Contract Null & Void

Chapter Twenty-six

Maybelle finished cleaning the DKA offices before ten o’clock, almost an hour earlier than usual. Half the staff hadn’t been in. Oh, the skip-tracers, temp typists, and routine field men had, but they were shadowy presences to Maybelle; she seldom ran into them during her nocturnal cleaning chores.

Miss Giselle obviously hadn’t been at her desk, and Mist’ Kearny just as obviously had — his wastebasket had been overflowing — but not for the whole day. Bart was on vacation, O’B must still be up there in the rainy country, Larry Ballard had been in to write reports but hadn’t left much of a mess. Kenny was in Marin again for the night, and Morales had left his desk strewn with Taco Bell wrappers. Mmmmm, didn’t like that man, was after any of the underage after-school girls looked the least bit timid, but he sure knew how to work in the field.

They all did. God’s truth, they was a crew got things done; but right now everybody that counted to her seemed to be doing something besides their regular DKA work.

She turned out all but the night-lights, set the alarms the way that Giselle had shown her, and locked up. Since it was so early she took the bus — wasn’t much danger even for a fat old woman at nine-thirty at night — and was grunting her way up the stairs to her apartment by ten o’clock.

Had her a shower and a supper of leftovers, sat down in front of the TV... And didn’t even turn it on.

That had been fun last night at Mood Indigo. Hadn’t sung that way for years, not since the day she got the telegram ’bout her boy Jedediah dying in Vietnam. After that, all the joy had gone out of her, and she’d gone down, down, down...

Maybelle heaved herself off the couch, got into her red dress again, got back into her black cloth coat, tucked her black leather purse back under one massive arm, and made her careful way back down the stairs. Didn’t want to be sit-tin’ there thinking no thoughts like that. She was up in her mind these days, gonna stay up. Up, up, up.

A single lady could surely go to an establishment, have a beer, listen to all those wonderful old blues tunes on the jukebox, couldn’t she? Maybe that nice Mr. Sykes would be there. She’d had a lot of fun singing them old blues tunes alongside his piano last night. He had made it talk for sure.

Most fun in years.

The thing was, sex had never really been fun for Amalia the way it was with Ballard. Oh, arousing when a man tipped her over the edge into orgasm, but fun — uh-uh. Now it was. They were inventive, daring, they did everything together, explored everything together — things one or the other of them had seen in porn films over the years, their secret fantasies they’d never acted out before, not even alone... Quite often laughing together just at the sheer joy of whatever wonderful and unexpected thing was happening between them.

Now they were in the kitchen, sated and wolfing pasta, telling each other about their respective days.

“The Mark is going to cave in, tomorrow, over the weekend, Monday — I know they are!” she exclaimed fiercely. “We’re hurting them just too badly. Hardly any cabbies are crossing the lines, routine maintenance is breaking down...”

“God, you’re one tough broad!”

Ballard spoke around a huge forkful of penne and Parmesan. “You really love sticking it to them, don’t you?”

“They’ve been sticking it to the union for years, now it’s our turn.”

“I hope you never get mad at me.”

Her dark eyes impaled him. “Don’t make me mad, then.”

He wiped all the others right off her slate. She’d always been focused like a hawk on work anyway, so her liaisons had been casual, based more on physical need than deep emotion. She had to like the guy, but wedding bells never rang in Amalia Pelotti’s mind when she was involved with someone.

Nor did they now. But still, something was different...

“You remember Sally, the girl I gave our signs to on the picket line yesterday?”

“Sure. Short and squat.”

“But a lotta heart. And very’ bright. She told me on the line today that the last two days before he disappeared Danny spent going through files at some government offices.”

Ballard was all attention. “Which files? Which government offices? State or federal?”

“I should have asked, shouldn’t I?”

“No, it’s okay. But this is the first thing out of the ordinary we know Danny was doing before he went missing. How did she know about it?”

“He came into the union offices after hours, she was in the ladies’ getting ready to leave, so he stopped to use the phone at her desk. She came back out just when he was saying something about spending two days in the government files and finding what they’d been looking for. He seemed excited.”

“Tomorrow I talk with Sally,” said Ballard with some excitement of his own. At last, getting somewhere! But tonight... He leaned closer to Amalia. “Tonight...”

The doorbell rang.

“Ignore it,” said Larry grandly.

She did. “Tell me about what we’re going to do tonight that we haven’t already done.”

“Maybe we have already done it, but practice makes...” But the damned doorbell had kept on ringing. And now a heavy fist had started pounding on the panel. Ballard was on his feet, exclaiming, “Goddammit, anyway!”

He went into the living room to get into the pants he had shed when he’d gotten there — their first time this night had been on the living room wall-to-wall carpet two minutes after he’d arrived. Pulling on his shirt, he trotted barefoot down the interior stairwell to the street door, where two bulky shadows could be seen backlit against the glass from the streetlights. He flicked back the dead bolt and jerked open the door.

“What the fuck do you—”

“Well, well, well, if it ain’t Mr. Ballard. You sure do get around,” said Rosenkrantz. Or maybe it was Guildenstern.

Without really seeming to they rode him backward and on up the stairs between them.

Death, the performer formerly known as Timmy Adams, leaped high in the air with his legs spread, came down with a crash! on the wooden stage. Legs wide — get the sexual symbolism? Timmy had become Death because, shit, Sting got famous and got laid all the time with only one name, didn’t he?

Death furiously scrubbed the only three chords he knew from his $2,500 Paul Reed Smith guitar — Carlos fuckin’ Santana blows a PRS, man — and in his atonal voice shrieked out for the admiring throng the lyrics of “Euridice in Hell,” Blow Me Baby’s stirring signature magnum opus with which he started every gig:

Death wore the de rigueur heavy metal accoutrements: the big hair, the chains, the skulls, the spandex pants without any underwear, the Blow Me Baby logo lumpily hand-painted on the back of the leather jacket open over no shirt to show his sunken, hairless chest covered now with sweat.

“Go go go go!” shrieked an overweight pimple-faced girl in the front of the throng pressed up against the stage. “Give it to me big-time!”

Death leaped and whirled, screamed and strutted, faked a split, rolled around on the planks as Taxes, Blow Me Baby’s drummer, laid down an uncertain riff on his Tama Star Classics metal-head big boy kit that was to die for as far as heavy metal bands were concerned. Four K just for the drums, dude, another K for the Zyldajian cymbals that he was now clashing with reckless abandon and no recognizable beat.

Death did a one-legged bounce-bounce-bounce across the stage to nestle up against Love on the Gibson Flying V rhythm guitar, the so-called teen dream special that ran $1,500 and was so favored by aspiring rock bands.

The scrubbed their axes cheek-to-cheek. They looked enough alike to be brothers, as did all the members of the band, who had started playing together two years ago in high school — though it was a generic, not genetic, similarity.

The only variation was Hate, across the stage working his Fender Precision Bass (a mere $800, but since none of the equipment was paid for anyway, what the hell?), who had long blond hair down to the middle of his back, while the other three had long black hair.

“That bitch is mine!” Death was yelling of the pimple-faced girl in the front row.

“I got her buddy, man!” shouted Love.

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. What else did you form a band for? Death spun away to the middle of the stage, leaped up into the air splay-legged again, banged to earth like a sun-singed Icarus for the next verse of “Euridice” (he had seen the name on some old black-and-white French movie, Orfée et Eurydice, in the video store, and pronounced it Euro-dyce:

O’B began working his way through the sea of nonstop bopping bodies and waving hands raised arena style above the bouncing heads toward the backstage area and the dressing room assigned to Blow Me Baby. He figured he was so bizarre for Eureka, even at the Rainbow, that it would get him through the security groupies guarding the dressing room.

Thank God. Too much of this would drive him back to drink, sure as Death or Taxes. Or, come to that, Love and Hate.

Blow me baby. Big-time. Yeah!

Rosencranktz and Guildenstern had just told a filthy joke, and Ballard was on his feet; the four of them had been sitting in Amalia’s living room.

“Listen, you fuckers, we don’t have to—”

“Yeah, actually, you do,” said Guildenstern.

“You’ve been turning up just too many goddam places in this investigation,” said Rosenstern.

“So siddown an’ shudda fuck up.”

Ballard was suddenly out of anger; he sat meekly down again. This was not the Larry Amalia had come to know and... well, maybe not love, but... but why was he being so passive?

“I don’t know anything about the Georgi Petlaroc murder and I don’t want to know anything about it.”

Guildenstern leaned toward Amalia. “What do you know about Petrock’s murder?” he asked her in an affable voice.

“Just like Larry. Nothing.”

“What were you doing when he got hit?”

“You asked me that before. Then I was in bed with a guy. Now, I still was.”

“What was... is... his name, Ms. Pelotti?”

“I told you that before, too.”

Ballard knew they wanted him to lose control, but he couldn’t. Thank God for martial-arts training; the successful blow was the one stopped a millimeter away from living flesh. Three years ago he wouldn’t have had that discipline.

One of them had gotten out a notebook, licked the tip of an old-fashioned pencil, and was writing down the name she was giving him as if he didn’t already have it down somewhere else.

“And where can we get in touch with him, Ms. Pelotti?”

“I don’t know, but he’s signed up for picket duty at the St. Mark tomorrow afternoon.” She added, “What did you mean about Larry showing up at too many places in this investigation?”

Rosenkrantz cleared his throat and winked at Ballard.

“Well, this afternoon we go talk with the partner of a possible missing witness in the Petrock murder, as sexy a little blonde as you’d want to see, and what do we find? Good old Larry Ballard there looking like he’s just about to dip the old wick. We come around here tonight to talk to you, as sexy a brunette as you’d want to see, about a possible missing witness in the Petrock murder, and what do we find? Good old Larry Ballard again — looking like he just did dip the old wick.”

“Now I ask you,” said Guildenstern, “is that a suspicious circumstance or what?”

“I told you this afternoon I was trying to find out what happened to Danny Marenne. I met Amalia when I dropped around to Danny’s union to see if anybody had any ideas of where he was.”

“That you did,” said Rosenkrantz in a suddenly thoughtful, albeit not bad W. C. Fields imitation, “that you did indeed.”

As if to some secret signal, the two policemen were on their feet. They looked at Larry and nodded together.

“We’ll come up with where we’ve seen you, pal.”

“I’m sure you will,” said Ballard.

They looked over at Amalia, who seemed to be smoldering, and grinned their nastiest grins — which were very nasty indeed. Then they went on down the stairs without any other goodbye. They paused on the sidewalk. It was a clear, chilly night.

They pointed at one another.

“A bite to eat...”

“Then Mood Indigo.”

Upstairs, Ballard turned to Amalia with his arms opened wide. She stepped toward him, eyes intense with a strange light.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t say anything to stop them when they were going after you, but I’ve got a situation that you don’t know about, and—”

“I know about it now,” said Amalia silkily.

And swung a totally unforeseen roundhouse right that knocked him right down the stairs, thud, clump, crunch, oww-w-w...

Ballard landed in a crumpled heap against the inside of the front door. Amalia yelled down the stairwell after him, “And don’t bother even trying to drag your sorry ass back up here again, ever, maledetto stronzo!”