Contract Null & Void

Chapter Eleven

Dan Kearny thought, The whole damn company’s going to hell, and me right along with it. Somehow he’d closed up Jacques Daniel’s last night instead of coming back to Ballard’s apartment after just a beer or two as intended. His head felt like an abscess, and he’d been rousted out of bed at this ungodly morning hour by Giselle’s phone call.

And look at Ballard. Disgraceful! Sprawled on the living room floor in his underwear with a blanket dragged down over him, snoring. He must have fallen off the couch sometime in the night and hadn’t even been awakened by the phone or Kearny making coffee. Of course Larry probably wouldn’t have called it coffee.

Hadn’t heard Kearny go to take his shower, either. The bathroom was down the hall, not in the apartment, and the water hadn’t got hot until Kearny was almost finished. Leaving wrapped only in a towel, he’d run into the Japanese woman from the rear apartment, and his towel had fallen off and she’d giggled merrily behind one hand and had bowed and had gone into the bathroom herself. Still giggling.

And Dan Kearny had been supposed to open the DKA office himself this morning and couldn’t even do that, thanks to Giselle’s call. He loved to get out of the office to look for somebody, grab a couple of cars, but here he had been forced to call Jane Goldson to open up, so now another person knew the office routine was going to hell.

Cursing, Dan Kearny slammed out of Ballard’s apartment.

Squawking, gasping, choking, O’B came out of quasidelirium tremens. Someone had shoved a spotted owl into his gaping mouth and then rammed O’B himself headfirst into an open grave. Had to be a spotted owl, that almost mystic little bundle of feathers that every logger on the north coast hated with a passion, because O’B’s tongue didn’t have foul-tasting feathers on it.

Still... Yeah. His tongue. Feathers and all...

And the open grave?

He began cautiously trying out various limbs. Everything sort of worked. Not interment after all. He was lying across a car seat, his torso half hanging off so his nose was jammed firmly into the rank-smelling floorboards on the rider’s side.

He twisted and turned, squirmed and churned, finally got upright on the seat, panting and disheveled. Early-morning light stabbed at his bleeding eyes.

His car seat. In a parking lot behind a bar in Eureka.

O’B had a sudden almost superstitious wave of dread. Dan Kearny was right. Time for him to quit drinking. Not just cut down, quit. He wasn’t really blacking out yet, but he was passing out — to wake up disoriented and with terrible dreams.

And he stank of booze and sweat and stale clothes, and of things unmentionable. He needed coffee. And a steam room. There had to be a steam room somewhere in Eureka.

And after a couple of hours of steam, some dry toast.

At least it had quit raining. O’B shuddered on the cold car seat in the dawn light. It was all coming back to him. Blow Me Baby. Instruments. REPOSSESS ON SIGHT. And he had awakened with an idea. But first, he had to try and locate those truck-trailer tires to get the Great White Father off his back.

For Dan Kearny, the Great White Father, king of the repomen, getting lost was about as likely as Jerry Rice catching a bullet from Steve Young on a slant pattern and then running for the wrong end zone. But it had happened.

Lost, even worse, in highly civilized Kent Woodlands while trying to find 246 Charing Cross Road. When he finally took the turnaround in front of the hulking mansion, Giselle’s Corsica was parked behind a Mercedes that had been machine-gunned to death. There were also a black special-order Continental stretch limo, a sporty little red Porsche 911 Turbo 3.6 coupe that went for a cool hundred grand, and two cop cars, new and shiny white, with TWIN CITIES POLICE under a pastel crest on the door.

He slammed his own door harder than was strictly necessary as Giselle came down the wide wooden verandah-style front steps of the mansion. He told her grumpily, “There was a guard on the gate who said my car was a piece of tin—”

“Hologram,” said Giselle.

“Dressed like somebody in a Viennese operetta—”

“The guard is a hologram, Dan. He isn’t real. He’s just intersecting beams of light.”

“Beams of light?”

Giselle was slowly walking him toward the house. He sighed. The world was passing him by. Beams of light.

“You said on the phone the wife has identified the assailant as Paul’s partner, Frank Nugent. You really didn’t have to get me out here at all, did you? You just wanted to—”

“Mrs. Rochement wanted to meet you,” said Giselle. After a significant pause, she added, “Our client. Remember? Client?”

“Yeah. But the cops’ll pick up this Nugent character and that’ll be the end of the case.”

“End of the case?” Giselle stopped dead. “I checked the downstairs windows. We found one open that I knew we locked before we settled in. I told you on the phone our coffee had been doped. This was an inside job for sure.”

“Where’d you get the coffee?”

Her voice was significant. “Inga.”

“Terrif. She puts doped coffee in your thermos bottles so her ex-boyfriend can sneak in and kill her husband — thus giving him a fortune but doing her out of one — then she screams when he’s about to do it, alerting the house and saving her husband’s life. Then she rats the boyfriend out, assuring he’ll go to the slam for attempted murder. A brilliant plot.”

“I never said she was a rocket scientist. And I told you the case was complicated.”

“You’re telling me that somebody else doped the coffee before she put it in the thermos?”

“No. I’m telling you that she doesn’t love her husband.”

“There’s a hot clue. If not loving your husband was a crime, half the wives in the Bay Area would be in Tehachapi.”

Kearny spoke of wives with surprising bitterness just as Paul and Inga appeared at the head of the front stairs. Paul was super-nerd again, although his eyes darted about in a rather haunted manner. Inga wore jeans and a man-tailored white shirt and an Anne Klein tweed jacket, and clung to her husband as if her life depended on not losing contact with him.

“Yeah,” said Kearny softly, “hates his guts.”

“That’s just for show. She doesn’t love him, Dan’l. A woman can tell these things.”

She introduced him to the loving couple. Paul looked starstruck. “The Old Man!” he exclaimed in excitement; then the Bogart lisp again. “ ‘The Old Man’s grandfatherly face was as attentive as always, and his smile as politely interested’—”

“Old man? Grandfatherly face?” Kearny’s face was ominous.

“The Old Man is head of the Continental Detective Agency,” said Paul, as if that were an explanation.

“Paul is a pop-culture-hard-boiled-private-eye-story kind of guy,” said Giselle hurriedly. “He’s quoting from one of Hammett’s Continental Op stories.”

Kearny felt the first faint stirrings of sympathy for Giselle despite her having dragged him out here with a hangover. If she had to put up with this fruitcake all day long...

One of the two young, upstanding, and handsome uniformed policemen who had been waiting beside the parked cruisers cleared his throat.

“Ah... Mr. Rochemont? Mrs. Rochemont? We’ve spoken with the detectives down at the station. They will be up here about noon to take your statements, if that’s all right. Of course if you’d rather we take you down to the station and return you afterwards, we’d be glad to, but—”

“The cop house,” said Paul. “Boss.”

Inga had begun to look interested. “I’ll take my own car. I’m really upset by all this. Once I give my statement I’ll go shopping for a new dress for the party.”

“What party?” demanded Kearny, the detective in him instantly alert. They were, after all, on a security detail.

A woman’s voice said, “At the Fort Mason Officers Club on Saturday after all the papers have been signed.” Bernardine and Ken had appeared at the head of the stairs. Bernardine added, “To celebrate Paul’s sale to the conglomerate.”

“You know anything about this?” Kearny growled at Giselle.

“First I’d heard.” She gestured. “Mrs. Rochemont, Mr. Dan Kearny, head of DKA.”

Bernardine inclined her head, extended her hand. “You have an excellent employee in Mr. Warren.”

He shook Bernardine’s hand. It was cold and angular and alive, like a fresh-caught surf fish. Her grip was strong. This was the woman Stan the Man wanted to keep happy on the trust department’s behalf. She was also the woman, according to Giselle, who had developed some sort of passion for Ken Warren. The dither at the edges of her coldness didn’t fool him for an instant. She was hard as nails underneath, especially, from what Giselle had said, when something or someone threatened her son.

Paul said excitedly to the cops, “I’m riding with the Old Man down to the station.”

“Now just a minute—”

But Bernardine interrupted Kearny imperiously. “And Mr. Warren and I shall go in the limousine,” She raised her voice slightly. “Oscar.”

A uniformed chauffeur with a frozen face and downturned mouth appeared and crossed quickly to the long limo fresh-washed with water still glinting in the morning sunshine. His uniform was gray, with tightly creased leggings, a priest’s collar on the jacket, a peaked cap, and a Sam Browne belt. No holster, no gun, Kearny was glad to see, unless he was packing something under his arm. Nothing would surprise him here in cuckooland.

Oscar said, “The limo is ready, Mrs. Rochemont.”

“I’ll take my car, too,” said Giselle significantly, with a pointed look after Inga.

Paul leaped into the rider’s seat of Kearny’s car, with all the eagerness of a puppy perhaps not yet fully housebroken.

“I hope he doesn’t do something on the upholstery before I get him down to Larkspur.”

“Dan,” said Giselle reprovingly.

Ken Warren was escorting Bernardine to the limousine with the look on his face of a man eating a lemon. Since the reason all of them were there was to keep Stan Groner happy, Kearny decided that the only way Stan could repay DKA was with a bevy of delinquent auto recovery assignments.

Going to his car, Kearny thought, What was the Karen Marshall/Eddie Graff connection revolving around Stan? What had Marshall really been looking for when she had sicced Stan — and incidentally Kearny — onto ex-boyfriend Eddie?

Trin Morales felt uneasy skulking down the hallways of the massive old shadowy main library at Larkin and McAllister in the Civic Center, designed by George Kelham in 1916 to match in scale the City Hall built a year earlier across the square. The library held unbelievable stores of knowledge he didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand — in itself irritating as hell.

The Latina civil servant in charge of the dim, quiet microfilm room that smelled of dust and furniture polish showed him how to index information and get the microfilmed newspapers he wanted delivered to the desk. She showed him how to thread the microfilm through the reader, how to adjust the focus.

Puta. He didn’t like women who knew more than he did. He especially didn’t like Latina women who knew more than he did. But she had a round pretty face and a nicely rounded figure beneath her fuzzy sweater and trim skirt and costume jewelry.

“Hey, chica, wha’chew doin’ after work tonight?” He spoke his English in a deliberately slurred Mexican accent, using his breathy, jovial manner to imply an intimacy that didn’t exist.

She answered him very formally, in Spanish, “Sir, I am a married woman.”

“Yeah? So what?”

Her voice in English was cold indeed. “So rewind the microfilms before you return them to the desk. And put them in their boxes also.”

“What happens I don’t, chica?”

“I get a guard and have you ejected.”

“Big deal.”

At the next reader was a very skinny, very Anglo old man in a heavy topcoat who reeked of sweat and vomit and cheap wine. Long dirty white hair, long filthy white beard, deep-sunk eyes, aquiline nose. Slumped down in front of the reader, long skinny legs thrust out under the table. Dead asleep and snoring. Why wasn’t she calling the guard to eject that old dung heap?

Dried-up broad, probably 35 goddam years old. Not like the little wetbacks he picked up in the Mission District. Just putting her on anyway. Wouldn’t screw her with Ballard’s dick.

For the first time in his life, Trin Morales wished he had paid attention to politics. He had no handle on Rick Kiely. But since he knew Kiely had run unopposed in last June’s Democratic primary, then had beaten his Republican opponent roundly for reelection to the Assembly last November, most background pieces on him probably would have run between July and the election.

He was looking for some connection between Kiely and the dead union guy, Petlaroc, that he could exploit by acting as if he knew more than he did when going up against Kiely.

He quickly learned which sections of the Chronicle carried the political stuff and caught on that the editorial page often had information not found anywhere else because editorial writers had to do their homework. An hour later, in an editorial praising Kiely, Morales got his connection.

Kiely, gushed the piece, was one politician who understood the needs and problems of the workingman, because he was a long-standing member of Culinary Workers Local 3, a bartender, even though he’d studied law at Golden Gate University, passed the bar on his first try, and had opened his own law office.

Kiely and Petlaroc, members of the same union, bartenders at the same time. He had his connection. Petlaroc obviously had dirt on Kiely, needed physical evidence, had hired Morales at third hand to go into the Kiely mansion and find the most likely places that such dirt might be hidden. But when the maid told him about Morales, Kiely’d neutralized Morales with the arrest and had hired someone to blow Petlaroc away.

Morales had no proof, but he could make insinuations just heavy enough to make Kiely uneasy, but not quite heavy enough to make him murderous. He kept digging, finally went up to the desk where the Latina was working. Midday sun through the tall windows laid a pale sash of bullion across her body and the worn wooden desktop. He was very polite this time.

“Señora, can you tell me where the men’s room is?”

“Yes. Down the hall beside the elevators.”

“Thank you very much. Is it all right if I leave my films on the table until I come back?”

“Certainly.”

He left the room and the building, leaving behind the final microfilm in the reader, the lights on, the last films he’d called for scattered around the table unboxed. Not much, but enough to be called a victory over her.