Contract Null & Void

Chapter Nine

If nothing else, Ken thought, when it finally came, the grub was good. Great, in fact. But they hadn’t even sat down at the table until nine o’clock, and everyone else had acted as though that was a perfectly normal time to eat.

He could tell it was food for gourmets: anchovy fritters (little salty fish belonged on a pizza), partridge in casserole, and cucumber mousse. The only drawback had been the old dowager’s occasional bony hand on his knee under the table; embarrassing, but he could handle it.

Before tonight he’d had one gourmet meal in his life, during the great Gypsy hunt when he’d been ferrying a linked pair of Gyppo Caddies from L.A. to San Francisco on Route 1, and had stopped at the Highland Inn’s Pacific Edge Restaurant. Took every dime in his pocket, he’d even had to siphon gas from one Caddy to the other just to get home, but it’d been worth it.

Over coffee and dessert — something incredible called Creole curds and cream — Bernardine and Giselle had still been going at it.

“I agree with Paul,” said Giselle, “internal security here at the estate makes bodyguarding redundant. We can have a man with any of you outside the estate, but our time would be better spent—”

“I’m paying the bills and I want around-the-clock personal protection.” Bernardine’s secret hand left Ken’s knee to gesture above the tabletop. “That means right here at the estate.” She simpered at Ken. “All-night protection by Mr. Warren.”

Before Ken could speak, Sam Spade’s alter ego said, from across the table, “You’ll play hell with her, you will.”

Ken got in quickly, “Hnaound flnoor.” That way they’d at least be away from the family asleep upstairs.

Giselle knew less about guard duty than he did: he’d been a doorknob rattler for a while with a uniformed guard outfit on the Oakland docks. But she knew how to deal with these people. Give them what they wanted.

“Ken’s right,” she said. “If we’re going to be inside, our most effective place will be on the ground floor patrolling the interior perimeter of the house.”

She thought Paul might persist in defending all of his electronic security, but instead he gave a wolfish Sam Spade grin and said, “You’ve got brains, yes you have.”

Inga said, “I don’t get it.”

That had been two hours ago; everyone else was asleep, or at least abed, and Ken and Giselle were moving through the ground floor of the silent house, checking perimeter security on windows, doors, locks, alarms. Because they would be moving around inside, the body-heat and movement sensors were turned off.

Giselle shined her high-density halogen light around the edges of a window to make sure the filament contacts of the alarm were intact, said crossly, “Playing miniature golf all afternoon and pursing Trivia all evening!”

“Nghood ngrhub!”

“That food was beyond grub, it was unreal. But did you take a peek into Paul’s laboratory? Coke Classic and Chee-Tos.”

“Hnenius.”

A genius. Yeah, she supposed so, with all of his holograms guarding the estate. But a real pain in the keister. When they got back to the living room where they had set up their little guard center, they found a CD player and a stack of discs, a thermos full of coffee and a plate of sandwiches covered with plastic wrap. Proper sandwiches that looked like little checkerboards, watercress, cucumber, with the crust cut off. Giselle dug an elbow into Ken’s ribs.

“Pays to have an in with the management,” she said.

Ken grunted in embarrassment and poured them each a cup of coffee. Then they sat down in the spindly-legged antique cherrywood chairs that were hardier than they looked. It was going to be a long night.

Two beers, that was all it was going to be. So how the hell had this happened again?

O’B lurched across the muddy, nearly empty parking lot to his car, keyed the door. Missed, left a long scar down the paint beside the lock. Leaned and squinted, jabbed with the key again.

Screeeech.

Another one. Like the lumber mill worker showing how he’d lost a finger in the saw, Lordy, Lordy, there goes another one. Only the Great White Father wouldn’t just take O’B’s digit over those scratches: he’d take O’B’s whole damned head.

He finally got the door open, fell across the seat facedown, muttering imprecations, dragged himself in, grunted and turned and mashed his knee on the steering wheel and his red gray-shot rain-sodden head on the on-off radio knob, finally got straightened around behind the wheel. Panting piteously.

Somebody must have put something in his drinks.

Like maybe booze.

After three tries, O’B found the ignition lock, got the key in, turned it. From the radio blared shitkicker music about moaning trains, dead mamas, unfaithful loves, lost dogs, tears on the pillow... All while he scrabbled wild-eyed at the key: the sounds were cutting through his head like laser surgery.

Blessed quiet. He settled lower in the seat, steaming up the windows with his wet clothes. Rain spattered lullingly on the roof of the car. He’d drive to Tony’s empty house, fall into Tony’s empty bed, hell, it was just a couple of miles south. Just rest here for a second before he went...

At least he had seen Blow Me Baby at this barnlike roadhouse, the Rainbow, north of Freshwater Corners on Myrtle Ave, which, taken far enough, got you to Arcata. Had seen their instruments, had heard their awful music. Had seen drug deals going down in the parking lot, if you still called grass a drug. Had seen band members taking a few heavy hits between sets...

Instruments... band members... Maryjane...

Re... pos... ses... sions...

Damn, somebody snoring so loud it was putting him to sleep.

Gnawg-zzzz. Gnawg-zzz. Gnawg-zzzzz...

Gnawg-zzzz. Gnawg-zzz. Gnawg-zzz.

Squeerq. Somewhere, stealthily, a window went up.

Gnawg-zzzz. Gnawg-zzz. Gnawg-zzz.

Rustle-rustle-rustle. Through the window a dark shape climbed, pushing aside the translucent drapes, silent except for the stealthy whisper of cloth. It was all in black, like a ninja in a Hong Kong karate flick. But in one hand it bore a vicious-looking pickax-like mattock such as are always used by the peones to take out swaggering government troops when the railroad train has just been blown up in movies about the Mexican revolution.

Gnawg-zzzz. Gnawg-zzz. Gnawg-zzz.

The intruder froze at the sound, an utterly motionless shadow in the midst of other motionless shadows. Then he started up the grand sweeping main staircase to the second floor, feet silent on the marble treads, pausing only to take a cautious look through the archway into the living room.

Slumped down in their chairs on either side of their card table were Giselle and Ken Warren, eyes closed and heads tipped over to one side. Their empty coffee cups lay on the thick rose-colored rug below their flaccid fingers.

From the CD player came the soft jazz of Birds “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” from the wonderfully evocative noir album by Charlie Haden’s Quartet West, Always Say Goodbye.

From Ken Warren’s mouth came the sounds that momentarily had frozen the intruder in midmovement.

Gnawg-zzzz. Gnawg-zzz. Gnawg-zzz.

Still wide awake well after midnight, Inga was lying in her cozy canopy bed in her cozy bedroom. Her eyes gleamed in the dim light coming through the filmy curtains over her windows. She could hear the measured ticking of the cabinet clock in the corner of the room, the only item she had not chosen herself: everything else was frills and lace and ruffles in her favorite colors of pink and purple.

Out in the hall, a floorboard creaked. Inga’s eyes moved but she lay rigidly on her back, her breathing so shallow her breasts barely rose and fell under her plain pink cotton nightgown with embroidered red roses at neck and cuffs.

Again. And then the slight stealthy rattle of a doorknob, the muted squeak of ill-oiled hinges.

With a surprisingly quick, lithe movement for one so outwardly placid, Inga was out of bed and padding on bare silent feet across the oval rag rug to the connecting door to Paul’s room. She turned the knob without sound, drifted the door open.

In the center of the room a crouched dark figure was advancing on Paul’s bed, head forward, a heavy pickax-looking thing in his hands. He began to raise it above shoulder level.

Inga threw up her hands and screamed a real scream.

Downstairs in the living room, Giselle and Ken fell out of their chairs. Shaking their heads groggily, but at least awake, they struggled to their feet and lurched toward the stairway, another scream helping bring them out of their haze.

Upstairs, the attacker swung the mattock down with terrible force at Paul’s head just as the young computer wizard sat up wide-eyed under the covers. The handle of the mattock hit the bed frame above Paul’s head, and the head of it flew off to smash into the wall beside the bed. Its sharp, narrow-pointed end went through the plaster and into the eighty-year-old lath behind, where it hung like a surreal piece of op art. The handle spronged back with enough force to whip out of the attacker’s hands and spin across the room to gouge the cedar chest in the far corner.

Paul was yelling and thrashing around, trying to escape, trying to find his glasses so he could see to escape, Inga was screaming, Giselle and Ken were coming through the door.

The assailant took three running steps, hurled himself feetfirst through a window to take glass and frame and lace curtains with him. He landed on his butt with a bump, bounced and rolled down to the edge of the porch roof’s sloping shingles.

Ken and Giselle, trying to get through the doorway together to get at him, got stuck. He hung by his hands off the drain spout, let go just as they got free. Ken rushed to the window. The shadowy figure was running across the oval of grass inside the turnaround. Giselle’s little .32 with the shrouded hammer was in her purse downstairs beside her chair. Ken was a lousy shot anyway. He turned back into the room.

Giselle had turned on the bedside light. Paul was sitting up with his glasses hanging down across his chin from one ear. For once, Sam Spade he wasn’t.

“God God God!” he keened in falsetto.

But he was unhurt. Giselle whirled to grab the still-shrieking Inga by the upper arms and shake her just as Bernardine appeared in the doorway in a long flannel robe and slippers.

She began in her haughty voice, “I demand to know—”

“Who was it?” Giselle snapped at Inga. “Did you see—”

“Frank!” Tears streamed down her face. “Frank Nugent!”

Then she tore free to hurl herself into Paul’s puny arms, sobbing as if her heart would break.

During drinking hours, Ace in the Hole furnished hot food to any patrons from the bar next door, closed now after hours, who might need to soak up some alcohol before ordering another round, and coffee to those who had to wend their way home to apartment, rooming house, residential hotel, street corner, or gutter for a little shut-eye.

Now, at 3:00 A.M., there were only four patrons in the place: Ballard, still on his stool at the end of the counter, a couple at one of the three tables with old-fashioned oilcloth covers along the wall, and a lone woman sitting at the furthest table around the el. In the back wall beside Ballard’s end of the counter was a plain wooden door with NO ADMITTANCE — THIS MEANS YOU stenciled on it.

The coffee, amazingly enough, was excellent, and he’d drunk five cups. He’d also eaten a cheeseburger with everything on it, an order of fries and one of onion rings, and had slurped two of the chocolate malts the dog-eared and grease-darkened menu had surprised him by featuring.

The short-order cook brought him a second cheeseburger and second orders of both fries and onion rings. What the hell, it had been twelve long hours since his lunch with Amalia Poletti.

As the cook got back behind his counter, the riverboat gambler from Mood Indigo came in, said something to the man made him laugh the way Mood Indigo’s black bartender had laughed, then strolled the length of the diner to go around the end of the counter past Ballard and into the NO ADMITTANCE door.

Larry wondered why he was sitting here, munching away, surreptitiously surveying the other patrons for a woman who might possibly fit the strange remarks of the bartender at Mood Indigo. Because he had had nowhere else to be: Kearny would be wallowing in his bed by now, leaving him with the too-short couch with the broken spine he’d paid thirty bucks for at the Salvation Army.

And he was worried about Bart. Maybe the bald bartender had been giving him some oblique message from Bart — even if he could not for the life of him see what it might be.

At least he knew why the two cops were looking for the Heslip look-alike in the composite drawing. He’d knocked Georgi Petlaroc on his butt in a gay bar on Polk Street a couple of hours before Petlaroc’s death. And then had said Petlaroc would look funny with his face blown off.

Bart Heslip in a gay bar?

Not likely. But Bart in San Francisco was unlikely, too. Bart calling him for a meet at Mood Indigo, and then not showing, was even more unlikely — and troubling. Yet the picture was him. The police artist had caught his brashness, the taut stance from his days in the ring that gave him a physical arrogance.

Ignoring Ballard, the woman from the rear table swept by on her way to the cash register. Tall, angular, languid, remarkable breasts, good legs, but with notably heavy jaws and brows, hint of five o’clock shadow. Transvestite? Or somebody halfway through a sex-change operation, popping progesterone and estrogen while waiting for the surgeon’s knife to make the changeover final and complete? Or just a woman with a high testosterone level? In San Francisco, any of the above, and just possibly all at once.

Her perfume reminded him of Amalia. Had the strike vote gone through? Undoubtedly. Were the St. Mark picket lines already up? Probably. Amalia had joked to look for her on the lines; would she be there now, shivering in the 3:00 A.M. chill? Maybe. He would go up to...

“You figured it out,” growled the damaged voice.

He looked up. Mood Indigo’s wide yet wiry black bartender was standing over him, eyes still hidden behind their dark glasses, big bull ring in his nose glinting in the subdued light.

“How the hell do you eat wearing that thing?”

The bartender jerked a thumb, led the way to the table where the woman had been sitting. Ballard picked up his cup and followed him. They sat down across from one another.

“I don’t have to,” said the bald man.

He reached up into his nose, gingerly unhooked the ring from it. The septum wasn’t pierced; the ring just clipped on like a clip-on earring. He was rubbing his nose vigorously. He sighed in relief.

“Made of light plastic,” he said. “Otherwise...”

When he spoke his voice was different, the rasp of damaged vocal cords was gone, and he was taking off his black glasses. He laid them on the paper napkin at his place to laugh across the table at Larry Ballard’s startled expression.

The bald bartender from Mood Indigo was Bart Heslip.