“Corinne!”
Her voice was soft and deadly. “You should’ve wiped off the lipstick — honky!”
She swung a fisted hand with all her strength; he rolled with it, so it caught the side of his neck instead of his face. His shoe slipped on the mist-slicked stair tread, he went down on his side, saving himself from a fall down the steps only by skinning a palm against the bricks flanking the entryway.
“Corinne!” he cried.
But she was already across the sidewalk, into the old black Triumph, jabbing the starter as he came off the steps. The little car shot away from the curb in a shriek of tires, was a third of a block away before the lights went on. He ran a few paces toward his own car, stopped.
That goddamn Virginia Pressler and her goddamn lipstick. Corinne had thought he’d been shacked up instead of working. Fiercely, intensely loyal to her man. And now, between her and Ballard, the whole stupid silly racial thing, like something the cat had thrown up on the rug. If he followed her, got it all explained, no sleep at all tonight. No sleep, when tomorrow he had to dig as he’d never dug before, had to dig out a dead skip who’d gone underground, had eluded DKA for three months already.
Cursing bitterly, Ballard went inside and went to bed.
Thirteen
It was 9:37 A.M. Fridays were always busy, with the banks open until six o’clock, and all the paper work to clear up before the weekend. Too damned much paper work, most of it waste motion just to satisfy the state. Yesterday, two hours arguing premiums with the insurance company. Last evening, another hour spent looking over that property on Eleventh Street yet again. Too crowded here at Golden Gate, that was the truth.
Dan Kearny took an impatient turn around the cubicle, ran a hand through his graying hair, stared with distaste at the mountains of files on the desk.
Gray hair. And billing. Hell, he ought to be glad that he had the business to bill.
His pleasantly tough, slightly battered face, with the nose just a bit awry from a fist or a bottle or a steering wheel — depending on which story he was telling that week — suddenly brightened. Come in tomorrow, the office was quiet on Saturdays, get the work out. Which would mean that today...
He bent over the desk, lit a cigarette as he buzzed Giselle on the intercom. “Let’s take a ride,” he said when she answered.
Outside, he stood on the sidewalk with his arms folded, his cigarette drifting smoke up into the morning overcast which would lift by noon.
Right here, Wednesday morning, Heslip had gotten it. No doubt about that; and after the carefully detailed hour with Ballard this morning, not a hell of a lot of doubt about who had done it. Griffin. Looked tired as hell, Ballard, carrying his head as if he had a stiff neck from the clout Corinne Jones apparently had given him. Well, being tired didn’t hurt field agents. Kearny had never minded the all-night, round-the-clock, week-long sessions he’d put in himself in the thirty years since he’d started grabbing cars for old man Walters as a tough kid of fourteen.
Kearny grinned to himself at the memory, then thought: Where the hell is that girl? You spent half your life waiting for some woman or another. He threw away his butt and shook out another cigarette.
Wild and woolly days then, five bucks a repo, investigate on your own time. Weekends, fighting club stags until he’d enlisted at sixteen, lying about his age and getting away with it. Probably one of the reasons he’d always had such a soft spot for Bart Heslip.
Well, times had changed.
But the subjects hadn’t. People still defrauded, defaulted, embezzled — money or goods or chattels. They cheated their employers or their wives, skipped out, dropped out of sight, just plain dropped out. Skid row or hippie commune, juice, pills, grass, acid, skin-popping or mainlining skag — the old-time cons had used a better name for the white stuff, shit.
It usually came down to money. Somebody wanted more than he had, or wanted what it could buy. Somebody else would spend some to get back his chattels, or his missing daughter, or the embezzler who had nickel-and-dimed the books (Griffin, at least, thought big).
And you went after them — for money. You found them, most of them. Damned tough to stay out of the way of an agency like DKA if it really wanted you. You had to change your name, dye your hair, keep your kids out of school, quit your union or your profession, tear up your credit cards, abandon your wife, not show up at your mother’s funeral, run your car into a deep river, quit paying taxes, get off welfare.
Because every habit pattern was a doorway into your life, a doorway that the skip-tracers and field agents with the right key could open. The right clue, he supposed, in the detective-story sense.
A few made it, of course, the dead skips who became invisible men. Charles M. Griffin had done it so far, might have done it indefinitely if he hadn’t ventured out to clip Bart Heslip over the head.
Now they had him outside the burrow, were running him hard.
Giselle came down the stairs, long lovely legs flashing under the hem of her fashionably short skirt.
“I’m sorry, Dan. Todd from the bank was on the phone.”
“Problems?”
They began walking down Franklin toward Kearny’s parked Galaxy wagon with the long whippet aerial. Giselle shook her head, made a face that emphasized little smile lines at the corners of her mouth which would have been dimples in a fleshier face.
“No problems. Todd didn’t get his promotion to V-P, and was looking for someone to hold his hand.”
Kearny opened the rider’s door for her; the tall blonde slid in past him in another flash of wickedly long shapely legs. Kearny was aware of her as a woman, but only as it related to her ability to do her job. She’d started out typing skip-letters while she was still in high school, now had her own license and wasn’t far behind Kearny himself in understanding what the detective business was all about.
As for making a pass at her, he’d as soon have made one at his own five-year-old daughter. Sex was for home, and maybe sometimes for a convention where the booze snuck up on you and knocked your judgment awry.
“Where are we going, Dan’l?” Her eyes sparkled; getting out of the office was rare enough to be a treat.
“First to the hospital, to see Bart.”
She instantly sobered. “Will he make it?”
“He’ll make it.” His voice carried utter conviction; no way to tell whether it was mere ritual or was really believed.
Kearny went up Franklin, eyes busy on license plates. He had a phenomenal memory for plate numbers, probably spotted more cars off the skip-list than all the field men put together.
“How was your session with Larry this morning?”
“You’ve been reading his reports?” When she nodded, he went on, “He knocked them off one by one, a beautiful job.”
“All except friend Griffin.” Unconsciously, she repeated his own thought of a few minutes before. “The invisible man. Think Larry’ll connect before your deadline?”
“He’s busting his back trying.”
He parked on Bush just off Divisadero; they got on the big, slow, lumbering elevator inside the hospital’s rear ambulance entrance.
“This is the first time you’ve been here, isn’t it, Dan?”