32 Cadillacs
Authors: Joe Gores
Copyright © 1992 by Joe Gores
All rights reserved.
Mysterious Press books are published by Warner Books, Inc.,
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
.
First eBook Edition: June 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56234-8
CONTENTS
By Joe Gores
NOVELS
A Time of Predators (1969)
Interface (1974)
Hammett (1975)
Come Morning (1986)
Wolf Time (1989)
DKA FILE NOVELS
Dead Skip (1972)
Final Notice (1973)
Gone, No Forwarding (1978)
32 Cadillacs (1992)
NONFICTION
Marine Salvage (1971)
ANTHOLOGIES
Honolulu, Port of Call (1974)
Tricks and Treats (1976)
(with Bill Pronzini)
SCREENPLAYS
Interface (1974)
Hammett (1977–78)
Paper Crimes (1978)
Paradise Road (1978)
Fallen Angel (1980)
Cover Story (1984–85)
(with Kevin Wade)
Come Morning (1986)
Run Cunning (1987)
Gangbusters (1989–90)
TELEPLAYS
Golden Gate Memorial (1978)
(four-hour miniseries)
High Risk (1985)
(with Brian Garfield)
“Blind Chess” (B. L. Stryker, 1989)
EPISODIC TV (1974–92)
| Kojak | Remington Steele |
| Eischied | Scene of the Crime |
| Kate Loves a Mystery | Eye to Eye |
| The Gangster Chronicles | Helltown |
| Strike Force | T. J. Hooker |
| Magnum, P.I. | Mike Hammer |
| Columbo |
This book is for
My beloved Dori
Who helped me snatch a Cadillac from
Mafia hitman Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno
on our first date
“Please don’t talk,” said the nun. “It’s dangerous for you to talk, you’re very seriously ill.”
“Not so seriously as you’re well. How don’t you enjoy life, mother. I should laugh all round my neck at this very minute if
my shirt wasn’t a bit on the tight side.”
“It would be better for you to pray.”
“Same thing, mother.”
Joyce Cary
The Horse’s Mouth
Every man is as Heaven made him, and
sometimes a great deal worse.
Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote
UST
S
O
Y
OU
K
NOW
I offer the usual disclaimer: the characters, events, and places in this novel are totally fictional, products of the author’s
lively imagination. Now, having said that:
Once upon a time a band of Gypsies really did rip off thirty-two cars from a large San Francisco Bay Area bank in a single
day. During the next months David Kikkert & Associates, hired to recover them, grabbed twenty-nine of the thirty-two all over
the U.S.A. (including Hawaii) and in Mexico.
Here’s where, in
32 Cadillacs
, the currency of truth becomes funny money, for not every repo in the novel took place while tracking down these Gypsies
during a rwenty-six-day time frame. Some were “stretched” a bit, others were from elsewhere in my dozen years as a legal car
thief, but all really happened—even Lake Shore Drive in Chicago and the Lovelies in Nebraska.
Although my stance toward the
room
during my detective career was strictly adversarial, my Gypsy lore in
32 Cadillacs
is as honest as research and experience can make it, as are their scams, cons, and grafts. And I have tried to make my fictional
Gypsies realistic— and fun—without sentimentalizing them. If you sentimentalize Gypsies, you run the risk of ending up with
a car that won’t run, a roof that won’t stop the rain, or a driveway that comes up on the sole of your shoe.
On that note: our society becomes ever more bland, ever more afraid of countless pressure groups poised to scream foul if
their particular toe gets stepped on. In
32 Cadillacs
they can find a lot to scream about. But to sanitize the tough and lively world I am writing of would be to make its people
mere hollow reeds, the novel itself an exercise in futility.
The amount you can withdraw from a bank account without federal scrutiny is
under
$10,000, so actually my Gypsies should be moving $9,999.99 around during their bank scam. It was just a lot less cumbersome
to make it an even 10K.
Bizarre as they might seem, the shenanigans at the Giggling Marlin in Cabot San Lucas are a real, nightly occurrence.
Finally, I want to round up the usual suspects:
First, foremost, and always, Dori—beloved wife, best friend, peerless editor, critic, greatest support—who bled a lot over
this book and lent it her own invaluable Gypsy research.
My agents, Henry Morrison and Danny Barer, poked and prodded and threatened and cajoled and never lost faith.
Otto and Carolyn Panzer, early enthusiasts when they were Mysterious Press, and Bill Malloy, who continued their enthusiasm
after he took over as editor in chief of Mysterious.
Martin Cruz Smith shared his research from
Gypsy in Amber
and
Canto for a Gypsy
; his lovely wife, Me, did the same with the notebooks and diaries from her remarkable clergyman grandfather’s lifelong involvement
with the Gypsies.
Inspector Victor Wyckoff, SFPD Bunko, is not anything at all like Dirty Harry Harridan; and no one like Stan Goner was ever
remotely involved in the Great Gypsy Hunt.
Don Westlake found these tales amusing over a long Mohan weekend, and later, during a train ride in Spain, suggested sharing
a chapter of this book with one of his own (it turned up in his Dortmund classic,
Drowned Hopes
).
Finally, the real guys and gals of the once-real DKA:
Dave Kikkert (R.I.P.)
Hiroko Ono (R.I.P.)
Ronnie Lathe
Maurice James O’Brien
Floyd Ryan
Ken Warner
Isadora “Izzy” Martinez
and
the Me I was then
Gang, I couldn’t spin all these tall tales without you.
Joe Gores
San Angelo
April, 1992
IX
M
ONTHS
B
EFORE
A
t 5:04:09
P.M.
on a Tuesday, October 17, Daniel Kearny Associates’ narrow high-shouldered old charcoal Victorian at 760 Golden Gate Avenue
…
fell over
.
Seven-point-two on the Richter scale. That’s all it took.
In the Gay ’90s the old building had been a high-class bawdy house for San Francisco’s movers and shakers, and Dan Kearny
had just gotten Landmark status for it by shaming the City into honoring these fallen women among its other heroes—madmen,
tarnished athletes, dishonest cops, corrupt politicians.
But what the State of California had been unable to do in ten years of trying, the San Andreas fault, after gulping downtown
Santa Cruz a hundred miles south, accomplished with a discreet belch. Only because DKA had closed early for the World Series
was no one hurt during those seventeen violent seconds in which 760 was gone, gone to dust, its memories with it.
Which left the DKA Head Office (Branch Offices in All Major California Cities) abruptly located Nowhere. Yet Giselle Marc,
DKA’s office manager, when surveying the tipsy splintered remains the next morning, sighed as much for the ghosts of scented
ladies and boar-eyed power brokers as for DKA’s current plight.
“The damnedest finest ruins,” she murmured, echoing San Francisco’s epitaph after the Big One in ’06.
Giselle, who combined an M.A. in history with her own P.I. license, was an exquisite racehorse blonde with bedroom eyes that
masked boardroom brains. Brains discovered to their sorrow by many of DKA’s cockier adversaries just moments before the hammer
fell on them.
“I wish Richter had gotten flattened himself, before he invented the damn scale,” Dan Kearny growled.
Kearny was a flint-faced 52, with icy grey eyes and a cement-mixer jaw, his thinning curly hair getting frosty around the
edges. His nose obviously once had met an object harder than itself moving very rapidly in the opposite direction.
“What good would that have done, Dan’l? Somebody else just would have come up with a measurement for seismic activity.”
“Seven-point-two on the Smith scale?” He chuckled for the first time in two days. “Well, what the hell, the place had gotten
too small for us, anyway.”
Which was true. The upstairs clerical offices had been a rabbit warren of tiny rooms crowded with too many people and too
much equipment, and Kearny and the field men had been crammed into mouseholes in an under-the-building garage with room left
over for only a repo or two. For over a decade DKA had leased storage lots all over town for the cars it had repossessed.
“I wonder if the phones still work?” Kearny muttered.
They didn’t. But those down at 340 Eleventh Street did. Years before, when the state first started trying to get the old Victorian
condemned for a Social Services parking lot, Kearny had bought a disused laundry South of Market as a backup site, and had
been desultorily remodeling it a weekend at a time ever since. Now, suddenly, that old laundry was the New Jerusalem.
* * *
As Kearny and Giselle talked, by honest, genuine, sheer chance, a man calling himself Karl Klenhard and his wife of over fifty
years, calling herself Margarete, were waiting for the light at a corner in Steubenville (“Where the Tall Corn Grows”), Iowa.
Steubenville— not to be confused with the much more nifty Steubenville in Ohio—was county seat for 9,581 souls and several
hundred square miles of rich alluvial flatland below the bluffs of the Mighty Mississippi.
Steubenviile had been settled in the late 1800s by farmers from Trier, Prussia; in those early days, paddlewheel steamers
plying the river offered tempting access to markets for their produce. But times change, markets shift, prices rise and fall,
and with the Midwest farm crunch Steubenviile had become Stupidville to those unfortunate enough to still live there.
Karl did not look stupid, but he did fit right in with the local populace: his Santa Claus smile, great walrus mustache, and
gold watch chain glinting across a benevolent expanse of belly all suggested the retired German burgher. As for Margarete,
her plump bosom, high color, and twinkly eyes above glowing apple cheeks made her look like a ceramic cookie jar. Only the
cigarette smouldering between the first two fingers of her right hand hinted at anything other than classic
Hausfrau
.
Here’s where chance comes in: as they waited at the light, an elderly Eldorado with those majestic ’50s tailfins stretching
out forever behind it rolled by them. Karl leaned jauntily on his ornate gold-headed cane and gave Margarete a nostalgic little
pat on the fanny in honor of other tailfins in other times.
“Remember the pink nineteen fifty-eight Caddy convertible we rode to my coronation? Ah, darling, what times we had!”
“Yes, my dumpling,” said Margarete with shining eyes. Then a hint of sadness crossed her face. “We’re getting old,
Liebchen
. It makes one think of retirement.”