The receptionist, elegant as the room but definitely no antique, had a spring mist of ash-blond hair around her exquisitely chiseled face. She glanced at an old grandfather case clock in the corner, its pendulum slowly ticking off 5:03 on its Roman numerals. She wore a pearl-gray silk suit that would have cost Morales three months rent if he’d wanted to give it to her as a present. Not that he would ever want to give any chica anything except seven stiff inches.
She smiled warmly at him. Class. Real class. If he could ever get something like that into bed... Well, hell, that’s why he was trying to be a player, wasn’t it?
“Yes sir, may I help you?”
He tossed one of his DKA cards on the desk in front of her with a contemptuous flick of the wrist. He had no cards of his own; this was preprinted with the firm name and address, and had Trinidad Morales as an afterthought in the lower left corner.
“I’m here to repo Kiely’s limo,” he said in his breathy, intrusive voice. Then he opened his gold-glinting mouth wide and guffawed to show her it was a joke.
She was looking at the card without touching it, as if it were something nasty that Morales had done on her blotter. “Daniel Kearny Associates,” she said flatly. “Who are they — the only people who will associate with Daniel Kearny?”
“Kiely wants to see me. He knows what it’s about.”
“I’m afraid Mr. Kiely is in Sacramento. The legislature is in session and he—”
Morales cut her short with another guffaw. He didn’t know if the legislature was in session or not, but it stood to reason that this soon after having Petlaroc murdered, Kiely would still be around San Francisco for possible damage control.
“Do I look like I just got off the bus from Tijuana?”
“I see,” she said. “Do you have an appointment?”
“Na.” He plopped down on the burgundy couch. “Better take it in to him, sweetlips. He’ll be pissed if you don’t.”
She pushed a button on her switchboard and leaned slightly forward and spoke into her mouthpiece with inaudible tones. Then, with a cold glance at him, she rolled her chair back and got up with a flash of very long legs under a very short skirt. She opened a heavy, ornate hardwood door at the back of the office, went through it, and pulled it carefully shut behind her.
He’d like to snoop a couple of these desks, probably some juicy stuff in them that a man could turn to his advantage, but he figured that Kiely was sitting there in his back room right now, watching him on closed-circuit surveillance video.
So he just sat there and waited. There was nothing else he could do, now. Even if he left, Kiely would know he had been there and had been pushing it. And a guy like Kiely would always know where to find a guy like Morales.
“Big and wide, but he still looks squat?” asked Kiely from behind his huge hardwood desk. It was littered with files; today he was trying to convince himself he was a working attorney.
The blond receptionist nodded. “And with an insinuating manner as if he knows what color underwear I have on.”
“Yeah, that’s Morales, all right,” chuckled Kiely. “I’ve got to admit he’s got more balls than I gave him credit for. He might even be smarter than I thought. Let him stew for half an hour or so.” Kiely picked up his brief. “Thanks, Maddy. Can I impose on you to stay to show him in?”
“Surely.”
“I owe you dinner at Postrio’s.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Give Herb Caen something to write about. ‘What prominent assemblyman was seen by the Shadow having dinner with which beautiful blond assistant at Postrio’s?’ ” When she chuckled with him, he added, “Better get out there, make sure our brown-skinned boyo doesn’t steal the silver or a couple of files. I first ran across him when he was trying to burgle my house.”
Maddy chuckled again, dutifully. She thought the boss was making a joke as he so often did.
Chapter Sixteen
Ballard unlocked and opened the car, she got in, suddenly yawned involuntarily. She looked tired, but was high on the union movement. He got in under the wheel and started it.
“Another late night?”
“ ’Til damn near dawn,” she said. “The strikers are supposed to do six hours in what would have been their normal work shift, and we get ninety-five percent of them on the line. On the day shift you’ve got the room cleaners, the bellmen, food servers, cooks and telephone switchboard operators, on the night shift the nighttime cocktail servers and bartenders and graveyard bellmen. But from two to six A.M. the only people working are the night porters who clean the kitchen. So I did a midnight-to-eight stint with them, and boy, is it cold out there!”
“Why you? You’re union brass, you don’t have to—”
“Sure I do. Solidarity. And we’re killing the St. Mark!” She sparkled with Garibaldi fervor. “Local Seventeen of the Service Employees International, who just signed with the St. Mark last week are honoring our picket lines. So are the electricians and plumbers.”
“But even after being there all night you—”
“I told you I buy into all this bullshit. Look around you. Women getting sick working murderous split shifts. Employers hiring people for thirty-eight hours a week so they don’t have to pay bennies, putting four out of five employees on the street so they can work the fifth to death doing the work of five.”
Ballard pulled away from the curb. “You believe all that stuff?”
“It’s the truth, I see it every day,” she snapped at him, eyes flashing. “I think you’re going to see a union comeback if for no other reason than we need people coming at problems from all different angles. The unions have only half the workforce now, but workers are going to start forming their own grassroots organizations just like in the old days that will become unions eventually. That’s why we have to win at the St. Mark — to show it can be done.”
“I think that if the unions have lost ground, it’s because of corruption,” said Ballard. He had come down Hyde and was looking for parking not too far from the union hall. “In the unions themselves, among the politicians. You said it yourself, John Burton and what’s-his-face, the big gun in the Assembly—”
“Rick Kiely. They’re not corrupt.” She got a surprised look on her face. “At least I don’t think they are. Anyway, what you’re looking for is somebody raiding our general fund or going after the benefit funds. And we’ve been over all that. They’re so closely monitored that even if you could embezzle a lot of bucks, you wouldn’t get away with it for very long.”
He found a space that wasn’t tow-away, killed the engine.
“Why are you parking here? You can just drop me off.”
“I thought we could get a pizza or something afterwards.”
“That’s the only reason you want to come in with me?”
They got out of the car, locked the doors. “Maybe I thought that as long as we were there, you might be able to take a quick peek in Danny’s file and see if there was anything that might help us find... what’s the matter?”
“A detective!” she exclaimed.
“Where?” He was looking around, clowning it up.
“You’re a goddamned private eye! You’re too focused and too good at looking for Danny to be anything else.”
“Or maybe I’m a cop,” he suggested.
“You wouldn’t last five minutes. Cops got to knuckle under to the chain of command.”
Ballard took it as a compliment. So he had to be damned sure to never knuckle under to her.
“So I’m a detective. But I’m also a friend of Danny’s—”