Contract Null & Void

Chapter Twelve

“Got you, you mother!”

O’Bannon unconsciously hunched forward behind the wheel of his company Corolla. He started the engine and waited as the huge eighteen-wheeler truck-trailer rig came out of Leppek Court just beyond the fire station to turn west on Eureka’s Herrick Road.

“Heading for the freeway,” muttered O’B.

After his steam and a gallon of coffee, he had gone to stake out the house he’d taken Don Nordstrom to after they’d gotten drunk together following the musical-saw fiasco. Three hours later Nordstrom had driven off in his battered Ford Escort wagon, O’B behind him. Down here at the south end of Eureka had been the truck-trailer rig, stashed away on a dead-end street. Fully loaded and ready to go. Maybe somebody was after the rig just like O’B was after the rig’s eighteen tires.

They took the southbound on-ramp to the Redwood Highway. O’B dawdled along behind with seven cars between. There were high clouds and watery sunlight; on O’B’s right was Humboldt Bay with its National Wildlife Refuge and the long thin peninsula separated from the mainland like a forefinger opened out from the rest of the hand. Gulls swooped and squawked over the dark bumpy water in which sleek-headed seals bobbed like brown crab apples in autumn cider.

O’B had scant eye for beauty. He was hung over and with a very large problem: how to get those tires. The semi’s load of cinched-down redwood logs could be going halfway back to San Francisco; he might not even stop long enough to give O’B a chance at the tires. O’B had too many other cases to work for that kind of long shot.

But at the little logging town of Fortuna, the semi’s turn signals went on and Nordstrom took an off-ramp with a green sign bearing the symbols for gas (a pump in silhouette), food (a fork in silhouette), and lodging (a bed in silhouette). Neither the gas station, this close to Eureka, nor the motel, at one in the afternoon, made sense. So it was probably lunch.

Sure enough, Nordstrom swung the semi into the blacktopped lot of a diner called Trucker’s Best Eats. Behind Trucker’s Best Eats was a motel called Trucker’s Best Sleep, and beside the café, separated by a weedy field and a low fence, was a service station called Trucker’s Best Gas.

Nordstrom pulled his truck-trailer rig around to the side where it was well away from the marked-out car parking slots and hidden from the road. O’B stopped fifty feet from the semi, beside the low dilapidated fence that separated the café’s parking area from the weedy lot and the adjacent gas station.

The beefy trucker was just swinging down from his cab. He rammed his cowboy hat low on his head, hitched his jeans up under his beer belly, and disappeared around the front of the truck. While Nordstrom was getting some Trucker’s Best Eats, maybe O’B could just peek into the semi’s cab...

Screened from the coffee shop, O’B stepped up on the running board and the stair step above it to take his peek. The Rottweiler would probably be curled up on...

But as his eyes cleared the window frame, a huge square head with a roaring, contorted face full of teeth hit the other side of the glass. O’B almost fell off the step, only his grasp on the rearview mirror bracket saving him. The Rottweiler smashed himself against the glass again, slavering and snapping.

O’B dropped to the ground, walked quickly back to his own car, got in, and slid down behind the wheel. When nobody had appeared for long enough, he raised his head above the lower edge of the window; the Rottweiler was still at his window, but just watching now, upper lip pulled back from over yellow fangs on one side in a lemme-at-’im lemme-at-’im Rottweiler kind of sneer.

His arms would be gone to the elbow and the Rottweiler would be wearing his face before he could get the ignition lock out from under the dashboard to replace it with one of his own.

So much for Plan A.

O’B thought cheerfully, On to Plan B.

O’B thought mournfully, There isn’t any Plan B.

O’B thought constructively, How about Plan C? Plan C was to make it up as you went along.

Maybe Plan D should be some coffee and maybe something to eat in Trucker’s Best Eats. Yeah. Good one. He’d just sit here for a few minutes, enjoy nature, let his pulse get back into the low hundreds, then go in and contemplate what sort of nifty he could pull that would make up for waking up drunk in his car at six in the morning.

Getting to bed on his too-short couch at six in the morning had left Ballard feeling sleep-deprived when he woke just at 11:00 A.M. Somehow he’d fallen off onto the floor. He shook the coffeepot, smelled it. Christ! Kearny had done something indescribably nasty in it. He scrubbed it out, wrapped a towel around his middle, and went to get a quick shower while the kettle was bringing cold fresh water to the boil.

In the hallway he passed Takoko Togawa, the tiny vivid Japanese exchange student in the back apartment, on whose virtue he had waged a gentle if unsuccessful campaign during her two years as a student at S.F. State. Although she was carrying a stack of books and folders that probably outweighed her ninety pounds, she stopped him with the wide, rather goofy grin that made her so uniquely attractive.

“I no realize you one of those,” she lilted musically.

“One of what?”

“Boy-girl.” She did something with the angle of her head and tension in her wrist that suddenly made her unmistakably gay. “For tough-looking man sleep in your bed.”

“For Chrissake, Takoko, he’s my boss’ Just sleeping here for a couple of nights because his wife...” He stopped and made the universal shrug of the male in the face of incomprehensible female intransigence. “She threw him out.”

“She not get enough,” said Takoko wisely.

“You know Dan’s wife?” demanded Ballard in amazement.

She shook her head and giggled merrily. “This morning he come from shower, show me what he’s got.”

“Dan?” demanded a scandalized Ballard.

“His towel fall off.”

“Oh.” Ballard suddenly found himself asking, “So, ah... how... I mean... ah, er... ah, what’s he got?”

“Not much.” She gave another peal of laughter and was gone down the hall. In her own doorway, she paused after unlocking the door, looked back over her shoulder at Larry with dark, slanted, mischievous eyes. “Maybe could make something of it. He need Japonee girr walk on his back, loosen him up.”

“You volunteering?” asked Ballard with a completely nonsensical little twinge of jealousy.

She put her free hand up over her mouth and giggled, said, “Maybe fo you,” then was through the door and into her apartment.

Behind his own door the teakettle was singing. He felt like singing himself: maybe fo you. Hey, suddenly there were a lot of beautiful women potentially in his life. Beverly. Amalia. And now Takoko. He didn’t count Giselle.

Somehow their brief spurt of unconsummated passion and jealousy had dissipated during last year’s great Gypsy hunt when they had cooperated on getting the pink 1958 Cadillac convertible the Gypsy King said he wanted to be buried in. Giselle had gone back to being, next to Bart, his best friend.

Giselle decided that Inga drove as badly as she seemed to do everything else. After the turn into Magnolia Avenue from Woodland, she rode the pedal constantly, her brake lights almost continually flashing. Giselle hung back, hoping that Inga would do something — like not going to the police station — that would make her complicity in last night’s attack as obvious to Kearny as it was to her.

Why was she so sure Inga was mixed up in it? Because she’d had the best chance at drugging their coffee? Or because she was maybe just a little too scatterbrained, too apparently dim, to be true? Inga stayed on Magnolia all the way to Doherty Drive, docilely turned in, and stopped beside the Twin Cities police station on the edge of Piper Park.

Giselle drove a quarter mile down the road to the big Redwood High School complex, past a sign with a black and yellow abstract tree painted on it that showed the school hadn’t yet achieved its $100,000 fund-raising goal. If she arrived at the police station right after Inga it would be a bit too obvious that she had been following the zippy little Porsche.

Instead, she looped around a couple of times through the school’s crowded parking lot — this being Marin, most kids old enough to have their licenses drove their own cars. Would she ever get back to the teaching her master’s degree in English had prepared her for? Probably not. Mountains of papers to be graded versus mountains of reports to be filed. She’d take the reports — especially now that she got a chance to generate some of them herself in the field.

She drove back to the police station, parked and locked behind Inga’s car under the ONE-HOUR PARKING sign, and went inside. Inga was standing in the vestibule beside a hulking soft-drink machine, looking confused. Three of the six choices were covered with paper inserts that had SPRITE hand-lettered on them.

“Somebody likes Sprite a lot,” said Giselle.

“I don’t get it,” said Inga. “Who’s gonna let us in?”

Indeed, the reception window to their left was open but unattended; directly ahead of them was a door marked OFFICIAL PERSONNEL ONLY. Giselle opened it and stuck in her head.

“Honey,” she yelled, “I’m home!”

That brought them a uniformed cop in a hurry.

Bernardine seemed to be sitting closer to Ken on the opulent crushed leather seat than when the limo had left the estate. Was anybody in this goddam household not a nut?

“You know, Kenny,” said Bernardine in an almost simpering voice, “that the client-detective relationship between us will end when the police apprehend Frank Nugent. Then we will be free of professional restraints.” She put her hand on his knee. “I must admit that you are just the sort of strong, silent, rugged, experienced man that I find... exciting...”

Ken had a sudden inspiration, that he was too worried about her son to think of anything else; he tried it, in shorthand.

“Hnyour hnson. Hnworryd.”

She got it. She squeezed his knee. “That’s just what I should expect from a man of your caliber.”

Oscar parked the limo under the big NO PARKING sign in front of the low brown nondescript police station off Doherty Drive a quarter mile or so before the sprawling Redwood High complex. The rest of the cars were there before them.

Chief of Police Ernie Rowan was a tall, bulky man who in his younger days probably had been hard and tough and athletic. But years behind the captain’s desk of a suburban police department in wealthy Marin County had reddened his face with good living, grayed his hair, opened his belt a few notches. Especially after a public relations lunch at, say Salute in San Rafael or the Lark Creek Inn just up the road in Larkspur.

Ernie Rowan was a good cop and a good investigator, adept at dealing with wealthy Marinites over the years who felt they — and especially their children — were not bound by the same rules as, say, Latinos from the Canal District. But right now his face wore a barely concealed look of savage frustration.

He let his eyes sweep over the witnesses assembled in his rather plush office: the three Rochemonts, wealthy and powerful in the community, their chauffeur, and as if that wasn’t enough, a trio of goddam private eyes from across the bridge.

He said, with great control, “I’m having a little trouble here getting a picture of what happened last night.”

Paul snarled in his Bogart voice, “What’re you birds suckin’ around here for? Tell me or get out!”

Rowan cleared his throat. Old man Rochemont had owned half of Larkspur when the flats where the freeway now was had been grazing land for herds of fat Jerseys and Guernseys. Moo.

“That’s what I mean,” he said. “I don’t quite know” — his face darkened, his voice deepened as he almost lost it — “what the fu — pardon me, what the hell you’re talking about.”

The tall elegant blond P.I. said with great precision, as if reading a report, “Mr. Warren and I had been assigned security detail at the Rochemont home after the vandalism of Mr. Paul Rochemont’s automobile. We set up our post in the living room. We checked the door and windows after midnight. At two A.M. we heard screams. When we arrived upstairs, we saw an assailant going out the second-floor window of Mr. Rochemont’s bedroom.”

“Get a good look at the guy?”

“No.”

Rowan switched his piercing eyes on Ken Warren. “You?”

Warren shook his head without answering. Rowan could have stuck his thumb into the big guy’s eye without repercussion, the man was in a low income bracket, but what was the use? He hadn’t been that kind of cop for a lot of years; indeed, it was to stop being that sort of cop that he had moved to the suburbs after his first kid had been born.

So he said mildly, “What happened to all the electronic security at the estate? I understood it is state-of-the-art.”

Paul’s imitation Bogart voice said, “Well, I know where I stand now. Sorry I got up on my hind legs, boys, but you fellows tryin’ to rope me made me nervous...”

It seemed to have made Inga nervous also. She surged to her feet. “Can I go now? I’ve told you everything I know.”

“Indeed you have,” said Rowan in sugary tones. “You have identified the assailant as your husband’s business partner, Frank Nugent. We’ve got Mr. Nugent in the computer and on the air right now.” When she didn’t react, he waved a gentle hand. “Thank you, Mrs. Rochemont. You may go now.”

The elegant blonde was on her feet also.

“Until Nugent is found, we’ll still be on security at the estate. You can reach me there when you have my statement printed up ready for signature.”

Rowan wished he had one of those in his office. He wiped his brow with a Kleenex from the box on the desk and looked at Ken. “You haven’t done too much talking, Mr. Warren. In fact, you haven’t uttered a single goddam word. How about—”

“Mr. Warren is acting as my personal security while this madman is loose,” said Bernardine. She was busy gathering gloves and hat. “You need no statement from me, since I entered my son’s bedroom after Nugent had already gone out the window, therefore you need no statement from Mr. Warren.” She gestured at Warren, said, “Come, Kenny,” and swept out of the office.

Ken waited for the cop to say something, and when Rowan didn’t, got to his feet, shambled bearlike toward the door, then stopped in front of Kearny, staring down at him. Dan nodded.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “You aren’t going to be put out to stud, not even for old DK and A.”

“Enhackly,” said Ken with force, and went out the door.

There was a poignant moment of silence after he was gone, then Rowan said, “I didn’t quite get that.”

“He said, ‘Exactly.’”

Rowan nodded. “Speech impediment?”

“Best goddam carhawk in the business.”

“He’s got the build for it,” sighed Rowan. It was being a long morning. He looked at Paul. “I’d like a statement from you, but I guess you got other things on your mind, right?”

“I was asleep,” said Paul in a startlingly normal voice. “I didn’t see anything except that ax or whatever it was coming down at me. I was so scared I wet myself. After that I just kept my eyes shut and kept peeing until Inga quit screaming.”

Rowan nodded, said brightly, “Then I guess that just about covers it, doesn’t it?” He gestured at the door. “Why don’t you wait out in the squad room, Mr. Rochemont, while I have a word with Mr. Kearny?”

“Boss,” said Paul, and departed.

Rowan and Kearny stared at one another across the chief’s desk. Kearny clapped a few times, softly, in acknowledgment of the chief’s forbearance. Rowan chuckled, shook his head. “What the hell ever happened to good old police brutality?”

“I can remember when the Yankees used to win the pennant all the time, too.”

Rowan gestured at the door. “I think young Master Paul maybe needs his brakes relined.”

“What he’s got in his head is worth half a billion bucks to somebody,” said Kearny.

“Maybe that’s my point.” Rowan bit the end off a cigar, held it up with raised eyebrows. Kearny shook his head. Rowan lit up. “Against the law in public buildings these days,” he said as he turned the cigar to get it burning properly, and puffed out fragrant clouds of smoke. “I take certain liberties.” He leaned back in his chair and waved a hand. “As one professional to another, why don’t you just tell me what the fuck is going on?”

Kearny lit up, and, as one professional to another, told Rowan what sounded like the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And if Rowan believed that, Kearny had this wonderful building site a few miles west of the Golden Gate...