Heslip got out and hurriedly pulled on his black raincoat. He locked the Plymouth, crossed the street with rain popping off the fabric. Mother supposed to be weatherproofed, but every time he had it dry-cleaned it leaked until he Scotch-guarded it again.
He trotted up the concrete steps and slanting walk between sodden greenery. Kearny’s warnings to her at the studio must have sunk in. Which meant once DKA had the car, he could pull the stakeout and go over to Corinne’s and...
The door drifted open under his knuckles. He felt an odd chill in the gut. He hesitated, then stuck his head in.
“Chandra?”
She didn’t answer. He finger-tipped the door wider, stepped into the hall. Silence.
“Chandra?”
Silence. She was in the living room.
Heslip stood in the doorway, surprised at the way his heart was thumping. He looked at his watch. Six-o-six. Cross the room. Use a handkerchief to pick up the phone. Dial 553-0123 with the capped tip of your Bic fine-line.
As he reported it to the police, he made himself look at it. Not much blood. One of the first frenzied blows must have killed her, so the heart had stopped pumping. The rest must have been sheer panic. Or sheer indulgence.
What made him queasy were the fingers, pointing off from the hands in unexpected directions. And the ear. Ripped off by the savagery of the attack, it lay in the middle of the rug a full three yards from the shapeless head.
Seventeen
Ballard stifled a yawn as he drove slowly by 2416 Pacific Street. It was 8:35 P.M. The rain had lessened to a fine mist. The Jaguar was just passing beneath the opening garage door, its reflected headlights silhouetting their heads and gleaming off the dark side of the Gran Torino.
After turning in a driveway down the block, Ballard cut his lights and drifted to the curb across from the house. Fazzino and the girl were just emerging with their suitcases. The door rattled down automatically behind them. Lights sprang up behind the curtained windows less than a minute after they mounted the front steps.
Ballard fought a brief battle with duty, lost, and flipped on the radio to call the office. Probably nobody there this time of night, but at least he ought to make the gesture before going home and getting a shower and falling into bed and...
“This is KDM 366 Control.” Not Kearny. Giselle. “What’s your 10–20, Larry?”
“Pacific and Steiner. What are you doing there?”
That was when she told him about Chandra.
“You’re watching the house from two-thirty on,” said the Homicide inspector in obvious disbelief. “Nobody in and nobody out, and yet—”
“That’s the way it happened,” insisted Heslip doggedly.
The interrogation was going on in the kitchen. From down the hall came the white blip of a flash camera before the technicians zipped up what was left of Chandra in a canvas bag.
“Sure. Only at six-o-three you’re told she just phoned your office. Just. At six-o-six you enter the house and find the old lady spread around the front room like somebody dropped the jam jar.”
“What were you working on?” asked the other Homicide cop. He was also big, salt-and-pepper to his partner’s baldness, but despite that, nearly interchangeable with him. Big men who worked well together because they had worked together for a long time.
“I don’t know,” said Heslip.
“This is a homicide, Heslip. As in Murder One? That I-don’t-know shit don’t go with us.”
“It’s all I’ve got. I was told to come over here and watch the house. Nobody in or out unless I was there. Nobody went in or out.”
“She suicided?” demanded the first cop savagely.
A uniformed patrolman came down the hall. Everyone was waiting for some solid facts from the M.E. The kitchen had a white-tiled drainboard and a gas stove with a black stovepipe probably as old as the house.
“Keep talking,” yawned the second cop. “I love to hear an educated nigger talk.”
“Spell ‘educated’ for me.”
“I don’t think I can,” said the cop in a surprised voice.
Heslip yawned himself, not a phony one like the cop’s. Those all-night stakeouts took it out of you. “Why not call my boss and talk to him?”
“Yeah.” The first cop turned to the patrolman. “Yeah?”
“That door at the end of Edith Alley doesn’t lead to an apartment at all, Inspector. It leads to a garden, just on the other side of the fence around this yard.”
“Yeah!” Both Homicide men were on their feet, almost in unison. The one who’d tried to get Heslip sore to see if he’d spill anything said, “On the front with the back wide open. Beautiful!”
“One of my better days,” said Heslip modestly. “Mind if I come along for a look?”
“Come along. We can always shoot if you try to run.”
“We’d probably miss him,” said the first cop sadly.
It was nine in the morning and Kearny’s cubbyhole was crowded with too many people. Benny Nicoletti was raging, which had caught Giselle entirely by surprise. She’d taught Benny’s daughter to type skip letters and how to handle the complicated DKA phone system, and had always thought of him as a big old teddy bear.
Right now he was more like a grizzly.
“Dammit, Dan, why didn’t I know about those hundred-dollar bills until this morning?”
“Tell me what they’re evidence of, Benny, and I’ll apologize.”
“They indicate a payoff—”
“Evidence, Benny.”
“Ballard saw Fazzino in and around her car in South Park—”
“Evidence, Benny,” repeated Kearny implacably.
“All right, goddammit, no evidence,” he admitted darkly, his cold eyes incongruous in his round mild face. “But goddammit, I cooperate with you, knowing damn well that attack on old Ed Dorsey has something to do with mob business, and what happens?”
Kearny looked up from lighting a cigarette. He seemed unperturbed by Nicoletti’s outburst. “What happens, Benny?”
Nicoletti swept an arm to indicate Ballard and Heslip, leaning against the filing cabinets behind Kearny’s desk in identical poses, arms crossed on their chests.
“An old lady I don’t know nothing about gets beat to a goddam pudding in her house with one of these clowns camped on her doorstep. And the other one furnishes an airtight alibi for the guy most likely to have hit her.”
“Or have had her hit,” amended Kearny. “Any muscle in from outside?”
“Not a whisper,” said Nicoletti in a milder voice. “Could be some pro we don’t know nothing about, of course, but there’s just no word on the street, Dan. None at all.”
“What about Garofolo?” asked Heslip suddenly.
Nicoletti shook his head. “Long gone. Jumped bail, his bondsman’s eating the thirty-five thou. Who actually took the phone call from the old broad?”
“I did,” said Giselle. “Clocked it in at five fifty-nine.”
“And talked how long?”
“About two minutes. She said she wanted to turn in the car, she’d gotten the final notice. Would one of our men come and pick up the keys? She’d tell him where the car was parked. Goodbye.”
“Say, six-o-two or three, you get Heslip on the radio. He answers right away?”
“Instantly.”
He looked back at Heslip. “You found her at six-o-six?” He nodded to the big inspector. Nicoletti nodded to himself. “So whoever done it had enough time, all right. Just enough time.”
“To do... all that?” asked Giselle faintly.
Nicoletti nodded. He seemed unable to visualize the welter of sodden flesh and pulverized bone that Bart’s terse description had made vivid to her. Or maybe violent death no longer had any emotional impact on him.