He threw down his pen, strolled between empty desks. No messages at Jane Goldson’s reception area by the front door except a scurrilous fax from O’B. So he had gotten the truck tires, big deal. That’s what he was being paid for. Granted, Nordstrom had just about wiped out tough Tony d’Angelo, nobody’s patsy, and O’B had come through, but...
He gave his mind to the questions. Why had Danny Marenne disappeared? Who had hired Morales to prowl Kiely’s house? Not Petrock, for sure, but somebody had. The same somebody who had hired Bart to beat up Larry? And both Petrock and Kiely had been shotgunned to death.
The cops were looking for Bart Heslip, and he and Larry were playing their usual gumshoe games. And not calling in. Had Ballard learned anything from Amalia Pelotti? Had anything happened to Heslip in the Tenderloin? If so, what?
Kearny sighed and went back to his desk and sat down and stared distastefully at the towering stack of billing folders. His people had gotten too good, they didn’t need to check in with the old man anymore. They had the fun, he did the billing.
But not yet. How did Karen Marshall really know Stan Groner? Had Groner been an entrée to the Rochemonts for her? He got the “Rochemont, Bernardine” folder from the file cabinet beside his desk, opened it. He’d never asked Bernardine if Marshall had ever tried to sell life insurance to her or Paul.
Why, to find her former boyfriend, Eddie Graff, had Marshall rushed to Stan for help in such a hurry — panic almost — rather than to the cops? Obviously, because she didn’t want the cops involved.
Something danced around at the edge of his mental vision, but he couldn’t catch it. It would come.
What if Nugent was dead and Eddie Graff, posing as Nugent, had blown up Paul Rochemonts new Mercedes? Tried to run Kearny off the road, shot at his car? Could it even be Eddie Graff who had entered Paul’s bedroom on Tuesday night? If so, why had Inga said it was Nugent? Was he, not Nugent, Inga’s secret lover?
If she had a secret lover. Maybe this whole thing wasn’t about Paul’s microchip at all, but was about... what?
It eluded him. But either way, Giselle might well be right that it wasn’t over, that Paul was still in danger.
He sighed, started to close the Rochemont file, but was staring at yesterday’s page of notes made during his conversation with Chief Rowan up in Larkspur.
With sudden energy, Dan Kearny slupped down the last of his coffee, grabbed up his cigarettes, and headed for the door.
Chapter Thirty-five
Their idea was very basic: slap around Charlie Bagnis, manager of Mood Indigo, until he told them who had asked him to put Bart next to the Vulture and the Mormon. Then slap him around some more, find out who they were.
Desperate stuff, but Bart was in a desperate place.
Only they couldn’t find him. The emergency number he’d given Bart turned out to be disconnected. Information said there was no listing for Bagnis in 415, 510, 708 or 408 area codes.
Mood Indigo was closed up tight. They used Bart’s keys, snooped it for Bagnis’s address. There was none. Listed owner was the Ace Corporation, a post office box at the Rincon Annex. The number listed for emergencies had no machine, didn’t answer.
“How about the union?” asked Heslip. “The Vulture and the Mormon just gotta be members of Local Three.”
“Their descriptions fit half the guys on the union books.”
“What about Amalia?”
“What can she do without names?”
“So we gotta wait ’til Monday. If I make it that long.”
“You’ll make it, Bart,” said Larry. He pulled away from the curb. “Let’s go back to my place, get you off the street, wait for Mood Indigo to open so we can get hold of Bagnis.”
In the black sedan that could almost have been a short limo, the whine of the electronic tracker changed tones.
“They’re moving again,” said the Mormon.
The Vulture tossed his cigarette out the window and started the car, following the impulse being sent from the beeper he’d left under the back bumper of Bart’s car just before his partner had blown old Rick Kiely away. He’d put it there just in case the nigger somehow slipped the noose, and damned if he hadn’t.
And damned if the nigger and Ballard weren’t asshole buddies. The deception pissed him off, especially that damned charade in the alley. He didn’t voice his thoughts. It took very little to set his partner raging like a mad dog. They were here just to get information, not to do anything. Yet.
He kept a good six blocks behind Heslip’s car; with the beeper in place, there was no need to get any closer.
Giselle had spent a delightful — and tasty — two hours with the French pastry chef. Antoine was a pussycat under his zut, alors and his bristling mustache, his French as Parisian as his pastry. She came out feeling the premises were secure and that she’d spent the afternoon at a sidewalk café in St.-Germain.
As she waited for the light inside the Fort Mason gates, Inga’s little yellow Porsche went zipping by on Bay Street. Giselle fell in behind her. Where had little Inga been after the signing on this, the biggest day of her husband’s life? And where was she going now?
Presumably, prosaically, she’d had her hair done and was now going back to Marin to dress for the banquet; but where was the fun in being prosaic? Inga made the expected right into Laguna for the dogleg into Marina Boulevard past the Marina Safeway. But instead of continuing on toward the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin, Inga abruptly turned into the parking lot for the yacht harbor that flanked the east end of the Marina Green.
Giselle, four cars back, made the same turn, found a slot overlooking the moored yachts.
Inga went down the slanted incline and opened the locked gate in the Cyclone fence blocking access to nonmembers. She walked out one of the jetties to a forty-foot cruiser with BASIC PASCAL, whatever that meant, incised on the stern in gold-painted letters. The top of a man’s head appeared at the companionway as Inga climbed aboard. They disappeared below.
Gotcha, baby! Giselle would give odds forever that the man on the yacht was Inga’s would-be murderous lover, Frank Nugent. But she could be wrong; by a stretch it could even be Paul on the yacht. She turned the radio to classical 100.7 FM, and settled in to see what would happen next.
Treasured Things was on the second floor of a beautifully kept-up yellow-with-white-trim house in the middle of Cow Hollow’s upscale shopping area on Union Street. Wide wooden steps, freshly painted, led up to the antiques store; below the stairs, down a few steps from street level, was a bookstore.
The only thing higher than the turnover in shops doing business on Union Street was the rents, but Dan Kearny knew that Treasured Things had been there since the ’70s and was always solvent because, after hours, much more than just antiques moved through the place. This was the Colonel’s lair.
He paused under the marquee of the movie theater across the street to slip his reading glasses down on his nose where they wouldn’t be in the way but might give him a touch of the scholar. He had to think rich, think eccentric; going up against the Colonel, he would need every edge he could get.
At the top of the stairs was a narrow porch and an ornate door with TREASURED THINGS hand-carved into its thick oak panels. A tinkly bell jangled when Kearny opened the door and went in. The place was crammed with spindly-legged chairs, ornately scrolled mirrors, and tables glowing darkly like the depths of precious gems, their heavy legs varicosed with carvings. It smelled of old wood, lemon oil, new wax, dust, old mildew.