Verna reappeared, trailed by a mobile Polish joke. Kathy gestured the big truck driver to a chair. Verna leaned in the doorway with her arms folded, blowing a bubble.
“Lissen,” said Pivarski belligerently, “you shit-heels took my goddam car two years ago, you got no call come around now...”
“You ignored repeated calls and letters concerning this delinquency, sir.” Then Kathy explained what a deficiency judgment was. “Even though your car was repossessed and resold, the resale price was $789.35 less than the contract you signed with General Motors Acceptance Corporation. When you didn’t appear at the court hearing, we were awarded a Judgment by Default. To get you into our office we placed a Writ of Attachment on your wages—”
“Yeah, well, I’m here now.” Pivarski grubbed in the breast pocket of his faded blue workshirt with cold-chisel fingers. The chisels brought out folding money. “Two hundred bucks.”
Kathy counted it and read aloud as she wrote the receipt:
“ ‘Two hundred dollars received on account from K. Pivarski, November fifth, 5:46 P.M.’ ” She looked up to break Verna’s Bubble-Yum catatonia. “Ask Jeff to come in, will you, please?”
Five minutes later the Polish joke had departed with a payment schedule worked out for the remainder of his delinquency, and Jeff Simson was waiting beside Kathy’s desk as she made out the bank-deposit slip for the trust account.
“This is on your Pivarski file. Run it down the street to the bank before the six o’clock close, will you?”
It was 5:56 P.M.
At 5:56 P.M. Elena gently kicked the bottom of the motel-room door. Espinosa, lying on the bed in his shorts with a drink balanced on his bare chest and the TV turned to the Channel 4 news, yelled at her without turning his head, “Use your goddam key!”
More gentle kicks. Jesus. Women. She could have had the cab driver carry her packages to the door for her. He swung his bare feet to the rug and set his drink on top of the bureau.
He swung the door open, saying, “Wendy, why in the hell—”
“Goodbye, Phil.”
The bulky, swarthy man in the heavy topcoat pulled both triggers at once from three feet away. Assorted bits of Espinosa were blown against the side of the dresser by the sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun.
The killer stepped unhurriedly across the threshold to roll the eviscerated corpse over onto its face. He jerked down the boxer-style shorts and shoved a shiny new penny up between the buttocks with a quick jabbing motion. The body had voided in death, so he wiped his middle finger on the shorts before crossing the room to pick up the leather satchel.
Screams started behind him as he walked across the blacktop to his stolen car, but he ignored them. His tires yelped his escape against the damp blacktop. A linen-truck driver, just about to deliver fresh towels to the motel, exclaimed aloud, “Holy Christ! I know that guy!”
Then he looked around quickly: a screaming woman, eyes tight shut, and a snot-nose kid eating a slice of pizza. He jumped back into his truck and accelerated away without bothering to leave the towels, turning in the opposite direction from that taken by the murderer.
One
Kathy Onoda was twenty-nine years old when she died of a massive blood clot on Saturday, October 15. The funeral was on Monday; because she had been a Buddhist, it was at night. On his way there, Dan Kearny picked up Giselle Marc at her apartment just off the MacArthur Freeway in Oakland. Giselle was a tall, lithe blonde whose high cheekbones and sensuous mouth often made men overlook the intelligence which animated her clear blue eyes.
Usually clear. Tonight they were red with crying. She settled back against the seat and sighed, and then snuffled. “Why Kathy? She was so alive and so... so vital...”
“What can I tell you? Her number was up? We worked her too hard? She worried about her kids too much because after nine years of college her old man’s idea of going to work was filing for food stamps?” Kearny was a compact, hard-driving fifty, with a jaw to batter down doors and gray eyes hard enough to strike sparks. “Twenty-nine goddam years old.”
He cut across the Oakland flatlands to the Nimitz Freeway. Giselle was snuffling again but had forgotten her handkerchief. Probably cogitating upon some poem about death she’d read in college, Kearney thought. He hadn’t had time for college; he’d been knocking off hot cars for Walter’s Auto Detectives down in L.A. at an age most kids, then, still wore knickers.
“You’re the new office manager,” he said gruffly.
Giselle asked wearily, “Does a raise go with it?” then wailed, “Oh! Dan, why did she have to die?”
The Alameda tube was clad in gleaming pale tiles crusted with engine dirt. Yellow emergency phones studded the right wall at regular intervals. Giselle looked over at Kearny curiously. What was he thinking? Feeling? Kathy had been with DKA since the start.
Weep not for the silent dead, their pains are past, their sorrows o’er.
What was she feeling so smug about? Her M. A. in history, her six years of university? As of a few moments before, she was office manager for a very hard-nosed detective agency specializing in skip-tracing, repossessions and embezzlement investigations. None of which suggested sensibilities that Dan Kearny didn’t have.
Kearny turned on Buena Vista and started looking for a place to park. Alameda, which lived off the Naval Air station, had somnolent mid-thirties streets once you cleared the industrial clutter along Webster Street. Streaming up the walk to the white frame building which housed the Jodo Shinshu Universal Church were dozens, hundreds of Japanese, with a sprinkling of non-Orientals. Kearny caught a flash of O’Bannon’s red hair, the ebony gleam of Bart Heslip’s tough impassive face as they drove by. He had to go three more blocks to find a parking place.
“Popular girl, Kathy.”
Giselle merely nodded. Her eyes were leaking again. Lucky she was here to step into Kathy’s shoes at the agency, Kearny thought. Then he felt a stab of guilt. Kathy’d really hated the Oakland office, but that’s where the troubles were and he’d kept her there, month after month. And now she was gone, like your fist when you open your hand.
One DKA hand who wasn’t mourning Kathy was Larry Ballard. Letting himself into his stuffy two-room apartment after a long weekend of skin-diving, he didn’t know she was dead. He dropped wet suit, crowbar, flippers, mask and snorkel on the floor, put the twelve cleaned abalones in the fridge and tore the tab off a cold beer. The phone was balanced on the arm of his big saggy living-room easy chair. Ballard dialed.
“Hi, beautiful. Larry.”
“Oh, Larree!” Maria Navarro’s voice was oddly tense, almost frightened. “I... tried to call you Saturday.”
“Up the coast after abs, baby. I’ll bring you over half a dozen in an hour.”
“Oh, Larree, no! I—”
“One hour exactisimo.”
He went, whistling, through to the bedroom to undress, sipping his beer on the way. He was just under six feet tall, conditioned like an athlete, with a thatch of sun-whitened hair and even features saved from male beauty by hard, watchful eyes and a slightly hawk nose.
The phone started to ring. Ballard ignored it. Maria, to say don’t come — she’d refused to see him since That Night, three weeks before, when he’d finally gotten her into bed after two years of trying. And her with two kids from a busted marriage.
The phone stopped ringing, then started again.
Ballard whistled his way down the hall, nude, to the bathroom he shared with the Japanese couple in the rear apartment. He dropped a five-flavor Cert with that sparkling drop of retsin, then stepped into the shower. What was he complaining about? A woman so hard to get into bed probably would be a pretty good long-haul sort of woman, ¿no es verdad?