“Madeline? In a place like this, one of my oldest tenants. She’s been here nearly two years, I’d have to look it up if you need an exact date.”
“Two years is fine.” Ballard had said he was from a bank to which Ms. Madeline Westfield had applied for credit.
“Banks want to know a lot more than they have to.” She was knitting, her large, shapely, capable hands moving with bewildering speed, clicking the needles in a syncopated counterpoint to her words. She never looked down; some inner computer seemed to know when those hands had taken the needles to the end of a row.
“Well, she wants to finance a very expensive car through the bank, and they want to be sure she can handle the payments. Can you confirm where she works?”
“Last I knew...” She was squinting. She started to shake her head, then her face cleared. “Sure. When she took the apartment, she was working for United Parcel Service.”
Ballard nodded sagely. “That agrees with our records. Now, how can I put this, Mrs. Garnison? Personal data. Do you know of any personal habits that aren’t... well, that might interfere...” He let his tut-tut expression speak for him. “Any special boyfriends or...”
She shook her head vigorously. “Mister, she could run a football team through that apartment for all I know or care, long as their cleats don’t scar the floors.”
That was that from Mrs. Garnison. He used the same pay phone that he had used that morning with Kearny to call the retail credit agency he’d asked to get a complete rundown on Greenly’s credit.
“Oh, hi, Mr. Ballard, I’m glad you called. We just got that data you requested. As we told you yesterday, his current rating is top of the heap. But the computer tells us that as recently as five months ago his credit was very spotty. Bad pay on credit cards and retail accounts, paid the late penalty on his house note for seven months out of an eleven-month period. Classic picture of a man getting into financial trouble. Then he got healthy and has stayed that way ever since.”
Ballard felt a rising excitement. Greenly was beginning to come together in a picture very different from the one he presented to the casual observer.
“Anything in the derogs to suggest what his problem was?” Derogs were raw data, derogatory reports collected in the field from friends, associates or neighbors by the retail credit checking firm. They did not go into client reports.
“Um...” Ballard could hear papers being shuffled. “A number of informants said he liked poker and the ponies. Gambling.”
“Women?”
“Steady family man, by all reports.”
More and more, Madeline Westfield was beginning to look like a charade played for Madeline’s benefit. Greenly, in financial trouble through gambling, is subverted by mob money for some purpose. What? No idea. But something involving DKA in some way. To get what the mob needs, he has to seduce Madeline Westfield. He goes through the motions, gets what he needs.
So the something has to do with Madeline’s job. What in hell could an employee of United Parcel Service have that someone out after DKA could need? Answer: Madeline was no longer employed at UPS. So one of Ballard’s jobs was to get her current employment. And in Sacramento he was pretty sure it was in state government. And not in Professional and Vocational Standards, because then Greenly could have gotten what he needed on his own.
Ballard caught Interstate 80 back downtown, and got off at Fifteenth Street. Greenly banked at the Bank of Tokyo on Broadway and Fourteenth. Time to try to fake his way into a look at Greenly’s account. See if five or six months ago heavy cash deposits had suddenly begun. See if cash payments to Madeline Westfield had begun. He was sitting outside in the Cutlass trying to work up the nerve to pass himself off as a state investigator when he had an inspiration. One of those inspirations recognized — if not always understood — not only by detectives private and public, but by scholars, researchers, and genealogists among others. The sudden rush of feeling that made you tum around and go back to ask the final question and break the case. The phone call you hadn’t planned to make, the public record book you reached for when the one you really wanted was out, the name you looked under in a phone book that had no rational connection with your subject but was the name he was hiding under, all the same.
For Ballard it was a word. Gambling. And an absolute knowledge that Greenly, as an accountant himself, would never run dirty money through his bank account. And finally, the fact that it was Friday, and people need extra cash over the weekends.
Thus he was parked on O Street off Seventh at 12:06 when Greenly emerged from the Business and Professions Building. So sure had Ballard been that he’d already fed the meter an hour’s worth of change, so he had only to get out and saunter along half a block behind the spare figure moving through the noontime lunchers, strollers, and window-shoppers from the adjacent government offices.
Right into a savings and loan company eight blocks from Greenly’s office. Since Ballard’s face meant no more to Greenly than a cantaloupe, he was close by when Greenly strode back to the safe-deposit window and read the number off his key to the girl. “Box eleven eighty-seven, please.”
“Yes, sir.” The bright-faced girl riffled through the signature file, compared it with the name Greenly had written on the slip. “Right this way, Mr. Maling.”
Ballard, standing at the closest customer table, wrote “1187” on the back of a withdrawal slip, along with “Maling,” and put the folded slip in his pocket. Greenly shortly emerged from the gate into the big, steel-gleaming vault. Several minutes and three blocks later, Ballard watched Greenly, in a quasi-skid-row area a detour away from his office, enter, in turn, a cigar shop and a Chinese laundry.
Since he was stuffing no cigars in his pocket as he emerged from the cigar store and carried no shirts under his arm from the Chinese laundry, Ballard deduced that he had been placing bets with cash gotten from the safe-deposit box. Not a bad trick for a feller whose sole source of income, according to retail credit, came from his salary with the State of California.
The rest of the day was anticlimactic. Out at the huge echoing United Parcel Service warehouse on Shore Street in West Sacramento he learned that Madeline Westfield had left her job as a package sorter nineteen months before, when her Civil Service job as a clerk-typist for the State of California had come through. No idea where she had landed as a clerk-typist, except that it was indeed with the State.
Back downtown, for miles and hours of red tape from office to office, until he was brought to the cubicle of the lady who could tell him where Madeline was now employed — the lady in this cubicle in the Department of Employment on Eighth Street. Only it was empty. Its occupant had left forty-seven minutes early for the weekend and no, nobody else could help him because, see here, mister, this is Friday and we have to clear our desks. Come back Monday, fellow. Who do you think you are?
Nobody, my friend. Nobody at all. Just a taxpayer.
Ten minutes before the streetlights went on, a purple hog with two black men and three white women in it pulled up in front of 428 Madison Street. Heslip came erect behind the wheel of the Pinto, happily jerked from his thoughts by the arrival. They had not been pleasant thoughts because his mind, unbidden, had kept returning to the venomous, weak, hurt, frightened voice of Fleur. God almighty, her nose cut off, an ear gone — could a plastic surgeon fix things like that?
Whatever it cost, DKA was going to pay for it, either out of the health plan or out of pocket.
And then the Cadillac showed up. Behind the wheel was a hard-faced dude wearing a wide-brimmed hat and smoking a cheroot. That would be Willy. The pusher. The other man got out, with one of the girls. Dressed in funky plaid threads and a floppy cap. He would be Johnny Mack. Peanut butter. Off the wall.