“Slap his wrist. Fidelity’s made a gross recovery of five thou in cash, DKA’ll take half of that, so they’ll hook Gondolph for another four and a half and come out even.”
“That isn’t fair! He only took—”
“Lady, he stole — not took. They could go for Grand Theft. Instead, they’re going to let him get another job and pay them back out of his salary. I’m hoping DKA gets more of this kind of case and that I get to work ’em. The repo end is getting tougher all the time, the way the courts—”
“About time, too,” said Corinne in her end-of-discussion voice. Her heart-shaped face, Hamitic in cast rather than Bantu, missed true beauty — if at all — by the narrowest of margins.
Looking at her across the table, Heslip vividly remembered coming out of the coma at Trinity Hospital, after three days in the dark un-world where nothing lived or moved. That face above him, drawn with worry and sleeplessness, those eyes looking down at him with more naked love and pain and delight in them than most men are blessed with in a lifetime.
“But don’t let it make you cocky,” he said obscurely.
When she looked puzzled, he reached across the table to touch her lips with his fingertip. She was gradually coming to accept the fact that he was a detective, as he had once come to accept the fact he’d never be middleweight champ of the world.
He said mildly, “We’re in the age of the deadbeat, baby.”
She sighed. “Tomorrow I s’pose you’ll be back after them again.”
“I s’pose. But chasing Gondolph was fun. Know how he blew the two thou he went through? Being bi-i-ig man in a couple of crummy Tenderloin bars. And on hookers. Little and blond and cuddly and with them Dixie vowels.” He shook his head. “I can’t understand guys that pay for it.”
“That’s ’cause you don’t have to.” An utterly bawdy look flashed at him from the corners of her magnificent eyes. “Speaking of that, lover, what time you plan to come over tonight?”
“There’s an idea!” he exclaimed. “Yeah, man, there’s an idea!”
“Only if you show up early.”
Heslip checked his watch. “I’ll beat you home, baby,” he promised.
He didn’t.
Giselle Marc hung up the phone and leaned back in her swivel chair to massage her temples. She was a tall, lithely built blonde whose aura of wicked sensuality made a lot of men miss the fact that her mental attractions at least equaled her physical ones. Because Kearny hadn’t been fooled, she’d been able to develop into a damned good man-hunter. On the wall behind her desk were her three framed licenses: private investigator, repossessor, collector. Not bad for a girl with a master’s degree in history from SF State.
So. Hospitals next. No less than eighty-four entries in the San Francisco book, although many of the rest homes and convalescent homes could be eliminated without a call.
The jail idea had been a bust. No record in the county jail down in San Bruno. No record with SFPD or the sheriff’s office. Not in the morgue. Negative at the U.S. marshal’s office, their contact at the FBI, the...
The phone rang.
Giselle sighed. It was 5:20; from the line it was coming in on, probably a client with a bitch. Most client complaints eventually filtered through to her.
“Oh! Hi, Pete!” she exclaimed. Unconsciously she leaned closer to the phone. She liked Pete Gilmartin, liked him a lot. Then she said “Oh!” again, and “Don’t tell me we’ve got more grief on that Chandra car.”
“Can’t I just be calling my favorite private eye to say hello?”
“It would be the first time.”
He laughed. “Matter of fact, I am calling about the Chandra file. The high mucky-mucks liked DKA’s work on it so much that they told me to hand more assignments to you people. Can the Great Dan K come up here in person to pick them up?”
“Anything for you, Petie-boy.”
“Anything?”
“In a business way.”
Gilmartin sighed gustily, then said “Huh?” to someone beside his desk. He came back to Giselle. “Tell the Great White Father to be here by five forty-five sharp, or we’ll give ’em to the competition.”
She had just delivered the message to Kearny, who’d come up for a cup of coffee from the dark little kitchen behind Giselle’s office, when the radio said: “SF-7 calling San Francisco KDM 366.”
“This is KDM 366, go ahead.”
Giselle left “Control” off because SF-7, a new man named Dunford who’d come highly recommended from an agency in Seattle, had put “San Francisco” in front of the call letters. It was an alerting signal. She was aware of Kearny at her elbow, stirring his instant coffee.
“Is Mr. Bush of the bank’s legal department there?”
Kearny took the mike. “This is Bush. What’s the problem?”
“Are you familiar with the Norman Twiggs file, sir?”
“I certainly am.”
Giselle was already flicking through the CAL CIT Open tub beside her desk, to flop the TWIGGS file under Kearny’s nose. Dunford had explained to Mr. Twiggs that the radio had a direct tie-in to California Citizens Bank, and he wanted Mr. Bush to talk to Mr. Twiggs, since Mr. Twiggs wouldn’t surrender his car. It was a drill Kearny had worked out to help cool potentially explosive situations where the field agent felt he was in trouble.
“Mr. Twiggs, I have to say frankly that I don’t understand your attitude...” Kearny went on at length, his eyes roaming the unfamiliar file for facts to support the idea that he was intimately acquainted with the subject’s delinquent contract. “...signed with you in good faith, Mr. Twiggs, and you have reacted with a threat of force to the bank’s legal representative...”
Kearny released the Transmit button to let Twiggs stammer hesitantly into the unfamiliar microphone. He turned to Giselle. “Better call Ed Dorsey on the intercom; tell him to get up to the bank for me. He can use my station wagon. The keys are over the visor.”
It was 5:31 P.M.
At 5:34 Bart Heslip parked in front of the primary school across from DKA. That side of the street was tow-away in the mornings but not the afternoons. Ed Dorsey came from the DKA basement and turned toward Franklin. Heslip locked the Plymouth, thinking that Kearny ought to transfer that old fart into inside skip-tracing, where he could do all his work on the phone. He wasn’t worth a damn on the street.
The lights came on as Heslip crossed toward the curb where a few months before he had been struck down with a blackjack. Three days of coma. He unconsciously fingered the tiny scar at the base of his throat where the tracheal tube had been.
He reached the curb. Two bulky men walking briskly up from Franklin had just come abreast of Dorsey, who was opening the door of Kearny’s station wagon. One of the men hit Dorsey in the face. Heslip saw the glint of the horn-rim glasses flying off. Dorsey went over backward into the cyclone fence that separated the sidewalk from the blacktop parking lot flanking it. He screamed. The scream seemed to cut Bart Heslip off at the knees. The second man drove a fist into Dorsey’s stomach.
Concussion. Three days in coma.
The first man slammed Dorsey face-first into the fence. It made a spronging sound against his face.
No metal plate in Heslip’s head, but almost.
Fists were thudding into Ed Dorsey’s kidneys.
One more blow, Dr. Arnold Whitaker had said. One more traumatic shock to Heslip’s skull, and it would have been...
Dorsey was down on his hands and knees where a heavy shoe could snap his head back. A haze of bloody spray flew up off his face, as if he were a fighter taking an uppercut under the lights. His upper plate arced into the gutter like a fighter’s dislodged mouthpiece.