“We’re closed,” said the face.
“Tell Rounds I’ll be waiting in the parking lot,” said Heslip. “Tell him it’s about his daughter.”
Five minutes later a hulking black man with massive shoulders and a strutting stride appeared, his eyes moving suspiciously from car to car until they spotted Heslip leaned against the fender of a Torino hardtop several stalls away from the rent-a-car where Fleur waited. Up close Rounds bore the marks of his former profession on his square, massive face. A flattened nose, thickened lips, scar tissue around the deep-set gorilla eyes. Maybe, Heslip thought, remembering the current wife’s battered appearance, Emmalina was lucky Rounds had dumped her years ago.
“I need your daughter’s address.” Heslip was still wearing the clear-glass horn-rims and carrying the clipboard, but the fruity manner was gone. “Your real daughter. Verna.”
Rounds’ eyes got even meaner than usual. He went into a half-crouch. “Lissen, Oreo, you got no call coming around...”
“Get off it,” Heslip snapped. “We know you never bothered to get unmarried from Emmalina, so your children by the woman you are living with now are illegitimate.” He curled his lips around the word. “Bastards, Rounds. Got it? Now, where’s Verna?”
Rage washed across Rounds’ features but there was also an underlying intelligence and caution Heslip hadn’t expected. This tempered that always smoldering rage, checked it, controlled it. “I ain’t telling you nothing.”
Heslip made a notation on his clipboard, holding it so Rounds could not see what he wrote. “That’s your choice, Rounds.” He looked up. “What’s your social secur... no. The computer has that.”
“What... what’re you writing there?” Much of the belligerence had drained from the big man’s voice.
“You’ll be...” He clicked his pen and pocketed it. “You’ll be served with a Summons and Complaint. Your attorney can explain...”
“Attorney? Summons and Complaint?”
“If it goes against you, you’ll lose the restaurant, of course. Convicted felons can’t be licensed for the on-premises sale of alcohol in this state.”
He turned and started to walk away. Rounds caught his arm.
“Convicted felon? What are you tellin’ me?”
Heslip shook his arm free and dissected him with icy bureaucratic eyes. “We don’t force cooperation, Rounds. That’s outside our constitutional brief. But when we find evidence of a felony committed by someone uncooperative, we feel no urgency to shield that person from the local authorities...”
“But I ain’t done anything!”
“Bigamy’s a felony, Rounds. I would think you’d know that.”
He started off again. Rounds kept pace, hunched and pleading. “Look, mister, it was Emmalina. She ran off, fifteen years ago. I would have gotten a legal divorce, I swear to you, but I couldn’t find her...”
“We have her statement to the contrary. The fact that she’s listed under ROUNDS, EMMALINA, in the Oakland, California phone book might influence a jury’s decision. Add petjury to the other—”
“Look, I tell you where to find Verna, what happens?”
“Our only interest is in contacting your daughter.”
Rounds shook his head in abrupt irritation. He said bitterly, “I know you bringin’ up all this stuff just to force me to talk. I want to know what happens to Verna if I tell you where she’s at.”
Once again Rounds had surprised him. The huge man’s ugly face was set in an agony of indecision.
“Nothing happens to her,” said Heslip. “We just need a statement from her.”
Rounds said softly, “Mister, that little girl got all the grief she can handle. Like to tore out my heart when she came into my home with tread marks on her arms and a pimp’s child in her belly.”
“It was our understanding you were hostile to your daughter,” he said in his cold bureaucratic voice.
“That first time she came to see me, you mean? Man, I have a wife and family that don’t know nuthin’ about Emmalina or Verna or the boy, Sammy. But she came to see me here, a bunch of times, and we got on fine. I gave her money to go North with that pimp...”
“Why North?” Heslip had almost forgotten his role.
“The pimp, he has relatives there, said they’d take care of her while she had the baby. She wrote a few times, it seemed to be working out. Then the letters quit cornin’.”
When he got back into the rent-a-car sixty seconds later, Fleur said eagerly, “Did we get anything?”
Heslip had to chuckle at her “we.” Emphasizing it, he said, “We got an address where she’s supposed to be. Or, least, was until about four months ago. One-ten Allerton Street, Roxbury, Massachusetts. Let’s find a phone and get me lined up with a flight to Boston, and then I’ll buy you dinner wherever you want.”
“Just over at Fontana’s,” she said, “is some of the best soft-shelled crab you ever ate.”
Not only the best, but the first.
Ballard had found Thomas Greenly listed in the Sacramento phone book; a $50,000-class house on Bartley Drive near William Land Park, not out of a civil servant’s honest reach these days. Greenly was third from the corner of Cavanaugh Way, so Ballard had to hit only those two houses before Greenly’s in his role as a census taker for the Polk Directory. The wife was obviously the one he had started with, one of the kids was in college and the other two in high school, all depressingly honest and aboveboard. No meat there for any conjecture of mob contacts, none at all.
Next stop, in on Sixteenth Street to 0, left to the 1000-block. The Business and Professions Building directory told him room 516, which he entered lugging half a dozen bulging legal-size files from the trunk of his car. His view through an open door from the secretary’s desk showed him the man from the anniversary photo the wife had proudly displayed. Medium height, lean, stooped, prominent Adam’s apple, dark hair receding from an accountant’s high brow.
“Hey, I’m really sorry” — scooping the files back up off her desk before she could open any of them — “I wanted 416. Only my second week on the job, I still get lost...”
Outside to park where he could see Greenly’s green Toyota, again, courtesy the talkative wife, and then he settled down to wait. Nothing on Greenly yet to think about or plan, so he thought about his night at the motel in Santa Rosa with Yana. What a woman! And so many contradictions. She couldn’t, for instance, read or write.
“Oh, I can recognize the shape of the letters that make up the name of the city — Santa Rosa, eh? — and I know numbers because we depend on the telephones a lot. But beyond that...”
He watched the first freshets of what would soon be a flood of departing civil servants start from the state buildings.
... beyond that, she had loved him and asked for nothing in return. She’d been sold to her husband for six thousand dollars when she’d been thirteen and her father had discovered she was sneaking into school on the sly instead of selling stolen flowers on street corners as she was supposed to be doing.
“I have miscarried seven times in the five years since then, because I have been unhappy. But now I am happy and you and me, we will make a very handsome baby.”
Which was not really what Ballard had in mind, but dammit! He had just caught a flash of the rear end of Greenly’s Toyota as it made a right into N Street off Seventh where Ballard was parked. He bulled across traffic to get seven cars behind it for a sedate inching back to Cavanaugh Way on Fifteenth Street. Ballard parked down the street and bored himself into a near-coma waiting for the house lights to go out.