Contract Null & Void

Chapter One

In Germany, Walpurgisnacht, eve of the pagan festival of May Day when witches and warlocks cavort with their demonic master, usually took place on the Brocken, highest peak of the Harz Mountains. Goethe, in fact, used the Brocken for his witches’ Sabbath in Faust.

Dan Kearny, being American and a private eye besides, had never heard of the Brocken, or Goethe’s Faust, or even Walpurgis Night. Halloween, its cousin on the far side of the calendar, was enough for him. As he drove across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco just before ten o’clock on that cloudy April 30 night, his troubles were much more immediate and personal than witches, or he-goats, or even Old Nick himself.

Giselle Marc had heard of Walpurgis Night. Besides being office manager of Daniel Kearny Associates (Head Office in San Francisco, Branch Offices in Major California Cities, Affiliates Nationwide), she held a master’s degree in history from San Francisco State. But right now, driving through Larkspur, she was more concerned about finding 246 Charing Cross Lane in nearby Kent Woodlands than she was about cavorting demons. No pedestrian, no other car, moved on broad Magnolia Avenue; on this Monday night, even the neighborhood pizza joint was closed tight.

Stan Groner, president of the Consumer Loan Division of California Citizens Bank, had conned her into being here over a latte at a sidewalk café on MacArthur Park that afternoon.

“Their name is Rochemont,” Stan the Man had explained. “Heavy clients of the bank’s trust department. Mother and son, the father’s dead, the kid’s big in computers. Something about a stolen car and some kind of deadline. Ten tonight, take an hour of your time, the bank’ll be grateful.” Heh heh heh and a big false banker’s smile. “You DKA guys give great car.”

Giselle said, “We’re looking for Charing Cross Lane.”

Ken Warren, the thick, hard-looking bird who shared her Corsica’s front seat, was shining a tiny halogen flashlight on Map 1 °C of his outdated Thomas Brothers Street Atlas for Marin County. Warren had an aggressive jaw and dusty brown hair tight-cropped like a marine drill sergeant’s.

His mind glibly told Giselle, Left at Woodland Road.

His mouth hoarsely told her, “Hngaeft aht Wondlan Nroad.”

By the darkened BP station where Magnolia, College, and Kent came together, Giselle made a hard left into Woodland. It was a wealthy, gorgeously wooded street that petered out on a forested lower slope of Mount Tamalpais overlooking Phoenix Lake. There were only intermittent streetlights. Her brights picked out two joggers, the woman with a blond ponytail and tight shiny purple pants and a violet T-shirt, the man wearing a Giants cap, black sweatpants, and a black sweatshirt with a gorilla on its back bending a barbell as if it were a swizzle stick.

“Safe neighborhood,” observed Giselle. Where she lived in Oakland, a woman jogger, even with a male companion, would need an Uzi down her pant leg and a Glock-7 in her bra to make it around Lake Merritt after dark.

Big, three-story white mansions peeked out from behind screens of exotic California plantings mixed with flowering plum, birch, cypress, pine and redwood, pyracantha and Chinese elm. Many of the fake-gas-lamp driveway lights on black metal posts were still lit, either on timers or left on all night.

Ken broke in, “Iht htsa waes nyet.”

A ways yet. The further up the street they got, the more wrought-iron gates their lights picked out, closed against the night and set into strong-looking mortared stone pillars. To their right was a hulking rock outcropping, beyond which a fence ran along the crown of the hill flanking the road.

A heavy-bodied mulie buck, his velvet-covered antlers already well sprouted, came bounding down the slope and into the road ahead of them. His hooves clattered over the engine noise as he slipped and his hind legs sprawled on the damp blacktop so he almost went down.

Giselle hit the brakes, but by then the buck had righted himself to disappear into the trees on the downslope side.

“Hntern nrhite!” exclaimed Warren belatedly.

Giselle braked again, backed up. The lights showed a narrow road coming in from the right and a nearly leaf-covered sign, Charing Cross Lane. She started up. But there were no driveways, and then the street dead-ended in a T-junction. Giselle stopped the Corsica. Its lights shone on a street sign that read Tamal Lane.

“Where did Charing Cross go?” she demanded as if Ken knew.

He shrugged. She turned right. After a block with no houses on it, Tamal dead-ended. Back and fill, get turned around, go back past Charing Cross. A block this way, Tamal dead-ended again.

Almost. As she was getting turned around yet again, the lights picked out a narrow blacktop lane angling sharply up through the redwoods. Ken’s flashlight found the brass numerals 2 4 6 set into a rock at the side of the narrow drive. Low branches swiped at the roof as they went up the steeply slanted track. A hundred yards in, squat ornamental stone posts and an ornate black wrought-iron gate loomed in front of them. Inside, to the left, was a red and blue guard box like those flanking the entrance to Buckingham Palace.

The moment Giselle stopped the car beside the speaker set on a wrought-iron stand to the left of the drive, flood-lights went on, several Hounds of the Baskervilles started to bay in the woods, and the door of the guard box opened.

A guard came out rather stiffly, carrying a musket at port arms. He was dressed like one of the wooden soldiers in Nutcracker. After peering intently at them through the wrought-iron gate, he started to laugh.

“What a heap of tin!” he exclaimed in a metallic voice.

As the guard jeered at Giselle’s car in Kent Woodlands, in San Francisco the Executive Council of Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Local 3 was ready to cast a secret strike vote. Georgi Petlaroc held the floor, a burly, bearded man with unruly hair who was called Petrock by friend and enemy alike.

“In the 1930s, if you put a picket line in front of a hotel, nobody would cross,” Petrock boomed in his marvelous orator’s voice. He was six-two, 240, wore hack boots, blue jeans, a Greek fisherman’s cap, and a heavy Coogi sweater, the kind that costs $400 and is woven in many colors out of mercerized cotton by a computer in Australia. “That ain’t true today. You gotta bust your ass just to keep your people out there on the line.”

“We’re being treated to this harangue just because the International doesn’t want a strike against the St. Mark Hotel at the present time?” asked the local’s vice-president, Rafael Huezo, in his low, barely accented voice.

“Why don’t they, Rafe? Goddam answer me! Why don’t they?”

“They deem it unwise in the current political climate.”

“Deem it! Unwise!” Petrock’s slitted blue eyes flashed in his flushed, bearded face. He towered over the diminutive Latino. “I’ll show you unwise, you miserable little spic!”

His right hand swept down to the sheath on his belt, brought up and around a huge glittering bowie knife that he buried three inches deep in the scarred tabletop half a foot from Huezo’s interlaced fingers. Huezo neither flinched nor recoiled.

“Get the point. Rafe? The cadaverous International is a goddam knife buried in the heart of this union!”

Petrock jerked out his knife and sheathed it, then glared at the other six men and one woman seated around the table.

“Two hundred of the Mark’s three hundred and sixty employees are members of this union, but the International says don’t strike. Why? Because they’re rat-fink bastards like the spic here! What do they want? A quart of my blood? My arm? My leg? A pound of my flesh? Now I’m president of this local, and their sweetheart contracts with porkchoppers in this local are gonna end.”

A porkchopper is a corrupt union official out only for himself. In liquid but deadly tones, Huezo demanded, “When you say porkchopper, amigo, are you talking about me?”

“If the zapata fits, wear it,” sneered Petrock. “We have a council quorum, only one member is missing, so let’s quit screwing around and vote to take our people out. Then we can get down to some serious drinking!”

Larry Ballard took a sip of his exquisite home-brewed coffee. As he did, the phone on the frayed arm of his easy chair shrilled. The decrepit chair dominated the tiny living room of his two-room apartment in the Sunset District directly across Lincoln Way from Golden Gate Park.

Ballard had just returned from two hours at the tae kwan do dojo on Ninth Avenue where he would soon be tested for his first-degree black belt in karate, and he was stiff and sore and bruised. He wanted nothing so much as to vegetate until the bars closed and people went home to bed so he could go to work.

The phone shrilled again. Maybe it was Bart Heslip, out on a hot one and needing... No, Bart was in Detroit in the middle of a three-weak vacation. Still, it was the end of the month; like Ballard, every’ DKA field man would have a fistful of REPO ON SIGHT orders.

So he sighed and picked up. “What?”

“Larry? Oh, I’m so glad you’re home!”

“Beverly?” Larry was suddenly intent. He hadn’t heard Beverly Daniels’s voice since the night, several months ago, when the pert little blonde had made her partner, Danny Marenne, throw Ballard out of their bar a mile further out Lincoln Way. “I thought you weren’t talking to me.”

“I wasn’t, Larry, but...”

On a date with Beverly, Ballard had paused to look for a delinquent decorator’s $85,000 Mercedes in the garage beneath the swank Montana condo high-rise, and somehow had ended up totaling Beverly’s beloved little yellow 280Z. Ballard had been totaled, too, but had Bev worried about his concussion? The big red lump on his forehead? Hell no; she’d been ticked off only about her car.

“But now you need me for something, I’m supposed to come back into your life.”

“Well, if you want to be mean-spirited about it...”

Just then his doorbell rang.

“Shit, somebody at the door. Just a sec.”

Ballard carried the phone on its long cord across the room. He was a taut, strong-looking 32, a shade under six feet, 180 pounds, with a shock of sun-bleached blond hair and a handsome face saved from being pretty by hard blue eyes and a hawk nose.

He stuck his head into the hall to look at the street door into Lincoln Way. Bev had kept on talking.

“...and actually, I wouldn’t blame you if you said no, but it’s about Danny...”

Ballard could see a wide, stocky, backlit shape against the lace-curtained window of the front door. “Yeah?” he yelled.

“About Danny!” Beverly shouted on the phone.

The backlit shape bellowed, “Me!”

“Goddammit.” Ballard pushed the door buzzer.

“I thought you and Danny were friends.”

“Not you,” said Ballard to the phone as Kearny came through the front door. “Him.”

Dan Kearny was a pylon-jawed 52, his flinty gray eyes flanking a nose many times broken and reset, his curly hair gray-shot and thinning. He went past Ballard, put his suitcase down in the middle of the living room floor with a frightening finality, and stalked into the minuscule kitchen area to pour himself coffee. For a man showing up with his luggage, he was making but minimal effort to be engaging.

“Danny’s in trouble. It’s something to do with the union.”

“Danny can take care of himself,” said Ballard.

“Not this time,” said Beverly. Kearny sat down in Larry’s easy chair, cup in hand, and said, “Jeanne threw me out,” just as Beverly continued, “It’s five days tomorrow since I’ve seen him. He wouldn’t leave me in the lurch that way. I had to call you.”

Five days. Great. “It’s about goddam time, isn’t it?”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” said Kearny.

“Not you — her,” Ballard said, indicating the phone.

“Well! If you have company there with you—”

“Not you — him. Dan Kearny just showed up on my doorstep.” Ballard added to Kearny, “What can I do about it?”

“You can damn well come out here and talk to me!” wailed Beverly.

“Won’t do any good to talk to her tonight,” said Kearny in a resigned voice. “She’s really steamed.” Then he added, “I’m gonna have to bunk here a couple days, ’til she cools off.”

“I’ll be there soon as I can,” said Ballard into the phone.