32 Cadillacs Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1992 by Joe Gores

  All rights reserved.

  Mysterious Press books are published by Warner Books, Inc.,

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: June 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56234-8

  CONTENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  JUST SO YOU KNOW

  SIX MONTHS BEFORE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  By Joe Gores

  NOVELS

  A Time of Predators (1969)

  Interface (1974)

  Hammett (1975)

  Come Morning (1986)

  Wolf Time (1989)

  DKA FILE NOVELS

  Dead Skip (1972)

  Final Notice (1973)

  Gone, No Forwarding (1978)

  32 Cadillacs (1992)

  NONFICTION

  Marine Salvage (1971)

  ANTHOLOGIES

  Honolulu, Port of Call (1974)

  Tricks and Treats (1976)

  (with Bill Pronzini)

  SCREENPLAYS

  Interface (1974)

  Hammett (1977–78)

  Paper Crimes (1978)

  Paradise Road (1978)

  Fallen Angel (1980)

  Cover Story (1984–85)

  (with Kevin Wade)

  Come Morning (1986)

  Run Cunning (1987)

  Gangbusters (1989–90)

  TELEPLAYS

  Golden Gate Memorial (1978)

  (four-hour miniseries)

  High Risk (1985)

  (with Brian Garfield)

  “Blind Chess” (B. L. Stryker, 1989)

  EPISODIC TV (1974–92)

  Kojak Remington Steele

  Eischied Scene of the Crime

  Kate Loves a Mystery Eye to Eye

  The Gangster Chronicles Helltown

  Strike Force T. J. Hooker

  Magnum, P.I. Mike Hammer

  Columbo

  This book is for

  My beloved Dori

  Who helped me snatch a Cadillac from

  Mafia hitman Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno

  on our first date

  “Please don’t talk,” said the nun. “It’s dangerous for you to talk, you’re very seriously ill.”

  “Not so seriously as you’re well. How don’t you enjoy life, mother. I should laugh all round my neck at this very minute if my shirt wasn’t a bit on the tight side.”

  “It would be better for you to pray.”

  “Same thing, mother.”

  Joyce Cary

  The Horse’s Mouth

  Every man is as Heaven made him, and

  sometimes a great deal worse.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Don Quixote

  JUST SO YOU KNOW

  I offer the usual disclaimer: the characters, events, and places in this novel are totally fictional, products of the author’s lively imagination. Now, having said that:

  Once upon a time a band of Gypsies really did rip off thirty-two cars from a large San Francisco Bay Area bank in a single day. During the next months David Kikkert & Associates, hired to recover them, grabbed twenty-nine of the thirty-two all over the U.S.A. (including Hawaii) and in Mexico.

  Here’s where, in 32 Cadillacs, the currency of truth becomes funny money, for not every repo in the novel took place while tracking down these Gypsies during a rwenty-six-day time frame. Some were “stretched” a bit, others were from elsewhere in my dozen years as a legal car thief, but all really happened—even Lake Shore Drive in Chicago and the Lovelies in Nebraska.

  Although my stance toward the room during my detective career was strictly adversarial, my Gypsy lore in 32 Cadillacs is as honest as research and experience can make it, as are their scams, cons, and grafts. And I have tried to make my fictional Gypsies realistic— and fun—without sentimentalizing them. If you sentimentalize Gypsies, you run the risk of ending up with a car that won’t run, a roof that won’t stop the rain, or a driveway that comes up on the sole of your shoe.

  On that note: our society becomes ever more bland, ever more afraid of countless pressure groups poised to scream foul if their particular toe gets stepped on. In 32 Cadillacs they can find a lot to scream about. But to sanitize the tough and lively world I am writing of would be to make its people mere hollow reeds, the novel itself an exercise in futility.

  The amount you can withdraw from a bank account without federal scrutiny is under $10,000, so actually my Gypsies should be moving $9,999.99 around during their bank scam. It was just a lot less cumbersome to make it an even 10K.

  Bizarre as they might seem, the shenanigans at the Giggling Marlin in Cabot San Lucas are a real, nightly occurrence.

  Finally, I want to round up the usual suspects:

  First, foremost, and always, Dori—beloved wife, best friend, peerless editor, critic, greatest support—who bled a lot over this book and lent it her own invaluable Gypsy research.

  My agents, Henry Morrison and Danny Barer, poked and prodded and threatened and cajoled and never lost faith.

  Otto and Carolyn Panzer, early enthusiasts when they were Mysterious Press, and Bill Malloy, who continued their enthusiasm after he took over as editor in chief of Mysterious.

  Martin Cruz Smith shared his research from Gypsy in Amber and Canto for a Gypsy; his lovely wife, Me, did the same with the notebooks and diaries from her remarkable clergyman grandfather’s lifelong involvement with the Gypsies.

  Inspector Victor Wyckoff, SFPD Bunko, is not anything at all like Dirty Harry Harridan; and no one like Stan Goner was ever remotely involved in the Great Gypsy Hunt.

  Don Westlake found these tales amusing over a long Mohan weekend, and later, during a train ride in Spain, suggested sharing a chapter of this book with one of his own (it turned up in his Dortmund classic, Drowned Hopes).

  Finally, the real guys and gals of the once-real DKA:

  Dave Kikkert (R.I.P.)

  Hiroko Ono (R.I.P.)

  Ronnie Lathe

  Maurice James O’Brien

  Floyd Ryan

  Ken Warner

  Isadora “Izzy” Martinez

  and

  the Me I was then

/>   Gang, I couldn’t spin all these tall tales without you.

  Joe Gores

  San Angelo

  April, 1992

  SIX MONTHS BEFORE

  At 5:04:09 P.M. on a Tuesday, October 17, Daniel Kearny Associates’ narrow high-shouldered old charcoal Victorian at 760 Golden Gate Avenue … fell over.

  Seven-point-two on the Richter scale. That’s all it took.

  In the Gay ’90s the old building had been a high-class bawdy house for San Francisco’s movers and shakers, and Dan Kearny had just gotten Landmark status for it by shaming the City into honoring these fallen women among its other heroes—madmen, tarnished athletes, dishonest cops, corrupt politicians.

  But what the State of California had been unable to do in ten years of trying, the San Andreas fault, after gulping downtown Santa Cruz a hundred miles south, accomplished with a discreet belch. Only because DKA had closed early for the World Series was no one hurt during those seventeen violent seconds in which 760 was gone, gone to dust, its memories with it.

  Which left the DKA Head Office (Branch Offices in All Major California Cities) abruptly located Nowhere. Yet Giselle Marc, DKA’s office manager, when surveying the tipsy splintered remains the next morning, sighed as much for the ghosts of scented ladies and boar-eyed power brokers as for DKA’s current plight.

  “The damnedest finest ruins,” she murmured, echoing San Francisco’s epitaph after the Big One in ’06.

  Giselle, who combined an M.A. in history with her own P.I. license, was an exquisite racehorse blonde with bedroom eyes that masked boardroom brains. Brains discovered to their sorrow by many of DKA’s cockier adversaries just moments before the hammer fell on them.

  “I wish Richter had gotten flattened himself, before he invented the damn scale,” Dan Kearny growled.

  Kearny was a flint-faced 52, with icy grey eyes and a cement-mixer jaw, his thinning curly hair getting frosty around the edges. His nose obviously once had met an object harder than itself moving very rapidly in the opposite direction.

  “What good would that have done, Dan’l? Somebody else just would have come up with a measurement for seismic activity.”

  “Seven-point-two on the Smith scale?” He chuckled for the first time in two days. “Well, what the hell, the place had gotten too small for us, anyway.”

  Which was true. The upstairs clerical offices had been a rabbit warren of tiny rooms crowded with too many people and too much equipment, and Kearny and the field men had been crammed into mouseholes in an under-the-building garage with room left over for only a repo or two. For over a decade DKA had leased storage lots all over town for the cars it had repossessed.

  “I wonder if the phones still work?” Kearny muttered.

  They didn’t. But those down at 340 Eleventh Street did. Years before, when the state first started trying to get the old Victorian condemned for a Social Services parking lot, Kearny had bought a disused laundry South of Market as a backup site, and had been desultorily remodeling it a weekend at a time ever since. Now, suddenly, that old laundry was the New Jerusalem.

  * * *

  As Kearny and Giselle talked, by honest, genuine, sheer chance, a man calling himself Karl Klenhard and his wife of over fifty years, calling herself Margarete, were waiting for the light at a corner in Steubenville (“Where the Tall Corn Grows”), Iowa. Steubenville— not to be confused with the much more nifty Steubenville in Ohio—was county seat for 9,581 souls and several hundred square miles of rich alluvial flatland below the bluffs of the Mighty Mississippi.

  Steubenviile had been settled in the late 1800s by farmers from Trier, Prussia; in those early days, paddlewheel steamers plying the river offered tempting access to markets for their produce. But times change, markets shift, prices rise and fall, and with the Midwest farm crunch Steubenviile had become Stupidville to those unfortunate enough to still live there.

  Karl did not look stupid, but he did fit right in with the local populace: his Santa Claus smile, great walrus mustache, and gold watch chain glinting across a benevolent expanse of belly all suggested the retired German burgher. As for Margarete, her plump bosom, high color, and twinkly eyes above glowing apple cheeks made her look like a ceramic cookie jar. Only the cigarette smouldering between the first two fingers of her right hand hinted at anything other than classic Hausfrau.

  Here’s where chance comes in: as they waited at the light, an elderly Eldorado with those majestic ’50s tailfins stretching out forever behind it rolled by them. Karl leaned jauntily on his ornate gold-headed cane and gave Margarete a nostalgic little pat on the fanny in honor of other tailfins in other times.

  “Remember the pink nineteen fifty-eight Caddy convertible we rode to my coronation? Ah, darling, what times we had!”

  “Yes, my dumpling,” said Margarete with shining eyes. Then a hint of sadness crossed her face. “We’re getting old, Liebchen. It makes one think of retirement.”

  The light had changed. They started slowly across the intersection, two loving old people arm in arm.

  “Retirement.” Karl’s voice savored the word, but his eyes had taken on a speculative gleam. “Nineteen fifty-eight.” He smiled a beatific smile. “The year I became King.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  T. S. Eliot once remarked that April is the cruellest month. But on this Tuesday the 17th, six months to the day after the Bay Area’s devastating temblor, April did not seem cruel at all.

  Oh, there were the usual traumas; breakdowns on BART, too many homeless on the streets, a tanker grounded in the bay, water rationing in place for this sixth straight drought year despite the miracle March rains. But the IRS beast had gotten its human sacrifice for another season; most of the quake damage had been repaired or swept out of sight; and the A’s—if not the Giants—looked in top early-season form.

  And remodeling was finished at 340 Eleventh Street. In the first of two (count ’em, two!) huge open ground-floor offices—each larger than the entire setup had been at 760 Golden Gate—were the skip-tracers and clerical staff. And Dan Kearny himself, strategically placed to slip out the back door if a process server stormed the front.

  In the other ground-floor office were the CB, the fax, and the computer. Here also, under Giselle’s watchful eye, were the teenage girls who earned after-school money churning out skip and legal letters on the old but serviceable automatic typewriters.

  Upstairs were actual offices for the field agents—with desks and chairs and phones and even typewriters for one-fingering reports.

  And out in back was storage for twenty cars.

  So, with DANIEL KEARNY ASSOCIATES backward on the glass of the door in fresh paint, DKA was again ready to find people who had defaulted, defrauded, or embezzled, and to wrest away their purloined assets for return to its clients. Clients who, unfortunately, were not the sultry blondes and devious tycoons of fiction. They were, rather, much more mundane banks, bonding companies, financial institutions, and insurance conglomerates.

  On this bright spring day, typewriters clacked, phones clamored, exhaust fumes wafted in from the storage yard where someone was gunning a repo. At Jane Goldson’s reception desk a big hard-looking man with a tough jaw and lank, close-trimmed brown hair had written KEN WARREN on an employment application and was trying to add to that. Jane kept rolling the conversational ball at him, which he kept not rolling back.

  “How did you say you found us, Mr…. um…”

  Warren chewed on his pencil eraser in morose silence.

  “If you’ve never done this sort of thing before, actually, it is rather difficult to… er…”

  Warren laboriously filled in another line on the app. His scowl could have blistered paint. Sliding back her chair, Jane gave him a brilliant smile and some equally brilliant thigh.

  “Perhaps you’d best speak with Mr. Kearny directly…”

  Daunted by the application form, Warren was unaware of smile, thigh, or remark. Okay, sure, applying in writing was better than trying to explain
himself verbally; but even so, most of what he did best really couldn’t be put down on paper.

  Kearny’s left hand was shaking a Marlboro from his pack as Jane came up to his desk; his right continued its creative bookkeeping on the rather thin stack of billing before him. Cash flow, cash flow—relocating had cost a mint, and clients, waiting to see if they’d survive it, had been hesitant. A minor irritant was the cleaning service—it was lousy.

  Jane moved her head slightly toward the man scowling over the clipboard at the far end of the office. Kearny raised heavy interrogative brows at her through his first wisp of carcinogens.

  “So?”

  “Actually, Mr. K, he just wandered in off the street,” Jane said in her tart cockney accent. “But…”

  “So what’s the gag?” Even in a slow month they always had room for a good repoman. “Let him fill in the app and—”

  “So maybe you’d best hear for yourself, hadn’t you?”

  Summoned down the office, the big man looked okay to Kearny. Better than okay, in fact. Hard-faced, moved well… of course in a 3:00 A.M. alley a lot of self-styled tough dudes had tiny balls. Kearny stood up and stuck out his hand. He’d hear what the big guy had to say.

  The big guy said, “GnYm Kgen Gwarren.”

  Oh.

  * * *

  Those same six months since the San Francisco quake did not seem to have been so kind to Karl Klenhard back there in Stupidville. No longer did his gold watch chain stretch taut across a splendid belly. It sagged. No longer did he stride. He shuffled. No longer did he use his gold-headed cane with a boulevardier flair, but as one dependent upon its support.

  Margarete held his free arm protectively as she guided him into the town’s largest department store. He was being loud, querulous, and rambling in a newly acquired old-man’s voice.

  “But we gotta get her somethin’ today!” Close to tears. “It’s our own little granddaughter we’re talkin’ about here…”

  Margarete said placatingly, “I saw a lovely little pinafore just her size on the lower level, Liebchen…”

  She had to let go of his arm so Karl could grasp the moving handrail of the down escalator at the same time that he stepped on one of its moving stairs. His hand missed, his foot missed. With a loud cry, Karl took a terrifying headlong tumble, arms and legs windmilling, cane flying, falling down… down… down…