Giselle got her mouth close to the phone.
“Paul suddenly turned into a real actual human being. His mother controls all the money. He knows she doesn’t trust Inga but he does. So in his own mind he really needs to get the money for his computer chip. He and Inga are planning something.”
“What? Is he involved in all the crazy stuff that’s been going on. Is she?”
“That’s when Bernardine arrived for tea. I’m hoping I can get him in a corner sometime this evening and open him up.”
After he’d hung up, Kearny decided he’d better run everyone in the Rochemont affair through his credit and police sources. Paul’s remarks about money, relayed by Giselle, had sharpened his attention. Money or emotion drove most violence, and if the violence around the Rochemonts had so far been more moon madness than mayhem, it could easily turn very real and very ugly. And there were also Karen Marshall, Eddie Graff, and the missing supposedly murderous Frank Nugent.
After the credit-checking service, he called Benny Nicoletti of the SFPD Intelligence unit. Benny gave his high-pitched giggle, so incongruous with his thick, tough body and beaming Italian face.
“No way I run any errands for private fuzz, Dan.”
But he would: ever since mob attorney Wayne Hawkley had gone down because of DKA, Benny had owed Dan a lot of favors.
Kearny sighed and lit a cigarette and raided Mr. Coffee for a cup of steaming brew. He’d come into the office to do the billing from the files closed out during the last few days of April. If he didn’t, DKA would have no mid-May payroll.
But first he sent another insulting fax to O’B up in Eureka concerning the truck tires — what the hell was the guy doing up there? Hanging around gin mills getting swocked, most likely. Not that he wasn’t closing out cases at a surprising rate, but O’B, drunk or sober, knew how to do that.
The Rainbow was a huge Quonset-style place like an airplane hangar that was really an old-fashioned ’50s-style dancehall. Being outside the Eureka city limits — a couple of miles north of Freshwater Corners on the Myrtle Avenue extension — it had unlimited free parking and freedom from city taxes.
Blow Me Baby played heavy metal there four nights a week, with some better-known band up from the Bay Area for the weekends. O’B hadn’t known what kind of music they played, but from hearing them Tuesday night, even drunk he would have said they played bad. In the real, not hip, sense.
O’B parked John Little’s longbed Dodge Dakota truck behind the stage door at the rear of the sprawling building. It was illegal to use a repo on another assignment, as he was doing with the Dakota, but he knew John Little wouldn’t mind. The bank would, vociferously, but the bank didn’t know about it.
He’d parked beside a plain-sided battered one-ton tan Dodge van without windows. It had a hand-painted logo on the door of a guy in black waving a guitar with the words BLOW ME BABY around him in a circle. O’B had a momentary unholy urge to steal the van along with the band’s instruments and amps, but he had no repo order on it. Too beat-up for anyone to carry paper on it anyway.
He began skulking around the parking lot dramatically, staying away from his mud-splattered local vehicle, because O’B looked nothing like a local in from the boonies for a big night.
He looked, truth be told, like an East Oakland pimp. A brilliant purple velvet suit coat halfway down his thighs, with hugely padded shoulders to make him a yard wide. Orange silk shirt with a gray silk tie covered with Gauguin Tahitian nudes. Electric-blue silk slacks so skintight he hadn’t been able to wear underpants for fear of destroying the line, shiny black narrow-toed ankle boots with stacked heels. He hoped the Rainbow’s youthful clientele would note him as some exotic outsider, a parrot in the flock of local crows. He’d had his half dozen business cards printed to foster that impression.
At the last minute he’d slid a fairly heavy wrench into his inside left breast pocket. It made the purple jacket bulge just enough to approximate a heavy handgun like a Python .357 magnum or a Glock-7 in an underarm shoulder holster. Little added edge.
Then he heard the tearing stutter of the first bikers arriving with the cutouts wide open on their Harley hogs. He’d noted them the other night, dealing dope openly and brazenly; and in his crazy getup he couldn’t help but attract their attention.
The man who eventually sidled up to him wore black leather and black hack boots and greasy black hair and beard, a Nazi World War II steel pot on his head, swastikas and SS insignias on his jacket. No shirt, just a sheepskin vest. Little pig eyes in a face bloated with water retention.
“I’m Hitler!” he boomed, and jerked a thumb at a lily-white fat-butt mama sprawled picturesquely all over his hack. She also wore black leather, and an old leather flier’s cap and goggles high up on her head. In one black-leathered fist was a bicycle chain she kept slamming against the open palm of her other hand. “That there’s my mama, Betty Boop. We been watchin’ you wandering ’round the parkin’ lot—”
“That’s right. You have.”
“Lookin’ for somethin’ special?” O’B didn’t answer. “I mean... you lookin’ to score?” Still no answer. The biker leaned close. Beer, chili, bourbon, onion rings for supper, hadn’t brushed his teeth afterward. Probably not for two or three years. “What I wanna know, whadda ya want?”
“I’m an undercover narc looking to bust some badass biker pushers I hear hang around here in the Rainbow parking lot.”
Hitler stepped back as if O’B were a live wire stripped of insulation. Then he said in an uncertain voice, “You’re shittin’ me, man. I mean, in those clothes...”
O’B chuckled. “That’s right, I’m shittin’ you, man.”
Hitler gave a little relieved, almost embarrassed laugh.
“So, you lookin’ to score, or what?”
“Recreational use only.”
“How ’bout some nose candy?”
O’B hadn’t heard coke called nose candy for years, but he was delighted. He would have been satisfied with anything he could get, was expecting local-grown grass maybe being passed off as Acapulco Gold or Maui Wowie, but to be offered coke was a real bonus. It probably had been walked on so many times it needed resoling, but it needed to do its job for a scant twenty minutes.
“What price we talking?”
“Now, not so fast, man.” Hitler looked around. “Not right here.” He jerked his head toward a clump of tall, spear-straight shadowy redwoods beyond the darkest corner of the lot. “Let’s go to my office and talk business — unless it bothers you to go into the dark with a big bad biker like me.”
O’B, who was so bothered he couldn’t distinguish it from abject terror, chuckled and patted the pipe wrench in his pocket. It made a hard, convincing bulge under the purple cloth.
“There’s not a whole lot in this world bothers me, sonny.”
Hitler’s eyes got bigger and O’B’s anxiety level decreased as he revised the man’s age downward by half a dozen years.
“Uh, ah, yeah, sure,” said the biker. “That’s cool, man.”
They started for the clump of trees. O’B said, “I like you, Hitler. Your shit’s any good, I might make you and some of your buddies another couple hundred for five minutes’ work.”
Hitler was working to rebuild his rep.
“Who we gotta kill?”
“First I have to know how you feel about Blow Me Baby.”
“Them fuckin’ fag pussies?”
“Okay. At a certain point, I want a couple of your guys to start a little scuffle just inside the front door of the Rainbow. By the front end of the bar.”
“Scuffle? You mean like a fight, like?”
“Yeah. Throw a few punches at each other, maybe a bot-tie or two. Get everybody looking at them for about ten minutes.”