32 Cadillacs Read online

  “For all of us?” asked Ballard.

  “Him and Morales, yeah.” Kearny gestured at the repo-crowded street. “You got a problem with that, Larry?”

  “Hell no, no problem, I just wondered how one guy…”

  Ballard ran down. The guy had repo’d seventeen cars in three days! That was a decent score for a decent field man in a decent month. For the first time in his professional life he felt something akin to awe for another man’s work besides Kearny’s; the Great White Father, of course, was always the best. He stepped forward and stuck out his hand to Warren.

  “I’m Larry Ballard.”

  “GnYm kGen Gwarren.”

  Then they were all crowding around and shaking his hand and clapping him on the shoulder, like football players mobbing the guy who took the opening kickoff and ran it back for a touchdown. Warren suddenly understood why they had been staring at him. Not because they’d heard he talked funny. Hell no. Because they were impressed.

  For the first time in his life, the very first time, Ken Warren felt he was part of a group that didn’t give a damn how he talked. However he did it, he spoke their language.

  Kearny said, “Okay, Warren’s got reports to write and cars to get back to the dealers. Giselle and Trin each have a Gypsy Cadillac to do the same with. The rest of us, the Gyppos aren’t going to waste any time spreading the word that someone dropped a rock on a couple of their boats over the weekend.”

  “Hell, Dave,” said O’B, “they were both gotten on drivebys. Maybe the Gyppos’ll figure the law of averages just caught up with them. Only so many new Caddies on the street—”

  “You really believe that?” demanded Kearny in disbelief.

  “Nah.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  We knew somebody would be looking,” Marino offered tentatively. They were in the kitchen of Yana’s ofica, and although he would never admit it, she was pretty impressive on her own turf.

  “Track is always good place to look for Gypsies,” agreed Ristik eagerly. But he came out sounding defensive just as Marino had, even though Yana was his kid sister, so he added, “Just some repomen getting lucky.”

  “That’s some kind of lucky.” Yana shook her head. “No. Somebody very good and very clever is after us.”

  “Repomen are not clever,” said Marino disdainfully.

  “These are.”

  “Or maybe your husband is up to his old tricks of selling our cars to the gadje, and maybe you are helping him…”

  His voice ran down: he had gone too far and knew it. For a moment, her face looked like scraped bone; he felt a stab of superstitious dread. Then she relaxed and shrugged.

  “If Ephrem can make money betraying the rom to the gadje, he will—but he gets no information from me. I don’t know where he is and I don’t want to know. Whether somebody is on to us or not, we have to tell the kumpanias two cars are lost. And I want to know for sure about the repo agency.”

  “Not too hard to find that out,” Marino said.

  At the same time, Ristik said: “Why tell the kumpanias yet? Most of our people are already gone from here—”

  “Then find out,” she told Marino, then told Ristik, “because if a repo agency knows about us, they’ll try to follow us all over the country from here. Also, I can’t leave yet—”

  “Theodore Winston White the Third,” smirked Marino.

  She shot him a venomous glance.

  “If you spent more time on your St. Mark Hotel scam and less on having your clansmen follow us around, hoping to take that fifty-eight pink convertible away from us, maybe you—”

  “What do you know about the St. Mark?” demanded Marino in a furious voice. She laughed aloud, and whirled toward him so her full skirt flared out around her beautiful legs.

  “What do I know? What I know.”

  “If you interfere with that—”

  “Stay away from Teddy White.”

  There was a long pause. Finally, Marino nodded and stood up from the kitchen table, where he and Ristik had been sitting.

  “Agreed.”

  She softened slightly. “I only need a few more days…”

  “Also.”

  They stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment. Then both of them burst out laughing at the same time.

  “Want to be lady-in-waiting to my King after Zlachi dies?”

  “Want to be court jester to my Queen?”

  * * *

  But clattering down the stairs a few minutes later, with no need to keep up a front, Marino was unsmiling.

  Was there a detective agency good enough to tag them as the ones who had hit the bank for the Caddies? Couldn’t be. No agency was that good. Yet as Yana had said, two cars in one weekend out of the fourteen still in the Bay Area were too many.

  And meanwhile, time was tight and his people were having no luck at all in finding the pink 1958 Eldorado convertible. If she turned out to be right about the repo outfit, he’d use it to smoke out the ragtop. Not that he thought she was right.

  As he started down the Romolo steps, a tall blond man with a hawk nose and cold blue eyes passed him coming up. Their eyes locked for a moment, like those of adversary eagles; then the man was gone. On a sudden impulse, Marino turned to look back up the street after him. Yes. Turning in at Madame Miseria’s ofica just as Marino somehow had expected.

  Theodore Winston White III? No. The man who fell for candle readings, and money that bled after a special-dye-soaked bill had been substituted for his, and probably a poisoned egg, and maybe even a cemetery dig, had never viewed the world through such bleakly realistic blue eyes. More likely, a cop.

  Maybe she was in trouble. Good! He hoped she was.

  * * *

  Yana was saying, “We have to find out who repo’d those Cadillacs, and we don’t have the contacts in the cop shop that Rudolph does. If someone in our kumpania could pose as—”

  Ristik stopped her with a characteristic Gypsy shrug, the sort that involves eyebrows, hands, wrists, forearms, shoulders, and a tilt of the head to one side.

  “I still ask, why bother?”

  “Rudolph will use them to panic us into moving the pink Cadillac. He thinks then he can take it away from us and present it to the King as his own.”

  Ristik’s eyes flashed. He shook a rigid forefinger at the ceiling. “He will not take it! Not while there is life in—”

  Yana giggled.

  “Thank you, Cornel Wilde. Or maybe Victor Mature?”

  Ristik looked sheepish. “Okay. But if he thinks—”

  The street buzzer sounded.

  * * *

  Ristik opened the door to stare up at the blond man who said, “I want to see Madame Miseria.”

  Ristik was glad that through habit he had centered himself in the doorway when he opened it. This guy looked like a cop. Yana didn’t need any cops sucking around with their hands out or their backs up, not with Teddy White responding so great. So Ristik’s usually bright snapping eyes went dull with stupidity, his gutturals became thick as engine grease.

  “Madame Miseria is not here.”

  He tried to shut the door, but the blond man’s shoe was in it. Ristik raised his voice for the benefit of Yana waiting behind the curtain at the head of the stairs.

  “You need a warrant to—”

  “I’m no cop.”

  No cop. That made it easy. He tried to shut the door again. The foot had not moved. He put on his best threatening look. The tall blond man put contempt in his voice.

  “You Yana’s husband?”

  Ristik was surprised; few gadje knew his sister’s rom name.

  “I know of no one by the name of Yana.”

  “Then lemme see your license for this mitt-camp.”

  “You said you were not police.”

  “I lied.”

  “Let me see your badge.”

  That’s when Yana called from the head of the stairs, “Ramon. It is all right. Let him come up.”

  * * *
>
  Ballard hadn’t been sure he’d played it right, but here he was trudging up the stairs after the Gyp who had answered the door. And there at the head of the stairs staring down at him was Yana, more beautiful than ever. Beautiful, even with her face closed and unreadable.

  She said, as he came up level with her in the hallway, “Ramon is my brother and he watches out for me.”

  She started down the hall toward the duikkerin room with the velvet drapes and crystal ball, talking over her shoulder to Ballard as she went, a bewildered Ristik trailing along behind.

  “How did you—”

  “Your mother-in-law.”

  In the room she turned to face him, took both his hands in hers, and started laughing. “How much did you have to pay her?”

  “Enough.”

  “Too much, perhaps?” Her voice was teasing.

  He said softly, “Never too much to see you again.”

  Ristik was looking from one to the other as if watching the U.S. Open. Yana was treating this gadjo like an old friend! He opened his mouth to speak, then felt the chill of Yana’s piercing eyes. He shut his mouth, then opened it again, meekly.

  “I’ll make some tea,” he said.

  She nodded like a queen as she and Ballard sat down facing each other across the boojo table. They spoke in unison.

  “So why did you—”

  “So how have you—”

  Both stopped. Both laughed. She took his hands across the table, as she had done with Teddy White, as she did with all the gadje marks. But wasn’t this different? Surely very different?

  “So why did you seek me out in Santa Rosa?”

  “Old times?” asked Ballard.

  She merely shook her head. He nodded. Gestured around the room with its long concealing drapes.

  “Could we maybe go out somewhere to—”

  “No.”

  He nodded again, going slow, letting her set the tone. She was all he had, but more than that, she was even more dazzling now than three years ago. And he’d been booted out by Beverly…

  “Maybe later? Another time?”

  Yana felt herself weakening, felt herself short of breath the way she had been last time. But she had been a girl then, rebelling against the dread return of her husband. She was a woman now, she must not give in to her attraction to this tall blond gadjo.

  “To have your fortune told?” she asked almost coquettishly.

  Ballard was staring at her, trying to read her.

  “Whatever it takes,” he said.

  So he felt it too. But even so, it could not be. She had taught herself to read and write, and when her husband had come back and had beaten her for it, she had left Madame Aquarra’s home and ofica with her bride price and had never returned.

  Now, to the San Francisco kumpania, she was a woman of substance with her place in their councils. And very shortly, if she could keep Rudolph from getting the pink Cadillac, she would be Queen of all the Gypsies.

  The pink Cadillac. The thirty-second Cadillac. If only…

  And then she knew—knew before he said it—why Ballard was there. She shivered, because she had never believed in her own hocus-pocus: few Gypsy fortune-tellers did, or at least few would admit it. But here was the answer to her problem.

  Ballard said, “You remember when we met that I was a detective looking for—”

  “Yes. For a woman who had worked for your own company.”

  “This time I’m a detective looking for a bunch of Gypsies.”

  Yes. She had known what he was going to say. And now… now she knew that she was going to do to Rudolph just what he planned to do to her. She put scorn into her voice.

  “So you come to my ofica asking me to betray—”

  “I don’t want you to betray anyone,” Ballard said hotly.

  He did, of course. That’s why he had come to her. But… not really. Really, it was the memory of that velvet night…

  Yana disengaged her hands from his, sat back with a judging look across the table, not speaking. Ballard cleared his throat.

  “All the Gypsies in the country can’t be your friends.”

  The draperies behind him parted silently, and Ristik started through with a tray on which were cups and a teapot and several diamonds of baklava, dripping honey. Yana narrowed her eyes at him and he just as silently withdrew again.

  “No,” she agreed gravely, “not even most of them.”

  “So if someone you felt no obligation toward has…”

  “Has what?” she asked quickly.

  “Has, um… stolen some Cadillacs—”

  “Stolen?”

  “Absconded with. Embezzled.”

  After a dramatic pause, she said, “And if I were one of those Gypsies who has done this, then I suppose you would—”

  “Are you?”

  Don’t hesitate. The pause betrayed the lie. “No.”

  Don’t hesitate. The pause betrayed the lie. “Even if you were, I’d look the other way.”

  It wasn’t really a lie. He would look the other way. The rest of DKA wouldn’t, but he would. Yana leaned toward him.

  “There is another kumpania that has recently moved into the Bay Area, led by a man named Rudolph—I don’t know his last name or what he looks like—I have never met him. But he is a bad man, a bold man, he will do almost anything for money. It is such people who give the rom a bad name among the gadje, and such a man might well be involved in something like this… this theft of these Cadillacs…”

  Ballard felt his excitement rising. If he could just get some leads from her… “There are over thirty cars,” he said.

  “Of course if I am to ask around, perhaps learn something about their activities, where you might find some of these Cadillacs … I would lose money… be in some danger…”

  “Hundred bucks for every recovery we make,” said Ballard promptly, with no disillusionment in his voice. She would surely want payment hand-to-hand, and when hands touched…

  She was leaning forward again, eagerly, like a child, excitement and intrigue in her eyes, as if the prospect of money had rekindled her personal feeling for him. She laid her open hand palm-up on the table. She almost giggled again.

  And actually said, “Cross my palm with silver.”

  Ballard hesitated but a moment, then dug out his money clip and counted five twenties into her palm. That left him with three bucks. She closed her hand around the money.

  “I wish to prove my heart is true,” she said, “so I will find you a car, today. After today, if I have information for you I will leave a message only we will understand, and you will come, and I will tell your fortune, and you will—”

  “—pay you for the reading,” finished Ballard.

  “And only you and I will know of it, no one else! I will be your… what do the police say? Your snitch!” She smiled complacently and leaned back in her chair. The $100 had disappeared. She glanced casually beyond him and added with delight, “And here is Ramon with the tea!”

  Ristik came through the draperies with his tray again, as if just coming from the kitchen rather than lurking and listening behind the curtains. Ballard ignored him, wondering hopefully what else Yana might come to be for him besides his snitch.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The two cheap metal plaques were placed so they would be facing anyone who sat down across the desk from the broken-down swivel chair in the narrow cubicle. One read, INSPECTOR HARRY CALLAHAN, with, underneath it, Dirty Harry. The other read, FEEL SAFE TONIGHT—SLEEP WITH A COP.

  “Pretty good, huh?” demanded a voice behind her.

  Giselle turned. The man wore an off-the-rack suit and Polo aftershave obviously applied in the men’s room after seeing that she was good-looking. The cheap suit said honest cop; the Polo, and the leer he was giving her despite his wedding band, said son of a bitch. Said, to Giselle, don’t trust the cheap suit.

  She stuck out her hand and said, on that insight’s impulse, “Inspector… Callahan? Gerry M
erman, free-lance journalist. I want to do an article about the Gypsies, and—”

  “Harrigan, not Callahan. Bunco.” Going around the desk, he ignored her hand but not what she had down the front of her blouse. “The other guys gave me that plaque ’cause my name is Harry an’ I get all the dirty jobs.” To her silence he added, “You know, Dirty Harry Callahan… in the movies…”

  Giselle finally nodded. Harrigan was the SFPD Gypsy man, and despite his wandering eye she needed his help.

  “Clint Eastwood,” she supplied.

  “Yeah. As for the other plaque…”

  “Very clever,” she agreed too quickly.

  “Yeah.” A little sourly.

  He lit a cigarette and leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. Early 40s, Irish, red hair faded to pink by the grey in it, face full of sexual predation. Would once have been good-looking and would have known it, still would never regard his mirror with less than full approval.

  Just the reverse of O’Bannon’s bright blarney Irish coin.

  “So, Gerry, you wanna do an article about me an’ the Gyppos. Well, lemme give you an example…”

  Two retired brothers, both in their 80s, lived in one of the showplace homes across the Boulevard from the Marina Green. A his/her pair of Gyppos had come knocking on their door claiming to be from the French Hostel welfare department…

  “Musta staked ’em out an’ followed ’em home, ’cause these old guys belonged to the hostel, all right—but they’d never heard of any welfare department there…”

  Giselle realized that Bunco was even more depressing than Homicide. At least death had a hard truth. In Bunco it was all lies, lies to vulnerable old people who thought they had been helping the police catch a bad guy by cleaning out their trust account, only to learn they had given their life savings to some slime who’d dreamed up a new wrinkle on the pigeon drop.

  “Anyway, the woman talks to ’em, prob’ly hints around about doin’ ’em, y’get my drift…” He was leering at her through his cigarette smoke. “Meanwhile, her partner is goin’ through the house. Gyppos know how to smell money. One old guy had thirteen hundred cash in the inside pocket of one of his suits in the closet, his brother had five hundred. That’s eighteen hundred bucks!”