Dead Skip

by Joe Gores

  Whispers. Then he said, with Virginia’s voice almost audible behind him, “You mean the bank is asking you to cancel my insurance?”

  “That’s right.” Dammit, she was smart.

  “Tell them to go ahead. I’ll place other coverage elsewhere.”

  Kearny’s heavy voice suddenly came on, rich and oily and insinuating. “Mr. Hemovich? Joe Bush here, of California Citizens legal department. I just happen to be here in the Continental office discussing this case with Mr. Beam at this moment. You know, and I know, Mr. Hemovich, that the contract is being voided for only one reason: nonpayment of the auto notes under the contract agreement. We don’t even know who’s driving the car—”

  “Mrs. Virginia Pressler.” No coaching; they’d covered that beforehand.

  “A third party? Mr. Hemovich, you’re way out of trust on this contract!” Kearny was winging it, without even the file in front of him and with just the sketchiest briefing. There just wasn’t anybody better around, anywhere. “First, we need Mrs. Pressler’s home address—”

  “I can’t . . . give you that.” Furious whispers. “I mean, I don’t know where she lives.”

  “You gave the car to someone you don’t even know?”

  “Yes. Ah . . . no. Ah . . . I mean, I never see her . . . Ah, I never drive it, she has it, she, ah . . . yes, she just moved . . .”

  “Then we’ll need your current address.”

  Again, consultation. “I . . . can’t give you that, either. I—”

  “You don’t know where you live?”

  “No! Ah . . . I’ve got, ah, personal problems . . .”

  An irate husband with a shotgun, for openers. Kearny was saying, “. . . don’t understand your attitude, Mr. Hemovich. I’m afraid I’m going to have to advise the bank to go for Grand Theft, Auto, on this one—”

  “Hey! Wow, ah, listen, I . . . Look, I’ll pay. I’ll pay! And I’m working, honest. I—”

  “I haven’t found you honest yet, Mr. Hemovich,” he said coldly.

  “I am working. Valencia Shee—”

  The phone was slammed down abruptly. By Virginia, of course. Kearny and Ballard still had an open line even though the outside connection had been broken, and Kearny said, “I bet she’s giving him hell right now. Not that he told us anything useful . . .”

  Ballard was already into the Yellow Pages. Since he hadn’t turned in his reports yet, Kearny didn’t know what old man Pressler had told him the night before.

  “Here it is, Dan. Valencia Sheet Metal Company, thirty-two-hundred block of Mission.” He looked at his watch. “He’ll be there until four-thirty, he won’t expect us because they don’t know I found out he works in sheet metal. I’ll go out as soon as I finish these reports.”

  TEN

  VALENCIA SHEET METAL WORKS was on Mission just south of the angled Valencia Street intersection. An old building in an old neighborhood which had witnessed successive streams of Micks, Wops, Portagees, Spics, and Spades; each group, in the fullness of time, moving out and up and being magically transformed into Irishmen, Italians, Portuguese, and Spanish-Americans. The blacks, mainly, were still there; but they were beginning to eye with disdain the illiterate Hong Kong Slants. Thus they passed, one after the other, in that curious upward mobility which seems to characterize American ethnic groups.

  Ballard, who was not even subconsciously aware of any racial debts, was concerned only with spotting the yellow Roadrunner and avoiding the punk in the dune buggy who ran the red from Valencia Street.

  No Roadrunner, of course. Virginia Pressler would be driving that. Hemovich, if he had wheels at all, would be herding some heap of tin that had slid out of the bottom end of the Blue Book years before.

  Valencia Sheet Metal Works was a big monolithic-pour concrete building with dirt-opaqued, thickly wired windows, and huge loading doors wide and high enough to admit interstate semis. Inside, screeching saws bit through metal; galvanized steel dust lay over everything; weird truncated modern sculptures which were actually made-to-order duct-work crowded the shop area.

  “Who?” shrieked the little Chicano Ballard had picked as not possibly being anyone named Hemovich.

  “Ken!” Ballard bellowed. “Kenny Hemovich—”

  “Oh. Heem. Ken.” He pointed across the cavernous room to a lathe beside which a skinny kid wearing a Giants cap and new leather gloves was lethargically stacking sheets of galvanized steel. “On the duct-work tin.”

  Ballard mouthed thanks made silent by the shrieking saws, then went up the wooden office stairs as soon as the Spanish-American turned away. At the head of the stairs was a tiny, cramped, but blessedly soundproofed office with a wooden counter behind which two harassed-looking females labored. One was young and blond and typing on an old manual, the other was older and doing bookwork.

  “’Nye help you?”

  “I need Kenny Hemovich’s home address,” said Ballard. When the ledger woman made a movement toward the intercom page system, he added quickly, “He’s out on one of the trucks, I checked. I’m taking over the payments on that yellow Roadrunner of his, and he wants me to pick it up tonight, before the bank repossesses it or something. Only all I’ve got is the old address.”

  “We just got the new one ourselves,” said the blond girl.

  She gave Ballard an unexpectedly brilliant smile; when she bent over to get the personnel folder from the bottom drawer of a file cabinet, he watched with a quick faint stirring of lust as her miniskirt rode up almost to her buttocks. Glancing away, he caught the ledger woman watching him watching, and winked at her. Also unexpectedly, she bent her gray head over her bookwork and started to giggle. The curve of cheek he could see turned bright crimson.

  The blonde came back to the counter. “Here it is,” she said happily. “5-0-7 Nevada Street. I’ll write it out for you.”

  When she handed him the slip of scratch paper, her fingers rested on the back of his hand. Again, that brilliant smile. Maybe she hadn’t been so unaware of the miniskirt after all. Ballard went away. Ledger was still giggling.

  Before getting back under the wheel, he removed his sport jacket. Hot afternoon for May; the Mission District got more sunshine than most other areas of the city. Maybe he should have asked the blonde for her phone number. He bet the shopmen all hung around the bottom of the steep open stairs when she went up to the office each morning, if she always wore skirts that short. He got the radio going.

  “SF-6 calling KDM 366 Control.” When Giselle’s voice told him to go ahead, he said, “I’ve got a res add on Hemovich. 5-0-7 Nevada Street, San Francisco. I’m going over there now to check it out. After that I’ll try to beat the rush hour across the Bay. Over.”

  “10-4. We’ll inform Oakland Control that you’ll be in their area this afternoon, over.”

  “Ashcan that. They always try to rope me in on one of their lousy repos. Last time I got two ice-picked tires out of it.”

  In a very la-di-da accent, Giselle said, “A-ten, a-four, a-Roger, a-Wilco and out. Your Majesty.”

  Ballard clipped his mike, grinning, and started out Mission toward Cortland Avenue, which gave easiest access to Nevada. That Giselle.

  The 500 block was a steeply slanted street sliding over an arm of Bernal Heights toward the incredible maze of overpasses and underpasses, ramps and cloverleafs which marked the confluence of the Interstate 80 and Interstate 280 traffic streams. Houses crowded down the hill waist-to-shoulder, all of them needing paint, all of them with garages on the ground floor, short steep drives, and tiny slanted squares of lawn just big enough to blow your nose on.

  The Pressler-Hemovich shack-up was apparently still too tender for the permanence of house purchase contracts; 507 was a stucco bungalow that looked like a rental property. If old man Pressler didn’t blow Kenny-baby’s head off, Virginia probably would get sick of mindless all-night humping and adolescent pimples, and eventually go home to papa and the kids.

  The garage was locked but empty. Ballard checked the mai
lbox, saw a window envelope from the San Francisco Department of Social Services addressed to Hemovich. His lip curled unconsciously. Nineteen years old, on welfare. At least Virginia had gotten him off his dead butt and back to work. A woman, like a dope habit, was expensive to support. Even a working woman.

  Ballard opened the trunk of his car, found a piece of thin copper wire, looked about and saw no window shades or drapes or curtains flapping. He clipped a short piece of wire and stuck it in the lock of the garage door. He drove off grinning. Poetic justice, that—although he didn’t believe that Hemovich had clouted Bart over the head. Not after seeing the kid in person. The attack on Bart had required a deadly decisiveness that Hemovich just didn’t have.

  Of course, maybe Virginia Pressler did. She was smart, obviously strong-minded. Could she also be murderous?

  To hell with them. Nothing to be done about them until tonight anyway. Which left Griffin, and the East Bay. But down on the freeway the cars were already clotting up even though it wasn’t yet four o’clock.

  Why not wait until after six, use the time to drive out to Trinity and see Bart? He hadn’t been there since his first visit yesterday morning. Yesterday? God, it seemed like a week since he’d stared down at that dark, still face on the pillow, with Corinne sobbing in the background.

  He pulled the car over and stopped beside a sidewalk pay phone near a small neighborhood shopping area. He sat in the car for a few moments. The hell of it was that he didn’t want to visit the hospital, either. Didn’t want to see Bart just lying there.

  He had to pull out of it. But according to Whitaker, every hour that he stayed in the coma meant . . .

  Had to get the mother that did it. Had to. If he hadn’t connected by the end of the seventy-two hours, and Kearny cut him off, he’d have to quit his job and keep looking. There was no other way to go.

  He got out of the car, got the phone number from the telephone book, asked to have Whitaker paged. The girl on the switchboard said he had already left the hospital. She switched Ballard to the third floor, this time to a nice-sounding nurse who had heard of Florence Nightingale.

  “No, gee, I’m terribly sorry to have to say he’s still in coma, no change at all in his condition.”

  “His, ah . . . Miss Jones wouldn’t be around, would she?”

  “I’m sure she’s in his room. That poor girl has barely been out of this place since . . . just a sec. I’ll send an aide to get her.”

  When Corinne’s voice came on the phone it was flat and exhausted, limp as a home permanent in the rain. Trying to compensate, Ballard put as much spurious warmth as he could into his own. “Hi, kid! This is Larry—”

  “I know who it is. Why haven’t you been around to see Bart?”

  A lump of black meat lying on the bed . . . How do you give that as a reason to the girl who loves him? “Well, ah, Corinne, I’ve, ah . . . they said at the office that there’d been no change . . .”

  “Don’t you even care enough to come see him?”

  “It isn’t that, kid. You see, I—”

  “Or do you feel that he’s all done anyway, so what the hell’s the difference?”

  ‘‘You know that isn’t it, kid. It’s just . . . well, I’ve only got about one more day to find out who did it—”

  “Who cares?” she asked in a bone-weary tone.

  “I care, I . . . Look, Corinne, you need sleep, food—the nurse tells me you’ve barely been out of the hospital since he was brought in. When was the last time you ate a meal?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. This morning sometime. Last night. I don’t know, what difference does it make?” She suddenly burst out, “Oh, Larry, he just lies there! Why can’t they do something?”

  “I guess Bart has to do it himself, from what Whitaker said. He will do it, Corinne. He’s never backed down from a fight yet.”

  “Please come over here, Larry.” Her voice held an almost wistful note through the fatigue. “I need you. Bart needs you.”

  Ballard looked at his watch. “All right, kid, I’ll try to make it. I’m way out in the Mission right now, I can’t guarantee anything, but—”

  “Thanks a lot, sport,” she said flatly.

  He cursed, once, hung up the already dead phone. Back in the Ford, he dug out his maps for Southern Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. Shit, he just couldn’t hack it there at the hospital. And he couldn’t really take the time, anyway. Only about thirty-four hours left to his deadline.

  Then he thought, guiltily: How many hours does Bart have left?

  ELEVEN

  THE MYSTERIOUS EAST BAY, as Herb Caen always called it in his daily Chronicle column. Ha. About as mysterious as a bag of dirty laundry. A big hot sprawl of nothing, like L.A., with all those cute names the subdividers loved. Glorietta. Saranap. Gregory Gardens. Housewives driving around in shorts and hair curlers, men drinking beer at the drags on Sunday.

  Christ, he was tired. Used up.

  And the clock pushing him, pushing all the time, so he couldn’t afford any mistakes, couldn’t miss any nuances. He didn’t have time for backtracking. He had to get everything there was to get out of a single interview; rechecking leads burned up precious minutes, hours.

  One nice thing about Castro Valley, however: he was far enough south to be out of radio reach of Oakland Control. Half a mile away Interstate 580 whined and yelped like caged lab animals awaiting dissection; but this part of Castro Valley Boulevard was big old frame houses that must have been here before World War II. Overlaid with hot-dog stands and drive-ins and laundromats and gas stations now, but with the old residential neighborhood still showing through like silver through the tarnish.

  The rambling white house at 3877 had a lawn. It even had a garage instead of a carport. He walked across the grass just to feel it under his shoes; the back yard was full of roses. In the garage was an old Mercury whose license he didn’t even bother to jot down.

  He had stopped to eat, bringing twilight close enough for lights to burn in the front room. The door was finally opened by a woman with iron-gray hair, of about the same vintage as the house. “Sorry I took so long; I was on the phone.”

  “I wonder if I might speak with Charles, ma’am.”

  “Chuck? My goodness, he hasn’t lived here for—oh, seven, eight months anyway.” She was vaguely horse-faced, with glasses, and surprisingly vigorous physical movements—which probably explained (and were explained by) that yardful of fantastic roses.

  “Do you know where I might get in touch with him?”

  “My goodness, no, I don’t.” She emphasized don’t; it was a Midwest trick of speech, Illinois, Iowa, somewhere like that.

  “I understood this was his mother’s house.”

  “It was. She was my sister, you see, and . . .”

  Which made her Mrs. Western. In the original investigation she had been contacted in Sacramento, where she had lived in a tract house. Once started, Harriet Western was a talker.

  “. . . still in escrow, but Marian did leave the house to Chuck, and in February he asked if I wanted to live in it. Just gave me the keys. Too many associations for him, he said. I moved in last month. He and his mother were awfully close, time he lived a life of his own. Over forty years old, big, fine-looking man—always was. Marian just couldn’t let go . . .”

  Big, fine-looking man. Big enough to bounce a blackjack off Bart’s skull? Big enough, fine enough, to carry a 158-pound limp body into a basement garage, stuff it into a Jaguar, slide it over behind the wheel when the time came?

  “When you say big, Mrs. Western . . .”

  “Heavens, six feet tall, two-hundred-ten pounds now that he’s lost all that weight. Was two-hundred-forty. And he lifts those barbell things around—he’s strong as an ox. I remember . . .”

  Better and better, Griffin looked. She hadn’t seen him since the first week in February when he’d given her the keys, knew nothing of California Street in Concord.

  Because of that Concord lead, Ballard had
gone the seven miles east to the 680 Interstate interchange instead of doubling back through Oakland. Now he was zipping north through the valley in light traffic. Very good indeed, Griffin looked. Especially after Ballard had asked Harriet Western about the cash he’d understood her sister had left to Griffin.

  “Cash? Cash money?” She’d given a hearty full-throated laugh. “She had this house free and clear, and that was all. Chuck’s father was killed in a car accident in 1954, didn’t leave her a dime of insurance. Chuck was the one giving her cash, not the other way around . . .”

  Yeah, and Ballard had a pretty good idea where the cash had been coming from, too; at least during the past few years. Have to call JRS tomorrow, find out if an audit had been talked of before Griffin had taken off. He might have known his peculations had become gross enough so they would be caught when someone else went through the books, even if none of the partners realized it.

  Charles M. Griffin, age forty-one, white, single, a middle-aged swinger driving that middle-aged swinger’s car, the Thunderbird. And thief? And would-be murderer? And where, oh, where, are you, Chuckie baby?

  Meanwhile, Ballard, cool goddamn private eye, got lost.

  Made it all the way up through Danville and Alamo and Walnut Creek (just beds of lights laid down beside the raised 680 freeway) and then stayed on 680 when he should have veered right on California 242 just north of Pleasant Hill. He took the Concord Avenue offramp—the right street off the wrong freeway—and couldn’t find California Street. Dammit, where the little residential grid was supposed to be laid down, there wasn’t anything at all. Darkness. And beyond, where Concord was supposed to be, was a huge blare of lights that turned out to be an auto dealership with forty acres of used cars for sale. Then he ran out of gas, had to walk half a mile.

  Shit, if he’d re-upped when his two years in the army were finished, he’d have been a sergeant by now. If he hadn’t got his ass shot off in the meantime.