“You ought to see them from in here. The Great White Father and I closed up the place down on the corner of Franklin last night.”
“What kind of shape is he in?”
O’B managed to get coffee into his mouth instead of down his leg. “I can’t remember.” He leaned back carefully in the old swivel chair. With any luck, he’d be dead by noon. “What happened with the embezzler last night?”
Ballard leaned his butt against the edge of the desk. “One look at us, he uppy-chucked all over his necktie.”
“Nervous stomach,” said O’B sagely.
Despite the booze, he was the best field agent DKA had. He jerked a thumb at the gleaming red length of the Chandra Cadillac which almost blocked the door of the cubicle. The three garage stalls were reserved for hot ones that might get a little ouchy. “That the one you hijacked from me yesterday?”
The intercom buzzed again. This time Ballard picked it up and spoke his name into it. Giselle Marc’s voice was full of laughter. “O’B sounds like he’s hung over. And la Chandra, your exotic dancer, has arrived to redeem her car. I’m sending her down.”
“He is. What’s so funny?”
“The look on your face when she gets through with you.”
Larry Ballard’s face wore an almost savage look of frustration. Chandra, after a full twenty minutes, showed no sign of weakening.
“Why just Chandra?” he broke in with a desperate abruptness. “Why not Miss Chandra or Chandra-something or—”
“Chandra has style.”
Looked at dispassionately, Chandra had to be well over sixty. She had an old woman’s face and dumpy body. But Ballard had already learned that she was not a person you could look at dispassionately. Maybe he should have run over her when she had darted off the curb in front of the Caddy the day before.
“Style?”
“Chandra is Sanskrit for ‘She Outshines the Stars.’ Isn’t that beautiful?” She nodded to her own question. She had a low-register, almost harsh voice. “Of course it is. Perfect for a dancer. Give me my car.”
“I told you several times, Miss—”
“Just Chandra, damn you!”
Ballard gave back a step from the blue eyes blazing in the lined face, even though the top of her gray head came to just above the middle of his chest and showed him pink scalp around the part. Built like a peasant off the steppes of Russia or something, dumpy and shapeless in sweatshirt and Navy peacoat and blue jeans — and what the hell was she doing driving a new Cadillac? He tried again.
“Chandra. No money — no car. Savvy? No tickee, no washee. That’s it. Final. Over. Done. No more. A lay’s a play. You gotta redeem it, understand? R-e-d-e-e-m—”
“Give me my car.”
He threw up his hands in exasperation, then turned quickly from the obdurate little woman when he heard the glass door of Kearny’s cubbyhole in the back of the garage slide open. Thank God, even if the Great White Father was nursing a hangover. Chandra was just like talking to the goddam wall, she really was.
Kearny’s heavy-jawed face was a bit pale but otherwise he showed no signs of nocturnal carousing with O’Bannon. Ballard walked quickly back to him, the Caddy’s distributor rotor safely in his pocket.
“No mention of the five hundred bucks?” asked Kearny.
“Nothing about the comic book, either.”
Kearny nodded. He had been studying Chandra as they talked. Odd mixture of age and youth. He knew that what Ballard took for dumpiness was a dancer’s thick, muscular body, and that the ankles were thickened with overdeveloped tendons, not age. He moved down the garage.
“Can I help you, ma’am?”
Kearny’s basso was hard to argue against, but Chandra tried. “That nasty child refuses to give me back my car.”
“Why do you think he took it in the first place?”
“I want my—”
“Two payments delinquent, Chandra — the first two after the down. Another due tomorrow. That’s $191.84 each, plus late and repo charges—”
“I’ll pay after I have my car back.”
Kearny shrugged. “The law gives you five days to redeem. Then the bank has the legal right to resell the vehicle. They will.” He turned and started back toward the cubbyhole.
“I’ll have this back inside an hour!” she yelled at his back.
Kearny kept going. He slid open the cubbyhole door.
“Philistine!” she yelled.
Kearny disappeared.
Chandra glared after him for a moment, then slid her fierce blue eyes across Ballard as across a dog dropping — was that a hint of laughter in those eyes? — and strode from the garage. Strode, like a man, feet turned out just a bit and heel not really hitting the concrete.
The moment she had disappeared, Kearny came out of his office again. To Ballard’s amazement, his face was serious and his cold gray eyes were puzzled.
“It don’t wash, Ballard, you follow me? She doesn’t know anything about that money, which just ain’t reasonable.”
The two phone calls came in stacked, like jets in a holding pattern for clearance, almost exactly one hour after Chandra had stalked out. When Giselle Marc buzzed him with the first one, Kearny picked up to find Pete Gilmartin of Golden Gate Trust on the line.
“What gives, Pete?”
“When that Chandra comes back in, release the Caddy to her.”
Kearny, stubbing out a cigarette in the overflowing ashtray, paused to say, “She pay you people direct, trying to dodge the repossession charges?”
“Just release it to her, Dan,” said Gilmartin in a frustrated voice.
“Now wait a minute—”
“Dammit, d’you think I like it any better than you do?”
Kearny made a wry face and hung up. The moment he did, the intercom buzzed with another call which had been on Hold. When he picked up, it was that old friend of all private investigators, the Threatening Phone Call.
“Too bad, Kearny,” said the voice.
“Who is this?”
His attention was only half on it, to tell the truth. He was lighting another cigarette and wishing he could quit the damned things.
“Keep looking over your shoulder, Kearny.”
Kearny laughed and slammed down the receiver quickly, hoping to catch the caller in the ear with it. Then his face got thoughtful and his eyes hooded. He smoked his cigarette moodily down to where it singed his fingers, hunched forward across the desk as if watching the Late Late Show on a nonexistent television.
Oh, not because of the threat. The locked door and one-way glass of his cubbyhole were to discourage process servers, not assassins. If somebody really wanted to get you, he would get you. Kearny’s slightly bent and flattened nose, which made him look like an aging club fighter minus cauliflower ears, was a memento from one of the two men who had actually meant it among the literally thousands who had threatened.
No, Kearny was puzzled. Chandra, when she had been in the garage, had not known about the green-backed comic book. Yet an hour later enough pressure had been put on Pete Gilmartin to make him give back the Caddy while it was still delinquent, and a phone call had come from that so-goddam-casual threatening voice they had all picked up from Mafia movies, polished but with the brass showing through. And...
Chandra again. Kearny went around the desk and through the door to forestall Ballard. What Ballard didn’t know, Ballard couldn’t spread around.
“Should I put the rotor back, Mr. Kearny?”
“Do that. And I want some action on that Duster, Larry. I want it today. Cal Cit Bank is boiling.”
Ballard cast a glance at Chandra. “It didn’t show up at South Park last night, Mr. Kearny.”
“Then find out where it is showing up, and drop a rock on it.”