“Somebody from his union, maybe. Unions always have a lot of tough-guy members looking for extra bread.”
“Bringing the cops back to the guy in the composite — he admitted he was a bartender. Nonunion, but even so...”
They both glanced around as yet another ape-man went through the disguised vault door behind the counter.
“That’s four in, nobody out,” said Ballard. “They got a poker game running back there?”
Bart leaned his shiny dome closer, elbows on the table, the bunched heavy muscles of his upper arms straining the sleeves of his shirt.
“They got a sure thing running back there. That looks like a standard wooden door, but it’s a steel bank vault door with a birch veneer. Behind it the head bookkeeper for Griffin Paris counts the take until six every morning except for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter.”
“Griffin Paris? I’ve never seen the guy, but I hear he’s into liquor, drugs, pinball, prostitution — anything to do with vice and dope in the Tenderloin.”
“You hear right, bro — he owns this place, probably Mood Indigo, too — leastwise he’s always droppin’ by there. Man’s got twenty-some indictments, zero convictions — he goes to his pocket real good. So many defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges got their hands out that he’s never even been in court.”
Ballard mused, “The bars feed porno houses feed dirty bookstores feed street hookers feed massage parlors feed gambling houses feed payoffs. All spokes of the wheel—”
“With Griffin Paris as the hub.”
The T-shirted cook appeared at their table. His face looked as if it had been run over by a truck, with his nose to one side to sniff out opportunity, one eye cocked off the other way to see what he’d gotten away with. He was easily six and a half feet tall, but even towering over Heslip he was not able to make the smaller man look frail.
He smirked at their coffee cups. “I think you’ve had enough, gents. If you was driving I’d have to take your keys.”
Ballard said, “You wanna try to take mine?”
“Why you so innerested in that door behind the counter?”
“I’m interested in breakfast,” said Heslip. “Three eggs over easy, bacon, two English muffins, half a quart of orange juice, coffee and leave the pot for my friend here.”
The big man considered them for a long moment, or at least one of his eyes did; the other seemed to be considering his cooking range. Finally he gave a rumbling chuckle.
“Over easy it is.”
“And cream with that coffee,” said Heslip. To Ballard he said, “You get all that stuff about Petrock’s murder just from listening to those cops kick the case around?”
“Naw, I’ve been poking around at Petrock’s union hall. Danny is a member of their Executive Council, and Danny’s missing. Bev asked me to find him.”
“Missing?” Heslip’s eyes flashed angrily. “Damn it all anyway! Danny’s the guy got me into this mess.”
“How do you mean?”
“He lined me up with the guy hired me.” Seeing the look on Larry’s face, he added, “He couldn’t go to you, man. You’re too tight with Bev. He was afraid she’d get out of you what was going on. This had to be buried deep, deep, deep.”
Ballard leaned back so his chair was balanced on its two hind legs. “So somebody put you into Mood Indigo undercover. Why’d you take the gig instead of your vacation with Corinne?”
“The man was shoving a lotta bread my way, so Corinne and I talked it over — we wanta buy into the travel agency where she works. I can always visit her folks in Detroit City.”
“A lotta bread for bartending in the ’Loin?” asked Ballard in an unbelieving voice.
“Course not. For being a real undercover private eye like the Great White Father is always sayin’ he wants DKA to get involved in, but never does. The man told me he thought something big and rotten and financial was going down at Local Three. Powerful people involved. He wanted to know who — and I guess he thought maybe Mood Indigo was the place to find out.”
“Is it?”
“You saw the joint — nothing’s happening there. For all I know he has a dozen guys like me spread around the Tenderloin.”
The cook, smelling of hot bacon fat, brought plates balanced up and down both hairy arms, slid them to the table with practiced ease. Up close they could see a dozen prison tattoos on one arm going up under the shoulder of his T-shirt. He winked at them and left. Heslip started to eat, Ballard poured coffee.
“Have you heard from this guy since Petrock got aced?”
“No. But I can’t quit just yet.”
“Why not? He hired you to go undercover, right?”
“Right.”
“He hired you to punch out Petrock, right?”
“Right.”
“Then he was just setting you up for Petrock’s murder.”
“No he wasn’t.”
“How can you say that?” demanded Ballard.
“Because,” said Heslip as he popped the whole wiggly egg yolk balanced on his fork right into his mouth, “he was Petrock.”
Chapter Eleven
Dan Kearny thought, The whole damn company’s going to hell, and me right along with it. Somehow he’d closed up Jacques Daniel’s last night instead of coming back to Ballard’s apartment after just a beer or two as intended. His head felt like an abscess, and he’d been rousted out of bed at this ungodly morning hour by Giselle’s phone call.
And look at Ballard. Disgraceful! Sprawled on the living room floor in his underwear with a blanket dragged down over him, snoring. He must have fallen off the couch sometime in the night and hadn’t even been awakened by the phone or Kearny making coffee. Of course Larry probably wouldn’t have called it coffee.
Hadn’t heard Kearny go to take his shower, either. The bathroom was down the hall, not in the apartment, and the water hadn’t got hot until Kearny was almost finished. Leaving wrapped only in a towel, he’d run into the Japanese woman from the rear apartment, and his towel had fallen off and she’d giggled merrily behind one hand and had bowed and had gone into the bathroom herself. Still giggling.
And Dan Kearny had been supposed to open the DKA office himself this morning and couldn’t even do that, thanks to Giselle’s call. He loved to get out of the office to look for somebody, grab a couple of cars, but here he had been forced to call Jane Goldson to open up, so now another person knew the office routine was going to hell.
Cursing, Dan Kearny slammed out of Ballard’s apartment.
Squawking, gasping, choking, O’B came out of quasidelirium tremens. Someone had shoved a spotted owl into his gaping mouth and then rammed O’B himself headfirst into an open grave. Had to be a spotted owl, that almost mystic little bundle of feathers that every logger on the north coast hated with a passion, because O’B’s tongue didn’t have foul-tasting feathers on it.
Still... Yeah. His tongue. Feathers and all...
And the open grave?
He began cautiously trying out various limbs. Everything sort of worked. Not interment after all. He was lying across a car seat, his torso half hanging off so his nose was jammed firmly into the rank-smelling floorboards on the rider’s side.
He twisted and turned, squirmed and churned, finally got upright on the seat, panting and disheveled. Early-morning light stabbed at his bleeding eyes.
His car seat. In a parking lot behind a bar in Eureka.
O’B had a sudden almost superstitious wave of dread. Dan Kearny was right. Time for him to quit drinking. Not just cut down, quit. He wasn’t really blacking out yet, but he was passing out — to wake up disoriented and with terrible dreams.