Contract Null & Void

Chapter Thirty-two

Dan Kearny was on the phone with Police Chief Ernie Rowan over in Larkspur, jollying him along, hoping to pick up something useful in the Rochemont puzzle that he, like Giselle, couldn’t quite convince himself was over. Not that he’d tell her that.

To Rowan he was saying, “After they sign the papers tomorrow, I guess the Rochemonts will be out of our hair.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Rowan in a long-suffering voice. “They live in my township, remember? And we still haven’t laid our hands on the elusive Mr. Nugent.”

“Maybe he isn’t the one causing you all the grief,” said Kearny airily.

“Oh, he’s it, all right.”

“I guess you’re right.” Then he added casually, though it was the reason he’d called, “Just so I can close my file, did the Marin County forensics lab come up with anything on the explosives Nugent used on Paul’s new Mercedes?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact... lemme find it here...” Kearny heard papers being shuffled, then Rowan came back on. “Guess it’s a sort of unusual combination...”

Kearny listened and wrote, repeating it aloud as he did. “...German radio transmitter... French plastique... Israeli pencil detonator...”

“That ring any bells with you?”

“No. But what does a private dick specializing in repos know about explosives?”

“I thought you guys were all James Bond in drag.”

They exchanged chuckles and hung up. Kearny sat staring at what he had written. That particular mix of explosives had rung some faint bell with him.

Sure. Repo they’d had a couple years back involving some big-time dope smugglers. The... what was it, the Eel Man, who had fallen on hard times and had started missing payments on his straight girlfriend’s car. He’d lived up in the Marin woods and had dealt with an international Scandinavian smuggler called the Swede who’d brought in explosives as well as dope; there’d been a San Francisco contact who’d moved everything interchangeably...

The Colonel, that was it.

Kearny’d grabbed the Eel Man’s car himself, because it had gotten so hairy the man assigned to the case had come in, tossed the keys to the company car on Kearny’s desk, and gone back to being a prison guard up in Oregon somewhere.

Kearny shrugged and stuck his notes in the Rochemont file. He still had that little itch in the back of his mind, but could think of no way to scratch it. He put the file away.

Bart Heslip sat in his darkened room at the unnamed ROOMS — DAY — WEEK — MONTH Tenderloin hotel above a bargain market calling itself Crim’s and Cram’s Palace of Fine Junk. He rented by the week. A neon sign across the street was going on and off, washing him with color as if he were in a ’40s noir movie. Except for the bald head, he looked his old self; he had abandoned his nose ring because if the cops caught up with him in whatever guise, they’d know him.

Bart was wondering if he should go down the hall to see if Sleepy Ray was in his room when someone banged on his door. He sat silently — if he shifted his weight even a millimeter, the bedsprings would squeak — and tried to assess the quality of the fist on the panel.

Sleepy Ray? Too assertive.

A drunk? Not boisterous enough.

The manager? His rent wasn’t due until Monday.

The cops, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern? Probably. He sighed, got off the bed and crossed to the door. The Vulture came in quickly and closed it behind him. How had he known where to look? thought Bart. Aw hell, Charlie Bagnis had his address.

They faced one another on the thin stained napless rug in the middle of the darkened room. The Vulture said. “The boss liked how you handled that little chore last night.”

“The boss as in who?”

By the intermittent red light from the sign across the street, the Vulture waggled his finger at Heslip almost co-quettishly. “Later for that. Tonight—”

“Uh-uh. A simple beating, okay. Anything heavier, I don’t deal with unknowns.”

“Okay. You got a car?”

“I can borrow one.”

The Vulture handed him a sheet torn from a memo pad. “The boss thought you might wanna face-to-face. Here’s the address and the time to meet. Be exactly on time and he’ll have a sweet, sweet deal for you.”

“Why not for you?”

“I told you last night — I’m squeamish.”

So the next step up might be an assignment for a killing. But by then he’d know who was behind it all — and who almost surely had ordered up Petrock’s murder.

He felt a moment’s unease. Dan Kearny would want him to call in about this, discuss whether he should go or not, maybe suggest some backup. But he hated to go running to the Great White Father when he really didn’t have anything solid.

Why weren’t they using the same team that had done Petrock? Maybe the team was too hot — or maybe they’d left town after the killing. Could be whoever he was seeing tonight hadn’t ordered the Petrock kill at all. That’s why he was going, wasn’t it? To find out for his own self.

After he was sure the Vulture had left the building, he slipped down the back stairs and out the alley door. Because he had the time, he hoofed it to DKA to pick up an anonymous company car for his rendezvous.

Rendezvous with whom?

Ballard’s doorbell rang. He went out and down the hall. When he opened the front door, he allowed himself to be astounded and hopeful.

“I guess the pleasure is all mine.”

Amalia Pelotti went by him without speaking, down to his open apartment door spilling light across the hall. By the time he had closed the door and followed her, she was standing by the coffee table near his sofa, sizing things up.

“It looks like you, Larry.”

He looked around the shabby living room, seeing it through her eyes. “I don’t spend much time here,” he mumbled. “You want me to make some coffee?”

“Why do you think I came instead of calling?”

Ballard sighed and began measuring out water and French Roast while Amalia sat down in his battered easy chair and made it her own. Why did he feel guilty? He hadn’t done anything with Beverly, hadn’t even entertained the thought of doing anything with Beverly, hadn’t...

They faced each other over steaming cups of coffee, he on the couch, she in the easy chair.

“Sally heard Danny say he’d been at the Redevelopment Agency — does that mean anything to you?”

“You have to go through them to do any commercial building in San Francisco.”

“He’d also been to the Office of Economic Development.”

“I put up a dollar, you put up a dollar,” Larry said. “They coordinate matching funds. And no matter how hard economic times get, no matter how much people get laid off, there’s always private and government bucks for so-called worthy projects.”

Amalia said softly, “Would you call our union tearing down the current building and putting up an eight-story building with six floors affordable housing for the aged a worthy project?”

“Man, I bet that’s it!” exclaimed Ballard. “A way to milk the union for a lot of money without touching union funds — it all would come from private start-up and rebuilding funds, and local and state and federal development deals. Just bypass the watchdogs on the union’s pension and welfare funds entirely.”

Amalia was silent. He went into the cubbyhole kitchen, got the pot, poured them more coffee. He sat back down.

“You know where this is going, Amalia. Someone in your union might be planning to steal just a hell of a lot of money with dazzling paperwork, so no one else quite knows just what money went where for what.”

“I know that,” she said sadly.

“Who in Local Three’s got the moxie to do it?”

“Petrock — but if he heard about it, he’d try to stop it.”

“And he’s dead,” said Ballard. “Who else?”

After a long pause, she said, “Assemblyman Rick Kiely.”

“And he isn’t dead,” said Ballard.

Assemblyman Rick Kiely’s wife was teaching her specialed class at USF, as she did every Friday evening, so he sat under the Klee wall safe in his home office, having a drink and finding himself getting caught up in a book called Shakespeare’s Game, by a playwright named Gibson. Hamlet was Kiely’s favorite play, because every day he saw — hell, himself played — those same power games in the Assembly, and the book had a marvelous analysis of the play and the games.

The house was still except for the servomechanisms that nobody ever really heard anymore — the hum of his computer, the slight distant shudder of the refrigerator starting up, the electronic click dick click of his desk clock.

He checked the time and set his book aside. His men at the union had said they’d be calling him tonight with some important news about what might have happened to Danny Marenne while he was nosing around. They were the same ones who had told him about Ballard and had put the man in the hospital at his orders.

Heslip was ten minutes early. He parked on Brentwood Avenue, a block away and around the corner from the address he’d been given. From long practice in making quick getaways from irate subjects, he automatically parked facing downhill with no car in front of him.

He walked from there, keeping in the shadows, walking on grass so his footsteps wouldn’t ring out. After he was gone, another shadow moved to his car, but Bart was already focused on the huge, pretentious house, mansion almost, in the next block. He settled in to wait for his appointment.

Danny Marenne came awake with a start, yelped as his cracked ribs dug into his flesh. Just, he hoped, into the pleuram, not into his lung. He lay in the dark, totally disoriented. What time was it? What day was it? Dark out. Must have fallen asleep, slept the whole night through.

He swung his legs gingerly out of bed, sat with his feet on the floor. Yes. Still naked and wrapped in the bedspread. He’d been going to call all night...

He turned on the bedside lamp, sat staring stupidly at the clock. As he stared, it turned from 8:57 to 8:58. Almost nine o’clock in the morning. Suddenly he leaned forward, ignoring another jolt of pain from his ribs, to stare at the little red electronic dot beside the 8:58. The red dot meant P.M.

Of course. It was light at nine o’clock in the morning. He’d slept the clock around. It was night again — Friday night. Bon Dieu. He feverishly tapped out his man’s number.

Rick Kiely could hear police sirens in the distance, very faint, as if coming over the shoulder of Twin Peaks on Portola Drive. Then the phone rang. At last. He picked up.

“You’re late. Where in the hell—”

“Rick? This is Danny.”

“Danny! Jesus! I was just waiting for a call about you. Where have you been? What happened?” Kiely found he was gripping the phone very tightly.

“They sent me off the cliff Monday night when I was on my way to your beach cabin with the proof we’ve been looking for. They went into the water with me and were lost.” Danny was talking very fast, as if against some impending doom. “None of that matters now—”

At the tar end of the house, the doorbell rang.

“Danny, hang on a second. Someone’s at the door. I—”

“Don’t answer it! They have to know that you’ve been—”

A twelve-gauge shotgun roared outside the window. Rick Kiely took the full charge of double-O shot directly in the back of his head. It knocked him forward over his chair and sent the receiver flying from his hand.

The second shot, the deer slug, blew his spine apart, but Kiely was already dead by then, without ever knowing how badly he’d been betrayed.

The sound of the police sirens was much louder.

Bart Heslip was just pushing the doorbell a second time when he heard the double crump! from behind the house. He whirled and leaped from the porch, was in the shrubbery flanking the lawn as the first police car. siren and lights blazing, squealed into Hazelwood from Monterey Boulevard.

Bart let the car roll out of sight and sound of the Kiely mansion before starting the engine. Set up. The fall guy. He didn’t even know who had been in the mansion. And it had almost worked.

He parked the car in the Haight and hiked up the hill to the house above the Haight that he shared with his lady. Corinne Jones. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern might know about it — although it was in Connne’s name — but they probably wouldn’t check it tonight. They’d either think he’d have a room somewhere in the Loin and be looking for that. or they’d believe he really was in Detroit and have Detroit P.D. looking for him in the Motor City. Still, he’d decided to leave his DKA company car a half-mile away just in case.

He’d hole in here, and wish Corinne were with him tonight, instead of in Detroit. As he fell into bed, how he wanted her to be holding him in her arms — and telling him he hadn’t been as stupid as he knew he had been.