Contract Null & Void

Chapter Thirty

Friday morning. O’B woke at six-thirty, could hear rain on the roof, smell it even inside the house. He went to pee, went back to bed to grab more sleep, but sleep was elusive. Usually rain helped him drop off, but not today.

Last time it had rained had been Tuesday night, and he had been falling-down drunk in the Rainbow parking lot. Not a drink since, and now Blow Me Baby’s instruments and amps were right here in the middle of the living room. A correlation between the two facts?

This afternoon, the try for Nordstrom’s eighteen big truck tires. Sack in until he had to go after them... better not.

He groaned and jacked himself out of Tony d’Angelo’s comfortable bed, padded barefoot out into the kitchen in his T-shirt and boxer shorts to make coffee. While it perked he showered and shaved and dressed, drank two cups with plenty of cream and sugar at the little table in the old-fashioned breakfast nook off the kitchen, watching the rain slant down.

A whiskey jay hopped up and down on the wooden fence that closed off d’Angelo’s backyard, cussing him out, then arrowed away with that joyous precise abandon that all jays displayed. The bad-guy birds who hung around on street corners and mugged other birds were always the best fliers.

Two new assignments in by fax, both reopens, and another crappy fax from Kearny about the truck tires. Two calls on the phone machine. Tony was out of the hospital, staying at his sister’s place in Arcata for a little tender loving care, would be back home tomorrow. The other phone message was a new repo assignment from the Furniture Ranch, one of DKA’s better north coast clients because they sold to people with such lousy credit.

“Well, hell,” said O’B aloud in the quiet office.

He loaded the band equipment back into John Little’s longbed because it had stopped raining for the moment, then covered it with a tarp that he lashed down before driving to downtown Eureka and backing the truck up to the rear entrance of Redwood Empire Music.

He went in snapping water off his tweed cap — it was bucketing down again — and through a messy instrument repair workshop to come around the customer counter from behind. The long narrow shop was lined with guitars both acoustic and electric, banjos, ukuleles, upright basses, amps, speaker boxes, a rack of country and bluegrass and rock guitar instruction videos, display shelves of how-to books. More stringed instruments hung from the ceiling.

Jackson Singer, just unlocking the front door, was a lanky balding man with soft blue eyes and long musician’s fingers and scholarly horn-rims. It was Singer himself who had been driven off by Blow Me Baby when he had tried to collect a payment on his band instruments.

“What say, Reverend?” exclaimed O’B cheerily.

Singer gave a little startled jump. “Oh! I didn’t hear you come in. Almost nobody uses the back door...”

O’B extended a hand and Singer automatically shook it.

“P. M. O’Bannon. O’B, taking Tony’s place for a few days.”

“The band instruments? Em almost sorry I assigned them out to you people. There could be real danger for you—”

“Nothing we can’t handle,” said O’B. He used his thumb in illustration. “In fact, I could use a little help out back.”

Jackson Singer’s eyes had opened wide in surprise. As they walked to the back of the store, he said, “How did you—”

“You don’t want to know. If anyone asks, you never heard anything about any talent rep from Warner Music Group, okay?”

They propped open the rear door and started reaching in under the tarp and hauling out the equipment.

“So there was trouble.” Singer made it a statement.

“Not for me,” said O’B.

Singer stopped just inside the open doorway with Death’s Paul Reed Smith lead guitar in his hands.

“They scared me, really scared me. So... thank you.”

“Maybe you won’t be so grateful when you see what DKA bills you. I had to hire some help, spend money on props—”

“I don’t care what it costs me,” said Singer. “It... wasn’t right what they did to me.”

O’B gassed up, then headed out of town on the twisting blacktop into the redwoods, slippery now with rain. He would give Tony d’Angelo back his territory in damned good shape — if he could get those truck tires. And if he didn’t get the front of his head ripped off beforehand on his new furniture repo.

As O’B drove along telling himself he’d have to make sure Kearny didn’t overbill Jackson Singer, Dan Kearny himself was waking up in Ballard’s bed with one of O’B’s hangovers.

Kearny got one eye open first, then the other, then both together, then remembered he had closed up Jacques Daniel’s last night. He’d even helped Beverly get the chairs upside down on the tables. Listened to her worries about Danny, her face-off with the homicide cops that afternoon... She was a good kid.

Drinking too much, getting to bed too late — Ballard’s bed — dammit, he wanted to go home.

No sense wallowing in bad feelings all by himself, not when he had someone available he could pass them along to. He went into the other room of the tiny apartment and shook Larry Ballard awake by one bare shoulder. Bleary blue eyes opened to stare uncomprehendingly up at him.

“Wha...”

“You look like death warmed over.”

“So does the other guy.”

Kearny hoped so. Ballard’s nose was swollen and red, there were faint black rings around the inner corners of both eyes that would soon turn into shiners and make him look like a raccoon. A scrape on his jaw, another on one bare shoulder.

Comprehension was coming into Ballard’s gaze. “Why’d you wake me up? You want to take over the couch, too?”

“What other guy?”

“Bart Heslip.” Ballard was sitting up with his bare feet on the floor. Kearny sat down in Larry’s venerable easy chair.

“Heslip is in Detroit and is your best friend besides.”

“He’s not in Detroit, he’s tending bar in the ’Loin and I’m in hiding, and it’s because he’s my friend that he’s supposed to have put me in the hospital last night.” He added significantly, “I was going to sleep in this morning, but you...”

“Goddammit, Ballard—”

“Okay, okay, but it’s a long story and I gotta have some coffee first.”

“There’s some left over from yesterday morn—”

“Surely you jest.” With cold dignity, Ballard swept his blanket around him like a trading-post Indian and stalked barefoot into the kitchen cubicle to scrub out whatever vile thing Kearny had left in his pot the previous morning. Then he set about brewing some of his own superb French Roast.

That was really what Kearny had been angling for. If only there were some nice fresh steaming muffins to go with it, he thought. Or maybe some doughnuts to dunk...

A slice of dry toast, even?

Eggs boiled, poached, and scrambled, herring kippered, pork sausage links, bacon, ham, cold roast beef slices, porridge and dry cereals, six kinds of muffins and toast, gallons of coffee, four kinds of juice. Fresh fruit, of course: bananas for slicing over cereal, apples, oranges, apricots.

The Rochemonts, used to such abundance, ate moderately while Paul talked about his beloved holograms. Giselle picked, Ken ate everything in sight.

Tomorrow was the signing. After that, nobody would have any reason to want Paul dead. Of course he could drive just about anyone ‘round the bend, but you didn’t murder a man for that. You just got as far away as possible...

Somehow Giselle couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t over yet. There had to be another shoe to drop.

She realized that Paul had stopped talking and that into the void, Bernardine was saying, “Tomorrow is the signing and tomorrow night is the celebration dinner at the Officers Club at Fort Mason. You will, of course, be our guests. Mr. Warren. I want you to rent a tux at Selix Formal Wear in San Rafael.”

“Hnmbuht Hyhn don’ waunt—”

“Nonsense.” Her eyes flashed with social excitement. “It is going to be one of the great occasions of the season.”

The maid came in to plug a telephone into the jack next to Giselle’s chair. Giselle thanked her, heard Kearny’s voice, blunt and hard-edged, and felt a tremor of excitement. She knew that tone very well indeed.

“Anybody murdered in their bed last night?”

“Even-thing secure, Mr. Kearny,” she said snappily.

“Good. Leave Ken there to handle the security, you get right down to the office and jerk everything we have in the files pertaining to Bart Heslip. Personnel folder, application photos, everything. The cops will be around eventually. He resigned two weeks ago and he went back to Detroit with his girl.”

Even in the dark, she said automatically, “Is that wise?”

“It wouldn’t be, but he isn’t in Detroit — he never left town, and he and Larry have been playing some of their goddam games again. We’ll all meet at the office at two-thirty to find out just how much trouble we’re in.”

John Little was lying on the living room sofa, softly strumming his guitar and singing as he stared up at the water-stained plasterboard ceiling. Never had got around to fixing that leak in the roof. Had thrown a tarp over it, but...

It seemed like the whiskey hadn’t smoothed out his memories of her leaving him after all, else why such a bitter song? He heard the front door open and twisted around to look across the room, for a moment white-hot hope springing up in his breast.

He sighed and set aside his guitar to pick up his bottle.

“The living room furniture this time?”

O’B almost hung his head. “That’s what the man said.”

John Little swung his feet around to the floor, sat up. “Ain’t your fault, Red. Lemme help you with this thing.”

They each got an end and wrestled the couch out through the front door. Little set down his end and straightened up to stare at his beloved Dodge Dakota longbed backed up to the front porch. He looked at O’B with half-reproachful hound-dog eyes.

“She’s a damn fine truck,” he said. “I loved that truck.”

O’B said hurriedly, “Exactly! I thought to myself, I’m gonna have this big load of furniture to haul, and where could I get anything better to haul it in than Mr. Little’s longbed Dodge Dakota?”

“It only makes sense,” said John Little sadly, and bent to pick up his end of the couch again.