I left it all as I had found it. The next likely place was an attic. Ballard didn’t have a walk-up attic, but I found a tiny trapdoor in the ceiling. I pushed it open with a broom, which I found in the kitchen. I gripped the rim and chinned myself up into the hole. With my little light in my teeth, I turned my head from one direction to another, dropped, chinned, and did it again from the other side. Nothing. It looked like he had never been up there: the place was two inches deep in dust and had never been disturbed.
I went through his living room. There wasn’t even a Reader’s Digest condensed book for the criminally brainless. In fact, Ballard didn’t have a single book in his entire house that I could see. I looked through the kitchen cupboards, remembering that twice before I had found in closets and cupboards small stacks of very good books. No luck this time. So…the hell with the books: maybe I could find a gun. A lot of cases are broken that way, through the almost unbelievable incompetence and stupidity of the killer. I went into the bedroom and looked in all the normal places where a man might keep a gun, and found nothing.
I came at last to his den. He didn’t even have a law book. I had never been in a lawyer’s house that had not even one book around, and it felt almost empty. He had a filing cabinet and a rolltop desk, neither of which was locked. I opened the cabinet and found his dead files, duplicates of old cases long disposed. I flipped through the folders double-time, looking for high spots. There weren’t any.
The bottom drawer was full of pornography. Another waste of time.
The desk had pigeonholes and compartments and many sliding drawers. The pigeonholes were empty, the compartments were full of dust, and the drawers were stuffed with pornography. I didn’t go through the whole boring inventory: it just didn’t look like the den of a guy who practiced much law.
I found what I found in the last possible place. On top of the desk, pushed far back where it lay in dark shadow, was a yellow pad. The top sheet was filled with doodles and notes. There was a name at the top—Rubicoff—and under it a figure, $1,235. There was a phone number. I recognized the exchange as east Denver, not far from my store. Rubicoff. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t remember from where. At the bottom of the paper he had done some multiplying: the figure 8,500 multiplied by various numbers from 10 to 150. Each time the writing got darker, more slashing, angrier. I didn’t know what it meant but I had some guesses. The figure 8,500 might correspond roughly to the number of books in old Stan Bal-lard’s library. The figures were guesswork—somebody’s idea of what the library might be worth if the books averaged $10, $50, $75, and so on. He didn’t know books very welclass="underline" it’s unheard of to get a high average on that big a library. On the other hand, I hadn’t seen a book yet that was worth less than $100.
And what about Rubicoff? I’d lay odds he was the turtle-faced man. I was getting close to cracking it, I thought.
I wrote the number in my notebook. I put everything back exactly as it was. Then I got the hell out of there.
43
I sat in the car and listened to the wind. A cold fear was blowing across the Platte.
At a gas station about half a mile from Val Ballard’s, I called Hennessey at home.
“Me, sweetheart,” I said when he answered.
“Oh, lucky day.”
“What’d you find out on that McKinley tape?”
“I don’t want to talk about this on the phone.”
“What’s Lester doing, running a tap on you now?”
“You’re puttin‘ my ass in one big crack, Cliffie.”
“Hey, one big crack deserves another. Come on, Neal, give.”
I let the line hiss for a moment.
“What do you expect me to say?” he said.
“I expect you to say yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. I imagine you’ll break into song, with the chorus of ‘Over the River and Through the Woods.’ I’m hoping somewhere along the line you’ll tell me something about the McKinley tape.”
He sighed. “Why don’t you come on over here?”
“ ‘Cause I’m two thousand miles away and heading in the opposite direction.”
“Then I guess I can’t help you. I can’t talk about it on the phone.”
“They separated the voices, didn’t they?”
“I don’t want to talk about this…”
“They separated the voices.”
“I told you before, they can do wonders with modern equipment. You want to talk about that, fine, I can talk all night. I’ve become a regular scientist since I saw you at lunch, a real electronics wizard. Did you know they can take fifteen people and put ‘em to talking all at once, then take machines and separate every voice? Did you know that, Cliffie? Got something to do with timber and pitch. And all I always thought timber was was something loggers yell when they’re chopping trees down.”
“What did Peter say?”
“I think he yelled timber. Maybe he was an old logger up in Oregon.”
“You’re a pain in the ass, Hennessey,” I said, and meant it.
“Oh yeah? Fine. Someday I’ll sit down with you and compare notes and we’ll see who the real pain in the ass is.”
“It’s you, Neal. You’re becoming one of them.”
“I got news for you. I always was.”
“Hang up, then, if that’s how it is.”
We listened to each other’s silence for ten seconds. Then, with an anger in his voice that I’d never heard, he said, “Cliff, you’re abusing our friendship. It’s bad enough when you put your own neck in a noose, but you want me to stick mine in too and call it for old time’s sake. Dammit, you’re gonna cost me my badge before this is over.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said, but I hung in there, knowing that my silence was working on him.
“God damn it,” he said. “This isn’t right, Cliff.”
I didn’t say anything.
“The bastard said nothing, all right? Not one damn thing you or anybody else can use. You want his exact words? 1 ought to know ‘em, I been sitting here listening to the damn thing all afternoon. He said, ’Get away, get away.‘ He said that twice. Then he said, ’There’s nothing you can do to me, people already know.‘ ”
“What people?” I said—aloud, but to myself.
“I should’ve asked him that,” Hennessey said.
“What people?” I said again.
The line was quiet for a moment.
“What about Miss Pride? Did she say anything?”
“She said, ‘Oh, hi, everything’s fine.’ ”
I blinked. “She said what?”
“She said, ‘Everything’s fine, I’ll call you back.’ ”
The silence stretched.
“If you’re waiting for an encore, there isn’t any,” Hennessey said. “That was it, short and sweet: we busted our humps over nothing. I hope you’re satisfied.”
“Yeah, Neal, I’m satisfied.”
“I want you to be happy, old pal. If you’re not happy, I’m not happy. Is there anything else I can do for you, buddy?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good. Don’t ever do that to me again.”
“Look, I’m sorry about—”
But he had already hung up.
44
I called rita McKinley, a futile gesture, I knew.
But, wonder of wonders, she answered the phone. Scooped it up on the first ring.
“Rita McKinley,” she said. I love women who answer the phone that way, crisp and cool and professional. “Go to hell you slob” might have been okay too, when the best I expected was a monotone from the damned answering machine.