“Where’s the tie-in with this East Bay trucking firm?” he asked.
“Bart’s boyfriend works for them. Garofolo.”
“Worked.” Heslip laughed suddenly. “When I hits ’em, man, they stays hit!”
Ballard made a rude noise. Kearny asked if there were any questions. No questions. No requests for handgun permits; these people were professionals who knew you only wanted a gun when you were completely sure you’d be willing to use it.
“I’ve got a spaghetti feed laid on at Rocca’s,” said Kearny. He added to O’B, “With lots of dago red.” As they began reaching for their coats, he stopped them once again. “All of you keep a sharp eye on your own back trail. If you cut someone else’s tracks, let me know right away. Right away.”
Giselle walked the two blocks to Rocca’s with Kearny. “You don’t really think Pete set you up, do you, Dan?”
Kearny shrugged. “Him or Nucci — or somebody in between, like a secretary.”
“I can’t believe Pete...” She stopped. If Gilmartin hadn’t been married, with a couple of kids, she might... “Do you know exactly what it is we’re trying to find?”
“Connections. Anything that sticks out, doesn’t fit, doesn’t make sense.”
“Like a sixty-year-old dancer, who can barely pay her studio rent, driving a ten-thousand-dollar car?”
“Exactly like that,” said Kearny.
Eight
There is nothing glamorous about asking questions, but it is what detectives do. Hundreds of questions, of dozens of individuals, firms, groups. Personal questions. Business questions. Social questions. Asked in person in the field, asked by phone from the office.
Asking questions means long hours, because you have to talk to people when they are available, not when you are. It means role-playing, because many people won’t talk to investigators. Not glamorous — but because of the endless variables in the human equation, seldom dull.
Kearny had his meeting on a Friday night. On Saturday morning they sorted out assignments. By midweek, he knew, information would be piling up.
Padilla Trucking.
Because there was a good chance Garofolo’s unknown partner might also work for the trucking firm, it was Larry Ballard instead of Bart Heslip who showed up in Walnut Creek on Monday morning looking for work. Unsuccessfully.
“Padilla Trucking doesn’t hire drivers,” he explained on Tuesday morning to Kearny. “You have to own your truck-trailer rig, and you sign with Padilla as an independent contractor.”
Kearny ran a thoughtful hand through his graying hair, worn a trifle longer than the year before. “Own your truck — or lease it?”
“Oh! That’s right. Lease it — and only from Padilla. But hell, Dan, the understanding is that your payments are going toward your purchase of the rig. According to the general manager, a guy named DeSimone, you make so much bread that you own the rig within about three years...”
“Let me tell you how I think it works, Giselle,” said Kearny later. He was leaning against the edge of the rangy blonde’s desk, slurping too-hot instant coffee. “Padilla Trucking gets a lot of business because they bid lower on jobs than any legitimate trucking outfit can — which they can do because of two factors. First, they gimmick their scales so they overload their trucks. If a driver gets busted by the state for overloading — what the hell, he’s an independent contractor, you follow me? Second, they pay their drivers substandard rates, because the poor bastards have signed a lease contract agreement which stipulates they’ll take whatever jobs Padilla offers them — at Padilla’s rates.”
“But in three years, when the driver gets his truck paid off...”
“Not in three years, not ever. Padilla makes sure that eventually he starts falling behind in his payments. Then the agreement is declared in default, and the truck-trailer is repossessed. The driver finds the payments he thought were going into equity really have been eaten up by interest and carrying charges. And then Padilla leases it all over again to another driver.”
Giselle shook her head. “It sure sounds like a Mafia operation.”
“It is. Benny coming around confirms that.” He stood up with a wry face. “Jesus, that’s lousy coffee. Our problem is whether Garofolo and his partner were on syndicate business when they jumped Ed, or were doing a little moon-lighting on the side. I hoped Larry could get in over there to find out, but...”
Giselle’s blue eyes suddenly challenged him across the desk. “How about my checking with the state to find out who the stockholders in the Padilla corporation are? If we can establish a connection between one of them and Nucci at Golden Gate Trust...”
Kearny noted that she excluded any possibility that Pete Gilmartin might be involved. He nodded. “Let me know when you have something, Giselle.”
Peter Gilmartin.
Heslip found that Gilmartin had a tract house in Edgemar, in the San Mateo County fog belt three or four miles south of the county line. A great view of the Pacific sparkling to the west — when the fog let you see it. Three-bedroom, two-bath on a standard lot, frame-and-stucco California bungalow.
“Twenty-nine thousand with a twenty-year mortgage,” he told Giselle. He’d run the lot number through the San Mateo County courthouse in Redwood City to get ownership data. “Two-car garage, but one side full of the kids’ toys and camping gear. Neighbors confirm: one car, a two-year-old Chevy wagon.”
Giselle copied down the license. “I’ll run it through DMV, find out whether they have any other vehicles and who holds the pink on the wagon. We can get a copy of his credit app and the name of his insurance broker from the financing institution...” She paused. “He looks pretty clean so far, doesn’t he, Bart?”
“Yeah. Kids in the Little League; he pitches softball for the bank-sponsored team. His wife belongs to a bowling team from the dry-cleaning shop where she used to work before they got married. Hell of a good-looking woman.” He scratched the back of his neck thoughtfully. “Be interesting, of course, if he owned that Chevy outright. AVP can’t make more than a grand a month...”
Giselle sighed. “I’d better try to bluff the phone company out of his long-distance phone records for the past few months, too.”
Arthur Nucci.
Ballard and Heslip together had begun looking Nucci over on Sunday. He was going to be a thornier problem than Gilmartin, because a man making fifty to sixty grand a year can — given an inheritance or a break in the market — legitimately account for quite a bit of excess cash.
“Whoee!” exclaimed Heslip. “I figure this mother’s going to need an explanation.”
Ballard shook his head. “What do you figure he pays in taxes?”
Nucci lived in a house the grounds of which covered a quarter of a block in the exclusive St. Francis Woods area. Two-story pseudo-Mission pseudo-adobe, with the red-tiled roof so popular with this sort of 1930s California construction. A sparkling black Fleetwood ran puddles of water onto the broad concrete apron in front of the garage.
“The last time I worked anything in St. Francis Woods was the Mayfield case,” said Ballard.
“A long time ago, man.” A black chauffeur had come from the garage to begin wiping down the Fleetwood with a damp chamois cloth. “Hang loose, I got an idea.”
Ballard kept walking. He heard Heslip’s cheery “What say, brother?” before he was out of earshot. The Fleetwood had PS plates, so it was a bank car. Ten minutes later Heslip joined him to display a five-dollar bill. He was laughing so hard he almost fell down.