by Joe Gores
But all was not lost. Even as the retard turned away, Colleen was coming up the hall, all bright eyes and saucy black ringlets and a tight skirt that ended a foot above her knees. Great cheerleader legs! Innocence aching to be defiled. And Benny was just the boy to defile it.
But Ken Warren stopped in front of the girl, once again the immovable object. He held up his hand.
“Hgno!” he told her.
She gazed up at him, wide-eyed; she came only to his chest.
“Okay,” she said, and turned around and went back down the hall with him. Benny slammed the door so hard it resonated until they reached the elevator.
Colleen thought the Mustang was so, like, awesome, that Ken let her drive it back to DKA for him, gave her $25 as a driver’s fee, and drove her safely to her folks’ place. He even got her home before midnight.
Trin Morales stopped on Mission Street for the pizza he hadn’t gotten last time around. Yeah, that pizza joint. Where Milagrita worked. But he’d been a scared rabbit then; now, the Cisco Kid rode again. Besides, she worked weekdays and this was midnight on a Saturday night. He just wanted a pizza, right?
But when he went in, his eyes instinctively sought out and, amazingly, were rewarded by her slim and graceful person. She was there, waiting tables! Pulling a split shift? Filling in for someone out sick? Maybe she had switched to nights. He slid into an empty booth so when she came over to take his order he could flash his biggest gold-tooth grin at her.
“I just made an estraño repo,” he said, “an’ I wanna—”
“No!” She thrust out both hands, palms-forward, as if to ward off el diablo himself. “Go! Get out! Esteban . . .”
If Esteban hears you were in here, he will kill you.
Too late, survival instincts revived. In a window booth were four young Latino bucks with beers and cigarettes in their hands—who had the balls to bring up no-smoking laws to them? They were galvanized to action by Milagrita’s cry of warning.
Trin’s choice was simple: flight or fight.
If he fled, they would own him forever.
If he fought, he would be smashed up again. Maybe killed.
Nine months ago, fuck ’em, he would have fought.
But now . . . Now, he ran for his life in blind panic, away from his car—they would drag him down on busy Mission Street before he could even get the door open. Instead, he sprinted left and around the corner and three doors down to the fleabag hotel where he’d been a bellhop when he was 18. He remembered that in recent years it had become a sort of residence hotel for old geezers on Social Security.
He jammed an elbow through the glass of the door, twisted the knob to open it, and flung himself into the dust-shrouded and night-deserted lobby. The shoes of his pursuers thudded on the sidewalk. He skittered around the corner beside the deserted check-in desk. If the utility room was unlocked as it used to be . . . Yes!
Trin slammed shut the heavy old hardwood door, rammed home the deadbolt. That would hold them only until they realized the hinges were on the outside of the door.
Each breath was like a razor blade in his chest, not from exertion but from terror. Sweat stung his eyes. During his bellhop days, the room was crammed with maids’ carts, the shelves stacked with linens and towels. Now, crammed with old suitcases, dusty boxes of abandoned belongings, broken TV sets, three-legged chairs, bureaus without drawers, cracked mirrors . . .
He fought his way around, through, under, over, and between the obstacles to the back wall. Behind him were excited hunting cries, the thud of shoulders against the door.
Then a shout, “Los goznes! The hinges! Get out the pins!”
At eighteen, Trin often escaped the house dick’s wrath by throwing himself headfirst down the laundry chute to land in the dirty sheets piled in the basement laundry room below. Twenty years later, he gingerly levered himself into the chute feet-first—if he got stuck, they would carve him out of it like corned beef from the tin. Hell with it. He let go, slid down into darkness. The lost forty pounds was just enough. He landed on water-puddled concrete, somehow retained his footing. From the storage room above came the crashing of boxes being hurled aside.
Trin dragged a wooden crate under one of the high narrow windows, smashed loose the wire mesh with the butt of his hand. Seeing blood on his knuckles, feeling nothing, he rolled out into the alley that would take him around the block to his car.
Couldn’t go back to his apartment. Not now, not in any future he could foresee. His desperate mind leaped to DKA.
That was it. Hide his car in the fenced storage area they couldn’t get into, sleep in the personal property storage room on the second floor with a lot of locked and burglar-alarmed doors between him and them. Let nobody at DKA know he was sleeping there. Safety. For the moment.
To a despairing, self-adjudged coward like Trin Morales, safety for the moment was enough.
thirty-three
It was a bright, cool May Monday. At California-Citizens Bank’s outdoor lot below Telegraph Hill, gulls swooped and squawked, unseen traffic rumbled on the nearby Embarcadero. Stan Groner, president of the bank’s Consumer Loan Division, was holding the classic-car auction now, at the beginning of the week, because on a weekend the place would be jammed with the kind of old-car buffs who kicked tires and never tired of telling each other about the beauty they’d picked up for a bag of peanuts—and never bid on anything.
Today it was serious classic-car dealers, with a sprinkling of 20-something execs from Silicon Valley, kids with money to spend and nostalgia for a past they’d never known.
Dan Kearny watched as Groner, a pleasant-faced man of 42 with warm brown eyes, wearing a three-piece banker-conservative suit, worked the crowd before the auction started. The banker had learned some tricks a few months back, during the day they’d spent playing private eye together. For one thing, just how damned tough it was to get information out of people who didn’t want to give it to you. Obviously wanting something from DKA, he was trying to not be too obvious about it.
“Mr. K!” Stan exclaimed, pumping Dan’s hand with half-real, half-synthetic enthusiasm. “Lots of Wiley’s competitors here today looking for bargains.”
“Ex-competitors,” said Kearny. “Wiley’s out of business.”
Stan chuckled. “Giselle was around at the crack of dawn to grab that little red Alfa for herself.”
“I hope you gave her a good deal on it.” Then, since Giselle’s love affair with the red Alfa obviously wasn’t why Stan had asked him to come around today, he got his face close to Stan’s ear and spoke in his best sotto voce tough guy growl. “Who you want bumped off?”
“Bumped off?” exclaimed Stan in alarm. Then he got it, and actually started to blush. “Okay, so I . . . well, I want you to meet one of the bank’s overseas customers who has a problem I thought you could help with. He’s a baron. You’ll find out all about it at lunch.”
Ladies who lunch, thought Giselle rather giddily. She slid the gleaming red low-slung Alfa Quadrifoglio Spider to the curb in front of the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street, just as Sofia Ciccone came trotting down the broad front steps. Sofia was out of her SFPD uniform and into civvies for the occasion. Oh, let the printouts be in that white handbag slung over her shoulder!
Sofia stopped amid the river of fellow cops, lawyers, civilians, accused felons, and weepy relatives that flowed up and down the wide steps. Giselle touched the Alfa’s horn. Sofia’s mouth fell open in surprise at the sight of the sleek red car.
She got in with fluid grace, glittery earrings swinging, essentially unchanged by the years since they’d been dormmates at S.F. State. Her dark Italian eyes were round with wonder.
“I thought Kearny never let you guys drive repos.”
“No repo, Sofia. It’s mine!” Giselle checked her rearview and zipped the Alfa away from the curb with a throaty chuckle of engine, adding the classic, “And the bank’s.”
“How much?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“Way. So today it’s the Bocce Café to celebrate.”
Sofia squirmed her tidy bottom around in the pale leather bucket seat, sighed luxuriously, then looked over at Giselle with sudden suspicion. “Is it still the Bocce even if I wasn’t able to Xerox those records you wanted?”
“Hey, we’re celebrating my new car, remember?”
“Just testing,” Sofia grinned. “I got what you asked for.”
“But did you get what I need?”
“I don’t know what you need.”
Giselle stopped for the light at Sixth and Howard. A short dumpy Asian woman in cast-off clothes was taking a long, oblivious time to cross while deep in discussion with a tall thin black man.
“Some of those MamaSans make ten thousand dollars a day at the illegal food stamp trade,” Giselle observed. “The guy with her is obviously one of her runners. Where’s a cop when you need one?”
Sofia tossed her dark, shoulder-length hair back out of her eyes. “Be polite or I won’t tell you what I found.”
“Oh come on! Did you get anything salient?”
“After lunch,” said Sofia firmly. “If I lose my civil service pension ’cause I stole worthless records for you, I want to go down full of good Italian cooking.”
The three men were having lunch at the shining chromium-and-glass Fog City Diner on the waterfront. Baron Herbert Von Knottnerus-Meyer had thinning too-black hair combed across his scalp, muttonchop whiskers, a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, and a monocle on a black woven silk cord strung through his lapel buttonhole, a monocle that kept falling out of his right eye as he talked. He kept replacing it as he held forth, in a Prussian accent, about a certain class of animals descended from arboreal phalanger stock.
“All thirty species uff dot kangaroo, best known uff de marsupials, are found only in Australia unt New Guinea. Since development uff de young marsupial takes place partly in dot mother’s uterus unt partly in dot pouch, dere iss perhaps even something Freudian in deir reproductive strategy. Vould you not agree, Herr Kearny?”
“I have no opinion about it, Baron,” said Dan blandly.
“You do know vut a marsupial is, don’t you, Herr Kearny?”
“Pogo the Possum,” said Dan sagely, to Stan’s shocked expression and the Baron’s bewildered one.
“Possum? Dis I do not unterstand,” muttered the Baron.
“Little rat-tailed guy about as big as a cat.” Dan drew a quick sketch on his cocktail napkin. “Good eating where I come from. Got the stomach pouch for the kits and everything.”
“I vould like to see one,” said the Baron solemnly.
Groner said quickly, “The Baron is an amateur naturalist in the true sense of the word—he is devoted to animals . . .”
“Animals haff naturally goot manners,” agreed the Baron. “People dogs do not trust, vor instance, are chenerally untrustvorthy. How do dogs feel about you, Herr Kearny?”
“We get along all right. A little kick here, a little—”
“Goot. A joke.” He stood up, made the slightest of bows. “Iff you vill excuse me . . .”
The two men stared after the Baron’s stiff retreating back. He was heavy without being fat, his erect military posture causing rolls of flesh to form above the back of his tight shirt collar. Dan turned to look at Stan unbelievingly.
“People who dogs don’t trust are untrustworthy?”
“You gotta go along with me on this, Dan! He’s a major stockholder in one of the bank’s biggest international clients. Their deposits in our Berlin affiliate would make you weep.”
“What’s this company do?”
“Consults. The Baron is here on a security consultation for an American, a real heavy hitter in financial circles in L.A., who’s worried about his private art collection in the mountains behind Big Sur. The firm was recommended to him by a man in Hong Kong; they need to liase with someone local who can keep his mouth shut.”
“We’re private eyes, Stan, not security guys.”
“But you know a lot about security systems and alarms from getting in and out of places on the sly. I’ve watched you operate, remember? And you’re smart and a quick learner.”
“I’m the only guy you could think of on short notice?”
Stan cast a quick look down the long narrow diner toward the rest rooms. “His people came to me, personally, for an expert, so I vouched for you, personally, with the bank.”
“Who pays us, and how much?”
“The client pays the Baron’s people, they pay you—lots.”
“With Cal-Cit Bank guaranteeing our payment,” said Dan.
“That goes without saying,” Stan agreed airily.
Giselle asked, “You think Dirty Harry is really dirty?”
“He sure lies a lot.” Bart Heslip was sorting through the arrest records on Giselle’s desk. “He said it was a cop friend in Vallejo who told him Ephrem was a dip at Marine World.”
“Ephrem was a dip at Marine World.”
“Marine World’s security never notified the Vallejo cops about him. They didn’t know, so how’d Harry find out? He claims he didn’t know either Ephrem or Yana personally, but . . .”
Giselle scaled a file folder across the desk at him.
“He arrested Ephrem twice for reading palms without a license, Yana once for illegal fortune-telling.”
Bart, scanning the records, said, “Dirty Harry never showed up to give evidence, so both cases were dismissed.”
“Small potatoes if they slipped him a few bucks for the no-show,” she said.
“Yeah, but dammit, Giselle, there’s a lot of death going around in this one all of a sudden. Two old men are dead, Ephrem Poteet is dead—Yana’s the only one left standing.”
“Except for Dirty Harry,” said Giselle. “Get down to L.A., Bart, and find out what Ephrem was doing on the day he died.”
“Damn!” Bart exclaimed. “We should have asked your buddy Sofia for a mug shot of Yana.”
“I did. She said it was really hard for her to access closed files and get the mug shots out of them to copy.”
“I bet I’m gonna wish I had one to show around,” said Bart.
thirty-four
Waiting to take Midori to a late lunch in the Stonestown Mall before going to talk to Geraldine Tantillo, Larry saw a familiar face. Whit Stabler, who reminded him of his grandpa less than before because of his costly but too-youthful duds. Larry went over to shake the old gentleman’s hand.
“I’m sorry,” stammered Whit. “I don’t . . . do I know you?”
“No reason to remember me, sir. We met just the one time through Luminitsa.”
The rather vague blue eyes sharpened. “That Luminitsa! She’s some babe, eh? She’s real good to me.” He dug an elbow into Larry’s ribs. “Magic salt in the soup. Better’n Viagra.”
“Magic salt,” agreed Ballard. Poor old guy was losing it.
He looked around for Midori, but it was Luminitsa who came up to hook her arm possessively through Whit’s.
“What lies have you been telling my beautiful Larry?”
“He told me you were some babe,” said Ballard.
“Well, that’s no lie!” she said with a laugh so wide it showed her back teeth. She gave Whit a little tug. “Come on, you, let’s get you home for your nap.” She winked bawdily at Larry over her shoulder as they went off.
Over fresh Mex at Chevy’s, Midori said, “Luminitsa say she been taking poor Mr. Stabler to see the doctor, but she no ought to sleep with him. He pretty sick, she maybe hurt him?”
“Sick how?” asked Ballard around a big bite of burrito.
“Something called leukemia, maybe?”
“That’s sick, all right,” agreed Larry sorrowfully. He liked the old banty rooster who wasn’t giving up without a fight.
“Luminitsa say she gonna maybe have to take leave of absence to take care of him if he keep on getting worse sick.”
Geraldine Tantillo had called in sick�
��the first day of work she had missed since starting her job at JeanneMarie’s beauty salon. She sat in front of the window of her one-room walk-up under the eaves of this old five-story Victorian in Dolores Heights, bawling her eyes out.
Last night, as she was getting ready for the workweek, someone knocked on her door. She opened it and perfidious Ariane, beautiful of face, beautiful of hair, tall and willowy but with a luscious bosom, peach-soft skin, and lo-o-o-o-ong legs, fell into her arms.
“I’m back!” cried Ariane, covering her face with kisses.
Geraldine somehow extracted herself from the embrace, and somehow found the strength to say coolly, “Where’s my seven thousand dollars?”
Ariane collapsed loosely into Geraldine’s woven wicker chair. “It’s all gone. Every penny.” She made a wan gesture. “I barely had enough left for the flight back from Cabo.” She brightened. “But now the two of us are together again!”
“There is no ‘us,’ ” said Geraldine coldly. “I’ve rebuilt my life, I can’t let you take it away again. Just . . . go.”
Ariane sneered, “I will go. I always hated this place. Back in Iowa there are real people who care about a person!”
And ten minutes later she was gone—with a check for $400 to cover plane fare to Dubuque she probably would use on clothes. It cleaned out Geraldine’s account, and here she sat on the edge of her lonely bed, crying with great abandon. She knew, deep down inside, that Ariane was manipulative and destructive, but . . .
There was a knock on the door.
Geraldine went to the door steeling herself for another confrontation. But it was a man, big and blond and handsome. She remembered him from JeanneMarie’s salon.
“My name is Larry Ballard,” he said.
“My name is Milagrita,” said a quiet little voice at Giselle’s elbow. “The nice English girl in the front office said I should come talk to you.”
A pretty girl, eighteen or nineteen, Latina, probably Mexican. Long black gleaming hair and big eyes brimming with intelligence. A summery blouse with a ruffled neckline and a swirly skirt. Giselle reached for the application forms.
