If his nose had been good enough, Petrock might even have been able to smell the cigarette smoke. But he was a smoker himself on occasion, so noticed nothing. He paused to dig his keys out of his tight jeans pocket before stepping out around the Ultima to the driver’s side.
“Shit,” he said aloud. He had forgotten his Greek fisherman’s cap in the bar. To hell with it. They knew him at Queer Street; he’d pick it up next time he was in.
As he bent to unlock his door, a short twinned dark cylinder slid eight inches out of the sedan’s rear window to roar and spit at him. An ounce of rifled lead, the kind of shotgun slug used for deer, ripped into his left side near the kidney.
The blow swung him around against his car, so he was facing the second blast, this of double-O buckshot. Some of the charge missed him to pock the yellow brick apartment house beyond his Ultima, but one pellet struck him in the shoulder, a second in the right biceps, and five tore into his face, one of them going through his right eye into his brain.
He sprawled facedown in the street beside his Ultima, car keys glinting a yard from his outstretched hand. Blood began seeping out from under his body.
The dark sedan peeled off the curb in the best gangster movie tradition. It roared away down Post Street toward downtown — and the Tenderloin, where the man calling himself Nemesis had said he tended bar.
A patrol car arrived within three minutes; the bartender, running after Petrock with the fisherman’s cap, had seen him go down. Big black car, maybe a limo, no license number, no make, model, or year. The blues called for Homicide and an ambulance; in California, only a medic can pronounce a person dead.
The two homicide men, aroused at their respective homes because it was their week in the barrel, had been a team for eleven years. An assistant D.A. who did little-theater had dubbed them Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern after the characters in Hamlet, and the names had stuck.
Even at that hour a small crowd had gathered, kept back by the yellow plastic CRIME SCENE tapes. The two cops stood together pulling on thin rubber medical gloves as they stared down at the body. They were big men, wearing slacks and herringbone sports jackets with, however, different patterns.
The medic stood up, stripping off his gloves. Rosenkrantz, bald and ever hopeful, asked, “So what can you tell us?”
“It’s a man. He’s dead.”
“No shit,” said Guildenstern, the one with hair. “You know the difference between meat and fish?”
Rosenkrantz answered, “Your fish’ll die if you beat it.”
They got busy. The wallet told them the victim probably had been Georgi Petlaroc, president of Hotel and Culinary Local 3; they sent a blue to get hold of someone from the Union for confirmation. From the bartender’s verbal they had Ray Do and the man who had called himself Nemesis to chew on.
“I like the Armenian myself,” said Rosenkrantz. “He popped the guy in the gut, knew his name, said he’d look—”
“—funny without any front to his head. Yeah.”
“Get out an APB.”
Guildenstern made a police siren sound with his mouth. Neither man moved. They had no facts to put out on the air.
“You hear Clinton lost a spelling bee to Dan Quayle?”
“Sure. He thought ‘harass’ was two words.”
The young, fresh-faced blue returned, excited by his first homicide. “The business agent for the local, a man named Morris Brett, says he can be here in fifteen minutes to make a positive ID. He only lives ten blocks away, on Pine. He was still up.”
“Still up at two in the morning? Aha, a—”
“—suspect.”
Morris Brett wasn’t, at least tentatively. He was a very tall, stooped, cadaverous man with glasses and thinning hair combed sideways across a high-domed skull, a chain-smoker and to hell with the surgeon general. He was also, he said, an insomniac who seldom got to sleep before three in the morning, had a wife and two grown kids, one of whom had temporarily moved back into the Pine Street apartment after her divorce five months earlier.
“Temporarily?” said Rosenkrantz.
“ ’Till I can talk the wife into kicking her butt out. Not that she’s ever home anyway.” Brett dragged on his unfiltered cigarette, gave a cough, stubbed it out on the crystal of his watch. “Nobody has any goddam ashtrays anymore.”
“You’re all busted up by Petlaroc’s death.”
“Petrock was a son of a bitch. I backed him in the union council, but he was a wild man, a tough boy — he didn’t care whose butt he kicked.”
He went on to tell them what else Petrock had been. A fiery, dedicated union radical, a spiritual throwback to the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World involved in the violent organizing confrontations early in the century. A newly elected union president who feuded with the International, and with those on the council who backed the International.
“Just tonight he stuck a knife in the table six inches from Rafe Huezo’s fingers. Rafe’s the V.P” He held out his hands a foot and a half apart. “Huge goddam bowie knife.”
“We saw it on his belt,” said Rosenkrantz.
“Didn’t do him any good,” said Guildenstern.
Brett lit another cigarette, said almost hopefully, “He also called Rafe a spic sellout artist.”
“Aha! Another—”
“—suspect. You think this Huezo maybe did him in?”
“I didn’t say that. Did I say that?” Brett took a big drag on his cigarette. “Said I backed Petrock on the council and Rafe was opposed to Petrock, that’s all. Personally, I like Rafe a hell of a lot better than I do Georgie — uh, did Georgie.”
“That the usual way you guys conduct meetings? Knives stuck in the tabletop and like that?”
“If Petrock’s there — was there — yeah.” He coughed, stubbed his half-smoked butt on his watch crystal. “Guess I gotta get used to talking about Georgie in the past tense, huh?”
“What’s this do to your strike vote?”
“He’s a martyr,” said Brett. “We’ll go out big-time now.”
After Brett had departed to seek elusive sleep, the two homicide men moodily watched the medics put the body into the ambulance. The SFPD didn’t use a meat wagon anymore.
“Maybe we got us a union killing. Everybody hated his guts. He damn near nailed down his vice-president’s hand—”
“Could be a union enemy, get him out of the picture—”
“Or a union friendly, looking for a martyr.”
“Yeah, friendly fire. Or maybe he suicided.”
“Make sure they’ll go out on strike.”
“Or maybe we got us a racial killing.”
“Bastard calls himself Nemesis, gotta be bad.”
“Or a fag killing. The Queer Street bartender knew him.”
“Then there won’t be any wife and kids to notify.”
“Nowadays, who knows?”
As if choreographed, the two big men turned and started from the crime scene toward their cars half a block away.
Rosenkrantz took a quarter from his pocket. “Hey, know why guys give their cocks names?”
“Sure. They don’t want a total stranger making eighty percent of their decisions for ’em.”
Rosenkrantz flipped his coin. Guildenstern called, “Heads,” as Rosenkrantz caught it and covered it with his hand. It was tails. He sighed. “My car, my gas. Let’s go make Play-Doh out of Ray Do.”
“Yeah, maybe he dropped a rock on Petrock.”
Both big men laughed. At the same time.