Contract Null & Void

Chapter Thirteen

Trucker’s Best Eats had chrome and vinyl stools at a counter that went down to the left and around a corner. Plenty of six-person booths and at least a dozen tables. O’B found a seat halfway down the counter, where he could see the rest of the room. The place was still half-full with tourists and truckers just passing through, and locals dawdling over that last cup of coffee before getting back to work.

Nordstrom was in the furthest booth, the one closest to the hallway to the rest rooms and the side door; he could see his truck-trailer rig by just looking out his window. He wasn’t looking, instead was tucking into a platter of hot, steaming biscuits, a chicken-fried steak big as a manhole cover, and a mound of mashed potatoes the size of a small van drowned in a lake of thick pale gravy. Truck drivers’ health food.

O’B thought he could maybe manage black coffee and a glass of tepid water to wash down his aspirin.

Hovering near Nordstrom was a straw-blond waitress barely out of her teens — in fact, she was standing across from him with one knee on the red vinyl seat, laughing at something he was rumbling at her. The breasts beneath her trim waitress uniform were too heavy for her narrow hips and thin thighs.

She had a long pretty horse face and a wide mouth full of very white teeth and very pink bubble gum. Bazooka, probably; did they still have the god-awful little comic strip wrapped around the pink gum dusty with confectioners’ sugar? Periodically she stopped laughing to blow a bubble, snap it with her teeth, chomp it back into her mouth.

“What’ll it be, Red?”

O’B turned to the wide, grinning waitress who was pouring hot coffee into his cup from the other side of the counter. Her hair, piled up on top of her head with a little starched waitress cap perched atop it, was the flame-red color O’B’s had been before he’d started going gray.

He said with a laugh, “Pot calling the kettle red. Red.”

“And it’s real.” She glanced around and leaned closer to add, “All the way down.”

“Me too,” said O’B immodestly, and they both laughed again.

Hers was a hearty bark that came from the back of her throat, honest and uninhibited. A wedding ring glinted on her left hand, but her flirting was automatic and without thought.

O’B was suddenly hungry. “What’s good, Red?”

“You’re talking lifetime commitment, me. You’re talking lunch, chicken potpie with cherry pie a la mode for afterwards.”

“Way I feel, lifetime is maybe twenty minutes max.” He was getting his little bottle of aspirin out of his jacket pocket. “So for now, water. No ice. Then both pies.”

“Bad boy last night, Red?”

“Bad boy every night, Red.”

Chuckling, she churned her ample hips away down the counter, comfortably sure O’B’s eyes would be following their action. She hung his check on the round metal carousel the cooks could turn to see what the customer had ordered, then came back with O’B’s tap water. She leaned over the counter, giving him a visual sample of the charms the crisscross front of her waitress uniform did a bad job of hiding.

“Just for you, Red.”

“Thanks.” O’B tossed four aspirin into his mouth, slugged back the water, set the empty glass on the table, let his eyes wander back to the well-filled V of her blouse. “I needed that.”

She gave a throaty chuckle. “I bet you still do.”

“Hey, how about some more coffee down here?”

She straightened languidly, turned to get the pot off the hot plate. “Don’t go away, Red.”

“I’m glued to my seat.”

She dropped her eyes toward his lap to make sexual innuendo of his line, gave a bellow of laughter, and slopped coffee into the cup of the irate customer down the counter. O’B turned on his stool to check out Nordstrom.

The straw-haired waitress had gotten him some of the cherry pie a la mode and was bringing his check up to the counter. She looked a little flushed. She stopped beside the redheaded waitress O’B had been flirting with, spoke in a low voice.

“Charlene, you gotta cover for me for an hour.”

“He’s gonna get you fired and then he’ll just dump you.”

“I won’t get fired. Not if you cover for me. And he won’t dump me. Just this once more, Charlene?” Her eyes were pleading; O’B realized it was a routine the two waitresses went through regularly. “Pretty please?”

Charlene relented, as both women knew she would.

“Okay, LuElla. But just an hour. Last Friday it was closer to two.”

LuElla giggled. “You know how it is, Charlene.” She leaned closer. “With me, Don is just a big old ragin’ bull!”

One of the cooks hit the little handbell that signified O’B’s order was ready. Charlene went down the counter on her black crepe-soled waitress shoes to get it. Nordstrom was out of his booth and slipping out the side door. He turned right and out of sight. Toward Trucker’s Best Sleep.

As Charlene came back with the chicken potpie, LuElla sidled past as if on her way to the ladies’ room, then also slipped out the side door. Charlene set down O’B’s lunch.

“Romance rears its ugly head.”

“Ugly is right,” she said. “LuElla isn’t but twenty, her eyes roll up into her head and her knees go weak every time that s.o.b. lays a hand on her. She thinks she loves him.”

“What does he think?”

“He thinks he’s a great lay. Couple of weeks ago, Charlene was off sick and he got me in the hallway by the rest rooms, stuck his hand up under my skirt.”

“What happened?”

“I had me an abusive husband for a couple years, Red, I learned all the tricks.” She gave a sudden burst of her infectious laughter. “Lover boy was walking kind of funny for a week or so, he don’t give me no more trouble. Oh, he keeps threatening me with that Rottweiler of his, but I don’t pay him any mind.” She leaned close again. “You seem awful interested in friend Don.”

“He stops off to see LuElla sort of regular-like?”

“Every Wednesday and Friday, like clockwork. He’s got a regular run for Tall Timber Logging up in Eureka. Sees her when he’s takin’ a load of logs down to Santa Rosa on Wednesday, like today, sees her when he’s coming back up on Friday.”

“What time he usually get here on Friday?”

“Two, three in the afternoon.”

O’B jerked his head in the direction of the motel. “They always over there for an hour?”

“You planning something nasty for him?” Her face had taken on a calculating look.

“It won’t make him piss blood for a week, but yeah, middling nasty,” admitted O’B.

“How much time you need?”

“Two hours would be better than one.”

“You got it, Red. I’ll just tell LuElla I’ll cover for them as long as she wants.”

O’B believed she would give him the time he needed, so he looped into Fortuna and made certain arrangements for Friday afternoon. Then he headed back toward the freeway. Maybe enough time to go out on the longbed pickup truck that was REPO ON SIGHT in the boonies on Fallen Tree Road. At least he could find out if the guy had skipped or not.

Heading back north on the Redwood Highway, he realized he was singing along with the shitkicker music on the radio. His hangover had finally dissipated. By six o’clock tonight he’d be ready to take on the world.

Chief Ernie Rowan regretfully stuck the butt of his cigar in the eye of the gap-toothed barefoot hobo that decorated the center of his big ceramic ashtray. He gestured at the tramp.

“Some days, like today...”

“I know what you mean,” said Kearny.

Rowan stood, went to open the window that looked out on a bright green swatch of Piper Park, let out the smoke. Some kids were chasing a red and white soft soccer-size ball in the sunshine, their voices high and sweet and clear as a Mozart sonata. A black and white springer ran among them, yipping with unfettered joy. For a moment, both men were frozen by the scene.

Rowan came back, sighed. “Dogs aren’t allowed in the park, but...” He shrugged. “I appreciate your frankness, Mr. Kearny. You didn’t have to tell me everything you did; in fact you didn’t have to tell me a damned thing. But having the background sure makes it easier to deal with Mrs. Rochemont.”

“I get the feeling that lady can stop bullets with her teeth,” said Kearny.

Rowan chuckled. “In southern Marin, anyway, but you said it, I didn’t. I got to operate in this town.”

“So do I, so I always cooperate with the police.” Kearny said it with a straight face, then to Rowan’s sourly disbelieving grin, added, “When it suits my interests, anyway.”

“That I believe,” said Rowan.

Rowan knew nothing of the Stan Kroner/Karen Marshall/Eddie Graff triangle; Kearny hadn’t mentioned it because he didn’t like telling cops his business and he didn’t like serial coincidences. One: Karen Marshall meeting old friend Stan at II Fornaio (run a check on Karen). Two: Stan not knowing her (he didn’t know he didn’t, but Dan was sure of it). Three: Stan the reason DKA was mixed up with the Rochemonts.

“I’d better go collect young Mr. Paul,” Kearny said to Rowan as the chief opened the door for him. “Until you drop a rock on Nugent he’s technically at risk.”

“We’ll get Nugent — he’s a computer guy, not a hit man.”

They shook hands. Kearny had a ghost of an idea chasing itself around inside his brain, but it was like Nugent’s cigar smoke: there one instant, gone the next. He was suddenly impatient to get Paul safely to the estate with its array of alarms and get back to the city. But the squad room was empty except for an earnest-seeming kid in uniform, who looked two years out of high school, manning the reception desk.

“Paul in the men’s room?”

The kid turned around from his keyboard. “The dweeb?”

“You’d better not let the chief hear you call him a dweeb. His name is Paul Rochemont.”

“He’s a Rochemont?” The cop looked suddenly uncomfortable. “He, ah, got a phone call and took off. Sir.”

“Phone call? Who from? Took off? Where? How?” barked a suddenly steely Kearny.

“From Prestige Motors — that’s the Mercedes dealership in San Rafael.”

“How the hell did he leave? He didn’t have a car.”

“Taxi.”

“Call him at the dealership, tell him to stay put until I get there.”

Larry Ballard parked on Golden Gate Ave, fed the meter two quarters, went into the union headquarters in hopes of talking with Amalia again. Was it only twenty-four hours ago they had met? It seemed like a week. Without sleep. He hadn’t even had a chance to think of the implications of what Bart had told him last night — that it was Petrock who had hired him to punch out Petrock. It made as much sense as a Tarantino movie.

Just inside the door to Local 3, in a sad-looking potted palmetto, a spider had hung her web between several fronds. The men and women on benches along the wall looked sad and unattended, too, as if they’d been waiting a long time for someone to talk to them.

Beyond the zombies was a partitioned office with four of the kind of windows you have at a theater, with a little gouged-out place underneath to shove money or papers through. Here, it would be money for union dues.

Only one of the windows was open. Behind it on a stool was a lanky man with dusty hair and a white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. His forearms did not look strong enough to balance a tray of food or drinks. He was listening to a joke being told in the office beyond him. His name plaque read BURNETT SEBASTIAN.

“Pardon me,” said Ballard.

Sebastian continued to listen to the joke until the punch line, “A refrigerator doesn’t fart when you take out the meat,” as Ballard said again, “Pardon me.”

The lanky man finally decided to notice him. The eyes didn’t fit the rather pleasant face: they were mean and watchful the way a boar hog’s eyes are mean and watchful when he thinks he can maybe get a tusk into your calf.

“Yeah?”

“Amalia Pelotti, please.”

“Amalia. Yeah. You have an appointment?”

Ballard didn’t. “Yes.”

Sebastian was looking down at a blotter on the desk with the month laid out on it. “I don’t see it here.”

“The appointment isn’t with you.”

With ill grace, Sebastian said, “I’ll see if she’s in.”

He left the window, went out a side door to a long hallway stretching parallel to Golden Gate past a rabbit warren of mismatched offices and partitions. On silent rubber repoman’s soles, Ballard followed him to a small messy littered office with a desk and two chairs and a trestle table piled high with union literature. From the lingering cigarette smell but no ashtray it was the office of a closet smoker. Amalia, all right.

The tall gawky union man whirled around angrily when he realized Ballard was right behind him.

“Union premises are off limits to nonmembers,” he snapped.

Ballard said, “Do you think Ms. Pelotti might be on the picket lines at the St. Mark?”

Sebastian sniffed an outraged bureaucrat’s sniff. “She’s supposed to be here during work hours.”

Ballard sat down in the visitor’s chair. “I’ll wait.”

“You will not.” He grabbed for the telephone. Ballard could picture three-hundred-pound union goons jumping up and down on his spine. He slouched his way out of the chair again.

“I will not,” he agreed.

At the corridor, he turned left, away from the front office toward the right-angle corridor leading to Golden Gate Ave. The walls were of raw Sheetrock, not even taped, but a couple of holes already had been kicked in them. There was trash on the worn linoleum floor.

The street door was the kind that could be opened from the inside by pushing a bar, but not from the outside without a key. He emerged directly across the sidewalk from his parked car. A heavyset Latino, his back to Ballard, had his hands cupped against the window to peer inside.

“Lose something?” asked Ballard pleasantly.

Trin Morales straightened up and turned. “Thought it was your car, shithead,” he said.

“Now you’re sure.”

“Hey, you got an informant, anybody like that around here?”

“I know someone,” Ballard admitted. “You’re after what?”

Morales shrugged. “Maybe a little union history, like?”

Ballard came closer, got confidential. “Listen, my source is really good. And a really nice guy. In fact, he’s on the desk right now. Name of Burnett Sebastian.”

“Hey, thanks,” said Morales in surprise. “I owe you.”

As Morales went off toward the union’s office, Ballard got out of there before Trin discovered just what he was going to owe Larry after talking with Sebastian.