“There you are,” said Kearny with great finality.
Odum shuffled his feet. “Ah, look, I mean, I hadn’t gotten around to telling him yet, but, I... look, this week I’ll...”
“The car isn’t yours anyway.”
“But I paid three hundred—”
“Where’d you get that from? Kite some more paper?”
“Jesus!” he yelped. “No!”
He said it loud enough to bring the woman out of the car; she wouldn’t have been able to hear anything that had gone before. Now she just stood beside it, silent, undecided.
“Does she know about you and Sharon Beaghler?” asked Kearny relentlessly, just too low for her to hear.
Odum automatically glanced back at the Toronado. Seeing her standing beside it, he made almost hysterical waving-away motions with both open hands. She hesitated, finally got back into the car. Which was, Ballard knew, what Kearny had wanted. A cardinal rule of investigating was never to make a man seem unnecessarily foolish or weak in front of his woman. Pride might stiffen otherwise dormant resistance.
Now Kearny laid a comforting hand on the small man’s shoulder. “Mr. Odum, we think you’ve been victimized by an unscrupulous con artist.”
“But he gave me a bill of sale and the white—”
“You have those with you?”
“Right here in my wallet...” He laid down the monkey wrench on the pavement, got out and riffled through his wallet until he came up with a much-folded rectangle of brown paper that looked like wrapping paper. He also had the white slip for the car — the registration slip which in California designates the registered as opposed to the legal owner of a vehicle.
“See...” Odum’s blunt cracked fingernail traced the hand-lettered bill of sale and the slanting backhand scrawl, Charles M. Griffin.
Kearny looked at him sharply, for a moment not playacting for effect. “Didn’t it strike you as odd that he’d give you this sort of butcher-paper receipt and a five-thou car and the white slip for only three hundred bucks? Didn’t you suspect that maybe it was hot?”
“He... ah...” The eyes moved uneasily behind their thick glasses. “He said a new payment book would be mailed to me from the bank. You know, after the transfer of title was recorded, like. I was just s’posed to keep up the payments, and... well, see, I was s’posed to send in another two hundred bucks or so, besides the three I give him. That was to pick up those February and March payments, like...”
“But you didn’t.”
“I... ran short...”
“What did you figure he was going to do when the bank kept on chasing him for the payments?”
The eyes moved again, nervously, from Ballard to Kearny to the car and back again. He cleared his throat. “Well, ah, see, I was getting his mail, right? And he said he was leaving the country for a year or so, soon as he got the car sold off. So I figured I just wouldn’t send those notices on to him when he, ah, you know, sent me his forwarding address...”
“He hasn’t?” asked Ballard.
“Naw, he never did. Didn’t any mail come, either.”
“How did he get in touch with you about taking over the equity in the car?”
“He, ah, through a newspaper ad. Just a phone number, it gave, in the Concord paper. I hadda go down to San Jose to see the car. Some tract house, I can’t remember the address—”
“1545 Midfield Road?” asked Ballard.
“That’s it. After we closed the deal, he, ah, asked me to pick up his mail for him. He said he didn’t trust the post office. I didn’t want it to come to my rooming house, you know, Savidge has that address, so I thought about Sharon right away. I hadn’t met Gloria then yet. Then I forgot to tell Sharon for a couple of weeks...”
Which explained the returned letter which had given Kearny the Beaghler address, the returned W-2 which had led Ballard to it.
“Can’t I... ah... keep the car until—”
“No,” said Kearny flatly. “Of course, we’ll give you our personal receipt for both the car and the registration slip. I’m sure you can work something out later with the bank. And meanwhile, Mr. Odum, we’ll clear you on the car with Savidge.”
“That’s right,” said Ballard, on cue. “I’ll tell him that my informant was mistaken, that it wasn’t you driving it after all.”
Odum finally shrugged, even grinned wryly. Ballard could see, suddenly, how he had been able to hang paper around a series of East Bay bars. He had a gold tooth right in front; that tooth, with the wide grin and the glasses and the shaggy hair, gave his face a sort of witless charm that suggested he was too dumb to steal.
“Uh... Mr. Savidge won’t have to know about...” He stopped and jerked a thumb at the Toronado and the blonde waiting inside it.
“Our little secret, Mr. Odum,” said Kearny soothingly.
He surrendered the keys; they helped him carry his tool kit over to the Toronado. The tools were the only possessions he had in the car. Gloria Rouse started hassling him angrily as soon as Kearny and Ballard had retreated out of earshot. Ballard called the cops to report the repo; just before he left the booth, the argument ended and the Toronado laid twin streaks of rubber taking off.
“Seven’ll get you ten it was her three hundred bucks,” said Kearny. “In fact, he probably got the whole five bills from her and then just told her he’d sent the other two hundred to the bank.”
Ballard agreed. To take even as small a game as Odum, Gloria Rouse would just naturally have to sweeten the pot with money. She was absolutely the ugliest woman he had ever seen, at least from the neck up. He actually found it hard to believe that somebody, sometime, hadn’t stuck her in the dog pound by mistake. Maybe somebody had. Maybe that’s where Odum had gotten her. Went in for a collie, came out with Gloria Rouse.
Kearny was still staring pensively after the departed car. “Well, what do you think? Still like little Howie as that topless dancer’s weirdo with the flashlight? What did she call him? Tall? Dark? Handsome? This guy looks like he’s been in a closet for twenty years.”
“Odum must have something, Dan. Sharon Beaghler—”
Kearny shook his head impatiently. “She’ll drop her pants for anything that can get stiff. Just the fact that her old man doesn’t like Odum would be enough to turn her on to him.”
“So we’re right back where we started? It was Griffin all along? And we don’t have lead one as to where Griffin is — except that he was supposed to have left the country. Who don’t we have extradition treaties with any more?”
“Not quite back where we started.” Kearny got into the T-Bird. “We’ve got this. And we’re pretty sure Odum is out of it. And we know that if Griffin left the country, he came back — at least somebody knocked Bart on the head. I’ll drive down to Concord to my wagon, throw this on the tow bar, and bring it in tomorrow morning. You’d better go home and get some sleep.”
“Big deal,” grunted Ballard, with a terrible sense of anticlimax.
Twenty-one
How could they have missed so badly? As he began the fifty-mile drive to San Francisco, Ballard mentally reworked the other five cases he had closed in his search for Bart’s attacker. Had he screwed up on one of those? Or had the attacker actually come from some other case entirely? Or from some incident in Bart’s life that nobody — maybe not even Bart — would know about?
Or were the police right after all? Had Bart taken out the Jag for some unknown personal reason and gone off Twin Peaks by accident?
No, dammit, he couldn’t accept that. There had to be something he had missed or misinterpreted in the Griffin file, something even Kearny had missed or misinterpreted, something that would lead them to...