Since 1820 Mount Diablo Boulevard was less than three miles from Miss Moher’s non-stop mouth, he would check it before lunch. He doubted if the insurance agent would know very much — his name, maybe, if he was having a good day — but it was worth a stop.
It was a very bright and sunny two-person office, decorated in primary colors. Wyman’s empty desk was in the back by the wide picture window. At a much smaller desk in the center of the room a pleasant-faced middle-aged woman was talking on the phone. When she was finished, Ballard learned that Mr. Wyman was expected back within the hour. She would not feel right about going into Miss Moher’s file without Mr. Wyman’s knowledge and permission. He did understand?
Ballard understood. “I’ll grab a sandwich and be back in — oh, thirty, forty minutes.”
That would be fine. There was a coffee shop around the corner on Concord Boulevard. The cheeseburger and fries he had were so incredibly bad — even the pickle was soggy — that he was partially prepared for the coffee. But only partially. After tasting it, he really expected to find a tadpole in the bottom of his cup.
When he caught himself falling asleep over it, he went out to the car to bring in the Griffin file to review. A hole became immediately apparent. He’d forgotten to check at the Concord courthouse when he had been at the police department. He would go back there after he’d finished with Wyman, find out who the bail bondsman was who’d gotten burned, get the name of Griffin’s lawyer.
After that, to Martinez to check the county jail. Drop in at the Dukum Inn to find out about the accident in December. Maybe get the name of the garage where the T-Bird had been towed; that really ought to be in the file even though it was meaningless information.
And after that...
Ballard shook his head. He was starting to feel a little panicky. About twelve hours left, he was really just making motions, spinning his wheels. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.
But that did remind him to stop at his car and call KFS 499, Oakland Control, so they could call Giselle over in S.F. Yes, the San Jose field agent had been out to Midfield Road this morning. None of the neighbors had ever seen the subject around the address, but a T-Bird, red with a white hardtop, had been parked in the garage for several weeks in February and March. Nobody remembered the license, of course.
The tract home had been rented from the realty office by phone, paid for by a cashier’s check depositing six months’ rent in a lump sum. The transmitter of the check: Charles M. Griffin. The six months would be up on August 10, which meant it had been rented on February 10. A day before the court date he hadn’t shown up for, according to Wanda Moher. San Jose had done a hell of a job on short notice. But what did it add up to? What was bugging him?
Ballard got out of the car, then paused. Car. That was it. Why had Griffin quit paying for the T-Bird? He’d had plenty of cash, siphoned from JRS Garage. Why rent a house in San Jose to store the T-Bird in the garage with money he could have put into the car payments?
Harvey E. Wyman was red-faced and jovial and mid-thirties, and should have taken up jogging the year before. He was also, unlike so many small insurance agents Ballard had met, very sharp. Very sharp indeed.
“Oh, I remember that Griffin accident, all right. Much better than I would like to. Three hundred bucks damage to his car, over four hundred to Wanda’s...”
“Who was his insurance company?”
Wyman looked up from the Moher file the secretary had laid on his desk. “He was driving without any. Our people had to eat the loss on Wanda’s car.”
“They’re suing, of course?”
“We’ve never been able to find him to serve him.” He went back to the file. “Jumped bail in February, didn’t show in municipal court...”
“What address did you show on him at that time?”
“Eighteen-hundred-something California Street, here in town. But I have a later one than that—”
“Midfield Road in San Jose? We have that. We—”
“No, this is here in Concord...” Ballard straightened up, his heart pumping. Wyman nodded. “Here it is. You see, I have my own repair work done at the same garage that fixed up the T-Bird after that December smash. They worked on it again last month...”
Ballard snapped, “He was sure it was the same car?”
“Oh, sure. He showed me the work order; same license number. The address was 1377 Mount Diablo Street...”
Ballard was halfway across the office, throwing a hurried “Thanks” over his shoulder, when Wyman called him back. “I rushed a process server out there, but hell, the people living there had never heard of Griffin.”
“They could have been lying—”
Wyman shrugged. “I’ve used this guy for years, he’s tough to lie to. It’s a family: husband, wife, couple of kids. No connection with Griffin at all. I guess he just picked the address out of a phone book.”
Hell, it had to have some meaning, Ballard thought. Mount Diablo Street, as opposed to Boulevard, was just a block away, 1377 just a few blocks west. It was a live one, he could feel it was a live one. He left rubber in front of Harvey E. Wyman’s office.
Fifteen
At 1:45 P.M., just as Ballard sank a hesitant tooth into his soggy cheeseburger in Concord, Dan Kearny parked his station wagon on Main Street in Martinez. He still hadn’t been able to raise Ballard on the radio. Field agents working addresses in a constricted area were in and out of their cars like yo-yos; eventually he would catch him. Meanwhile, he had a pretty good idea of what Ballard was doing.
Kearny’s first stop on reaching the East Bay had been, like Ballard’s, the Concord police department. The inelegant rear in the striped hotpants had long since wobbled out — to a ten-buck parking tag, a fact to warm Ballard’s heart — but the freckled desk sergeant still was available. He repeated his information to Kearny, and added, on request, an excellent verbal of Ballard.
“You should have been a cop,” Kearny dead-panned.
He went around the corner to the municipal court, which Ballard had missed. A short hall ended in wide double doors leading to the courtroom of the presiding judge. On one of them was a typed notice dated February 17, detailing acceptable dress for court appearances. Barefoot was not acceptable, nor were hotpants. Long hair and beards carried no interdictions short, it could be assumed, of nesting sparrows.
Kearny went back down the hall to a Dutch door with the top half open on a room containing four women and a great many file-jammed open-face cabinets. The ladies were huddled by the windows, gabbing.
“Where do I find out about docketings?” Kearny asked.
“Right here.”
“Griffin, Charles M.”
One of the women found the applicable clipboard and, with another, checked it. Both of them were placid as cattle, but Kearny evinced no impatience. He was in the field, working. You kept going, you kept digging, until you got there. It was as simple as that.
“No record here, sir.”
“Has anyone else been around asking about Griffin within the last three hours?”
She immediately became official. “We couldn’t give out that sort of information.” Her face could, however, and did. No.
“How about criminal docketings?”
“Why didn’t you say so?” she demanded with considerable asperity. She extended a jiggly-fleshed arm, the sort seen so often on farm wives at summer church socials in the Midwest. “Across the hall, at Traffic.”
Kearny thanked her, but she had already returned to the gossip. Across the hall was a set of double windows and a counter. Two Mexican women, one holding a very loud baby, were paying a traffic fine; they laid their dollar bills down on the counter separately, as if each were made of fine Spanish lace. A hard-faced man in khaki, with a black eye, was losing an argument about a warrant for unpaid moving violations with an equally hard-faced deputy.