“Stop it!”
Ballard quelled her with open hands, palm out, just as the waitress came up. He shook his head, she departed.
Amalia said, “Damn you and your coffee, now I expect it to always taste like yours.”
He sighed and shrugged and told her what had happened to him since she had knocked him down the stairs the night before, and that, in order to protect his buddy Bart Heslip, nobody could know Ballard was up and around.
He indicated his nose, his growing shiners. “That’s how I got these. Faking the fight with Bart.” She had the bad taste to laugh at him. “We have to know exactly what Sally heard Danny Marenne saying on the phone the day he disappeared. Exactly.”
“So you want me to talk to Sally again.”
“Right.”
“Wrong. You’re a dead issue with me. I opened up to you like I never have to a man before, and all the time you’re—”
“Amalia, I told you I never...”
She put her hands over her ears until he quit talking, then said, “Just stay out of my life, all right, Larry? I can’t stand to have you in my life.”
“This is about the union, Amalia, not about me.”
Leaving, she hesitated, then slid back into the booth. “I told you there’s no way anybody could use the union to make money illegally. Our funds are just too tightly monitored.”
“But just what if somebody has figured out a way?”
She stared at his face as if it were a piece of abstract art, nothing human, for a full thirty seconds.
“Okay. Where can I reach you if I find out anything?”
“Call me at home. I’ll pick up but I won’t answer.”
With a sudden surprised look on her face, Amalia said, “I don’t even know your telephone number.”
Ballard wrote it on a napkin.
Nordstrom gave a series of self-satisfied grunts and rolled off LuElla without waiting for her to catch up. He slapped her, hard, on the bottom, and said, “Gotta hit the trail, sweetlips.”
LuElla rolled over onto her back to watch with starry eyes as he pulled on his clothes. “Will I see you Wednesday?”
“You’ll see me when you see me, got that?” He went into the bathroom, smirked at himself in the mirror, came back out, pointed a forefinger at her, shot her with his cocked thumb, and swaggered out. He owned the stupid little bitch.
Charlene watched him cross the waste ground between the motel and his mighty eighteen-wheeler, black cowboy hat on the back of his head since the rain had stopped for the moment, hands halfway thrust into the hip pockets of his tight Levi’s, rolling his shoulders the way the Duke had done in scores of movies.
Suddenly he stopped dead, staring at his truck. He started yelling curses, so loud she could hear him even through the window glass, started jumping up and down so hard his hat flew off just as it started to pour again.
Drenched, Nordstrom rushed his truck as if he wanted to kick the tires to vent his frustration. But there were no tires to kick. Just the bare hubs, a couple of feet off the ground.
Under each axle on either side were double rows of stacked railroad ties, bearing the brunt of the truck-trailer’s loaded weight. O’B had just had the tow-truck driver jack up the truck and take the tires.
Charlene laughed through the window until there were tears in her eyes, as Nordstrom pounded his fists on the truck body and screamed his curses while his Rottweiler, still locked inside the cab, thundered its impotent rage.
Chapter Thirty-two
Dan Kearny was on the phone with Police Chief Ernie Rowan over in Larkspur, jollying him along, hoping to pick up something useful in the Rochemont puzzle that he, like Giselle, couldn’t quite convince himself was over. Not that he’d tell her that.
To Rowan he was saying, “After they sign the papers tomorrow, I guess the Rochemonts will be out of our hair.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Rowan in a long-suffering voice. “They live in my township, remember? And we still haven’t laid our hands on the elusive Mr. Nugent.”
“Maybe he isn’t the one causing you all the grief,” said Kearny airily.
“Oh, he’s it, all right.”
“I guess you’re right.” Then he added casually, though it was the reason he’d called, “Just so I can close my file, did the Marin County forensics lab come up with anything on the explosives Nugent used on Paul’s new Mercedes?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact... lemme find it here...” Kearny heard papers being shuffled, then Rowan came back on. “Guess it’s a sort of unusual combination...”
Kearny listened and wrote, repeating it aloud as he did. “...German radio transmitter... French plastique... Israeli pencil detonator...”
“That ring any bells with you?”
“No. But what does a private dick specializing in repos know about explosives?”
“I thought you guys were all James Bond in drag.”
They exchanged chuckles and hung up. Kearny sat staring at what he had written. That particular mix of explosives had rung some faint bell with him.
Sure. Repo they’d had a couple years back involving some big-time dope smugglers. The... what was it, the Eel Man, who had fallen on hard times and had started missing payments on his straight girlfriend’s car. He’d lived up in the Marin woods and had dealt with an international Scandinavian smuggler called the Swede who’d brought in explosives as well as dope; there’d been a San Francisco contact who’d moved everything interchangeably...
The Colonel, that was it.
Kearny’d grabbed the Eel Man’s car himself, because it had gotten so hairy the man assigned to the case had come in, tossed the keys to the company car on Kearny’s desk, and gone back to being a prison guard up in Oregon somewhere.
Kearny shrugged and stuck his notes in the Rochemont file. He still had that little itch in the back of his mind, but could think of no way to scratch it. He put the file away.
Bart Heslip sat in his darkened room at the unnamed ROOMS — DAY — WEEK — MONTH Tenderloin hotel above a bargain market calling itself Crim’s and Cram’s Palace of Fine Junk. He rented by the week. A neon sign across the street was going on and off, washing him with color as if he were in a ’40s noir movie. Except for the bald head, he looked his old self; he had abandoned his nose ring because if the cops caught up with him in whatever guise, they’d know him.
Bart was wondering if he should go down the hall to see if Sleepy Ray was in his room when someone banged on his door. He sat silently — if he shifted his weight even a millimeter, the bedsprings would squeak — and tried to assess the quality of the fist on the panel.
Sleepy Ray? Too assertive.
A drunk? Not boisterous enough.
The manager? His rent wasn’t due until Monday.
The cops, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern? Probably. He sighed, got off the bed and crossed to the door. The Vulture came in quickly and closed it behind him. How had he known where to look? thought Bart. Aw hell, Charlie Bagnis had his address.
They faced one another on the thin stained napless rug in the middle of the darkened room. The Vulture said. “The boss liked how you handled that little chore last night.”
“The boss as in who?”
By the intermittent red light from the sign across the street, the Vulture waggled his finger at Heslip almost co-quettishly. “Later for that. Tonight—”
“Uh-uh. A simple beating, okay. Anything heavier, I don’t deal with unknowns.”
“Okay. You got a car?”
“I can borrow one.”
The Vulture handed him a sheet torn from a memo pad. “The boss thought you might wanna face-to-face. Here’s the address and the time to meet. Be exactly on time and he’ll have a sweet, sweet deal for you.”