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  And shrieked in pain as the rough fabric scraped across innumerable splinters to drive them deeper into his bruised and lacerated rear end.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Because Giselle was out in the field chasing Gypsies, Dan Kearny was stuck in the office with all the routine paperwork they usually shared. And it was making him feel old.

  Time was, his field agents needed him to clean up their messes; now, he’d trained ’em to be the best in the business.

  Time was, at Walter’s Auto Detectives—before he founded DKA with Giselle and O’B and Kathy Onoda, God rest her soul—he was the best field agent in the business.

  Now … Old. Mighty old.

  His phone rang. Jane Goklson’s voice was in his ear. “A man calling himself Ephrem Poteet is on line—”

  Kearny, suddenly twenty years younger, punched into the blinking red light. “Whadda ya have for me?”

  A recognized chuckle and heavy tones came at him over the wire. “Always right to business with you, ain’t it, Kearny?”

  “Gadje manners.”

  “Okay. Los Angeles. Silverlake District. Wasso Tomeshti. TV sets. And I’ll take my hundred bucks now, up front.”

  “Not for that you won’t. I need more. What’s the scam?”

  “Factory-direct to consumer. That’s all you get.”

  Kearny recognized finality, but more than that, had a flash of inspiration.

  “Your hundred’s in the mail.”

  He hung up, sat there behind his desk. Fired up a Marlboro, forgot to shake out the match until the flame touched his fingertips. In all the years he’d dealt through various P.O. boxes with Poteet, they had never laid eyes on each other. He took a puff of his cigarette.

  “No,” he said aloud. “Not enough. Not nearly enough.”

  Not this time. This time he needed leverage, or Poteet would string out his info for weeks in an attempt to raise the $100-per ante—while the subject Gypsies scattered like quail.

  Right now Poteet was calling the shots, and Dan Kearny didn’t like anyone calling the shots on him.

  He didn’t like feeling old, either.

  He shook his heavy silvered head, chuckled, jerked open a drawer to grab out one of the made-up Gypsy folders with everything they knew on each Cadillac. He didn’t have a set of keys cut for the cars, but what the hell? Stay hungry.

  As he went past Jane’s desk, she piped up cheerily, “Where to, Mr. K? Your meeting with Stan at the bank isn’t until—”

  “Cancel it.”

  “But—”

  “And hold my calls.”

  “But—”

  “Hold tomorrow’s calls, too.”

  “But…”

  “And maybe the day’s after that.”

  From her wastebasket he grabbed a discarded FINAL NOTICE window envelope with a canceled stamp on it—a shocking-red envelope designed to catch a delinquent’s eye—and took a sheet of letterhead from her desk. Then he was gone.

  * * *

  Few would recognize Wasso Tomeshti in sleek Mr. Adam Wells.

  Wasso Tomeshti was a greasy-curled rom who wore a heavy curled mustache with a day’s beard, bright shirts, a brick-red bandana around his thick throat, and black jeans tucked into the tops of black leather hack boots. Mr. Adam Wells, his finest creation, wore a painfully close shave, too much cheap cologne, a gangrenous three-piece electric-green suit, a purple and gold plaid shirt, a paisley tie mostly orange, and black loafers.

  “Want a little air?” Mr. Adam Wells asked expansively.

  “No, I’m fine,” said Sam Hood.

  If Sam Hood thought Adam Wells sleazy—a compliment in Sam’s book—he also knew Adam Wells was making enough of those big fat greasy bucks everyone yearned for to tool along Ventura Boulevard in a white Seville STS four-door notchback that went for $40,000 stripped. And this baby was loaded. Ultra-soft leather seats, hand-fitted to the car with French upholstery seams; air, Delco AM/FM stereo deck and C/D player, custom phaeton roof, power everything … still had paper plates and the new-car smell.

  Like riding on a cloud.

  “Trade every year,” Wells was bragging. “One a these, then a Lincoln Town Car, then a Chrysler Imperial.” A chuckle. “Gotta keep the Big Three going, y’know.” Sam Hood knew. He also knew he wanted some of Wells’s big fat greasy bucks. Wells added, “Yeah, strictly American, that’s me.”

  “Except for TV sets?” Sam put a sly question mark on it.

  “The TV sets are business” Wells slapped the steering wheel with beringed fingers. “This here is personal. This here is love of country.” He gestured with the stogie. “There she is, just ahead.”

  “She” was a nearly completed motel on the south side of the Boulevard near Tujunga that damn near popped Sam’s eyes out of his head. Behind it rose green-foliaged hills studded with million-dollar homes. There was an obscene amount of construction going on along Ventura, but none of it was more opulent than this block-square U-shaped motel complex.

  Wells pulled the Seville over to the curb to gesture.

  “In the middle there’s gonna be a fountain. Palm trees, lots of shrubbery. We got a Spago’s coming in, shops, boutiques, indoor an’ outdoor pool, sauna, a World Gym …”

  Having a little trouble with his voice, Sam asked, “How many color TV sets did you say you’re gonna need from me?”

  “I didn’t, but maybe three hundred to start. Sure, that’s chicken feed, but we’ll double-deck next year and’ll need another five hundred. Not much even then, I know, but—”

  “No, no—no job too small,” said Sam quickly.

  You bet your butt, thought Wasso. Three hundred would clear out this gadjo’s stock on hand—he’d checked. That’s why Wasso had picked him even though he might be connected. A dangerous man, perhaps, but hungry enough to be stupid.

  When Wells had wanted “a few” color consoles for “his” motel at a discount off the already low wholesale delivery price that was Sam’s stock-in-trade, Hood had pictured a couple dozen run-down units huddled around a postage-stamp pool with dead bugs floating around in it. But this…

  This was money in the bank. His entire stock in one transaction! Since all his TVs fell off the back of the truck, anyway—with the driver’s reimbursed cooperation—he was going to make a dizzying amount of money off this turkey.

  Of course if Sam Hood, even tough as he was and with his underworld connections, had known this turkey was a Gyppo, he would have jumped from the Caddy and sewn his pockets shut. But he didn’t.

  “I’d love to show you around the place,” Wells was saying regretfully, “but I’m doing lunch at LAX with a couple of Japanese investors between planes. So we’d better—”

  “There’s Jap money in this?” asked Hood, awed for sure.

  “Nah, they don’t fool with penny-ante crap like this. We got a seven-golf-course deal cooking that…” He broke off to laugh. “No you don’t. Enough said about that.” He opened his door. “I see the foreman there, can you wait for just a minute?”

  Tomeshti was already out of the car and walking over to a man checking things off on a clipboard. He pointed at the roof.

  “How high is that?”

  The workman frowned at him. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Who the hell am I?” Tomeshti took a step closer and pounded a fist into his other hand. “A taxpayer, that’s who.” He started away toward the Seville, then turned back to point at the nonplussed workman and yell, “And don’t you forget it, pal!”

  He got back in, pushing blood into his face to flush it.

  “Trouble?” Hood couldn’t help asking as they pulled away from the curb in a harsh shriek of rubber.

  “Nah—it’s just that you say three hundred TV sets are coming tomorrow, the rooms gotta be ready, does he say they’ll be ready? Hell no. He says…” He shook his head, then brightened. “To hell with all that. Let’s go over to your office and sign that contract for those TVs. I’ll take delivery tomorrow no matter what th
e damn foreman says. And pay you for all three hundred sets right then.” He looked over at Sam Hood as the big Caddy lanced through the Ventura Boulevard traffic. “A check on the corporation account is all right, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” said a dazzled Sam Hood. “Money in the bank.”

  * * *

  Dan Kearny’s rental Cutlass took the Silver Lake off-ramp from the Hollywood Freeway to a wide messy street of narrow messy retail businesses with wide messy signs over them. Furniture stores. Karate studios. Doughnut shops. Hairdressers. Clothing stores spilling racks out across the sidewalk full of the sort of flowered sport shirts that make you want to roll a pack of cigarettes up in one sleeve. Mostly brown faces crowding the sidewalks, a lot of Habla Español signs.

  After an hour of cruising he spotted the billboard:

  FACTORY-DIRECT TO THE CONSUMER

  Beneath that was:

  MITSUBISHI—SONY—HITACHI—TV

  ONE-TIME UNHEARD-OF PRICES

  Kearny thought he got a glimpse of the con, and started to chuckle. He found an open meter, parked and locked, walked back. Bright sunlight, tempered with acrid smog felt in nose and throat, was hot on the shoulders of his San Francisco-weight wool suit. He looked into the empty storefront through recently washed windows. Floor fresh-swept, racks waiting to receive their sale TVs. Sales counter in the back, glassed-in office partition behind that. Realtor’s sign still in the window. Phone number and an address in the next block.

  No Cadillac in the narrow dirt parking lot out in back, not that Kearny had expected any when he saw the empty showroom. He wove his way through the polylingual crowd to the realty office; he had to know who Tomeshti was and when he would show.

  Dusty pictures of commercial bargains nobody wanted crowded the front windows. Inside it was a narrow storefront with four battered hardwood desks down one wall and a manager’s office in the rear. Latinas at two of the desks, the others empty.

  A blonde with metallic hair that could break a fingernail came up from the office. She reeked of musk and greed. Too many teeth, a face-lift that hadn’t helped blunt her icepick eyes.

  “E. Dana Straub. ’Nye do for ya?”

  “The empty storefront in the next block—”

  “Din’t you see the billboard?”

  “Televisions factory-direct?” He shrugged. “Place is empty right now, today, and right now, today, it’s just what I need for my retail electronics store.”

  E. Dana Straub got a look compounded equally of greed and regret. “Mr. Wells has already signed the contract.”

  “Danny Wells?” demanded Kearny in delight. “I can—”

  “Adam Wells.”

  “Oh. But don’t matter—I’ll sublease from him instead.”

  “The terms of his lease stipulate no sublets.”

  Kearny brought out his flash roll—a hundred wrapped around a couple of dozen ones—and leaned suggestively across the counter with a dirty look in his eyes.

  “Lease contracts can get lost…”

  She sighed regretfully. “We remodeled to meet his needs, and Mr. Wells is moving his stock in tomorrow. At the end of the week he’s giving me a check for the entire year’s lease …”

  Calling himself Wells … be here tomorrow …

  Kearny put his roll away and shook her hand heartily, a good loser. E. Dana Straub had a warm sweaty palm. Out in the smog-browned sunlight, he thought that the Gyppo had to be very good indeed to con that stainless-steel lady into nothing down, pay at the end of the week—when both he and his hustled TV sets would be gone and she’d be stuck with her remodel.

  * * *

  It had been a lousy day for Ephrem Poteet on the Universal Tour shuttle buses. Every woman he sized up had her purse zipped, every man had his wallet in his front pants pocket instead of on his hip, and none of the kids was bratty enough to give the natural diversions he needed while he made his dip.

  A lousy day. Less than a hundred bucks in seven hours.

  The trouble’d begun when he’d donned the maintenance uniform and lifted all those wallets that one afternoon. So much extra security as a result of it that he was reduced to working only two days a week; even then he’d had a couple of close calls and been saved only by his disguises. He’d given his big score to the ponies, and now was barely making the rent. Kearny’s $100 a car was suddenly looking damned good.

  * * *

  As he thought that, Dan Kearny went into the Universal City Post Office across Lankershim from the studio to check through the semi-opaque window of Poteet’s P.O. box. Not even junk mail. Already picked up today? Still, worth a shot now he was here; it was the only place he could make physical contact with his man.

  Behind the counter was a strikingly handsome black man in postal uniform, likely an actor waiting to be discovered. Kearny gave him the used red window envelope with its canceled stamp. Inside was his blank sheet of letterhead, now with five $20 bills folded into it and Poteet’s handwritten box address showing through the window.

  “This was lying under the bank of boxes. Guy must have dropped it when he picked up his mail.”

  “Sure. Thanks. I’ll put it right back.”

  Kearny went back outside and, sheltered from the hot sun by an overhanging tree, sat in the Cutlass to keep observation on the P.O. boxes through the big plate-glass window. If Poteet did come in to check his, being a Gypsy he would be sure to spot anyone hanging around in the post office lobby itself.

  * * *

  Leaving the special-effects demo without scoring yet again, Poteet felt sudden rage roil up inside. Tomeshti driving around in a new Caddy, him riding the stinking bus. Well, he had a line on three other cars besides the Seville, and over the next weeks he would feed them to DKA, hundred bucks a pop, getting even with goddam Yana for making all this necessary …

  He left Universal through the Main Gate, just in case someone was lying in wait for him at the Studio Tour gate. Maybe he would get drunk tonight, get in a fight. Get the bastard on the ground, knee-drop him—you could crush a guy’s ribs that way, even kill him. Yeah! Grrr! Everybody said the Gypsies were conmen, nonviolent—but he’d done a hard deuce at Walla Walla during which he’d learned a thing or two. He’d show ’em.

  Goddam bus was just pulling away when he got out to the street. It figured. Another half-hour wait.

  May as well check the P.O. box again even though he’d checked it this morning—Kearny might have sent his $100 same-day delivery or something.

  * * *

  To pass the time, Kearny was playing the guessing game about those entering the post office. Three beautiful women in their 20s—easy, actresses from Universal. An older woman with white hair and the bearing of a queen—director, perhaps? A white-haired southern colonel limping along with his gold-headed ebony cane—aging character actor in a TV mellerdrama. A couple of suits—had to be execs from the Black Tower.

  But no Ephrem Poteet, Gypsy. Not coming tonight. Kearny’d hang on for another hour just to …

  Flash of red! The envelope, please. Never would have taken the old Kentucky colonel for Poteet, must be running a scam. Looking quickly around the lobby—Kearny was glad he was outside in his car—then ripping open the red envelope. Taking out the sheet of letterhead, staring at the $100 folded inside … Pocketing it, quickly caning his way out of the building.

  Kearny already had slid down in his seat so he was not visible over the dashboard. This guy was jumpy as a cat. Watched the angled rearview until the Gyppo’s retreating back came into it. Shifted around, staying low in the seat until the bus came and Poteet boarded it.

  Tailing a bus is not as easy as it might seem, not during rush hour. You can get blocked off by other cars, lose your man when he debarks. But Kearny was an old hand at it, so he was driving by when Poteet walked into a run-down residence hotel on North Main not far from the old Union Station, was parked in a meter space across the street when Poteet emerged minus his disguise thirty minutes later.

  He was sipping
a draft three stools down when Poteet got into an argument over liar’s dice and got 86’d from the first of several bars he visited that evening. After the third, Kearny dropped out to buy a cheap camera and film and find a motel for the night. He settled on the Sherman Oaks Inn on Ventura. He still didn’t know what Poteet’s scam was, didn’t have any leverage on him yet. Which meant a busy day tomorrow.

  He didn’t bother to call the office. Nothing to report.

  Yet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  With Kearny gone off somewhere, Giselle had been stuck behind her desk all day. Now, 7:00 P.M., the after-school girls had abandoned the automatic typewriters, the skeleton night staff had arrived—and Giselle was still here. And cranky.

  The limo outfit in L.A. hadn’t called back. Dan Kearny hadn’t called in, no idea where the big bum was. Ballard was probably playing footsie with his red-hot Gypsy mama and getting all sorts of hot leads, while Giselle hadn’t even time to ask any hotels if they had an Angelo Grimaldi registered, or to check out who Theodore Winston White III in Marin might happen to be.

  And on top of everything else, she still hadn’t found a new cleaning service whose work she’d trust, and the scrap paper was piling up and… oh, to heck with it for tonight. She reached for her purse. Field men were in and out all night, but when she worked the office she liked to be gone before seven. As she stood up, her personal phone that didn’t go through the switchboard rang. Kearny. Finally. She picked up.

  “Dammit, Dan, where are—”

  “Yeah, where the hell is he?” Stan Groner. Pissed.

  “Stan!” She put delight and surprise in her voice. “You’re working late. You want to talk with Dan? He just—”

  “Don’t try to con me, Giselle. He missed a ten o’clock this morning, and Jane said he’s out of town. Now, where is—”

  “Hot lead on the Gyppos,” she ventured promptly.

  “Hot?” he asked in a slightly mollified voice, then turned hard again. As hard as Stan could get. “It better be hot. I’m getting a lot of heat myself, from the president of the bank.”