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  “Yeah. Skips. All thirty-one of them. By these files, dead skips.” In finance parlance, a “skip” is someone who has literally “skipped out”—usually with mortgaged property, such as a car, he has not yet paid for. A “dead” skip is one on whom there are no apparent live leads for finding him and bringing him back. “Eight financed through this office, eight through Cal-Cit San Rafael, eight through Oakland, seven through San Jose.”

  Kearny turned. “How’d you get onto it so quick, Stan?”

  “The downs bounced,” groaned Groner.

  “All thirty-one of them?” Kearny was disbelieving.

  “They were drawn on only four accounts,” said Giselle. “One account at each branch.”

  “But… credit checks… reference and employment and residence verification…”

  Groner’s speaking voice was normally high-pitched; now it was pitched even higher, tumbling out excited words with fire-hose pressure and speed.

  “Hell, Dan, you know the drill!” He was pacing again. “We make a big show of checking references, but it costs us a hundred bucks a head if we do a thorough credit check of all prospective car buyers. If we don’t check anything out, and prorate the collection and repossession costs over all our auto contracts, it costs us twenty bucks a head. So we trust the dealers’ credit managers to size the person up, make a few phone calls… But this…” He waved an unbelieving hand. “They hit every damn Caddy dealer in the Bay Area, every one!”

  Giselle started to giggle. “Blue Skye Enterprises. All four accounts were in the name of—”

  “Blue Skye?” Kearny had joined her at the coffee table to flick through the files. He looked up at Groner in amazement. “Come on, Stan, I know you don’t pay your bank officers very much, but when a guy waltzes in and wants to open an account called Blue Skye—”

  “What can I say? Apparently he looks like Omar Sharif in his Doctor Zhivago days, and went to women AVPs in each case. All four still swear he just couldn’t have been conning them.”

  “I’d like to meet this guy,” said Giselle thoughtfully.

  Kearny was scanning the files as his computer brain was assessing, assimilating, relating with the bewildering speed of close to forty years—he’d ridden an old single-speed bike to his first repossession—of chasing deadbeats and absconders and embezzlers and outright thieves. He stiffened abruptly.

  “Something?” Giselle asked with sharpened attention.

  Groner was saying, “Cal-Cit Bank is out one-point-three-two-five million dollars, retail.”

  Kearny was saying, “The names.”

  Giselle checked the files again. She said in measured tones, “Oh… my… God…”

  “I need those cars back to keep my job! I don’t care what you do to get them, how many laws you have to break, what—”

  “What it costs,” inserted Kearny smoothly.

  “I didn’t say that,” The kvetcher was magically transformed into the hard-nosed bank unit president again. “I can’t go over a flat rate per car of—”

  “No flat rate. Ten percent of gross value recovered for each vehicle, dealer cost, with expenses over and above—”

  “Ten percent!” Groner clutched at his heart dramatically. “How can you even suggest doing that to me?” He turned to Giselle as if to display his bleeding heart. “How can he even suggest ten percent to me? Me? Plus expenses, yet?”

  “How about eight percent?” asked Giselle sweetly.

  Groner looked over at Kearny. He said, “I thought she was with you.”

  “So did I.” Kearny grabbed Giselle’s arm and hustled her into a corner of the room. “What’re you trying to do to me?”

  “Show you how it’s done.”

  She pulled free, went back across the room as Stan the Man began judiciously, “Eight percent, that doesn’t sound half—”

  “Good enough,” Giselle agreed briskly. “I agree. Eight percent wouldn’t even cover field costs, let alone factoring in DKA’s agency expenses—prorated office overhead, field equipment upkeep and replacement, licenses, salaries, the various insurances we have to—”

  “Overhead? Insurance?” Groner had his hands up in front of him, the left one vertical, the right palm-down, bouncing against the left’s stiffened fingertips. “Time out! Time out! You know the bank’s policy is to pay only a fixed repo fee to cover that stuff, plus field time and expenses, not—”

  “Not this time,” said Giselle.

  Kearny ventured, “Twelve-point-five would be—”

  “Not nearly enough.” To Groner she said, “I don’t see us doing it for under twenty percent of gross recovery, Stan.”

  “Twenty percent?” shrieked Groner. “Not even Christ come down from His cross to find our cars would get twenty percent! Okay, maybe, just maybe, twelve and a half, but…”

  Behind Groner’s back, Kearny was signaling Giselle wildly to take it. She paid him no attention whatsoever.

  “Seventeen-five-oh and a wonderful bargain, Stan.”

  He crossed his arms on his chest in a gesture of finality. “I’ll have to go to Holstrom Auto Recovery Bureau if you won’t take… fifteen percent. That’s absolutely as far as I’ll go.”

  “And all expenses.”

  “And all expenses.”

  “You’ve got a deal,” said Kearny very quickly. He added, “We’ll need keys for all the cars, tagged with vehicle I.D. numbers, model, and color…”

  Groner nodded solemnly. He sighed.

  “Why are you guys being so tough on this, Dan?”

  Giselle said, “There’s just nothing in here for us to go on—just the dope on the cars from the dealers. Every reference is phony. Jobs, home addresses, friends, credit information—all of it is phony.”

  “You don’t know that, you just know that the downs bounced. Yet here you are, demanding guarantees…”

  “We do know that.” She glanced over at Kearny, who was silent, so she merely added, “Thirty-one Cadillacs, Stan.”

  “Even so.” Groner had gone back behind the bastion of his desk. “There aren’t going to be that many new Cadillacs around this town with the dealer stickers still on them to justify—”

  “Around this town?” Kearny looked up from trying to close the leather straps on the bulging briefcase. “Uh-uh. Nope.” He enlightened Groner with a single word. “Gypsies.”

  Stan Groner stared at him for a full thirty seconds before muttering, “Dammit, Dan, it can’t be! I mean—”

  “All thirty-one of them. Gyppos, working in concert.”

  After a long moment of assimilation, Groner slowly nodded in acceptance of this horror—Kearny was the expert. He put his head down on his arms as if he were very, very tired.

  Anyone involved in big-ticket retail sales knew that giving credit to one Gypsy was exactly like burning the money. So what was giving $1.325 million credit to thirty-one Gypsies like?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A license to steal, that’s what it’s like. I gotta hand it to you, Giselle.”

  They were hack at DKA, for some reason upstairs in the disused reception area from which the laundry’s billing had once come, rather than down at Kearny’s desk.

  “Dan Kearny, if you try to put one of your fancy moves on Stan Groner after I as good as promised him—”

  “We’re gonna have to be thieves, and tricky ones, to walk away from this one without a bloody nose.”

  He spoke without his usual steamroller optimism. She had a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She had been delighted with herself at that unbelievable fifteen percent of recovered value. Why, if you took $25,000 as a median dealer cost per car, DKA would be paid $3,750 per recovery, plus expenses. Even when Kearny had pointed out they were talking about Gypsies here, she had just assumed the Great White Father would have a dozen ways to break the universal Gypsy solidarity against gadje attempts to pry information out of them. But now…

  “Damn good car thieves, you mean?” she ventured hopefully.

  “I
don’t know what I mean.” Kearny was stone-laced as always, but after all these years she could read him as she could a case file report. “This is a lot of cars and a lot of Gypsies, Giselle. Or maybe I’m just getting old.”

  “How are things at home?” she asked, surprising even herself. She just didn’t ask that kind of question of him.

  He answered readily, if vaguely, “Spare-room couch.”

  Giselle knew and liked Jeanne, had often taken care of the kids when they were growing up. “Is… it anything I can…” He just shook his head. The moment had passed. She ventured, “Wh… what’s our first move with the Gypsies?”

  “You tell me,”

  In a small voice, she said, “Check out all those references they gave the dealers, even though we know they’re false?”

  “That’s a start. Put the skip-tracers on it right away. Use the after-school girls, too—forget about the legal letters for the time being. The Gyppos might have slipped up somewhere and given us a crumb. You can coordinate that part of the investigation from here in the office while the field men—”

  “No,” said Giselle.

  Kearny looked astounded, or as astounded as his tough, uninformative face could look. “No?”

  “I want out in the field on this one. I’m the guy who went up there and—”

  “You are, aren’t you?”

  “—nailed Stan’s foot to the floor and—”

  “You did, didn’t you?”

  “—got us fifteen percent, and so I expect to…” She ran down when she realized that Kearny wasn’t arguing with her.

  “Like I said, a license to steal.” She had to admit, he gave credit where credit was due. Or blame. “Stan wasn’t going to go over ten percent with me no matter what, because ten percent was the most I thought I could squeeze out of him. But he was in a panic and you were sore enough at me to believe you could get more—so you made him believe you could. Of course now we gotta find the cars…”

  He stood, started pacing, abruptly sat down again.

  “Call him, tell him we need a contract spelling out the terms exactly. They’re desperate now, but if we start turning these babies they’re going to think it’s easy and start wanting to cut that recovery percentage fee.”

  “You’re godfather of Stan’s daughter, for Pete sake. He wouldn’t try to—”

  “Stan is just a unit president, he doesn’t run the bank. So do it. And get a guarantee of exclusivity, too. If recovery is slow, we don’t want some flunky VP to panic and start shoveling out these assignments to other agencies. We gotta hit the Gyppos hard and fast, get all we can before they realize we’re after ’em—’cause once they do, they’re gonna disappear into the woodwork.” He was pacing again, thoughtfully. “We got that Gypsy informant with the letter drop down in L.A.…”

  “The one calls himself Ephrem Poteet? He just wants to get back at other Gypsies he imagines have done something to him.”

  “Listen, at least one of our thirty-one is just sure to of stuck a finger in his eye sometime. Send him a list of all the cars—motor I.D. numbers, color, and model—plus the names they were purchased under. Send it fast mail, okay? Overnight. Tell him a… oh, a hundred bucks per recovery we make off his information—and stick in a fifty-buck bill to prime the pump. Then run some extra copies of Stan’s list—”

  “For our affiliates around the country?”

  He shook his head, pulling down the corners of his mouth.

  “Put this info into the hands of other agencies, and it’d be open season on every new Cadillac with paper plates between here and Key West. I want it in-shop only. Don’t even memo our own branch offices on this one for the time being.”

  “Getting a little paranoid, aren’t we, Dan’I?”

  “Ever think how often paranoiacs are right?”

  Well, yes, paranoia, come to think of it, was part of this business. An operating asset, as it were. Kearny’s moment of hesitation, or introspection, or whatever it was, had passed; he was his old hard-driving self again. The lump suddenly was gone from the pit of her stomach. Kearny was on his feet.

  “We’ll use this office as command headquarters.” He bent to smear out his butt, then banged his hand on one of the filing cabinets that had held the laundry’s paperwork. It echoed hollowly. “Keep the case files in these babies, plug in some phones, bring up a computer terminal and one of the printers. Everything centralized so the field men can have easy access.”

  “Will all of the field men be on this, or—”

  “No. Regular business is picking up again and some of our people will have to cover that.” He looked at his watch. “I want you, O’B, Heslip, and Ballard here at five-thirty for a headbanger. Spaghetti feed afterward at the New Pisa…”

  Surprising herself with a sudden rush of feminine emotion, Giselle began, “Dan, Larry’s head is still—”

  “I want Ballard here if he has to come in carrying his head under his goddam arm, you got that?”

  “Yessir,” she said immediately and meekly. Why push her luck? She’d gotten what she wanted: she was going to be out in the field playing with the big guys on this one.

  * * *

  “Why are we so sure they’re Gyppos, Dan?” asked Heslip.

  It was nearly 6:00 P.M.Giselle, O’B, Heslip, and Kearny were in the disused upstairs reception area for the headbanger. Ballard of the shiny red forehead was supposed to be on his way in. Kearny had announced they were going after a band of Gypsies and had outlined the scams used against the bank. Man, not just one or two Gyppos, but thirty-one of the mothers.

  “Because of the names,” said Giselle.

  O’B was frowning. “Grimaldi isn’t Gypsy, it’s not even one of their usual phonies. Since he’s the guy who set up the bank accounts—”

  “But look at the others.” Kearny was flipping through the list of names under which the Cadillacs had been conned out of the dealerships. “Gregory Kaslov. Kaslov is a Gypsy name. Stokes. Often a Gypsy pseudonym. Sally Poluth. Gypsy all the way. Tibo Tene? You can hear the tambourines. Yonkovich… Demetro… Petulengro… all Gyppo tribal names.” He was flipping faster now, selecting pseudonyms the Gypsies habitually stole from the straight populace. “Hell, listen to these. Adams, Evans, Green, Miller, Mitchell, Steve, Stokes, Wells…”

  Man, Heslip thought, this was big. No wonder Dan wanted Ballard there. Larry’d worked that Gypsy mitt-reader down in Palm Desert, who’d put that curse on him; and when the state had been trying to take away DKA’s license, Larry’d gotten something going with that Gyppo crystal-ball gazer up in Santa Rosa…

  A tall form at the head of the stairs said in a sepulchral voice, “Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night—”

  “I didn’t know we was gonna do this in blackface.”

  “Whadda you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

  Ballard’s two blackened eyes were staring pointedly at the white bandage still around Heslip’s head. Sooty calipers extended down on either side of Ballard’s nose to the corners of his mouth. His forehead was just one large purple bruise.

  “You look like you need a slice of watermelon,” said Heslip judiciously.

  “You’re late,” said Kearny coldly.

  “Why am I here at all?” said Ballard cautiously.

  “Gypsies,” said Giselle without inflection.

  When she’d called to tell Ballard there was a meeting he had to get to, she hadn’t told him what it was for. She knew her Larry. Curiosity would bring him in like nothing else would.

  “Thirty-one Gypsies,” said Heslip.

  “Aha,” said Ballard. Something besides fatigue gleamed in his eyes. He took off his topcoat and tossed it on the desktop.

  Kearny said, “Thirty-one Gyppos who conned the dealers out of thirty-one Cadillacs. All financed through Cal-Cit Bank.”

  Ballard sat down between Heslip and O’B. They all listened while Kearny sketched out what he had already told the others.

  “I bet poor old Stan wishes he’
d died in the quake,” said Ballard. “How’d they work the downs?”

  “A smooth and handsome guy looks like Omar Sharif in his movie-idol days shows up at Cal-Cit Main and approaches a woman AVP,” said Kearny. “He’s out from New York looking for investments, so he opens an eleven-thousand-dollar business account. Makes sure there’ll be no trouble to make an unannounced ten-thousand-dollar cash withdrawal if he gets a good ‘investment opportunity’—you with me so far?”

  Ballard nodded. “Sure. Then, from what you tell me, he goes and opens three more accounts in three branch banks—”

  “For a thousand each.”

  Somehow a drink had materialized in O’B’s hand. “So last Friday people with ethnic names start going into the dealers and snapping up Caddies and making the downs with checks drawn on those Cal-Cit accounts. Starting in the City and then moving to Marin and then East Bay and then San Jose just at bank-close.”

  “Damn, that’s clever,” said Ballard admiringly.

  “He closes the accounts out in order, too,” said Heslip. “After the calls come in to confirm there’s enough money in each account to cover the downs on the cars in that area, but before any checks can actually be presented for collection.”

  “Why doesn’t the bank just charge ’em with felony fraud and get the cops involved?”

  “He’s too smart for that,” said Kearny. “He doesn’t really close out the accounts. He pulls ten grand—in cash—from Cal-Cit Main but he leaves a grand behind. Deposits the ten K in each account in turn; then, a couple of hours later, after the queries on the accounts’ status have all come in, pulls it out again. Leaving the original thousand behind in each case.”

  “If somebody catches up with him,” said Giselle, “he just says it was all a mistake, he got confused between accounts.”

  “Legally he can do that?” asked Ballard.

  “Under California law, criminal intent can be assumed, and fraud charged, only if the account doesn’t exist or has been closed prior to the presentation of the check.”

  Heslip’s mind was momentarily drifting. It was at these conferences that he most keenly missed Kathy Onoda, dead at age 29 of a busted blood vessel in her head. CVA, they called it. Cardiovascular accident. Some accident. Icepick-slim Kathy, button-black eyes shining, classical Japanese features alight with excitement…