“Hello?”
Ballard jerked and hung up the phone in a quick reflex action.
“If a man answers, hang up?”
It was Giselle. Her eyes were red but her pale face was composed. She was massaging her upper arms as if she were cold, leaning against the doorframe and staring at him. Ballard stared back. She’d been right, literally right. But that meant... Holy Christ! Of course. He thrust the phone toward her.
“Call for me, Giselle. If a man does answer, ask if he’s Hiram Shapiro. If he is, you hang up.”
She did. She asked. She hung up.
“Hiram Shapiro,” she said. “What does that mean?”
Ballard hesitated. It fit all right, but... it was so damned obvious. Why hadn’t anyone else — Kearny, for instance-come up with it?
So instead of answering, he said, “Why are you hanging around here at eight o’clock on a Friday night?”
Giselle let out a long sigh. Eventually she’d have to tell him. “Larry, you...” She stopped. She plunged ahead. “You know about... Pete Gilmartin and me?”
“Guessed.”
“I was supposed to meet him here tonight after work. He didn’t show up. Half an hour ago he called.” She stopped again.
Ballard looked at her. “And?”
“He told me his wife had just tried to commit suicide. He got there just in time...”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Only I could hear music in the background. Faintly.” Anger had entered her voice and her face had gotten a surprised expression as she realized how angry she was. “Maybe it’s all the years in a profession where you’re lied to all the time — or maybe it’s just that... I knew. Anyway, after he’d hung up I called his house. His wife answered. I could hear the kids laughing in the background.”
“Did you—”
“No.” An almost fiercely happy look came over her face. “But I still might, that son of a bitch. I might call back and—”
“That’d hurt her more than him,” Ballard said quickly, uneasily. It bothered him to see that sort of cold, calculated anger in Giselle. Against it he said, almost harshly, “Look, forget all that right now. I found out something tonight—”
“And me feeling guilty about that rotten bastard’s wife and kids all these weeks!” She snorted and tossed her heavy mane of pale hair. “Go ahead,” she snapped.
He told her about the scene in the warehouse, but first explained what he thought was the significance of Hiram Shapiro’s being home, obviously reconciled with Bridget. By the time he was halfway through she was listening, intently, and she burst in with the probable meaning of the phone call from Bridget before he even got to it. She even went beyond that, with the sudden ghost of a smile.
“I get the feeling that you and Mrs. Shapiro did a little more than just talk about her sister.”
Ballard started to say something, finally just nodded almost morosely, and then said, “To hell with it, let’s go get a drink.”
“A lot of drinks,” said Giselle. “And I won’t talk about Gilmartin and you won’t talk about Bridget.”
Ballard stood up. Very carefully. “I’ll talk about Catholics,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been out with one again.”
Twenty-seven
Dan Kearny got the word about phone calls on Saturday afternoon from a rather blear-eyed Giselle, and as a result — surprise, surprise — spent a bad weekend. He should have seen it himself, of course, it was the only logical conclusion, but he hadn’t. And now, having had it pointed out to him, he suddenly had the answer to the second thing that had been puzzling him all along.
But Christ, that meant that he could...
It was the knowledge of what he could do that kept him awake on Saturday night. He finally got up and paced the bedroom floor, smoking innumerable cigarettes, until his slender black-haired wife, Jeanie, woke up and asked him what was the matter.
“Nothing. Go to sleep,” he said absently.
“Is there anything...”
He went over and sat on the edge of the bed to pat her hand, still absently. “No. Nothing. Just a business problem. Go to sleep.”
Which took care of Saturday and half of Sunday, until the kids banging around woke him up to a headache. By Sunday night he still hadn’t made his decision, but he had hold of it: he had decided to decide, if that makes sense.
So he slept well Sunday night, was clear-eyed and clear-minded and ready to convince Giselle that the case was closed when he got to the office on Monday morning. It was very necessary to do that.
“I was going to call Benny with it,” she said, “then I thought you’d probably want to do it yourself.”
“Nobody calls Benny with it.”
“But, Dan—”
“It’s just another thing we can’t prove,” he said heavily. “And even if we could, all they have to do is deny it.”
“But—”
“This whole thing is closed, Giselle. Absolutely, totally and finally. Got that? Tell the others, DKA is off the case. Now, I’ve got billing to get out and I’m sure you’ve got some work to do. If you don’t, I’ll find you some.”
But after watching her leave with an angry swing of the hips, Kearny didn’t turn to his billing. Instead he lit a cigarette and thought to himself that she’d been like the old, pre-Gilmartin Giselle just then. Well, she’d probably gotten sick of him at last.
“Quit screwing around, Kearny,” he said aloud in the silent little cubbyhole. He sighed and stabbed out the cigarette.
He’d read Ballard’s report about Friday night, so he called Fazzino’s office to find out if he had gotten back from his plane flight. He had, as Kearny had expected. Next, a long-distance call to a toll-free number, where he talked persuasively with a supervisor for ten minutes to get the confirmation he wanted.
Which meant he’d made up his mind. The confirmation wasn’t any good for court, as he’d told Giselle, but now he was going to have to act. He’d dug old Chandra too much to let it go. The other one, good riddance, but they shouldn’t have killed Chandra. On a practical level, Fazzino shouldn’t have indulged Wendy in her little joke on Ballard Friday night. That kick in the crotch was going to cost them.
Fazzino should have remembered that when you play chess with human pieces, they are liable to make some moves of their own.
Next he called a Concord number and asked for another number in the exclusive Piedmont area of the Oakland hills. A number that would be good that night, if necessary.
Finally he just sat in the little cubbyhole, quietly smoking and thinking a number of private thoughts. Taking a step he’d never taken before, on several different levels. But necessary. At five o’clock he opened the middle drawer of his locked filing cabinet, stood staring into it for quite a while before reaching in. Not since he’d been a twenty-two-year-old field agent in Bakersfield.
He waited for dark, reflecting that nobody else at DKA could ever know about it. No one. His decision, solely. His responsibility.
It was dark and it was raining. The falling water took on substance as it passed through the streetlights, so his eyes could follow individual drops until they plunged into darkness. The gutters were full again.
Kearny tossed away his cigarette, stuffed his hands into his raincoat pockets, and walked stolidly out into it. His wagon was parked just about where it had been the evening Ed Dorsey had been attacked. Now the rain had swept the streets clean of people.
Left up Franklin, over the hill and down rich Pacific Heights, the big car drifting easily with the sparse wet-Monday-evening traffic. He was in no hurry. He had as long as it would take. Beyond 2416 Pacific he parked and got out again. Here the arched trees overhead gave the rain a muted sound, as if it were awed to be falling on wealth. He had seen the house often in reports, had a total familiarity with it.