“This is KDM 366. Go ahead.”
“Subject appears headed toward vicinity Grant and Greenwich.”
“10-4. Stand by.” She released the Transmit button. “He’s tailing Wendy Austin, and she—”
“I heard.” Kearny’s voice betrayed no excitement, but the gray eyes were alive with it. “There’s our link, Giselle. Wendy Austin. How long does somebody work out at a dance studio like that?”
“A serious student, about two hours.”
“Okay. Tell him that if she—”
Heslip’s voice broke in again. “Subject just parked on Lombard Street by Julius Alley. That’s a confirm on the destination.”
Kearny had been quietly smoking behind the wheel of the station wagon for twenty minutes when the beautifully shaped blonde unlocked the Jaguar. She was wearing only a black leotard and black tights under her open coat, giving him a glimpse of her remarkable body as she got into the low-slung sports car. She had her street clothes over her arm. No showers in that place?
As Kearny trudged up narrow Grant Avenue, Heslip’s Plymouth passed him going down. Neither man gave a flicker of recognition. Far below, the lights of the piers jutting out from the Embarcadero had been blotted out by a fog bank that had the horns crying out in the bay.
Lights inside Chandra’s studio made the uneven brush strokes stand out on the glass of door and window. He went in. Light classical music came from a cheap portable record player set on a straight-back chair in one corner. Chandra was nowhere around.
“I’d like to talk with someone about lessons for my daughter,” he told a limber serious-faced girl who was standing with her head down, panting.
“That’d be... Chandra, but I guess... she bugged out...” She caught her breath. “Sometimes she splits for half an hour or so...”
But just then Chandra emerged from a curtained doorway in the plasterboard partition which stretched across the back of the studio. The curtain was a faded green. Chandra herself was a small broad figure in black leotard and tights. She had the legs and hips of a dock worker, oddly combined with a fluid grace so ingrained as to be unconscious.
“Support, Norman!” she cried. A man and woman had just flitted by in tandem, the woman wearing a long split skirt over her leotards and tights. The man had better legs. Chandra cried after them, “You’re not giving her enough support for her pirouette, Norman!”
“The unmannerly bastard,” said Kearny. “I waited until Wendy left before I came in.”
“Oh!” She had whirled to stare up at him from vividly faded blue eyes. “You startled me!” Then her gravelly voice belatedly added, “Wendy who?”
“Fazzino’s girl friend. Anywhere we can talk? Your car’s going to be assigned to us again in ten days.”
Her face momentarily sagged. “But I just...” Then she caught herself. “I’ll... take care of it by then.”
“Don’t do it, Chandra. Give it up.”
She realized she wasn’t going to get rid of him, so she heaved a long-suffering sigh. “The dressing room, then.”
They crossed to the partition. The studio was shabby, dingy, the floor unswept.
“They come to dance, not make beds of roses and a thousand fragrant posies,” she said defensively to his unspoken distaste. Then she shot an almost coquettish look at him, as if assessing his reaction to her quote.
He gave a heavy, sardonic chuckle. “Don’t try to con me, lady. Hell’s Kitchen — remember? I don’t give a damn about fragrant posies, but does it have to smell like a hamper full of old jockstraps?”
“People sweat and sweat gets stale. At least I scrub the shower stall down with Lysol twice a week — that’s more than most of ’em do.” She stopped so abruptly at the curtain that Kearny bumped into her. She yelled, “Watch your turn-out! Your turn-ou... that’s better.”
A slight flat-chested girl holding one of the bars along the wall with one hand, while doing what looked to Kearny like deep knee bends, changed the position of her feet. Chandra nodded approvingly.
The cubicle was empty. Bare hooks were screwed into the walls at about chin-height over the single long gray wooden bench. The back partition ended short of the left wall, so it was possible to walk around the end of it.
Chandra faced Kearny defiantly. “I have no intention of giving up my car,” she said.
He sat down on the bench. Even sitting, he didn’t have to look up at her very much. “What do you have on them and how did you get it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Cut it out, Chandra,” he said in a pained voice. “It has to be heavy for a five-thou first bite. You got panicky when the bank said they were assigning the car to a repo agency, and hit Fazzino for another five hundred. Now you’re thinking of trying it again. Don’t.”
Anger, fear, curiosity — all were fighting in her lined face. He realized that she was a little girl trapped in an aging body. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her.
“This isn’t a game, Chandra!” he snapped. “One man’s already in the hospital, and—”
A lean muscular girl with unexpectedly large and slightly sagging breasts came from behind the rear partition, her head buried in a fuzzy towel. Water beaded her totally nude body. Her face emerged as she lowered her arms, and she saw them for the first time. She had beautiful copper-colored hair. “Sorry,” she said vaguely.
She reached for underclothes, making no attempt to cover her well-shaped dancer’s body in the meantime. The muscles of her belly and thighs had good separation.
“About half the kids wait to shower when they get home,” said Chandra as if in explanation of the redhead.
Like Wendy Austin, thought Kearny. He stood in the doorway, looking stolidly out at the dance floor. For himself, not for the redhead. To her, a stray man in the dressing room was just another set of clothes like those hanging on the hooks. He counted a dozen dancers and four or five people in street clothes waiting for them to finish.
“Who’s in the hospital?” Chandra demanded when the red-haired girl, now dressed and wearing an old raincoat, had departed.
Kearny told her: who, and how, and — as far as DKA was concerned — why. When he had finished he stood in front of her, legs set, hands thrust deep into his topcoat pockets.
“Don’t try pushing them again, Chandra. You know damned well they’re the sort that pushes back. Just give up the car and—”
“I won’t!” she exclaimed. In a quieter voice, she went on, “It’s beautiful, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever... Why, to me, that car is...”
“Is it worth dying for?” he asked softly.
Fourteen
That was Thursday night. On the following Wednesday, Fazzino stuck his head through the open doorway. A table had been shoved up against it to serve as a reception desk.
“Philip Fazzino to see Daniel Kearny,” he called over to Giselle.
“Mr. Kearny asked that you go right down to his private office.”
“Clairvoyance?” Harvard Law still slightly broadened the vowels in his well-modulated voice. Then his eyes touched the big radio and he nodded. “Of course. Radio-controlled units.”
“If you’d go back down the stairs, sir, and into the garage, you’ll find Mr. Kearny’s office at the very back.”
Fazzino, as Larry had said, was indeed handsome in an almost sculpted way. His softly waved hair just touched the tops of his ears and the back of his collar. Only his dark eyes were jarring: pellets of lead, with absolutely no depths. He smiled at her winningly. “I understand this place used to be a whorehouse.”
“That’s right.” Giselle made her voice saccharine.