Contract Null & Void

Chapter Thirty-one

Must have been a hell of a fight, even if only a staged one, Dan Kearny thought. Heslip looked just as battered as Ballard, who’d apparently torn every strand of hair completely off Heslip’s head.

“Trouble is,” Bart was saying, “the cops are going to be after me — the me in that composite — pretty damned quick.”

Giselle said, “I stripped the files of your records, but you’re hot. You should be on a plane—”

“I have to be in the ’Loin tonight, just in case.”

“That’s right.” Larry understood instantly, perfectly. “Bart took the man’s money, he’s got to make the effort.”

They were crowded into the small second-floor front office at DKA, seldom used except by the bookkeeper, where they could not be interrupted by anyone coming into the downstairs offices.

Kearny said, “So what’s your next step, Ballard? Are you going to talk to this Sally?”

“I’m in intensive care, remember? I show my nose around that union hall, Bart’s hanging out there in the wind.”

“So who is going to talk to her?” said Kearny impatiently.

Somebody said, “Morales?” and everybody chuckled.

Trin Morales was a hell of a detective, but you couldn’t control him, ever. Ballard said, “Come to think of it, Trin was snuffling around Local Three the other day when I was there. He have any assignment would logically take him down there?”

“No,” said Giselle flatly. As office manager, she knew most everything assigned to any of the field agents.

“I’ll ask him when I see him,” said Kearny. Which meant he would ask Morales, keep asking until he got an answer. He added, to Ballard, “What about your girlfriend?”

“Amalia? She knocked me down the stairs last night.”

“I can’t imagine why,” said Giselle.

“Ain’t nobody really likes you much, is there, dude?” asked Heslip with a grin.

Kearny said, “Quit clowning. Can you trust her not to blow your cover to whoever thinks you’re in traction?”

“She gave me the lead to Sally in the first place.”

“What about Sally? Can we trust her?”

“How the hell should I know?” said Ballard almost testily. “I didn’t even really meet her — just turned my picket sign in to her when Amalia and I—”

“Turned your what in?” asked Giselle incredulously. “Larry Ballard was actually walking a union picket line?”

“Well, I, I was just...” He said suddenly, triumphantly, “I was questioning an informant.” He drew himself up with dignity. “Amalia. Who later gave me the lead to Sally.”

“Maybe she gave you that lead just to set you up,” said Kearny.

Heslip said, “For what it’s worth, the guys I was riding around with last night aren’t going to trust a woman in their affairs, ever.”

“It’s Larry’s call,” said Kearny.

And an easy one, thought Ballard. Any pretext to speak with Amalia was a valid course of action. Even if the unthinkable was true, and she was somehow involved in the Petrock murder, he’d still have to find that out.

He could ask her to speak with Sally. She could just say no. Life was an experiment.

“So I’ll find out one way or another,” he said. “I’ll call her, try to get her to meet me.”

Kearny stood up from the corner of the desk where he’d been sitting. “Okay, everybody, check in with Jane Goldson whenever you have anything to report. By landline — no cell phones that anybody could be tuned in on.”

“Or by fax,” said Giselle. “Jane’s the only one sees ’em.”

The intercom phone on the desk rang. Kearny picked up.

“Yeah?”

“Two homicide inspectors are here to see you, Mr. Kearny,” came Jane Goldson’s crisp, precise voice.

“Hold ’em thirty seconds, send ’em up the front stairs,” said Kearny. He hung up, pointed at Ballard and Heslip. “You two. Down the back stairs and out, pronto.”

Up in Trucker’s Best Eats at Fortuna, Charlene was checking the clock and wondering if Red would show up on time, when he slid onto the stool right in front of her.

“I see Nordstrom’s truck outside. Are he and LuElla—”

“They went back to the motel five minutes ago.” She poured him a cup of coffee and leaned across the counter so he could cop a look down her blouse and smell the perfume newly applied behind her ears. “I told LuElla I’d cover for her until the dinner rush starts about five o’clock. You know I wouldn’t be doing this if he wasn’t such a skunk to her, don’t you?”

“I know that, darlin’,” said O’B.

“What you gonna do to him, Red?”

“Take away all those truck tires he hasn’t paid for.”

Concern entered her face. “He was bragging he put the guy trying to take those tires away from him into the hospital.”

“That he did. So they sent in the first team.”

“You?” O’B looked properly modest as he slurped the last of his coffee. “How can you get ’em? If you open the cab, that damn dog of his will eat you alive.”

“So I won’t open the cab.”

There was a heavy rumbling from outside. Grunting its way up beside Nordstrom’s big rig was an even bigger tow truck with FORTUNA TOWING on the door in ornate flowery lettering.

“That won’t work!” exclaimed Charlene, who knew a thing or two about trucks. “You still gotta get into that cab and put it in neutral and get the brake off, and that damn Rottweiler will get somebody no matter what you have to neutralize him.”

O’B had to get out there to help the tow-truck driver — and to handle Nordstrom should he somehow catch them in the act.

“Then we’ll just have to avoid bothering Fido,” he said.

When Ballard entered the same Market Street coffee shop he’d taken her to for lunch four days ago, Amalia was seated at the same table, eating what looked like the same lemon meringue pie.

She looked up when Ballard slid in across from her. “The St. Mark folded this morning. They’re meeting all our demands, right across the board.” Then she got a mean look on her face. “I don’t want to hear anything about last night.”

“Look, Amalia, Beverly and I weren’t—”

“Stop it!”

Ballard quelled her with open hands, palm out, just as the waitress came up. He shook his head, she departed.

Amalia said, “Damn you and your coffee, now I expect it to always taste like yours.”

He sighed and shrugged and told her what had happened to him since she had knocked him down the stairs the night before, and that, in order to protect his buddy Bart Heslip, nobody could know Ballard was up and around.

He indicated his nose, his growing shiners. “That’s how I got these. Faking the fight with Bart.” She had the bad taste to laugh at him. “We have to know exactly what Sally heard Danny Marenne saying on the phone the day he disappeared. Exactly.”

“So you want me to talk to Sally again.”

“Right.”

“Wrong. You’re a dead issue with me. I opened up to you like I never have to a man before, and all the time you’re—”

“Amalia, I told you I never...”

She put her hands over her ears until he quit talking, then said, “Just stay out of my life, all right, Larry? I can’t stand to have you in my life.”

“This is about the union, Amalia, not about me.”

Leaving, she hesitated, then slid back into the booth. “I told you there’s no way anybody could use the union to make money illegally. Our funds are just too tightly monitored.”

“But just what if somebody has figured out a way?”

She stared at his face as if it were a piece of abstract art, nothing human, for a full thirty seconds.

“Okay. Where can I reach you if I find out anything?”

“Call me at home. I’ll pick up but I won’t answer.”

With a sudden surprised look on her face, Amalia said, “I don’t even know your telephone number.”

Ballard wrote it on a napkin.

Nordstrom gave a series of self-satisfied grunts and rolled off LuElla without waiting for her to catch up. He slapped her, hard, on the bottom, and said, “Gotta hit the trail, sweetlips.”

LuElla rolled over onto her back to watch with starry eyes as he pulled on his clothes. “Will I see you Wednesday?”

“You’ll see me when you see me, got that?” He went into the bathroom, smirked at himself in the mirror, came back out, pointed a forefinger at her, shot her with his cocked thumb, and swaggered out. He owned the stupid little bitch.

Charlene watched him cross the waste ground between the motel and his mighty eighteen-wheeler, black cowboy hat on the back of his head since the rain had stopped for the moment, hands halfway thrust into the hip pockets of his tight Levi’s, rolling his shoulders the way the Duke had done in scores of movies.

Suddenly he stopped dead, staring at his truck. He started yelling curses, so loud she could hear him even through the window glass, started jumping up and down so hard his hat flew off just as it started to pour again.

Drenched, Nordstrom rushed his truck as if he wanted to kick the tires to vent his frustration. But there were no tires to kick. Just the bare hubs, a couple of feet off the ground.

Under each axle on either side were double rows of stacked railroad ties, bearing the brunt of the truck-trailer’s loaded weight. O’B had just had the tow-truck driver jack up the truck and take the tires.

Charlene laughed through the window until there were tears in her eyes, as Nordstrom pounded his fists on the truck body and screamed his curses while his Rottweiler, still locked inside the cab, thundered its impotent rage.