Kearny leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He wondered what Ballard was finding down in El Granada.
Her sister.
The same pale sheen of hair, the same long smooth legs left bare by the scantiest of hotpants. Older, thicker, Bridget Shapiro, with a bold nose just very slightly hooked that gave her face a predatory cast Wendy’s escaped. The same piercing eyes — without the hardness. Seven or eight years older than Wendy.
“Can I help you?”
“I...”
A child, perhaps four, appeared beside her to lay a hand on her mother’s bare brown thigh. She was eating bread and jam. Child and mother each wore garish red polish on the nails of their bare toes.
“I’m looking for your sister, Wendy.”
“Mmm. Friend of hers?”
Ballard had walked up to the door of the weather-beaten frame bungalow knowing only that Bridget Shapiro had cosigned an auto note for Wendy back in 1968, probably when the girl had turned sixteen and could get a license. Girls like Wendy, girls in a hurry for everything they could get, would have stuck their co-signer for the payments. A flash of ID, I’m a detective...
But because this was the sister, Ballard tried a different tack. He was suddenly flustered, shuffling. “Yes, ah, do you... I... ah, you knew she used to make... ah...”
“Pomies. Sure.” The bold-eyed woman laughed abruptly, a good hearty, honest, three-drinks-in-the-middle-of-the-morning laugh. “C’mon in.”
He followed her into the living room. Tract house, Readers Digest condensed books and a set of encyclopedias filling the built-in bookshelf, furniture by the room from Levitz.
She pointed at the couch. “Drink?”
Would it help to open her up? The room was cool and dim, the child’s bread and jam had left a smear of strawberry on the tanned flesh of Mommy’s thigh. A lot of woman, Mommy.
“Sure. Vodka if you have it.”
“With?”
“Tonic?”
She nodded and disappeared through the far doorway, daughter in tow. Ballard listened to the rattle of ice cubes. Minutes passed. She came in alone with two drinks.
“Time for her nap.” She sat down beside him, leaned forward far enough to click glasses with him and show the ripe curves of unbrassiered breasts down the front of her sleeveless scoop-necked blouse. “Cheers.”
They drank. Her laugh this time had subtle undertones. She could handle the booze, probably a lot better than he could.
“You were in one of those pornies with Wendy, weren’t you?”
“I... ah... Well, two, actually, and I’ve been away and...” Something dark moved behind the blue eyes. Bridget Shapiro raised her drink to look into it intently, as if trying to see through the ice-laden whiskey to some reality hidden from him. “She was good, huh?”
“Good?”
“You need another.”
She drained hers, making Ballard follow suit. Ten o’clock in the goddamned morning, O’B should have had this assignment. She was back in the kitchen. More ice. Gurgle of things into glasses. So damned much like her sister, without the formica surface. Sharp erotic fantasies from following Wendy now being transferred to Bridget. Dangerous. Mrs. Bridget.
“A good screw,” she said from the doorway.
Her answer to her own question of a couple of minutes before spoke so directly to Ballard’s fantasies that he didn’t have to fake the blush this time.
She came into the room thoughtfully. “Even under the lights with a camera crew watching? And he comes back three years later? The girl must have something.”
She spoke more to herself than to him. She handed him his drink with sudden decision, and drained hers in one long draught. “Drink it,” she ordered harshly.
He drank. “Ah... your... What about... ah... Mr. Shapiro?”
“There isn’t any Mr. Shapiro any more. Not for me. He sends me money every month, but—” She broke off to demand furiously, “You think I’m going to bed with you, is that it?”
“No, I... I didn’t mean—”
She dropped her glass on the floor and leaned down, still standing, to push her face against his, hard. Her teeth grated against his, her tongue found his. Ballard got his drink put down on the end table and got to his feet without either of them breaking the contact. They went down the hall together toward the bedroom without another word, hand in hand, like Jack and Jill going up the hill.
What they found at the top wasn’t a pail of water.
Twenty-two
What Heslip found was a real surprise. After Giselle hung up she went down to Kearny’s office to see if he could fit it into the ramshackle theoretical structure they were erecting. She figured it had to be significant, she just couldn’t see how.
“Dan, I’ve had Bart at the public library all morning, checking the Chronicle and Examiner files for anything that looked significant which might have happened in the month or so before Chandra came up with the five thousand. And...”
“Good thinking.” He waved her to the client’s chair. “How’re you getting along with Pete?”
“I don’t know,” she said, the telltale crimson mounting her cheeks again.
She didn’t know. Last night had been as always, physically, and yet... not as always. And Petie couldn’t see her tonight, and he still hadn’t told his wife, and dammit, was he just stringing her along? Oh Christ, what was the matter with her? She was sick with guilt, that was what was the matter.
Kearny was looking at her. When she met his eyes, he said blandly, “What did Bart come up with?”
Back to work, then. Thank God. Fixing her face to come to the office this morning, she’d suddenly burst out crying.
“Fazzino is married,” she said. “He filed for divorce from a Constanza Fazzino on May seventh, irreconcilable differences — the usual. I don’t know what significance it has, but—”
“May. Chandra got her money in July...” Kearny frowned and shook out cigarettes for both of them. “Doesn’t look like there could be much connection, but... Listen, have Pete find out when Nucci signed the contract on that Jaguar, Giselle.”
“Talk about no connection—”
“Just a hunch. I have an idea that little Wendy-baby gets well paid before she does any cooperating, even with Flip Fazzino. Goods or services. Meanwhile, Padilla’s death is still our best bet — hell, our only bet — for what Chandra had on Fazzino. Who do we know who’ll get us copies of the Highway Patrol investigation?”
Giselle thought, tapping the end of her ballpoint pen on the side of the desk. “How about Mrs. Noesting in DMV? She’s always been...”
“I’ve always been jealous of her.”
Bridget Shapiro was up on one elbow in the bed. She ran a finger down Ballard’s bare chest. He had never experienced anything like the past hour. Not ever.
She touched the bridge of her own nose. “It started with this. In high school all I could think about was getting it fixed, but plastic surgeons cost money and Mom and Dad didn’t have any. Not enough, not then. Wendy’s nose used to be like this, too.”
He could see it coming, but said, “And now it isn’t. So?”
“So the folks paid for it, for her but not for me. I’ve never been able to forget that.” Her eyes studied his face in a bedroom made dim by lowered shades. Her firm, heavy body was deeply tanned, so her breasts stood out whitely. “You were never in a porny flick with her, were you?”
Ballard met her eyes. He couldn’t get the easy he past his teeth. Not after the past hour. “No.”