Kearny flopped his license photostat open on the counter while barely stifling a yawn. The man behind the counter looked at it without curiosity; only his uniform suggested he was a cop.
“Yeah?”
“Sergeant Barton said you’d maybe still have the property itemization on Fazzino. Philip Fazzino. Monday, the twenty-ninth.”
“I ain’t supposed to show the itemizations to just anybody...”
“We got a client,” said Kearny. He leaned on the counter, and this time his yawn got the better of him. “Fazzino’s attorney. He’ll spend a buck.”
The custodian looked at Kearny quizzically. He was into his sixties, with baby-blue eyes and fine silky white hair. “You’re the tiredest man I ever seen,” he said. He leaned closer. “Barton really send you down here?”
Kearny grinned sleepily. “Told us to go to hell.”
The custodian grinned back and reached under the counter. “He’s a pistol, ain’t he? Got an ulcer. You say you cover expenses?”
Kearny said he did. The old cop shuffled paper, came up with an itemization form with Fazzino, Philip typed across the top. He also dropped a sheet of scratch paper and a pencil on the counter. Kearny copied things down. When he was finished, he gave back the pencil and a green and white crumpled oblong he had previously palmed from his money clip.
Outside, he handed his scrawled list to Ballard. “Anything grab you right off, Larry?”
“Leather wallet, personal papers, BankAmericard, Mastercharge, American Express, Diner’s Club... He isn’t going to run out of credit cards, is he?”
“Keep going.”
“Leather folder of keys, handkerchief, pocket comb, car keys with plastic tab, penknife, thirty-six cents in change...” His eyes widened abruptly. “Six hundred seventy-eight dollars in paper...”
“His bail was three hundred fifty bucks,” said Kearny.
“And he had nearly twice that in his pocket. That means—”
“Yeah. He wanted to spend the night in jail.”
Cabdriver Jacob Christie came through the garage from his Santa Barbara house, a big paunchy man with a huge square head and close-cropped thin gray hair and a very wide mouth that grinned easily. Two fingers were missing from his left hand.
He didn’t mind answering questions, hell no. Fazzino? Hell yes, he remembered him. Wanted to go to Los Angeles, Christie made him call the central dispatch office of Santa Barbara Taxi Company and work out a price beforehand.
“He sat in the back seat the whole way. We didn’t make much time — he kept wanting to stop for a drink, had me wait outside. Carpinteria. Ventura. Oxnard. Camarillo—”
“You remember the names of the bars in those towns?”
The big man grinned. “Most of ’em, I guess, if I sat down and thought. Hell, I was getting pretty thirsty myself by that time.”
The trouble had started after Thousand Oaks. Christie, checking the rear-view mirror, had seen Fazzino drinking straight out of a pint bottle.
“Told him nix in my cab, I’d lose my license the HP stop us. He didn’t like that, clammed up the rest of the way to L.A.”
“What kind of booze was it?”
“How the hell would I know?”
“Not the brand,” said Kearny.
“Oh. I’d guess vodka. Couldn’t smell it, anyways, that’s why I didn’t catch on any sooner. In L.A. we went off the Hollywood Freeway at Alvarado Street. He was getting nasty by then. Said he wanted out at a little bar on Beverly Boulevard. I says I want my money before you go in, that’s when he started to cut up rough.”
They’d gotten into a tugging and shoving match by the curb, and Fazzino had fallen down twice. Someone had called the police.
“He take a swing at the cops?”
“Naw, I was handling him pretty easy, even if he had twenty years on me.” The big man laughed in reminiscence. He had a huge laugh that seemed to well up out of his hard semisphere of gut. “Used to be Shore Patrol in the Navy, I ain’t forgot it all.”
The police had wanted him to hang around and give evidence in the morning, and he fully intended to when he hit the street. But then he put his hand in his windbreaker pocket.
“He’d went and stuck a hundred-dollar bill in my pocket. Musta done it when we was hassling, close as I can figure. Well, hell, that covered the charge and then plenty, so I just come back home.”
It was worth another ten, Kearny said, if the big cabby would write out a list of all the bars he could remember. It took him only ten minutes.
“One last question,” said Kearny. “Where did you pick him up?”
“Big motel down on State Street. The Pepper Tree.”
Interstate 280 runs south from San Francisco down the spine of hills which separates the peninsula from the sea, parallel to the Bayshore freeway but several miles west of it. The afternoon was so warm that Giselle was trailing her arm out the open window. The white concrete abutments and roadways had a stark beauty all their own.
“Do you realize, Bart, that I’ve never been on this freeway before?”
He cast a quick glance at her. “You ought to learn how to drive.”
They had just passed Crystal Springs Road off-ramp, between San Bruno and Millbrae. Giselle was leaned back against the seat, her face troubled. To their left, far away and far below them, San Francisco airport stretched slim fingers into the bay from which toy jetliners rose with marionette precision.
Heslip decided to ask it. “What are you going to do about him?”
Giselle gave him a quick, shocked flash of very clear blue eyes. All he gave her was a profile. “Do about whom?”
“Don’t shuck me, chile.”
“It... shows that much?”
“I can hear violins whenever he calls you on the phone.”
Giselle’s exquisitely honed face was almost haggard; she spoke with a sort of forceful weariness that brought his head around again. He hadn’t realized just how badly it had been chewing at her.
“Bart, it’s such a mess! I... when I’m away from him I hate myself for what I’m doing to his wife and kids. For what I’m doing to him. But then he touches me...” She shivered, and quickly delved in her purse for one of her not-now-so-rare cigarettes. In a few moments the acrid smolder of tobacco stung Heslip’s nostrils. “He’s asked me to marry him.”
Heslip was very carefully watching the road again. Hillside Avenue in Burlingame, almost there. He could tell her some things about Gilmartin he’d uncovered while investigating him, but hell, it never did any good. They didn’t believe you until it was too late, then were p.o.’ed at you for telling them.
“He told his wife yet?”
“He’s afraid she’ll suicide.”
Heslip just kept from grunting. Now there was a laugh. If the wife knew of Gilmartin’s endless shack-ups, she wasn’t letting it interfere with her own round of bridge, bowling, her kids, her home...
“Next off-ramp,” he said.
She stubbed out her just-lit cigarette, turned her mind with obvious relief to the folded-open road map on the seat between them. “Black Mountain Road? That one?”
“Then we double back to Chateau Drive.”
“Got it.”
It was richly wooded, lush country being eaten away by expensive subdivisions. Chateau dropped them down the face of the ridge, carefully landscaped estates to the right, the Hillsborough Reservoir to the left. Below them were the emerald-green fairways of the Burlingame Country Club.
“Floribunda,” he said.
“Okay. Take a left on...” Her eyes suddenly widened. “Were going to Padilla’s place?”