“That’s where you’re wrong, Bart. He might not think we’re very bright, but he knows we’re dogged. So he decides to use us. The intricate scheming again. He encourages us to tail him and Wendy, he—”
“Encourages? Christ, Dan, he was down here raising hell, warning us off, making himself...” He stopped with a sheepish look on his face.
“Yeah. Encouraging us to keep after him. Losing your tail in a way that you’ll know you’re being deliberately lost...”
“Sending Wendy down to the boutique earlier than usual so Larry will be damned sure to stick with her when she starts traveling,” cut in Giselle.
“Okay,” said Ballard impatiently. “According to your reconstruction, he’s ready to have Chandra knocked off, so he sets up his alibi through us. I tail the girl to L.A., where she bails him out of jail, they’re on the road back together, with me behind them, when Chandra is hit.”
“No,” said Kearny. “That’s where we’re being hustled.”
“Hustled?”
“The rube who wanders into the pool hall and loses a few games, Giselle. Then the bets get bigger and he hauls out a handmade cue and starts clearing tables. That’s Fazzino — making us see what he wanted us to see. Only, I’ve spent the past week just reading reports in this file, and pretty soon the hustle started to stand out. They have lunch at the Pepper Tree Motel, start to get into the car — and what happens?”
“He wants her to drive and they have an argument,” said Ballard.
“No. They give you an argument to watch while the important switch is made: she ends up driving the car. Remember, they knew you were there. They also knew you would wait out in the street while they drove through the motel, because they knew you would have previously checked it out and made sure there was only one exit. Any good investigator would.”
“My God!” breathed Giselle. “Then when the Jag came back out...”
“Fazzino was no longer in it. I’d guess he stepped out when the car was behind the blank-walled narrow end of the motel building. I’d also guess the rental car he used to get back out to the airport was parked in one of the end slots — with Dr. Immanuel Sanderson’s wig and walking stick in the trunk. He already was wearing the dark glasses...”
“Goddammit, Dan, he was in that car! I saw him, slid down in the seat with his knees up against the dash—”
It was Heslip who caught it first. He slammed his hand on the desk. “That’s why that bitch was so scared when she walked in on me at Funky Threads with that mannequin I She’d just brought the goddam thing up from the trunk of her car.”
“And the two identical suits with identical shirts and ties—”
“That’s right, Giselle. One for Fazzino, one for the mannequin. That’s the real reason Wendy went down to Funky Threads at eight-thirty on the Monday morning. To pick up the dummy, dress it, and stick it in the trunk of the Jag before anyone was around. I’d guess that the stop south of Soledad was just so Wendy could shift the position of the dummy so it’d be watching Ballard when she went by him again.”
“But I tailed the car right up to the door of the house on Pacific Street,” objected Ballard. “I was parked across the street when she and Fazzino came out of the garage carrying their suitcases. That was no damned dummy I saw going up the front stairs—”
“Why were they doing that?”
Ballard said sarcastically, “To get out of the rain, Dan.”
“Surveillance reports by both you and Bart mention that whenever they drove into the garage they shut the door behind them and went into the house through the inner connecting door. So the only reason they could have for coming out into the drizzle with their suitcases was so you’d see Fazzino.”
Heslip, at least, was convinced. “So Fazzino drives to the Santa Barbara airport as Dr. Sanderson, flies to San Carlos, picks up his car, drives to North Beach, kills Chandra, drives home and gets rid of the wig and stick, waits in the garage for Wendy to show up, lets Larry see him, and that’s it.”
“That’s it,” said Kearny. “How do you like it?”
Ballard suddenly laughed. “You’re forgotting one thing, Dan. If the old man in Edith Alley was Fazzino, he still didn’t kill Chandra. Because he was seen leaving the alley by that girl waiting for her laundry at five forty-five. Chandra was still alive to call Giselle at five fifty-nine. Bart found her dead at six-o-six.”
“That’s our problem.” Kearny nodded equably. “Until something happens or we come up with something new, that’s it.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Giselle. “We can hand the whole package to Benny Nicoletti.”
Twenty-five
“Giselle, do me a favor, will you?” grunted Benny Nicoletti. “Don’t do me no more favors.”
A week had passed; it was Wednesday and it was raining. It was raining as if it had decided not ever to stop raining. The roof was leaking in the little kitchen behind Giselle’s office, so her conversation with the big soft-voiced cop was punctuated with the splat splat splat of water into a saucepan.
“You mean the Fazzino case?”
“I mean there ain’t no Fazzino case, doll,” he said in his patient, high-pitched voice. “We’re still working on the Chandra hit, but between you an’ me, everybody s pended Fazzino.”
“But, Benny!” she wailed. “All the information we gave you—”
“Was real pretty. You must of sat up nights working that all out. It’s pretty but it ain’t police work.” He stood up abruptly; his wet raincoat had smeared the papers on the corner of her desk. “If it makes you feel any better, I like all them detective novels with masterminds an’ tricky plots an’ all that. But we can’t move on this, Giselle — and by us I mean both the SFPD and the San Mateo county sheriff’s office.”
“You could get search warrants—”
“We can’t show no probable cause, Giselle. Sure, that accident could of been a setup — but how do you prove it?”
“If someone saw Padilla with her at the sister’s house...”
“Nobody did. Me and one of the Half Moon Bay cops personally spent two days questioning everyone, I mean everyone, on Columbus Street. Nothing. Always at night, always foggy...”
“Okay, what about the old man in Edith Alley? If he was Fazzino—”
“Now, there’s another beauty. There’s thirty-nine family units, as our friends down to Social Services would say, in that alley, and we talked to everybody in ’em. Twice. That old man was all we come up with, and he was fifteen minutes too early to of done any business at Chandra’s. Nobody was home in either of those two end flats during anywhere near our time span—”
“So you mean that’s it? You just...” She threw up her hands. “At least you could give it to the D.A. and see if there’s anyone there with a little more imagination...”
“I dumped the whole thing in the lap of Paddy O’Dea, one of the assistant D.A.’s, on Monday. He studied it until today.”
“And he said?”
“The same thing my lieutenant said when I showed it to him.” He shook his head sadly. “You ain’t hearing that kind of language out of me, doll.”
And the rest of Wednesday was no better.
Kearny, doing three weeks of accumulated billing, which he hated, chewed her head off when she mentioned Chandra. Pete Gilmartin had to baby-sit, since it was his wife’s bowling night. He wouldn’t be able to see her until Friday evening after work, when he’d pick her up at DKA.