“Figure of speech?” He was at the corner where he knew the concealed pickup was. To the wall he thundered, in case the tape was turning; “I HOPE YOU’RE GETTING THIS ALL DOWN!”
Delaney was also on his feet, visibly shocked. “Hec! Hey, cool down! What’s got into you? You know—”
“But remember,” Tranquillini bellowed at the corner, “I’m subpoenaeing the goddam tapes!”
“Hec, for God’s sake, man! You know this is just a routine accusation and hearing. No deep dark motives, no—”
Tranquillini hurled his copy of the Accusation on the table. “You call that routine?” he cried dramatically. “Over a couple of hundred lousy bucks Kearny didn’t pay on a point of law?”
“Which point of law is that?”
“Which one do you want? Was DKA to return all of the money? Or half of it? Because in accordance with state law, they’d remitted half the collected sum to their client. So is GMAC their co-defendant? Or is GMAC excluded from the suit because they’re big and powerful?”
“Hec, that money was never supposed to have been paid into the collection trust account. It was supposed to be held separate until the judge’s decision in the Pivarski countersuit.”
“And then the State would be after Dan’s license for being out of trust because he held the money out of the trust account.”
Delaney contrived a dazed look. “All we’re saying is that—”
“—that Kathy was stupid enough to take money under those circumstances. Do you really believe that?”
“That’s what’s alleged.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“Don’t cross-examine me, for Chrissake. I just work here.”
“Just a good German,” sneered Tranquillini. “It’s damn convenient for the State that Kathy isn’t around to testify as to what happened that day, isn’t it?”
“Aw, c’mon, Hec, you think Pivarski snuck into her bedroom and gave her a blood clot when nobody was looking? He and his attorney have stated under oath that she verbally agreed to hold the money until the judge’s decision came down. She didn’t.”
“They’re going to have to state it again under oath. To me.”
He stuffed his Accusation in his suitcoat pocket, meanwhile maneuvering Delaney out into the hall where no recorders could reach them. It was for this thirty seconds he had come. “Okay, Johnny, tell you what,” he said as if it had just occurred to him, “how about Dan pays the man back his money, plus costs and interest, and picks up his attorney’s tab? If Pivarski is satisfied with that, would the State butt out and drop charges?”
“I hadn’t thought of that, Hec. Have Dan give me a call after I talk with Greenly at the licensing agency. Maybe it’s a way around it for all of us.”
The two attorneys shook hands and parted. Tranquillini was due in court on behalf of a raven-tressed whore whose civil rights, he was claiming, had been violated after a routine soliciting bust by a prison matron’s discovery of an ounce of heroin in one of her body cavities. Delaney got on the horn with Tom Greenly, supervising auditor for the Private Investigation Agency Licensing Bureau, who had brought the charge against DKA.
“I think we should go with their offer, Tom,” said Delaney into the phone. “Any violation was inadvertent and in good faith. And if Tranquillini gets Pivarski on the stand, there’s no telling how it’ll come out. Pivarski is sort of a dim bulb, and Hec is—”
The phone squawked back. He listened. And listened. And finally hung up and stared out of his window down at
Golden Gate Avenue’s busy traffic. He’d worked long and hard, and honorably, for his own office with its own view.
After a while he stood up and put on his topcoat and departed for Rocca’s bar. Screw Tranquillini and his bullshit about good Germans. He just worked there, right? Did what he was told, right? What the job demanded, right? He was on the side of the angels.
But maybe he needed a couple of double Bushmills to keep on thinking that way.
Four
Ballard had never really liked the East Bay. No there there, as Giselle had once told him some lesbo writer back in the twenties had put it. Like going to L.A. or drinking a low-cal beer or eating chow mein: when you thought about it afterward, you realized that nothing very much had happened.
Before riding the creaking single elevator to the top floor of the narrow three-story building a block off Oakland’s Broadway, he stopped to look at the list of names Giselle had given him. Giselle. Wow. He’d apologized to her for that stupid mark, but he still wasn’t sure she was over being sore at him. And Kathy. He couldn’t think about Kathy. Not yet. Him out getting drunk while she was being buried. Talk about stupidity. No. The names. Concentrate on the names and on keeping the investigation quiet.
Ballard pushed open the glass-paneled door with Daniel Kearny Associates on it in black letters. Slightly offset below this was the name of the defunct outfit from whom DKA had picked up a lot of quasi-worthless finance papers, including the Pivarski headache. ZIPPY COLLECTIONS. No wonder they’d gone bust.
“May I help you, sir?”
Ballard had passed the field agents’ narrow office, afternoon-deserted, and had started for the closed hardwood door beyond. The field-agent secretary who doubled as PBX girl — Rose Kelly’s job until she’d quit the previous December — came to her feet when she saw he wasn’t going to stop. She was a big slow tranquil brunette obviously too nice for the job.
“Ballard.” He shook hands with her. “San Francisco. To see Irene Jordon back in Collections. I know the way.”
It was a long narrow room with half a dozen waist-to-ceiling windows in the left-hand wall which let in enough October sunshine to make Ballard squint his hangover-sensitive eyes. At the far end was the plush private office, empty now, where Kathy would have relieved Pivarski of his two hundred bucks. Irene Jordon was machine-gunning out a letter at the first desk with dazzling speed. She was a fat girl with a bad complexion and two uncles who had gone into local politics. The connections made her doubly valuable to DKA.
She looked up at him and grinned. “Hi, beautiful.”
Ballard winced. “I said that to a girl the other night, and her husband threw me down the stairs.”
“That’s what husbands are for. What brings you slumming?”
“You.”
They went down the block to a cafeteria that sold, at that time of day, mostly coffee and pie while setting up for supper. Ballard had tea; he trusted few people’s coffee but his own.
He ran the scam on her which he and Giselle had dreamed up to explain the investigation. “Pivarski is claiming that he slipped on a loose rug in our office and injured himself. An attorney has talked him into suing and we need any eyeball of him entering and leaving the office.”
“How much of a stink is he making?”
“Enough so they sent me over here.”
“November fifth, huh?” mused Irene. Her acne-blotched moon face was thoughtful. She was having a hot-fudge sundae. “What time’d he come in?”
“Between five-thirty and six, by the time-stamp on the payment receipt Kathy gave him. If you can remember whether—”
“Kathy. My God, wasn’t that terrible about her?” Ballard, more keenly aware than she of just how terrible it was, agreed shortly and steered her back to November 5. “We’re also interested in anyone who heard him and Kathy talking while he was making the payment.”