“Bestway Aviation. At San Carlos airport.”
Mr. Yee was built like a judo freak, short and thick, with glasses and glossy hair too black to be entirely convincing at his age. He smiled a lot and laughed a lot, hee-hee-hee-hee, high and twittering, and had lousy English. His breath was nothing to age in the wood, either.
“You go see, yes? You like, yes? Mebbe rent, yes?”
“We... can’t see it without the key, Mr. Yee...”
Mr. Yee nodded and showed his teeth and gave them the key. “You like very much, you see. Very lucky, yes? Hee-hee-hee-hee. Just come empty.”
Depressingly empty, Giselle thought as they crossed the wide, now dusty hardwood floor of Chandra’s studio. The odor of sweat and tired bodies still clung to the place.
“He seemed all broken up to lose his tenant.”
“Mr. Yee is hiding his grief in his inscrutable oriental way,” said Heslip.
Kearny, in the lead, pushed aside the dressing-room curtain and kept going, right around the end of the partition from behind which the red-haired girl had emerged nude and wiping her face.
“My guess is he’ll double the rent.” His voice from behind the partition echoed hollowly but was clearly audible. “Wonder if he shut off the wa—”
There was the abrupt, very brief hiss of a shower and a burst of cursing. Kearny emerged from behind the partition. Water glinted in his graying hair and he was rubbing the wet-darkened arm of his suitcoat with a towel. “Your turn,” he said sourly to Giselle.
“I’ve already had mine, thanks.” But she disappeared behind the partition.
Kearny said, “We know that Chandra sometimes bugged out to her house for a half-hour, forty-five minutes, so if she wasn’t on the floor somebody could easily assume she’d taken off. We know she cleaned the showers a couple of times a week. And we know that friends sometimes waited for the dancers to get through working out.”
Giselle emerged from behind the partition and nodded. “Every word,” she said. “But why would he let Wendy keep coming here after Chandra put the bite on him?”
“Probably to make Chandra feel safe until he figured out a way to knock her off,” said Kearny. “I figure she was a walking dead woman from the moment she overheard whatever the hell it was — with or without the blackmail. It’s that sort of organization.”
“I figure Dan’s right,” said Heslip. “Wendy, who always took her shower at home rather than here, comes in to collect her coat and clothes. Fazzino comes with her. Nobody’s in here, they don’t know Chandra’s in back cleaning the shower, and they’re talking about — something.”
“And Chandra hears them,” said Giselle. “And doesn’t say anything until...”
“Let’s say, until Padilla dies,” suggested Kearny. “Maybe, until he does, she doesn’t understand what she overheard. But he dies on July twenty-second and she deposits her five thou a week later. That much we know. What it means we’re just guessing at. We can’t even prove the money actually came from Fazzino.”
“But it fits so damn well.”
“Fitting things together isn’t hard fact, Bart. We’re assuming that maybe Wendy was shacking up with Padilla. We don’t know where, how often, whether Fazzino planned it or didn’t know about it. Until we get the CHP report, we don’t even know the circumstances of Padilla’s death.”
When they got back to the DKA office, the report was waiting. Lots of facts, none of them helpful.
Frank Padilla left his Hillsborough home at “about 8:00” on the evening of Sunday, July 22, following a “business” phone call. His wife had retired at 10:30, her usual hour.
The extreme coastal fog had gotten so thick that CHP had closed sections of the Coast Highway to traffic at 4:00 A.M. on Monday. The highway was reopened at about 10:00 A.M. At 10:48 A.M. a passing motorist spotted Padilla’s Imperial in the surf below Devil’s Slide. It was late afternoon before the Pacifica Fire Department rescue squad was able to haul the wreckage to the top of the cliff.
The bruises on Padilla’s body were consonant with a car going through a guardrail and down five hundred feet of precipice. The autopsy confirmed death by drowning: lividity in the face and neck; foam in the nostrils and mouth; blueish tinge to the skin; and the water in his lungs was identical in salinity and chemical content with seawater.
Louisa Padilla had no idea where her husband had been, whom he had seen, or what he was doing on the Coast Highway.
Leaving them right back where they had started.
The San Carlos airport was built on bay fill off Holly Street, on the far side of the Bayshore freeway. Ballard parked in the big unattended blacktop lot behind the modernistic airport building. Room for a hundred cars, anyway; now almost deserted. Must get a heavy weekend turnout. Bestway Aviation faced on the tie-down areas and runways, not on the parking lot. Behind the reception counter were jammed two desks, a big radio, and five teenagers all talking at once about driving tests.
“Pardon me,” said Ballard.
Nobody stopped talking. Bestway apparently ran a loose ship. He slammed an open hand down on the counter to cut them off like a knife. “Mallory Rickerts?”
“You... ah, mean the chief pilot, sir?”
“If his name is Mallory Rickerts.”
“He’s... in the Sky Kitchen, sir.”
Just like the wife had said: flying a stool in the coffee shop. Rickerts was a lean, slightly stooped mid-forties redhead with freckles and fine squint-lines at the corners of his eyes. He had a slow friendly grin and took his coffee black but with a lot of sugar.
“Sure, I rented the car. Station wagon. Monday the twenty-ninth, brought it back the next day.”
“And paid cash for the rental and deposit?”
“That’s right. Why—”
“With a hundred-dollar bill?”
“That’s right.” A very slightly defensive tone had entered his voice. “Why?”
Ballard smiled reassuringly into his baffled, slightly angered eyes. Hiding something, but it didn’t have to concern Flip Fazzino. Didn’t see how it could, in fact, since Fazzino had been right in front of Ballard all the way to San Francisco. But still...
“You were down there with a charter, sir?”
“That’s right.” The warm and friendly smile was gone now as if it had never been. “But no more damn questions until—”
“Just one, sir. Did you get the hundred from your charter passenger?”
Curiosity replaced anger. “Cou... counterfeit?”
Ballard looked properly caught out, but shook his head. “We aren’t at liberty to discuss that, sir.”
Then it all came out. During the flight from San Carlos to Santa Barbara on Monday morning, Rickerts’ passenger had offered him a hundred dollars above his twenty-five dollars per diem plus expenses if Rickerts would rent a car and then let his fare use it. It was absolutely essential, he told Rickerts, that no one know he was in Santa Barbara. Rickerts had gone along — what the hell, if the old coot smashed up the car or something, Rickerts could just say it had been stolen from his motel parking lot.
He’d taken a cab out to the airport sometime around two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, the passenger had shown up with the car as arranged, Rickerts had turned it in and had flown him back to San Francisco.
It all fit. Except the fare couldn’t have been Fazzino. But...
“What did he look like?”
“Medium height. Stooped. A doctor, he said he was, in his mid-fifties, I’d guess. Talked in a sort of whisper, told me very matter-of-factly that he’d had an operation for cancer of the larynx. Smoked glasses and a lot of white hair and a slight limp and a cane.”