“Why not for you?”
“I told you last night — I’m squeamish.”
So the next step up might be an assignment for a killing. But by then he’d know who was behind it all — and who almost surely had ordered up Petrock’s murder.
He felt a moment’s unease. Dan Kearny would want him to call in about this, discuss whether he should go or not, maybe suggest some backup. But he hated to go running to the Great White Father when he really didn’t have anything solid.
Why weren’t they using the same team that had done Petrock? Maybe the team was too hot — or maybe they’d left town after the killing. Could be whoever he was seeing tonight hadn’t ordered the Petrock kill at all. That’s why he was going, wasn’t it? To find out for his own self.
After he was sure the Vulture had left the building, he slipped down the back stairs and out the alley door. Because he had the time, he hoofed it to DKA to pick up an anonymous company car for his rendezvous.
Rendezvous with whom?
Ballard’s doorbell rang. He went out and down the hall. When he opened the front door, he allowed himself to be astounded and hopeful.
“I guess the pleasure is all mine.”
Amalia Pelotti went by him without speaking, down to his open apartment door spilling light across the hall. By the time he had closed the door and followed her, she was standing by the coffee table near his sofa, sizing things up.
“It looks like you, Larry.”
He looked around the shabby living room, seeing it through her eyes. “I don’t spend much time here,” he mumbled. “You want me to make some coffee?”
“Why do you think I came instead of calling?”
Ballard sighed and began measuring out water and French Roast while Amalia sat down in his battered easy chair and made it her own. Why did he feel guilty? He hadn’t done anything with Beverly, hadn’t even entertained the thought of doing anything with Beverly, hadn’t...
They faced each other over steaming cups of coffee, he on the couch, she in the easy chair.
“Sally heard Danny say he’d been at the Redevelopment Agency — does that mean anything to you?”
“You have to go through them to do any commercial building in San Francisco.”
“He’d also been to the Office of Economic Development.”
“I put up a dollar, you put up a dollar,” Larry said. “They coordinate matching funds. And no matter how hard economic times get, no matter how much people get laid off, there’s always private and government bucks for so-called worthy projects.”
Amalia said softly, “Would you call our union tearing down the current building and putting up an eight-story building with six floors affordable housing for the aged a worthy project?”
“Man, I bet that’s it!” exclaimed Ballard. “A way to milk the union for a lot of money without touching union funds — it all would come from private start-up and rebuilding funds, and local and state and federal development deals. Just bypass the watchdogs on the union’s pension and welfare funds entirely.”
Amalia was silent. He went into the cubbyhole kitchen, got the pot, poured them more coffee. He sat back down.
“You know where this is going, Amalia. Someone in your union might be planning to steal just a hell of a lot of money with dazzling paperwork, so no one else quite knows just what money went where for what.”
“I know that,” she said sadly.
“Who in Local Three’s got the moxie to do it?”
“Petrock — but if he heard about it, he’d try to stop it.”
“And he’s dead,” said Ballard. “Who else?”
After a long pause, she said, “Assemblyman Rick Kiely.”
“And he isn’t dead,” said Ballard.
Assemblyman Rick Kiely’s wife was teaching her specialed class at USF, as she did every Friday evening, so he sat under the Klee wall safe in his home office, having a drink and finding himself getting caught up in a book called Shakespeare’s Game, by a playwright named Gibson. Hamlet was Kiely’s favorite play, because every day he saw — hell, himself played — those same power games in the Assembly, and the book had a marvelous analysis of the play and the games.
The house was still except for the servomechanisms that nobody ever really heard anymore — the hum of his computer, the slight distant shudder of the refrigerator starting up, the electronic click dick click of his desk clock.
He checked the time and set his book aside. His men at the union had said they’d be calling him tonight with some important news about what might have happened to Danny Marenne while he was nosing around. They were the same ones who had told him about Ballard and had put the man in the hospital at his orders.
Heslip was ten minutes early. He parked on Brentwood Avenue, a block away and around the corner from the address he’d been given. From long practice in making quick getaways from irate subjects, he automatically parked facing downhill with no car in front of him.
He walked from there, keeping in the shadows, walking on grass so his footsteps wouldn’t ring out. After he was gone, another shadow moved to his car, but Bart was already focused on the huge, pretentious house, mansion almost, in the next block. He settled in to wait for his appointment.
Danny Marenne came awake with a start, yelped as his cracked ribs dug into his flesh. Just, he hoped, into the pleuram, not into his lung. He lay in the dark, totally disoriented. What time was it? What day was it? Dark out. Must have fallen asleep, slept the whole night through.
He swung his legs gingerly out of bed, sat with his feet on the floor. Yes. Still naked and wrapped in the bedspread. He’d been going to call all night...
He turned on the bedside lamp, sat staring stupidly at the clock. As he stared, it turned from 8:57 to 8:58. Almost nine o’clock in the morning. Suddenly he leaned forward, ignoring another jolt of pain from his ribs, to stare at the little red electronic dot beside the 8:58. The red dot meant P.M.
Of course. It was light at nine o’clock in the morning. He’d slept the clock around. It was night again — Friday night. Bon Dieu. He feverishly tapped out his man’s number.
Rick Kiely could hear police sirens in the distance, very faint, as if coming over the shoulder of Twin Peaks on Portola Drive. Then the phone rang. At last. He picked up.
“You’re late. Where in the hell—”
“Rick? This is Danny.”
“Danny! Jesus! I was just waiting for a call about you. Where have you been? What happened?” Kiely found he was gripping the phone very tightly.
“They sent me off the cliff Monday night when I was on my way to your beach cabin with the proof we’ve been looking for. They went into the water with me and were lost.” Danny was talking very fast, as if against some impending doom. “None of that matters now—”
At the tar end of the house, the doorbell rang.
“Danny, hang on a second. Someone’s at the door. I—”
“Don’t answer it! They have to know that you’ve been—”
A twelve-gauge shotgun roared outside the window. Rick Kiely took the full charge of double-O shot directly in the back of his head. It knocked him forward over his chair and sent the receiver flying from his hand.
The second shot, the deer slug, blew his spine apart, but Kiely was already dead by then, without ever knowing how badly he’d been betrayed.
The sound of the police sirens was much louder.
Bart Heslip was just pushing the doorbell a second time when he heard the double crump! from behind the house. He whirled and leaped from the porch, was in the shrubbery flanking the lawn as the first police car. siren and lights blazing, squealed into Hazelwood from Monterey Boulevard.