Joe Gores
Contract Null & Void
This novel is for
DORI
Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore;
Per che si fa gentil ciò ch’ ella mira:
Ov’ ella passa, ogni uom ver lei si gira,
E cui saluta fa tremar lo core.
Acknowledgments
I must acknowledge several people without whose unselfish and patient aid this book could not have been written.
My forever debt to my wife, Dori, goes far beyond mere “thank you” — she makes my novels as good as they can be with her love, insights, suggestions, understanding, restructuring, and editorial work that are themselves acts of primary creation..
David Fechheimer, who is a modern-day Sam Spade and the best private detective I know, spent one whole night performing an autopsy on the Tenderloin to help me re-create those dangerous and colorful underbelly streets of San Francisco in the novel.
Sherri Chiesa, international organizer for San Francisco’s Local 2, answered all my questions about how modern-day union pension and welfare funds are administered and safeguarded — and in the process made me rethink the basic plot line of the book.
John Pedersen, that self-styled bog-jumper from Jutland, runs Amazing Grace Music in San Anselmo and gave me invaluable (and hilarious) insights into the West Coast heavy metal scene.
Once again Bill Malloy, editor in chief of Mysterious, backed me at the eleventh hour against near-impossible odds. He is the editor all writers wish for, and so very few ever get.
Last, thanks to him whom I call The Eel Man, who emerged from the shadows for a few hours to share with me a plate of pasta and some tales of his life and times in the drug trade.
And of course, thanks to all the real guys and gals of DKA.
Walpurgisnacht
I
He was north of the Golden Gate Bridge on the Coast Highway, pumping his way up the steep hairpin turn without even breathing hard. What he carried was fitting for Walpurgis Night, when witches supposedly made rendezvous with the devil — Allemands à l’excès, with their fear of women! Even his light expensive racing bike was a sort of parallel for the broomsticks — or he-goats — the witches rode.
The last of the light was gone, even far out across the Pacific, but he’d ridden this route a hundred times, day, night, in heat, in icy cold, in blinding fog, drizzle, outright rain — it held no terrors for him despite the almost sheer cliff face a few feet from his spinning tires.
Nobody knew where he was; since they’d come looking he’d been a ghost, a wraith, nothing more than a rumor. But held to his bike rack by tightly wound bungee cords was the evidence. He’d sleep the night at the beach cabin; in the morning he’d call, his unlikely allies would come, and the three of them would plan their strategy.
He was flooded with light. A high-compression engine screamed as it slammed the needle against the post in the red zone. Tires shrieked. He didn’t even look back. His mind was ice, computing strategy. First thought was to crowd the narrow dip of ditch between the blacktop and the rising rock face to his right. But the pursuers wouldn’t mind losing a fender if they could smear him against the cliff in the process.
His only hope was the edge of the world. He swung boldly left across the narrow road so he was inches from it, bent over his bike, his legs churning as if to send him across the finish line at the Tour de France. Finish of him instead, perhaps; but only if the driver was first-rate enough to risk the sheer fall.
The driver was. The front left fender of the black sedan brushed against his back tire as the car swept by, punching the rear of the bike out into the air beyond the edge of the road. The light machine was whipped around in a deadly circle and flung into the night. The rider went with it, shot out into space as from a catapult.
The retreating sounds of the sedan were lost in the thud and roil of surf on the black rocks far below.
Chapter One
In Germany, Walpurgisnacht, eve of the pagan festival of May Day when witches and warlocks cavort with their demonic master, usually took place on the Brocken, highest peak of the Harz Mountains. Goethe, in fact, used the Brocken for his witches’ Sabbath in Faust.
Dan Kearny, being American and a private eye besides, had never heard of the Brocken, or Goethe’s Faust, or even Walpurgis Night. Halloween, its cousin on the far side of the calendar, was enough for him. As he drove across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco just before ten o’clock on that cloudy April 30 night, his troubles were much more immediate and personal than witches, or he-goats, or even Old Nick himself.
Giselle Marc had heard of Walpurgis Night. Besides being office manager of Daniel Kearny Associates (Head Office in San Francisco, Branch Offices in Major California Cities, Affiliates Nationwide), she held a master’s degree in history from San Francisco State. But right now, driving through Larkspur, she was more concerned about finding 246 Charing Cross Lane in nearby Kent Woodlands than she was about cavorting demons. No pedestrian, no other car, moved on broad Magnolia Avenue; on this Monday night, even the neighborhood pizza joint was closed tight.
Stan Groner, president of the Consumer Loan Division of California Citizens Bank, had conned her into being here over a latte at a sidewalk café on MacArthur Park that afternoon.
“Their name is Rochemont,” Stan the Man had explained. “Heavy clients of the bank’s trust department. Mother and son, the father’s dead, the kid’s big in computers. Something about a stolen car and some kind of deadline. Ten tonight, take an hour of your time, the bank’ll be grateful.” Heh heh heh and a big false banker’s smile. “You DKA guys give great car.”
Giselle said, “We’re looking for Charing Cross Lane.”
Ken Warren, the thick, hard-looking bird who shared her Corsica’s front seat, was shining a tiny halogen flashlight on Map 1 °C of his outdated Thomas Brothers Street Atlas for Marin County. Warren had an aggressive jaw and dusty brown hair tight-cropped like a marine drill sergeant’s.
His mind glibly told Giselle, Left at Woodland Road.
His mouth hoarsely told her, “Hngaeft aht Wondlan Nroad.”
By the darkened BP station where Magnolia, College, and Kent came together, Giselle made a hard left into Woodland. It was a wealthy, gorgeously wooded street that petered out on a forested lower slope of Mount Tamalpais overlooking Phoenix Lake. There were only intermittent streetlights. Her brights picked out two joggers, the woman with a blond ponytail and tight shiny purple pants and a violet T-shirt, the man wearing a Giants cap, black sweatpants, and a black sweatshirt with a gorilla on its back bending a barbell as if it were a swizzle stick.
“Safe neighborhood,” observed Giselle. Where she lived in Oakland, a woman jogger, even with a male companion, would need an Uzi down her pant leg and a Glock-7 in her bra to make it around Lake Merritt after dark.
Big, three-story white mansions peeked out from behind screens of exotic California plantings mixed with flowering plum, birch, cypress, pine and redwood, pyracantha and Chinese elm. Many of the fake-gas-lamp driveway lights on black metal posts were still lit, either on timers or left on all night.
Ken broke in, “Iht htsa waes nyet.”
A ways yet. The further up the street they got, the more wrought-iron gates their lights picked out, closed against the night and set into strong-looking mortared stone pillars. To their right was a hulking rock outcropping, beyond which a fence ran along the crown of the hill flanking the road.