“SF-6 calling KDM 366 Control.”
The voice of Kathy Onoda, DKA’s Japanese office manager, said, “This is KDM 366. Go ahead, SF-6.”
“Kathy, will you check O’B’s In box and tell me if he’s got an assignment on a 3-3-3-F-F-X?”
“10-4. Checking, Larry.”
Ballard sat with the mike in his hand. It wouldn’t be the right car, of course. This sort of thing happened to Kearny or O’B or even old Ed Dorsey, but never to...
“That’s 3-3-3-F-F-X, a seventy-three Cad convert. Instructions...” Her voice thinned with excitement. “REPOSSESS ON SIGHT! Go gettem Bears!”
This was it. That always intense excitement, almost pure joy, when you faced the moment of action. Get out hot wire and pop keys. Lock up the Plymouth. Walk casually, as casually as the hard-eyed man had walked. No need for window picks, since the top was down.
He pushed over the four little sateen pillows on the seat, slid in, began working with his set of filed-down keys, gently, gingerly, always exerting the slightest sideways pressure, checking the rear-view mirror for trouble. He hadn’t forgotten those eyes.
The key suddenly turned in his hand with that always unexpected ease, the radio came alive with classical music from KKHI, the starter gave a discreet stutter.
Goddamn, he had it! Even Kearny would have to admire this one. As he swung left into Second, a white-haired dumpy old woman ran off the curb waving her hands. He accelerated, just stifling the exuberant urge to give her the finger. Goddamn! Neat and nasty, and best of all, would be rubbing O’B’s nose in it tonight, when the red-headed investigator got back from working Marin County.
Stopped by the light at Sixth, Ballard opened the glove box. Empty except for the Owner’s Manual. No personal property apart from the sateen pillows and an incongruous comic book on the front seat. He riffled the pages.
The fight changed. The cars behind the Caddy started honking. Ballard was staring at the comic book, open-mouthed.
Interlarded between the four-color pages were crisp new hundred-dollar bills.
Two
Honeyed Dixie tones, rich with sexual implication, were coming from the office at the end of the hall.
“Shugah, you don’t know what lovin’ means until youah’ve had me!”
Bart Heslip, lounged in his chair and listening with one knee cocked against the edge of the desk, abruptly turned almost plum-black features toward the open door. At the far end of the hall, Larry Ballard was just topping the interior stairs of the old converted Victorian. It had once been a specialty whorehouse; now it was the head offices of DKA.
“Baby, Ah heard you were, why do you think Ah called youah up?” A very faint sheen of perspiration dotted the upper lip of the girl on the phone. She exclaimed delightedly, “Shugah, youah pick the spot...”
Ballard paused in the open doorway, eyebrows raised in question. Heslip waggled his own.
“Fifty dollahs foah all night, lovah,” crooned the girl on the phone. She gave a low throaty laugh that sent a chill down the spines of both detectives. “Aftah one night with little ole me, shugah, youah going to want it every night. Eight o’clock? Phone booth behind the old Ocean Beach Amusement Pahk? Lovah, youah not...” She paused, gave the throaty laugh again. “Fahve-fouah and blond all ovah, baby. All right. Tonight. Ah can hardly wait.”
She lowered the receiver very gently, then clapped her hands explosively and spun her swivel chair toward Heslip with a hard joyous laugh totally unlike her earlier tone.
“Got that son of a bitch!” she exclaimed.
“Buddha Head strikes again,” said Heslip.
Kathy Onoda was an angular twenty-eight, Heslip’s age, her almost classical Japanese features refined by illness and framed in a lustrous mane of gleaming jet hair. Not ill, she kept insisting, just run-down. Maybe so: office manager of DKA while raising two doll-like daughters and supporting a dead-beat husband who never seemed to graduate from Cal Berkeley.
“I just got here for the cartoon,” said Ballard. “Who?”
“Gondolph,” said Heslip.
“No shit? Beautiful! Want help tonight?”
Alex Gondolph had embezzled $7,000 from Fidelity Trust; Dan Kearny had given the assignment exclusively to Bart Heslip five days before, and had given the ex-professional boxer a week to turn him.
“Sure. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
“You cats have all the fun,” complained Kathy. She looked at Ballard. “What happened on that Caddy convert?”
With a dramatic flourish he laid five one-hundred-dollar bills on the desk. Heslip’s eyes popped open. The black detective’s sloping breadth of shoulder and depth of chest made him seem heavier than his 158 pounds. He had been with DKA for six years.
“Man, what—”
“Not payments. Personal property. The Caddy’s in the barn.”
“I have a feeling you’d better tell the Great White Father all about it,” said Kathy weakly. “He’s down in his cubbyhole.”
“You walked into the middle of a payoff,” rumbled Dan Kearny. He was a graying compact man in his mid-forties, with gray eyes turned bleak by over a quarter of a century spent probing the underbelly of society. “What’s the name on the file?”
“Chandra.”
“Chandra what?”
“Just Chandra. It came in that way from the client — Kathy checked it. I don’t even know if it’s a man or a woman.”
“Sounds sort of exotic,” mused Bart Heslip. Teeth flashed in his dark face; he seemed totally recovered from the concussion of half a year before. “Like a belly dancer or something. Swirling veils—”
“Swirling hundred-dollar bills.” Kearny reached forward to shake a Lucky from the pack on his desk. He frowned at Ballard through the first cloud of smoke. “Write the money up as personal property, same as a box of tools in the trunk or something. Then we’ll play it by ear.” He changed subjects by looking back at Heslip. “I hear Kathy smoked out Gondolph.”
“It was beautiful, Dan! Bartender in that joint on Eddy Street said Gondolph can only make it with little blond cuddly southern whores. So Kathy just laid it all over the Tenderloin that she’s little and blond and cuddly, in a Dixie accent you gotta use a spoon on, and this afternoon she got his phone number.”
“You and Larry are both going on it tonight?”
Heslip nodded.
Kearny scratched his massively pugnacious jaw. “Good. Fidelity’s bonding company wriggled out from under on a technicality, and I want to do a good job for them. Use the old citizen’s-arrest line: he’s got to hand the money over to you tonight and show up at Fidelity in the morning, or blah blah blah.”
“If he kicks up rough?”
“Then take him in, you’re legal rep for Fidelity — but that’s the last resort.” He stubbed out his cigarette. He said to Ballard, “What are you doing on that Schilling car? The client’s raising hell.”
“The wife tells me he’s got a girl friend down in South Park. That’s how I spotted the Chandra Caddy.”
“Keep after it.”
Through the one-way glass door of his cubbyhole, Kearny watched them cross the garage to the field-agent cubicles against the far wall. He lit another cigarette.
Chandra. A damned odd one even to someone like him who’d started out knocking off cars for old man Walters down in L.A. as a teenager, five bucks a repo and pay your own transportation. Kearny had ridden out on a bicycle to grab his first hot car. Worked up to general manager of Walter’s Auto Detectives after the war, quit in 1964 to start Daniel Kearny Associates.