“KDM 366 Control calling SF-1. Come in, Dan.”
No response, not that she expected any. Kearny would be home in bed in Lafayette, the T-Bird tucked into the Kearny double garage. Kearny had a radio unit in a converted closet off the bedroom where he and Jeanie slept, but a mobile unit wouldn’t reach that far. Only SF and Oakland Controls.
Still, she conscientiously tried him twice more. No answer.
“KDM 366 Control calling any SF unit.”
Again, nothing. Nobody out at 2:00 A.M. on a Saturday, which wasn’t surprising. Not this early in the month. Besides, Larry and Bart were the best DKA nighthawks anyway, the ones who took chances, who thought it was fun as well as a job. Bart was in the hospital and Larry was inside the house at 27 Java Street by now. Had been gone long enough to be inside. Breaking and entering.
Giselle shook her head. Just as good she hadn’t gotten Kearny, really. If he knew what Ballard was doing, he’d skin Larry alive. And skin Giselle Marc, too. She knew better, knew the consequences of this sort of unplanned action if anything went wrong.
Emotionally involved on this one, all of them. Running around in circles from the beginning, ignoring the facts, ignoring the evidence. And because of it, working from a massively wrong premise right from the beginning, from the first note Larry wrote on the case. Even before that, from the verbal she had gotten from Heslip on Tuesday afternoon.
They had assumed that Griffin had disappeared because he had embezzled a large sum of money from JRS Garage. Which was wrong, dead wrong. Larry had realized that as soon as he knew who the murderer was.
No, Griffin had disappeared because he hadn’t embezzled any money. And because his mother had died and he had started drinking heavily. (She and Ballard were wrong in this reasoning, but they weren’t to know that until it was too late.)
Anyway, she thought, because they were involved in the case personally, and were working from a wrong assumption, they had ignored the most obvious evidence that Griffin wasn’t an embezzler and never had been. His chronically delinquent auto payments. A man smart enough to embezzle a large sum of money would have used some of it to keep his account current and thus not draw attention to himself needlessly.
She drew her coat tighter around her. Cold in the car, without the motor or the heater on. But she couldn’t run them, couldn’t even smoke. Not on a deadly serious stakeout like this one.
Movement froze her. Then she gave a nervous little giggle. A gray-and-white-striped tomcat had run across the street from her side and into the bushes on the edge of the property at 27 Java.
She tried Kearny again on the radio, tried the other SF field men. No answer. Nobody abroad this night except a gray-and-white cat, chased or frightened out from under Ballard’s car...
Chased or frightened by what?
And then she realized, just too late, that she hadn’t pushed down the lock button on the driver’s side after Larry had gotten out. She lunged across the seat, but as her fingers grazed the door, it was jerked open and a dark bulky shape came into the car at her. She didn’t even have time to scream, let alone hit the horn ring.
Twenty-four
Ballard paused in the shadows of the dripping bushes that flanked the walk. No lights showed in the house, but that didn’t mean nobody was home. It was two o’clock in the morning. The bars were just closing and... He gave a little snort. Just seventy-two hours since Bart had gotten it, and here he was, at the killer’s house.
Why, really? Because he wanted to close this one out all by himself? Partially. But also because the murderer might find out that Bart Heslip was still alive. If Griffin was buried here, the killer might have left traces he would hide or obliterate, not knowing that Bart was permanently blacked out on what he had seen when he had been struck.
He shot one glance between sodden leaves back at the car. Just a dim shape across the street. From behind, Giselle’s head would be hidden by the high-backed seat. It made him feel rather secure to know Giselle was there to warn him with a horn blast if anyone fitting the murderer’s description showed up.
Ballard boldly mounted the broad front steps, eleven of them, and gently turned the front doorknob. Locked, of course. It wasn’t the foolhardy maneuver it seemed; he knew his rubber-soled shoes made little noise on the steps or the porch itself.
Door locked, no garage to give possible access. Around in back, then.
The lot wasn’t a great deal wider than the house, even though it was a double, but the property was deep. He had to use his flashlight three times on the journey along the side of the house to keep from tripping over bushes or roots. The ground rose sharply under his feet; a hillside lot, backed up against the broad base of Twin Peaks.
The back door was also locked, although the wood of the frame was so old that it almost gave when he laid his weight against it. Ten seconds with his tire iron would have had it open, but they would have been noisy seconds.
Better to try the windows first. Because of the slope of the lot, the sills of the rear windows were at waist-level rather than far above his head as they had been at the front.
The third one he tried was unlocked.
But it was stuck. He worked on it with the tire iron, digging it into the wood and gently prying upward, and within a few moments it had broken free. He pushed up the bottom half, then melted back into the bushes behind the house.
Ballard had prowled houses before, of course; nobody spent very long in the investigation game without an occasional crude illegal-entry job — through attached garages if nowhere else. Usually it was just curiosity, the almost unnatural interest in delving behind people’s facades that most detectives seemed to have.
Curiosity. What killed the cat. And he was dealing with a killer.
No lights went on, no second-story windows went up, no pale questing faces appeared. After two minutes Ballard moved in again. If anyone was there, he was asleep. Or lying in ambush.
Ashcan that, Ballard. Time to do it.
He wiped his hands down his pant legs before swinging a leg up over the sill, then went in under the white lacy curtains that covered the opening. When he straightened up he was in a disused dining room. A single stab of flashlight showed a heavy oak table, big captain’s chair at the head and lesser chairs ranged down the sides. An immense oak sideboard with a collection of bottles on it. Behind it, a big mirror with an ornate frame.
Ballard wiped his hands again. He was totally illegal now, totally vulnerable. If the bastard walked in on him now and shot him, the cops couldn’t do a damned thing about it except sweep him up and cart him away.
Better not to think about that. If the killer wasn’t in here, asleep, Giselle would give warning if he showed up.
He crossed the room by the flashlight, switched it out before opening the door. The air in the hall was fresher; the dining room, then, was usually shut up. Which suggested a man living alone. He wished he’d had time to research this guy a little.
The hell of it was, he was scared. Heart thumping.
Light from the street came through the heavy etched glass half-panel of the front door despite the fog. By it, Ballard could see that the hallway ran straight back through the house to the kitchen in the rear. He stood in front of the dining-room door, mouth-breathing. No sound, not anywhere in the house. No feel of anyone in the house.
The kitchen was old-fashioned, with a wooden drainboard flanking the stained porcelain sink. Water heater, new icebox, new electric stove. He opened a couple of drawers at random. Silverware. Knives. A heavy-caliber blued-steel revolver. A homeowner’s weapon. Ballard checked it. No shells. He left it there. A tire iron was a better weapon than an empty gun.