And what was more calculated to confuse a girl of relatively little sexual experience than an intense love affair with a lot of nice gooey guilt mixed up in it?
He went up the hall past the empty kids’ rooms and through the big kitchen, remembering that brooding look Ballard had sent after Giselle and Gilmartin. There was a nonphysical intimacy between Ballard and Giselle which might be useful...
The phone rang. He answered it on the first ring; Jeanie had planned to take the kids down to get decorations for the Hallowe’en party on the way home from school and wasn’t home yet.
“Dan? I didn’t find nothing on that little Austin girl for you here,” came Benny Nicoletti’s soft, almost apologetic voice.
“That tells us something in itself, Benny.”
“But I did get sort of a line on her. Just for the hell of it, I took a look through the Juvenile Court Index — those records are sealed, the Index just tells you who’s been sealed, you understand? There ain’t no way to get into the file itself without a court order; but I gotta contact or two in the juvie probation setup. One of ’em thinks he remembers it was something to do with skin-flicks. Thinks she was maybe seventeen at the time, the filmmaker got busted for Contributing under W and I six hundred.”
W&I 600: a statute of the Welfare and Institutions Code.
“Dependent Children, Benny?”
“That’s it. He can’t remember what happened to the girl, probably probation under control of the parents or something. Maybe three, four years ago. Like I said, otherwise she’s clean.”
Kearny stood in abstraction after thanking him and hanging up. Benny was being damned accommodating all of a sudden, bending rules he’d usually only bend in the interest of what the SFPD saw as justice.
Time to quit using him as a bird dog. What the hell was the name of that friend of Bart’s who... Yeah, Bob McDade, that was it. Get Bart to ask him if he’d ever heard of Wendy Austin. They had to establish the connection between Fazzino and Chandra; it could be through the girl. McDade, who was into that whole porn-movie scene, might know something about her.
Thirteen
Wendy Austin was an incredibly beautiful girl. Her blue eyes looked up into those of the black man standing beside the bed; her full lips, bright and gleaming, were parted in anticipation and her tongue came out over her small white even teeth. Her blond hair made a glistening halo on the pillow.
Then his naked black body covered hers; her arms tightened about his shoulders as her full breasts cushioned under his weight. Her beautifully sculpted legs accepted him.
Wendy Austin began to talk. A stream of almost clinically scatalogical terms spewed from her, dainty at first, then becoming coarser as she urged him on to greater effort and sweat darkened the sheet beneath her. Finally her fingernails began raking thin bloody gashes down his back.
“She was seventeen then,” said Bob McDade.
The moving Technicolor images on the beaded screen faded as the room lights came up. Bart Heslip was sweating. He went to the heavily screened window of the projection booth to look down through dirt-crusted glass at Sixth Street. A white drunk was standing on the sidewalk below, head back, drinking muscatel. It was three in the afternoon.
“Baby, ain’t she something?” persisted McDade to his back.
McDade was a big black man, coal-black, with a fuzzy Afro and wearing the extreme in hip clothes. A knife scar ran down across his throat beneath his shirt collar. He was still alive because years ago Heslip had kept a thumb pressed on the artery during a wild-ass ride to the hospital.
“We made four of those with her, three, three and a half years ago. Each time she took us all on afterwards — me, the cameraman, the sound man—”
“What’d you pay her?”
“Same as everybody — twenty-five a picture. Wanta see the rest of ’em?”
“I couldn’t take it,” said Heslip truthfully, feeling a faint revulsion.
Bob McDade had come out of the government housing projects at Hunter’s Point, same as Heslip, had started out making quickie pornos in pads rented from landlords who knew the tenant would be at work for the afternoon. Now he owned two skin-flick houses, a grocery/liquor store three doors away, a men’s clothing store, a $60,000 house over in Richmond and an expensive Danish wife to whom he was unfaithful with every girl appearing in one of his films.
“You still showing these?” asked Heslip.
McDade’s face closed up like a fist. “Don’t jive me, man. You ain’t that goddam dumb.”
“Maybe not.” Heslip started for the door, then turned to point at the film. “But you are.”
“Sheeit, baby, private stock, purely — for my own solitary sorrowful gazin’ an’ rememberin’.”
“Know where I can find her now? It’s important.”
McDade said thoughtfully, “No idea, man. I remember she was takin’ voice and elocution and dancing lessons... Hell, I remember her wanting us to do one with her as Marilyn Monroe, she had that voice down perfect, and...”
“Thanks a lot, baby,” snapped Heslip.
“Man, I told you I dunno! Maybe, you really need to find her, you got to act, or somebody...”
“Don’t jive me, man,” said Heslip softly. “Maybe Flippo would like to see this print.”
Pure terror spasmed McDade’s face. He came quickly to the door and grabbed Heslip’s arm. “You ain’t seen this, man! Promise me! He know I still got these, it be my black ass, surely.”
Heslip went away without promising. McDade owed him, then came around with that I-dunno shit. Let him sweat it for a day or two.
Giselle leaned back in her chair and blew smoke out through her nostrils. She had smoked more in the past few days than in the whole month. It was that damn Kearny and his ability to reach into her mind and grab out what she was thinking. What made it worse, she didn’t know what she was thinking; everything was a whirl and a muddle. She hated it, yet could hardly wait for the workday to end so she could get to Rocca’s to meet Peter. And then...
Other, more intimate images of the inevitable end of the evening flooded over her, making her body feel heated with anticipation.
How in hell had it happened to her? So suddenly, so completely? Pete’s lovely wife, and the two boys, seven and nine years old — three months ago she’d spent half the company picnic walking those kids around the Lafayette Reservoir. If there were someone she could talk to...
Larry? She would completely panic trying to tell him about it. Bart? O’B? Nobody. No...
Kearny came in with his empty coffee cup dangling from a finger.
“Mr. Gilmartin phoned,” Giselle said formally as the telltale flush mounted her cheeks. “He’s giving us a re-open on Chandra.”
“The hell! You sure?” Kearny seemed thunderstruck.
“With a Hold until a week from Wednesday. He’s going to send out Final Notice on Friday if she doesn’t pick up the delinquent payment this week.”
“Dammit, Giselle, it just don’t reach.” Kearny was pacing. “If you see Pete tonight, ask him if this is his idea or Nucci’s.”
“He already told me. Nucci’s.”
“Did Bart find out if Fazzino had ever seen those films of his girl friend?”
“He asked McDade that.” Giselle suddenly found herself giggling. “He said McDade turned white.”
Just then Heslip’s voice came over the radio: “SF-3 calling KDM 366.”