32 Cadillacs Read online

  “He’ll know it was you told the gadjo where to look.”

  “Maybe he’ll blame Ephrem again,” she said indifferently.

  After two more, they scrambled and ate the eggs she had been practicing with, discussing when and with what trappings of the occult—and speculating for how much—they would work the poisoned-egg effect on Theodore Winston White. The Third.

  * * *

  Even from the outside, Theodore Winston White III’s house looked to Giselle like something out of Hammett’s “The Gutting of Couffignal,” Part stone, part wood, probably twenty-five to thirty rooms, three stories on grounds that were a wilderness of native California trees and shrubs able to thrive despite the now-broken drought.

  Giselle had driven up a winding drive to the top of a Tiburon hill and climbed the broad stone stairway to the hardwood door. She banged the iron gargoyle-face knocker and turned away to look at the City, rising from the far side of the sparkling bay like a misplaced Camelot: distance lent it a bogus charm absent in close-up.

  When the door was opened by a slender blond chap in his 30s, a big tiger-stripe tomcat scooted out between his legs and bounded off down the steps.

  “It’s okay,” he said quickly, “he does it all the time.”

  There was a moment of silence. Once the office-work crunch had eased, Giselle had been in a great hurry to follow up on her anonymous phone caller’s lead. So she had gotten White’s address from the tax assessor’s office at the Marin Civic Center, and had driven directly here without even phoning ahead. She had not even formulated a plan of attack or worked out her cover story.

  So she cleared her throat and said, “Ah … I’m looking for Theodore Winston White the Third.”

  “That’s me. Teddy White.”

  “This might sound a little strange, but do you perchance know any Gypsies?”

  His slightly too close-set eyes lit up. “Madame Miseria’s incredible, you know. She’s changing my life.”

  It all fell into place. Madame Miseria. Ballard’s Yana, the Gypsy fortune-teller. Giselle’s anonymous caller obviously was some Gyppo opposed to Yana. Giselle smiled. Brilliantly. The kind of smile men felt all the way down to their toes.

  “Mr. White, I’d love to drive you down into town and buy you an espresso,” she said.

  * * *

  Drinking muddy Turkish coffee in the office, Wasso Tomeshti could see his sister and mother and two cousins feeding the shopping frenzy surrounding his purloined color TVs. He’d priced the sets for quick cash sales, so was also collecting and pocketing the 7.25% sales tax to help offset the bargain prices.

  Wasso figured he had today and tomorrow before some officious bureaucrat came around asking to see his sales permits; so tomorrow he’d give E. Dana Straub her check and pack up his remaining sets and move on—to be gone by the time it bounced. No sweat about Sam Hood’s check bouncing—Hood didn’t know where to find him anyway. Life was good.

  “Mr. Adam Wells?”

  Tomeshti looked up from his paperwork—bogus optional service guarantees on the sets, also paid to him in cash—into cold grey eyes above a granite jaw. Cop face. But they couldn’t have got on to his scam yet, so …

  So he said, “That’s me, King of the Cash Sale—”

  The guy shook his head. “No. A Gyppo named Wasso Tomeshti.” He showed some I.D. “Private detective.” He held out his hand. “The keys to the Seville, Gyppo.”

  The coin dropped. Yana’s call warning him that some P.I. might have a line to their Caddies. He was unworried. He was a big man, heavy-waisted and four inches taller than the square, grey-haired man’s five-nine. Never actually violent, but this gadjo couldn’t know that. He came around the counter.

  “You better get to hell out of here, pal, before I … ”

  Hard-face merely picked up the phone and tapped out a number with such confidence that Tomeshti waited just too long.

  “Yeah, gimme Sergeant Block in Bunco.” He listened to the canned voice saying, At the tone, Pacific Daylight Saving time will be, then said, “Larry? Dan Kearny here. I’m at …”

  Tomeshti’s thick fingers depressed the hooks on the phone. Kearny laid those cold grey eyes on him once more.

  “And my next call, Tomeshti, is to the guy you conned out of those three hundred TV sets.”

  Kearny didn’t know if Tomeshti had conned the sets out of anybody or not, but it was a safe bet—and conmen were easily conned. Tomeshti slid the Seville keys across the counter.

  Saying, “Goddam you,” in a heartfelt voice.

  He followed Kearny silently out through the bedlam of the store, careful to arouse no hot-blooded rom hostility against him: what if the guy wasn’t bluffing? Sam Hood was the kind of man would live up to his name if he knew he’d been ripped off.

  Wasso had left the Seville parked out in front as a sort of advertisement. Kearny opened the trunk and curbside doors.

  “Please remove your personal possessions from the car.”

  “Hey, listen, can’t we—”

  “No.” Flat voice. No give. No leeway. “Just do it.”

  Kearny watched as Tomeshti put his personal gear in a rather messy pile on the curb. Prospective customers were starting to gather around and watch also, highly diverted. In that neighborhood, repos were no novelty.

  Wasso’s beautiful Seville pulled away, the radio blaring golden oldies. He turned sadly back to the store—and stopped dead. Facing him was brass-haired E. Dana Straub.

  She bared all those teeth in a supposed smile. “I need the year’s lease payment in cash right now, Mr. Wells, instead of a check tomorrow,” she said with transparent ferocity.

  Aw, hell.

  * * *

  Giselle Marc, back from Marin only twenty minutes ago, dropped the receiver onto the hooks and leaned back in her creaking swivel chair to slam a fist against her thigh in delight.

  “Yes!” she exclaimed.

  Still no callback from the limo people in L.A., but whammo! the St. Mark, the very first hotel she’d called (she’d had to start somewhere), had turned up an Angelo Grimaldi registered in one of their penthouse suites.

  A day or two, scout his scam, take him down. But before that, using the wealth of information Teddy White, that sweet, simple, confused little rich boy, had just given her without knowing it, she’d take down his incredible Madame Miseria.

  Yeah, she’d show Yana she couldn’t take Larry away from …

  No, wait a minute, that was nonsense. This was strictly business. This was about purloined Cadillacs, not men.

  Dammit, it was.

  * * *

  When the dice passed to Ephrem Poteet, he could feel a jolt like electricity run up his arm. He’d picked it up in the joint, had come to like it. And he just knew he was hot tonight.

  “I shoot twenty,” he said. “Look out there, gimme room.”

  Seven. He scooped up crumpled bills.

  “Read ’em and weep, boys.”

  The “boys” were another Gypsy and six gadje—three blacks, a Mexican, an Anglo, a Chinese—all of them in a closed poolhall on run-down Temple near Beaudry Ave. Poteet again rolled the dice out across one of the green felt tables.

  “Gimme the news. Don’t hold nothing back!”

  The dice bounced off Robert Byrnes’s classic, Standard Book of Pool and Billiards, resting on edge inside the far end of the table as a backstop, and tumbled to the felt showing two twos.

  “Twenty says I can do it!”

  He was covered. Boiled a nine.

  “The point is four,” he chanted. He rolled again. “C’mon, little Black Joe. Hah! See that? I shoot the roll.”

  The side bets were getting fierce. He rolled. Five.

  “Feevy’s the point—fever in the south. I’m coming out.”

  He came out. And sevened out.

  Next point, eighter from Decatur.

  Snake eyes. Crapped out.

  And crapped out again … and again … and …

  * * *
>
  “Goddammit!” Ephrem Poteet muttered to himself.

  He was trying to sober up (black coffee and chili dogs slathered with relish) in a little white tile, chrome and glass all-night hot-dog joint on Hollywood Boulevard. At the next table was a burly bearded man with a knitted cap pulled down over his ears and wearing heavy skiing mittens, reading that day’s L.A. Times through sunglasses. Behind the counter was a soft-eyed Iranian who looked about 12 years old except for a fierce black mustache and a scar running down one side of his face from below his eye to the collar of his shirt. The place smelled of fried onions and dead hot dogs and stale coffee and sour milk.

  The chili dogs and coffee weren’t working. Or were working too well. Poteet was coming down and didn’t want to. In the crap game he’d lost his case money, the day’s take from Universal, and the $100 in the mail from DKA the night before.

  Goddammit.

  A stack of photographs was slapped down to splay out across the shiny red Formica tabletop. Photos shot at Universal that very morning. He was in every one of them, every time with his hand in somebody else’s pocket or pocketbook. The voice jerked his eyes up to the man just settling down across from him.

  “I turn these over to the cops, Poteet, and it won’t be back to T.I. for another vacation. It’ll be serious time upstate at Q for you, pal.”

  The grey-haired old camera freak from Universal! Poteet half started from his chair. He’d knock the bastard down, knee-drop him to smash in his goddam ribs, snatch the photos …

  “I wouldn’t,” said the man in a disinterested voice.

  Poteet already knew he wouldn’t. He never did. Women, yeah. Them he could hit. Them he could beat up. But other men … He always thought he would, but when it was down-and-dirty in some alley … or in some Hollywood hot-dog joint …

  He sat down again, heavily. He never had any luck. “Aw, Jesus Christ!” he moaned in disgust, almost to himself.

  “No. Dan Kearny.”

  Dan Kearny! During the years he’d been selling information to Dan Kearny over the phone, and hearing stories about him, the man had assumed almost legendary status in his mind. Kearny had once found a relative of Poteet’s hiding in Palm Springs under her brother’s wife’s maiden name.

  The capped and gloved man at the next table suddenly heaved himself to his feet, glaring at them, and stalked away to a farther table muttering, “Goddam zoo at feeding time!” Kearny was picking up the photos and stuffing them into his inside jacket pocket. He tapped the pocket.

  “These were just to get your attention—if you give me everything you have or can get on those Gyppo Cadillacs. Right now. Without stringing it out or getting tricky with me.”

  “And you want it all for free,” said Poteet bitterly.

  “No, our original terms stand. What I want it, is NOW.”

  Hey, maybe there were angles to be worked here. He drank coffee, tried to figure percentages … and tried to meet those bleak eyes. No, Too much danger in them. As if to confirm it, Kearny again tapped the picture pocket suggestively.

  Poteet sighed. “How’d you make out with Tomeshti?”

  “In the barn.”

  Of course. He wouldn’t have expected anything less from Dan Kearny. He leaned forward across the table, his decision made. Play it straight all the way. Dump the bag for Kearny and get more for him later. And from him. Hell, at $100 a car, Ephrem Poteet would make out all right.

  “Okay. Seattle. Chicago. And tomorrow right here in Beverly Hills.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It was midmorning of the next day. O’B drove his company car sedately along Bayshore Boulevard. At the foot of Geneva was the railroad siding from whence, if the circus was in town, elephants would parade trunk-and-tail, trunk-and-tail, all the way up to the Cow Palace from the Barnum & Bailey train.

  O’B loved the circus. But he wasn’t after elephants today.

  Gyppo Cadillacs. In fact, one particular hypothetical Gyppo Cadillac O’B had deduced was out there in the same way that an astronomer who sees there isn’t anything in a particular patch of space deduces it is holding a black hole.

  The trail had been tortuous, but then O’B had a tortuous sort of mind. His last two days had been spent chasing a set of assumptions that went something like this: (1) since the Gyppos who had conned the $5,000 check out of Doc Swigart had then (2) turned around and blackmailed him into giving them (3) the medical documentation needed for storefront phone rooms from which (4) the Cadillac scam had been worked, then (5) it stood to reason that these same Gyppos already would have ended up with (6) one of the purloined Cadillacs as a reward. Right? Right.

  That was the Cadillac O’B wanted.

  First, he’d gone back up to Sonoma yet again to talk with the soils engineer named Oleson who owned that old Stampe biplane the Gyppos had so blithely sold to Rob Swigart. Oleson, alas, had never laid eyes on them so he couldn’t confirm Swigart’s description. But the kid who pumped gas for the airplanes maybe had and maybe could. At least he remembered a swarthy man and woman hanging around for a couple of days and driving an old car.

  Aha! An old car! Please, let the kid be a car freak.

  He was. Rusty old ’74 Plymouth Road Runner, green, with a wide flash running back from the headlights along the side under and then up behind the window to the roof. O’B remembered those Road Runners—he’d picked up enough of them for Fellaro Dodge/Plymouth/Chrysler on Geary Boulevard during their heyday.

  He dared barely whisper it: license number, maybe?

  And would you believe, the kid had a partial plate because it wore the same digits as the license on his Harley: 444.

  Of course just the digits, without the letters, were useless, because there had to be about a zillion different three-letter combinations on California license plates ending in 444.

  Dead end in Sonoma. But what about San Francisco? The reluctant Doc Swigart should have gotten back his canceled $5,000 check by this time.

  Swigart, now that O’B wasn’t really a P.U.C. investigator, didn’t want to cooperate. O’B picked up the phone to call the worthy doctor’s wife and tell her all about how stupid her husband had been. Then, like magic, Swigart managed to dig out the canceled check.

  Used to open an account (closed again as soon as the check had cleared) at an American West Bank on Geneva Ave near the Cow Palace. The check endorsed on the back with, and the account briefly opened in the name of… Tucon Yonkovich!

  A Gypsy name. Could Tucon be guilty of one of those gaffes even the best occasionally make when dealing with doctors—whose credulity is legend among conmen because they believe they can never be wrong? Could Tucon have chanced his real name because he needed the check to clear before it could be stopped?

  O’B stayed on the line while SRS in Sacramento computer-checked DMV records for possible driver’s license and auto registration data linking Yonkovich, Tucon, with a 1974 Plymouth Road Runner whose plate ended in 444. Yeah! Tucon had been thusly stupid. Such a car was registered to him in the 300 block of Oriente, Daly City—which O’B knew lay just south of the San Mateo County line near the Cow Palace. As the bank where Tucon Yonkovich had cashed Swigart’s check was near the Cow Palace.

  By now the Road Runner doubtless had been sold to somebody in a bar; but eventually the Caddy should turn up at that address.

  * * *

  A wrecking crew was tearing down an old white frame house in the 300 block of Oriente. For one dismal moment O’B feared it was his house: the subject address. No. Four doors away. And squatting right on the subject address was a new Eldorado two-door notchback with paper plates. What could be sweeter?

  O’B, pulses quickening though he’d done this thousands of times, parked his company car around the corner and got out with his ring of keys coded to all of the Gyppo Cadillacs.

  The Eldorado was unlocked with the driver’s-side window down. O’B began running his keys, not even bothering to shut the door— the window was frozen open until he found the r
ight key, anyway. Besides, Gyppos were talkers, not fighters, and O’B figured he could hold his own with any talker who ever lived.

  Missed the right key on his first hurried run-through. He patiently started back at the front of the ring.

  “HEY, WHADDA FUCK YOU DOIN’ IN MY CAR?”

  O’B looked up through the windshield at the man bearing down on him, and his airy quips in response—having a picnic, flying to St. Louis, like that—died on his lips.

  Because this wasn’t just a Gyppo, this was, for God’s sake, Paul Bunyan! Seven feet tall and three wide, black curling beard, black curling hair, snapping black eyes, wearing a red plaid lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled up almost to the shoulders and even carrying an axe in one hand.

  Well, a sledgehammer, really, but at a time like this who the hell cared?

  O’B frantically worked his keys, at the same time calling, “From the bank, from the bank, about your auto loa—”

  The sledgehammer came whistling in an arc through the open window at his head, wielded by a Schwarzenegger arm lumped and knotted with muscle. O’B ducked; as the sledge took out the windshield from the inside, he threw himself across the soft leather seat, jerked the door handle, and slid headfirst out the far side of the car as the huge man grunted with the effort of his next swing. This one knocked the door off the glove box an inch behind O’B’s departing right heel.

  O’B ran around to the front of the car, held up a placating palm. His other hand rested on the hood of the car.

  “You don’t understand! I’m from the bank. I’m not a car thief, I’m the legal repre—”

  The sledge smashed in the hood where his hand had been a moment before. He ran back around to the driver’s side as his pursuer yelled, “You sonna beech, I gonna kill you!”

  Jesus, that huge guy was fast. O’B fled down the side of the car with Paul Bunyan tight behind. Swinging.

  CRUNCH! Driver’s door.

  SMASH! Rear door.

  THUD! Trunk lid.

  O’B was able to dive back in through the rider’s side to get in a couple of twists with the next key because the sledge stuck for a moment in the hole it made in the trunk. The next blow just missed his ankle and demolished the Eldorado’s C/D player and tape deck as O’B dove out again.