32 Cadillacs (10 page)

“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…

Him and her off in a corner giggling at each other’s dirty jokes like a couple of schoolgirls… Neither one of them ever told
off-color jokes to anyone else. It was like their little minority secret together, and…

Aw, dammit to hell, anyway.

Ballard was musing in an awed voice, “One-point-three-two-five million bucks!”

“Until this morning, when Stan finally collated all the contracts, the bank didn’t know how bad they’d been stung. And until
we told ’em, they didn’t know it was Gypsies who’d hit them.” Kearny slapped his palm on the files on the butt-scarred desktop.
“These don’t have a single name, address, credit reference, residence or work address that’s genuine.”

“But they
look
wonderful,” said Giselle. “The dealer credit managers did everything right, made all the requisite background phone checks—work
adds, home adds, personal refs, pay experience with other lenders.
Everything
. They all checked out. On paper and over the phone, pure as the driven snow.”

“Like a certain Colonel Buford Sanders, USAF Retired,” said Ballard slyly.

They looked at O’B and laughed. DKA had repo’d nine Caddies from the larcenous colonel before he took an insurance company
for $275,000 in a fake injury accident scam. O’B went after him, but instead of proving the con, ended up being an affidavit
eyewitness in support of the colonel’s fraudulent claims.

“I’ll still nail that guy one day,” O’B muttered darkly.

“Maybe we ought to hire him,” said Kearny.

“Why Cal-Cit Bank?” demanded Heslip.

Kearny stood stock-still for a moment.

“Damn good question, Bart.”

Giselle added a note to the list on her shorthand pad. “Hmmm… yes… He could have gone to four
different
banks—going to branches of the same one made it a lot harder because he put himself in a time bind. He had to make the withdrawals
and deposits in cash all in one day so the bank’s in-house computer wouldn’t catch up with him before bank-close. Why?”

“I’m still bothered by that non-Gypsy pseudonym for their main man,” said O’B.

Heslip said, “Yeah, he’d have to have valid-looking I.D., just in case he got questioned on one of the ten-thousand-buck withdrawals—but
why not use a familiar Gyppo pseudonym?”

“Maybe he already had the Grimaldi I.D. for some other scam he was working,” said Kearny. “Giselle…”

She was already writing it in the notebook. Ballard, still catching up, asked, “How did they work the phones? It’s a lot more
sophisticated than pigeon drops or Jamaican switches.”

“In each area,” said Kearny, “all the purchasers used the same sets of phone numbers to confirm all false credit data and
false personal and business references on the applications.”

“Why four phone rooms? Why not just one?”

“They were working across area codes, and they’d want to keep everything local to help avoid raising suspicions.”

“If you hustle cars for a living in the middle of a recession,” said O’B cynically, “how suspicious are you gonna be when
you’re looking at the commission for a forty-K sale?”

Ballard: “Phone rooms—how do they help us?”

Heslip: “Somebody had to rent the rooms to them.”

Giselle: “And Pac Bell had to put in the phones.”

O’B; “All places to start.”

Kearny stood up abruptly.

“Okay, that’s enough for tonight. We’ve got a packet for each of you with all the information we’ve got so far, plus dupe
keys and info on all the vehicles. Each of us runs down whatever leads he develops himself, but meanwhile check out any Caddy
with paper plates that fits the description of any car on this list.”

“How tough do we get?” asked Ballard.

“As tough as we have to.”

Heslip muttered, “A felony a week if we need it or not.”

“Current workloads?” asked Giselle.

“Turn ’em in tomorrow morning, reports current, for reassignment. I want to be able to get someone else out on them over the
weekend so our regular billing doesn’t suffer.”

“Not Uvaldi,” said Ballard hotly at the same time that Heslip exclaimed, with equal heat, “Not Walinski.”

“Don’t be a sap, Larry,” said O’B. “Let somebody else get the next headache.”

“Turn ’em in day after tomorrow,” snapped Kearny. “
All
of ’em. From now on all
our
energies have to be focused on the Gyppos.”

Ballard and Heslip exchanged looks that said: we got tomorrow to drop a rock on Uvaldi’s Mercedes and Walinski’s Charger.
Kearny caught the look but said nothing. He wouldn’t have wanted his men to feel any other way. Getting even was better than
getting screwed without intercourse, every time.

On the other hand, they were going to have to move damned fast on the opposition. Being Gyppos, those guys wouldn’t be standing
still.

T
he black stretch Caddy whispered up Taylor to the blinking yellow light at California. Behind the wheel was Rudolph Marino
in another $1,200 suit. Inbound traffic streamed across in front of him as he edged the limo farther up the steep incline.
Ignoring a glaring old woman in a cloth coat who shook a fist at him, he violated the pedestrian walk to swing down California
Street with his right blinker on.

Thirty-one brand-new Cadillacs—and no way the bank could ever find out who had them or where any of them were! The sheer brilliance
of that scheme alone ensured him immortality in the legends of the
rom
. Plus this audacious hotel scam, another first; nobody could stop him from becoming King of the Gypsies.

But just in case, he would find the thirty-second Cadillac, the pink ragtop, and take it away from Yana to present as his
own for the King to be buried in.

Cool shadow swept over the limo on the down-ramp to the St. Mark garage. After parking, he rode the escalator up to the lobby.
Beyond the rest rooms and phone bank, he pushed open a door marked HOTEL EMPLOYEES ONLY; thanks to unwitting Marla the Check-in
Clerk, he knew which of the four offices to enter and who to ask for.

A very decorative secretary wearing colored contacts and Obsession and a man-tailored blue pinstripe suit with enormous shoulders
was putting the plastic cover on her computer when he came through the door. Wearing that perfume to work, she had to be sleeping
with her boss.

“Angelo Grimaldi. One of your penthouse suites.” Marino had chosen the end of business hours to heighten drama and tension.
He pointed at her intercom, put into his voice the sort of steel his role demanded. “Harley Gunnarson.
Now
.”

“Sir, I’ll have to call hotel security if you don’t—”

“Ten days ago a terrorist death threat was phoned to this hotel.
Do you want that threat carried out?
”

Tense minutes later, Gunnarson, the St. Mark manager, opened his door to stand there frowning. He was a heavyweight mid-50s
with thinning hair and piercing eyes and a hawk nose; the sort of man who looks soft and then beats you straight sets at handball.

“All right, Grimaldi. Come in and say your piece.”

Marino sauntered past him, hoping that a penthouse suite at $900 a day carried enough weight for Gunnarson to run a check
on him before calling the cops. It did: neither the big redheaded guy nor the little shrunken guy wore cop eyes.

Gunnarson gestured brusquely at the redhead, who had chiseled features and stupid blue eyes. His wide blue suit coat was unsuccessfully
tailored to hide the gun under his arm.

“Shayne. Hotel Security.”

Another gesture at the shrunken man, whose rounded dome had thinning strands of grey hair combed sideways across it in a vain
attempt to hide its geodesic nakedness. For at least 75 of his 80 years he would have carried no hayseed in his pockets.

“Smathers. Corporate attorney. Now what the devil do—”

“Corporate doesn’t cut it with me,” said Marino.

He figured Smathers as the man with the moxie, but he had to be sure. The old man blinked bluejay eyes, bright and amoral
and full of surprising mischief behind their rimless specs.

“Too old?” he demanded in a piping, birdlike voice. “No fire in the belly? No starch in the pecker?” His chuckle was bigger
than he was. “Sonny, I was a Chicago D.A. busting scumbags like you before you were born.”

“Christ, my mistake,” said Marino with Grimaldi’s tough New York inflection. He gently shook a tiny birdlike hand clawed by
arthritis. “Maybe it’s these other two clowns who should drift.”

Smathers’s smile drew a thousand fine creases in his aged face. “Now they’re here, let’s humor ’em and let ’em stay.”

Marino shrugged, hooked a hip over a corner of Gunnarson’s big messy desk. Yeah, Smathers was the Man.

Shayne rumbled, “We looked you up, wise guy.”

“In the ten minutes since I knocked on Gunnarson’s door?”

“Computers. Fax machines,” snapped Gunnarson. “We found out that back in New York you’re just some two-bit shyster, some sort
of glorified corporate sharpshooter—”

“And that I’m on a fishing trip in the Maine woods where I can’t be reached, right?” Marino clasped his hands around his knee
in relaxed command, looked from face to face. “I gotta ask, do I look like the kind of guy goes fishing in Maine?”

Shayne said, “Why don’t we just call the San Francisco cops and tell ’em we have the guy phoned in the bomb threat? We—”

“Better yet, call the Secret Service, They’re the men who guard the President, right?”

Marino grinned into their sudden silence. Yeah! They
hadn’t
reported the original bomb threat! Not to anyone! Report it and watch the Secret Service keep the President from coining
anywhere near the St. Mark? Maybe keep him from coming anywhere near San Francisco? No way. A hotel man’s P.R. nightmare.

“The threat was telephoned in by the Saladin,” he said. “Iraqi fanatics whose name will appear on no Mideast terrorist flowchart
but who have unlimited funding and a plan. Since the threat was for the future and wasn’t repeated, you didn’t report it to
the feds. You could have. You should have. Now it’s too late.” He held up a hand. “No, I don’t know the Saladin’s plan, because
nobody’s paid me to know it. But if—”

“If?” Smathers’s bluejay eyes gleamed. The smart ones were the easiest to fool; they conned themselves.

“If the hotel hires us, I’ll learn it, and then my people will deal with the Saladin.
And
protect the hotel’s name.”

Gunnarson sneered, “Just who the hell are
your
people?”

This was the moment he was there for. He spoke mainly to Smathers and the little old man’s wicked sense of conspiracy.

“Why, the Organization, of course. The Gangsters. The Mob. The Bad Guys. The Outfit. I’m Mouthpiece for the Mafia, get it?”
Now he was all the Bronx. “We find these guys an’ we smoke ’em for you—all for only seventy-five large.”

Gunnarson, aghast, began, “We couldn’t possibly—”

But Marino, with a wink at Smathers, was already leaving. Of course they’d need more persuading; but why have a stretch limo
custom-made to the exact specifications of the President’s own if not for a little extra persuading at the right time?

*   *   *