32 Cadillacs (35 page)

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.

M
idafternoon 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 SIGHT
s 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.”