32 Cadillacs Page 10

  Today he was mid-40s, with a red bandana around his neck and a grey gunfighter’s mustache and powdered hair to glint silver below a white wide-brimmed ten-gallon cowboy hat like Tom Mix wore in the Saturday morning serials long before his birth. He walked a little pigeon-toed in his cowboy boots, a bit bowlegged from aridin’ that old cayuse on the lone pray-ree.

  He was also sober—a small triumph not entirely his own, because his latest thirty-day stretch in the county slam had ended just last week. When he drank he got nasty, when he got nasty he beat his wife, when he beat his wife he got into bar scuffles, when he got into bar scuffles he got arrested and booked for Drunk & Disorderly. He no longer had the wife, but he was still getting drunk, nasty, in scuffles, and arrested for D&D.

  Poteet came to work at Universal Studios early most days during the peak April-September tourist season. Only after Labor Day, when the crowds had thinned and he would stand out as a regular despite his disguises, would it be too risky to continue.

  Risky because Universal had no idea he worked there.

  His first mark was an overweight red-faced woman with two noisy kids and a gaping purse. The bus stopped and everyone started crowding off for the earthquake special-effects show. While standing politely aside and speaking to her with a West Texas drawl, Poteet lifted his cowboy hat with one hand and her wallet with the other.

  “First time y’all here, ma’am?”

  “Yes. We’re from Indiana. The kids are so excited…”

  “Wal, don’t let ’em get scairt—it’s all jus’ funnin’.”

  He sat behind her on the bleachers and, when the lights went down, slipped two $20s from the wallet. When the audience applauded the completion of the tour guide’s opening spiel, he dropped the wallet back into the purse.

  If the mark had only a bill or two, he took nothing at all. If the wallet was missed before he could return it, he merely dropped it on the floor. When it was found with money still inside, they were happy: at an amusement park with the kids, who knew how much actual cash they had left?

  By early afternoon he’d made nearly $200, a very good day’s score, when, from the queue for the next bus, he saw the door of one of the maintenance sheds was ajar. Awfully early in the season, but too good to pass up even though Universal would know a dip had been working the crowd that day. He would skip work for a week, let the pickpocket heat die down; the big score should make the interruption of steady income worth it.

  He stepped casually over the low fence flanking the walkway and went through screening bushes into the shed. A minute later he emerged wearing a white knee-length smock with MAINTENANCE printed across the back. His ten-gallon hat had been replaced by a billed MAINTENANCE cap, pulled low to hide his greyed hair and shadow his eyes. His mustache was in his pocket.

  “Pardon me, folks, could I get through?” Working his way clumsily up the line at the busiest food concession, a shoulder jostle here, a lurch there, a slip and a hand out to steady himself elsewhere. “Sorry, ma’am, something slippery there…”

  All the time, dip, dip, dip—busy clever fingers darting into pockets and handbags as he moved along, sliding the take into the voluminous pockets of the maintenance smock. His mother had taken him to playgrounds to practice on other kids’ mothers when he was too little to be arrested, so he had good hands.

  At the head of the line he veered off to the side door, opened it, stuck his head and a $20 bill inside, reading the name of the nearest girl off the front of her smock as he did.

  “Hey, Marie, can you give me two double cheeseburgers and two jumbo fries and two big Cokes? All in one big sack? We got a generator shorting out down by King Kong and I’m gonna be stuck there the rest of the day.” She looked blank. “Charlie Bilton. We got our jobs the same day.”

  Marie didn’t know him because they hadn’t, of course, but now she thought she knew him. “Oh, sure. Hi, Charlie.”

  Her quick hands scooped up two bulky wrapped burgers and two fries and two Cokes, stuck them and napkins in a big bag with a bright logo on the side, took his money, gave him change.

  “Thanks, Marie. See you later.”

  He worked quickly around the knoll, hitting three more concessions, then sheared off back to the shed. Inside, he dropped the food into a big green leaf bag but kept the paper sack—in it the wallets looked and smelled like hamburgers and fries. Off with smock and cap, mustache stuck hurriedly back on, aw-shucks-ma’am cowboy hat back in place, slip out of the shed.

  This was the time of maximum exposure, when he still had the wallets on him. Usually, this kind of gig, you handed off to an accomplice. But he had no accomplice, he had to work alone, the rest of the goddamned Gypsies had seen to that. Just because, drunk, he’d ignore marimays—tribal taboos—relating to women. So now he was no longer welcome into anybody’s vitsa.

  Twenty minutes later, he was walking up toward the main gate past sound stages and bungalows with the names of current TV shows on them, past the Alfred Hitchcock Theatre, the editing building, then left into the newly refurbished commissary.

  In the big echoing basement men’s room he emptied the leathers of their money and credit cards, feeding the stripped and wiped wallets one by one into the tippy mouth of the trash bucket. He removed his mustache and ran wet fingers through his hair to blot out some grey, crushed his high-crowned cowboy hat into a nondescript oval under one arm. He emerged minus a dozen years and the cowboy’s pigeon-toed bowlegged walk.

  Out the main gate past the guard kiosk, across Lankershim to the Universal City branch post office. Check his P.O. box, then catch a bus down to LAX and sell the credit cards to a broker. Tomorrow they would be in play in New York, until the security nets got them on the stolen-card lists.

  There was an Express Mail envelope from San Francisco in his box. At a table under the WANTED posters he pocketed the $50 bill it contained and read DKA’s accompanying material. The gadje were offering $100 for each hot tip that led to recovery of any of those San Francisco Cadillacs he’d already heard about.

  He was sure his bitch wife, Yana, was involved in it. Yana, who wouldn’t work like a good Gypsy wife to bring money home to her husband no matter how much he beat her. Yana, who taught herself to read and write like no good Gypsy woman should.

  Since the rom chose to treat him as an outcast, the bastards, he would make them pay right along with her. He would spend his week off work from the studio tour to run with the rom once more, pick up a word here, a name there, then piece things together. Then he would make occasional calls to San Francisco and he would have his revenge—wonderful revenge, repeated revenge, filling as stolen eggs, sweet as wild honey.

  Revenge at $100 an installment. Collect.

  * * *

  “To tell you the truth,” said Alvin Crichton, M.D., chief of Neurosurgery at Steubenville General Hospital, “we don’t have a clear X-ray picture of your husband’s injuries yet.”

  “My Karl has been here days and days,” said Lulu in her Margarete persona, “and you’ve had him up and down to that room with that big machine and made him lie on that cold table—”

  “The X rays we have gotten don’t really tell us anything.”

  They were in Zlachi’s semi-private room on a beautiful spring day in Stupidville; the drapes were back and the shades up so the bright afternoon sunlight poured across the bed and dripped to the floor like honey. The other bed was unoccupied.

  “Why don’t they?”

  Crichton had a big beak and was tall and lanky and slightly stooped, so in silhouette against the window he looked like a heron about to spear a fish with his nose.

  “Because your husband won’t lie still for the X rays.”

  “You keep puttin’ him through all that pain,” she snapped. “On the table, off the table—”

  “That’s why we’d like to run a few tests right here,”

  “Is it gonna hurt?” quavered Staley in his weak old-man’s voice. “I gotta lotta pain even just lyin’ here. I can s
tand that okay, but when I move—”

  “I know, but it would be a great help in our diagnosis if we could localize the pain to find out exactly where it hurts.”

  If the patient had been younger, Crichton would have suspected some sort of scam, but this was a man pushing 80, with no insurance and a dozen witnesses to his terrible headlong tumble down the department-store escalator.

  Mrs. Klenhard surprised him by patting her husband’s arm.

  “Karl, you gotta do what the doctor tells you.”

  “Whatever you say, Mama,” he replied in a docile voice.

  “Wonderful.” Crichton rang for the nurse as he sat down on the empty bed and got out his pen. “Are you still having those bad headaches, Mr. Klenhard?”

  “Alla time, Doc.” He put a hand to his head. “They don’t never go away.”

  “Not even with the medication?”

  “Sometimes at night I kinda drift off… but otherwise…”

  Crichton made cat scratches on the patient’s chart. “And how about the vertigo?” Seeing the look on their faces, he amended, “Dizziness. Losing your balance when you stand?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I gotta lean on Margarete when I gotta use the bathroom, Doc. Is very… makes me feel… ashamed, you know?”

  The nurse came in, a sturdy freckle-faced girl with auburn hair and upturned nose. Crichton said he would like the patient to stand beside the bed for a few simple tests.

  “Here we go,” said the nurse cheerily. She drew back the covers and reached for Staley’s feet. “We’ll just—”

  “No!” exclaimed Margarete. “He don’t do it that way.”

  It was a major operation, with everyone helping, just to get Staley on his two feet beside the bed. Even then he wasn’t upright; he was bent forward and pulled over to one side.

  “That’s fine!” exclaimed Crichton with dubious enthusiasm. “Now I would like you to stretch your arms out to your sides… yes… that’s it… Now close your eyes and touch your nose with your forefinger…”

  Staley tried with his left hand first. He fell over to his left. Margarete, expecting it, was quick to catch him.

  “Gee, Mr. Doctor, I… I’m sorry…”

  “You did just fine. Could you try the other hand?”

  Staley tried with his right. And fell over left again.

  “What’s it mean he does that?” demanded Margarete in alarm.

  “It suggests that the major injury is on your husband’s left side.” Crichton patted Staley’s shoulder. “You’re doing just fine, Mr. Klenhard. You game for another little test?”

  This one was more daunting. Staley was to try to relax his body, and then bend gently forward at the waist as if to touch his right foot with his left hand.

  He bent down a few inches. And shot erect, screaming.

  Trying to reverse it, to touch his left foot with his right hand, Staley, pale and shaken, got down about a foot before he yelped and shot erect again with a hand to the small of his back. They got him carefully but quickly back into bed on his back, pale and shaken, with the covers still drawn down.

  “Is that it?” he asked hopefully. Lulu was patting his face with her handkerchief. “I don’t know if I can…”

  “Just one more, then we’ll give you something for the pain and leave you alone.”

  Lulu was fierce. “You gotta tell him what it is first.”

  “I’d like you to raise your left knee just a little, Mr. Klenhard, then straighten it out again…”

  “Hey, that oughtta be easy!” exclaimed Staley with his first show of enthusiasm for the day.

  He almost delightedly started to lift his left knee. And yelped in agony, jerking to his left. Lulu started forward protectively. The nurse stopped her. Staley was breathing quickly and shallowly. He finally relaxed, the lines of pain lessening on his face. He spoke apologetically.

  “Guess I didn’t do that so good, huh, Doc?”

  “You did fine.” Crichton made a little grimace of his own. “How about… could I try to bend your knee, Mr. Klenhard?”

  “Sure,” said Staley with a ghost of his former enthusiasm, “maybe you be better at it than me, huh?”

  Crichton gingerly began to bend the knee. Staley yelped. This time Lulu started for Crichton, hands clawed, but the nurse again interposed herself between them.

  “That’s enough. My Karl has had enough.”

  Crichton frowned. “If we could just try his right leg—”

  “No more,” she said with that sudden determination that so far had kept anyone else from being assigned to the other bed in the room. “No more for my Karl.”

  “Mama,” said Staley. This time he met that dark, ominous gaze with one of his own. “We gotta let the doctor find out what he can. One more leg, okay? Then we be all through here.”

  Another long pause from Lulu. Then finally, reluctantly, she nodded. “Okay. Once more. The right knee.”

  Staley steeled himself, then started to bend his right knee. One inch. Two. Six. He kept bending it. It was almost totally flexed before he suddenly winced and let it drop. He lay there panting, but he met the doctor’s eyes triumphantly.

  “Hey, I done good, huh, Doc?”

  “You done wonderfully,” agreed Crichton. “And that’s it for today. In a few minutes they’ll bring supper—”

  Lulu said, “I think he’s got too much pain to eat supper.”

  “Then you can eat it for him,” grinned Crichton.

  He made his notes on Staley’s chart and departed with the nurse. Staley’s eyes met Lulu’s. He winked. She winked back.

  “I’ll make sure the nurse knows it was me ate your supper,” she said. “Then during visiting hours tonight I’ll sneak you in something from Jack in the Box—”

  “Some of those fingerfoods I see on the TV,” exclaimed Staley with enthusiasm. His voice was deep and full, not thin and quavery as it was when anyone else was around. “With some of those curly fries and a Coke…”

  * * *

  Marino was off working his secret hotel scam, but the three other literates in the kumpania—Yana, Immaculate Bimbai, and, surprisingly, fat Josef Adamo—were filling out registration applications in a variety of names, with return addresses all over the country. The DMVs of such friendly southern states as Georgia and North Carolina would mail valid auto registrations to anyone who paid the fee and sent in the forms, and already only fourteen of the cars were still in the Bay Area.

  Immaculata Bimbai herself was still in town only because she wanted to hit a big Post Street jeweler before driving down to hit a similar establishment on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

  As soon as fat Josef Adamo finished the Cadillac paperwork he would be heading for Seattle. His brother was already up there, organizing a much expanded version of the road-paving scam that was Josef’s usual M.O.

  Wasso Tomeshti was in the southland setting up the most ambitious con of his career, involving an East L.A. TV wholesaler and a contractor who was just finishing a fancy motel in the Valley. For this, the new Caddy was essential window dressing.

  Heading for Florida was Kalia Uwanowich, planning on a big score in subdivision roofing just outside Fort Lauderdale.

  Chicago for Nanoosh Tsatshimo, where a relative had rented a defunct metalworking plant under a phony name. Nanoosh’s electroplating scam needed a physical place of business where the bogus plating work could be done, not just a mail-drop address.

  Pearso Stokes was going to New York; she specialized in shortchanging banks and she liked Manhattan because New Yorkers, even bank tellers, thought they were too streetwise to be taken. Which made them very easy to take indeed, especially with a hoary scam everyone had forgotten in this new electronic age of computer theft. Gypsies are nothing if not traditionalists.

  No fewer than seven Lovellis, each with a new Caddy, were gathered in Reno to prepare for their annual round of the Midwest county fair circuits as palmists, curse-removers, mentalists, astrologists, telekineticists, tarot-card and
tea-leaf readers, crystal-ball gazers, and similar divinators. All for twenty-five bucks a reading, quick in and out, wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.

  All felt good about their work, because Christ Himself had given permission to the Gypsies to steal. As He hung dying on the shameful cross, a Gypsy stole the Roman soldiers’ fourth spike—the one intended for His heart. A grateful Christ gave His absolution forever to all Gypsies who stole from the gadje.

  Of course in this world of unenlightened souls, the gadje, just because they could not find the story in their Bibles, didn’t believe in this dispensation; but the kumpania didn’t worry about them. The kumpania could always outwit non-Gypsies.

  Or had up until then.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  O’B spent his Friday on the phone rooms. He started out in the morning by dropping around to the Public Utility Commission offices looking for a field investigator named Sturrock with whom he once had worked at a collection agency.

  “Hey, Reverend, how’s tricks?”

  “O’Bannon, you old devil, what are you doing around here?”

  O’B leaned close enough for Sturrock to smell the bourbon he’d swished around his mouth in the men’s room.

  “Well, I’m, ah, lookin’ for work…”

  Sturrock, that subservient ferret of a man, immediately darted down his burrow to safety. “Damn, O’B, you know with the recession and all, we don’t have even entry-level jobs…”

  Then, of course, guilty about dropping his old buddy like a used condom over that drinking problem, he had to take O’B around to meet the other field men before easing him out the door. Lots of heavy male guffaws, bluff manly hellos, mano a mano slaps on the shoulder, macho hearty handshakes all around—and O’B came away with four of the investigators’ business cards he was after.

  Each was worth its weight in gold because of the miniature— but official—Public Utility Commission seal in the corner.

  At the phone company’s gaudy blue building flanking Islais Creek, O’B pulled a soft wool cap down over his red hair before facing the uniformed guard on the door. This was a big red-faced galoot with mean little eyes who loved his pinch of power.