32 Cadillacs (4 page)

He returned to word of their fallen King.

*   *   *

Meanwhile, the smell of hot grease was, like Banquo’s ghost, following Trinidad Morales up the trash-cluttered stairs over
a 24th Street
taqueria
in the Mission District. Morales was 35, heavy-set, with small precise hands and feet and sly brown eyes and broad white
teeth, a front one glinting with gold when he unclamped his thick lips from around his habitual cheap cigar.

Trin had quit DKA almost six years ago—“quit” was his euphemism for getting his butt booted into the street by Dan Kearny—had
gotten himself his own P.I. license, and had opened an office down here off Mission in the Spanish-speaking end of town. On
the door he had put:

No more skip-tracing and repos for Trin Morales. Divorce work. Insurance frauds. Electronic snooping. Betrayed wives ready
to get even for their husbands’ infidelities by clocking a little motel time of their own with the investigator who’d wised
’em up to them cheatin’ hearts. People who had said too much on a bugged phone willing to cross a brown palm with silver for
discreet silences. The meaty stuff with the perks on the side.

It hadn’t quite worked out that way. Puffing his way to the top of the stairs, Morales found his landlord, an Anglo with a
face like a toothache, installing a new lock on his office door. A lock for which Trin would not have a key.

“Hey, what the hell you think you’re doin’, man?”

“I don’t think, I
know
, beaner.”

Trin started after him, then stopped abruptly with his hands surrendering their fists for placating palms: the landlord’s
heavy screwdriver was not being held the way screwdrivers are held to drive screws. Trin’s gold filling glinted in a wide
disarming grin as genuine as junk bonds.

“Whoa, man, there’s some mistake here.”

“An’ you made it.” The toothache put the screwdriver in its toolbox, clanked it shut, strutted past Trin. “You can get your
stuff back when you come up with the back rent—beaner.”

Trin bounced rapid-fire Spanish curses off the landlord’s heedless back, then sighed and got out his picks and started working
on the new lock. Might as well clean out the office; he wouldn’t be back. And since he’d just lost an argument with Pac Bell
over
their
cutoff service, he might as well rip off their rental phone and sell that while he was at it.

And then maybe swallow his pride and ask that
chingada
Dan Kearny for his old job back as a DKA field agent. He could use Kearny’s phone and company car and gasoline charge to
work his own cases on the side. If he could get any cases on his own. If Kearny’d have him back.

*   *   *   *

A panting Theodore Winston White III caught up with Ramon Ristik outside the street door of Madame Miseria’s palm-reading
emporium on Romolo Place, one of the narrow one-block alleys leading up the side of Telegraph Hill from Broadway. It was so
steep the sidewalk had stairs cut into it. The door had a seamed human palm in gilt paint facing out from inside the glass.

Teddy puffed, “I saw you… turning the corner down… on Broadway…”

Ristik, who’d made a point to be seen, paused for a moment, then shrugged as if submitting to fate and briefly and almost
formally clasped Teddy to his bosom again, as in the bar. He stepped back.

“I cannot handle the weight of whatever future Madame Miseria might uncover,” he said in a low voice, “so I must leave you
alone with her. You will not have to tell her why you have come… she will feel the emanations…”

The fog had rolled in, the air was raw; it was starting to sober Teddy up, refocusing his paranoia, making him remember fanciful
tales about Gypsy fortune-tellers.

“Listen, maybe I’d better come back tomor—”

But Ristik was already herding him up narrow, ill-lit interior stairs toward Yana’s
ofica
. Teddy covertly and belatedly checked that his wallet with his money and I.D. was still in his suit coat pocket. It was.
Ristik indeed had lifted it when he had embraced Teddy in the bar, and had telephoned Yana a
précis
of its contents; but then he had returned it intact during their second brief embrace just moments before.

Incense, a mere thought at the street door, became heavier, thicker, almost palpable as they ascended. When they were four
steps from the second-floor landing, the heavy drapes were swept aside, squealing on their runners, to disclose a dramatically
backlit woman in bright clothes staring down at them.

“Quickly,” she said. “There is not much time to move through the aperture to infinity my brother opened when he looked at
your palm.”

“Listen, I don’t think I want to…”

But she already was drawing him through the curtain, the rounded swell of her breast momentarily firm against his arm, her
thigh fleetingly hot against his through the filmy layers of floor-length parrot-colored silk. Raven hair, a truly beautiful
oval face somehow stern despite small, full-lipped mouth and short nose. Liquid black eyes seemed to look right through him.
Not yet 30, she had all the wisdom of the ages in her face.

“Do not talk, please.”

“But—”

“Please.”

She led him down a narrow drape-lined hallway lit by lamps with dangling crystal shades that tinkled with their passage, around
two or three corners, abruptly into a room where blood-red plush drapes masked the four walls and soaked up sound. The only
light seemed to come from the glowing cantaloupe-size crystal ball waiting for Yana’s
duikkerin
on a three-foot-square table covered all the way to the floor with black plush.

On other tables pushed back against the draperies were museum-quality Greek Orthodox icons next to ceramic figures won at
carnival midways. Bottles of holy water and glowing colored votive candles enshrined a faded phrenologist’s chart. Draped
around the neck of a cheap fat grinning Chinatown Buddha was a Catholic rosary, with amber beads exquisitely hand-carved in
Poland and a heavy amber crucifix backed with antique silver. The unseen incense was making Teddy giddy.

“Please to sit,” said Madame Miseria. Teddy sat. She sat down opposite him, the crystal ball between them. “Your hands. On
the table. Palms up.”

She put soft hands in his, gripped him tightly. Her underlit, slightly lowered head seemed suddenly suspended in midair, severed
from her body. As she stared into the crystal, points of light began to glow in her eyes, grew, as if from apertures in the
pupils themselves.

The eyes widened in shock. A low moan escaped her, exactly like Ristik’s in the bar. She began to thrash. Alarmed, Teddy tried
to pull away; but now those soft hands were steel clamps around his wrists. Her head whipped from side to side, spittle flying
from her lips. She let go of him, leaped to her feet: her eyes rolled up into her head and she fell straight backward to land
on the thick floral carpet with a thud.

Teddy started around the table toward her. One of the curtains was thrown aside. Ristik stormed in. They dropped to their
knees on either side of her.

“What did you do to her? What have you done?”

“I didn’t do anyth—”

Ristik leaned across her to grab the lapels of Teddy’s jacket and begin shaking him hysterically.

“What have you done to her? She has never before—”

Her eyelids fluttered; her eyes opened, became sentient.

“Ramon—it is all right. He did nothing. It was just the… the power of… the vision that… I have seen…”

They got her back into her chair. She gestured weakly.

“Sit down. We will go on.”

Ristik said, “No, I don’t want you to—”

“We
must
go on. Leave us.” Despite her weakness, when speaking to her brother her manner was somehow imperious.

“But if the vision should again overwhelm—”

“Leave us.”

Ristik hesitated, then left. Teddy shifted uneasily in his seat. His dread and foreboding were back a hundredfold.

“In the crystal I have seen many things, confusing things, frightening things, Theodore Winston White.”

“The Third,” added Teddy automatically, then blurted out,
“How did you know my name?”

“The crystal.”

This was no Gypsy trick! He hadn’t given Ristik his name at the bar! But she had taken his hands again, her palms were warm,
moist; her touch, her eyes burning into his across the table, her words, all had a muted sexual fervor.

“You are in grave danger.”

“Danger?”

“From the past.”

“But I don’t know anything about my past! Not my
real
past. My parents—”

“Put you up for adoption the day you were born. The Whites made you their legal heir. Yes. I know. But your blood parents
still live inside you. Their fate is your fate unless…” She sprang up. Her eyes were fearful. “
No!
I cannot go on. Not without the protection of the candles.”

“But you have to tell me—”

“No. It is too dangerous.” She sank back down as if exhausted. “It is fifty dollars for the reading. You can pay my brother.
If you insist upon a candle reading, it can be done… but it is dangerous for both of us…” Her eyes were dull with dread.
“I hope that you do not return for it. Some things are best not known. Good night.”

“No, wait! Madame Miseria, please! I… I must know…”

But she was gone through one of the plush walls.

When the downstairs door closed behind the reluctant Teddy, Ristik found his sister at the kitchen stove, switching off the
gas flame under the frying pan full of smouldering incense that had filled the
ofica
with its heavy cloying odor. He gave her half the $50, pocketed the rest.

“You should have hooked him hard, tonight, Yana! We could have gotten a couple of hundred bucks—”

“He will be back. We will take him through a candle reading… no, two… a poisoned egg… a cemetery dig…”

“How do you know he’ll be back? How do you know he has that kind of dough? Like I told you on the phone, I just cut into him
in the Pink Flesh, I thought—”

“You said on the phone that he lives in Marin County. You said that all his credit cards were Goldcards. And a poor man would
not reflexively insist on being called Theodore Winston White
the Third
.” She tapped him on the arm. “Go over to Tiburon tonight, Ramon, learn what you can. He will be back.”

Just then the phone rang. With word about their fallen King.

W
ord was: Staley the King was perhaps
dying!

Word was: Staley had told his wife, Lulu, that if worse came to worst, he wanted an encampment in Steubenville to choose his
successor before he went. Word was: he wanted to be buried in a perfectly restored pink 1958 Cadillac convertible like the
one he’d driven to his coronation thirty-four years before…

Today such a vehicle would run you, oh, say, $46,000 and change on the open market. If you could even find one. Of course
no Gypsy in the entire history of the world has ever bought
anything
on the open market.

Buying is for the
gadje.

Buying is for when you can get what you want no other way.

Buying, in short, is a sucker’s game. And no
ram
, ever, believes he is a sucker. For dealing with the straight world, the
gadjo
world, the non-Gypsy motto is:
Gadje gadje, si lai ame Rom san
—outsiders are only outsiders, but we are
the rom.

In other words, Do them before they do you.

*   *   *

Dan Kearny, at his desk long after office hours, was trying to clear the meager post-quake billing so he could meet payroll
at the end of the month. He paused, frowning, at an employment app with the name
KEN WARREN
on it, then remembered the big guy talked like Donald Duck with a cold—
GnYm Kgen Gwarren
—and filed the application in the wastebasket.

“Good,” said a rich and oily voice from behind him. “That means you got room on the roster for me.”

Trin Morales moved forward on small, almost delicate feet to plunk down his considerable bulk in the hardback chair beside
Kearny’s desk.

“Trin. How’s tricks?”

The chair creaked in protest as Morales stretched to drop one of his business cards on the desk and shake a cigarette from
Kearny’s pack. He lit up and blew out the match and dropped it on the floor. Neither man had offered to shake hands.

“Never better.”

“That’s why you’re coming around looking for work.”

Morales shrugged with Latin expressiveness. “Slow month.”

“What I hear,” said Kearny, “is that you got locked out and had your phone jerked for nonpayment.” He turned the business
card over with blunt fingers. Trin’s unlisted home phone number was scrawled on the back in pencil. “What I hear is that the
Bureau of Collection and Investigative Services up in Sacto might pull your license for unethical conduct.”

“Just like they tried to pull yours a few years back,” sneered Morales, then added defensively, “you ever catch me with my
hand in your pocket when I was working for DKA?”

“
Catch
you? No. You’re a damned good investigator, Morales, I’ll give you that, but you’re trouble. I dumped you for trying to get
into that Latina girl’s pants, Maria something, Maria Navarro, that was it. Threatening to have her kids taken away from her
if she didn’t put out for you…”

“Aw, hell, Kearny, I was just clowning around—”

“Larry Ballard didn’t think so.” The two field men had come to blows over Maria. Kearny went on, “Put it this way, Trin…”
A quick flick of his fingers scaled the card into the wastebasket on top of Ken Warren’s employment app. “Don’t call me—I’ll
call you.”

The disgruntled Morales departed in a swirl of Mexican epithets, and Keary went in search of other game. Such a grand start
was too good to pass up. He found Giselle outside under one of the anti-theft spotlights set at strategic intervals around
the perimeter of the storage lot, itemizing the personal property in Maybelle Pernod’s Lincoln. Neither thought it strange
that the other was there long after office hours.