32 Cadillacs Read online

  “On customer accounts we only furnish the balance as of four, five, or six figures, low, middle, or high range.”

  “Wonderful! And if I need to draw a few thousand in cash without prior notification…”

  “A small branch bank might have trouble covering, but not here at San Francisco Main—so long as it is under ten thousand. Then we’d have the federal reporting requirement—”

  He waved this away with a chuckle. “I’ll just have to find deals with a downstroke that’s under ten K…”

  * * *

  The fantastic pink beast squatted on its reinforced wooden riser as if it were a triceratops reconstructed in the days when paleontologists still put them together like lizards instead of rhinos. Overhead, around the perimeter of WONDERLY’S WONDERFUL WHEELS, long festoons of twisted gold foil shimmered and glinted and clacked in the hot desert wind. Flanking the antediluvian animal were twin posterboard signs:

  RETURN TO THE HAPPY DAYS

  OF THE FIFTIES

  The monster was 18.03 feet long (on a 10.75-foot wheelbase) and weighed 2.66 tons. Beneath a gleaming hood as long as a Yugo crouched 310 horses, generated by 365 cubic high-pressure-cooled inches that had a 4.0 bore and a 3.63 stroke. Its tailfins were right off one of Wernher von Braun’s rockets from those halcyon ’50s when the Army still ran the space program. Doubled twin headlights (an industry first soon to become an industry standard) stared out from chromium eye sockets. Outthrust rubber-tipped metal tusks parenthesized the grille’s toothy grin.

  It seldom rains in Palm Springs, so the top on the 1958 Eldorado Biarritz convertible was lowered. Gawkers could check out the power steering and power brakes (with auto-release parking brake), the cruise control, the two-speaker radio with automatic signal-seeking tuner, the leather interior, the automatic windows. The restorer had even gold-anodized the large “V” on the hood and the “Eldorado” lettering on the trunk lid to return them to their original satiny gold finish.

  In this fossil-fuel-conscious age, the lot was crowded with much newer, smaller, more efficient vehicles—mostly trucks and vans and subcompacts. Poster-paint lettering across their windshields pimped their stylistic allures, but the ’58 ragtop gas-guzzler was very definitely the star of the show.

  Jeeter Pickett, an oily-faced, oily-haired, oily-mannered ’50s used-car salesman reincarnated in living color, lay in wait for customers brought in by the convertible. Preferably dumb little blondes he could take out into the desert for a test drive that would leave their dusty heel prints all over the headliners. He hadn’t nailed anybody in the old Caddy ragtop, not yet, but… But, oh wow!

  Check out that sweet young thing just threading her way through the lesser cars toward it right now! Wearing five hundred bucks’ worth of summer frock so carelessly it might have been $19.95 off the pipe at Mervyn’s.

  Pickett drifted across the lot to cut her off, ignoring the Fleet-wood V-8 limo parked in the side street behind her. As he approached, he stared at her crotch. It was his belief that if you stared at a woman’s crotch—any woman’s crotch—when pitching her, you’d make your sale and make her as well.

  Up close the girl was a thing of almost awesome beauty, with a shining blond Marilyn Monroe hairdo and a figure to match, but with startling dark brows and smouldering black eyes. Great tan. And with a mid-’50s innocence that sheathed, he was sure, a white-hot sensual core ready to be probed. Pickett could feel the probe against the front of his pants already.

  Yeah! Or, in the spirit of the ’50s, Hubba Hubba!

  She looked at him with soft little-girl’s eyes, she spoke to him in a soft little-girl’s lisp (with a soft little hint of exotic accent) that made him touch the talisman packet of Trojans in his pants pocket. “I want to buy that nineteen fifty-eight Cadillac convertible.”

  “No, you don’t, little darlin’,” he beamed, “you want to buy this BMW Bavaria. Twelve thousand easy miles on her, belonged to a shut-in who only drove it to friends’ funerals. Zero to sixty in seven-point-four seconds, comes factory-equipped with—”

  She said in exactly the same tone as before, “I want to buy that nineteen fifty-eight Cadillac convertible.”

  “The BMW out of your price range?” He put his hand on her arm. “Well, little darlin’, you have come to the right place.”

  She looked as if his hand were leaving a slime trail across her sleeve. Pickett and his hand ignored the look. Instead, they steered her toward an ancient paint-pitted Hyundai Excel that looked as if it had just been winched from a reservoir.

  “Wonderful economy you want, wonderful economy you get! This little subcompact right here—”

  She repeated patiently, “I want to buy that nineteen fifty-eight Cadillac convertible.”

  “Little darlin’, that ragtop is just not for sale.”

  “Of course it’s for sale. Everything is for sale.”

  Pickett began urging her toward a GM pickup truck with a camper shell fitted inside the bed, letting his knuckles brush the side of her breast as he did.

  Staring at his hand, a swarthy Arab-looking man in a black chauffeur’s uniform straightened up abruptly from the fender of the R/V. The Arab wore a black mustache eight inches from tip to tip; Pickett’s breath stopped in his throat when the man flipped open a horn-handled flickknife as long as his mustache. The blade made the knife seven inches longer.

  The girl repeated, now somehow with menace, “I want to buy that nineteen fifty-eight Cadillac convertible.”

  The Arab began cleaning his fingernails with his knife, but his eyes were honing themselves on Pickett’s throat. Pickett’s hand went limp on the blonde’s arm. His probe prolapsed.

  “Look, it… it’s not for sale. Honest.” He had started to sweat. His voice had lost its jocularly suggestive tone. He put up a hand to tug at his suddenly tight shirt collar and momentarily shield his throat from the chauffeur’s knifeblade eyes. He found himself talking faster and faster in shorter and shorter sentences. “It’s a loaner. From the guy. Who restored it. We just borrowed. It to drum. Up trade. He spent. Over. Three. Years. Just—”

  “Give her a price,” the chauffeur interrupted in a flat voice full of soft sibilants like Zachary Scott’s in The Mask of Dimitrios. “She will pay it.”

  “But—”

  “Give her a price.”

  “Our promo still has a week to run—”

  Dead eyes, dead voice. “The price.”

  “Uh… sixty thousand?” Even filled with dread he couldn’t help overstating it by fifteen grand. He added quickly, “But if the guy who restored it don’t want to sell—”

  “Then you will find a way to convince him,” said the blonde.

  She snapped her fingers. The chauffeur immediately flicked shut the knife and produced a checkbook. The checkbook was in a folder made of thin beaten sheets of what looked like solid gold. The girl opened it and began writing.

  “Sixty thousand… to Wonderly’s Wonderful Wheels…”

  Pickett automatically said, “Ah, no no no. To, ah, Jeeter Pickett, but, ah… you can’t… I can’t… we can’t…”

  The switchblade eyes again laid the edge of their cold gaze against Pickett’s throat. The woman ripped out the check as if it were Pickett’s jugular. The check, for $60,000, was on creamy bond as thick as a money clip.

  “Fine,” she said, “that’s settled, then.”

  Ten minutes later, pink slip denoting ownership in hand, she gave Pickett one momentary flash of golden thigh as she slid under the wheel of the pink monster. Then she was gone and he really looked at the check for the first time. It was drawn on the First National Bank of Bahrain, and by the name engraved on it he would never get to run his hand up that silken flesh.

  Because the name was Turk or Moslem, or some damn thing. Her tan was not from the sun, but from the Levant. Opium traders, he bet. Her father made a lot of money importing heroin and married a blond American. His daughter spent the money under the protection of that life-taker with the mustache
. Probably one of them eunuchs guarded the caliph’s harem, with his balls cut off so he couldn’t hump the merchandise.

  Mean-looking mother. Course who wouldn’t be mean with his things turned into Rocky Mountain oysters?

  But some of Pickett’s habitual jauntiness returned as he looked at the check one more time before folding it and putting it in his shirt pocket. No need to tell the restorer the selling price was sixty. Hell, the guy would be delighted to get $50,000 for his car. And no need to tell Wonderly, owner of Wonderful Wheels, anything at all. Jeeter Pickett would just keep the extra ten large for himself—camel jockeys were no match for a wheeler-dealer like him. Nossir.

  * * *

  Half a state north of Palm Springs, and twenty miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, Rudolph Marino walked into the Cal-Cit Bank on the corner of Fourth and Court streets in downtown San Rafael. He paused just inside the door of the modern glass and concrete building to scan the officers behind their desks.

  The woman handling New Accounts would have won by a nose at Golden Gate Fields; her face should have whinnied instead of spoken. But his practiced eye noted there was no bra under her conservative dark blouse and no wedding band on her mid-40s finger. Her nameplate said RITA FETHERTON. Up close, her perfume was an aggressive musk, Perfect.

  Marino walked over to her desk and sat down and crossed his legs and looked deep into her eyes and smiled.

  “Ms. Fetherton, I hope that I offer no offense when I say that you have very beautiful eyes…”

  A thousand in this account, then the same at the Cal-Cit branch in downtown Oakland over in Alameda County, then the same at the Cal-Cit branch in downtown San Jose. That would complete the necessary loop of banks: the City, the North Bay, the East Bay, the Peninsula /South Bay. Tomorrow, phone rooms.

  * * *

  The blonde slid over, the chauffeur got behind the wheel of the pink Cadillac. The stolen credit card with which the Fleetwood limo had been rented wouldn’t hit the lists until tomorrow, earliest. As the chauffeur pulled the ragtop out into traffic, the blonde took off her golden hair to become Yana.

  “The schvartzes brag that if you could be black for just one Saturday night you’d never want to be white again.”

  “Huh?” The puzzled chauffeur was driving one-handed while stripping off his mustache to become her brother Ramon.

  “So the rom should say that if you could run just one Gypsy scam you’d never want to be a gadjo again.”

  Then he understood. They both started to laugh.

  “I’ll drop you at the airport and drive this back up.”

  “Be sure and hide it when you get there,” she said. “Rudolph will be watching for my return, intending to steal it, and I don’t want to have to worry about him. Tonight is Teddy’s first candle reading, I want that to be perfect. He’s going to be my biggest score ever.”

  “Until you become Queen.”

  “Until I become Queen,” she agreed.

  And right now she was riding in the pink 1958 Caddy that would assure she would become Queen. Rudolph Marino was out of the running for royalty before the race had even begun. He just didn’t know it yet.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In Stupidville that same night, Staley Zlachi thrashed and turned in his semi-private hospital room (courtesy the department store down whose escalator he had fallen) and then began crying out as if in drugged sleep. The nurse peeked in, withdrew; Lulu was there to wipe his fevered brow with a corner of her shawl.

  In San Francisco, Ristik hid the pink Cadillac, Yana held Teddy’s first candle reading, Marino read the classifieds for storefront rentals, and Dan Kearny took Jeannie out to dinner. Without the glue of the kids living at home to hold it together, Kearny’s marriage had begun leaking sawdust at the seams. Time for a little candlelight of his own, and wine, and romance.

  But they squabbled at the restaurant.

  They squabbled on the way home.

  They squabbled in the bedroom.

  Instead of romance, Dan Kearny got the couch in the spare room he’d converted into an office a few years back—never realizing that this office-in-the-home neatly epitomized a great deal of what was going wrong with his marriage.

  * * *

  O’B was also dining out with his wife that evening, also in search of domestic felicity: Bella was pissed because O’B’s most recent night out with the boys had been three days long. Since Bella was as Italian as O’B was Irish, and loved her stuffed cannelloni the way he loved his double Bushmills with water back, O’B had thought, a little candlelight, a little Chianti at that new Italian family-style restaurant on Taraval, and later, in the bedroom, a little romance…

  But they squabbled at the restaurant (it had a full bar).

  They squabbled on the way home (O’B ran a red light).

  They didn’t squabble in the bedroom only because O’B, after observing sagely that he must have gotten some bad ice, passed out in the middle of getting undressed. Staring at her snoring spouse, Bella was more pissed than ever.

  * * *

  Giselle Marc was going out to dinner with a Brit (visiting prof of English lit at SF State) whom she’d recently taken to letting hold her hand while reciting poetry at her by candlelight—candlelight yet again!—in his Oxford accent. She felt so good she thought she just might let him finally seduce her.

  You see, Maybelle had come in and redeemed her 1991 Connie, proving Dan Kearny wrong—which meant he was going to be, at least temporarily, a lot easier to work with. God knew where May-belle had gotten the cash, but why look a gift horse in…

  Oh-oh. Maybelle’s Connie was parked near a fireplug on Turk Street. And around the corner on Divisadero, in front of a ribs joint, was all 250 pounds of Maybelle, poured into a tight cheap red satin dress slit up a thigh the size of a Clydesdale’s. Vamping arthritically at anything male that strolled by, like Julia Roberts waiting for Richard Gere to show up. Damn the woman! And damn Dan Kearny, too: Giselle could already see the smirk on his face, already hear the laughter in his voice.

  Then at the restaurant the Brit insulted her intelligence by trying to pass off Sonnet 116—“The Marriage of True Minds,” that one, for God’s sake!—as his own. It was all too much: she poured fumé blanc down the front of his trousers and stalked out yelling she couldn’t abide an incontinent man.

  * * *

  Larry Ballard’s evening began beautifully when Beverly Daniels, a pert little blonde with big blue eyes and a dancer’s figure, picked him up in her yellow Nissan 280Z. He once had repossessed it from her, then had worked out a payment schedule so she could get it back. Beverly stood the same scant inch above five feet that Ballard stood below six, but somehow they fit together wondrous well on a horizontal plane. Which Ballard fully intended they should attain before the night was over.

  Then everything went to hell. Blame it on Pietro Uvaldi, or maybe Dan Kearny—all Ballard did, after the movie and the pizza, was suggest they “swing by” the Montana…

  “Don’t you do this to me,” said Beverly.

  “Do what to you? All I said was—”

  “I know what you said,” she snapped savagely.

  Beverly had some justification. Their first date had ended with her all alone in Ballard’s car while members of a rock group called Full Moon Madness—whose Maserati Bora coupe Ballard had just snatched—tried to drag her out through the window without opening it first.

  “This time isn’t like that at all,” he explained. “I even have a key for this one.”

  And he told her about Pietro Uvaldi, the wispy little decorator at the Montana with the $85,000 Mercedes. If they could get into the under-the-building garage, and the car was there, it would be a piece of cake. Of course Ballard didn’t mention either the shotgun or Pietro’s poopsie, Freddi of the cellophaned hair and leather underwear, so Beverly couldn’t factor them into the equation until it was much too late.

  A tenant was using his electronic door-opener when they arrived at the Montana; they swe
pt into the garage on his rear bumper. He parked, they cruised, and there was the Mercedes, gleaming in a far corner like the Holy Grail!

  “Just like you said—a piece of cake.” Beverly secretly got off just a little on the excitement of stealing cars.

  Ballard opened the door of the Mercedes with the key he’d gotten from the dealer, and did a somersault. He managed to hit the concrete floor in some sort of shoulder roll, cushioning the shock; but he was still dazed when he staggered to his feet to try and block Fearsome Freddi’s second attack with a wobbly shiko dachi defensive stance, one hand at shoulder level in shotei, the other horizontal across his stomach in nukite.

  Freddi didn’t know from martial arts: he slammed his arms up inside Ballard’s defense and smashed his head into Ballard’s face. Luckily, Ballard ducked so their skulls met forehead-to-forehead, or he would have been a wasteland from ear to ear.

  Undaunted, Freddi got in a rib-crushing front bear hug; Ballard countered by slamming his cupped palms against Freddi’s ears. Freddi dropped him, screaming with the pain of almost ruptured drums. Ballard made a shambling run for the open door of Beverly’s little yellow sports car, yelling as he went.

  “GO GO GO GO GO!!!”

  As he tumbled in and slammed the door, Beverly WENT WENT WENT WENT WENT—but not before the heel of Freddi’s hand holed the windshield in a shower of plastic-coated safety glass. Trying to peer through the remaining opaque starburst, Beverly hit a post, ripping off the left front fender and bending the axle. She backed off and goosed it again, even more terrified than Ballard. The wheel was wobbling. By some miracle, another resident had just entered and the overhead steel mesh door was still clanking down as she zipped through.

  Well, not quite zipped through. The reinforced lower edge of the descending door hooked under the front edge of the Z’s roof just above the shattered windshield and stripped it back like opening a can of sardines.