Dead Skip

by Joe Gores

  “How are things at the hospital?” interrupted Giselle quickly.

  “In a coma.” Ballard’s voice was grudging. “He was breathing so badly they did a tracheotomy. The doctor says if he doesn’t wake up within seventy-two hours, he probably never will.”

  Waterreus stood up. “Tough luck about him—and about the Jag. You guys going to have to eat the loss?”

  “Unless we can prove responsibility elsewhere,” said Kearny.

  “Pretty tough in a one-car, one-driver accident, ain’t it?”

  He shook hands around. Giselle followed him out of the cubbyhole bearing a tall narrow paper bag that clinked. Ballard slid down in his chair to cock one knee against the edge of the desk.

  “How’s that for superficial?” he sneered. “No mention of possible skid marks, no estimate of the speed the car was going when it went through that slot between the fence and the knoll, no mention of the automatic transmission, no mention of the fact that the head injury was on the side away from the doorpost—”

  “Just what were those cases you checked out when you left the hospital?” asked Kearny mildly as Giselle came back in.

  “I don’t like that guy, he’s always got his hand out,” she said.

  “Be glad he does.” To Ballard, Kearny said, “You left your attaché case here with all of your case files in it. All of them.”

  “All right, so I was up on Twin Peaks to see where he went off,” said Ballard irritably. “And I went down to the police impound garage at Fifth and Bryant to look at the Jag.”

  Kearny lit a cigarette. Waving out the match, he said to Giselle, “He thinks somebody drove Heslip up there with his skull already fractured, stuck him behind the wheel with the Jag pointed at that gap by the end of the fence, used Heslip’s foot to jam down the accelerator with the car in neutral, then reached in the open window, flipped it into gear, and bailed out before it was going so fast it—”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But that’s what you think.” When Ballard was silent, Kearny thrust his massive jaw across the desk like Popeye sighting the spinach. “Isn’t it?”

  “All right, that’s what I think. It’s what Corinne thinks, too.”

  “There’s some great facts to hand the insurance company.”

  “Whitaker says the injuries don’t rule out a prior assault—”

  “Don’t rule out. I think.” Kearny smeared out the almost untouched cigarette, reached for another. “Facts!” he barked explosively. “I’d love some facts. If somebody tried to kill him, I can tell the insurance company to pound salt.”

  “No skid marks,” said Ballard. “No witnesses. Everybody knows that Bart is no boozer—”

  “Everybody knows. Jesus, Larry, you’ve been with us for two years, you know what facts are.”

  “All right, goddammit, I don’t have any facts!” Ballard began walking back and forth in front of the desk, slamming his open left hand with his fisted right, like a boxer warming up his taped fists against the target provided by the trainer’s open palm. “Let me work Bart’s assignments for a few days, I’ll get you facts. This has to be in connection with something he was working . . .”

  Kearny shook his head sadly. “Two years as a field investigator? I can’t believe it.”

  “Without pay, then,” said Ballard. “You want off the hook with the Jaguar. If I can furnish you with proof—”

  Kearny’s “If” dripped scorn. He drummed the desk with his fingers, glaring from Ballard to Giselle impartially. Finally he said, “What did that doctor say was the critical period? Seventy-two hours? You’ve got that to prove or disprove your idea. Have you checked Bart’s case files?”

  “Not yet. I didn’t know—”

  “Everything’s on his desk. Type up a full list of your cases so Giselle can spread them around among the other men, then go through Bart’s and narrow it down to possibles. I want a summary of those, and daily reports on all work done.” He turned to Giselle. “Bart wasn’t carrying anything except repossessions and chattel recoveries right now, was he?”

  She narrowed her eyes for a moment. “No.”

  “Larry, eliminate cases on the possible list by finalizing them. Close them out. Got it?”

  “Yes.” In the doorway, Ballard paused. “Thanks, Dan.”

  Through the one-way glass they watched him cross the basement to Heslip’s cubicle. Giselle cleared her throat. “It was good of you to go along with Larry so he could get it out of his system, Dan, but you were awfully rough on him. He could be right, you know. It isn’t like Bart to—”

  “He is right,” said Kearny. He shook out cigarettes for them.

  “What?” Giselle gaped as one hand groped behind her for the chair Ballard had vacated. She sat down without taking her eyes from Kearny. “You mean that all the time—”

  “Larry’s involved, emotional on this. I had to get him thinking like a cop again.” He mimicked Ballard’s voice. “I think. Jesus!”

  Giselle feathered smoke through her nose, felt a quick stir of anticipation. This was it, one of those rare moments for which she stayed on at DKA despite her M.A. in history and the offer of a teaching fellowship from S.F. State. The hunt. It got into your guts, twisted them; and Kearny was the best hunter there was. She waggled her fingers at him.

  “Give,” she said. “Tell me what I missed. What Larry missed.”

  Kearny put his elbows solidly on the desk. “All right, the call came in at three-thirty, at home. Operating assumptions: Bart Heslip wouldn’t joy-ride a repo; if he did, he wouldn’t be drunk; if he was drunk, he still wouldn’t smash it up.”

  “But just assumptions,” said Giselle quickly. “No facts.”

  “No? I talked with the driver and the steward in the Park Emergency Hospital over by Kezar Stadium, and they gave me what you and Larry just heard Waterreus say: the booze in the Jaguar was Scotch.”

  “Ri-i-ght,” said Giselle, chagrined. “And Bart never, not ever, drank anything but bourbon. When he drank anything at all.”

  “That made me go up to Twin Peaks to look it over at five o’clock this morning.” His gray eyes gleamed in the rough granite face. “The only place a car could go over, he went. The only place, you follow me? So then I came down to the office. And Bart’s car was parked across the street where it still is.” He paused. “Unlocked.”

  Giselle sat up straight, suddenly. “Bart would never—”

  “Exactly. Ballard missed that, too. And something else he missed. Look at this.”

  He opened his desk drawer, flopped a trifolded sheet of paper on the desk. Pink report carbons were stapled face-out to the back of it. Harold J. Willets. Scrawled across the front was Heslip’s notation, Repo, with the date beneath it.

  “Lying alongside the curb outside the front door,” said Kearny.

  “He could have dropped it, not noticed . . .”

  He shook his head to the question in her voice. “No way. What do all our men do when they call in a repo? They write down the cop’s name and shield number. Here it is, see? Delaney, 7-5-8.”

  “What time did Delaney log in Bart’s call?”

  “One-oh-one A.M. I talked with Delaney; he said they joked back and forth, Bart sounded perfectly sober then. Ballard got here at one-twenty-five. That means that in a little over twenty minutes, Bart had to take off in a repo—to buy a quart of Scotch, let’s say—in such a hurry that he left his own car unlocked, and left the office locked but didn’t bother to set the alarms.”

  Giselle shook her head. “That just doesn’t make it, Dan.”

  “Now it gets cute. What was he going to do until Larry got here?”

  “Type reports.”

  “Sixteen of them, remember. That’s what he told Larry on the radio. We both know he always writes his notes on the face of the last report carbon stapled to the assignment sheet. We also know that he keeps those case sheets which are ready for reports over his car visor. He had the Willets assignment sheet with him because
he’d just phoned it in to the cops, you follow me? But—”

  “But he would need the others from over the visor,” said Giselle in excitement, “and he would go out to get them . . .” She ran down. “But how do we know he was carrying the Willets assignment in his hand when he went out?”

  “Because I found it in the gutter. Right where he would drop it if he got sapped as he came out the door. If he hadn’t been carrying it, it would still be on his desk with the condition report. Or it would be missing.”

  “Missing?”

  “The rest of them are missing.”

  Giselle’s eyes went wide with shock. “All of his case assignments are missing?”

  “No, not all. I think all of those he worked yesterday—the ones that would have been over the visor. We know he picked up three cars last night, right? Well, no assignment sheets were over the visor ready for reports, none of those three repo assignments were in his briefcase. And none of those that were in the briefcase have notations of work done yesterday. Yet he told Larry he worked sixteen of them.”

  “So I’d better go through all of the open files, type a list of the ones Bart was carrying, compare that with the list of case assignment sheets Larry finds in Bart’s folders—”

  “Right,” said Kearny. “Another thing Larry missed. He spent twenty minutes with that doctor, never asked him whether there was alcohol in Bart’s bloodstream. I asked when I called over there; all the Scotch was down the front of his shirt.”

  “If we remind the police of that—”

  Kearny shook his head. “The cops have it as an accident, let them keep it that way for a while. Somebody tried to knock off one of my men, Giselle. Somebody panicked on some case after talking with Bart sometime yesterday, and acted damned fast to take him out. Then he grabbed all of those case assignments to mask which one he was really after—actually, of course, he was after Bart’s notes on the back of it. He couldn’t know that our routine is so standardized we’d realize the assignment sheets were missing. So then he locked up after running the Jag out, forgot to lock Bart’s car door, didn’t know about the burglar alarms. Strictly a panic operation all the way, but he almost got away with it. Almost. We’re going to find that bastard, and—”

  Ballard burst into the cubicle, almost stuttering with excitement. “Dan! Giselle! Every single damned one of Bart’s case sheets that he worked yesterday is missing! That means—”

  “All except this one,” said Giselle dryly.

  He grabbed it out of her hand. “Yeah! Dirt, grease, oil on it . . .” He looked at Kearny. “In the gutter out in front?”

  Kearny nodded.

  “Then he did get it here. Went out to cross the street to his car for the other assignments, and—”

  “You had seventy-two hours as of two o’clock this morning to convince me,” said Kearny. “Twelve of them are already gone.”

  FIVE

  SIXTY-EIGHT. THAT was how many cases Giselle and Ballard, working together, finally were able to confirm as being carried by Heslip at the time the Jaguar had gone off Twin Peaks.

  Current: active files on which work would have to be done. There were thirty-seven of them, ranging from two months old to those assigned to Heslip the day before, and which still needed their twenty-four-hour first report.

  Hold: eleven of them. Open cases, still active and still in the area, but cases on which the clients had advised DKA that the subjects were in the process of working out arrangements with them.

  Skip: fourteen skips. When the subject had left the area covered by the field agent—literally, “skipped out”—he became the responsibility of the inside skip-tracers (usually girls) who worked the files by phone. The field agent held these files in abeyance until new leads had been developed.

  Contingent: Heslip had been carrying only seven contingent files. The DKA fee (setup, time-and-mileage, and skip-tracing charges) was paid on contingent cases only when—and if—the case was successfully closed. These were worked only sporadically by the field agents and skip-tracers.

  Of these sixty-eight files, they had been unable to find assignment sheets in Heslip’s briefcase for fifteen. With the Willets case included, that tallied with what Heslip had said on the radio the night before—which was maybe the only hopeful thing in the whole setup. Because it could be a damned obscure motive connected with any of those sixteen cases.

  At eight o’clock, after an indigestible sandwich at a coffee shop, Ballard leaned back in his chair and groaned. His coat had been discarded long ago, and his tie. He could smell himself. Man, for a shower and ten hours of sleep! But eighteen of his seventy-two hours were gone, and he hadn’t even been out of the office yet. Hadn’t called the hospital again, either.

  He dialed, got the reception desk, and was switched up to the floor desk. Whitaker was gone for the night, so he asked if Miss Corinne Jones was in Heslip’s room.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t leave the desk.”

  It was ten paces from the desk to the door of Bart’s room. Ten paces. What the hell had ever happened to Florence Nightingale?

  “Could you tell me the condition of the patient in room three-eight-two?”

  That she could do. After a pause, the depersonalized voice came back on. “The patient is still in coma, sir.”

  Just beautiful. Dark and silent in there, all systems shut down. Not Bart. The systems had to start up again, the quick smile had to light the dark features, the teeth gleam, the muscular boxer’s hand slap the thigh, the voice laugh, “You an’ me, baby, we cool!”

  Find the son of a bitch. At least you can do that much. Before Kearny takes you off the search; only fifty-four hours left. Can’t let that happen. So, have to be cold and steady. Here for one thing, to find the son of a bitch. No, not even that. To find the subject. That was it, find the subject, eliminate those cases one by one, coldly, efficiently, until only one was left.

  And that would be the right one.

  Ten o’clock, sixteen had been reduced to six. On eight of them, the reports had indicated there just was none of the passion or hatred or fear one associates with attempted murder. And thirty minutes before, at 9:30, Kearny had dropped in on his way home and had promptly eliminated two of the eight Ballard was then considering.

  “Forget the three we know were repo’d last night. No subject is going to come down here and beat Heslip over the head, grab his assignment sheets—and then leave his own car here.”

  “Bart said on the radio that Willets had given him a hard time because he was black.”

  Kearny nodded thoughtfully. “He might have come after Bart, not to get his car back, but because he wanted to whup a nigger?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why take the assignment sheets without taking his own?”

  “He could have just not seen it in the gutter. Hell, I didn’t—and I wasn’t scared and excited like whoever slugged Bart probably was.”

  “If anybody did,” said Kearny flatly. “Okay, leave Willets in as a possible until you can check his movements last night.”

  Which left six.

  Of course he still could be wrong, Ballard knew. He might have missed or misread something in the files, it might really be none of these. But at least he had a starting point. And Giselle and Kearny would be coming through the files behind him to check his conclusions. Which reminded him to type up the list of “possibles” and leave it on Kearny’s desk.

  1.Harold J. Willets, 1972 Mercury Montego. Residence address, 736 Seventh Avenue, San Francisco. Age, 44; 3 dependents; white. Ballard regarded this a moment, then added Reason Why Included: SUBJECT HATES BLACKS.

  2.Joyce Leonard Tiger, 1972 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Last known address, 1600 Fell Street, San Francisco. Age, 28; single; white. Reason Why Included: SUBJECT PROBABLY IS A WHORE.

  3.Charles M. Griffin, 1972 Ford Thunderbird. Last known address, 3877 Castro Valley Blvd., Castro Valley. Age, 41; single; white. Reason Why Included: SUBJECT MAY BE AN EMBEZZLER.

 
4.Fred Chambers, 1971 Buick Skylark. Residence address, unknown. Work address, The Freaks Bar, Clement and Tenth Avenue, San Francisco. Age, 22; single; white. Reason Why Included: UNIT WAS REPOSSESSED IN BAKERSFIELD BY CLIENT TWO MONTHS AGO. SUBJECT STOLE IT BACK AFTER CLIPPING CLIENT’S MAN WITH A TIRE IRON.

  5.Timothy Ryan, 1956 Chevrolet sedan. Residence address, 11 Justin Drive, San Francisco. Age, 21; married; white. Reason Why Included: SUBJECT THREATENED CLIENT’S REPRESENTATIVE WITH A MACHETE WHEN RECOVERY OF UNIT WAS ATTEMPTED.

  6.Kenneth Hemovich, 1970 Plymouth Roadrunner. Residence address, 191 Stillings Avenue, San Francisco. Age, 19; single; white. Reason Why Included: SUBJECT LIVING WITH 32-YEAR-OLD WOMAN WHO IS TRYING TO GET HER THREE KIDS FROM THE HUSBAND.

  There they were, the six of them. Was the attempted murderer among them? He had to be. There wasn’t enough time to find him if he wasn’t one of these six. In each case there was a history of or a motive for violence. A black-hater. A whore whose pimp would be oriented toward violence as a problem-solver. An embezzler; tracked down for his car, he would also go to jail. A rock-group leader at a hip bar who had stolen the car back once, had attacked a man to do so. A young man with an old car (hence, probably rodding it up, hence, probably a car-lover) who had threatened violence to retain his vehicle. And a nineteen-year-old kid living with an older married woman—an always explosive situation, especially with small children involved.

  Before leaving, Ballard typed up duplicate assignment sheets for himself on each case, and stapled to the back of them the spare gold-colored copy of all reports and memos in each file. Before leaving, also, he set up his swing.

  New men with DKA usually would start with one file and work every address in it until they found something. It was the way it was done in detective stories. But experience soon taught them to arrange their field work by address. Thus, the swing: a loop or circle through the city or that portion of it where there were addresses to work. Since Ballard was trying to discover why Heslip had gotten a busted head, he was trying to retrace Heslip’s probable movements the day before. Which meant reworking all leads, no matter how basic. This rearranged the cases by address: