“Madame Aquarra knows all.”
The mother-in-law, obviously. And beside her a massive mongrel about the size and apparent temperament of the Hound of the Baskervilles in that Christopher Lee movie that popped up on Creature Feature every once in a while. Ballard built an instant role. “We’ve been getting beefs about fortune-telling being done without a license at this address.”
She didn’t ask who “we” was: his suit, his stance, his dark car with the long aerial all spelled cop. Her eyes went flat and uncomprehending and her Romany accent thickened to near unintelligibility. The dog at her side growled softly. “But ve half been doing noddinks dat—”
“Complaints are against a...” Ballard turned to read from a blank page of his pocket notebook by the dim streetlight. “Female gypsy in her early twenties who—”
“Dere iss no vun here by dat description.”
The door started to shut, but Ballard thrust out his jaw and one foot. The jaw stopped her, the foot stopped the door. The dog gave a vicious snarl, but Ballard’s voice crackled with ice. “Trot her out here, lady, or I’ll make this mitt camp so sick it’ll need an iron lung to stay alive.”
He turned and swaggered down the steps to stand with his back to the place, hands shoved deep into his suitcoat pockets in a cop’s stance of habitual arrogance. Yana’s voice spoke behind him with practiced hesitancy. “Officer, my mother-in-law tells me I have broken the law...”
He turned. “Hello, Yana.”
“You must be crazy!” she exclaimed in recognition. “Do you know what will happen if—”
“If your husband comes out? I’m a cop interrogating a suspect.”
“My husband and father-in-law are traveling with the carnival now. But that one...” She made a gesture toward the house. It was a despairing and forlorn gesture. At the same time, she brushed up against him. “You are now threatening to take me down to the station. I am trying to excite you with the promise of what I might give you.”
Ballard put his hands on her shoulders and thrust her away. Her flesh was arousing under his fingers. “You really think she’s watching?”
“She is watching.”
“Can you get away for a while?”
“You think I am easy because I am a gypsy?” she asked coldly.
“A drink. A drive. A movie. A hamburger. A pizza,” he said irritably. “How the hell do I know?”
“You must take me with you, then.” She made pleading gestures. Ballard shook his head. She moved in to lay a suggestive hand on his chest. “I will go in and tell her you are taking me away, but that I will try to seduce you enough on the way so I will not be arrested or booked.”
Ballard jabbed a dictatorial finger at the house. Yana dropped her hands in resignation and, head lowered, retreated sadly back up the stairs. Ballard made a tough-guy silhouette again and wondered if six gypsies would come bursting out to hold him down while the Hound of the Baskervilles bit his balls off. But Yana returned.
He shoved her unceremoniously into the Cutlass, thankful for the police-like CB antenna and the car’s plain dark color. He drove half a block without lights so the rear plate wouldn’t be illuminated in case the mother-in-law wanted to get his license number.
“Where to?” he asked, braced for more defensiveness. But she laughed deep down in her throat and stretched her arms high above her head to emphasize a marvelous bustline.
“Why, your motel room, of course,” she said.
Why, ah... of course. Oh Ballard, you devil you!
Eighteen
Benny Nicoletti looked like a good pro linebacker gone to seed. He sounded like your Aunt Ethel getting ready to faint over a mouse. Only the eyes said cop. His 230 pounds overflowed Kearny’s client chair. It was Tuesday morning and Kearny was not at all happy to find him on the doorstep. He said in total delight, “Congrats on the promotion, Benny, and what the hell do you want?”
“Can’t an old friend drop around to say howdy?” asked Nicoletti in his reedy voice.
“When he’s just been put in charge of the Police Intelligence Unit? No.”
To Kearny’s surprise, Nicoletti looked almost embarrassed. “Do you owe me any favors, Dan?”
Kearny said nothing. Nicoletti sighed and drew himself erect. He had a cop’s slightly seedy hardness, not so much of conditioning as of having dished it out and taken it for a couple of decades.
“I didn’t think so. But I need one.”
Kearny pushed Giselle’s intercom button, then realized it was the first time he’d thought of that signal as Giselle’s instead of Kathy’s. “Could you bring down some coffee for the three of us?”
“On the way, Dan’l.”
Her voice sounded sprightly. Kathy had begun her inevitable fade from everyone’s consciousness. Nicoletti grunted to his feet when Giselle entered with an insulated pot and three plastic cups. “When are we off for that weekend together, babe?”
“When you hadn’t gotten married to a wonderful woman and had those four great kids.”
He shook his head sadly and sat down to sip his coffee. “It’s my middle-aged charm.” He slapped his belly. It sounded like a board being struck. “And this ten pounds I picked up since I ain’t got time for handball any more.” He sipped and sighed. “Now your witness is here, Dan, you ready to go?”
Kearny feathered smoke, unembarrassed. “I start to get wary when you bureaucrats show up.”
“Bureaucrats!” Nicoletti snorted. “And the hell of it is, you’re right. Anyway, remember that Mex dude got blown away down on Fisherman’s Wharf last November fifth?”
“Everything that happened that particular day is engraved on my brain,” said Kearny. “Yeah, I remember. Espinosa, was it?”
“That’s him. Adán Espinosa. This coffee’s pretty good.”
“Larry kicked up such a fuss about the instant that we got a Mr. Coffee,” said Giselle.
“His real name wasn’t Espinosa.” Nicoletti’s specialty was mob activity in California. “He was actually Phil Fazzino.”
Fazzino! Kearny felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. The man he’d fingered to Hawkley two years before. He said, with a poker face, “Good old Flip?”
“Good old Flip. Coroner tells me he was an easy autopsy.”
Giselle almost choked. Abstract approval of Kearny’s phone call to Hawkley was one thing; somebody being an easy autopsy because he’d been blown all over the front of a motel dresser was something else. She said, “Why was it kept out of the papers?”
“It wasn’t easy. But we had witnesses. A woman, a kid, a linen-truck driver who started running the same afternoon. He had to know something, because he didn’t even stop to deliver his towels. We caught up with him when he phoned his wife from Canada on her birthday. The kid didn’t see the killer, just his car. The woman just saw the corpse and lost her lunch. So we needed the driver.” He reached for the coffee pot. “This guy, he’s a survivor, he wants to keep on living. So we had to pry him open.”
“How?” asked Kearny.
“Yeah, well, we’re a little ashamed of that.” Nicoletti sounded as ashamed as a cardinal at a canonization. “We told him we were putting six uniform people, four shifts around the clock, on his wife and kids. They don’t go to the bathroom, one of our people is holding their hand, get it?”
“No,” said Giselle. Kearny was silent. He got it.
“Then we told him that we’d let drop on the street how he was fingering the Espinosa hit man, and then we’d pull the protection and give odds on how long his family lasted.”