It was ironic: if he had just left it parked somewhere by Griffin’s house, a DKA man would have spotted it, grabbed it, and the investigation would have ended right there. Instead, he had brought in Odum as a way to get rid of it.
“And then Odum didn’t keep up the payments,” Ballard said.
“And here you are.” His voice had roughened, coarsened, deepened. Working himself up to it? No. Please... “You had to keep going. You wouldn’t let me alone.”
Oh Jesus Christ, this was it. It couldn’t be, he was only twenty-six years old, he couldn’t die yet, Jesus, he was going to shit his pants or something...
Elkin took a deep breath. His hand raised the heavy revolver.
And the front door slammed.
The gun muzzle wavered. Elkin’s face had become frantic with indecision. When whoever it was came through the door, Ballard would lunge for the bourbon bottle on the sideboard, throw it...
Heavy careless footsteps tramping down the hall, heavy as doom. Elkin whispered furiously at Ballard as if they were fellow conspirators, “Who...”
A hard-faced, compact, bleak-eyed man in a dark topcoat came through the door, stopped. His hands were in his coat pockets. Elkin swung the muzzle of the revolver toward him, but the man was unaffected. His eyes went from one of them to the other and back. Ballard was on his feet.
“Rodney Elkin?” said the hard-faced man.
“I’m... Elkin.” The gun was wavering; he didn’t know who to point it at. If Ballard had been himself he could have taken him then. He didn’t even try.
“Inspector Ed Gough, Homicide, SFPD,” said the bleak-eyed man. Ballard had a sudden totally irrational urge to start laughing. “You are under arrest for the murder of Charles M. Griffin on the night of Wednesday, February ninth. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to counsel. If you cannot afford an attorney, the court will appoint one for you. If you choose—”
“But... I have a gun!” exclaimed Elkin. He had gone into an oddly theatrical half-crouch, like a Western gunfighter on a Hollywood sound studio street.
“So do I,” said Gough. “And I know how to use mine.” He looked over at Ballard as if Elkin’s revolver did not exist. “Who the hell are you?”
“La... Larry Ballard,” he said in a carefully controlled voice.
“You a friend of his?”
“Private investigator.”
“Give me your belt,” said Gough.
“I have a gun!” yelled Elkin. He looked as if he wanted to cry; all three of them, oddly, knew that the time he could have used it had already passed.
“Don’t make me take it away from you, sonny. We’ve had a police accountant going through the books at JRS two nights a week since sometime in April. Spectrographic analysis of the inks in the ledgers show some entries were altered, others put in at different times since Griffin was murdered, trying to make it look as if the entries predated his disappearance. We’ve got an eyeball witness to Griffin coming to this house on February ninth. We’ve got an eyeball of you at the San Jose house in March. We’ve got an eyeball of someone answering your description putting a black man into a Jaguar on Golden Gate Avenue at one-fifteen a.m. on Wednesday morning. The witness got a partial make on the license plate. Should I go on?”
The three men stood looking at one another with a strange intimacy in the unused dining room. Finally Elkin gave a little sob and laid the revolver on the oak table. His hands were shaking so badly that the steel clattered against the wood. He no longer looked like an athlete: he was just a lanky, frightened man with a nose that was big enough to keep him from being truly handsome.
Gough stepped forward, scooped up the revolver, dropped it into a coat pocket. “Turn around,” he said. Elkin did. Gough made impatient gestures at Ballard. “Your belt. I got roped into a big drug bust down in the Haight on the way up here, I don’t have any cuffs with me.”
Ballard gave him the belt. Ballard’s face ached from being kept impassive. As Gough lashed Elkin’s hands behind him, the faint far wail of a siren came from down toward Stanyan. Gough nodded.
“That’ll be a prowl car.” He grabbed the tall murderer’s shoulder in an ungentle grip. “Let’s go. We’ll meet them out in front.”
Ballard followed them to the front door. The fog had thinned; as they went down the front walk, Giselle’s tall golden-haired form appeared on the sidewalk. Gough went by her without a glance; she turned and stared after him as if she had never seen a cop before. Then she burst out laughing.
“Where the hell have you been?” Ballard yelled at her.
Giselle quit laughing and ran up the walk. “Larry! Are you all right?”
He put a hand to his kidney and groaned. Actually, it didn’t feel too bad; but he had to go to the bathroom and was afraid to. If blood came out... “I was almost killed!” he exclaimed. “Why in hell didn’t you blow the horn when Elkin showed up?”
She gestured after Ed Gough. “He got in the car with me about fifteen minutes after you left. He’d had the same idea as you, to search for the body. But since you were already inside, he said let you find it. But then Elkin showed up. He told me to run for a phone, and then he followed Elkin right up the walk and into the house. No gun, no nothing. He looked awfully damned good doing it, Larry.”
So the bastard had been in the house when Ballard had been attacked, probably had been hiding out of sight at the foot of the stairs to the second floor, just inside the front door. Had let Ballard get slammed in the kidneys and hadn’t done a damned thing. Had then slammed the front door from the inside and come down the hall at the crucial moment.
An SFPD radio unit squealed into Java from Masonic, red lights turning, siren dying. Two uniformed cops jumped out.
Ballard turned and started down the hall. “There’s a bottle of bourbon in the dining room.”
Ten minutes later the front door slammed and familiar aggressive footsteps came down the hall.
“How did you know Elkin was the one?” demanded Ballard as Dan Kearny alias Ed Gough came into the room.
“When I was driving back in the T-Bird,” said Kearny, “I realized Griffin seemed to be two men — one who attacked Bart coldly and viciously, the other who was Cheri’s gentle soul drinking too much out of grief about his mother’s death. Then I finally caught on that somewhere along the line a substitution had been made, a phony for a real Griffin. It had to be after Cheri and before Odum. So...”
“So,” said Giselle, “as soon as you realized you had two different psychological descriptions, you started looking for two different physical descriptions, right?”
“I finally started to think about the evidence instead of just walk around it. When I did that, Elkin stuck out like a broken thumb. Only he talked with Griffin when Griffin called in sick on the tenth and eleventh of February. He was the one who started the talk that Griffin might have been embezzling. He was the one who told Larry that Griffin had said the mother’s will was out of probate — nobody else heard Griffin say that. He fit Cheri’s description of Griffin’s kinky friend. Even getting rid of the furniture in the California Street house — if that wasn’t Griffin, it had to be somebody who knew Griffin wouldn’t be around to object. So then I went back and asked Odum the two questions I should have asked him in the first place.”
“For a description of Griffin,” said Ballard. “But what was the second?”
“Whether Odum gave the description to Bart. He did.”
“And Bart caught up with the description on the wrong person. He thought it was just a coincidence, but he wanted to ask me about it because it bothered him.”