Contract Null & Void

Chapter Thirty-six

O’B had delivered John Little’s bedroom set back to the Furniture Ranch’s warehouse, and had, with Tony d’Angelo’s help, gotten rid of John Little’s longbed pickup at the dealer’s lot. Free! Tomorrow morning early he would take that old Redwood Highway south for San Francisco and home.

As he drove by Redwood Music he saw it was still open, with an empty parking space in front. On impulse, O’B pulled over to the curb. He’d liked Jackson Singer; maybe the man would have some business for DKA in the future.

“Hey, Reverend,” he said as he entered, “how’s tricks?”

Singer was rearranging the front window display, which was a sort of starburst of guitars hung from thin nylon cords and outlined with lights. “They’re fine, Mr. O’Bannon.”

“O’B. Mr. O’Bannon was my dad. I’m on my way back to San Francisco and just wanted to say I hope you’ll call Tony d’Angelo if you have more trouble from delinquent customers.”

“I certainly will,” said Singer with a warm smile on his lantern-jawed face. “But most of my people are good pay.” They shook hands as O’B started for the door, then Singer said, “Well, actually, there is one thing you could do for me...”

They’d stopped at the corner market on the way, so back at Ballard’s apartment he made coffee while Bart Heslip short-ordered them his own specialty, medium-rare cheeseburgers. As they licked the last of the beef juices off their fingers, the phone started to ring.

“Kearny, checking up,” guessed Heslip.

Ballard looked at his watch and went into the living room to answer it. “We probably should have called in. He’s probably heard about what went down last night.” He picked up the phone.

And heard Danny Marenne’s French-accented voice in his ear.

The Vulture used the car lighter on his cigarette during the red light at Ninth Avenue. Ballard and Heslip were ten blocks ahead. Failing afternoon sun glinted off his glasses.

He said, “They’re turning right into Park Presidio.”

“So — Golden Gate Bridge.” The Mormon tapped out a number on the mobile phone. It was picked up on the second ring. He said, “I think our friends are going out of town into Marin.”

“Keep me posted.”

The Mormon hung up. His smooth inexpressive features looked oily. “Could that bastard Marenne still be alive?” Then he added, suddenly vicious, “If he is, he won’t be for long.”

The Vulture dragged smoke down into his lungs, glanced over at him. “You’re getting to like it, aren’t you?”

“Just drive the fucking car, you’re good at that.” He smiled. “Maybe I’ll get to do that fucking Larry Ballard, too.”

“You’re getting to like it,” said the Vulture again almost mournfully. He stubbed out his cigarette and in a continuing motion reached for another.

The room was high-ceilinged, so the low-watt bulb in the old-fashioned fixture high above the threadbare carpet cast little light. The husky man with black curly hair wore a black tux and a snap-on red bow tie. He sat on the sagging edge of the bed, putting on shiny narrow black shoes with three-inch lifts.

At the pine dresser once stained walnut, he slipped a gray wig over his own hair, and his image in the dresser’s mirror aged ten years. With spirit gum, he affixed a huge gray handlebar mustache to his upper lip, aging himself another five years. Then he hid his dark, cold eyes behind tinted aviator glasses.

“Faith an’ be jeysus, an’ y’r sainted mither wouldn’t know ye, laddie,” he joked aloud to his image.

He put on a red cummerbund, took the Colonel’s hand grenade from the top left-hand drawer of the dresser, and slipped it into the cummerbund. After he buttoned his tux, he turned this way and that in front of the mirror. No bulge showed.

Then he giggled again like Tommy Udo, picked up the gym bag holding his other clothes, and went out to kill a few people and get millions and millions of bucks. Ain’t life grand?

The cramped check-in desk was stuffed at an angle into one corner of the converted Victorian’s ground-floor lobby. A green-shaded lamp glowed on the deserted desk. Dan Kearny started up a narrow stairway with a polished banister down which shrieking gleeful children must have slid before the turn of the century.

Halfway up he met a tall, gray-haired man with a gym bag; he wore an old-fashioned gunfighter’s mustache and an incongruous tux. They had to turn slightly sideways to get by one another.

The door of room 212 was standing ajar. The closet was just an alcove without a door, empty. Kearny switched on the dim overhead. He began opening dresser drawers, in the upper left found a crumpled handkerchief. He sniffed it. Something metallic had been wrapped in it. Something like a grenade?

Always one step behind. How to cut across? And suddenly he was able to scratch that itch at the back of his mind: the shape of a murder conspiracy was forming his head, a shape that had nothing to do with microchips or half-billion-dollar contracts. Or maybe it did. Even better: that would explain why Karen Marshall...

He needed facts to bolster conjecture. He sighed. It was going to be a hell of a way to spend Saturday night: committing a burglary. With a stab of guilt, he thought: Most men spend their Saturday nights with their wives, their families...

Well, at least burglary was better than another night in Ballard’s apartment.

Ballard parked the car so the cabin was between it and the road, as Danny had directed. No lights showed. He and Bart got out and strolled around in front and, by the just-set sun’s dying light, stepped up onto the slightly sagging front porch.

“Nice place to sit and look at the ocean,” said Ballard.

“When the cops ain’t looking for you,” said Heslip.

The front door opened; Danny Marenne motioned them in past him, shut the door. “Jesus, Danny!” exclaimed Ballard. He would have embraced the little Frenchman, but Danny winced away.

“Ribs,” he warned.

A gravelly voice, soaked in seawater. Danny looked dehydrated, beaten down, buffed away, as if he had been tumbled around for a couple of days in a rock-polishing cylinder. Any visible flesh of face, hands, arms was bruised and abraded and scabbing over. One ankle was taped. Obviously he had cracked or even broken ribs that needed something done for them.

There was enough paranoia in Danny’s face to almost scare Larry: Danny wasn’t given to paranoia. He demanded tensely, “You weren’t followed out here, were you?”

“We cut off U.S. One at Tennessee Valley Road in Tam Junction,” said Heslip, “and waited for ten minutes. Nobody turned off after us.”

Finally, Danny relaxed. Looking from one battered friend to the other, he cracked a painful grin.

“Who beat the shit out of you?”

Each answered in unison for the other. “I did.”

Danny even chuckled.

“Okay, now that’s settled, let’s get to hell out of here, guys. We can tell each other our stories on the way.”

“Good idea,” said Ballard. “You need a doctor—”

“Merde,” said Danny, who was facing the door.

They whirled, by the last of the fading daylight saw two men coming in with guns in their hands. The tall gawky one had a classic German army 9mm Parabellum Luger, with the four-inch barrel, and the shorter smooth-faced one, grinning like a maniac, had a double-barreled sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun.

“The Vulture and the Mormon!” exclaimed Heslip, not quite surprised, as Ballard said, in a flat, accusing voice, “Morris Brett and Burnett Sebastian,” and Danny said in a tired voice, “Business agent and organizer for Local Three.”

“You’re all three right!” The left hand that held Brett’s current cigarette flicked the light switch. In the brightness, Sebastian waggled the sawed-off at the three friends.

“The bad guys,” grinned nasty-faced Sebastian. “So you good guys sit on the floor two feet apart facing us, hands behind the head, fingers interlocked.”

They did. There was nothing else they could do.

“What do we do now?” asked Danny. He still sounded tired.

“We wait,” said Sebastian, “for the boss. Then it’ll all be over.”

“It’s ain’t over ’til the lanky lady screams,” said Giselle.

They were bound back-to-back in near dark in the middle of the yacht’s cabin floor, their wrists tied together behind their backs, their lashed ankles straight out in front of them.

Giselle was so scared she was afraid she might wet her panties, but she wasn’t going to let poor Frank Nugent know that. She might need him for something, although at the moment she couldn’t think what. What she didn’t need was him even more demoralized than he already was.

After a long silence, Nugent said in a subdued voice, “Inga went out with Graff before she went out with me, that’s how he got to know me and Paul. She quit him for me—”

“And quit you for Paul,” said Giselle.

“She isn’t that way. I’ll just never believe that.”

“You just don’t want to believe it, Frankie. The only reason she’s been hiding you out is just what Graff said — you’re the perfect fall guy for whatever horror they’re planning tonight. We’ll be dead when the police find us—”

“You certainly will.” Once again, they hadn’t heard the companionway door being slid open.

Eddie Graff switched on the light at the foot of the ladder. Even looking right at him, she would not have recognized him without hearing his voice. He was three inches taller, now Frank Nugent’s height, gray-haired, mustached, wearing tinted glasses, resplendent in the tux, red tie, and red cummerbund all the waiters would wear as they served at the banquet.

Graff crouched to check their bonds; everything was secure. The bastard knew how to tie knots. He stood, grinning.

“As Lorena Bobbitt said, it won’t be long now. You’ll be found dead, Frankie, wearing this uniform and this disguise. Dead with you will be Ms. ... what is it? Oh, yes. Ms. Marc.” He had snooped Giselle’s purse after tying them up, had put it on the sideboard beside the companionway. “Superb detective that she is, she was onto you. Guilt over her murder, on top of guilt over Paul’s, finally made you crack and kill yourself.”

“What about Inga?” asked Giselle.

“Ah, dear, darling, sweet, stupid, malleable Inga. After a suitable time as a widow, she will marry me hoping to live happily ever after.” He giggled his Tommy Udo giggle. “The next sounds you hear you won’t hear — they’ll be pistol shots.”

Larry Hansen had perforce become a reader during the twelve years he’d been sitting behind the lobby security desk at 114 Sansome Street. Mostly science fiction and fantasy, because nothing could take him further from this desk, this lobby.

The street door opened and a stocky guy with a hard face and heavy jaw came in, yawning, an attaché case in his left hand. Another yawn, so prodigious that his head went back until Larry thought he might bust his neck, stopped him in front of the directory board. Then he came on.

“Nice night.” He signed in as Joe Bush, Bedney & Oehler, Attorneys-at-Law, seventh floor. “Wouldn’t you know Oehler would want me for a conference tomorrow on a goddam Sunday? And wouldn’t you know the papers I need are here at the office?”

Hansen barely heard him. They were taking a Treadon from the storage facility and removing his legs to snap him into place on his treads so he could explore the surface of the planet Zorg.

Sixteen minutes total for Dan Kearny, who had picked Bedney & Oehler off the directory board during his second jaw-creaking yawn. Nine minutes to get off at seven, walk down two flights, break into Marshall and Associates, Insurance Brokers, All Lines. He wasn’t handy with picks, but it wasn’t much of a lock.

Only seven more minutes to rifle the life insurance folders in Marshall’s private office, find the file he’d been pretty sure would be there, and run a copy on the office Xerox.

At the Fort Mason Officers Club, Bernardine’s little dinner party for one hundred of her most intimate friends — plus selected members of the Bay Area media, of course — was just getting under way. Bernardine, Inga, and Paul were at the head table by one of the choice windows looking out over the bay toward the East Bay lights twinkling like jewels in the night.

“I wonder where Mr. Warren is.” Bernardine, wearing a gown one size too tight, was adrip with jewels of her own.

“And Giselle,” said Inga. “I really like her.”

She was stunning in the gown she’d modeled the day before, and Paul was actually quite handsome in his tux. Suddenly he went into his harsh, angry, Bogart-doing-Sam-Spade voice.

“Phone your mother. See if she’s coming yet.”

“My mother?” asked Inga in bewilderment. “I don’t get it.”

Paul said, “In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade sends Brigid O’Shaughnessy to safety at Effie Perrine’s house but Brigid never arrives, and...” He stopped with a surprised look on his face. “To hell with it, I don’t have to do this stuff anymore.”

“Just what do you mean?” asked Bernardine a bit frostily.

“I can just... be me,” said Paul with a sort of wonder.

Ken appeared beside the maître d’s table, looked around the room before reluctantly coming over toward them.

Bernardine pointed imperiously. “Here — next to me.”

Ken pulled out the indicated chair and sat down.

“Hngwears Hnjezel?” he asked.

“Giselle? She’s not here yet,” said Paul in normal tones.

Bernardine had her hand on Ken’s knee under the table. She said coyly, “You look very handsome in a tuxedo, Kenny.”

And you look remarkable yourself, Bernardine, thought Ken. Where was Giselle? He wasn’t going to get through this evening without her help. At the Transamerica Tower she’d told him she might drop by here early to check out the security — and now no Giselle. Probably tied up in traffic on the Bay Bridge.

Giselle and Frank Nugent were still tied up back-to-back on the Basic Pascal’s polished hardwood floor. Both of them were panting from their unsuccessful efforts to get free.

“We’re... going to die here, aren’t... we?” puffed Nugent.

“Of course we aren’t,” said Giselle, thinking, Don’t go to pieces on me now, kid. “We’re going to get out of here. I have an idea. Maybe. First thing we have to do is stand up.”

They started trying to do so, grunting, pushing, drawing their bound feet under them a bit at a time. Giselle caught herself on the edge of hysteria, but at least her giggles at their gyrations were taking away some of Nugent’s tension.