O’B dropped to the ground, walked quickly back to his own car, got in, and slid down behind the wheel. When nobody had appeared for long enough, he raised his head above the lower edge of the window; the Rottweiler was still at his window, but just watching now, upper lip pulled back from over yellow fangs on one side in a lemme-at-’im lemme-at-’im Rottweiler kind of sneer.
His arms would be gone to the elbow and the Rottweiler would be wearing his face before he could get the ignition lock out from under the dashboard to replace it with one of his own.
So much for Plan A.
O’B thought cheerfully, On to Plan B.
O’B thought mournfully, There isn’t any Plan B.
O’B thought constructively, How about Plan C? Plan C was to make it up as you went along.
Maybe Plan D should be some coffee and maybe something to eat in Trucker’s Best Eats. Yeah. Good one. He’d just sit here for a few minutes, enjoy nature, let his pulse get back into the low hundreds, then go in and contemplate what sort of nifty he could pull that would make up for waking up drunk in his car at six in the morning.
Getting to bed on his too-short couch at six in the morning had left Ballard feeling sleep-deprived when he woke just at 11:00 A.M. Somehow he’d fallen off onto the floor. He shook the coffeepot, smelled it. Christ! Kearny had done something indescribably nasty in it. He scrubbed it out, wrapped a towel around his middle, and went to get a quick shower while the kettle was bringing cold fresh water to the boil.
In the hallway he passed Takoko Togawa, the tiny vivid Japanese exchange student in the back apartment, on whose virtue he had waged a gentle if unsuccessful campaign during her two years as a student at S.F. State. Although she was carrying a stack of books and folders that probably outweighed her ninety pounds, she stopped him with the wide, rather goofy grin that made her so uniquely attractive.
“I no realize you one of those,” she lilted musically.
“One of what?”
“Boy-girl.” She did something with the angle of her head and tension in her wrist that suddenly made her unmistakably gay. “For tough-looking man sleep in your bed.”
“For Chrissake, Takoko, he’s my boss’ Just sleeping here for a couple of nights because his wife...” He stopped and made the universal shrug of the male in the face of incomprehensible female intransigence. “She threw him out.”
“She not get enough,” said Takoko wisely.
“You know Dan’s wife?” demanded Ballard in amazement.
She shook her head and giggled merrily. “This morning he come from shower, show me what he’s got.”
“Dan?” demanded a scandalized Ballard.
“His towel fall off.”
“Oh.” Ballard suddenly found himself asking, “So, ah... how... I mean... ah, er... ah, what’s he got?”
“Not much.” She gave another peal of laughter and was gone down the hall. In her own doorway, she paused after unlocking the door, looked back over her shoulder at Larry with dark, slanted, mischievous eyes. “Maybe could make something of it. He need Japonee girr walk on his back, loosen him up.”
“You volunteering?” asked Ballard with a completely nonsensical little twinge of jealousy.
She put her free hand up over her mouth and giggled, said, “Maybe fo you,” then was through the door and into her apartment.
Behind his own door the teakettle was singing. He felt like singing himself: maybe fo you. Hey, suddenly there were a lot of beautiful women potentially in his life. Beverly. Amalia. And now Takoko. He didn’t count Giselle.
Somehow their brief spurt of unconsummated passion and jealousy had dissipated during last year’s great Gypsy hunt when they had cooperated on getting the pink 1958 Cadillac convertible the Gypsy King said he wanted to be buried in. Giselle had gone back to being, next to Bart, his best friend.
Giselle decided that Inga drove as badly as she seemed to do everything else. After the turn into Magnolia Avenue from Woodland, she rode the pedal constantly, her brake lights almost continually flashing. Giselle hung back, hoping that Inga would do something — like not going to the police station — that would make her complicity in last night’s attack as obvious to Kearny as it was to her.
Why was she so sure Inga was mixed up in it? Because she’d had the best chance at drugging their coffee? Or because she was maybe just a little too scatterbrained, too apparently dim, to be true? Inga stayed on Magnolia all the way to Doherty Drive, docilely turned in, and stopped beside the Twin Cities police station on the edge of Piper Park.
Giselle drove a quarter mile down the road to the big Redwood High School complex, past a sign with a black and yellow abstract tree painted on it that showed the school hadn’t yet achieved its $100,000 fund-raising goal. If she arrived at the police station right after Inga it would be a bit too obvious that she had been following the zippy little Porsche.
Instead, she looped around a couple of times through the school’s crowded parking lot — this being Marin, most kids old enough to have their licenses drove their own cars. Would she ever get back to the teaching her master’s degree in English had prepared her for? Probably not. Mountains of papers to be graded versus mountains of reports to be filed. She’d take the reports — especially now that she got a chance to generate some of them herself in the field.
She drove back to the police station, parked and locked behind Inga’s car under the ONE-HOUR PARKING sign, and went inside. Inga was standing in the vestibule beside a hulking soft-drink machine, looking confused. Three of the six choices were covered with paper inserts that had SPRITE hand-lettered on them.
“Somebody likes Sprite a lot,” said Giselle.
“I don’t get it,” said Inga. “Who’s gonna let us in?”
Indeed, the reception window to their left was open but unattended; directly ahead of them was a door marked OFFICIAL PERSONNEL ONLY. Giselle opened it and stuck in her head.
“Honey,” she yelled, “I’m home!”
That brought them a uniformed cop in a hurry.
Bernardine seemed to be sitting closer to Ken on the opulent crushed leather seat than when the limo had left the estate. Was anybody in this goddam household not a nut?
“You know, Kenny,” said Bernardine in an almost simpering voice, “that the client-detective relationship between us will end when the police apprehend Frank Nugent. Then we will be free of professional restraints.” She put her hand on his knee. “I must admit that you are just the sort of strong, silent, rugged, experienced man that I find... exciting...”
Ken had a sudden inspiration, that he was too worried about her son to think of anything else; he tried it, in shorthand.
“Hnyour hnson. Hnworryd.”
She got it. She squeezed his knee. “That’s just what I should expect from a man of your caliber.”
Oscar parked the limo under the big NO PARKING sign in front of the low brown nondescript police station off Doherty Drive a quarter mile or so before the sprawling Redwood High complex. The rest of the cars were there before them.
Chief of Police Ernie Rowan was a tall, bulky man who in his younger days probably had been hard and tough and athletic. But years behind the captain’s desk of a suburban police department in wealthy Marin County had reddened his face with good living, grayed his hair, opened his belt a few notches. Especially after a public relations lunch at, say Salute in San Rafael or the Lark Creek Inn just up the road in Larkspur.