“Where did you hear about Fleur?” His voice sounded icy.
“Do you have to speak her name?”
“Where? From Giselle?”
“Giselle knew about you and that bitch?”
Toni got up hurriedly and went out to get a drink of water from the fountain across the corridor.
“So it wasn’t from DKA. Who from?”
She hesitated for the first time. “A...voice on the phone.”
“An anonymous voice?”
For the first time since those dreadful midnight moments, she felt a stab of uncertainty.
“At first I thought it was an... obscene call. A... you know, what they call a breather.”
“And you believed...” A hurt note had softened his voice. “When did you get that call?”
“I think... yes, yesterday afternoon.”
Laughter suddenly entered his voice. “Fleur is skinny, has light skin and freckles, orange hair, and a face like those Capuchin monkeys we like to watch out at Fleishhacker Zoo.”
“Orange hair? Now I believe you didn’t have anything to do with her.” Bart hated any sort of hair-dyeing. Toni had slipped back in. A great angry tide was receding inside Corinne, leaving only puzzlement behind. “But then why the phone call to me?”
“Can only mean one thing. They wanted me to make all my calls through DKA about Verna, rather than through you. Now, I want you to get right over to that hearing room...”
“Excuse me,” said Simson. He was sweating, although the temperature had not changed. “I was thinking of the previous month.”
“So when you say you did all your collection business over the phone, that was a deliberate...” Delaney started to object, so Tranquillini finished, “Deliberately loose way of speaking.”
“Um... yes, sir.”
“So in reality, three or four parties a week came up to the office to pay in person. Can you give me the name of any of them, anyone at all, besides Mr. Pivarski?”
Simson cleared his throat. “I... um...”
“Now, you testified that Mr. Pivarski came in on November fifth. That was the first time you had seen him?”
“Yes, sir, it was.”
“Very good.” Tranquillini, from the corner of his eye, saw a truly striking black woman enter the hearing room and head for the DKA contingent. “Was Mr. Pivarski ever in the office again?”
“Not while I was there.”
“How old a man was he, would you say?”
“Um... late thirties or early forties?”
“I sense indecision. How tall a man?”
“Average.”
“Weight?”
“Average.”
“What was the color of his hair?”
Simson cleared his throat. In the spectator section, Dan Kearny was on his feet and leaving with the black woman.
“I... don’t recall the color of his hair.”
“Clothing?”
“Just...” He cleared his throat. “This I don’t recall.”
“But he was clothed? He wasn’t naked? Wasn’t wearing a lamp shade on his head, or a swimming suit, or—”
“Oh no,” Simson chuckled. “A suit, I guess, colored shirt, tie — like that.”
Tranquillini turned to the bench. “Your Honor, I had hoped to be finished with this witness during this morning’s session, as he is missing law classes in Southern California. But...”
“Yes, I see we are only five minutes short of the noon recess. All parties will return at two P.M.”
It was more like a council of war than lunch, held at the Doggy Diner on Van Ness.
“All right, what has happened?” asked Tranquillini. “You go tearing off with this utterly charming young lady...”
“Hector Tranquillini. Corinne Jones.”
They shook hands above the table, awkwardly to keep coat sleeves out of the half-squeezed plastic tubes of mustard.
Kearny said, “Corinne came to tell me Bart is in Boston and that someone else is trying to tail him, to get at Verna through him. Someone picked up his trail through the messages he’s been leaving on the DKA answering machine in my office.”
“A phone tap?” asked Tranquillini, truly surprised.
Corinne did not mention the ugly phone call or her reaction to it. She was ashamed of both. “Bart thinks they picked him up yesterday morning, from the message he left on the machine about a topless dancer named Fleur who works at the Iberville Caberet.”
“Do you need me at the hearing this afternoon, Hec?” asked Kearny.
“To testify? No.”
“Okay, then I’m going to get hold of O’B and we’ll sweep the office for bugs. What I’m afraid of is a butterfly mike — that would have picked up not just phone conversations, but things like Benny Nicoletti telling me about his witness to the Fazzino hit.”
Giselle was lost. “But if Pivarski isn’t the hit man...”
“This guy saw somebody,” said Kearny bleakly. “He can identify the killer whoever it might be. Which means they still might want to try and hit him.”
“Are you going to call Nicoletti?” asked Tranquillini.
“Not until we’re sure.”
Tranquillini nodded and stood up. “I leave it to you. Time for me to get back to work. Thanks for a superb lunch.”
“Hell, I thought you were paying,” said Kearny.
Twenty-Four
Heslip had slept in his car yet again, this time in front of the address he had gotten from Zeb Rounds, 110 Allerton Street in Roxbury, Massachusetts. The houses were boxcarred down a San Francisco-steep hill, but the architecture was something completely new to him. Aged three-deck frame houses with an outside stairway to the upper floors on the front of the house and landings which were really porches on each floor. Looked like flats, one to a floor.
At 110, no answer on any floor. He went back down from the top flat and out to the narrow, slanted sidewalk. Roxbury was part of Boston, and Boston was damned cold this time of the morning in October, bright sunshine or not. Two houses down, a gray tiger-stripe cat was watching him. The door behind it opened and a black girl wearing an apron came out and picked it up. Her eyes met Heslip’s and he gestured at the house he had just quit. “Nobody home. Do you know—”
“Wasn’t no answer upstairs at Ethel’s place? Third floor? She’s Cliff’s sister.” Heslip had gotten Cliff Brown’s name from Zeb Rounds, to go with the address. One of the girl’s hands unconsciously stroked the old tom’s blunt, scarred head. “Ethel Brown. Gettin’ her welfare under that name, so that’s the name she keeps even though she’s got a live-in man. Probably went shopping, she’s got two boys in school.”
Half an hour later a slim black woman in a cloth coat came trudging up from the bus stop with a heavy supermarket bag of groceries. Heslip held them so she could get out her keys. “You must be Ethel,” he said with a big grin.
“That don’t tell me who you are.” She blew out a long breath. “Whew! The Good Samaritan, maybe?”
“I try to be.” He broadened his grin. “Johnny Mack said you’d be home, most mornings.”
Her Good-Samaritan look faded. “You a friend of Johnny’s?”
He took his cue from her voice. “I owe him a little money on the New England-Miami game, and that’s the truth. He was sayin’ how broke he was. I got some cash right now from Mother’s Day...”
Being when welfare checks arrived. Since she’d been shopping, it was a pretty safe bet yesterday had been the day. She reached, stiff-faced, for her groceries. “I don’t hold much with gambling.”
“Neither do I,” said Heslip with his ready grin, “not when I lose. Thing is, he said his woman was pregnant or some such...”