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; all 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 Roadrunner, 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—”
“Don’t matter ’bout black girl waitin’, black girl wait all afternoon, all night at the hospital. Waitin’ for the white mutha to show.”
He didn’t blame her for being sore, but he was so goddamn tired. And tomorrow he had to keep pushing, had to really push tomorrow. He blew out a long breath. “Okay, kid. I’m sorry. I was over in the East Bay, I got tied up.” Adrenalin stirred at the thought. “I know which one did it.”
“What you care who dunnit, white boy? What you care—”
“That’s stopped being cute, Corinne.”
“Ain’t meant to be cute, white boy.” Her voice was still tight and hard, her smile a rictus beneath glittering eyes. “You oughta see yo’se’f in a mirror sometime. Biiig man. Tough man. Hard an’ ruthless an’ no time for nothin’ but mountie-gets-his-man jive...”
He stood up to take her wrists, to shake her gently like a child. “Corinne! Stop it!”
“Okay,” she said soberly, in her normal voice. “All through.”
A single burst of traffic went by, released by a green light at Ninth Avenue.
“You’ve got to get some rest, Corinne, you’re on the ragged edge.”
She peered up at him, nodding dutifully, then suddenly leaned closer. Her eyes sharpened. “And you have to keep working,” she crooned softly. She was staring at him by the dim vestibule light. “You’re a detective, have to detect, no time to come to the hospital, that’s only logical. Got to get the one did it to Bart...” She raised her eyes to his face; the eyes were enormous and tired and defeated, but her voice was mockingly back in dialect. “Wanna take me inside fo’ a trick, white man? Want some nigger meat? My stud liable to die, gotta get me some—”