that, blood.” The man was very black and very wide-shouldered, with cool eyes and a hard face, and under his short-sleeved flowering aloha shirt, forearms which were ridged with muscle.

“Bes dere is,” said Sammy, expanding under his attention.

“You must be Sammy Rounds.”

Sammy was instantly guarded. “Where you hear ’bout me?”

The stranger lifted a shoulder fractionally, and an eyebrow fractionally. He was bad, Sammy could see that. Bad clear through.

“I’m a’ old friend of your sister Verna’s.”

Sammy was now downright suspicious. “You jivin’ me, man?”

The stranger shook a couple of cigarettes from his pack, offered one to Sammy. “Been away,” he said.

Sammy returned to his game so he could lay the cigarette on the edge of the pinball machine once it was lighted. He didn’t want to start coughing in front of the stranger.

“Whut you want with Verna?”

“Now whut you suppose I want with a foxy lady like that?”

Then the stranger bought a pint of sneaky pete and he and Sammy went to sit in his short and drink it and jive a little.

Nineteen-fifty El Camino Real in San Bruno turned out to be the Cable Car Motel. A motel? Ballard parked in front of the office and went in. A bell jangled when he opened the door. He could hear a TV in the apartment behind the office. A mid-fifties man with a springy stride and ill-fitting dentures and old-fashioned suspenders came out. The dentures made his smile sharklike.

“Does a Jeff Simson live here?” asked Ballard.

“Certainly.”

Weird old duck. “Which unit?”

“Here. This one.”

“He’s the manager?” The phone listing suddenly made sense. The old guy was still looking at Ballard expectantly, as if waiting for him to dance a jig or throw a fit or walk a tightrope. “May I speak with him, please?”

“You are.”

Oh no, including the middle initial? “Jeffrey L. Simson?” demanded Ballard, just to be sure.

“Oh.” The old man chuckled wisely. He had the breath to go with the dentures.

“This has happened before?”

“Last week, was a policeman with a warrant for unpaid parking tickets. A month ago, some feller from the State of California.”

“What did he want?” asked Ballard quickly.

Too quickly. The wrong Jeffrey L. Simson drew himself up and clicked his porcelain teeth over a curt good day. Almost, Ballard thought as he drove away, as if the feller from the State of California had elicited his patriotism about keeping quiet concerning the State’s interest in the other Jeffrey L. Simson.

Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Unless...