32 Cadillacs Page 9

  She was staring over his head, her eyes wider than eyes could possibly be, popping out of a face now so congested it was almost purple. Teddy, no Bible scholar, whirled in dread expectation of seeing, not the words that Yahweh’s moving finger had writ on Belshazzar’s wall, but demons hulking behind him.

  Nothing. No one. Just an empty room. He turned back. Yana had fallen back into her chair. She sprawled like a rag doll. She looked exhausted. Her voice was slow, dragging.

  “The curse is in your body… the snake is growing there… because… when you were small… you wanted your foster parents dead … you created the snake… out of cursed money…”

  “No!” cried Teddy. “I… I loved them, I…”

  He went dumb. When they told him he was adopted, for a fleeting moment he’d wished them dead, to unsay the terrible knowledge of his real parents’ rejection. Or had that death wish been so that he would be left their money? Could that insidious thought have lain in ambush within his mind down the years, exactly like a snake, finally growing into … cancer?

  He began thickly, “How did you know that I—”

  “Give me a dollar.” She was brusque, almost cold. She snapped her fingers. “Quickly! We must test whether your money is cursed. If the snake in your body indeed comes from your money, then perhaps there is a way… one way… to save you…”

  “How? Save? How can? You? You must save—”

  “The dollar.”

  As if mesmerized, he took out a dollar bill, started to hand it to Yana. She shook her head and pointed at the table.

  “My touch would affect the power, make the curse more potent,” Another gesture, this one to a point beyond him. “Through the curtain. Water. A bowl. Quickly.”

  Teddy tossed his dollar down and jumped from his chair, feeling the thick horrible ropelike snake in his buttocks and down his left leg as he ran limping across the room. Behind the curtain was a tiny alcove with a sink and a stack of ceramic bowls. He filled one from the tap, carried it back to Yana.

  “Put it on the table. Put your dollar bill in it.”

  He picked up the dollar from the table and dropped it in the water. They sat on either side of the bowl, watching it. The water began to discolor. But not green from the dye in the money— which was supposed to be waterproof anyway. No. It was getting pink. Then red. Getting redder. Blood-red. His mother’s blood. His own blood. In his money.

  “Cursed,” Yana said in a flat voice devoid of hope or pity; and Teddy knew he was going to be sick.

  CHAPTER TEN

  But she wouldn’t allow him even that. Not right away.

  “We have to be sure of the curse, we have to let the evil hatch,” she told him at the head of the stairs. “When you get home, wrap a fresh egg in a sock and put it in a shoe…”

  “A… shoe? But… what kind…”

  “Any kind. Just leave it there. Also collect all the cash money you can and put it in a paper bag with the shoe and the egg and leave it. When I call you, bring both with you to me.”

  Only then was Teddy, shaking as if with fever, allowed to pay for the candles and go down to vomit out his horror at Madame Miseria’s revelations into the slanting Romolo Place gutter.

  * * *

  As he was so engaged, Larry Ballard was leaving his two-room studio apartment on Lincoln Way with his case files and repo tools. On impulse he drove a dozen blocks west along the southern edge of Golden Gate Park to Jacques Daniel’s.

  Beverly had hung up on him five times since her car had gotten dinged up, which just wasn’t fair. Look what had happened to him—without any insurance to cover it like she had, either.

  Oh, man, he sure hoped she had insurance to cover it.

  Bev and her partner, Jacques, had renamed the little neighborhood bar “Jacques Daniel’s,” swept out the local rummies, put in an espresso machine, hung ferns and fake Tiffany lamps, and started serving trendy drinks like Sex on the Beach. It was not a meat market, Beverly saw to that; rather, a place where neighborhood singles could mix and mingle. In the grand old tradition, they were about to sponsor a softball team.

  Ballard stuck his bruised face and thatch of sun-whitened hair into the bar’s blast of light and heat and noise. Hammer was hammering eardrums on C/D. Beverly and Jacques were behind the stick serving them up with both hands, but when Ballard pushed the door wider and stepped through, Bev exploded.

  “Out!” she yelled over the noise.

  “Aw, Bev, can’t we talk about i—”

  “Out, or I’ll throw you out. Jacques.”

  Heads were turning, eyes were staring. Jacques sighed and took off his apron and dropped it on top of the beer cooler. Small, wiry, quick, balding, he once had been a diver with Cousteau. He and Ballard had SCUBA-dived together, they took karate from the same master—but he was Beverly’s partner.

  Ballard said placatingly, “Bev, it was an accident.”

  “My beautiful car.” Fire blazed in her eyes. Her lips were a thin enraged line. “Jacques. Do something.”

  Ballard began, “The insurance—”

  “Insurance? The car is totaled. Totaled! I don’t want insurance! I want my—”

  Ballard lost it. “Why do you have to be such a sorehead? I mean, if the insurance’ll buy you a new car—”

  The blazing eyes were on Jacques now. “If you won’t throw this bastard out of here…”

  Jacques made little nodding, placating gestures toward her. He took Ballard’s arm and spoke in his elongated Gallic vowels.

  “Larree, better you to go…”

  Ballard let himself be herded out. If he wanted to patch it up with Beverly, he couldn’t fight her partner: he’d lose whichever of them ended up on his back in the gutter. Outside, with the doors swinging back and forth behind them, Jacques released his arm with a fatalistic French shrug.

  “Larree, how can you reason with her maintenant? You should have telephoned first—”

  “I did. Five times. She hung up each time.”

  He said illogically, “Just as I said. So there is no reasoning with her now. Maybe never, hein?” He added, with bourgeois practicality, “Peut-être this is the end. Fin.”

  “Yeah. Fin. Shit.” Ballard started rapidly away down the street, then turned back to add, “Pardon me, merde,” before going on again.

  He drove right to the Montana, slid a tire iron up his jacket sleeve, and walked through the garage checking out the parked cars. No more Mr. Nice Guy for Larry Ballard.

  No Mercedes for Larry Ballard, either. Twelfth floor, leaning on the doorbell for a timed two minutes. Nobody home. He printed CATCH YOU LATER in block letters on a business card that he stuck, bent, between doorknob and doorjamb.

  Give the little toad something to think about.

  For the rest of the night he sat in his car across the street from the garage entrance, dozing, listening to Live 105, The Rock of the Nineties, feeling blue about Beverly. She couldn’t seriously have dumped him tonight, just like that, could she? In public and everything, just because her car…

  Rising sun woke him. People were leaving for work; no trick at all to get inside for another walk-through before admitting he wasn’t going to get the Mercedes. In two hours it would be assigned to someone else.

  But as he drove away, he brightened: anybody who was going to get that car away from Pietro and his poopsie was going to have to be a better carhawk than Larry Ballard.

  And Ballard had just enough ego to feel there weren’t too many of them fellers around.

  * * *

  A few hours earlier, while Ballard dreamed of hypersteroid Freddies going out twelfth-story windows in leather underwear without benefit of parachutes, Bart Heslip drove south through San Francisco on the post-midnight-deserted James Lick Freeway. His white teeth gleamed in anticipation as he took the Silver Avenue off-ramp into the outer Mission.

  Just after lunch he’d gotten a new lead on Sarah Walinski from the skip-tracers. Until she’d waved her magic axe at the other guy�
�s head, Sarah had been a shift-worker at Bonnard Die-Cutting on Tennessee across from the site of the old Bethlehem Shipyards. Heslip had timed his arrival at Bonnard to chat in the noontime cafeteria with people who’d worked Sarah’s shift. A Polish woman as old as water had beckoned him to her table.

  “Hey, you. Ya want get hold Sarah Walinski? Hey, talk Mel Larson. A driver.” She held up a hand with forefinger and index finger crossed. “Sarah and Mel like that…” She began moving her fingers in a shocking graphic rhythm and burst into raucous laughter. “Hey, that’s Sarah on top.”

  After making sure Larson was out on his truck, Heslip used an insurance scam to learn from a bright-eyed personnel woman that Larson lived off Silver Ave, near the green postage stamp of Portola Playground. Tall skinny three-story wooden row-house that needed paint, ROOMS FOR RENT on the front door and a street-level one-car garage beneath. He checked through the dusty window. Empty. But fresh oil on the floor and junk shoved back against the walls showed a car was being parked in there.

  The landlady had more chins than Chinatown, hawsers for ankles, and got more religion than a jackleg preacher when Heslip asked her about Sarah sleeping over.

  “Oh my goodness, no! I keep a respectable house here…”

  The Chicano who ran the little madre y padre down the street sang a different song. Sí, Sarah live in the white house needs paint. Sí, she lock up her car in that garage at night. Y caramba, she buy her liquor by the gallon.

  Heslip did not turn in the new address at the office when he went back to DKA. He wouldn’t do that until he’d gotten his final shot at Sarah himself: no tomorrow for him on this case. He tossed an old yellow Plymouth with only half a transmission on his towbar and, out at Larson’s place, dumped it in front of the still-empty garage. He stuck a note hand-scrawled on cheap paper under the wiper arm; im sorry wont run pleez dont call cops.

  Late tonight, when Sarah came back from whatever bar she was getting sloshed in, she would find the old Plymouth in front of her garage and, he hoped, being drunk and careless, would park the Charger in the street. From whence, Heslip thought as he drove through the night, he now would pluck it like an apple.

  The Charger wasn’t there. Nor on any adjacent street. He ended up down the block with a good view of the house, waiting for the bars to close. And sort of hoping that when she came, Larson would be with her, drunk and belligerent: he had begun to feel like hitting someone male, his own size or larger, several times very rapidly in the face.

  Not to be. At sunup, as Larry Ballard drove morosely away from the Montana on the far side of town, Heslip was still sitting there, chilled and stiff and also empty-handed. No Sarah. No Charger. And at ten o’clock he would have to go back to the office and hand her file over to someone else.

  Wait a sec! At 9:45 the landlady, shopping bag in hand, laboriously made her way down the front steps on her swollen ankles. She waddled obliquely across the street to his car, panting from such exertion. Heslip rolled down his window.

  “Young man,” she said, “I wish I’d told you the truth about that woman yesterday. She has been living with Mr. Larson, and she’s a fat lazy slob who all she does is lay around and drink hard liquor and never change the sheets. And all they’d ever do after he got home from work was drink and fight up there in his room until all hours.”

  Noting the change of tenses, Heslip said, “Swell.”

  “Last night, along about ten o’clock, they had a terrible row an’ she threw him down the stairs. Broke three of his ribs an’ give him a concussion. Amb’lance come an’ everything. Din’t even go to the hospital with him—just packed up an’ left. I seen you sittin’ out here all last night and still here this morning, an’ I just thought it was my Christ’an duty to tell you she was gone.”

  After she was gone. After he’d sat there all night.

  “Even if you are a nigger.”

  Bart Heslip drove off cursing her, and himself for not slipping her a twenty yesterday, and for not being here last night at the right time, and Sarah, and the guy she’d thrown down the stairs, and most especially Dan Kearny for… well, just on general principles.

  * * *

  Kearny had sneaked into work early that Friday morning to upend the big metal barrels full of paper trash over a square of canvas laid out on the concrete floor—for once he was glad they were having so much trouble with their cleaning service. He was in before anybody else—especially Giselle—to look for Warren’s app and Trin’s business card. They should still be here, since the trash had been piling up for a couple weeks. No reason for Giselle to know he needed them after all, was there?

  Forty minutes later he was still there, pawing away, when her voice made him leap and whirl as if stung by an asp hidden in the ejected paperwork. Giselle was holding up the elusive employment application and the wayward business card.

  “Looking for these?”

  He sighed and grunted his way to his feet and dusted off the knees of his trousers. “How’d you know I’d need ’em? When I tossed those, the Gypsies hadn’t even hit the bank yet…”

  “Woman’s intuition.”

  “Yeah, sure.” He eyed the offending papers as if they were cold-virus cultures. “A lying thieving conniving Mexican—”

  “But a hell of an investigator.”

  “If you can control him. I seem to remember that nobody cheered louder than you when I fired him the first time.”

  Giselle shrugged. “Things change. Now we need him.”

  “And this other guy, Warren! Donald Duck on helium—”

  “He doesn’t have to talk, Dan’l. Not if he can grab cars. Maybe he’s the greatest carhawk the world has ever seen.”

  “Yeah,” said Kearny bitterly, “sure.”

  * * *

  Something that sounded female and Latina and 15 max answered Trin Morales’s phone at 11:00 A.M. Morales took the receiver out of the girl’s hand to yell something short and Anglo-Saxon into it. The phone replied in Kearny’s voice.

  “Put your pants on and get your butt down here. Now.”

  * * *

  Four hours later Ken Warren, also summoned by phone, wanted to give a great big YELL. Except nobody would have understood him, anyway. He wanted to yell because Kearny was showing him stuff right out of Auto Mechanics 101. And talking to him as if he had a mind defect instead of a speech defect.

  “You put one alligator clip on the positive post of the battery, and the second one on the distributor…”

  All right, Ken thought, I know how to hotwire a car.

  Kearny showed him anyway. And then said, “These days we try to get key codes from the dealer and cut keys for the door locks. But if you don’t have a key, this funny-looking thing here like a Buck Rogers raygun is a…”

  I know how to use a lockgun to open door locks.

  Kearny showed him anyway, and then said, “If you don’t have a lockgun with you, this piece of thin strap steel can…”

  I know how to go down alongside the window with a slim-jim and flip open door locks.

  Kearny showed him anyway, and then said, “These days we use a lockpunch under the dash to….”

  I know how to punch an ignition lock and substitute my own. I know how to hotwire under the dash. I know how to…

  Kearny showed him all of it anyway. And then said, “Follow the instructions on the assignment sheet. If it’s REPO ON SIGHT, just grab the car. But if it says to make contact first—”

  “NgYe gho ntawk ta ghu man.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Kearny looked suddenly deflated, as if he had forgotten the extent of Warren’s speech defect. “ ‘Gho ntawk ta ghu man.’ That’s very important—talking to the man if the case instructions tell you to. Most of our trouble with clients comes from field men who don’t talk to the man.”

  He thrust the sheaf of field assignment sheets almost blindly back into Warren’s hand, started to walk away slump-shouldered, then stopped and turned back. He sighed.

  “One more
thing. Two of those files are pretty salty. That guy Uvaldi—that’s the Mercedes convertible—has a fag boyfriend who’s six-six and two-forty and leaps tall buildings in a single bound. He—”

  “Ngye ndon’ gho ntawk ta ghu man.”

  Kearny looked surprised, as if a guy like Warren wasn’t supposed to have a sense of humor. “Uhhh… that’s right, Ken, you don’t go talk to the man. You avoid the man like the plague. The other one you gotta watch out for is—”

  “Ghu whooman.”

  Kearny thought, This guy talks funny but he sure ain’t slow. All he’s had time to do is riffle through those files once, but he knows which cases I’m talking about. Could it be he might actually work out as a repoman?

  Feeling almost hopeful, he said, “She busted Heslip’s head with a can of coffee and Heslip is pretty nifty on his feet—won thirty-nine out of forty fights professionally before he—”

  Warren went into a sudden fighter’s crouch, bobbing and weaving, and threw a damned fast left hook/right uppercut combination at the chin of an imaginary opponent.

  “Ngye ngsaw hym gnfigh ngleven nears ago.”

  “Ngsaw hym gnfigh.” Kearny nodded as if pleased about something, and went back inside chuckling to himself. “Catchy.”

  That’s when Ken Warren started to like Dan Kearny. Dan Kearny might talk to him like he was an idiot, but Dan Kearny laughed at him like he was a man. And left him on his own with a fistful of REPO ON SIGHT orders and a whole weekend to prove he was the greatest carhawk the world had ever known.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When they had opened the turnstiles at Universal Studios Tours down in L.A. that same Friday morning, Ephrem Poteet had paid and queued up for the first of the long open-sided buses to the tour’s backlot delights. It was just a week since the Great Cal-Cit Bank Massacre and already he had heard about it.

  Poteet was late 30s and still handsome, sloe-eyed, well-built though starting to go paunchy. But by subtle alterations in his appearance, clothing, posture, and gait, he still could pass for any age between 25 and 50.