“Okay, I’ll hit the McCarthy reference tomorrow. Tonight I’ll check on the Jeffrey Simson residence address. And I’m going to ask Bart to work the file clerk. I’m the wrong color.”
By the time Ballard had gotten a hamburger and driven back to San Francisco, dusk had fallen and the fog had rolled in. He parked on Valencia around the corner from Simson’s Twenty-fourth Street address. A narrow foot passage led to the small court on which the apartment opened. There were potted plants and a strong catbox smell, but no lights in the apartment and no answer at the door. He left one of his business cards in the slot of the mailbox, which his flashlight showed bore the names BETTE and MILFORD DENNISON.
On his original employment application, Simson had listed a father living in the 1300 block of Stevenson Street. Ballard drove in on Valencia, contemplating once more his insight that straight arrows were as hard to track down as flakes and deadbeats. On the way he passed Eighteenth Street; half a block over on Linda Street lived Maria Navarro and her new husband. He didn’t even know her married name. And was surprised to realize he hadn’t even thought of her since hearing of Kathy’s death.
The father lived in a detached bungalow. He was a benign-countenanced, round-faced man with a fringe of white hair and a limp. He balanced himself on his good leg while admitting he was Ellis Simson and waving away Ballard’s apologies with his cane. “No, no, glad of the company. It beats television.”
“I’m trying to get in touch with your son Jeff.”
In the act of turning away, Ellis Simson stopped abruptly. He put the rubber tip of his cane against Ballard’s stomach and smiled tightly. “You a fag?” he demanded in a challenging voice.
“Huh?”
The cane was lowered. “Come on in.”
“Gotta blame myself, I guess.” Ellis Simson and Ballard were each having a can of beer. “Moved out on his ma nearly twenty years ago.”
“She never remarried?”
“Too ornery. Good-looking girl then. I was a merchant sailor, met her during the war...”
The three-room apartment was that of a man who’d grown used to small living quarters which had to be kept neat. Handmade hardwood bookshelves held a sailor’s reading: The Bible and Shakespeare, Stevenson and Kipling and Conrad, Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga; books to be read and reread during the long still watches far at sea.
“So she raised him alone?” prompted Ballard. All he needed was Jeff Simson’s address, but the old man was lonely and his beer was good.
“From six years old on. When we were docked in San Pedro I had to deliver the alimony payments in person. She liked that. Wouldn’t remarry because that would let me off the hook. A good hater, that woman. After I got this” — he slapped the bad leg — “I used the settlement to buy this place. At least it’s four hundred miles away from her.”
Ballard drained his beer. Out into the foggy foggy night.
“You said you have a recent address on your son...”
“Son!” he snorted. “Didn’t lay eyes on him for eight years, despite the support payments, then he showed up two years ago.”
He limped over to the old-fashioned rolltop desk which had been restored and hand-oiled to a soft glow like distant fires. As he rummaged in the center drawer he kept up his rapid-fire talk. “Jeff came to me with a lot of talk about his roots, authority figure, father figure — what really happened was his mother got wise to him and threw him out. Not that it stopped the alimony payments. They’ll go on until the day she dies. Or I do.”
“So Jeff got the apartment nearby?” asked Ballard.
Ellis Simson nodded. “So he could live near me, he said. Had a roommate called Ferdie. Should have known.” He came back with a sheet of scratch paper. “Here’s the address.”
Ballard copied it down. Way out in the avenues, almost to the beach.
“Dropped by his place one afternoon, got no answer from the bell and the door was open so I went in. Him and Ferdie were in bed together. I was sick on the bedroom rug.” His eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. “Maybe, if I’d stuck with Eleanor...”
“And maybe not,” said Ballard.
At the address on Forty-third Avenue just off Balboa, Jeffrey L. Simson was listed for Apartment One, but Ballard’s flashlight through the uncurtained window showed there was no furniture and the place was being repainted. Ballard went home and dreamed he was being attacked by a water buffalo in the paddock at Golden Gate Park off Chain of Lakes Drive.
Six
Bart Heslip was a plum-black man with such an exaggerated breadth of shoulder that he looked like a light-heavy instead of his middle-weight hundred and fifty-eight pounds. As he typed reports in his field agent’s cubicle along the left wall of the DKA basement, his hard bony face and deep-set eyes gave away few secrets. Not that he was trying to keep any just then. He was pissed off with Larry Ballard and didn’t care if the whole world knew it. In fact, he stepped to the door of his cubicle and cupped his hands around his mouth. “I’m pissed off!” he yelled.
O’Bannon’s flame-topped head appeared in the doorway of the end cubicle. “Ah ha!” he exclaimed. “The primal scream.” His head disappeared and his typewriter began rattling again.
Which made Heslip look over at his own, an old IBM bought by Kearny at a bankrupt stock auction yea-many years back. The “E” key stuck, so his reports always began: Follow d to th giv n addr ss, cruis d th ar a, could not spot assign d v hicl.
Which made Heslip even madder. He strode resolutely back to Kearny’s private office and threw wide the sliding door with its one-way glass. Kearny was behind his massive blonde wood desk.
“Dan, I want—”
“Shut up! Get the hell out of here!”
“Oh,” Heslip agreed quickly, his head already jerking back like a turtle’s into its shell. He slid the door shut whisper-soft and tiptoed across the concrete to O’Bannon’s cubicle. The red-headed Irishman paused in his work.
“Oh,” Heslip told him.
“Yeah.” O’B’s freckle-massed features were ruddy with incipient alcoholism and his eyes were wise with a quarter-century of investigating every conceivable foible, weakness and perversion of human nature. “Ever since Kathy died.”
The door at the far end of the basement opened, and Ballard came through washed by sunlight so fierce he looked like an over-exposed black-and-white print of himself.
“You!” Heslip yelped. “I’m pissed off with you!”
Ballard came down the basement with his attaché case and turned in at his cubicle. “It’s going to be a scorcher,” he said.
Heslip went in and plopped down in Ballard’s spare chair. Like Heslip’s, the cubicle held a desk, a typewriter, a phone and a set of trays with the various forms demanded by their profession.
“You hear me talking to you, man?”
“I had a bitch of a dream last night, Bart.”
“You hear me telling you I’m pissed off with you?”
“I was out in the buffalo paddock at the park, and this huge goddam water buffalo charged me. An African water buffalo, they don’t even have any of them out there. I started running—”
“You dumped so much work on me, man, that Corinne is—”
“Then, you know the way it is in dreams, I was somewhere else. In a farmyard. Still running. With this water buffalo chasing me. I ran into the farmhouse and up the stairs and up the ladder to the attic room under the eaves.”
“How much time you need to get over a weekend of skin-diving?”