Dan Kearny had told her funny stories about him and Stan Groner looking for this guy — and here he was. What did that mean? She let the purse slide from her shoulder. It hit the floor with a useless clatter — compact, nail file, lighter unused since she’d quit smoking for the umpteenth time, sunglasses...
Graff came down the last few steps, motioning them back. He seemed very pleased with himself.
“All the murder attempts before the signing were fakes — so no one will suspect Inga when Paul gets killed after the signing.” He chuckled. “Poor demented Frank here, unable to control his guilt—”
Frank Nugent had heard only one thing. “Inga would never be involved in anything to hurt Paul! Inga would never—”
“Inga would. Inga is. Tonight Paul dies. Unfortunately, at your hands. And afterwards...”
He started a high-pitched giggle, his tongue caught between his teeth, and Giselle realized with a frisson of near terror that he was doing Richard Widmark’s deranged killer Tommy Udo in the famous old black-and-white gangster saga Kiss of Death.
“Afterwards, I’m afraid that both of you are going to have to do the same thing... die!”
Tommy Udo, who shoved an old woman in a wheelchair down a long flight of tenement stairs and laughed at her all the way to the bottom.
Chapter Thirty-six
O’B had delivered John Little’s bedroom set back to the Furniture Ranch’s warehouse, and had, with Tony d’Angelo’s help, gotten rid of John Little’s longbed pickup at the dealer’s lot. Free! Tomorrow morning early he would take that old Redwood Highway south for San Francisco and home.
As he drove by Redwood Music he saw it was still open, with an empty parking space in front. On impulse, O’B pulled over to the curb. He’d liked Jackson Singer; maybe the man would have some business for DKA in the future.
“Hey, Reverend,” he said as he entered, “how’s tricks?”
Singer was rearranging the front window display, which was a sort of starburst of guitars hung from thin nylon cords and outlined with lights. “They’re fine, Mr. O’Bannon.”
“O’B. Mr. O’Bannon was my dad. I’m on my way back to San Francisco and just wanted to say I hope you’ll call Tony d’Angelo if you have more trouble from delinquent customers.”
“I certainly will,” said Singer with a warm smile on his lantern-jawed face. “But most of my people are good pay.” They shook hands as O’B started for the door, then Singer said, “Well, actually, there is one thing you could do for me...”
They’d stopped at the corner market on the way, so back at Ballard’s apartment he made coffee while Bart Heslip short-ordered them his own specialty, medium-rare cheeseburgers. As they licked the last of the beef juices off their fingers, the phone started to ring.
“Kearny, checking up,” guessed Heslip.
Ballard looked at his watch and went into the living room to answer it. “We probably should have called in. He’s probably heard about what went down last night.” He picked up the phone.
And heard Danny Marenne’s French-accented voice in his ear.
The Vulture used the car lighter on his cigarette during the red light at Ninth Avenue. Ballard and Heslip were ten blocks ahead. Failing afternoon sun glinted off his glasses.
He said, “They’re turning right into Park Presidio.”
“So — Golden Gate Bridge.” The Mormon tapped out a number on the mobile phone. It was picked up on the second ring. He said, “I think our friends are going out of town into Marin.”
“Keep me posted.”
The Mormon hung up. His smooth inexpressive features looked oily. “Could that bastard Marenne still be alive?” Then he added, suddenly vicious, “If he is, he won’t be for long.”
The Vulture dragged smoke down into his lungs, glanced over at him. “You’re getting to like it, aren’t you?”
“Just drive the fucking car, you’re good at that.” He smiled. “Maybe I’ll get to do that fucking Larry Ballard, too.”
“You’re getting to like it,” said the Vulture again almost mournfully. He stubbed out his cigarette and in a continuing motion reached for another.
The room was high-ceilinged, so the low-watt bulb in the old-fashioned fixture high above the threadbare carpet cast little light. The husky man with black curly hair wore a black tux and a snap-on red bow tie. He sat on the sagging edge of the bed, putting on shiny narrow black shoes with three-inch lifts.
At the pine dresser once stained walnut, he slipped a gray wig over his own hair, and his image in the dresser’s mirror aged ten years. With spirit gum, he affixed a huge gray handlebar mustache to his upper lip, aging himself another five years. Then he hid his dark, cold eyes behind tinted aviator glasses.
“Faith an’ be jeysus, an’ y’r sainted mither wouldn’t know ye, laddie,” he joked aloud to his image.
He put on a red cummerbund, took the Colonel’s hand grenade from the top left-hand drawer of the dresser, and slipped it into the cummerbund. After he buttoned his tux, he turned this way and that in front of the mirror. No bulge showed.
Then he giggled again like Tommy Udo, picked up the gym bag holding his other clothes, and went out to kill a few people and get millions and millions of bucks. Ain’t life grand?
The cramped check-in desk was stuffed at an angle into one corner of the converted Victorian’s ground-floor lobby. A green-shaded lamp glowed on the deserted desk. Dan Kearny started up a narrow stairway with a polished banister down which shrieking gleeful children must have slid before the turn of the century.
Halfway up he met a tall, gray-haired man with a gym bag; he wore an old-fashioned gunfighter’s mustache and an incongruous tux. They had to turn slightly sideways to get by one another.
The door of room 212 was standing ajar. The closet was just an alcove without a door, empty. Kearny switched on the dim overhead. He began opening dresser drawers, in the upper left found a crumpled handkerchief. He sniffed it. Something metallic had been wrapped in it. Something like a grenade?
Always one step behind. How to cut across? And suddenly he was able to scratch that itch at the back of his mind: the shape of a murder conspiracy was forming his head, a shape that had nothing to do with microchips or half-billion-dollar contracts. Or maybe it did. Even better: that would explain why Karen Marshall...
He needed facts to bolster conjecture. He sighed. It was going to be a hell of a way to spend Saturday night: committing a burglary. With a stab of guilt, he thought: Most men spend their Saturday nights with their wives, their families...
Well, at least burglary was better than another night in Ballard’s apartment.
Ballard parked the car so the cabin was between it and the road, as Danny had directed. No lights showed. He and Bart got out and strolled around in front and, by the just-set sun’s dying light, stepped up onto the slightly sagging front porch.
“Nice place to sit and look at the ocean,” said Ballard.
“When the cops ain’t looking for you,” said Heslip.
The front door opened; Danny Marenne motioned them in past him, shut the door. “Jesus, Danny!” exclaimed Ballard. He would have embraced the little Frenchman, but Danny winced away.
“Ribs,” he warned.
A gravelly voice, soaked in seawater. Danny looked dehydrated, beaten down, buffed away, as if he had been tumbled around for a couple of days in a rock-polishing cylinder. Any visible flesh of face, hands, arms was bruised and abraded and scabbing over. One ankle was taped. Obviously he had cracked or even broken ribs that needed something done for them.