He kept those flat eyes fixed on her face. “Why don’t you drop your panties, slut, so I can see what you’re selling?”
Giselle laughed aloud. She clapped her hands in delight. “Why, that’s perfect, Mr. Fazzino! George Raft? Ah... no, no, I have it. Jimmy Cagney! Ah... no! Mickey Rooney doing Andy Hardy!”
Fazzino’s face turned to stone. He walked rapidly back down the hall toward the head of the stairs. Giselle started trembling. Her face was burning. For the first time she realized the sort of control field men had to have when they were being baited.
“He’s on his way,” she choked into the intercom.
“Have Bart come in too, Giselle.”
Fazzino ignored Kearny’s outstretched hand. He looked around and sat down, totally at his ease.
“So the big private eye spends his time hiding in the basement.”
“Did you wish to hire the services of our firm, Mr. Fazzino?”
Fazzino leaned forward slightly. “I want you off my back.”
“Subject to state and federal statutes, anyone can investigate anyone he wishes, Mr. Fazzino. Ah! Mr. Heslip! Come in, I want you to meet—”
Fazzino cast a contemptuously casual look over his shoulder. “I don’t like niggers,” he said coldly. “Give him a plate of ribs and get him out of here.”
Kearny drew in a sharp breath; he’d seen Bart bust heads for much less. But Heslip was lounged against the aluminum doorframe, his hands in his pockets and his eyes rolled up toward the ceiling.
“Yassuh, boss,” he said vaguely to the acoustical tiles. “Go see me some mo’ dem’ mo’on pichurs. Seen one yist’day, li’l ol’ gal name of Wendy Austin was ballin’ dis hyar big black stud, an’ dat stud...”
With a strangled exclamation, Fazzino was on his feet, his eyes scummy with rage. “Where did you see that film?” he snarled.
Heslip continued to stare vacantly at the ceiling. Fazzino growled and lunged forward, hands outstretched to seize the front of his shirt. With incredible speed, Heslip skipped back from his grasp.
Then Heslip’s right hand came out of his pocket. His forefinger, slowly becoming rigid as the arm straightened, pointed at Fazzino’s stomach. In some odd way it was as menacing as an open switchblade. The tip of the finger began making a tight circle. “Open, honky,” he said softly. “You mess wid me, man, dat’s all-l-l gonna be open in dere.” Then his mouth suddenly gaped idiotically. “Ah saw dat moon pichur, Ah mos’ surely did. Dey was showin’ it down at de Vice Squad. Dey call it a trainin’ fillum on how to rec’nize hookers.”
Fazzino looked from one to the other, as if memorizing their faces. There was cold fury in his eyes. “You’re dead,” he said. “You’re both dead.”
He went by Heslip and was gone, not without a certain restrained elegance. It was tough to not be elegant in a suit like that.
“Keep on him,” snapped Kearny. Then, as Heslip started out, he added, “Don’t follow him up any dead-end alleys, Bart.”
Heslip’s black face broke into a grin. “Yassuh, boss.”
Kearny leaned back in his creaky swivel chair, his cigarette drifting smoke toward the ceiling. “What did you think, Giselle?” he asked the empty room.
Her voice — with laughter in it — came through the open intercom. “I don’t think he knew what hit him, Dan.”
“Yeah,” rumbled Kearny. “Blew his cool, acted like a punk, uttered stupid threats... Only it just don’t fit with what we’ve heard about this cat, you follow me?”
“Well... yes, but... I think Bart got to him, and...”
“Dammit, Giselle.” He tapped a clenched fist on his desk. “I’ve just got a feeling something’s going to happen that we won’t like...”
But for five days nothing happened. Not until Monday.
Well, actually, quite a bit happened over that weekend, but most of it was sexual and none of it had to do with Flip Fazzino.
Pete Gilmartin, on Friday, told his wife there was a bankers’ convention in L.A. and then asked Giselle to go down to Carmel with him for the weekend. He told her he loved her and wanted to marry her as soon as he could figure out how to tell his wife — who, as Giselle knew, was depressed and talking suicide. Giselle, who hadn’t known, cried and felt guilty and said she loved him too. And went to Carmel.
On Saturday night Ballard was very close to making Maria Navarro when one of Maria’s daughters came out of the bedroom crying for a drink of water. Then Maria burst out crying. God frowned, she said, because what they had almost done was a sin without marriage. And her with two goddam kids. Ballard drove home vowing never to go out with a Catholic again.
Heslip sneaked over to see Corinne on Sunday morning despite Kearny’s prohibitions, after making damn sure somebody didn’t have a tag on him. Corinne wormed out of him, in ways not approved by Women’s Lib, what was really going on. First she was scared, then she was mad, so it took until almost midnight to make up. They kept making up repeatedly for the rest of the night, so Heslip went into work on Monday morning completely shot.
Also on Sunday, in the afternoon, Bob McDade wrapped up the third porno quickie he’d made with a rather razzle-dazzle brunette, then when he got home, discovered he had caught a dose of clap from that same leading lady at the first film session. Since it had taken seven days to become manifest, he had already passed it on to his blond Danish wife. Who, since she knew she hadn’t been messing around, threw him out.
Dan Kearny finished mowing the lawn.
Fazzino’s usual route to his financial district office was to pop down to Broadway, go through the tunnel to Columbus, hang a right to Montgomery and park in his rented stall. So Heslip was just sort of loafing along behind, thinking yeah, man, that Corinne Jones could sure make a little black detective feller hate to get up and go to work in the morning, when...
What the hell?
Fazzino had gone right by his building and across torn-up Market Street, had taken a right off New Montgomery — proving he wasn’t headed for the freeway.
“Subject vehicle outbound on Mission, over,” Heslip told the newly installed radio. He was driving a repo with Minnesota plates which DKA had decided to pick up as a company car.
Kearny himself answered — probably up there getting a cup of that bug juice he called coffee. “Think he made the tail, SF-3?”
“Negative. I’m in that Olds with foreign plates we just put the radio into, 366. And I picked him up at Franklin and Broadway instead of his house.”
“Do you want another unit to front-tail, over?”
“Negative, 366. I... Subject slowing at green zone in front of Main Post Office, he’s going to... No. Subject turning into Seventh Street...”
Which was one-way inbound to Market. Fazzino dawdled along in the left lane in front of the Greyhound terminal, with his emergency blinker on to indicate a double-park. Heslip, half a block behind, was craning out of his window in front of an old pensioners’ hotel as if waiting for someone, in case Fazzino was using his rear-view mirror.
That’s when Fazzino goosed it.
Heslip realized just too late that he had actually been timing the lights on Market so he could cross on the yellow. He did.
Heslip had to sit through the red.
“SF-3 to KDM 366 Control. Subject doused the tail. Repeat, subject doused tail.”
Which told Kearny that the tail had been spotted and deliberately lost. His reaction was much stronger than Heslip had expected. “Go directly to Chandra’s residence, SF-3. Confirm that she is there and stick with her. I don’t care if you have to ride around in that Cadillac with her, don’t let anything happen to her.”