32 Cadillacs Page 13

“How do you know this?”

  “The young rom woman I thought was Madame Aquarra. She told my fortune and eventually it made me quite a lot of money. I want her to have some of it.”

  “She told you this fortune here? In my ofica?”

  Ballard thought fast. Yana obviously wasn’t here, and he knew the old gal hated her; so he shook a chiding finger at her.

  “You’re testing me, aren’t you, Madame Aquarra? Of course not here in your ofica. In…” He waved his hand in a dismissive manner. “But she’s gone from there…”

  He fell silent. Silence was useful: it might work even with this crusty old Gypsy woman driven by anger and greed.

  “Madame Aquarra knows of whom you speak,” she admitted in a suddenly mellifluous voice. “And of course Madame Aquarra knows the way in which she released your power so that you found financial success. So…”

  Ballard just stood there beaming at her, his hands in his pockets. He had her. Goddammit, he had her! Or her greed did.

  “So give me your gift for her and I will get it to her.”

  Ballard slowly moved his head from side to side, still without speaking, still with that silly grin on his face. The sudden anger he had hoped for suffused her features: yes! She hated her daughter-in-law hard enough to sell her out to a gadjo.

  “How much for her?” Madame Aquarra demanded bluntly.

  He brought his hand out of his pocket clutching two $50 bills. Madame Aquarra stared at them, then met his bland eyes with her angry ones. A shiver ran through him. She was a powerful presence despite her venality.

  “Madame Miseria. San Francisco.”

  He gave her a single fifty. Silently. She spoke again, as if he were physically dragging the words out of her.

  “North Beach.”

  Madame Miseria. Now he remembered her sign in… Romolo Place, that was it. He got around the City a lot, he knew most of the streets well. So Madame Miseria was Yana. Hot damn!

  He gave Madame Aquarra the other fifty. Who immediately exclaimed: “Go! Find her! Destroy her! Rip her eyes out!”

  Then Madame Aquarra slammed the door in his face.

  Ballard went down to his car both elated and uneasy. He had found her—unless the old lady had conned him. No. She had stopped believing his story of a reward, she thought the gadjo wanted to bust Yana for something. Her hatred had fused with her greed and she had dropped dime on her daughter-in-law.

  So it looked as if Yana had gotten away from her—and one way or another must have taken her bride price with her.

  Ballard’s unease came from the fact that he’d parked where Madame Aquarra could get his license number if she were so inclined. He didn’t believe in Gypsy curses, but he did believe in the efficiency of their information network.

  He drove off thinking, Maybe I ought to get word back to her that something really terrible has come down on Yana. That would make her happy and perhaps forget all about Larry Ballard.

  Which would make Larry Ballard sleep better that night.

  * * *

  Sleep that entire weekend had been in short supply for Ken Warren. Somehow he had gotten it fixed in his head that those three days were some sort of test for him. Show Dan Kearny that he was a real carhawk, and the DKA job would be his.

  There is a surprising number of things a guy with his sort of handicap can do to keep the bills paid, and Warren had done most of them, from civilian contract worker in Vietnam twenty years before (nobody with his kind of speech impediment could get into the military, he’d tried hard enough), to migrant laborer, to stevedoring on the docks, to pushing a big-rig, to, of all things, bartending.

  But repoman was what he liked best, he was really good at it if they didn’t try to make him talk to people. He got to use his smarts when he was a repoman. He got to figure out what the other guy had done and was going to do next. There was excitement and challenge and now and then intense danger. The perfect job.

  Not that he’d faced any danger this weekend.

  The woman with the can of coffee had taken off.

  The guy with the big boyfriend hadn’t come back.

  But lots of other people had been home. Pedestrians now, every one of them. The guy in Fairfax in Marin County, up on the hill with the dirt road, who’d wanted to argue about his truck until Warren had picked him up under the arms like a baby and set him on a shelf in his garage as if he were a can of paint.

  “Gnaw gnhew nthtay nere nhtil Ahm ghawn.”

  The guy didn’t look like he understood the words, but he stayed there on the shelf as Warren drove away in his pickup.

  The man and his wife down in Burlingame on the Peninsula with the twin his-and-hers Buick Reattas and the vicious watchdog. Warren had stolen the first Buick at 3:00 A.M., the second at 3:30, the first from the driveway, the second from the carport, without even waking up their Rottweiler in the backyard. In fact, he’d tied a big red bow he’d found in the back of one of the repos to the gate of the dog’s pen as a little joke.

  There had been one hairy moment in San Francisco’s Castro District when a crowd of hostile gays had been watching him break into a Ford Aerostar van. But some guy had helped chill them out, and then, when Ken was about to drive away, had handed him the keys! The registered owner. He’d just stood there watching Ken take it, ashamed to admit being behind in his payments.

  Then that other guy down South of Market, who had jumped on the hood of his own Plymouth Laser and spread his topcoat wide in front of the windshield in an attempt to keep Warren from driving it away. The Laser hit a phone pole, but still ran, so it came off better than the guy on the hood: he’d ended up in SF General with breaks and contusions and a bad case of gutter mouth from French-kissing a sewer grate.

  No, the problems Ken Warren had faced hadn’t been the subjects whose cars he was taking. The first was that along about 5:00 A.M. Monday he had run out of gas—him, not his car—and had fallen asleep on stakeout at 25th Ave and El Camino del Mar in Seacliff, The lady with the Beemer 535i never showed, and he woke bleary-eyed and fog-frosted at 6:30. He washed and shaved in the men’s room at the Seacliff Motel up behind Sutro Heights, even had toast and coffee in their dining room before driving unwillingly back toward the DKA office.

  Unwillingly, because that’s where his other problem was waiting. He hadn’t had a key to the DKA garage, so he’d street-parked the cars he’d repossessed around the block the office was on. Worse than that, when he’d run out of parking places he’d left the final repo right-angled across the sidewalk with its front bumper nudging DKA’s heavy garage door.

  He bet Dan Kearny was going to be really steamed about that.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  When Dan Kearny got to the office at 7:33 Monday morning, he was really steamed. Some idiot had nosed a car across the sidewalk to block the DKA storage garage door. And wouldn’t you know, there wasn’t a single parking place in either direction where he could leave his car until he could move this one.

  After double-parking in the street with the blinkers on, he went through the office deactivating the alarms, then out the back to unlock the heavy wooden sliding door and flick the switch on the little motor that rumbled it aside. Grumbling to himself, he got the car started and was backing it out into the street when Giselle double-parked behind it, boxing him in.

  “What’s that doing here?” she demanded.

  “My very thought. I’m going to leave it in the street for the cops to tag and tow—”

  “You can’t. Until we turned in our files last week, I was carrying the paper on that one.”

  “I’ll be damned!” said Kearny. “It must have been in that fistful of cases I gave Ken Warren on Friday. He must have grabbed it over the weekend and parked it here because he didn’t have a garage key. Not too shabby for a new man.”

  “There’s another one of mine across the street.”

  “Got two? Hey, terrif!” He paused, suddenly uneasy. “Ah, listen, Giselle, I fired the cleaning service on Friday.�
�

  “You what? Why didn’t you wait until I found somebody else who we can count on to—”

  That’s when O’B drove up and half got out of his car.

  * * *

  O’B had spent most of Saturday at the airfield up in Sonoma, trying to get a line on the Gyppos who had “sold” the ancient biplane to Doc Swigart—no luck—most of yesterday in the Old Clam House under the freeway near the Army Street off-ramp, and most of last night in an all-night steamroom on Market Street soaking clam juice out of his system.

  One foot on the blacktop, he craned cautiously over the roof of his car as if he were still hung over despite his fresh-scrubbed, russet look from the steam. He shamelessly gargled his r’s for his best Blarney-stone brogue—a gone-slightly-to-seed Irish potato with bloodshot eyes.

  “Faith an’ bejesus, an’ ’tis the wee leprechauns who’ve been busy this blessed weekend.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?” demanded Kearny, though he was starting to get an idea that he already knew.

  “Makin’ all the shoemaker’s shoon in the night an’ slippin’ away at first light.”

  “How many of ’em are yours?”

  O’B came around his car to slap a lean freckled hand on the hood of a green Cutlass Supreme right in front of the office.

  “This.” He turned and pointed down the block. “That one. And that pickup over there from Marin. Two more around the corner …” He grinned at Kearny. “Maybe now you appreciate just how much work I turn out in the course of a day’s—”

  Kearny had just begun pointing out that someone else had repossessed all those cars assigned to O’B, not the Irishman himself, when Larry Ballard drove up.

  * * *

  Ballard already had been around the block and through little one-block Norfolk Alley behind, and there was not one damned parking place to be found. Usually, early on a Monday morning, there’d be a dozen free.

  And now this, people standing around in the middle of the street waving their arms. What was going on? A convention?

  Or maybe it was trouble. Yeah, there were Kearny, Giselle, O’B… some guy’s car blocking the garage… He squealed to a stop behind O’B’s car and piled out, feeling behind the seat for his tire iron, only then belatedly realizing that nobody was there except the DKA crew. He went up to them.

  “What happened?”

  Kearny swept his arm around in an all-encompassing gesture. “How many of ’em were assigned to you, Larry?”

  For the first time Ballard began checking license plates.

  “I’ll… be… damned…” He shook his head. “I see those his-and-hers Buicks from down the Peninsula, I bet I hit that address a dozen times without getting a sniff of those cars, just a big damn dog who tried to bite off my—”

  “Don’t say it! “ exclaimed Giselle in alarm.

  “—foot,” finished Ballard, then said in equal alarm to O’B, “Nobody grabbed our Mercedes from Pietro, did they? I—”

  “I didn’t see it.” O’B turned to Kearny, “How many guys did you have out in the field over the weekend, Reverend?”

  Before Kearny could respond, Bart Heslip drove up.

  * * *

  He bounced out of his car like answering the opening bell.

  “Who got run over?”

  “Last week’s cases,” said Ballard.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Somebody did. Repeatedly.” Then it was Ballard’s turn to wave his arm around like Balboa on a peak in Darién. “How many do you recognize, Bart?”

  Surprise widened Heslip’s eyes.

  “That Laser with the front end bashed in was one of mine.”

  “I hope we didn’t do the bashing,” said Kearny quickly.

  “I couldn’t say. I never laid eyes on the car while I was carrying the assignment. I’d started to think the guy was made out of smoke…” He interrupted himself in sudden panic. “Nobody got Sarah, did they? If I spent my weekend chasing Gyppos without a sniff and somebody knocked off that Charger—”

  “I didn’t see it on the street,” said Ballard. “Unless it’s inside—”

  “The guys I had out over the weekend didn’t have keys to the garage,” said Kearny.

  Heslip’s eyes had lit on another of the parked cars. “Hey, there’s that Aerostar van, the one that—”

  “Out in the Castro,” nodded Giselle, who had assigned the case to him in the first place.

  “I only had it for a week,” said Heslip defensively. “With all the other cases I was working—”

  “The guy who got it only had it for a weekend,” Kearny interrupted in his most offensive manner.

  Heslip was indeed offended. “What guy?”

  “I only had two men out, and one of them is a green pea who just started Friday. So probably Morales—”

  Just then Morales drove up in one of the Gyppo Caddies!

  * * *

  Instead of being grateful, Kearny, that chingada, was on him like a junkyard dog.

  “What are you doing with that Cadillac?”

  “Driving it,” smirked Morales as he got out. He’d driven it the whole weekend, Jesus, what a boat! Power everything. “Bringing it in to make out my report and—”

  Ballard had been looking through the windshield to cheek the I.D. number against their Gypsy Cadillac master list.

  “Yeah, it’s one of ours,” he said in a crestfallen voice. “But what’s this bastard doing working for us again, anyway?”

  “Chinga tu madre, maricón! You wanna go ’round right—”

  Heslip got between them but Ballard was ready to go—last time Morales had knocked him down, this time that wouldn’t be so easy for him. Ballard was older, wiser, fitter, with a few years of karate under his belt.

  Not that karate, come to think of it, had made much difference to Fearsome Freddi of the leather underwear.

  Ignoring the ruckus, Kearny said, “We needed a couple of extra men to pick up the slack on the files you turned in so you guys could work the Gypsy stuff.”

  “Only a couple of extra men?” Giselle was looking around with a dazed expression. Apparently all the parking places were filled with repos. “Two guys? All this?”

  But Kearny had remembered all over again that Morales wasn’t supposed to even know about the Gypsy cases, let alone be working any of them.

  “You snooped those Gypsy files!” he stormed. “That’s what you were doing when I saw you in the front upstairs office on Friday afternoon! Dammit, Morales, I want—”

  “Hey, I got one, didn’t I?” Morales jerked a thumb at Ballard. “That’s more than hotshot here did over the weekend.” He stepped closer to Kearny, an insinuating look on his face. “Listen, I bet you’re offerin’ everybody a bonus on each Gyppo car they turn, right? Now it seems to me that if I was workin’ Gyppo cases along with the rest of the guys…”

  “No bonuses, and I can’t trust you anyway,” said Kearny flatly. “Not on something like this. You were hired to pick up the slack—”

  “I’d still like to know who repo’d all these cars, since it obviously wasn’t any of us,” said O’Bannon.

  That’s when Ken Warren drove up.

  * * *

  He knew it, he just knew it. The car he’d left in front of the garage door now was backed halfway into the street, and Kearny was waving his arms at some Mexican dude in the middle of a bunch of people like maybe there’d been an accident.

  He didn’t remember a Spanish surname on any of the cases he’d worked, but he’d been knockin’ ’em off pretty fast, he couldda forgotten a name. He’d never gotten a crack at so many easy repos in his life. These DKA guys must really talk to the man, like Kearny had said, instead of just grabbing cars.

  Ken Warren really liked just grabbing cars.

  He double-parked his company car like everyone else had, and sort of tiptoed down toward the group. Hey, they were all operatives, he bet. In fact, he bet he could figure out who was who just from reading the reports on the cases
he’d been handed.

  He couldn’t place the Mex guy, but the Mick with red hair and freckles and boozer’s face, that had to be O’Bannon, the one signed himself O’B.

  The black guy he’d seen fight, that was Bart Heslip. Not very marked up for an ex-pro middleweight.

  Kearny had said the tall good-looking blond lady was Giselle Marc, office manager. She also worked the field—he couldn’t blame her there, that’s where the action was.

  And the lean handsome muscular guy, must do a lot of surfing or SCUBA-diving to have his hair bleached almost white like that, he had to be Ballard.

  Inevitably, Kearny saw him. Came over working his face and waving his arms just as he’d been doing at the Mexican guy a couple of minutes ago.

  “Warren, what the hell were you doing over the weekend?”

  Giselle breathed, just loud enough for Kearny, “What do you think he was doing? Proving he is the greatest carhawk the world has ever known.”

  The rest of them had turned to stare at Warren as if he were from another planet—and he hadn’t even opened his mouth yet. He shifted uneasily from foot to foot, trying to figure out what Kearny wanted him to answer. Then inspiration struck.

  “Hey, Mr. Kearny, Ah gnthalk ta gha man!”

  Kearny astounded him by busting out laughing. And then clapping him on the shoulder and demanding, “You talk to all the men?” He seemed to be getting the hang of the way Ken spoke.

  “Well, no, juth nthoz who—”

  “How many cars did you grab since Friday afternoon?”

  He didn’t have to consult his case files to answer that one. He’d counted them up during breakfast. “Nthevnteen.”

  “Seventeen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Police reports?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Condition reports?”

  He’d completed those over breakfast and he’d rather show than tell, so he held out the sheaf of completed forms. Kearny looked at them, then nodded and turned to the rest of them still standing around staring as if they were at Fleishacker Zoo.

  “Ken Warren,” said Kearny with a flourish, then added with masterful understatement, “he’ll be covering for you while you work the Gypsy accounts.”