Going to his car, Kearny thought, What was the Karen Marshall/Eddie Graff connection revolving around Stan? What had Marshall really been looking for when she had sicced Stan — and incidentally Kearny — onto ex-boyfriend Eddie?
Trin Morales felt uneasy skulking down the hallways of the massive old shadowy main library at Larkin and McAllister in the Civic Center, designed by George Kelham in 1916 to match in scale the City Hall built a year earlier across the square. The library held unbelievable stores of knowledge he didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand — in itself irritating as hell.
The Latina civil servant in charge of the dim, quiet microfilm room that smelled of dust and furniture polish showed him how to index information and get the microfilmed newspapers he wanted delivered to the desk. She showed him how to thread the microfilm through the reader, how to adjust the focus.
Puta. He didn’t like women who knew more than he did. He especially didn’t like Latina women who knew more than he did. But she had a round pretty face and a nicely rounded figure beneath her fuzzy sweater and trim skirt and costume jewelry.
“Hey, chica, wha’chew doin’ after work tonight?” He spoke his English in a deliberately slurred Mexican accent, using his breathy, jovial manner to imply an intimacy that didn’t exist.
She answered him very formally, in Spanish, “Sir, I am a married woman.”
“Yeah? So what?”
Her voice in English was cold indeed. “So rewind the microfilms before you return them to the desk. And put them in their boxes also.”
“What happens I don’t, chica?”
“I get a guard and have you ejected.”
“Big deal.”
At the next reader was a very skinny, very Anglo old man in a heavy topcoat who reeked of sweat and vomit and cheap wine. Long dirty white hair, long filthy white beard, deep-sunk eyes, aquiline nose. Slumped down in front of the reader, long skinny legs thrust out under the table. Dead asleep and snoring. Why wasn’t she calling the guard to eject that old dung heap?
Dried-up broad, probably 35 goddam years old. Not like the little wetbacks he picked up in the Mission District. Just putting her on anyway. Wouldn’t screw her with Ballard’s dick.
For the first time in his life, Trin Morales wished he had paid attention to politics. He had no handle on Rick Kiely. But since he knew Kiely had run unopposed in last June’s Democratic primary, then had beaten his Republican opponent roundly for reelection to the Assembly last November, most background pieces on him probably would have run between July and the election.
He was looking for some connection between Kiely and the dead union guy, Petlaroc, that he could exploit by acting as if he knew more than he did when going up against Kiely.
He quickly learned which sections of the Chronicle carried the political stuff and caught on that the editorial page often had information not found anywhere else because editorial writers had to do their homework. An hour later, in an editorial praising Kiely, Morales got his connection.
Kiely, gushed the piece, was one politician who understood the needs and problems of the workingman, because he was a long-standing member of Culinary Workers Local 3, a bartender, even though he’d studied law at Golden Gate University, passed the bar on his first try, and had opened his own law office.
Kiely and Petlaroc, members of the same union, bartenders at the same time. He had his connection. Petlaroc obviously had dirt on Kiely, needed physical evidence, had hired Morales at third hand to go into the Kiely mansion and find the most likely places that such dirt might be hidden. But when the maid told him about Morales, Kiely’d neutralized Morales with the arrest and had hired someone to blow Petlaroc away.
Morales had no proof, but he could make insinuations just heavy enough to make Kiely uneasy, but not quite heavy enough to make him murderous. He kept digging, finally went up to the desk where the Latina was working. Midday sun through the tall windows laid a pale sash of bullion across her body and the worn wooden desktop. He was very polite this time.
“Señora, can you tell me where the men’s room is?”
“Yes. Down the hall beside the elevators.”
“Thank you very much. Is it all right if I leave my films on the table until I come back?”
“Certainly.”
He left the room and the building, leaving behind the final microfilm in the reader, the lights on, the last films he’d called for scattered around the table unboxed. Not much, but enough to be called a victory over her.
Chapter Twelve
“Got you, you mother!”
O’Bannon unconsciously hunched forward behind the wheel of his company Corolla. He started the engine and waited as the huge eighteen-wheeler truck-trailer rig came out of Leppek Court just beyond the fire station to turn west on Eureka’s Herrick Road.
“Heading for the freeway,” muttered O’B.
After his steam and a gallon of coffee, he had gone to stake out the house he’d taken Don Nordstrom to after they’d gotten drunk together following the musical-saw fiasco. Three hours later Nordstrom had driven off in his battered Ford Escort wagon, O’B behind him. Down here at the south end of Eureka had been the truck-trailer rig, stashed away on a dead-end street. Fully loaded and ready to go. Maybe somebody was after the rig just like O’B was after the rig’s eighteen tires.
They took the southbound on-ramp to the Redwood Highway. O’B dawdled along behind with seven cars between. There were high clouds and watery sunlight; on O’B’s right was Humboldt Bay with its National Wildlife Refuge and the long thin peninsula separated from the mainland like a forefinger opened out from the rest of the hand. Gulls swooped and squawked over the dark bumpy water in which sleek-headed seals bobbed like brown crab apples in autumn cider.
O’B had scant eye for beauty. He was hung over and with a very large problem: how to get those tires. The semi’s load of cinched-down redwood logs could be going halfway back to San Francisco; he might not even stop long enough to give O’B a chance at the tires. O’B had too many other cases to work for that kind of long shot.
But at the little logging town of Fortuna, the semi’s turn signals went on and Nordstrom took an off-ramp with a green sign bearing the symbols for gas (a pump in silhouette), food (a fork in silhouette), and lodging (a bed in silhouette). Neither the gas station, this close to Eureka, nor the motel, at one in the afternoon, made sense. So it was probably lunch.
Sure enough, Nordstrom swung the semi into the blacktopped lot of a diner called Trucker’s Best Eats. Behind Trucker’s Best Eats was a motel called Trucker’s Best Sleep, and beside the café, separated by a weedy field and a low fence, was a service station called Trucker’s Best Gas.
Nordstrom pulled his truck-trailer rig around to the side where it was well away from the marked-out car parking slots and hidden from the road. O’B stopped fifty feet from the semi, beside the low dilapidated fence that separated the café’s parking area from the weedy lot and the adjacent gas station.
The beefy trucker was just swinging down from his cab. He rammed his cowboy hat low on his head, hitched his jeans up under his beer belly, and disappeared around the front of the truck. While Nordstrom was getting some Trucker’s Best Eats, maybe O’B could just peek into the semi’s cab...
Screened from the coffee shop, O’B stepped up on the running board and the stair step above it to take his peek. The Rottweiler would probably be curled up on...
But as his eyes cleared the window frame, a huge square head with a roaring, contorted face full of teeth hit the other side of the glass. O’B almost fell off the step, only his grasp on the rearview mirror bracket saving him. The Rottweiler smashed himself against the glass again, slavering and snapping.