“What was I supposed to say? Try to understand, Giselle, we are stalling for time because we don’t have any direct evidence to present. We know Simson is lying, but—”
Kearny, who was eating chop suey, put down his fork with a clatter. “You aren’t going to have any trouble taking that lying bastard apart, are you? It’s so damned obvious that he’s—”
“Obvious to us, Dan, isn’t always obvious to the Hearing Officer. Or, much as I hate to say it, obvious to Johnny Delaney, either.” He leaned forward to speak earnestly to both of them, noting with satisfaction that Giselle had quit reacting and had begun to use her mind again. “Let me tell you how it went. On Monday we hit Delaney with the unexpected: Simson’s deposition. I’m sure he thought Simson was buried where we couldn’t come up with him.”
“Which means,” said Giselle almost triumphantly, “that he knew Simson’s testimony would support our side of the case. So now, when Simson is saying anything Delaney wants him to, how can you say Delaney doesn’t know he’s lying?”
“Delaney knew that deposition hurt him,” said Tranquillini patiently. “He thought he could get the letter in as direct evidence. The Hearing Officer had excluded it — hearsay only. Now we have a document which suggests there was no letter tendered by Pivarski or signed by Kathy. So Delaney needed direct testimony — and so far it seems that meant either Pivarski or Simson. We know Hawkley would fight any move to bring Pivarski out to testify, so Delaney would send a couple of the Attorney General’s investigators down to talk with Simson.”
“And ask him to perjure himself,” snapped Giselle.
“I’m sure that was Simson’s own idea,” said Tranquillini. “With an assist from the investigators. You know — you wanta be an attorney, there might be a job in the Attorney General’s office after you pass your bar...”
Kearny nodded. “Yeah. Simson’s just the boy would go for one like that.”
“He’d tell them that the deposition was just to help out an old friend — namely, you — but that testifying under oath was something else.” Tranquillini shoved aside the ruins of his pastrami sandwich. “So the investigators would tell him what Delaney needed the worst, and he would tailor his testimony to fit. But I’m sure Delaney believes that what Simson said on the stand this morning is roughly the truth.”
“Well, I’m going to send Ballard up to Sacramento to nose around in Tom Greenly’s life,” said Kearny. “He’s the lad brought the charges against us, and I want to see if there’s anything to connect him with Hawkley or the organized crime boys he represents.”
“What you really want, Dan, is to not feel DKA is helpless in this thing.”
Kearny shrugged darkly. “Whatever,” he said in a gruff voice.
“And I have to tell you that I don’t think Hawkley has a damn thing to do with this. I think Pivarski made a complaint, and I think Franks complained to the State, and I think the State decided they could grab your license and went for it. Both Franks and Simson are lying, but I don’t think we’ll be able to prove it unless Bart Heslip comes up with a witness on your side.” He turned to Giselle. “Have you heard anything from him?”
“Just a message left on the answering machine in Dan’s office at two this morning, our time. Verna has left New Orleans, but he’s tracked down her best friend, a girl named Fleur who dances topless in a joint called the Iberville Cabaret.”
Twenty-One
Bart Heslip opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. He could feel the weight of Corinne’s head against his bare chest, could feel her feather-soft exhalations against his skin. He cupped his hand around her head, his fingers thrust through her frizzy hair.
He was suddenly out of bed, looking back at it. Corinne didn’t have frizzy hair. And sure as hell not that strange shade of orange that very black hair takes when it is hennaed. The girl grunted and sat up. She looked at Heslip from big soft eyes in a funny little monkey face. “You’re a strange dude, you know that? You could have made it with me last night, and you didn’t even try.”
Heslip, scratching his hard fighter’s belly through his T-shirt, mumbled something unintelligible. When he’d accepted her five-in-the-morning invitation to use her bed, she’d been in a chair across the room in a bulky nightgown, saying she’d roust him out when she got tired. Now she’d been nude in bed beside him.
Fleur said, “We could make it now, if...”
Heslip shook his head. She was sitting up nude, watching him. “You gay or something?”
“Something,” said Heslip. “You seen my pants?”
“Hanging over the oven door.” She was up on her knees, careless of her nudity, a puzzled look on her face. “Married? Steady fox?”
“Steady fox.”
“She’s back in San Francisco, right? You’re here in New Orleans. So how she ever know if you an’ me do a little number here on the bed?”
“I’d know.” Heslip was in pants and shirt now, sitting on a dinette chair and lacing his shoes. Abruptly, she was off the bed in a flash of warm brown flesh, and into the bathroom. She stuck a freckled brown face around the edge of the doorway. “Man, a long time ago in my life I wish I’d said no to me.”
She was gone. Water started to run. Then she stuck her face around the doorjamb again. “If I can’t seduce you, can I at least feed you?”
They ate facing one another across the tiny formica breakfast table, talking mostly about her life: six nights a week dancing topless in a sidestreet joint, occasionally peddling her butt to a live one when the money was right.
“Think you’ll ever get out of it?” Heslip asked.
“Ain’t got a whole lot of choices.” She buried her teeth in her slice of toast and an eighth-inch of peanut butter, and brought up the subject before Heslip could. “Sorta like Verna, after she was sure.”
“Sure of what?” Heslip drank coffee. Hadn’t had a bad cup yet. He was going to end up like Ballard if he wasn’t careful.
“About the baby.”
“You mean she...” Heslip dropped back in his chair to cast his eyes to the ceiling. “A baby. Oh, that’s terrific.”
“I don’t see nothing so wrong with it. She wanted that baby, worst way, cause it would be the first thing she’d ever had was hers alone. Wouldn’t have no abortion. That was murder, she said.”
“A trick baby?” Heslip used the term for babies born to prostitutes who have no idea of whom the father is.
“Or johnny Mack Brown’s. Maybe that’s why he stuck with her even after she got hooked on smack.”
Heslip asked casually, “Still mainlining when she left here?”
“Ain’t that shit so easy to get off of, man.”
“Anybody ever point out to her that babies use the same bloodstream as their mother while she’s carrying ’em? So if the mother is a junkie, the kid’s hooked before he’s born. They have to cold-turkey it right there in the hospital. How far along is she?”
Fleur counted on her fingers “Was over two months gone in February, when she quit flat-backin’ cause some dude knocked her around and hurt the kid. Quit dancing cause it was startin’ to show—”
“So she’s had it by now,” said Heslip. “She ever find her own father?”
“You know ’bout that?”
“Guessed.”
She went back into the bathroom to put on a face. “She sure knew a lot ’bout findin’ people. Wrote away to Baton Rouge for his auto registration and driver’s license, stuff like that...” By the shape of her words, they were spoken around a lipstick being applied. She came out pressing a Kleenex between her lips to get off the excess. “Let’s go talk to him.”