32 Cadillacs Read online

“How much money have you had transferred from Miami to your bank here for the purpose of starting this taco place with your brother-in-law?” asked Señorita Trejo.

  “Fifty-three thousand dollars,” said Morales, but quickly added, “but I cannot… do anything with that money. It is from all the members of my family.”

  “You must,” said Cerruli gently. “They all will benefit.”

  Señorita Trejo took it up. “It is the only way. You withdraw the money, give it to Señor Cerruli to hold, to show us that you are acting in good faith. Señor Zaragoza gives you the lottery ticket to show that he is acting in good faith. It is he who is at risk. As soon as you divide the first payment between us, he will return your money to you.”

  Morales argued and cajoled, but in the end he acquiesced, it only made sense: after all, $53,000 against $1.75 million…

  The other three would wait in a taco joint across the street from his bank with the ticket. Morales would get his money before the 1:00 P.M. Saturday bank-close. He was sufficiently excited as he slid out of the booth that he knocked the señorita’s purse to the floor. He gathered up the various items that fell out of it, returned it to her, and crossed busy Glendale Boulevard with his overnight bag for the money.

  A few minutes later he recrossed the boulevard from the bank in which, of course, he had no account. Nor did he cross to the coffee shop. Instead, he went directly to the Brougham.

  Morales opened the door of the Cadillac with the keys palmed when he had knocked Señorita Trejo’s purse to the floor. He tossed in his overnight bag, and followed it into the plush interior. The engine caught instantly.

  As the three furious Gypsies boiled out of the taco joint to hurl useless threats and imprecations after him, Morales flipped them a bird and drove quickly away. An hour later, the police informed of the repossession and the company car on a towbar behind the Brougham, he was on his way to San Francisco.

  He had known the lottery ticket was real, of course, and it really had borne Wednesday’s winning number. But Morales also had known that it was for tonight’s drawing, purchased on Thursday after Wednesday’s winning number had been announced.

  For a skilled Gypsy documenter, child’s play to change May 6 to May 9, For a private detective of Morales’s experience, equal child’s play to spot the alterations. He would not have been the first mark they had hit on with their scheme; but he would have been the first who must have seemed just right: an out-of-towner with money in the bank and a larcenous itch.

  So… luck of the Chicano?

  Or perhaps just what Bart Heslip already had remarked, a hell of a detective—even if a son of a bitch personally.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Midafternoon on Saturday, Giselle went out the DKA back door and couldn’t believe her eyes: a 1958 pink Eldorado convertible was parked in the storage lot with Ballard beside it, hands on hips, gazing at it in a proprietary way. Florida plates, but it had to be the one Dirty Harry had told her about. The one ripped off from the Palm Springs used-car salesman…

  Beautiful Arab woman, posing as an American blonde.

  Or beautiful Gypsy woman named Yana, posing as an Arab?

  Elaborately casual, she asked, “Who’d you repo it from?”

  “No repo. Just storing it for a friend for a few days.”

  “A Gyppo friend?” she asked flatly.

  Ballard seemed to exude sexual smugness. “You know how it is, Giselle, I massage her back and she massages mine. Yana came through for me the other night with a lot of info…”

  Yana came through the other night? Just say Yana came the other night. While Giselle, to her eternal shame, was down on the corner hanging around under a streetlamp like Lili Marlene. Never again, not for Ballard, not for any man.

  “Don’t be disgusting,” she said to him.

  Why didn’t he… Of course! She’d never told him about the Caddy lifted in Palm Springs! She’d wanted to track that lead down herself. He didn’t know its significance. She walked around the car, peering inside, opening doors, kicking tires, secretly memorizing the I.D. number inside the drivers door.

  “What do you figure it’s worth?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “Classic ragtops in this condition can bring a lot of bucks, I know that.” He looked over at her. “How’d you make out with the great Grimaldi hunt?”

  “He’s, um… no sign of him yet.” She was glad to lie to him; he was sleeping with Ms. Gyppo Slut and bragging about it.

  “Too bad. The President’s gone, that means he’s probably worked his scam and taken off.” He patted her arm. “I know how much you wanted to nail that limo. But hey—we ought to be knocking off a bunch of Gyppo cars in the next few days. I’ll leave some assignments on your desk—”

  “Don’t bother! I’ll find my own cars!” She whirled away to storm quickly into the office.

  Now what the hell was bugging Giselle? Ballard turned to the ’58 Eldorado as if for an answer, but it told him nothing. Not yet.

  * * *

  After just forty minutes on the phone to Palm Springs, Giselle had Jeeter Pickett’s calculated Fonzie-voice in her ear, asking about her measurements as if he had one hand in his pocket and she were Dial-a-Porn. All that ended when she asked about the ’58 pink ragtop Eldorado.

  “Them goddam Ay-rabs!” he erupted. “I’m not ever gonna get beyond what they did to me!”

  Working off his debt over that damned car, he was still peddling used iron at Wonderly’s Wonderful Wheels, instead of raking in big bucks over to the Mercedes agency in Palm Desert where he belonged… Giselle brought him back to the main points: first, the Eldorado’s I.D. number; second, could the Arabs have been Gypsies posing as Arabs?

  —How’m I gonna remember a car I.D. number, doll?

  Well, could the bodyguard’s mustache have been fastened on with spirit gum?

  —Wasn’t looking at his mustache, doll, was looking at that flick-blade of his.

  How about the woman’s blond hair? Maybe a wig?

  —Wasn’t looking at her hair… a greasy chuckle, Leastwise not that hair, you get my meaning, doll…

  Giselle kept patiently at it, emerged with the following:

  The number, gotten from the original loan agreement for Wonderly’s HAPPY DAYS promo, matched the one on the Eldorado in the storage lot.

  The woman, minus blond wig, was Yana.

  The man, minus mustache and flickblade, was Ramon…

  So out in the DKA lot was the car grabbed by Yana for some arcane Gypsy purpose, and then hidden at DKA by Ballard. She was hiding it from someone—almost certainly Rudolph. Could Giselle ask Larry to find out all the whys? No. By this time he was too far gone to lift a finger against his little Gyppo.

  But now Giselle had her own Gypsy intimate, and the one thing Yana seemed to have that he didn’t was this pink Eldorado. So wouldn’t he tell her all about it if she showed up driving it?

  Yes! She didn’t stop to think about the situation any more than that, she just checked that Larry was elsewhere, got her pop keys and hotwire, and headed for the lot.

  * * *

  Why had Giselle’s reaction to the pink Eldorado been so casual? Why had her rejection of Yana’s easy repos been so angry? Ballard was at a second-floor window, taking a break from laboriously typing REPO ON SIGHTs on the Gyps Yana had given him, when the ragtop, top down, shot out into Eleventh Street with Giselle’s unmistakable blond head behind the wheel.

  Ballard took the stairs three at a time, was into his company Ford by the time she was jinking over to Ninth Street a few blocks up, lost her at Market, briefly spotted her going up the Larkin Hill, caught a flash of pink turning into California.

  So. Heading for the luxury hotels atop Nob Hill. He slowed going by the Cathedral Apartments where Brigid O’Shaughnessy once gave Sam Spade the runaround; when Giselle turned in at the St. Mark, he immediately dropped his own car into the Masonic Auditorium garage across from Grace Cathedral.

  A few
minutes later he sauntered into the St. Mark, making himself bland. She was not in the lobby, nor in the coffee shop. He drifted into the Garnet Room past its purple velvet rope. One of Scott Joplin’s tinkling piano rags tinged the air with sadness when he caught sight of Giselle’s gleaming blond hair and exquisite profile bent forward intently toward the handsome guy across the table from her.

  In the lobby Ballard found a discreet chair, tried to think it through. The handsome guy was swarthy and black-haired and looked like an Italian mobster. Sure as hell, the Gyppo calling himself Angelo Grimaldi whose complicated long con—give that one to Kearny—apparently wasn’t finished yet.

  Real name, obviously Rudolph something.

  What the hell was she doing with him? Working him to find out where he’d stashed the limo? Or working him for the other Gyppos’ Cadillacs and not trying to find where he’d stashed the limo? Or… Ballard, conveniently ignoring his own identical arrangement with Yana, shied away from that particular or.

  He felt a little grimy staking her out—Giselle, for God’s sake!” but he was driven by an emotion he didn’t even know he was feeling, let alone that the emotion was jealousy.

  * * *

  “Wont they recognize me as the underambassador’s wife who was too dumb to know her own car?”

  “The Secret Service left when their President left.”

  “What about hotel management? If one of them should—”

  “They never saw you. To them that woman was a terrorist, remember?” Rudolph Marino chuckled. God, he was a handsome brute! For his part, he was charmed to be telling a gadjo woman things he would never tell a rom woman, not even Yana. “Besides, I haven’t explained to you yet what happened to you…”

  Giselle was getting high on Cordon Rouge, not their first bottle. “Whatever happened to her, if they see me here—”

  “What happened is that I offed her.”

  “You what?”

  Giselle’s delighted squeal made him cover her pale long-fingered hand with a brown muscular one. He sighed theatrically.

  “Alas, she is now somewhere in the Pacific with scrap iron tied to her ankles. Now, if they see me with a beautiful blonde, merely…” He kissed his fingertips. “Cherchez la femme.”

  Giselle finished her champagne and frowned sternly. She had something to ask him. And tell him, too. This was, after all, a business conference. Not like Ballard with his bimbo.

  “First, Rudolph, why did you run all of those Caddies through one bank? If you’d used different banks, with different central computer systems, you would have had more time to…”

  She stopped because Marino was chuckling in embarrassment.

  “When I laid the idea out to the other rom…” He paused again and shook his head. “I wanted to use four banks, it would have been easier, but they said one bank… four branches…”

  “But it doesn’t make sense—”

  “The stars said it did.” A shrug. “The rom…”

  Giselle shrugged in turn. He acted as if he didn’t believe in superstition, but he’d gone along with it. “Okay. Now I want to know all about a nineteen fifty-eight pink Eldorado Biarritz convertible.”

  For perhaps the first time in his life, Rudolph Marino was speechless. He opened his mouth, shut it again, blinked, yawned like a confused cat, and then just stared at her.

  “What has that car got to do with whether the Gypsies get a new King or a new Queen?”

  Devalesa! This woman! But… with a typical Gypsy shrug he told her of the dying King’s wish to be buried in a restored 1958 Eldorado convertible because he had ridden in one to his coronation in 1958. She was laughing before he was through.

  “No no no no no! You have to have a casket and an embalmer and burial certificate and—”

  “You do. Not us, we are the rom.”

  She leaned suddenly across the table toward him, so their faces almost touched. “Would you give me all the other Gypsies’ Cadillacs for that pink Eldorado?”

  Her voice slurred “Cadillacs” so it ended with a slight but distinct “sh” sound. Yet, even here, even now, even tipsy, she was working him. He loved it. He shrugged again.

  “Of course. But even if you could and I did, you must understand that the rom are never long in one place…” Except Stupidville next week, but she was not to know of that encampment, ever. “We Gypsies are like the wind—”

  “I have it,” she said. For the second time that evening, he was momentarily struck stupid. She almost giggled as she pointed at the floor as if in confirmation. “I drove it here.”

  Not like other gadje women, no, not just useful to him…

  But still useful. On Monday he had to be heading for Stupidville because the real Grimaldi would make his departure imperative… somehow, he had to be driving that pink Cadillac.

  “Let’s go down to the garage and take a look at it.” He could barely disguise the greed in his voice.

  Giselle shook her head with a lazy smile. “I didn’t say it was in the garage. If Lar—” She stopped with a surprised look on her face. Champagne. She covered by saying, “Kiss me.”

  He did, using lips and tongue, working on her in turn… Devalesa, maybe this woman had hidden rom blood in her, after all. Just her kiss made him stiff.

  But meanwhile, Lar. Larry something. Of course! The tall blond man with the hawk eyes. Yana must have asked him to hide the Eldorado for her at their repossession agency, where Rudolph would never think of looking. How admirable of her! But he merely shrugged at Giselle.

  “It is of no moment. We can go out to dinner in the limo.” He gave it the lightest possible touch while feeling his heart actually pound as it had when he had lost his virginity at the age of 11. Champagne, of course. It could be nothing else. “Or… we could get room service…”

  This was it, wasn’t it? Giselle had felt her body go soft and creamy when they had kissed. This was what she had come here to find out, admit it. About herself. About him. All questions answered, even apart from getting leads to Gyppo Cadillacs…

  Ballard was probably with Ms. Slut right now.

  “With more Cordon Rouge?” she asked almost defiantly.

  “For us both,” he said. “And with oysters for me.”

  * * *

  Ballard was watching the blonde behind the reception desk, name-tagged MARLA, because she was a pale shadow of Giselle and because she was so obviously angry. Eyes glued to the entrance of the Garnet Room, mouth a downturned arc so compressed her lips had disappeared. Then her face tightened in barely repressed fury—and Giselle and the Gypsy came across the lobby to the elevator banks, arms around each other.

  Arms around each other! Giselle and the Gyppo bastard! And Ballard was stuck. He couldn’t get in the elevator with them, obviously; and if he caught the next up-car he wouldn’t know their floor or room…

  Giselle with that slimy Gypsy bastard who’d screw anything hot and hollow… He realized he was sitting with his teeth gritted and his hands white-knuckled on the chair arms. Jesus, Larry, get a grip. Giselle’d never cared what he did with who, just as he’d never cared what she did with who, either. Except as a friend. Sure, that was it. Friendship. He hated to see his friend sleeping with…

  Bullshit. Jealously. White-hot, searing jealousy. Unexpected, totally out of left field. But it hurt. Burned. Like drinking goddam Drãno straight out of the can.

  But still Larry Ballard sat there.

  Why? To find out how tough he was? Or to some purpose…

  Then the blond woman named Marla was relieved at the desk, and Ballard knew what that purpose was. In the coffee shop she looked up, startled, when he sat down across from her. He flashed a laminated yellow State of California registration card with his color photo in the lower right-hand corner.

  “I’m a private detective working on a case involving that blonde who got on the elevator with Mr. Grimaldi,” he said in gruff professional tones, “I’m hoping you can help me…”

  Could she. An ho
ur and four cups of coffee later, he knew all about Angelo Grimaldi from New York, and terrorist calls, and—although Marla didn’t—a whole lot about a Gyppo named Rudolph. He even had figured out the way the Gyppo, as Grimaldi, had used her in running—again, unknown to Marla—a damned clever scam on the hotel management.

  Later for that. For now…

  He went down to the garage. In all this the ’58 ragtop was significant, perhaps vital, but Giselle would be bringing it back; and besides, it wasn’t on his REPO ON SIGHT list. Rudolph’s long black limousine was. And Larry Ballard, no matter how much Drãno he might have drunk, was a professional.

  * * *

  Third time lucky: Marino and Giselle made it absolutely in synch, then fell apart gasping. The champagne was still cold, so they lay companionably on the king-size bed, sipping bubbly and smoking cigarettes while their hearts slowed.

  Their loving had been fierce, not tender; during her final involuntary rhythmic contractions, Giselle had felt Rudolph’s ultimate frenzied thrusts not only in her vagina but in her heart, perhaps even in her soul. For the first time in her life, she had wanted to be a succubus, to contract her whole body down around a man and greedily suck up all the juice he had in him, everything, everything…

  She looked over at him in the warm glow of city lights far below their aerie, and felt a great joy and sadness together, as if something in her wept at a loss of ecstasy not yet known, and she was roused to give this man something, something fabulous…

  Well, what about a Kingdom?

  “The pink Cadillac,” she said to Rudolph. “It is yours.”

  But with that highly feminine perception that made him so irresistible to women, he understood her gift and returned it.

  “Cara mia,” Rudolph said, “if you do that, Larry will know you have taken it and have given it to me. I can’t let you—”

  “I want him to know,” said Giselle grimly.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Larry knew bright and early Monday morning.

  He had gone to DKA to drive the limo to the bank’s storage lot, but instead found himself staring at the empty space where the pink Cadillac had been—just as Giselle came striding in. Through the open garage door Ballard could see the cab that had brought her. She was wearing the same clothes as Saturday.