32 Cadillacs Read online

  Giselle eased the door shut almost silently, just enough so the latch clicked to hold it in place, then backed up slightly. Kearny squatted to look at the bumper of the Cadillac her move had exposed.

  The Gypsy started to squat, too, holding his neck and grimacing theatrically as if from pain. But then he shrieked and struggled erect again, now holding the small of his back also.

  “Not a scratch on it,” Kearny was saying.

  “Besides my whiplash, I think I got a slipped disk.” He was groaning, still holding his neck with one hand, the small of his back with the other. “And whadda ya mean about the car? Looka that crease! That indentation! That chipped paint!”

  “Chipped paint?” yelled Kearny. “You’re crazy!” He was erect again, pointing accusingly at the car, drawing the Gypsy’s eye to the back of the Eldorado. “There’s no—”

  “There! There! And lookit there! And what about my neck? Very severe whiplash. And my back. Very dangerous slipped disk.” He was growing paler by the moment, experimentally moving his legs around beneath him, the knees now slightly bent as if he couldn’t straighten them. “And torn ligaments in both knees, too, from hittin’ them on the dashboard. That means I gotta see three doctors, go to hospital, get X rays, lose time on job…”

  He was still holding his neck and holding his back and keeping his knees bent when the traffic light changed to green. Kearny simply walked away from him and slid into the driver’s seat of the Cadillac. Belatedly, the Gypsy leaped erect beside the two cars, eyes bugging out, whiplash and slipped disk and torn tendons all suddenly and miraculously cured.

  “Hey, what the hell you think—”

  Kearny goosed the Eldorado across the intersection with the green light and the door still hanging open. The Gypsy ran after him for a dozen paces, shouting and waving his arms; then, as Giselle started to accelerate behind him, whirled to stand in her path, holding his arms out like he was herding sheep.

  “Hey, you, stop—”

  She whipped the wheel over, hard, floored it, bounced across the corner of the intersecting curbs with a loud crash! and screamed around the corner into Tenth Street. He slammed an angry hand against her rear fender, but she was already by him.

  And gone.

  As Kearny was gone in the Eldorado.

  Ah. First blood.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Second blood to, of all people, Trinidad Morales. Who wasn’t working the Gyppo files, wasn’t even supposed to know about the Gyppo files, Kearny’s paranoia about them being what it was. But on Friday afternoon he had snooped the supposedly empty file cabinet upstairs that seemed to hold so much fascination for Kearny, Giselle, O’B, Heslip, and Ballard. And had leafed through enough of the Gypsy material to know that almost any new Caddy with paper plates and a swarthy driver would be fair game.

  Then he heard someone on the stairs, so he snatched one of Giselle’s lists—the cars’ colors and descriptions and model and I. D. numbers—eased the file drawer shut, and was halfway down the hall by the time Kearny appeared.

  “Lose something, Morales?”

  “Just findin’ my office, Mr. K, just findin’ my office. Lot different here from over to Seven Sixty.”

  Not that Morales intended to go out looking for Gypsy cars off that list. He had been hired to work the cases abandoned by those assigned to the Gyppos, and besides, there weren’t any direct leads to work yet. For now he just wanted to know what was going on. Knowledge was power, and all that. And he would keep checking. There might be a way to snatch some meat from the jaws of the other guys for a quick buck or two.

  But that was Friday. Now, on Saturday afternoon, Morales was not thinking of Gypsies. He was, instead, over in the East Bay trying to find a welfare cheat Ballard had been chasing for his Mazda. Typical Ballard shit, he thought, booting the file all over the lot with that phony concussion of his.

  He still hated Ballard’s guts from the Maria Navarro thing.

  Golden Gate Fields is shoehorned between 1–80 and the fringes of the bay at Albany, just south of Richmond. This Saturday was a race day, and since a remarkably large percent of welfare checks in California, state or federal, are cashed at racetracks, and since the Mazda man had a history with the ponies, cruising the parking lots at the track offered good odds.

  He waited until the third race, so most patrons already would be there, then for thirty minutes methodically checked for the blue 1990 Mazda 323/Protege hatchback with, noted from an earlier Ballard repo, a grey leaded-in left front fender.

  Pretty easy to spot if it was around. It wasn’t. And that’s when he got his bright idea.

  Racetracks were also dandy places to look for Gyppos.

  Most of them were damned good with horses from the days when they rode around in wagons instead of Cadillacs; Gypsy horseplayers were legion, and a lot of others were seasonal trainers or grooms or even practice riders. For all he knew, there were even Gyppo jockies. He’d never met a legit Gypsy yet, not one, not ever, but he guessed there had to be some.

  There was a separate lot at the rear, on the other side of the access road, where owners and trainers parked dozens of R/Vs and horse trailers and big muddy luxury cars. Within five minutes he had spotted three new Cadillacs and felt the old adrenaline surge. Gyppos were the hardest game there was to track; to a manhunter, getting one was like wing-shooting a crow, that wiliest of birds.

  And technically, he hadn’t really gone looking for Gypsies, had he? Of course not. But if one of their cars should happen to fall into his lap, he couldn’t be blamed for that, could he?

  He parked across and down from the Caddies, studied the list of models and colors and engine I.D. numbers. Cad One was out. It had current California plates and it was just too soon for any of the Gyppo Cads to have plates—unless they were stolen or off a wrecking yard junker. Not likely, not yet. The Gyppos still would be thinking they were too smart for anyone to guess who they were, let alone find them. So, scratch Cad One.

  Cads Two and Three were real possibilities.

  But even as he thought this, a very tall, very lanky, very blond, very Anglo woman whose pale skin had the translucency of alabaster, wearing a beautifully tailored red hacking jacket and pearl-grey jodhpurs, appeared between the horse trailers. With her was a grizzled old man wearing a cloth cap and knee-high rubber boots spattered with dried horse manure. They shook hands and the blonde got into Cad Two. Before driving off she used her handkerchief to wipe the hand that the old geezer had shaken.

  If she was a Gypsy, Morales was Madonna.

  That left the silver Coupe de Ville loaded with one of the many Cadillac option packages. He itched to get out of his dumpy little company car and wander over there and try to get a squint at the I.D. number. But if it was one of the Gyppo cars, and he got spotted checking it out, they’d be gone in a flash.

  When in doubt, do nothing. For the next twenty-seven minutes he kicked around what he might do if he did snag the car. He was on DKA time here, a field agent hired by the company, but the bank wouldn’t know that. So could he turn it in on the sly, operating under his own still-active P.I. license? He’d probably get a hell of a lot more from the bank direct than the wages and expenses and— maybe—percentage of the repo fee he’d get from DKA. Assuming Kearny had cut DKA the kind of sweet little per-car recovery deal that Morales supposed he had.

  No, ashcan that. He didn’t like Kearny, but he was smart enough to fear him. He’d only get the one Gypsy car, then Kearny would find out about it and would have his butt. And if the state did lift his license, he would be out in the cold.

  So, since there was no other option, be a good guy. Win one for the Gipper…

  A short swarthy man and a beautiful girl of about 15—the age Morales found himself liking more and more these days—were coming his way. They both had brown skin and shiny black hair: Gyppos, sure as hell. Man and wife? Gypsy marriages were arranged for bride price… Naw, by the way they related to each other, father and daughter. Now, i
f they stopped at the Caddy…

  They did. Okay, then if he got a chance to grab it he would, even though he wasn’t rock-certain it was one of the bank’s cars. Without a key, he’d need a few minutes to break in unseen, check the I.D. against Giselle’s list, pop out the ignition lock and substitute one of his own…

  The girl got in behind the wheel of the De Ville but didn’t start the motor. The man talked to her through the open window and Morales slipped out of his car unobserved, a plan half-forming in his mind. When the Gypsy started away between the trailers, Morales, who could pass for rom himself with his heavy features and cruel, thick-lipped mouth, angled quickly toward him. Gyps often posed as Chicanos when working welfare and street scams; Morales now planned to return the favor.

  “Hey!” he called.

  The Gypsy turned. “Yeah, what you want?” His voice was thick and guttural.

  “Za Devalesa.” It was the sole Romany phrase Morales knew, a traditional greeting of some sort he had picked up in the Mission District as a kid. Something like Go with God, maybe.

  He said it loudly so the girl in the car, too far away for anything said in normal tones, could hear it.

  “Za Devalesa,” the Gypsy returned, obviously surprised into thinking for the moment that Morales was also rom.

  Morales put an arm around his shoulders, walking him quickly down between two trailers and out of the girl’s sight. To her, after hearing those exchanged greetings, it must seem that Morales was another Gyppo, a friend of her old man. At least he hoped that was the way it would seem to her.

  “I got a good horse for you in the last race,” he said to the Gypsy. “Saratoga Longshot.”

  “There ain’t no horse in that race got that name.”

  “No shit?” Morales turned away, shaking his head as if in amazement. “Guess I forgot to get up yesterday.”

  He walked off leaving the Gypsy frenziedly checking his pockets in case Morales had been a dip, The Coupe de Ville was still there, the girl behind the wheel, the window still open. Morales put what he thought was a charming smile on his heavy face. His gold tooth glinted in the wan afternoon sunshine. She’d like that, he thought, Gyppos were like fucking magpies, they liked bright things. Anything gold, even teeth.

  “Za Devalesa,” he said to her. It had worked the first time, what the hell? He added quickly, “Your daddy said you should help me get my car started. Just over in the corner of the lot. He said you’d be back before he was.”

  He went around the Caddy and slid his ample bulk in beside her. After a moment, she started the engine.

  Morales pointed. “Over that way.”

  And kept thinking, Go, move it. Even with her driving and him not laying a glove on her, she was a juvie and technically this had become a kidnapping as soon as they had started moving.

  “Got a dead battery, been sittin’ here since the start of the meet, my sister was supposed to pick it up but she got busted in Fresno behind a bum Murphy game beef…”

  Seeing him with her old man on an apparently friendly basis seemed to have activated the Gypsy thing of strictly obeying the elders. She seemed to be buying it. Just two more minutes…

  “There it is right over there, just needs a little shove to get it goin’…”

  As he directed her across this almost deserted quadrant of the parking lot farthest from the track, he picked out an old Chev Corsica with a lot of room around it. He had her pull the Coupe de Ville up a few feet short of the rear bumper.

  “You drive the Chevy, I’ll push it. The keys are under the front seat. It’s got a stick, it’ll start real easy.” The girl didn’t even hesitate in opening her door and getting out. Morales slid over behind the wheel. Because odds were that the Chevy would be locked, he added, “First, check the bumpers when I come up behind it. I wanna make sure they match…”

  Estúpida! She obediently went to look at the bumpers. Even began waving Morales forward, her eyes on the space between the two cars.

  Morales merely put the Caddy into reverse, backed up, then drove away from there in a wide arc that left the Gypsy girl yapping in his dust like an angry Pekingese. Back toward the freeway through the parking lots, avoiding the trailers where her old man probably by now had discovered the Caddy was missing. He would come back, drop the company car on a towbar later, when he could be sure the Gyp and his disgraced daughter had departed.

  Well away from her, he stopped to check through the windshield for the Caddy’s I. D. number, which was fastened to the dashboard on a little plate. He looked for a match with the list he had stolen from the DKA file drawer that he now had on his clipboard.

  Yeah!

  Second blood.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Larry Ballard didn’t get to work many North Bay assignments because O’B couldn’t resist all that sunshine when the City was freezing its butt off under a layer of coastal fog. So driving up to Santa Rosa that Sunday afternoon, Ballard was struck by how the land developers had bought effective control of Marin County’s Planning Department when he wasn’t looking. Almost every hilltop sprouted its dense crop of duplexes and triplexes; north of San Rafael, where he remembered a little French restaurant with a duck pond, a hulking PG&E plant generated power for all those hillsides acned with high-density housing.

  Marin needed a spotted owl of its own, and fast.

  Speeding north into still-rural Sonoma County on the six-lane 101 freeway, Ballard found himself wondering if Beverly would ever let him back into her life. They’d fallen into an easy routine of double-dating with Bart and Corinne, a movie and a drink afterward, then he and Bev over to her place for…

  Trouble was, he’d liked her a lot, sometimes thought they were in love with each other. But one or the other had always pulled back from a lasting emotional commitment. Now, all gone.

  He came off the freeway in Santa Rosa looking for the ’30s-style stucco house at 15431 Redwood Highway. He’d stopped thinking of Beverly and had started thinking about work again. Well, maybe not totally about work. Speculating, instead, about the woman he had driven north to try and find.

  Ballard hadn’t had to look up the address in the old case file; it had leaped into his mind when he had decided to seek out the beautiful Gypsy fortune-teller named Yana. Some three years before, Yana had given him a lead that had helped DKA save its license from the state.

  That wasn’t all she’d given him. Against all known logic concerning Gypsies and gadje, Yana had gone to bed with him in the big motel down the road from the mitt-camp.

  Just the one time; she didn’t dare do it again. She’d been sold in marriage at 13 to some mean Gyppo bastard for $3,000, and ever since had been living with him and his mother, Madame Aquarra, Madame Aquarra hated her guts, had been single-mindedly devoted to getting something on her so Yana could be kicked out of the house with her husband retaining the bride price.

  But Yana was the only Gypsy contact Ballard could think of, so he had to talk with her. Or, if she wasn’t there any longer, with Madame Aquarra to find her. It had been night the other time, he’d spoken to the old woman for just a few moments, no way she would remember him now, three years later. Was there?

  His speculations were academic: there was no 15431 Redwood Highway anymore. Just another stupid shopping mall. No one to ask where the mitt-camp might have moved to, and, it being Sunday, he couldn’t even run a gag on the local post office for a possible forwarding. Anyway, few Gyps were literate so they didn’t get much mail except government checks, anyway. Yana, he remembered, could only read phone numbers and street names, though she could fake newspapers and menus real well.

  Since Madame Aquarra had an unlisted phone number, it took two hours to get a possible new address on her. Out in the burgeoning suburban sprawl west of Santa Rosa proper, where the old Calistoga Road meandered up off Cal 12 into the hills.

  Spiritual Advisor, said the sign above the door, but it was a mitt-camp pure and simple. On the front porch of the stucco and red tile fake h
acienda were primary-color ceramic pots, bright trashy tourist souvenir figurines and ashtrays, and an exquisite Della Robbia ceramic medallion sunk in the stucco beside the door. A nearly life-size fuzzy stuffed gorilla sat in a wicker rocking chair with a dead cigar in his fist.

  Ballard crunched across the gravel lot and up the three steps to the porch. He rang the bell. Bingo! Madame Aquarra, the mother-in-law. Smoking a long black stogie like the gorilla’s which she whipped out of sight behind her back when she saw a possibly paying customer at the door.

  “Madame Aquarra knows all,” she intoned.

  The same words she’d used three years ago. Obviously, she didn’t recognize the supposed cop, half-seen in the darkness, who’d whisked her daughter-in-law away for a night in the pokey. Considering what he and Yana had so joyfully done together until dawn, it had been more like a night of pokey-pokey-pokey.

  Now he was acting confused.

  “I’m looking for the other Madame Aquarra.”

  She glared at him. Those same ice eyes, that same downy mustache adorning her upper lip, that same lustrous black hair, just slightly grey-shot, coiled about her head, that same extra fifty pounds stretching tight a bright silk skirt across her yard-wide derrière.

  “There is no other Madame Aquarra. Down through the eons, in all lands during all centuries, there has always only been one Madame Aquarra at any one time to look into the future, to—”

  “Damn!” exclaimed Ballard. “That’s too bad.”

  “Too bad.”

  Not quite a question, not quite a statement. Willing to be informed. Almost, if not quite, smelling money in it somewhere.

  “Yep. In her twenties—rom like yourself—”

  “What you know of the rom?” she demanded quickly.

  “I know they are the only true seers. I know only they are truly blessed with the second sight and the third eye.”

  He didn’t know what he had just said, but Madame Aquarra seemed to like it. She nodded sagely.