“That’s still four hundred dollars each.”
“Plus accessories. And Royal suits are not bench-made, Miss Wynters. No cut, make and trim at Royal Clothi—”
“Mizz,” said Giselle.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Mizz Wynters. Not miss. Mizz. Em-ess, Mizz. I am a liberated modern woman, Mr. Oates.”
“I see. Anyway, Mr. Fazzino has never questioned our—”
“I am not Mr. Fazzino. I am—”
“Yes, quite. A liberated modem woman—”
“I was about to say an auditor. Hired by the corporation to make sure all expenditures are legitimate.”
“Legitimate?” He had the voice of a man who wore a Guards mustache. “Miss Wynters, to suggest—”
“Mizz. What are the accessories?”
He heaved a long sigh into the phone. “Mizz Wynters. Matching shirts, matching ties, specially selected by Mr. Fazzino as to pattern, fabric and color. Identical, of course—”
“Identical?”
“The suits themselves were identical.”
Nothing, Giselle thought as she hung up sixty seconds later. So he usually bought one at a time like anyone else, but Oates had pointed out it had been an especially fine bolt of cloth, and...
No call from Larry and Dan yet, either. No word from Bart.
But... Ah! In the morning mail a full retail credit report on Wendy Austin, going back to her first revolving charge account at Sears in 1968. Two months later she had bought a junker, and to finance it, had gotten as co-signer a Mrs. Bridget Shapiro of Columbus Street in El Granada. By the map, the proverbial wide place in the road, a couple-three miles north along the Coast Highway from Half Moon Bay.
With quickening interest she saw that El Granada was also only about five miles from Devil’s Slide, where Padilla had gone off the road to his death on the foggy night of Sunday, July 22. If he had been meeting Wendy Austin behind Fazzino’s back, they’d have needed a place to rendezvous...
Later for that. Right now they had what she’d hoped for, somebody from Wendy’s past. Nobody of the seventy-odd Austins in the San Francisco phone book had ever heard of Wendy. But Bridget Shapiro on Columbus Street in El Granada had. And yes, there was a listing for a Hiram Shapiro at that address in the San Mateo County book.
Let Larry handle the interview. He was good with women if he didn’t have to push them around.
The Santa Barbara airport was actually several miles north of the town, in the Beach Park area of Goleta off Sandspit Road. Still squinting from the brightness outside, they walked into the cool dim interior to find the ground-floor strictly functional, with the cocktail lounge and coffee shop tucked away upstairs.
“We do it here or we don’t do it,” said Ballard.
They’d been all over Santa Barbara drawing blanks. Airways. Avis. Flightline. National. Nothing anywhere.
Out here were Budget, Hertz and Avis shoulder-to-shoulder in a tiny incestuous office just to the left of the terminal door. The two girls and the man who handled the three desks were drinking coffee in fine camaraderie when Kearny stepped up to the counter.
“On last Monday,” he began, “did anyone...”
Fifteen minutes later they were on the road north again. Nobody had returned a car at any time on Monday. A Mallory Rickerts had rented a station wagon on that day, at 11:23 A.M., and had returned it at about two-thirty the next day. Fazzino had been asleep in the Jaguar somewhere between Goleta and Pismo Beach at the time, but they’d noted Mallory Rickerts’ name anyway.
He was from the Bay Area — San Carlos — and he had paid cash for the car rental. In the age of BankAmericard and Mastercharge that was unusual, though certainly not unique, but there had been one other remarkable fact. The cash he had used for a deposit, and later as payment for the rental, had been a crisp new one-hundred-dollar bill.
Twenfy-one
Reports littered Kearny’s desk in numbers to challenge the butts in his ashtray. And right now Ballard was down the peninsula, Heslip was downtown and Giselle was upstairs on the phone, amassing more facts which would pile more reports on his desk.
He entered them with the same sense of adventure that a furniture salesman from Peoria would feel on entering his first topless and bottomless bar. After the third cigarette was ground out in his ear by a drunk and the third drink poured into his lap by a topless waitress getting her butt pinched, the furniture salesman might be disenchanted with the Broadway night-life scene. But Kearny never got his fill of reports.
Reports, even crummy reports by field agents who couldn’t have found out what happened to the toilet paper in the rest rooms, held an endless fascination for him. Hidden even in those would be strands which, wound together, would hang the poor dumb bastard you were after. And these were superb reports, written by three investigators who knew how to dig and how to tell you what they had found out.
Take Heslip at Wendy’s Funky Threads. He goes in trying to learn why Wendy went to work early on October 29, not knowing Ballard had figured out she wanted to draw the surveillance from the house. Because Wendy comes in lugging a display dummy and spots him there, they learn she’s scared about something.
Eventually they’d find out what.
Look at Giselle’s work on timetables to Santa Barbara. The only Greyhound from San Francisco getting to Santa Barbara before 6:00 P.M. was the 8:30 A.M. bus. Seven minutes too early. Fazzino had ditched the tail at 8:37. Trailways didn’t run to Santa Barbara, and Amtrack’s single daily train took eight hours and left at 8:15 A.M. If their assumption that he’d driven down in a rental car proved wrong, she’d already eliminated everything but the airlines.
Valley Air had two possibles: a 3:30 San Jose flight and a 3:00 Oakland flight. Air West had one daily, from San Francisco at 1:15 P.M. Another possible. The best of the lot was the United 9:25 flight from San Francisco.
The buzz of his intercom brought his thoughtful gray eyes down from the ceiling. He saw that his cigarette had burned itself down unsmoked, so he shook another from his pack as he picked up. Giselle.
“Dan, something just occurred to me. You need a valid California driver’s license to rent a U-drive car. Fazzino wouldn’t use his own. Maybe he could get a forged license pretty easily, but what if he would be in an accident? Wouldn’t a little checking show that it was a phony?”
“I’ll be damned. That’s right, Giselle.” He paused to fire up the cigarette. “And unless I’m wrong, that’s a felony in this state. I doubt if our boy with the genius IQ would chance that.”
“Take somebody with him as a driver?” she asked dubiously.
“Why would he go through all that when he could just catch a plane down? Giselle, get hot on the passenger lists for those flights that are possibles.”
“Will do.”
Were they wrong about the plastic-tabbed car keys? Well, time — and investigation — would tell.
He went back to the reports. Great job by Heslip on the Widow Padilla. He remembered his cigarette, got in a couple of puffs and started chuckling. Padilla damned for adultery with Wendy Austin? How many men hit for the Mafia? How many crushed with his phony trucking scheme? How many girls screwed casually down through the years, like washing his hands? How many more girls pandered to how many civil servants he’d wanted to bribe or discredit?
Good point, to check with the California Highway Patrol on the car wreck that had killed Padilla. The CHP knew its stuff; still, such accidents were among the easiest to fake.