32 Cadillacs (15 page)

So he went into the house and called Giselle at her apartment in Oakland. Got her. And spoke almost accusingly.

“I thought you might be at the office.”

“Nope. Washing dishes, and clothes, and my hair—I like to do that when I can’t tell anymore if I’m a blonde or not.”

“I thought you were going to talk with the bunco cop at SFPD who specializes in Gypsies.”

“He’s off until Monday.”

“I’m going to run into the office and go over that folder on Grimaldi—”

“
I’m
off until Monday.”

“I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”

He hung up before she could object. He knew she needed time for herself, to live some kind of normal life, meet the right
guy, get married, have kids. At 32, her—what did they say—her clock was running? But not right now. Right now they had these
Gypsies to contend with.

Until last year, when she’d learned how to drive and had gotten her license, Giselle had ridden in to work with him five mornings
a week. He didn’t realize it, but those forty-five daily minutes in the car had played a big part in DKA’s success. Cut off
from phones and interruptions, they’d reviewed operations, planned client strategies, discussed field men’s productivity.
They’d argued about computerized report-writing, insurance, health and pension and profit-sharing plans, automated legal and
skip letters. They’d fought about hiring ex-cons as field men and about dying investigations and about dead skips.

During those drives, over the years, DKA had become DKA.

Now they tried to do it at his desk in the morning before things got too hectic, but it wasn’t the same.

Giselle was dressed in jeans that looked like someone had spilled acid on them, and a mauve sweatshirt with figures leaping
like lightning that spelled out
Alvin Ailey
. Without makeup and with her blond hair pulled back into a ponytail under a billed Giants cap, she looked about 12 years
old. A tall, shapely 12.

But as she got into the car the angry gleam in her eye was anything but juvenile. On the other hand, she was carrying a fistful
of folders. So she hadn’t been as dedicated to free time on the weekend as she had let on.

“Dammit, Dan, I deserve a little personal time to—”

“You too, huh?” he interrupted without sympathy.

They were coming up to the metering lights on the Bay Bridge approach, inactive now for the weekend. She fastened her seat
belt and squirmed around to get comfortable. She fought a grin. Finally nodded ruefully.

“Yeah. Me too. On Monday I’ll check with the Gypsy guy in Bunco—an Inspector Harrigan—and the Better Business Bureau and the
state Consumer Fraud Division.”

“Why now, Giselle? This is a major, major con, one that’s going right into the Gyppos’ book of tall tales. Somebody really
bright— obviously this guy calling himself Grimaldi—had to think and plan a long time to set this one up. Why’d he spring
the trap right now?”

Out beyond her window and the whizzing railings of the bridge, the bay was whitecapped with hundreds of sailboats heeled over
by a stiff breeze through the Gate.

“He was ready to move. He had everything in place, so—”

“I don’t buy it.” Kearny was frowning behind the wheel. “I think we ought to check with our law enforcement and P.I. informants
around the country who work with Gypsies, find out if anything big is happening in their world.”

“I thought we didn’t want anyone to know about this case.”

“We don’t
tell
’em anything—we
ask
.” He paused. “Yeah, and when you see that bunco cop, check with him for any other odd incidents involving Gyppos and new
Caddies during our time frame—hell, make that
any
Caddies during the past couple weeks. I think it’s like you said—this guy Grimaldi was using that name to set up some nontypical
Gypsy scam. Something really big, well-plannedm… It had to be something even bigger to make him endanger that by activating
this Cadillac grift in such a hurry.”

They were still kicking it around as they came down off the skyway at Eighth, intending to run out Harrison to Eleventh and
the office. This was the heart of San Francisco’s light industrial area, shabby and blue-collar with dirty intersections weekend-deserted,
the lights clicking red and amber and green and red again in a senseless roundelay for nonexistent traffic.

Which made the car ahead of them in mid-block stand out. A white/blue Eldorado with the optional cabriolet roof. Without plates
but with a paper sticker in the corner of the windshield.

“That’s one of ours,” said Kearny in a taut voice.

“You can’t be sure, Mr. K—”

“Lookit the guy driving! Gyppo all the way. I’m sure.” And he was, she knew. A savage intuition that made him the best in
the business. “Get ready to slide over.”

“Dan’l—”

But Kearny had drifted into the far left lane behind the Eldorado so he was close behind it. Too close behind it. When it
braked for the red light at Tenth, he ran into the rear end.

“
Daniel
, are you
crazy?
What—”

But Kearny already had the car in neutral, motor running, and was jumping out. He left the door open. Ahead of them, the driver
of the other car was doing the same, leaving his door open also, outrage flooding his dark, saturnine features, Giselle understood
suddenly, even as she was sliding into the driver’s seat. She wanted to pound the steering wheel with delight.

Outside, Kearny and the Gypsy—surely, he was a Gypsy— were meeting where Kearny’s front bumper was just touching the Eldorado’s
rear one. The Gypsy was holding his neck.

“What the hell you do? Where the hell you learn to drive? I got whiplash—”

“It was your fault,” Kearny exclaimed. “Running fast up to the light that way, then slamming on your brakes.”

“Slam on my brakes? You were right on my bumper.”

Giselle eased the door shut almost silently, just enough so the latch clicked to hold it in place, then backed up slightly.
Kearny squatted to look at the bumper of the Cadillac her move had exposed.

The Gypsy started to squat, too, holding his neck and grimacing theatrically as if from pain. But then he shrieked and struggled
erect again, now holding the small of his back also.

“Not a scratch on it,” Kearny was saying.

“Besides my whiplash, I think I got a slipped disk.” He was groaning, still holding his neck with one hand, the small of his
back with the other. “And whadda ya mean about the car? Looka that crease! That indentation! That chipped paint!”

“Chipped paint?” yelled Kearny. “You’re crazy!” He was erect again, pointing accusingly at the car, drawing the Gypsy’s eye
to the back of the Eldorado. “There’s no—”

“There! There! And lookit there! And what about my neck? Very severe whiplash. And my back. Very dangerous slipped disk.”
He was growing paler by the moment, experimentally moving his legs around beneath him, the knees now slightly bent as if he
couldn’t straighten them. “And torn ligaments in both knees, too, from hittin’ them on the dashboard. That means I gotta see
three doctors, go to hospital, get X rays, lose time on job…”

He was still holding his neck and holding his back and keeping his knees bent when the traffic light changed to green. Kearny
simply walked away from him and slid into the driver’s seat of the Cadillac. Belatedly, the Gypsy leaped erect beside the
two cars, eyes bugging out, whiplash and slipped disk and torn tendons all suddenly and miraculously cured.

“Hey, what the hell you think—”

Kearny goosed the Eldorado across the intersection with the green light and the door still hanging open. The Gypsy ran after
him for a dozen paces, shouting and waving his arms; then, as Giselle started to accelerate behind him, whirled to stand in
her path, holding his arms out like he was herding sheep.

“Hey, you, stop—”

She whipped the wheel over, hard, floored it, bounced across the corner of the intersecting curbs with a loud
crash!
and screamed around the corner into Tenth Street. He slammed an angry hand against her rear fender, but she was already by
him.

And gone.

As Kearny was gone in the Eldorado.

Ah. First blood.

S
econd blood to, of all people, Trinidad Morales. Who wasn’t working the Gyppo files, wasn’t even supposed to
know
about the Gyppo files, Kearny’s paranoia about them being what it was. But on Friday afternoon he had snooped the supposedly
empty file cabinet upstairs that seemed to hold so much fascination for Kearny, Giselle, O’B, Heslip, and Ballard. And had
leafed through enough of the Gypsy material to know that almost any new Caddy with paper plates and a swarthy driver would
be fair game.

Then he heard someone on the stairs, so he snatched one of Giselle’s lists—the cars’ colors and descriptions and model and
I. D. numbers—eased the file drawer shut, and was halfway down the hall by the time Kearny appeared.

“Lose something, Morales?”

“Just findin’ my office, Mr. K, just findin’ my office. Lot different here from over to Seven Sixty.”

Not that Morales intended to go out looking for Gypsy cars off that list. He had been hired to work the cases
abandoned
by those assigned to the Gyppos, and besides, there weren’t any direct leads to work yet. For now he just wanted to know
what was going on. Knowledge was power, and all that. And he would keep checking. There might be a way to snatch some meat
from the jaws of the other guys for a quick buck or two.

But that was Friday. Now, on Saturday afternoon, Morales was not thinking of Gypsies. He was, instead, over in the East Bay
trying to find a welfare cheat Ballard had been chasing for his Mazda. Typical Ballard shit, he thought, booting the file
all over the lot with that phony concussion of his.

He still hated Ballard’s guts from the Maria Navarro thing.

Golden Gate Fields is shoehorned between 1–80 and the fringes of the bay at Albany, just south of Richmond. This Saturday
was a race day, and since a remarkably large percent of welfare checks in California, state or federal, are cashed at racetracks,
and since the Mazda man had a history with the ponies, cruising the parking lots at the track offered good odds.

He waited until the third race, so most patrons already would be there, then for thirty minutes methodically checked for the
blue 1990 Mazda 323/Protege hatchback with, noted from an earlier Ballard repo, a grey leaded-in left front fender.

Pretty easy to spot if it was around. It wasn’t. And that’s when he got his bright idea.

Racetracks were also dandy places to look for Gyppos.

Most of them were damned good with horses from the days when they rode around in wagons instead of Cadillacs; Gypsy horseplayers
were legion, and a lot of others were seasonal trainers or grooms or even practice riders. For all he knew, there were even
Gyppo jockies. He’d never met a legit Gypsy yet, not one, not ever, but he guessed there had to be some.

There was a separate lot at the rear, on the other side of the access road, where owners and trainers parked dozens of R/Vs
and horse trailers and big muddy luxury cars. Within five minutes he had spotted three new Cadillacs and felt the old adrenaline
surge. Gyppos were the hardest game there was to track; to a manhunter, getting one was like wing-shooting a crow, that wiliest
of birds.

And technically, he hadn’t really gone looking for Gypsies, had he? Of course not. But if one of their cars should happen
to fall into his lap, he couldn’t be blamed for that, could he?

He parked across and down from the Caddies, studied the list of models and colors and engine I.D. numbers. Cad One was out.
It had current California plates and it was just too soon for any of the Gyppo Cads to have plates—unless they were stolen
or off a wrecking yard junker. Not likely, not yet. The Gyppos still would be thinking they were too smart for anyone to guess
who they were, let alone find them. So, scratch Cad One.

Cads Two and Three were real possibilities.

But even as he thought this, a very tall, very lanky, very blond, very Anglo woman whose pale skin had the translucency of
alabaster, wearing a beautifully tailored red hacking jacket and pearl-grey jodhpurs, appeared between the horse trailers.
With her was a grizzled old man wearing a cloth cap and knee-high rubber boots spattered with dried horse manure. They shook
hands and the blonde got into Cad Two. Before driving off she used her handkerchief to wipe the hand that the old geezer had
shaken.

If she was a Gypsy, Morales was Madonna.

That left the silver Coupe de Ville loaded with one of the many Cadillac option packages. He itched to get out of his dumpy
little company car and wander over there and try to get a squint at the I.D. number. But if it was one of the Gyppo cars,
and he got spotted checking it out, they’d be gone in a flash.

When in doubt, do nothing. For the next twenty-seven minutes he kicked around what he might do if he
did
snag the car. He was on DKA time here, a field agent hired by the company, but the bank wouldn’t know that. So could he turn
it in on the sly, operating under his own still-active P.I. license? He’d probably get a hell of a lot more from the bank
direct than the wages and expenses and— maybe—percentage of the repo fee he’d get from DKA. Assuming Kearny had cut DKA the
kind of sweet little per-car recovery deal that Morales supposed he had.

No, ashcan that. He didn’t like Kearny, but he was smart enough to fear him. He’d only get the one Gypsy car, then Kearny
would find out about it and would have his butt. And if the state did lift his license, he would be out in the cold.

So, since there was no other option, be a good guy. Win one for the Gipper…

A short swarthy man and a beautiful girl of about 15—the age Morales found himself liking more and more these days—were coming
his way. They both had brown skin and shiny black hair: Gyppos, sure as hell. Man and wife? Gypsy marriages were arranged
for bride price… Naw, by the way they related to each other, father and daughter. Now, if they stopped at the Caddy…