Chapter Four
May Day, May 1, midmorning, clear and bright, still a chill in the air. The old Daniel Kearny Associates office, a narrow black Victorian on Golden Gate, had collapsed during the Loma Prieta earthquake. The post-quake headquarters at 340 Eleventh Street in San Francisco’s recently trendy SOMA District once had been a laundry.
Here Kearny’s people in the large airy front room that even had windows on the street — barred, of course, but windows — were up to their usual tricks: running down deadbeats and delinquents, tracing skips, repo’ing cars, finding embezzlers and serving subpoenas. All of this for their usual clients: banks, insurance companies, auto dealers, financial groups.
Giselle’s domain was the equally spacious, not exactly airy back room with the CB, fax, mainframe computer, and after-school teenagers running personalized-form skip-tracing and legal-service letters through the archaic but operative automatic typewriters. And that’s just where Kearny liked to see her — stuck in her office behind a mountain of paperwork.
Business as usual was hard to fight with new ideas and a new kind of case, but Giselle was in the client chair beside Kearny’s desk by the rear stairs, where he could look over his fiefdom — and slip out the back door if a process server made it past Jane Goldson at the reception desk. Giselle was earnestly trying to pitch the Rochemont affair to him. All around them were skip-tracers and clerical staff making too much noise.
“It’s the first of the month, Dan’l, we aren’t that busy. We only have to keep Paul Rochemont safe until the papers get signed. I told them to stay in the house until they heard from me, so I really need your okay on this.”
“Can you see Morales in that setup?” mused Kearny, going off on one of his maddening tangents. “Half the furniture would walk out the front door with him when he went off shift.”
Giselle had half shaken one of Kearny’s cigarettes from his pack in irritation before she remembered she’d quit yet again. But she persevered. “I figure Ken and I can do most of it. The dowager Rochemont even has the hots for Ken, wants him to guard her body personally.”
Kearny gave his heavy guffaw. “She must really like the strong silent type. Hell, Giselle, we’re repomen and damned good investigators. Stan can’t expect us to do flat-nose stuff like guarding bodies. You want to look into the car got shot to death, okay. But...”
He sipped coffee, made a face because it was cold, went to the corner where Mr. Coffee’s red eye glowed. Raised an eyebrow, Giselle shook her head, he returned with just his own, black and steaming. Sat down, shook out a cigarette, didn’t light it. Drummed on the tabletop with blunt fingers.
“Dan, you’re always making noises about branching out. You won’t get anything further from our usual stuff than this.”
She didn’t mention the wife-mother-son triangle, nor the fact that the wife had been Frank Nugent’s main squeeze. Time enough for all that after he said yes.
“And the bank’s for it,” he mused.
“Yes.” She had him. “Stan the Man put me onto it himself, remember?”
He lit his seventh cigarette of the day, said absently, “Goddam things,” added offhandedly, “draw up a contract and run it by Hec Tranquillini for a nod.”
“Thanks, Mr. K,” she said softly as she stood up.
He said almost tentatively, “Got a sec?”
She sat back down. “Sure, Dan’l.”
“Jeanne threw me out last night, I’m bunking over at Ballard’s for the time being...”
“Bastard took my bed,” said Ballard with feeling to Ken Warren in the upstairs field agents’ office they shared. While Giselle and Kearny were lounging around downstairs talking strategy, Ballard and Warren were stuck with cleaning up after the repos the two teams had made during the night. “I sure hope Jeanne lets him go back home pretty soon.”
“Hniselle,” said Ken.
“Turn Giselle loose on Jeannie? Good idea.”
Meanwhile, written police reports had to be made to follow up last night’s verbals, condition reports had to be finalized, personal property removed from the vehicles and cataloged for storage in the upstairs bins behind the hallway from which the field agent cubicles fronted the street. Clients had to be advised of the repossessions, field reports written, the cars returned to the dealers who had originally sold them on conditional sales contracts now gone sour.
The phone rang. Larry answered it with “Ballard,” since it was unlisted and didn’t run through the switchboard.
Bart Heslip’s familiar voice said, without preamble, “Can you meet me tonight at Mood Indigo? Maybe nine o’clock?”
“Mood Indigo? Sleaze bar in the ’Loin? Jesus, Bart...”
“Come alone.”
“Is everything okay? You’re supposed to be in Detroit—”
“Tonight, man. Alone. Be there.”
The line was dead.
Ballard and Kearny had knocked off eight cars the night before, Giselle and Warren seven, filling most of the twenty-slot storage lot behind the office. Two more slots had been filled by Trin Morales before he said to hell with it and drove home to the Mission District in his final repo, a honey of an Acura Legend coupe LS. He’d parked it in Balmy Alley alongside one of the sadly defaced wall murals, three blocks from his Florida Street apartment.
At ten in the morning, Morales started to grunt. Between grunts he started to pant very quickly, finally finished off with a huge groan. Immediately he rolled his impressive brown bulk off the skinny underage chicana and lay on his back letting his pounding heart slow.
“G’wan, get your ass out of here,” he said in English. When she didn’t move, not understanding a word he had said, he growled, with appropriate gestures, “Vamoose.”
She skittered off the bed for the bathroom; Morales whapped a surprisingly small shapely brown hand against her backside. The girl shrieked and began to rub the red mark it left.
In Spanish, Morales said, “You were most pleasing. I will not talk to Immigration about you.”
The girl giggled and went into the bathroom and shut the door. Living in the Mission, Morales was always running across young illegal Latinas he tried to sleep with in return for not reporting them to la Migra. Those who put out, he never reported; those who refused, he always reported. Simple justice. Fourteen to 18 was his chosen age range, although 13 was tempting him now and again these days. Latinas ripened early.
Forty minutes later Morales walked into Balmy Alley to collect the Legend, happily whistling. He stopped short, cursed volubly with Latin earnestness, American inventiveness. Some son of a whore had removed all four tires from the Acura.
The rest of the morning would be shot, stealing four tires off somebody else’s vehicle.
At 11:00 A.M., O’Bannon sat up suddenly in the queen-size bed in his room on motel row off U.S. 101 just south of Eureka. He was pouring sweat, eyes staring, croaking, “Mayday, Mayday!” against echoes of nightmare.
Mayday indeed. And May Day literally. May first.
O’B pushed down the blankets, sat up on the edge of the bed, holding his head with both freckled hands and fighting nausea as he tried to reconstruct the events of the night before. A night full of devils and demons, if he could only remember...
As he sat there breathing shallowly, bleeding to death, he was absolutely certain, out of both eyes, he was certain about something else: he had fallen off the wagon so resoundingly, and from such a great height, that he had exploded on the sidewalk like a dropped watermelon.
The rest was coming back. The visit to Tony d’Angelo, the DKA area man in the hospital with several broken ribs, a cracked jawbone, horrendous bruises, and... yes, O’B remembered now, bites.