Contract Null & Void

Chapter Three

San Francisco had a brand-new court-mandated county jail right next to the Hall of Justice at Eighth and Bryant, cushy as a luxury hotel, but Trin Morales was in one of the old holding cells in the Hall itself with the other felons, drunks, male whores and assorted scofflaws to be arraigned early in the A.M.

He sat on the floor with his back to the wall, sullen. How the hell could he raise bail? Kearny would get him out, of course — but then would fire him. He needed his DKA job until he could figure out how to open his own P.I. office again.

“Trinidad Morales? You’re sprung. Let’s go.”

A mystified Morales followed the uniformed guard out of the cell to catcalls from those of his fellow detainees not comatose from booze or drugs, and down to the property room.

“What’s the deal?”

“You care?”

He tore open the envelope of his belongings, checking to make sure his money was still in his wallet. Just because they were cops didn’t mean they weren’t a bunch of goddam thieves.

“Wanna update my Christmas list.”

Standing beside the door was a rather dissipated-looking black-haired Irishman in a tux and black tie. He had a belly, and a face that once would have been taut-chinned and crisp and maybe even a bit piratical. Now only the eyes were young: blue and brash and challenging yet glinting with humor at the same time. His tenor probably raised hell with “Galway Bay.”

“I told the good lads in blue that you were at my home to date our maid.” He chuckled. “She isn’t an illegal, Morales. She set you up. I told her to.”

They descended to the black limo waiting in the no-parking zone below the Hall’s front steps. A uniformed driver opened the door. The Irishman studied Trin as they drove off.

“You know who I am, then, laddie?”

Politics held as much interest for Morales as origami, but he’d have had to be brain-dead in this town not to know who this man was. He said, “Sure. Assemblyman Rick Kiely.”

“Right you are. When the Democrats get back control of the state legislature next election, Speaker of the House Rick Kiely.” They were sweeping around the curves of upper Market toward Twin Peaks. “You know a man named Georgi Petlaroc?”

“No.”

Kiely closed his right hand into a fist. “I’ve got you right by the balls, laddie. Don’t you try to screw with me.”

But Morales had figured out this guy wanted something, so he gave his short, heavy, jeering laugh. “You ain’t my type.”

“Tough guy,” chuckled Kiely. His fleshy chin made a roll above the tight collar of his dress shirt when he nodded to himself, but he looked like he probably had been a pretty tough guy himself in his day. He added, “I crook my finger, you come running — comprende?”

The limo slid to the curb and stopped. Kiely gestured. Morales opened his door and got out. “Si.”

“Or maybe after tonight I won’t need you. We’ll see.”

Morales stood beside his parked car to watch the limo turn the corner. Set up indeed. The bastard had even known where he had parked. Politicians, rich bastards, they had all the power.

Obviously some guy named Petlaroc, wanting something from Kiely’s safe, had anonymously hired Morales to scope it out. Soon Kiely would want Morales to get something from Petlaroc’s safe; money would change hands. Of course someone would try to set Morales up again, but he could take care of himself.

Meanwhile, it was the end of the month and he had a lot of item accounts to deal with. Morales went out to grab some cars.

Ken Warren wanted to be out grabbing cars, but here they were inside the mansion in Kent Woodlands. It looked like the kind of place you saw in miniseries about the Deep South: marble floors, statues without clothes, leather sofas that swallowed you when you sat in them, chairs with needlepoint potbellies and skinny legs, oil paintings of springer spaniels with worried brown eyes watching dead birds hanging off the edges of tables with brass bowls of fruit on them.

The nerd was Paul Rochemont, and his mother, Bernardine, was fighting middle age tooth and claw. From the neck up she was late 40s, the skin of her face smooth as porcelain and her blue eyes wide with the slightly surprised look successive face-lifts can impart. But her cantilevered bosom, skinny legs, and flat butt were all pushing 60.

“My mother made a mistake,” Paul was saying to Warren in an offhand manner, ignoring Giselle. “I don’t need a bodyguard. The security here at the estate is absolutely mega. I designed it myself. State-of-the-art electronic heat sensors, sound sensors, movement sensors, and some holograms that—”

“Nyernguy ahnnha hgatye ntutters.”

Rochemont splattered something around in some other language in his best Bogie impersonation, then turned to Giselle and added rudely in his real voice, “What did he say?”

“What did you say?”

“ ‘The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.’ In Greek.” To her blank stare, he added, “From The Maltese Falcon.”

What a dweeb, she thought. She said sweetly, “Ken told you that your guy on the gate stutters.”

“He’s programmed to make fun of any car which originally sold for under eighty-five thousand.”

“Stutters,” said Giselle.

“Hnditapeered,” added Ken.

“Stutters. Disappeared. I see.” Paul started pacing. “Holograms are just two beams of light overlapping in some substance that diffracts light. These beams interfere with each other, which creates a pattern of light and dark regions.”

Ken struggled with it. “Nhow ndoo gynyou gnreed it nout?”

“How do you read it out?”

Ken nodded. Obviously, Paul listened to how people spoke.

“You shine a third beam of light through it. Where there’s little information stored, this light goes right through. Where there’s a lot stored, an image is projected back as a diffracted light pattern. A guard, a pack of dogs, a dragon...”

“I’m glad you cleared that up,” said Giselle.

“Traditionally, the materials showing this photorefractive effect have been inorganic crystals. They’re okay for optical-processing, holographic, optical-limiting, phase conjugation, and storage applications, but they’re difficult and expensive to grow, and they leak a lot of light. So I’ve developed a photorefractive polymer that can put tiny structures on a single wafer in a portable projector. If Spielberg’d had my polymer when he was doing Jurassic Park...”

“Hnbut...”

“But? Ah! Yes! The guard on the gate, disintegrating. The worst feature of my new polymer is that it maintains the image’s integrity for only a few days. Which is also its best feature. Reversibility. You can store a hologram today, erase it tomorrow, and store a new one. What I’m working on is that and long-term storage capacity in the same polymer wafer...”

Bernardine, on the leather couch with Giselle beside her, was listening to her son with her mouth open as if in wonder at what she had wrought. She shut it with a snap.

“My son is a genius, Miss Marc. Only twenty-eight years old and in just a few days Electrotec will pay him a half a billion dollars in cash and options for what is in his head.”

Giselle gestured. “Photorefractive polymers?”

“No, no, a new computer chip he designed, three times as fast as the P6 and without any difficulties to the right of the decimal like the Pentium. The holograms are just his hobby — for now.” She waved a dismissive hand. “The trouble is that he developed the chip with a man named Frank Nugent.”

“And now Nugent is claiming he developed it?”

She sniffed in disdain. “Everybody knows my Paulie is the creative person in that combine. No, Nugent got a clause into their partnership agreement that if either one dies, the other inherits everything developed during their years together. Paulies agreement with Electrotec will supersede that.”

Giselle felt a surge of excitement. “You think Nugent wants to kill Paul before he can sign?”

Another sniff. “The police cannot prove he was behind the attack on the Mercedes. So let’s just say I want to hire your Daniel Kearny Associates to keep my son safe until the papers are signed. After that, no one will gain from his death.”

“We’re investigators, Mrs. Rochement,” said Giselle. “We don’t do bodyguard work. If you want us to look into the circumstances surrounding the attack on the car—”

“No,” said Bernardine, “physical protection. If you want to do the other, of course, that’s up to you, but...”

“Physical protection,” repeated Giselle almost absently.

Her eyes roamed the antebellum salon as she thought furiously. Vaulted ceilings, antimacassars on the armchairs — and that eerie Disneyland in the garden. There was almost certainly no real danger to the woman’s precious Paul here, even less to her. But the whole setup was so much more intriguing than the repossessions, skip-tracing, fraud and embezzlement investigations they were used to...

So she added, “I’ll ask Mr. Kearny about it immediately, Mrs. Rochemont. Either way you’ll have to tell me about the attack on the car. How many people in your household?”

“Servants, of course. Then Paulie, myself, and Paulies wife, Inga. He married her a year ago over my objections.”

A wife. Who presumably would inherit if anything terminal happened to Paul after the signing. Just as Nugent would inherit if he died before signing. Sounded as if Paulie were whiplashed.

She said cautiously, “If I could have some hint as to the basis of your objections to his marriage...”

That sniff again. “She used to be Frank Nugent’s poopsie!”

Poopsie? Anyway, the classic triangle under one roof; and if she was still Nugent’s poopsie, she had a solid motive for Paul’s death anytime. Kearny would run screaming from this one.

“I, of course, will need personal protection also.”

“If Mr. Kearny approves, I’m sure we can arrange—”

“Oh, I know who I want.”

With remarkable quickness and grace, she was out of the couch and across the room. A bemused Giselle followed. Bernardine already had a proprietary hand on Ken’s arm.

“You know, Mr. Warren, you remind me of the late Mr. Rochemont — so direct, so forceful!”

“Hnuh?”

“I feel Paul will be safe with you here. I feel we all will be safe with you here. A big, strong, physical person such as yourself, Mr. Warren, with your background and training...”

At 1:00 A.M., Georgi Petlaroc and Ray Do emerged from Queer Street. Petrock seemed still euphoric over the council vote despite having been knocked on his butt a few hours earlier.

“Fourteen other Class A hotels have signed the new master agreement,” he boasted. “Stanford Court has settled. The Fairmont has settled. And the Mark’s going to have to settle. The only way they’ll break this strike is over my dead body.”

“I don’t like to hear you talk that way,” said Ray Do. “Not after that Swede assaulted you tonight.”

“Swede” was one of the many p.c. euphemisms for blacks in daily use by street cops and union guys. They laughed and shook hands, then Ray Do went to his car parked on Polk Street.

Petrock’s Nissan Ultima was parked around the corner on midnight-deserted Post Street. In the bus stop next to the fire station across from it was a shiny black luxury sedan, perhaps a limo, motor running. The rear window was down, a shadowy figure sat in the backseat. A second was behind the wheel. The spark of a cigarette being inhaled glowed redly for a brief instant.

If his nose had been good enough, Petrock might even have been able to smell the cigarette smoke. But he was a smoker himself on occasion, so noticed nothing. He paused to dig his keys out of his tight jeans pocket before stepping out around the Ultima to the driver’s side.

“Shit,” he said aloud. He had forgotten his Greek fisherman’s cap in the bar. To hell with it. They knew him at Queer Street; he’d pick it up next time he was in.

As he bent to unlock his door, a short twinned dark cylinder slid eight inches out of the sedan’s rear window to roar and spit at him. An ounce of rifled lead, the kind of shotgun slug used for deer, ripped into his left side near the kidney.

The blow swung him around against his car, so he was facing the second blast, this of double-O buckshot. Some of the charge missed him to pock the yellow brick apartment house beyond his Ultima, but one pellet struck him in the shoulder, a second in the right biceps, and five tore into his face, one of them going through his right eye into his brain.

He sprawled facedown in the street beside his Ultima, car keys glinting a yard from his outstretched hand. Blood began seeping out from under his body.

The dark sedan peeled off the curb in the best gangster movie tradition. It roared away down Post Street toward downtown — and the Tenderloin, where the man calling himself Nemesis had said he tended bar.

A patrol car arrived within three minutes; the bartender, running after Petrock with the fisherman’s cap, had seen him go down. Big black car, maybe a limo, no license number, no make, model, or year. The blues called for Homicide and an ambulance; in California, only a medic can pronounce a person dead.

The two homicide men, aroused at their respective homes because it was their week in the barrel, had been a team for eleven years. An assistant D.A. who did little-theater had dubbed them Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern after the characters in Hamlet, and the names had stuck.

Even at that hour a small crowd had gathered, kept back by the yellow plastic CRIME SCENE tapes. The two cops stood together pulling on thin rubber medical gloves as they stared down at the body. They were big men, wearing slacks and herringbone sports jackets with, however, different patterns.

The medic stood up, stripping off his gloves. Rosenkrantz, bald and ever hopeful, asked, “So what can you tell us?”

“It’s a man. He’s dead.”

“No shit,” said Guildenstern, the one with hair. “You know the difference between meat and fish?”

Rosenkrantz answered, “Your fish’ll die if you beat it.”

They got busy. The wallet told them the victim probably had been Georgi Petlaroc, president of Hotel and Culinary Local 3; they sent a blue to get hold of someone from the Union for confirmation. From the bartender’s verbal they had Ray Do and the man who had called himself Nemesis to chew on.

“I like the Armenian myself,” said Rosenkrantz. “He popped the guy in the gut, knew his name, said he’d look—”

“—funny without any front to his head. Yeah.”

“Get out an APB.”

Guildenstern made a police siren sound with his mouth. Neither man moved. They had no facts to put out on the air.

“You hear Clinton lost a spelling bee to Dan Quayle?”

“Sure. He thought ‘harass’ was two words.”

The young, fresh-faced blue returned, excited by his first homicide. “The business agent for the local, a man named Morris Brett, says he can be here in fifteen minutes to make a positive ID. He only lives ten blocks away, on Pine. He was still up.”

“Still up at two in the morning? Aha, a—”

“—suspect.”

Morris Brett wasn’t, at least tentatively. He was a very tall, stooped, cadaverous man with glasses and thinning hair combed sideways across a high-domed skull, a chain-smoker and to hell with the surgeon general. He was also, he said, an insomniac who seldom got to sleep before three in the morning, had a wife and two grown kids, one of whom had temporarily moved back into the Pine Street apartment after her divorce five months earlier.

“Temporarily?” said Rosenkrantz.

“ ’Till I can talk the wife into kicking her butt out. Not that she’s ever home anyway.” Brett dragged on his unfiltered cigarette, gave a cough, stubbed it out on the crystal of his watch. “Nobody has any goddam ashtrays anymore.”

“You’re all busted up by Petlaroc’s death.”

“Petrock was a son of a bitch. I backed him in the union council, but he was a wild man, a tough boy — he didn’t care whose butt he kicked.”

He went on to tell them what else Petrock had been. A fiery, dedicated union radical, a spiritual throwback to the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World involved in the violent organizing confrontations early in the century. A newly elected union president who feuded with the International, and with those on the council who backed the International.

“Just tonight he stuck a knife in the table six inches from Rafe Huezo’s fingers. Rafe’s the V.P” He held out his hands a foot and a half apart. “Huge goddam bowie knife.”

“We saw it on his belt,” said Rosenkrantz.

“Didn’t do him any good,” said Guildenstern.

Brett lit another cigarette, said almost hopefully, “He also called Rafe a spic sellout artist.”

“Aha! Another—”

“—suspect. You think this Huezo maybe did him in?”

“I didn’t say that. Did I say that?” Brett took a big drag on his cigarette. “Said I backed Petrock on the council and Rafe was opposed to Petrock, that’s all. Personally, I like Rafe a hell of a lot better than I do Georgie — uh, did Georgie.”

“That the usual way you guys conduct meetings? Knives stuck in the tabletop and like that?”

“If Petrock’s there — was there — yeah.” He coughed, stubbed his half-smoked butt on his watch crystal. “Guess I gotta get used to talking about Georgie in the past tense, huh?”

“What’s this do to your strike vote?”

“He’s a martyr,” said Brett. “We’ll go out big-time now.”

After Brett had departed to seek elusive sleep, the two homicide men moodily watched the medics put the body into the ambulance. The SFPD didn’t use a meat wagon anymore.

“Maybe we got us a union killing. Everybody hated his guts. He damn near nailed down his vice-president’s hand—”

“Could be a union enemy, get him out of the picture—”

“Or a union friendly, looking for a martyr.”

“Yeah, friendly fire. Or maybe he suicided.”

“Make sure they’ll go out on strike.”

“Or maybe we got us a racial killing.”

“Bastard calls himself Nemesis, gotta be bad.”

“Or a fag killing. The Queer Street bartender knew him.”

“Then there won’t be any wife and kids to notify.”

“Nowadays, who knows?”

As if choreographed, the two big men turned and started from the crime scene toward their cars half a block away.

Rosenkrantz took a quarter from his pocket. “Hey, know why guys give their cocks names?”

“Sure. They don’t want a total stranger making eighty percent of their decisions for ’em.”

Rosenkrantz flipped his coin. Guildenstern called, “Heads,” as Rosenkrantz caught it and covered it with his hand. It was tails. He sighed. “My car, my gas. Let’s go make Play-Doh out of Ray Do.”

“Yeah, maybe he dropped a rock on Petrock.”

Both big men laughed. At the same time.