“What use would that be to DKA in an insurance hassle?”
Yeah, a very sharp chick. If her uncles had her brains, they’d be fighting over which one should run for governor rather than grafting retirement incomes out of local government.
“We want to know if he said anything about slipping on the way in. If he didn’t, and didn’t slip on the way out, we can tell him to go pound salt.”
She sighed. “I don’t remember him at all, but I wouldn’t. All the Legals are typed over in San Francisco.” She wiped the last trace of her sundae from her lips, and studied her wallet calendar. “I left at five that night, so I was gone before he got there.”
“You sure? The office was open until six...”
She poked a stubby finger at the calendar for the previous year. “Rose and I alternated late Fridays, and it was her week. She would have been there until about six-fifteen. I imagine Jeff Simson or Donna Payne would have been in the office, too. Kathy liked to keep one collector late on Fridays.”
On the way back to the office Ballard asked whether she and Rose had kept up, but they hadn’t. Nothing in common except work. And when he went back upstairs with her he found the two outside investigators, Norm Ponts and Simon Costa, in the field agents’ room one-fingering reports of their day’s activities. Neither one had ever heard of Pivarski, or had the slightest recollection of whether he had been in the office on that Friday nearly a year before. Ballard thanked them and went off to look for Donna Payne.
It was a new experience, looking for someone who wasn’t trying to avoid him. New, and frustrating. Because Mr. or Ms. Honest John was just as hard to find, in our mobile society, as Mr. or Ms. Deadbeat. People seemed to get lost just sort of by accident. Like Donna Payne, with whom he had started because she had been fired on August S, only about ten weeks before, and because her given residence address was just a couple of miles from the Oakland office.
Mather Street featured old frame houses set against the hills off Oakland’s Broadway. The street curved around the face of the hill; the house Ballard wanted had a steep lawn and concrete stairs leading up from the street.
When he rang the bell a woman wearing slacks and a sweatshirt opened the door. “The apartment’s been rented. I meant to take down the sign, but what with one thing and another...”
“I’m looking for Donna Payne.”
“Moved.”
Ballard leaned against the door without seeming to, so she could not shut it. She had the bloated face and pasty color of a gin drinker.
“No forwarding?”
Her eyes looked slightly unfocused but her breath was innocent of gin. Vodka, maybe? “Maybe she went back to Nevada.”
“Where in Nevada?” Nothing in the file on Nevada.
“Her car had a Nevada license.”
Very cautiously, like a fisherman with a nibble, he asked, “You wouldn’t remember the license, would you? Or the kind of car she drove?”
“The license, no. The car... You wait right here.”
He waited. You never knew. Across the street, a black-and-white alley cat was on the hood of his DKA Cutlass, washing its face as if using the windshield as a make-up mirror.
The vodka drinker returned with a twelve-year-old boy. “Tell him.”
“Austin Marina GT two-door coupé. Red. Pin stripes painted outside. Tach. Walnut-finish instrument panel. Whitewalls. Heated rear window.”
He turned away to go back into the house. Ballard said to his back, “What do you do? Sell used cars for a living?” But he was alone on the porch.
In the car he called KFS 499, Oakland Control, and told them to relay to Giselle he needed a “previous res and work add” on Payne. Then he consulted his list. Rose Kelly, the PBX operator had been living at 15321 Redwood Highway when her W-2 was mailed to her in January. Santa Rosa, fifty miles north. He’d save that for last, if he missed on Payne and Simson.
Oh, and on the file clerk. Verna Rounds. No file clerk would stay around for an extra hour of work on a Friday, but on the other hand, she lived just a couple of miles away, off MacArthur Boulevard in North Oakland. Get her off the list before heading back to the city and Jeff Simson’s listed residence address on Twenty-fourth Street in the Mission District.
Five
When Interstate 580 went through Oakland a few years before, it had reduced MacArthur Boulevard to a freeway-feeder street. The motels which once had catered to through-travelers slid — at the same time that girls from nearby recently black residential areas were growing up hungry for the good life.
Ballard drove north along MacArthur past quite a few who had found it. Maybe. On every street corner, in front of almost every motel, all he could see was legs. Long legs, short legs, thin legs, heavy legs — under short, scruffy, artificial fur jackets, or red blazers with brass buttons, or no jackets at all, just T-shirts and blouses. Many of the legs were covered only by body stockings and black boots, or outdated hotpants. He was glad to turn off and drive over a few blocks to the 3000 block of Thirty-fourth street, where Verna Rounds was supposed to live.
It was a run-down frame house with an old-fashioned front porch, its roof supported by squat, square pillars. One of the street numbers was missing from beside the open doorway, but the paint where the metal numeral had been was a different color from the house’s current hue. The front walk had broken into three separate sections tilted in three different directions. There was a three-inch gap between the top of the sunken concrete front steps and the porch. He knocked on the doorframe, unheard over the voices raised within.
“Whut you sayin’ to you mother?”
“Sayin’ I put thutty dollar in de pinball machine down to de rib joint.”
“Samuel, where you get dat sorta money?”
In a momentary silence, Ballard knocked again. A huge fat black lady came up the straight hallway from the kitchen, talking as she came. Her remarks seemed addressed more to herself than to the husky teen-age boy behind her. “... de baddest boy I ever did hear of...”
“Hey, Ma, I was kiddin’ you. Spent a dollar.”
This stopped her just short of the door. “Dat God’s truth?”
“Ask Ophelia.”
The fat woman shook her head, starting to grin. “I swear you bad to de very minnit, Samuel, fool you poor dumb mammy dat way.” She turned the grin on Ballard. “Yassuh?”
Ballard returned it. “I’m looking for Verna Rounds. Is she—”
“Ain’t no Verna Rounds here.” The face had closed like a fist.
He took a chance and said softly, “You’re her mother, aren’t you?”
“And if I is? Verna ain’t here.”
“It’s very important that I get in touch—”
“Look, caint you leave that poor girl alone?”
Ballard held up a placating hand. “She’s not in trouble—”
“Lot you know ’bout trouble.”
He stood without moving for a few moments, staring at the door just slammed six inches from his nose. “Terrific,” he finally said and went back to his car.
He had to try three pay phones to find one that was working. With it he called Giselle. “Oh, Larry, good, I didn’t want to put this out on the radio.” So she was over her mad, anyway. “Donna Payne worked for six weeks in the credit office of Royal Foods on Valley Drive in that industrial park down in Brisbane. She lists a Mary McCarthy there as a personal reference.”
“You got anything on her in Nevada? She might be there.”
“Nevada?” There was a rustling of papers. “No. Cincinnati, Ohio. And I remember her saying that’s where she was from.”