Mostly Murder: A Short Story Collection

Police officers, answering a call late last night to 31 Edith Alley, were greeted by Miss Victoria Goodrich, 24, a case worker with San Francisco Social Services. The hysterical Miss Goodrich said that her roommate, Jocelyn Mayfield, 23, and Harold P. Stuber, 38, had entered the apartment at eight p.m. Stuber had been drinking, she said; by ten p.m. he had become so abusive that he struck Miss Mayfield. According to Miss Goodrich he then departed, and Miss Mayfield locked herself in the bathroom.

At eleven p.m. Miss Goodrich called for police assistance. They broke down the locked door to find Miss Mayfield on the tile floor in a pool of blood. Both wrists had been slashed with a razor blade. The girl was D.O.A. at San Francisco General Hospital. Stuber, an unemployed bartender who was released only yesterday afternoon from the county jail, is being sought on an assault charge.

Ballard thought, I’ve never even seen the son-of-a-bitch I could pass him on the street and not even know it. He felt a sudden revulsion, almost a nausea, at his own role in the destruction of Jocelyn Mayfield. Half an hour later he slammed the Chronicle down on Kearny’s desk.

“Stuber said he’d leave her if we took the Continental while he was in jail. He left her, all right.”

Kearny looked at him blandly. “I’ve already seen it.”

“If we hadn’t taken the car—”

“—she would have killed herself next month or next year over some other deadbeat. She was an emotional loser, Ballard, a picker of wrong men.” He paused, then continued drily, “It’s the end of the month, Ballard. I’d like to review your case file.”

Ballard dropped his briefcase on the littered desk. “You know what you can do with your case file, Kearny? You can take it and—”

Kearny listened without heat, then reached for his cigarettes. He lit one and sneered, through the new smoke, “What will you do now, Ballard — go home and cry into your pillow? She’s going to be dead for a long, long time.”

Ballard stared at him, speechless, as if at a new species of animal — the square pugnacious face, the hard eyes which had seen too much, the heavy cleft chin, the nose slightly askew from some old argument which had gone beyond words. A long slow shudder ran through the younger man’s frame. Work — that was Kearny’s answer to everything. Work, while Jocelyn Mayfield lay with a morgue tag on her toe. Work, while scar tissue began its slow accretion over the wound.

All right, then — work. Very slowly he drew his assignments from the briefcase. “Let’s get at it then,” he said in a choked voice.

Dan Kearny nodded to himself. A girl had died; a man had had his first bitter taste of reality. And in the process DKA bought themselves an investigator. Maybe, with a few more rough edges knocked off, a damned good investigator.