Dead Skip by Joe Gores

Author:Joe Gores
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2019-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

AT 1:45 P.M., just as Ballard sank a hesitant tooth into his soggy cheeseburger in Concord, Dan Kearny parked his station wagon on Main Street in Martinez. He still hadn’t been able to raise Ballard on the radio. Field agents working addresses in a constricted area were in and out of their cars like yo-yos; eventually he would catch him. Meanwhile, he had a pretty good idea of what Ballard was doing.

Kearny’s first stop on reaching the East Bay had been, like Ballard’s, the Concord police department. The inelegant rear in the striped hotpants had long since wobbled out—to a ten-buck parking tag, a fact to warm Ballard’s heart—but the freckled desk sergeant still was available. He repeated his information to Kearny, and added, on request, an excellent verbal of Ballard.

“You should have been a cop,” Kearny dead-panned.

He went around the corner to the municipal court, which Ballard had missed. A short hall ended in wide double doors leading to the courtroom of the presiding judge. On one of them was a typed notice dated February 17, detailing acceptable dress for court appearances. Barefoot was not acceptable, nor were hotpants. Long hair and beards carried no interdictions short, it could be assumed, of nesting sparrows.

Kearny went back down the hall to a Dutch door with the top half open on a room containing four women and a great many file-jammed open-face cabinets. The ladies were huddled by the windows, gabbing.

“Where do I find out about docketings?” Kearny asked.

“Right here.”

“Griffin, Charles M.”

One of the women found the applicable clipboard and, with another, checked it. Both of them were placid as cattle, but Kearny evinced no impatience. He was in the field, working. You kept going, you kept digging, until you got there. It was as simple as that.

“No record here, sir.”

“Has anyone else been around asking about Griffin within the last three hours?”

She immediately became official. “We couldn’t give out that sort of information.” Her face could, however, and did. No.

“How about criminal docketings?”

“Why didn’t you say so?” she demanded with considerable asperity. She extended a jiggly-fleshed arm, the sort seen so often on farm wives at summer church socials in the Midwest. “Across the hall, at Traffic.”

Kearny thanked her, but she had already returned to the gossip. Across the hall was a set of double windows and a counter. Two Mexican women, one holding a very loud baby, were paying a traffic fine; they laid their dollar bills down on the counter separately, as if each were made of fine Spanish lace. A hard-faced man in khaki, with a black eye, was losing an argument about a warrant for unpaid moving violations with an equally hard-faced deputy.

Kearny’s deputy obviously was just waiting out his pension, which meant he was cooperative, good-natured, unhurried, efficient.

“Griffin, Charles M. Docketed to Judge Bailey Johnson’s court at nine-thirty A.M. on Tuesday, June thirteenth. Drunk driving, violation of the right-of-way.”

“You know the case personally?” asked Kearny in apparent idleness.

“He jumped bail back in February, Gerald Coogan Bail Bonds, 913 Main Street, Martinez, had to forfeit six bills bail.

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