And he stank of booze and sweat and stale clothes, and of things unmentionable. He needed coffee. And a steam room. There had to be a steam room somewhere in Eureka.
And after a couple of hours of steam, some dry toast.
At least it had quit raining. O’B shuddered on the cold car seat in the dawn light. It was all coming back to him. Blow Me Baby. Instruments. REPOSSESS ON SIGHT. And he had awakened with an idea. But first, he had to try and locate those truck-trailer tires to get the Great White Father off his back.
For Dan Kearny, the Great White Father, king of the repomen, getting lost was about as likely as Jerry Rice catching a bullet from Steve Young on a slant pattern and then running for the wrong end zone. But it had happened.
Lost, even worse, in highly civilized Kent Woodlands while trying to find 246 Charing Cross Road. When he finally took the turnaround in front of the hulking mansion, Giselle’s Corsica was parked behind a Mercedes that had been machine-gunned to death. There were also a black special-order Continental stretch limo, a sporty little red Porsche 911 Turbo 3.6 coupe that went for a cool hundred grand, and two cop cars, new and shiny white, with TWIN CITIES POLICE under a pastel crest on the door.
He slammed his own door harder than was strictly necessary as Giselle came down the wide wooden verandah-style front steps of the mansion. He told her grumpily, “There was a guard on the gate who said my car was a piece of tin—”
“Hologram,” said Giselle.
“Dressed like somebody in a Viennese operetta—”
“The guard is a hologram, Dan. He isn’t real. He’s just intersecting beams of light.”
“Beams of light?”
Giselle was slowly walking him toward the house. He sighed. The world was passing him by. Beams of light.
“You said on the phone the wife has identified the assailant as Paul’s partner, Frank Nugent. You really didn’t have to get me out here at all, did you? You just wanted to—”
“Mrs. Rochement wanted to meet you,” said Giselle. After a significant pause, she added, “Our client. Remember? Client?”
“Yeah. But the cops’ll pick up this Nugent character and that’ll be the end of the case.”
“End of the case?” Giselle stopped dead. “I checked the downstairs windows. We found one open that I knew we locked before we settled in. I told you on the phone our coffee had been doped. This was an inside job for sure.”
“Where’d you get the coffee?”
Her voice was significant. “Inga.”
“Terrif. She puts doped coffee in your thermos bottles so her ex-boyfriend can sneak in and kill her husband — thus giving him a fortune but doing her out of one — then she screams when he’s about to do it, alerting the house and saving her husband’s life. Then she rats the boyfriend out, assuring he’ll go to the slam for attempted murder. A brilliant plot.”
“I never said she was a rocket scientist. And I told you the case was complicated.”
“You’re telling me that somebody else doped the coffee before she put it in the thermos?”
“No. I’m telling you that she doesn’t love her husband.”
“There’s a hot clue. If not loving your husband was a crime, half the wives in the Bay Area would be in Tehachapi.”
Kearny spoke of wives with surprising bitterness just as Paul and Inga appeared at the head of the front stairs. Paul was super-nerd again, although his eyes darted about in a rather haunted manner. Inga wore jeans and a man-tailored white shirt and an Anne Klein tweed jacket, and clung to her husband as if her life depended on not losing contact with him.
“Yeah,” said Kearny softly, “hates his guts.”
“That’s just for show. She doesn’t love him, Dan’l. A woman can tell these things.”
She introduced him to the loving couple. Paul looked starstruck. “The Old Man!” he exclaimed in excitement; then the Bogart lisp again. “ ‘The Old Man’s grandfatherly face was as attentive as always, and his smile as politely interested’—”
“Old man? Grandfatherly face?” Kearny’s face was ominous.
“The Old Man is head of the Continental Detective Agency,” said Paul, as if that were an explanation.
“Paul is a pop-culture-hard-boiled-private-eye-story kind of guy,” said Giselle hurriedly. “He’s quoting from one of Hammett’s Continental Op stories.”
Kearny felt the first faint stirrings of sympathy for Giselle despite her having dragged him out here with a hangover. If she had to put up with this fruitcake all day long...
One of the two young, upstanding, and handsome uniformed policemen who had been waiting beside the parked cruisers cleared his throat.
“Ah... Mr. Rochemont? Mrs. Rochemont? We’ve spoken with the detectives down at the station. They will be up here about noon to take your statements, if that’s all right. Of course if you’d rather we take you down to the station and return you afterwards, we’d be glad to, but—”
“The cop house,” said Paul. “Boss.”
Inga had begun to look interested. “I’ll take my own car. I’m really upset by all this. Once I give my statement I’ll go shopping for a new dress for the party.”
“What party?” demanded Kearny, the detective in him instantly alert. They were, after all, on a security detail.
A woman’s voice said, “At the Fort Mason Officers Club on Saturday after all the papers have been signed.” Bernardine and Ken had appeared at the head of the stairs. Bernardine added, “To celebrate Paul’s sale to the conglomerate.”
“You know anything about this?” Kearny growled at Giselle.
“First I’d heard.” She gestured. “Mrs. Rochemont, Mr. Dan Kearny, head of DKA.”
Bernardine inclined her head, extended her hand. “You have an excellent employee in Mr. Warren.”
He shook Bernardine’s hand. It was cold and angular and alive, like a fresh-caught surf fish. Her grip was strong. This was the woman Stan the Man wanted to keep happy on the trust department’s behalf. She was also the woman, according to Giselle, who had developed some sort of passion for Ken Warren. The dither at the edges of her coldness didn’t fool him for an instant. She was hard as nails underneath, especially, from what Giselle had said, when something or someone threatened her son.
Paul said excitedly to the cops, “I’m riding with the Old Man down to the station.”
“Now just a minute—”
But Bernardine interrupted Kearny imperiously. “And Mr. Warren and I shall go in the limousine,” She raised her voice slightly. “Oscar.”
A uniformed chauffeur with a frozen face and downturned mouth appeared and crossed quickly to the long limo fresh-washed with water still glinting in the morning sunshine. His uniform was gray, with tightly creased leggings, a priest’s collar on the jacket, a peaked cap, and a Sam Browne belt. No holster, no gun, Kearny was glad to see, unless he was packing something under his arm. Nothing would surprise him here in cuckooland.
Oscar said, “The limo is ready, Mrs. Rochemont.”
“I’ll take my car, too,” said Giselle significantly, with a pointed look after Inga.
Paul leaped into the rider’s seat of Kearny’s car, with all the eagerness of a puppy perhaps not yet fully housebroken.
“I hope he doesn’t do something on the upholstery before I get him down to Larkspur.”
“Dan,” said Giselle reprovingly.
Ken Warren was escorting Bernardine to the limousine with the look on his face of a man eating a lemon. Since the reason all of them were there was to keep Stan Groner happy, Kearny decided that the only way Stan could repay DKA was with a bevy of delinquent auto recovery assignments.