He shook his head, remembering. O’Bannon in the field, teenage Kathy Onoda to answer the single telephone and set up files and skip-trace, Kearny to do all of those and hustle clients besides. Now DKA had nine California offices and a dozen field men in the Bay Area alone.
On sudden impulse, he jabbed the intercom button. In a moment Kathy’s voice came through from the clerical offices above.
“Who’s the client on that convertible Ballard just grabbed?”
“Golden Gate Trust, Dan. Pete Gilmartin.”
He replaced the receiver, stabbed the button for an outside line, picked up, dialed the new assistant vice-president in charge of auto contracts at Golden Gate.
“Pete? Dan Kearny, how’s it going? Listen, we’ve got that Caddy for you... Yeah, damned fast. Larry Ballard, one of our best men. Pete, what can you tell me about this Chandra...”
“Chandra is a dancer, has her own studio up in North Beach — on Grant at the corner of Edith Alley, I think it is,” said Ed Dorsey.
He came into Ballard’s already crowded cubicle. There was damned little about San Francisco old Ed didn’t know; could give you cross streets for almost every hundred-block in the city. Past sixty, a white-haired, bumbling man wearing a topcoat and a snap-brim hat that took ten years off his age. He’d made and lost two sizable fortunes on the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange in his day.
Heslip tipped Ballard a wink. He didn’t dig old Ed too much. Rough as a cob on the phone, mush out in the field where it counted.
“Say, Ed, we’re going out after an embezzler tonight. Might get a bit sticky, man, we could sure use some extra muscle.”
“Tonight?” Dorsey had a pink face getting jowly, weak watery blue eyes lent bogus authority by stem-rimmed glasses. “Dammit! Any other night, men, I’d be right out there with you. But... ah... I’ve got a meet set up tonight myself.”
When he was gone, Heslip snickered softly. “If his wife’ll let him out alone after dark.”
They finished their reports a little before six, then walked down two blocks for Red Hot Doggies that somebody hadn’t left in the infra-red oven long enough. A little after six, with the rush-hour traffic well thinned downtown, they rescued Ballard’s car from South Park and left it by the DKA office.
Six-fifty. Time for Alex Gondolph, embezzler. Both investigators tensing up and hiding it from the other. They’d both been threatened numerous times with everything from razors to shotguns to vehicular homicide, but embezzlers knew they faced a possible felony rap if somebody caught up with them. And the last time DKA had gone looking for an embezzler, Heslip had ended up in a coma...
“Schilling ought to park that Duster in South Park after the bars close,” said Ballard, just to be using his mouth. He shot a look at Heslip, so cool behind the wheel. Maybe forty pro fights taught you to mask it all, so the other cat in the ring with you would never know what was going on in your head.
Heslip yawned. “If his old lady was telling the truth. We’ll take a look after we keep Kathy’s date with Gondolph.”
They drove out through the Richmond District that flanked that side of the park, then dropped over the steep incline to Forty-eighth Avenue and the Great Highway. Street lights by turns illuminated and dropped into shadow Ballard’s unmemorably attractive features. Only unexpectedly watchful eyes lent the face distinction. He kept talking to quell the butterflies in his gut.
“You tell Corinne we were going after this cat tonight?”
“No. Hell, you know how she is, Larry. She just doesn’t like detecting, period. And since I was in the hospital...”
“What’s going to happen when you marry her?”
“One of us is gonna have to give, and it ain’t gonna be me.” The Great Highway was split to pass on either side of the several acres of blacktop parking that Playland at the Beach had once needed. Heslip parked. He amended, “Damned if I know what’s gonna happen.”
The insistent sea wind slapped at them with salty hands. Seven-forty. Time to kill, so they crossed the highway to stand by the concrete sea wall and stare out at the dimly rolling breakers.
“Tide’s out,” said Ballard.
Heslip shivered. Both men wore topcoats, but the wind cut through the unlined gabardines. “Hope I recognize the mother when I see him,” he said unexpectedly.
“I doubt if there’ll be one whole hell of a lot of guys standing around that phone booth.”
“You don’t think he’d be packing a gun?” asked Heslip even more unexpectedly. Before Ballard could reply, he answered himself, “Naw. No way. What time?”
“Eight minutes.”
“Yeah.”
Fronting the Great Highway was Playland, nearly dead, awaiting the high-rise development that would make it yet another memory in a city that lived on them. The only places still open were a pie shop, a Mexican café, a pinball emporium. They went by the lank-haired groups of oriental teenagers desultorily spronging pinball machines, out the back door into the darkened midway and turned left, past a shivering sailor and his girl. The pay phone was at the far end by the old streetcar turn-around.
Ballard stopped to light a cigarette he didn’t want so he could ask, “Is that him?”
By the booth was a short and rather tubby man. He had a round face and horn-rims and ears that stuck out from his head like clenched baby’s fists. No overcoat. Double-knit suit of a rather electric-yellow even in that dim light. It fit him the way the skin fits a half-peeled banana. Red shirt, a necktie wide enough to serve dinner on. Purple and gold. Boots that— Boots? With the trouser legs tucked into the tops of them.
“Sweet Jesus,” muttered Heslip. Laughter instead of tension danced in his voice. “No wonder he can only make it with hookers.”
They went past on either side, casually, then turned in on him with precision just as he raised his arm to check his watch. Two hard-faced men, one black and broad, the other white and tall, bearing him back against the open door of the booth with their hands stuffed menacingly in the pockets of their dark topcoats.
“She isn’t coming,” said the white one.
“She’s skinny, and a slant besides,” said the black one.
“Who... what...”
“Where’s the money?” said the white one.
Sweat stood on Gondolph’s face. His eyes darted from one to the other. His skin had gone chalky. “You’re... police?” he managed to choke out.
“Where’s the money?” said the black one.
Gondolph blinked twice and vomited down the front of his suit.
Three
The intercom buzzed.
Patrick Michael O’Bannon jerked spasmodically and steaming coffee cascaded down his leg. He yelped.
The intercom buzzed again. O’Bannon regarded it with balefully bloodshot eyes. He set down the half-emptied cup with a slightly tremoring freckled right hand, flexed his fingers, picked up the phone. “O’Bannon,” he told the instrument, “go ahead and surprise me.”
He listened, his leathery drinker’s face sad as a bloodhound’s this joyless morning. “Why would Ballard be here?” he asked finally. “Bing his extension.”
He hung up. He missed. He hung up. From the doorway Ballard’s voice said, gently, “That is my extension, O’B. You’re in my cubicle.”
“I... what? Oh!”
“Your eyes look like they’re bleeding to death.”