Bart was supposed to have left ten days ago with his lady, Corinne, to visit her folks in Detroit. So why was he still in town, asking Ballard to meet him at Mood Indigo? And why did the cops think he — or his twin — was bartending in the ’Loin?
Luckily, Ballard was wearing the reversible jacket Bart himself thought was your best basic item of disguise. Change the color, change the man. In the pocket he always carried the tweed cap that was O’B’s basic item of disguise. Change the shape of the head, change the man. The clear-glass horn-rims had been Giselle’s suggestion. Change the face, change the man.
The two cops emerged, turned his way. He walked ahead of them, slouch-shouldered, taking inches off his height and narrowing his silhouette — Kearny’s contribution to the art. Change the walk, change the man. He listened to them talk.
“So how can you tell if fags are living in a house?”
“The doormat says, ‘Wipe your knees.’ ”
“Jo?”
“Yo.”
And wouldn’t you know it, they chose Ace in the Hole to drink their coffee at, the nondescript all-night Tenderloin coffee shop on Taylor below the Hilton Hotel where Ballard was supposed to meet a nonexistent girl at 3:00 A.M. The jukebox was playing, surprise surprise, “Ace in the Hole”:
Ace in the Hole maybe should have been called Hole in the Wall, since it was a narrow steamy place, the air heavy with hot grease, with a scarred vinyl counter along the left wall as you entered, the stools in ripped red vinyl. Up in front by the window was the grill where the short-order cook, a hulking, remarkably fat man in a chef’s hat and tattoos on both arms, was flipping burgers while draining a fresh basket of fries in a fine show of ambidextrous grace.
Ballard turned in ahead of the cops, they went to a table against the back wall, he chose the seat at the counter, three feet away from them, raised his voice in octave.
“Just coffee for me. I’m expecting a darling friend.”
The cook got the cops’ orders and left. One of them said, “Whadda ya have when you cross a hooker with a pit bull?”
“The last blow job you’ll ever get.”
Terrific. Five hours until 3:00 A.M.; was it going to be five hours of sophomoric humor from two bigoted cops?
At first. But then they finally started kicking around Petrock’s murder.
You’ve kicked it around long enough, Dan Kearny thought, go back to Ballard’s apartment, go to bed. But instead he caught the eye of the petite blonde behind the bar.
“Another Pauli Girl, Beverly.”
She set the icy beaded bottle down in front of him on her way to serve someone else. Working the place alone tonight, though it was crowded because the Giants and the Dodgers were on the Sports Channel in a night game.
Kearny poured beer, fired up another cigarette. Usually, he’d still be at the office, working on billing at an hour when he didn’t have to deal with the distractions of phones and personnel. Had gone there and scared Maybelle out of her wits, so he’d come here, since he couldn’t be home with Jeannie and the kids. Not kids anymore, 20 and 17. And he couldn’t go home to them right now whatever their ages.
His own fault? Maybe.
Married to the job, always working late. Or out of town at a convention where he drank too much and, a time or two, slipped up with some convention floozie. Not for years now, but still...
To hell with it. He could think about it all night, but he would still be sleeping at Ballard’s tiny two-room apartment, and, with O’B out of town, drinking alone.
He stubbed his butt, sipped his beer from the bottle.
Maybe it was even deeper than that. Hard-driving, himself and others. Including Jeannie and the kids. Too hard-driving. The old vicious circle: did you work all the time for your family, or were you doing it for yourself because you loved it, and using the family as an excuse? And the years went by, and suddenly Jeannie had a whole circle of friends he didn’t know. And he was on the outside looking in.
As she’d been from the start with his work at DKA.
He caught his reflection, stared at it solemnly for a moment. Fighting the mirror, the old-timers called it.
Stan Groner. His wife’s friend Karen Marshall. Eddie Graff. Stan hadn’t remembered Karen when she’d hit on them at II Fornaio because, Kearny was sure, she wasn’t a friend of the wife’s and Stan had met her only briefly — if at all — when she’d tried to sell him some insurance. She’d made sure Stan was just attracted enough to her so he’d feel guilty and wouldn’t mention her to the wife. But why?
Maybe she hadn’t been looking for a connection with Stan at all. Maybe she’d been looking for a connection with Dan Kearny.
He straightened up a bit on his stool; so did the man in the mirror. Maybe he was getting a little paranoid here. Time to go home. Er, to Ballard’s apartment.
“Hear you took Larry’s bed away from him,” said Beverly Daniels, snapping him out of his reverie.
“Just for a few nights,” he rumbled.
“ ’Til it gets straightened out at home,” she nodded wisely.
“I’d better have a chat with Larry about his big mouth.”
“You followed him in here, he had to tell me something.”
He nodded, not happy that Larry had told her Kearny’d been tagging around after him because he’d just been kicked out of the house by his wife.
Watching Beverly get him another beer from the cooler, he could see what attracted Larry to her. Petite, great figure, sharply etched features but a great smile, beautiful blond hair, a dancer’s moves. He remembered an old dancer named Chandra, now dead, who’d gotten mixed up with a Mafia don. He’d really liked that old woman, had signed a man’s death warrant because the man had swatted her like a fly. A long time ago.
“Larry said he’s doing some work for you,” he lied when she returned. She fell for it, shrugged ruefully.
“Looking for Danny. My partner. I haven’t seen him in almost a week...”
It all came out: the missing Danny, the dead union guy, Ballard on the hunt. Why did her partner have to pick this week to disappear? DKA short of people, O’B up in Eureka, Heslip on vacation, Giselle and Warren on that Rochemont investigation, or bodyguarding, or whatever the hell the job was...
A lot of weird stuff going down that he didn’t understand.
Yet.
Walpurgisnacht
II
As he and his smashed bicycle were sent arching out into the night, he knew he was facing in toward the cliff: for one flashing instant, he could see the headlights of the car that had sent him and his machine spinning off the road. Then he was separated from the bike, plummeting downward, all orientation lost in the black rush of icy air. He didn’t even know how far he had to fall, whether he would hit rocks or water.
Jackknife. His only chance. Like Roy Woods, who went off the lower deck of the Bay Bridge in 1937 just about the way he had gone off the cliff. Only Woods had wanted to go off, had been a professional diver wearing a football helmet and a steel corset under his swimming suit. It had been a publicity stunt to get a job with the ’39 Golden Gate International Exposition.
He touched his toes, brought his feet up, was diving head-down. He hoped. Huge roar of wind all around him. Had to enter the upcoming water in a dive, not hit it feet-first so his legbones would be driven up into his pelvis. If it was water that he would hit.