“Philistines,” said Chandra again, but in a subdued voice. Kearny waited until Ballard had replaced the rotor and departed, then beamed on the dumpy little woman. “We’re ready to release the car to you now, Chandra.”
He waited for her to complete the pattern. She did. She said coyly, “You can take what I owe out of the five hundred, can’t you?”
The five hundred she hadn’t heard of an hour before. He nodded and led her into his office. She sat down in the client’s chair across the desk as he checked the file. Two months at $191.84 each, plus late charges of $7.17. For the bank, $390.85. For DKA, repo fee of $47.50, three hours for $37.50 total, eighteen miles for another $4.50...
“Everything in, $480.35,” he said. He got the comic book out of the locked middle drawer of one of his filing cabinets.
She sat with the bills from it in her hand, delight dancing in her faded but still somehow young eyes. “All my life I dreamed of a big car of my own,” she said softly. “Born in what they called Hell’s Kitchen then — Manhattan, Lower West Side. My dad was an immigrant Russian Jew — know what my real name is? Sarah Poplyovin. Can you imagine Sarah Poplyovin dancing for the Crowned Heads?” Her lined face had remarkable animation. “But Chandra!”
The light died. She laid the five bills on the desk. Kearny picked them up, riffled them, wrote out a receipt and found a twenty in the wallet he took from his inside suit-jacket pocket.
“You’re making sixty-five cents,” he told her.
“Thirty. The bus ride. A phone call. Thirty cents you can afford. You have a daughter wants to learn to dance, I’m very good. I’m the best.”
She signed the personal property receipt on the condition report. Kearny went out to watch her back the gleaming red monster from the garage, the four sateen pillows under her backside so she could see out. She waved to him, a remarkably graceful flutter of stubby fingers, and went her incongruous way. Kearny mashed the button to lower the heavy steel overhead door. He walked thoughtfully back to his cubbyhole.
One lousy phone call, and the bank would have let her drive that Cadillac out with two payments delinquent and a third coming up tomorrow.
Which meant somebody had a pretty heavy finger on somebody at the bank. Intriguing.
But she had paid, which made it no longer a DKA concern. And, incidentally, defanged the Threatening Phone Call. Their file was Closed — or would be as soon as he transferred the money to Golden Gate Trust along with the DKA no-bill statement.
Four
Having left Kearny and the old lady nose-to-nose over the red Caddy, Ballard emerged from the DKA basement into weak noon sunshine and blustery wind. Low clouds which would be fog by nightfall scudded by overhead. One thing you could say for San Francisco, you always had wind. And the rains could start any time.
He drove out toward Howard to find a parking place near Avery Printing. The same fat girl was banging the electric typewriter in the reception area. She had what looked like the same pimples on her chin.
“Gee, you just missed Mr. Schilling. By about four minutes.”
“Did you give him the business card I left?”
“Um... Mr. Avery had that, um...”
She stood up suddenly and went to the window. Ballard went with her, wondering what they were supposed to be doing besides not answering his question.
“He left such a little bit ago, I thought maybe we could still see him. Like if he was caught in traffic or something, you know...”
The door from the shop area opened and a girl in a long-sleeved velour jersey and Levis staggered out with six boxed reams of paper. Ballard glanced at her, and asked the secretary, “What color is Mr. Schilling’s car, do you remember?”
“White.”
“Bob Schilling? Was he just here?” The new girl put her load of paper down on the counter beside the front door. She was very good-looking. “I thought he was still in the...” She stopped abruptly, looking beyond Ballard at the secretary.
Ballard took his time about glancing back at her himself. “Will you give Mr. Schilling this card? It is important.”
“I’ll put it right here beside the typewriter so I don’t forget,” said the fat girl. She wrote Schilling across the face of the card in big crisp letters.
Ballard nodded and smiled, and winked at the girl in jeans — who was still standing beside her paper with an embarrassed look on her face. Long black hair and light-blue eyes and tawny skin, a really great-looking chick. He glanced back as he started down the stairs: nothing wrong with her backside, either, even in jeans.
That other fat lying bitch, he thought, just missed him by about four minutes, then tipping off the good-looking one before she spilled it, I thought he was still in the
The what?
Ballard pulled into the big drive-in where South Van Ness and Mission crossed, to order a cheeseburger and coffee. He couldn’t stomach that battery acid in the office.
He chewed hamburger absently as he sorted through assignments, setting up his “swing.” An experienced investigator will always arrange the day’s work by address, so he doesn’t run all over town spinning his wheels instead of working his cases.
still in the
Maybe it did help. It told him where Schilling wasn’t. Nevada, for instance. Or L.A. No place involving a proper name.
still in the
Something commonly known, a “the” which was also a place. What place was a... what about an institution? A “the” which would keep a guy like Schilling, whose personal life seemed to be going to hell anyway, away from Avery Printing for a recognized, apparently fixed time. Something like thirty days in the county jail, for instance? That would certainly explain why he had dropped so completely out of sight.
He switched on the ignition and the two-way radio came alive, then paid the carhop and called Giselle with his idea.
“I’ll get at it, Larry.” He could picture the slim blonde in the crowded middle clerical office where the big radio transmitter was: a better investigator than he would ever be, he knew, though she was just his age. She added, “And here’s another one: hospitals.”
He clipped the mike back on the dash. Jails and hospitals were her work on the phone, not his in the field.
“Because he was turned down by the Air Force,” said Bart Heslip to Corinne Jones. “He flunked the physical, so he embezzled seven thou from Fidelity. You explain it, I can’t. Over five grand in a paper bag in the Roosevelt Hotel safe, and he acted almost glad we’d caught up with—”
“Glad? The man is so scared he throws up on himself, and you say he was glad? You terrorized—”
Heslip rolled his eyes heavenward. “Here we go again.”
They were having coffee at one of the small high round lacquered tables in the Fatted Calf on Sutter, half a block from the travel agency where Corinne worked. She was a full-bodied woman in a wool knit suit, very chic, her flesh tones a warm café au lait against Heslip’s blackness.
“No, honey, we aren’t going anywhere again. I know — it’s what you do, if it kills you. But I still think—”
“I figured you’d be glad Dan put me on this kind of case instead of—”
“Which only lasted five days, and—”
Heslip broke out laughing. He drank coffee. “Ain’t either of us ever going to finish a sentence.”
“What are they going to do to him?”