The way her skirt emphasized Beverly’s shapely dancer’s thighs as she served the clamorous young professionals caught his eye, but he was all business by the time she got back to him. She stood on her toes to lean her five-foot-two closer across the bar as though her life depended on him.
“What would you like me to do?” he asked.
“What you always do. Find him.”
He snatched a peek at his watch. It was the last night of the month, always the busiest night of the month, and Bart was on vacation, O’B was covering for their disabled man in Eureka, and Kearny would be on Larry’s butt because they were shorthanded.
But Bev caught the glance, and her face went hard as stone.
“I thought you were Danny’s friend.”
“I am, Bev,” he said hurriedly, “but it’s the end of the month so I’ll be shagging cars for Cal-Cit Bank all night.”
Beverly knew what that meant, all right. “Item accounts?”
Cal-Cit Bank was DKA’s major client, and item accounts were debtors a month overdue; Beverly had been one herself once. The efficiency of the bank’s zone men who assigned out repos was judged by how few “items” they had at the end of any given month.
“Yeah. But I told you I’d do it and I will. I’ll find Danny. I just gotta slide it by Kearny when he isn’t looking.”
They involuntarily glanced down the bar; Kearny was just putting a coin in the juke for the brunette in the black tights.
“That shouldn’t be too hard,” said Beverly snidely.
O’B had heard some lousy saw-playing in his day, but this was the worst. At least the wailing voice fit the wailing lyrics and the wailing saw:
“Ah me-e-et with a wooman, we waint awn a spre-e-e,
She taught me-e-e to smoke an’ draink whuske-e-ey!”
O’Bannon had been trying to cut down on the booze since Dan Kearny had briefly benched him during last year’s big Gypsy hunt, but up here in the rain and fog a man needed a phlegm-cutter now and then. Still, he was virtuously sticking to longneck Bud. He rapped his empty on the bar, got a nod from the busy bartender.
O’B was a wiry 50, five-eight and 155 pounds, his thick wavy red hair only now getting watered down with gray, the hound-dog blue eyes in his freckle-splattered drinker’s face innocent of guile. Which made him the best con man — for that, read field man — around, except for Dan Kearny himself.
He sighed. Mercifully, the awful voice and shimmering whine of saw were partially lost in the racket — out-of-work loggers and their women did not a sensitive audience make.
Sweat was standing on the singer’s face. Six-six, bearded, hulking, wearing a plaid lumberjack’s shirt under two-inch-wide suspenders. Looked like anything but a musician: looked like, for instance, a long-haul big-rig driver. He was giving it his all, which was not enough. Suddenly he leaped to his feet.
“Goddammit!” It silenced the room, turned all eyes toward the narrow stage in the way his playing had failed to do. He held the saw across his chest, serrated teeth resting against his left biceps. “Whadda ya want me to do? Saw off my goddam arm?”
Someone said, “Yeah,” in a conversational voice and the patrons burst into spontaneous applause.
“You see those bastards?” he demanded plaintively when O’B caught up with him at his battered seven-year-old Ford Escort wagon in the Sawdust Lounge’s parking lot.
O’B, who had come here tonight solely to scratch up an acquaintance with the guy, whose name was Nordstrom, merely held out a half pint of Seagram’s he’d brought along for emergencies. The screw-off cap already had been removed.
“Yeah, Jesus,” said the saw-player, reaching greedily for it like a baby for the breast.
Chapter Three
San Francisco had a brand-new court-mandated county jail right next to the Hall of Justice at Eighth and Bryant, cushy as a luxury hotel, but Trin Morales was in one of the old holding cells in the Hall itself with the other felons, drunks, male whores and assorted scofflaws to be arraigned early in the A.M.
He sat on the floor with his back to the wall, sullen. How the hell could he raise bail? Kearny would get him out, of course — but then would fire him. He needed his DKA job until he could figure out how to open his own P.I. office again.
“Trinidad Morales? You’re sprung. Let’s go.”
A mystified Morales followed the uniformed guard out of the cell to catcalls from those of his fellow detainees not comatose from booze or drugs, and down to the property room.
“What’s the deal?”
“You care?”
He tore open the envelope of his belongings, checking to make sure his money was still in his wallet. Just because they were cops didn’t mean they weren’t a bunch of goddam thieves.
“Wanna update my Christmas list.”
Standing beside the door was a rather dissipated-looking black-haired Irishman in a tux and black tie. He had a belly, and a face that once would have been taut-chinned and crisp and maybe even a bit piratical. Now only the eyes were young: blue and brash and challenging yet glinting with humor at the same time. His tenor probably raised hell with “Galway Bay.”
“I told the good lads in blue that you were at my home to date our maid.” He chuckled. “She isn’t an illegal, Morales. She set you up. I told her to.”
They descended to the black limo waiting in the no-parking zone below the Hall’s front steps. A uniformed driver opened the door. The Irishman studied Trin as they drove off.
“You know who I am, then, laddie?”
Politics held as much interest for Morales as origami, but he’d have had to be brain-dead in this town not to know who this man was. He said, “Sure. Assemblyman Rick Kiely.”
“Right you are. When the Democrats get back control of the state legislature next election, Speaker of the House Rick Kiely.” They were sweeping around the curves of upper Market toward Twin Peaks. “You know a man named Georgi Petlaroc?”
“No.”
Kiely closed his right hand into a fist. “I’ve got you right by the balls, laddie. Don’t you try to screw with me.”
But Morales had figured out this guy wanted something, so he gave his short, heavy, jeering laugh. “You ain’t my type.”
“Tough guy,” chuckled Kiely. His fleshy chin made a roll above the tight collar of his dress shirt when he nodded to himself, but he looked like he probably had been a pretty tough guy himself in his day. He added, “I crook my finger, you come running — comprende?”
The limo slid to the curb and stopped. Kiely gestured. Morales opened his door and got out. “Si.”
“Or maybe after tonight I won’t need you. We’ll see.”
Morales stood beside his parked car to watch the limo turn the corner. Set up indeed. The bastard had even known where he had parked. Politicians, rich bastards, they had all the power.
Obviously some guy named Petlaroc, wanting something from Kiely’s safe, had anonymously hired Morales to scope it out. Soon Kiely would want Morales to get something from Petlaroc’s safe; money would change hands. Of course someone would try to set Morales up again, but he could take care of himself.
Meanwhile, it was the end of the month and he had a lot of item accounts to deal with. Morales went out to grab some cars.
Ken Warren wanted to be out grabbing cars, but here they were inside the mansion in Kent Woodlands. It looked like the kind of place you saw in miniseries about the Deep South: marble floors, statues without clothes, leather sofas that swallowed you when you sat in them, chairs with needlepoint potbellies and skinny legs, oil paintings of springer spaniels with worried brown eyes watching dead birds hanging off the edges of tables with brass bowls of fruit on them.