Laughing immoderately. Paul stroked. Right in. of course.
“Did you speculate to the police or the D.A. about who shot up your car?” she asked him as they walked.
“Mrs. Spade didn’t raise any children dippy enough to make guesses in front of a district attorney.”
Giselle trudged gloomily on, thinking that it was going to be a long week.
How had Scan Groner let Kearny talk him into going into the field as if he were a private eye himself? Well, sure, it was really his problem because the woman was Barbara’s friend, but Kearny should have been willing to do it for him. But no. The only way Kearny was going to help find the missing boyfriend was it Scan went with him. And since it was for free, he couldn’t insist that Kearny do it alone.
The address she had given them was on one-block Pfeiffer Alley, above Bay on the lower slope of Telegraph Hill facing Alcatraz. Out by the old federal prison a white finger of midafternoon fog was feeling its way into the Bay. The four-unit apartment house was sec slightly back from the street; an old woman with a trowel was on her knees in a strip of Hower garden beside the six-foot concrete walkway to the front vestibule.
“Your case, your interrogation,” said Kearny.
Stan crossed the sidewalk racking his brain for an approach from the thousands of reports he had read over the years.
Followed to given address, contacted the landlady...
He squatted awkwardly beside the old woman, not wanting to get dirt on his suit pants. She wore a heavy blue-green sweater, and chinos with loamy knees, and a black mesh gimme cap with an American flag on it above the legend THESE COLORS DON’T RUN.
“Ah... tuberous begoias?” Stan asked her in a voice as bright and bogus as a tin dime.
“Private property.”
The old woman jabbed her trowel into the soil between the flowering plants, used it as a brace to support herself as she turned to glare at him like an old turtle peering around a rock.
“Ah, I’m uh, trying to get in touch with my brother Eddie. He used to live—”
“He tryna kid me, mister?”
Behind him, Kearny said, “How much did Eddie burn you for?”
The old woman, grunting, got one foot under her, pushed harder on the trowel, got her bottom up, got the other foot parallel to the first, straightened up red of face.
“Two months rent.”
Stan said eagerly, “His fiancée, Karen Marshall, said—”
“Oh, I don’t tell her nothing. Give her the time of day and she tries to sell you life insurance. What does a woman my age need with life insurance?” She turned to Kearny. “Eddie hangs around that place they call The Muscle Emporium down on Bay. Works out all the time. I’d go after him myself, but I don’t get around much anymore.” She gave a sudden tinkly laugh that suggested fun and games in her youth. “Maybe I oughtta sign up, get in shape.”
“Hell, you don’t need it,” said Kearny. He took her hand, and to Stan’s amazement kissed its vein-roped back. Maybe, Stan thought, the DKA people earned all that time and mileage they ran up during their field investigations.
Which was just what Kearny wanted him to be thinking.
O’B, way up there in Eureka, was thinking about earning some time and mileage of his own. At 3:30 P.M. he finally had managed to keep down breakfast: dry toast and a Bloody Mary to clear his eyes and jump-start his heart. The celery used to stir the drink was loaded with vitamins, as was the V-8 juice. Once a man hit 50, he had to watch out for his health. O’B was feeling virtuous because in similar circumstances on previous occasions he had always washed down his belated breakfasts with two Bloody Marys. At least.
Tony d’Angelo’s north coast DKA office was in the garage beside his house. A deep redwood planter box where the overhead door once had been was full of pansies, protected from the deer by green plastic mesh. Inside, plasterboard walls and ceiling, two overhead lights, a maroon nylon wall-to-wall — obviously, from the slight wrinkles in it here and there, laid by Tony himself. One swivel chair, one straight-back, a desk against one wall, two locked filing cabinets, one letter-size, one legal.
What with Tony’s injuries, O’B could be stuck up here in mildew country for half the damn month! Made a man want a drink. He checked for faxes instead. Four new assignments:
Contact and collect two payments plus late charges plus expenses on a Chevy S10 Blazer. A reopen, address right here in Eureka. Phone that one in.
A hardware store’s office equipment, five payments down. Such equipment would be considered creditor assets by bankruptcy court if the store went belly-up. Between the lines: beat the sheriff to the stuff in case the guy took Chapter 11.
REPO ON SIGHT on a Dodge Dakota pickup out in the boonies. O’B knew it was in the boonies because the RFD street address had a high five figures: 98392 Fallen Tree Road. The phone was disconnected. There went half a day, out and back, to check whether the disconnect was for nonpayment or because the guy had skipped out.
And a REPO ON SIGHT for a rock band’s musical instruments and amps.
A rock band? How the hell was he supposed to do that? Especially a rock band called Blow Me Baby. More especially when the Special Instructions said: CLIENT WENT TO RAINBOW DANCEHALL TO ASK FOR PAYMENT. WAS ASSAULTED AND ROUGHED UP BY PATRONS EGGED ON BY BAND MEMBERS. Assaulted and roughed up. Just great.
Final straw, Dan Kearny’s sarcastic voice on the phone machine: “The client wants some action on those truck tires, O’B. So do I. He could shove a lot of business our way. Get your nose out of the bottle and your butt into your car, and repo those skins before the subject wears ’em down to baldies!”
Not one goddam word about poor Tony d’Angelo, in traction because of those same truck tires. Not one goddam word about the similar vast dangers bravely faced by Patrick Michael O’Bannon. Pissed off, O’B punched the DKA head office phone number. One ring, he had Jane Goldson’s British accent in his ear.
“Daniel Kearny Associates.”
“Yeah, this is O’B. Gimme the Great White Father now.”
“Out of the office, Mr. O’Bannon. But he said to tell you, should you call in, to get busy on those truck tires—”
O’B slammed down the receiver. Even by proxy he didn’t want to hear about it.
Chapter Seven
As he and Kearny went through the heavy glass door of The Muscle Emporium on Montgomery and Bay, Stan Groner, gentleman whiner, groused, “Rush hour’s started and we’re further away from Graff than when we started. Then we had an address. Now—”
“You’re doing great,” said Kearny heartily.
To the right were seven treadmills with sweating bipeds in expensive workout clothes huffing and puffing upon them. To the left, seven stationary bicycles; more huffers and puffers. Beyond them, a dozen sets of stairs. All women on these, many reading newspapers, all wearing skintight workout clothes that showed churning steel glutes as they climbed endlessly to heaven.
Beyond, on pieces of oddly shaped chromed equipment, people were stretched and contorted like something Amnesty International might sponsor a letter-writing campaign about.
“You learned a lot of technique with that landlady, Stan. I’ll nose around, you ask the instructor where Eddie is.”
Kearny shambled over to a bronzed giant turning this way and that in front of one of the floor-length mirrors, staring at himself with mesmerized wonder. Kearny now looked seedy and disreputable, shirt open, tie askew, the slight sideways slither of something that lived under a rock. How did he do that?