Contract Null & Void

Chapter Eighteen

Larry and Amalia were full of sausage pizza and a pitcher of beer when they finally got to Danny’s apartment at 666 35th Avenue, on the north, Richmond, side of Golden Gate Park. He slanted his car up across the sidewalk, they got out. At the locked under-the-building garage, he cupped his hands to peer in, turned away nodding.

“That’s a start,” he said with obscure satisfaction.

It was a clear chilly spring night; they could see their breaths. Amalia looked up at the apartment house, said in sepulchral tones, “Six-six-six is the devil’s number.”

“We’ll chance it.”

There were no lights on in Danny’s apartment on the second floor of the tall narrow stucco row house; Ballard didn’t even bother with the intercom outside the black wrought-iron gate. Instead, he huddled in front of it, his arm moved, the lock’s tongue clicked back, and he swung the gate wide.

“Hey, I’m impressed!” exclaimed Amalia. Ballard showed her his hand with a pair of keys in it. “Shit, another idol shattered, another dream turned to smoke.” Then she slapped his shoulder. “I bet you got those keys from Beverly.”

Ballard lied glibly. “I water his plants when he’s away.”

He checked the mailbox, then led the way up to Danny’s landing. The stairs continued on to the apartment above, where the Chinese landlady lived.

“Holy shit!” exclaimed Amalia.

Danny’s apartment had been tossed by people who didn’t care if anyone knew it or not. The living room faced the street with the kitchen behind it, separated by a counter. Newspapers and magazines had been thrown all over the place, all cabinets opened and their contents strewn around the room. The couch had been overturned, but not the chrome and canvas bucket chairs.

“Pros,” said Ballard, “tossed it during the day.”

“How do you know that?” She moved past him into the living room, sat down in one of the bucket chairs by the dining table.

“The landlady lives upstairs and works days. She’s always home at night. She would have heard the racket.”

“And about them being pros?”

“No vandalism and no thievery. They were looking for something — or somethings — specific.” He swung an arm toward the big-screen TV set and accompanying VCR in front of the windows overlooking the street. “Not gone, not busted up.”

“Maybe they stole other things you don’t know about.”

“We’ll see,” he said. “I know this place pretty well. At least this tells us he didn’t just decide to take off for a week or two of vacation on his own.”

“And you like that,” she said. “He’s your friend, but—”

“No, I don’t like it. But it’s a fact. I like facts.”

Amalia watched him work, fascinated. He started in the front room, mainly just looking, turning a few things over. After the first couple of minutes, she quit asking questions: he answered only with grunts or nods or head shakes. The TV was indeed intact, and the VCR, and none of the cabinets had been smashed. No way to tell if any of the tapes had been taken.

To Amalia the kitchen was a terrible mess. Ice trays in the sink. Cabinets opened, dishes taken out — but not, she had to admit, dropped on the floor and smashed. Silverware drawers pulled out. Surprisingly, the garbage had not been touched, but the stack of supermarket bags had been thrown about. No sign of the legendary Beverly. Was that good or bad?

Danny used the front bedroom to store sports equipment relating to his various outdoor activities: definitely a man’s apartment. The pattern held. Everything dumped out and gone through, wet suits turned inside out, but nothing cut up or smashed.

In the bathroom the top had been removed from the toilet tank, and the medicine cabinet stood open. Its bottles and tubes were on the floor where they had landed after being swept from the shelves.

Danny slept in one of the back bedrooms overlooking a postage-stamp backyard. The mattress was on the floor, the covers a swirl under the window, the pillows in a corner. Everything in the closet had been jerked off the hangers, but none of the jacket seams had been slashed. The dresser drawers were on the floor, their shirts and underwear and sweaters and socks tossed out in heaps. The bookshelves had been stripped and their volumes, mostly in French, were scattered across the floor. She wished being in this man’s apartment wasn’t making her so irrationally obsessed with Beverly.

Again Ballard grunted in satisfaction.

The other back bedroom that was Danny’s office had suffered the most. The room was knee-deep in paper; every filing cabinet had been rifled, as had all the desk drawers. Ballard pointed out an empty place on the desk.

“See? Took his computer but left the printer and the monitor. And...” He checked under the papers. “Yeah. Took his floppies, too.”

After almost an hour they finally left, Ballard pulling the door shut behind them. Outside, he unlocked his car. Some fog was in, making their world more intimate.

“I’ll drive you home,” he said. So he could then go and see Beverly?

She said, “Telegraph Hill,” then, when he started to open the car door for her, added, “Pants on fire.”

He completely missed the obvious allusion, instead looked at her as though she’d read his mind. A little chill went through her; in that instant she realized that his pants were on fire, all right, but for her, not for Beverly.

He had exactly the kind of Anglo-Saxon good looks as the fisherman millionaire she had cut out of a magazine when she was 12 and had framed next to her bed. The man of her dreams, forgotten over the years, because dramatically dark little girls with stern, peppery personalities weren’t the ones who attracted rugged blond men from the sprawly three-story Victorians in West Petaluma. Not when she was in high school. And not since.

Over the years she had come to settle for less: sort of slick, sort of good-looking guys, empty as blown-up paper bags, failures at living — like the unemployed bartender who had shared her bed two nights before.

But here was that Anglo-Saxon of her childhood dreams, and he wanted her. And she wanted him, too. He was a liar, weren’t they all, but did it really matter? Yes, with this one it did.

“Danny doesn’t have houseplants,” she said.

“That’s what they were after,” he said with a quickness that would have made O’B proud. “Danny was growing weed.”

When Maybelle Pernod finished her once-a-week watering of the big split-leaf rhododendron beside Jane Goldson’s reception desk, it was after eleven. She waddled out of DKA, locking the doors and setting the alarms behind her.

Usually when it was late she treated herself to a cab, but this week she was short. She’d been buying for the apartment. Not that getting home by bus scairt her. God was watching out for her. An extra hour to get home along dangerous streets don’t bother her any.

A horn honked. Stopped just beyond the parked cars on Eleventh Street was a dark sedan, the hulking driver getting out.

“HgnMaybel!” he called.

She hurried across the sidewalk to wriggle in her big bottom and ample hips. Warren got in behind the wheel and started them away. She gave a great sigh of relaxation. The Lord had sent Kenny in a nice car to save her from that dangerous trip along dark streets.

“Why you come pick me up from work? You think this old lady cain’t get home her ownself?”

“Hnigh on hna hntown.”

“A night on the town with these aching feet, chile?”

Warren slipped the big Dodge into a parking place three slots from the street door of Maybelle’s walk-up at Larkin and Eddy. He had lousy luck picking bridge lanes at the toll plaza, but had phenomenal luck finding parking anywhere in the city.

Maybelle was proud of her little shrine to Jesus under the front window, her lace curtains and her rug on the floor, her kitchen with fridge and stove and even an oven to cook Sunday dinner. Warren sat on the new couch bought by that week’s paycheck and talked to her through the open bathroom door as she got made up, telling her about baby-sitting the overbearing mother of a spoiled computer genius whom somebody apparently was trying to kill, and about Bernardine’s unlikely passion for him.

“You just ask Mist’ Kearny to put you on somethin’ else. Ain’t like none of the other men couldn’t handle—”

“Hgno!” exclaimed Ken sharply.

She understood why he couldn’t do that. When you were fat and black and old, or when you were handicapped some way, you made do in the regular world by sheer will alone. You didn’t back off. You didn’t make no easy compromises. You couldn’t.

“You jus’ let the Lord work on this. We just put it in His hands and go get ourse’ves somethin’ to eat.”

She came back into the room rouged and lipsticked, her black shiny hair piled on top of her head, wearing a red satiny dress. He made a slow swirling motion with one hand, and she pirouetted in front of him.

“Hmm-mmm,” he said, shaking his head in admiration, then added, “Hndrink firs.”

She gave her deep-throated belly laugh. “Okay, fancy man, drinks first. So where you takin’ me?”

“Hmude Ihndahgo,” said Ken Warren.

“They was a great old song by that name,” said Maybelle.

At that time of night, Fulton, running along the north edge of the park, was their quickest way in-town. Ballard’s face underlit by the dash and intermittently illuminated by streetlights, was tight. Twice she caught him frowning.

“Okay, Mr. Private Eye, I want to know everything you found out in Danny’s apartment. Every single thing.”

He looked over at her in surprise, as if she had brought him back from a distance, then started laying it out for her.

“Mainly, we confirmed what we already knew. That Danny is missing and we don’t know where he is. But,” he added cheerfully, “neither does the opposition.”

He turned left at Masonic, which with a couple of jogs fed into Presidio Ave., picked up one-way Bush inbound. The streets were nearly deserted.

“Maybe they kidnapped him.”

“Somebody trying to snatch Danny would get a big surprise. He’s a black belt in two or three disciplines.”

“They could have had guns.”

“No blood. I checked. Also his shaving kit was gone from the bathroom, some of his socks and underwear, some jeans and shirts, his leather jacket. His sweats and running gear. His bike is missing from the garage. And if they had him, why would they have to make a search?”

“So what were they looking for?”

“Information. Something written down they thought he had. Did you notice, everything paper was gone through — newspapers, files, books, magazines — the books, page by page. The couch upturned but not vandalized; looking for resewn seams. Same with the pillows and mattress. In the kitchen, the garbage bags were checked, but not the garbage.”

“The top was off the toilet. Don’t people stash dope—”

“Everybody looks in the toilet tank, so it’s always a lousy idea. But you notice none of the medicine cabinet tubes were squeezed, none of the jars or plastic containers were opened.”

Amalia was finally starting to understand.

“Take the hard drive and floppies, but not the printer.”

Ballard pulled a left into one-way Gough, which would take them to Union and thence up across Russian Hill to Telegraph. San Francisco is a city of hills with unexpectedly cut-off streets on them, so the straight shot is seldom the best route.

“Yeah. The printer wouldn’t have anything useful in it.”

“What are you going to tell your old friend Beverly?”

“That he was okay when he left the apartment. All I can do is just keep looking, that I know he’s one tough little bastard, that I’m betting he’s okay.”

“Are you really?”

“Yeah. One other thing — no mail in his box.”

“Maybe the landlady’s been collecting it for him.”

“Boy, there’s a positive attitude.”

Amalia lived on one-block Castle up on a shoulder of Telegraph; the buildings rose flat-faced right from the sidewalk. Ballard stopped in front of her number.

“Parking is a bitch around here, Larry,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons I don’t own a car.” Looking at his face, she burst out laughing. “You’d better go find a parking place while I make some coffee — and you’d better say it’s good!”

When he went upstairs twenty minutes later, she was at the head of the stairs in a lovely blue robe with frills and lace around the throat and wrists and a darker blue silk sash around her waist. She had the big urchin grin on her face he found himself wanting to evoke all the time, and a steaming cup of coffee in her left hand.

Ballard took the cup, sipped. It was Italian, it was strong, it was perfect. “Amalia, it’s just about the best I’ve ever had.”

“That’s not all that’s the best you’re ever going to get,” she promised him without really believing it, but with a wicked look in her eyes just the same.

And opened the robe. Larry Ballard drew his breath in sharply and lunged to set the cup on the sideboard.

Thirty minutes later, when for the first time he reared above her on her bed like a stallion, and clenched his buttocks and came and came and came in her, whispering her name hoarsely, Amalia, clinging to him with her arms and her legs and her breasts and her belly and her whole being, as if riding out some great storm, cried softly, “Yes, yes, yes, now now now.”

And knew she wouldn’t be letting out-of-work bartenders she felt sorry for into her bed for a long time to come. If ever.