Dead Skip

by Joe Gores

  It was 9:07 P.M. when he turned off Concord Avenue into the old by-passed residential area on two-block California Street. He missed 1830 on the first drive-through, finally found it to be a low ranch-style plaster affair with a red asphalt shingle roof. The old-fashioned picket fence was almost bursting with roses even prettier than those in Castro Valley.

  No garage; a dusty blue Bonneville with a white hardtop was parked in the weedy yard next to a tall elm. A rope hung from a convenient limb, knotted near the end so kids could use it to swing on. Cars were whipping by down on Concord Avenue in an angry blare of horns and headlights. Almost dark, but he could still see the outlines, beyond the old live oaks and the new multiplexes, of the round-topped treeless California hills. The houses would climb them soon, too.

  As he started through the weeds toward the front door, the lights went out. He paused. A woman came out, slamming the screen door behind her. She jumped and gasped when she saw him motionless in the yard.

  “Jesus, you scared me, man!”

  “I’m sorry. I’m trying to get hold of Griff, I thought you—”

  “Griff?” The dying evening light showed her to be a big, buxom, dark-haired girl in her twenties. She wore skintight slacks over generous thighs; enough nipple poked against her red-and-white-striped T-shirt to show she wore no bra. Buxom was hardly the word. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Ballard. You wouldn’t know me, I’m from the city. Griff—”

  “Get to hell out of my way,” she said abruptly. She started to push past him. “I’m late for work.”

  Ballard put out a detaining hand. “I’m not on the make. I—”

  “Keep your paws off me!”

  A clawed hand came up at his eyes. Ballard caught her wrist, turned his body sideways in case she tried to knee him, but as soon as she pulled her wrist loose she went right on talking as if there had been no interruption.

  “I’m sick of that bastard’s rotten friends sucking around! This is my place now, get it? Next time I’ll slap you with so much fuzz you’ll be wearing stripes before you need a change of socks, believe me. They’re my friends in this town.”

  Ballard seemed destined to never finish a sentence. “I’m not a friend of Griffin’s, I’m a private—”

  “Buck private, I suppose. Last one Griff brought around was so kinky he wanted me to sit on the edge of the bed so . . . oh, never mind!”

  Ballard stared after her in the near-darkness, then burst out laughing. What else could he do? But he had learned something: the bounteously endowed girl apparently had moved in when Griffin had moved out. Or before. So the house was a rental, and rental properties meant landladies. Somewhere close by, perhaps? Like next door?

  Next door it was, a well-kept house that looked pale green in the evening light, with a wood-shingle roof and attractive brown trim. A newly polished Galaxie-500 was parked in front under an evergreen. The woman who identified herself as the owner of 1830 wore gray slacks and a thin white blouse over a mannish frame that went with her sixtyish age. Heavy-rimmed glasses made her eyes owlish. Her name was Emily Tregum.

  “Griffin? Him? He left in February, good riddance, six weeks after that car smash he had on Christmas Eve—”

  “With the T-Bird?”

  “That’s right. They towed it away, should of kept it; but here a month later he had it back, all fixed up.” She nodded her head in tart satisfaction. “Ask me, he’s in jail—I know that’s where he should be. Left owing over two hundred dollars in rent, besides selling all of my furniture from that house. Put an ad right in the newspaper.”

  “Do you know anyone who can put me in touch with him?”

  She pursed meager lips, shook a finger at him in an oddly inappropriate gesture. “Someone bonded him over that auto wreck, then he jumped six hundred dollars’ bail.” She stopped, then added, “You look like a clean-cut young man, I’ll tell you this. Cheri, the girl who rents from me now, used to know him.”

  “I, ah, just missed Cheri.”

  “Well, she works right down the street. On Concord Avenue.” She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “In the topless place.”

  Ballard thanked her and turned to leave, then remembered another question. “Has anyone else been around asking about Griffin lately?”

  “No,” she said positively. “ ’Less you count the Nigra man was around on, let’s see, Tuesday it was. Told him just what I told you, ’cept about Cheri and all . . .”

  So Bart had been here. More to point to Griffin as the one. He said, “Why didn’t you tell him about Cheri, ma’am?”

  “Well, I told you. He was colored. He knew Cheri lives over there alone, he’d be after her, quick as scat. They can’t help it, of course, but . . . well, he was eyeing me before I shut the door . . .”

  The topless place was on the corner of Concord and Bonifacio, just being redone, so the outside walls were black tarpaper with chicken wire over them, waiting for the plasterers. The abbreviated gravel parking area held twelve autos, foreign and small and sporty except for one bright irridescent blue Continental, a peacock in a chicken coop.

  Above the door in fancy neon script was Dukum Inn, with a sign under it, TOPLESS, in big red painted letters, with NOW underneath that in smaller black letters.

  Ballard went through the heavy door, leathered and brass-studded on the inside. It was jammed. A lot of couples and even more single men, young, the sort that wear their hair too long and comb it incessantly by the back-bar mirror. In back, where in less frenetic times a shuffleboard would have been, was a stage. On it was a four-man combo, and gyrating wildly in front of them, wearing nothing but brief panties and flying sweat, was Cheri, the girl from 1830. Her bared breasts lived up to their promise under the striped T-shirt.

  “What’ll it be, sir?”

  “Just a beer.” Ballard didn’t take his eyes from the girl and her heavy jouncing bust. No wonder she was so defensive; in a place like this, a lot of hands would have been reaching for that candy.

  “Same price as whiskey, y’know,” warned the bartender absently, staring beyond him at Cheri with complacent lust.

  “That’s okay, I’m driving. Ah . . . how many girls do you have?”

  “Just the two. Her an’ Cleo. Ain’t she somethin’? Cheri Tart.”

  Ballard opened his mouth, realized it was open, and shut it again. Cheri Tart. How would he cover that in his report? Topless, dying in the city, seemed very big—in several ways—in Concord.

  “Griff been around lately?” he asked, very casually.

  “Chuck Griffin?” He shook his head slowly, side-to-side, his eyes moving in their sockets so they stayed fixed on the stage. “Not for three, four months, anyway.”

  “Hell! I’ve been at sea since the first of the year, just got in. Owe him some money and . . . Hey!” He let a light dawn in his eye. “Wasn’t he going out with one of these girls here or something? Sure! That girl. Cheri.” He picked up his glass and beer, turned toward a table a foursome was just vacating. “Tell her I’m here with Griff’s twenty bucks. She’ll recognize me.”

  Ten minutes later she threaded her way directly to his table, wearing her slacks and T-shirt, barefoot and sullen-faced, slapping away eager hands. Behind her the combo was belting out, of all things, a bad rendition of the old Johnny Cash “Ring of Fire.” She pulled out the chair across from Ballard and flopped in it with a huge sigh.

  “What the hell, it’s a living,” he told her discontented face. He laid a twenty on the table.

  She laughed suddenly, then tapped the bill with a long red fingernail. In a moment of intense sexual fantasy, Ballard’s imagination felt the fingernail running languidly down his bare spine.

  “This doesn’t buy you anything,” she said.

  “What I said at the house was the truth, Cheri. I’m not on the make. I’m just trying to get in touch with Griffin.”

  “A sweet guy,” she said unexpectedly. Her eyes were very clear under their tremendous overlay of mascara. �
�On the sauce too heavy, but a sweet guy. Gentle. And square, y’know? A real thing about his mother. Sometimes I think he dug me because I’ve got these big titties.” She put a hand under one of them and flopped it once, casually, as if it were a cow’s udder. “Like, the big mother image or something, y’know?”

  “What was all this about kinky—”

  “That was the other guy. Griff, he was strictly missionary-style.” She held her joined hands out, palms together as if in prayer but with the hands horizontal, not vertical, with the left on the bottom. She began rocking the right by raising the heel while the fingertips remained pressed to those of the left. It was almost shockingly graphic. “Like that, y’know? Always. Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Her eyes got a faraway look. “But a sweet guy.”

  The combo paused after scattered clapping. Then a rebel yell went up as Cleo appeared.

  “If he was so sweet, what happened?”

  “He just took off.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that. We had a big fight over this other guy—”

  “The kinky one?”

  “That’s him.” She suddenly shuddered. “Tall, good-looking guy. Griff brought him in to see me dance. February eighth it was, I remember it ’cause it was one month to the day after I moved in with Griff. Anyway, we all got loaded between gigs. At one o’clock the three of us went back up to the house and Griff went out for a bottle. This clown dragged me right into the bedroom like he owned me, y’know?” Her eyes were indignant. “Tore the pantyhose right off me, four-ninety-eight a pair, and you know what he wanted? To look up me. Honest. With a flashlight.”

  Ballard had trouble keeping his face straight. “You let him?”

  “No. I kicked him—where it hurts, even if you’re barefooted. Then I ran out. I slept over to my girl friend’s where I roomed before I went in with Griff. He came over the next morning, Griff, and I really lit into him. This guy came on so strong, I thought he had to have been told I was an easy lay or something, y’know? Real kinky guy. Griff felt terrible about it, he had no idea. Said he was gonna do something about it . . .”

  Ballard nodded. “So when I showed up tonight—”

  “Yeah. I thought, just like the other one.” She put out her hand impulsively. “I’m not that bitchy usually, honest.”

  “What I don’t understand, if Griff was such a nice guy, why he just took off like that.”

  “Yeah, how do you like that?” Cheri asked broodily, eyes dark with remembered injustice. “The next day, after we fought and made up so I thought everything was fine, he goes off to work and just keeps going. Walks out without a word. And then the next week guys start coming in, hauling out the furniture right from under me! Honest. Said they’d bought it from Griff, left checks made out to him. Finally, like three weeks or a month later—maybe early March or something—here comes this phone call from him.”

  “Phone call?” asked Ballard almost sharply.

  “From a bar somewhere,” she nodded. “He’s about half shit-face, y’know? The music so loud I can hardly hear him. Says he’s sorry it didn’t work out, would I, like, mail these checks for the furniture to him. I was pretty sore at the time, y’know, but I got something else going for myself now. Might even marry him, big deal.”

  Ballard rubbed his jaw, hard. He said cautiously, “Ah . . . you wouldn’t remember that address you mailed the checks to, would you?”

  “No. But I got it up to the house. I’ll run up and get it for you on my next break.”

  The address was 1545 Midfield Road. In San Jose.

  Ballard felt it was worth his twenty bucks.

  TWELVE

  IT WASN’T. It was a tract house and it was empty. Empty, by the look of it, for quite a while. The street light behind Ballard showed bare living-room walls and floors; the cheap ornamental mailbox on the porch was empty. Garage locked but empty. So much for 1545 Midfield Road in San Jose. Twenty DKA bucks down the tubes (if Kearny would even honor the payment), a forty-mile drive from Concord for nothing, another sixty to get back to San Francisco.

  And when he got there, he still had to positively eliminate Hemovich—which wouldn’t get him any closer to Charles M. Griffin.

  Before leaving, Ballard wrote down the numbers of the houses on either side and of the three across the street. This would give the skip-tracers something to work with. He took the new inner route, Interstate 280, a great beautiful sweep of freeway which ran up the spine of the peninsula behind the bedroom communities cupped between the coast and the Bay. It was an almost exhilarating drive; the highway was starkly deserted, he fled north with the radio blaring and the window wide to let stinging fresh air slap at his tired face. Despite an unfinished stretch near the Crystal Springs Reservoir, he took the Alemany off-ramp near the Farmer’s Market at 1:10 A.M.

  Twenty-five hours left to Kearny’s deadline, and not a damned thing proved. Lots of eliminating, but no proof of anything.

  As he had hoped, the Roadrunner was parked in the driveway on Nevada Street, its nose against the gimmicked garage door. He parked around the corner at the bottom of the hill, on Crescent, and walked up. Usually, once he had gotten into it, he would have rolled the car downhill and out of sight of the house before starting it. But this time he doggedly ran the Chrysler pop keys on it right there. The third one he worked in the lock with delicate fingers did it. The radio screamed hard rock until he found the right button to punch it silent; the overhead light wouldn’t go off even when he shut the door.

  Ballard revved the engine, turned to look over his shoulder as he backed it out. And looked right into the face of a redheaded woman outside the door. He was so startled he killed it. She tapped with a knuckle, mouthed the word “Please” through the glass. He rolled down the window, recklessly—a field agent named Warner once had caught a three-pound can of coffee right in the face that way.

  “I just want to get our possessions out of it,” she said. She had very pale skin and a narrow, small-featured face that looked much younger than her age. Despite the hour, she was fully made-up.

  “Be my guest.”

  She delved in the glove box, pulled papers from above the visor. “Lying about who you were on the phone,” she said disdainfully. She was dressed in a rather faded quilted robe and fuzzy red slippers, a get-up far from sexy. People.

  “It worked,” said Ballard. He added, almost casually, “I have to know where you and lover-boy were on Tuesday night, too.”

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve!” she blazed. “If you think—”

  “Me or the police. Take your pick.”

  “We haven’t done . . .” She paused, shivered, said, “What time Tuesday night?” She eased in on the seat beside him, face almost haggard, as if impelled by her own obscure feelings of guilt.

  “You tell me.”

  “We were having a row with my mother and brother up in San Rafael until after midnight. I know it was one-thirty when we got back here.”

  Say, 12:30 leaving San Rafael. If that checked out, they were clear. And having talked to Virginia Pressler, he couldn’t see her as helping anyone attempt murder.

  “Who won the fight?”

  “Oh God, it was terrible! They just don’t understand. Mom—” She stopped abruptly, a surprised look on her face.

  Ballard reached over, took the keys to the Roadrunner from her unresisting fingers. The fingers were icy cold. He said, “Leave him. Go back to your old man.”

  “How dare you! I ought to . . .” Her face contorted suddenly; she started crying, turned to Ballard and jammed her head, hard, against his chest like a little girl. “Oh God,” she sobbed into his shirt collar “what am I going to do?”

  “Keep him away from your old man for openers,” said Ballard literally. “He’s got a loaded shotgun and he’s just waiting.”

  “Oh God!” she said again. She got out, stood there in a listening attitude, as if hoping for some revelation that would magically unsnarl the tangle of her life.

  Ballard had no revelations; al
l he could offer was a monosyllable. “Luck,” he said; and meant it

  When he parked the Ford and turned off the ignition, silence trilled in his ears like phone wires strung across empty winter fields. After 3:00 A.M. He stayed slumped behind the wheel for a full minute, literally too tired to move. Finally he groaned, got out, locked the car. The ocean-laden air swirled early-summer fog around him, haloing the street lights. The 800 block of Lincoln Way was deserted. Across the street a hedge hid the wide darkness of Golden Gate Park.

  Turning from the car, he lost his balance like a drunk, had to steady himself with a hand on the fender. Shot. Utterly shot. And on his desk, when he had brought in the Road-runner, had been a note he was to be in at eight o’clock to knock heads with Kearny on the investigation to date.

  Right now, twenty-three hours left. For him; perhaps for Bart. Jesus. He crossed the sidewalk to the old narrow pink house; he had the downstairs front, two rooms with a phonied-up cubicle of a kitchen and a bathroom and shower down the hall which he shared with the Japanese couple in the rear.

  As he started up the front steps, a car door slammed and rapid female steps clipped the sidewalk behind him. He turned, hollow-eyed. “Corinne! What . . .” Then her presence shocked him wide awake. He caught her by the arms. “Bart! What? Is Bart? Is—”

  “Get your hands off me, white boy!” she blazed. He stepped back in confusion. Her full dark lips curled in a smile that was nearly a sneer. She was wearing a fawn-colored coat that buttoned up high under the chin in a complicated strap-and-brass-button arrangement. “What would you say if I told you he was gone?”

  “Is . . .” The fear crowded his heart like an embolism. “Is . . .”

  “No. If layin’ there like a lump of gray shit is all right, he’s still all right.” Her lips curled again; her accent was blatantly Negro, something that, like Bart, she could assume at will. “Had you worried there for a minnit, white boy?”

  Ballard sat down abruptly on the cold steps, like a gunny-sack full of seed tipping over. He shook his head. “For Christ sake, Corinne,” he protested weakly. Then he added, “Did you have to wait long? I—”