Joe Gores
Final Notice
for Rog
because he let me kill him twice
once by water, once in blood
One
She was a willowy girl wearing a skirt that was too short. At first glance her face held so much vivacity that Ballard thought she was feverish. Then he realized the glitter of her eyes came from contact lenses.
“I represent California Citizens Bank, Mrs. Schilling, and—”
“I don’t know anything about it and I don’t want to know anything about it,” she snapped. With the expectancy gone from her face, she was just a skinny woman showing too much skinny leg from behind a realty-office desk.
“Your name is on the contract.”
“I don’t care whose name is on what, I told the other man from your company that the Bastard has the car.” She said the Bastard as if it were her husband’s legal name. “Get out of here. Leave me alone.”
Ballard had just gotten the case on the 1972 Duster that day, because the man assigned to it had been unable to do anything with Mrs. Schilling.
“Your name’s on the contract.”
“Leave me alone!” she shrieked.
A bald head was stuck around the edge of the interior door that led to the other office of the suite.
“Trouble, Joanne?” it asked.
Ballard sighed. “No trouble. I’m just leaving.”
The features assembled under the bald dome glared at him for a moment longer, then were withdrawn. Joanne Schilling’s mouth moved in triumph, as if she wanted to laugh and spit at the same time. Ballard was feeling a lot of sympathy for the Bastard. He paused in the outside doorway.
“I hope you remember I gave you a chance to cooperate when the bank socks you with a grand-theft warrant.”
Her mouth stopped moving. Her face became somber, then sullen. “Is that on the level? Can they do that?”
Ballard didn’t say anything. It was a trick he had learned from Dan Kearny. Make them come to you. It worked. An unexpected flush spread over her cheeks.
“The Bastard is sleeping with some... some spade chick.” Jarred past that admission, she was suddenly eager to cooperate. “She lives down south of Market in a little park-sort-of-area. South... South-something. I went down there once just... to see...”
“South Park?” asked Ballard, whose knowledge of the city was becoming mildly encyclopedic.
“That’s it! South Park.”
Since the Bastard’s given work address was on Howard Street, Ballard swung over to check it out on the way to South Park. It was early enough in the month so he could give a couple of consecutive hours to the Schilling Duster, especially after reading the crappy report written on it. He didn’t blame the client for yelling.
Avery Printing had the second floor of an old concrete building from before the ’06 quake which had been tricked out with new aluminum-sash windows and a vestibule with lots of nonfuctional glass. The thump and roar of presses filled Avery’s little reception area. The pudgy girl working the electric typewriter had dandruff, and pimples on her chin.
“Gee, Mr. Schilling doesn’t really work here, he just sort of...” She looked beyond Ballard and brightened. “Oh! Mr. Avery...”
Avery was a heavy man in wash pants. Dark hair sprouted at the open neck of his white shirt. He had a smear of ink up one hairy forearm, and kept turning over Ballard’s Daniel Kearny Associates card (Branch Offices Throughout California, Affiliates in All Major American Cities) with blunt fingers while listening to Ballard’s pitch.
“Yeah, well, I know Bob Schilling, all right. Thing is, he’s a sort of jobber, you get me?”
“No,” Ballard admitted.
“He gets printing jobs around town, then farms ’em out to small presses like us. Funny you wouldn’t know, being a friend of his...”
“I’m just trying to buy his car. I only met the man once.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll tell him you was by when he comes in next”
Ballard walked back to his car, a tall, well-conditioned blondish man in his mid-twenties, wearing a suit but no topcoat in San Francisco’s mild mid-October sunshine. He wrote notes on the pink report carbon stapled face-out to the back of the Schilling assignment sheet, started to stick it up over the visor ready for a report, then remembered he still had South Park to check out.
In the 1860s South Park, designed by an Englishman some ten years earlier as a copy of London’s Berkeley Square, was the residence of those wealthy and influential Southern gentlemen known as the Copperheads because of their virulent opposition to abolition. A century later, by one of those ironies of time, it had become an exclusively black slum.
Not that Ballard knew any of this as he turned off Third Street. Driving slowly around the one-way oval of South Park Avenue, looking for the Duster, he thought only that it must have been a nice residential area once and that it was a pity industry had grown up around and in it.
In the center of the startlingly green mini-park/play-ground, four blacks sat at one of the tables having lunch. At the far end of the oval, a one-legged black man wearing a GIANTS baseball cap crutched his way from the Home Market with a bottle of wine in a paper bag.
The houses were old, weathered, with false fronts like the houses in western movies, except they were painted unexpectedly bright — if faded — colors. New paint couldn’t hide the age of the Hotel Madrid. In a garage with the overhead door up, four middle-aged black men and two equally middle-aged black women were playing poker. An obvious whore drifted like a tattered butterfly from the Yellowrose Hotel, 84 Rooms, Day or Week. Ma and Pa businesses alternated with the houses or occupied their ground floors.
But no Duster.
Ballard pulled into the yellow zone in front of a For Lease import company to note that fact on the assignment sheet and sort through his other cases. Parked directly in front of his Plymouth was an immensely bright, immensely shiny 1973 Cadillac convertible with the top down. Fire-engine red. License 333 FFX.
An elegantly slim Caucasian, the first besides himself Ballard had seen in South Park, strolled up to the Cadillac and got in. He moved like an athlete. He had beautifully wavy hair and the most exquisite tailoring Ballard had ever seen.
Neither the suit nor the Cadillac fit the neighborhood.
Come back tomorrow morning about three-thirty, Ballard thought. Schilling and his lady love would be home by then even if they’d been bar-hopping with coffee afterward. He could use an easy repo, he’d knocked off only five cars since the first of the month. O’Bannon, the old pro, had already chalked up twelve on the Monthly Work Breakdown board.
The man was getting out of the Caddy again. 333 FFX. Something flickered in the back of Ballard’s mind. He began searching through the Active files from his attaché case as the elegant man walked by him again. Three 3s in the license. Older than he had looked from the back, a good ten years older than Ballard. Thin features almost classically handsome, clean-shaven, with a wide firm mouth — only the eyes betrayed his age. Dark eyes that should have been Latin and liquid, but instead were like alcohol on the skin. Ice eyes, without depths.
Three 3s on the license plate? Not in his Active files. But dammit, Ballard had seen, somewhere... Skip list? This carried license numbers only, and only for the hot ones: cars driven by dead skips, embezzlers, absconders, out-and-out thieves. Every field agent’s dream was to knock one off the skip list. In three years with DKA, Ballard never had.
Nothing with three 3s. But dammit...
He suddenly grabbed the mike clipped to the dash, flipped on the radio and waited while it squeerged through warm-up. Office. That morning. Snooping O’Bannon’s In box, as they all did to see what assignments the others were getting.