Seeing an Arkie-looking woman enter, Brittingham glided toward her, speaking in a deep, soft, almost sepulchral voice.
“If you could tell me your Loved One’s name, madam—”
“Loved One?”
Her voice had some sort of regional twang; apart from lips smeared a garish red, that small oval face should have had a dusting of freckles across the bridge of the nose but didn’t quite. Slanty eyeglasses that had gone out in the 1970s gave her the slightly goofy, off-kilter look of a tipsy church organist.
“The, ah, Departed whom you wished to—”
“Oh, no, I’m looking for Mr....” Her voice had an upward inflection that made it a question. “Brittingham?”
“I am he,” said Brittingham with admirable brevity.
He was a slightly soft, fulsome man over six feet tall, impressive in striped pants and cutaway dark coat, gleaming plain-tip black Oxfords, and black silk tie knotted in a full Windsor.
She stuck out a firm hand which he found himself taking.
“Becky Thatcher,” she said. “From a little bitty town in the Ouachitas Mountains of Arkansas. I’m looking for a job.”
Brittingham shuddered inwardly. “I’m very sorry, Ms. Thatcher, but we have no openings of any—”
“Isn’t anybody better’n me on hair and makeup for corpses.”
This stopped Brittingham cold. It was very difficult to find cosmeticians who could — or would — adequately wash and set the hair of the Departeds, let alone make up their poor, cold, dead faces. And the girl he’d had for almost a year had, the day before, suddenly quit.
He considered Becky Thatcher’s taffy hair piled in curls on top of her head, the pigeon-toed stance in the scuffed shoes, the garish lipstick, the jangly costume jewelry. Any corpse this little hillbilly sent up to him might well come out looking either like a strumpet or a gigolo. But he needed someone now .
“So, um, what... er... qualifications?”
“I’ve been to beauty school — didn’t graduate, Mama took sick and we needed the money so I went to work for the local undertaker. Mr. Toombs. He taught me to make up corpses real pretty for God. Toombs, isn’t that just the name for a man who buries people, though? Anyway, he was the coroner, too, so I’ve worked on every sort of people — fell off of a silo, mashed flat by a semi, gut-shot by someone thought they was a deer—”
“Oh my,” he said, “we don’t get many Departeds like that at Brittingham’s.” He paused. “Well, I don’t suppose it would do any harm for you to fill out an employment application...”
The Reverend Dickhead chose that moment to come in from the street bearing several layers of unction.
“Carter, Carter, my dear man, may God bless, sorry I was detained, but a man of God is at the mercy of...” His eyes focused on Becky Thatcher, surreptitiously caressed the body accented by the pinch-waist suit. “Ummm, whom have we here?”
Becky dropped him the hint of a curtsy.
“Reverend, I know you and Mr. Brittingham are gonna be real busy, so if you could spare him for just one teensy second...”
With one small hand she drew Brittingham a few feet down the hall, out of the Reverend’s earshot.
“I’ll fill out them forms and all later, but couldn’t I just sort of... try out today? I really need the work.” Her eyes turned merry behind the slanty glasses. “You don’t like what I do, you don’t owe me a thing. What can you lose?”
What indeed? His assistant, Harvey Parsons, would be there to see she didn’t do anything outré to one of their Loved Ones.
Giselle Marc had hitched her chair closer to Kearny’s desk, and had been talking steadily. Since DKA’s life’s blood was finding people who had defaulted, defrauded, or embezzled from banks, bonding companies, lending institutions, or insurance conglomerates, and taking their unpaid-for chattels, she had a lot to go over with Kearny. An hour later she was down to a final folder. She opened it on the desk.
“Okay, the classics from UpScale Motors. We started out looking for seven of them after Ken scored that little 280Z. Larry got the Corvette roadster out of Wiley’s brother-in-law’s garage down in Pacifica the day after you left.”
“Any trouble?”
“Not with the repo, no.” She already was losing her enthusiasm at his return. “But, ah, Dan, something happened that might come back to bite us. A few hours after Larry took the Corvette, the brother-in-law and his very pregnant wife stormed in here with a bunch of Polaroids they said showed—”
She was interrupted by the arrival of three men through the back door. Two of them were cops who now and then shagged cars through police records for DKA. The other...
“You Kearny?” snapped the one she didn’t know.
He had strands of thin black hair combed sideways to cover a spreading bald spot and his small black mustache looked pinned to his sallow face like a tail pinned to a birthday party donkey.
Kearny said, “Tom. George. How are the families?”
The stranger yapped, “I’m the one you gotta worry about, wise-ass. Sergeant Willis Franks of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department. You’re under arrest for aggravated assault and wanton destruction of property. On your feet, buster.”
Tom and George winced. Kearny said, “Let’s see some tin.”
Franks pulled out his shield wallet and displayed his badge. Kearny nodded and stood up.
“Pacifica?” he asked Giselle as if the cops weren’t even there. She nodded. “Okay, get Hec Tranquillini on the horn and have him meet me at the San Mateo County Courthouse.” He looked at Franks. “The holding coop’s still in South City, isn’t it?”
Franks nodded, taking the cuffs off his belt.
“You don’t need those,” said Tom.
Franks got a mean cop look in his eye. “Assistant D.A. Scarbrough said to bring him in fast and bring him in hard . I don’t know what that means to you pussies up here, but in San Mateo that means the cuffs.”
“You ain’t in San Mateo,” George pointed out.
Kearny winked at Giselle, said, “Hec, pronto,” and went out with the San Mateo cop firmly holding his arm.
Hector Tranquillini was small and neat and nasty, like a scorpion in your shoe. Five-four in his artfully constructed high-heeled boots, an invariable 145 pounds before a session of handball at the YMCA on Golden Gate. Handball , not racket-ball. And no sissy soft inflated blue handballs: the little black hard rubber ones that made red swollen catchers’ mitts of your hands.
Hec was waiting in the interview room when Dan was brought in prior to his arraignment and bail hearing before the judge. Hec shooed out the guard while flicking his eyes around the room to indicate the D.A. might have it bugged. Illegal, of course, and it couldn’t be used in court; but bugs were a useful tool in scoping out the defense attorney’s strategy. Fat chance, fella.
“Another fine mess you’ve gotten me into,” Hec said with the joviality of a miniaturized Al Capone once the guard was gone. He slid the Accusation and Complaint across the table. Dan read, suddenly looked up to meet Hec’s twinkling eyes. His own hard blue eyes were bright with suppressed laughter.
But in deference to the possible bug, he said in a defeated voice, “Do you think you can get me out of here on bail? I... I don’t know if I could handle a night behind bars.”
“I can try. And I think I’d better demand a preliminary hearing as soon as possible so we’ll know how bad it is.”
Assistant D.A. Philip Scarbrough was just 30 years old and just six feet tall, straight, single, with the sort of clean-cut good looks that often came out of Stanford. And like so many other Stanford men, he was on the rise. Important People were beginning to notice him. He would work up to District Attorney of San Mateo County, springboard to state Attorney General — after that, who was to say how far his ambition might carry him?
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