“That’s right.” He took a flier. “The bank tells us they can’t get in touch with you, they claim their contract is out of trust and that they are about to declare it null and void. Under the circumstances...”
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, Spies, 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 shop-men 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.