Contract Null & Void

Chapter Twenty-four

Kearny had flaked out on Giselle before breakfast, the cops had dropped around at midday and had left when nobody had anything to report, and now the Rochemonts were about to pour afternoon tea in the solarium and Ken Warren still hadn’t gotten back after taking the night off to see Maybelle. Giselle looked up sourly as Inga swept into the solarium in the gown she had been buying the day before.

She was suddenly quite stunning. Her eyes sparkled. She wore mascara and pale pink lipstick that made her prim mouth seem sensual. The gown showed she’d been hiding a striking figure under all her flowy sundresses. She turned around in the center of the room for Paul and Giselle to admire.

“What do you think?”

“Hubba hubba,” said Paul. Obviously retro-’50s this afternoon. That brain was worth half a billion dollars?

“Very striking,” said Giselle.

“Just trying it on.” Inga bent to give Paul a quick peck on the mouth, whirled away through the doorway. “I’ll get out of it and be right back.”

Paul rang the silver handbell on the low wicker coffee table. The solarium itself had once been a side porch facing south, but had been given double-glazed windows to replace screened porch walls on the three external sides. The floor had been covered with sod and clumps of odd-looking grasses and the solarium filled with exotic tropical plants. Taking tea there was like taking tea in the midst of a steamy African jungle, as if they were characters from an Evelyn Waugh novel dressing formally deep in the bush for their foursies.

Maybe Johnny Weismuller in a loincloth would serve them tea. Or Cheetah the chimpanzee. Me Jane, you Tarzan.

Better not bring anything like that up. Paul probably had all the Tarzan first editions, the pop-up books and big-little books from the 1930s, the original art by Alex Raymond and Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth from the earliest comic strip versions.

Giselle wondered how she even knew all this stuff. Rushing in upon her came a dim pre-teen memory that her dad, before he had walked out for cigarettes one night to never come back, had been an avid Tarzan nut. So had Giselle, but she had never fantasied herself as Jane, Tarzan’s mate; rather as a female Tarzan — as fierce, as strong, as quick, as the ape-man himself.

It must be this place, bringing up old memories like that. She was getting as goofy as everyone else.

She leaned back and crossed wickedly long and shapely legs (worthy of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, another of her teenage favorites) as a uniformed maid wheeled in an old-fashioned tea table that had a shelf underneath crammed with cucumber sandwiches, crusts off; digestive biscuits; and cream cakes. Very British.

Giselle thought about pouring tea, then decided to use her time alone with Paul to see if it was possible to have a sane conversation with the scion of the Rochemonts — God, she was starting to think in Edgar Rice Burroughs style. She already knew he was a man full of anomalies and contradictions. Which, if he really was in danger as she believed and Kearny maybe didn’t, made him that much more difficult to guard.

“So, Paul, tell me, when you have wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, what are you going to do to celebrate?”

“I’ve given it a lot of thought, Giselle,” he said seriously. “First I’m going to fill out all the gaps in my Action and Detective comic book runs, and complete my Lionel train collection. But the really boss thing, I’m taking out the miniature golf course — I could see you thought it was ridiculous, and you were right, miniature golf is childish.

“Once I perfect my photoreactive polymer, I’ll be replacing it with a full-size live-action Jurassic Park. The dinos will be holograms, but I’ll hire live actors on a permanent basis for all the characters and devise new scenarios that will really put them in mortal jeopardy. Scary for the actors, maybe sometimes fatal, but I’ll be paying them enough to—”

“You’ve got to be kidding!” burst out Giselle, startled into sincerity by the madness of his vision.

“Of course I am.”

He said it so normally it took her a second. “You are?”

He waved long-fingered hands around vaguely. “Everybody expects far-out wacko stuff from me, so that’s what I give ’em.”

Giselle waved her own hand around at the miniature jungle.

“You mean all of this is a massive put-on?”

“No. I’m just immature enough to really love this stuff. I just ham it up a bit... The problem is Mother.”

Giselle found herself caught up in his mad mad mad mad world. “You don’t have to do anything to please mother, you have plenty of old family money, you can do anything you—”

“No. Mother controls that money. My father didn’t trust my judgment, neither does Mother, so I don’t have a dime of my own. To Mother, I’m still twelve years old, playing with the computers in my father’s office.”

“So until you sign this contract—”

“I can do anything I want as long as it fits Mother’s image of who she thinks I am. And she doesn’t like me being married to Inga. Mother thinks Inga is... involved in all these things that have been happening, and I know you do, too, but she isn’t. Once I have my own money from my own work, Inga and I will—”

“Here you are!” exclaimed Mother, sweeping into the solarium. “Hiding in the jungle.”

“Damn,” muttered Giselle under her breath. Ten more seconds and she would have had the goods on Inga. Or at least a clue to what Inga was up to.

Paul immediately quoted, as if finishing another of his unending evocations of Bogart’s Sam Spade, “ ‘Maybe you could have got along without me if you’d kept clear of me. You can’t now. Not in San Francisco. You’ll come in or you’ll get out — and you’ll do it today.’ ”

“Oh, Paul, love, you’re so literary!” said Bernardine offhandedly, not hearing a word he was saying. To Giselle, she said sharply, “Where is Mr. Warren? I haven’t seen him at all today.”

“He... um... he’ll be along directly.”

She hoped. She could feel a Rochemont headache coming on.

Inga appeared in one of her flour-sack smocks, looking once again like the ingenue of an eighth-grade play.

“I’ll be mother,” she said brightly, reaching for the teapot, adding to the company at large, “one lump or two?”

“Hnungh,” said Ken Warren from the doorway.

“I don’t get it,” said Inga, confused.

“None,” explained Giselle. “No sugar for Mr. Warren.”

Ah, yes. The whole cast together yet again. Having tea in an African jungle in the middle of Marin. All of them just about to dive back down the rabbit hole.

They had finished their beer and Ballard had moved up to the bar where he was drinking Bev’s coffee and watching her wash glassware as she talked.

“And that’s it,” she finished up. “That’s every single thing I remember Danny saying or doing that last day.”

Nothing. He had been hoping she would have something — maybe even something she didn’t know she had — but Danny had just vanished into thin air. And Ballard was starting to get afraid something bad really had happened to him. If not, why wasn’t he getting in touch with someone? Anyone? Maybe it would be just as good for the cops to get wind of the fact he was missing, and start digging around for him...

And here they came walking into Jacques Daniels, just as they had walked into Mood Indigo two nights before: maybe they could find Danny, but there was nobody he’d rather less see than Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. Do it often enough, and they’d eventually make him from Mood Indigo and Ace in the Hole afterward. Which would be disastrous for Bart.

Bev took her blue-gloved hands from the steaming water and said, “Sorry, gents, we aren’t open for another half hour.”

They held up their shields. “Homicide, we got questions.”

“About your partner.”

“We understand he’s missing.”

“Unless you know something we don’t.”

Beverly began, “Well, I was just telling Larry here...”

She ran down. They both were looking at Ballard.

“Larry what?”

“Ballard,” said Ballard. “Larry Ballard. Just an old friend of Danny’s. Bev was worried about him—”

“Good friend of the beauteous and curvaceous Beverly, too, perhaps?” asked Rosenkrantz with a smirk.

“Is this going to help you find Danny?” Beverly demanded.

“Might could. If, maybe, good old pal Larry here didn’t like that Danny was spending all of his time with you, and—”

“For Chrissake, grow up!” snapped Beverly. “Danny’s my partner, not my lover. Do you two clowns sleep with each other just because you ride around in a car together all day?”

The two cops looked at one another goggle-eyed.

“Is she suggesting an unnatural sexual relationship between us?” Rosenkrantz demanded of his partner, then added, “If a straight has a mirrored ceiling, what does a fag have?”

“A rearview mirror.”

They turned to Ballard in unison, like vaudeville performers in a brother act. “Do we know you? We think we know you.”

He met their scrutiny blandly, casually, avoiding a staredown contest. “I don’t know you. I’d’ve remembered.”

After another moment of staring, Guildenstern said, “You hear about the Irishman who couldn’t find his glasses?”

“He drank from the bottle instead,” said Ballard.

“How can you tell an Irishman in a topless bar?”

“He’s there to drink.”

“Shit, he’s no fun,” muttered Guildenstern.

But their moment of automatic and professional suspicion seemed to have passed. Rosenkrantz jerked a thumb at the door.

“Well, Larry, good-looking guy like you probably has a hot rocket waiting home in bed, and our questions of this lovely young lady are kind of private-like.”

“If you don’t mind,” added Guildenstern in a voice that dared him to mind.

Ballard sighed and got off his stool. He caught Bev’s eye. She didn’t know he was shielding Bart Heslip, of course, but she’d picked up his cue.

“Thanks, Larry. It was nice to have someone to worry at.”

Outside, he started walking in on Lincoln, leaving his car behind. He didn’t want them getting interested enough to take his license number. That would lead them to DKA, which would lead them to Bart Heslip... He felt bad about leaving Bev alone with them, but if he’d stayed they’d have made him for sure.

And they would cover all the usual things in the Danny hunt, now that they were on the hunt. As was Larry Ballard. Or was he? Because Amalia would be off work in half an hour. He’d wait a few minutes, then go back and get his car and drive over to her place. He couldn’t help Bev here, but he could help himself a lot over at Amalia’s. He could already feel the tingle in his groin just thinking about it.