32 Cadillacs (16 page)

They did. Okay, then if he got a chance to grab it he would, even though he wasn’t rock-certain it was one of the bank’s cars.
Without a key, he’d need a few minutes to break in unseen, check the I.D. against Giselle’s list, pop out the ignition lock
and substitute one of his own…

The girl got in behind the wheel of the De Ville but didn’t start the motor. The man talked to her through the open window
and Morales slipped out of his car unobserved, a plan half-forming in his mind. When the Gypsy started away between the trailers,
Morales, who could pass for
rom
himself with his heavy features and cruel, thick-lipped mouth, angled quickly toward him. Gyps often posed as Chicanos when
working welfare and street scams; Morales now planned to return the favor.

“Hey!” he called.

The Gypsy turned. “Yeah, what you want?” His voice was thick and guttural.

“Za Devalesa.”
It was the sole Romany phrase Morales knew, a traditional greeting of some sort he had picked up in the Mission District
as a kid. Something like Go with God, maybe.

He said it loudly so the girl in the car, too far away for anything said in normal tones, could hear it.

“Za Devalesa,”
the Gypsy returned, obviously surprised into thinking for the moment that Morales was also
rom
.

Morales put an arm around his shoulders, walking him quickly down between two trailers and out of the girl’s sight. To her,
after hearing those exchanged greetings, it must seem that Morales was another Gyppo, a friend of her old man. At least he
hoped that was the way it would seem to her.

“I got a good horse for you in the last race,” he said to the Gypsy. “Saratoga Longshot.”

“There ain’t no horse in that race got that name.”

“No shit?” Morales turned away, shaking his head as if in amazement. “Guess I forgot to get up yesterday.”

He walked off leaving the Gypsy frenziedly checking his pockets in case Morales had been a dip, The Coupe de Ville was still
there, the girl behind the wheel, the window still open. Morales put what he thought was a charming smile on his heavy face.
His gold tooth glinted in the wan afternoon sunshine. She’d like that, he thought, Gyppos were like fucking magpies, they
liked bright things. Anything gold, even teeth.

“Za Devalesa,”
he said to her. It had worked the first time, what the hell? He added quickly, “Your daddy said you should help me get my
car started. Just over in the corner of the lot. He said you’d be back before he was.”

He went around the Caddy and slid his ample bulk in beside her. After a moment, she started the engine.

Morales pointed. “Over that way.”

And kept thinking, Go, move it. Even with her driving and him not laying a glove on her, she was a juvie and technically this
had become a kidnapping as soon as they had started moving.

“Got a dead battery, been sittin’ here since the start of the meet, my sister was supposed to pick it up but she got busted
in Fresno behind a bum Murphy game beef…”

Seeing him with her old man on an apparently friendly basis seemed to have activated the Gypsy thing of strictly obeying the
elders. She seemed to be buying it. Just two more minutes…

“There it is right over there, just needs a little shove to get it goin’…”

As he directed her across this almost deserted quadrant of the parking lot farthest from the track, he picked out an old Chev
Corsica with a lot of room around it. He had her pull the Coupe de Ville up a few feet short of the rear bumper.

“You drive the Chevy, I’ll push it. The keys are under the front seat. It’s got a stick, it’ll start real easy.” The girl
didn’t even hesitate in opening her door and getting out. Morales slid over behind the wheel. Because odds were that the Chevy
would be locked, he added, “First, check the bumpers when I come up behind it. I wanna make sure they match…”

Estúpida!
She obediently went to look at the bumpers. Even began waving Morales forward, her eyes on the space between the two cars.

Morales merely put the Caddy into reverse, backed up, then drove away from there in a wide arc that left the Gypsy girl yapping
in his dust like an angry Pekingese. Back toward the freeway through the parking lots, avoiding the trailers where her old
man probably by now had discovered the Caddy was missing. He would come back, drop the company car on a towbar later, when
he could be sure the Gyp and his disgraced daughter had departed.

Well away from her, he stopped to check through the windshield for the Caddy’s I. D. number, which was fastened to the dashboard
on a little plate. He looked for a match with the list he had stolen from the DKA file drawer that he now had on his clipboard.

Yeah!

Second blood.

L
arry Ballard didn’t get to work many North Bay assignments because O’B couldn’t resist all that sunshine when the City was
freezing its butt off under a layer of coastal fog. So driving up to Santa Rosa that Sunday afternoon, Ballard was struck
by how the land developers had bought effective control of Marin County’s Planning Department when he wasn’t looking. Almost
every hilltop sprouted its dense crop of duplexes and triplexes; north of San Rafael, where he remembered a little French
restaurant with a duck pond, a hulking PG&E plant generated power for all those hillsides acned with high-density housing.

Marin needed a spotted owl of its own, and fast.

Speeding north into still-rural Sonoma County on the six-lane 101 freeway, Ballard found himself wondering if Beverly would
ever let him back into her life. They’d fallen into an easy routine of double-dating with Bart and Corinne, a movie and a
drink afterward, then he and Bev over to her place for…

Trouble was, he’d liked her a
lot
, sometimes thought they were in love with each other. But one or the other had always pulled back from a lasting emotional
commitment. Now, all gone.

He came off the freeway in Santa Rosa looking for the ’30s-style stucco house at 15431 Redwood Highway. He’d stopped thinking
of Beverly and had started thinking about work again. Well, maybe not totally about work. Speculating, instead, about the
woman he had driven north to try and find.

Ballard hadn’t had to look up the address in the old case file; it had leaped into his mind when he had decided to seek out
the beautiful Gypsy fortune-teller named Yana. Some three years before, Yana had given him a lead that had helped DKA save
its license from the state.

That wasn’t all she’d given him. Against all known logic concerning Gypsies and
gadje
, Yana had gone to bed with him in the big motel down the road from the mitt-camp.

Just the one time; she didn’t dare do it again. She’d been sold in marriage at 13 to some mean Gyppo bastard for $3,000, and
ever since had been living with him and his mother, Madame Aquarra, Madame Aquarra hated her guts, had been single-mindedly
devoted to getting something on her so Yana could be kicked out of the house with her husband retaining the bride price.

But Yana was the only Gypsy contact Ballard could think of, so he had to talk with her. Or, if she wasn’t there any longer,
with Madame Aquarra to find her. It had been night the other time, he’d spoken to the old woman for just a few moments, no
way she would remember him now, three years later. Was there?

His speculations were academic: there was no 15431 Redwood Highway anymore. Just another stupid shopping mall. No one to ask
where the mitt-camp might have moved to, and, it being Sunday, he couldn’t even run a gag on the local post office for a possible
forwarding. Anyway, few Gyps were literate so they didn’t get much mail except government checks, anyway. Yana, he remembered,
could only read phone numbers and street names, though she could fake newspapers and menus real well.

Since Madame Aquarra had an unlisted phone number, it took two hours to get a possible new address on her. Out in the burgeoning
suburban sprawl west of Santa Rosa proper, where the old Calistoga Road meandered up off Cal 12 into the hills.

Spiritual Advisor
, said the sign above the door, but it was a mitt-camp pure and simple. On the front porch of the stucco and red tile fake
hacienda
were primary-color ceramic pots, bright trashy tourist souvenir figurines and ashtrays, and an exquisite Della Robbia ceramic
medallion sunk in the stucco beside the door. A nearly life-size fuzzy stuffed gorilla sat in a wicker rocking chair with
a dead cigar in his fist.

Ballard crunched across the gravel lot and up the three steps to the porch. He rang the bell. Bingo! Madame Aquarra, the mother-in-law.
Smoking a long black stogie like the gorilla’s which she whipped out of sight behind her back when she saw a possibly paying
customer at the door.

“Madame Aquarra knows all,” she intoned.

The same words she’d used three years ago. Obviously, she didn’t recognize the supposed cop, half-seen in the darkness, who’d
whisked her daughter-in-law away for a night in the pokey. Considering what he and Yana had so joyfully done together until
dawn, it had been more like a night of pokey-pokey-pokey.

Now he was acting confused.

“I’m looking for the
other
Madame Aquarra.”

She glared at him. Those same ice eyes, that same downy mustache adorning her upper lip, that same lustrous black hair, just
slightly grey-shot, coiled about her head, that same extra fifty pounds stretching tight a bright silk skirt across her yard-wide
derrière
.

“There is no other Madame Aquarra. Down through the eons, in all lands during all centuries, there has always only been one
Madame Aquarra at any one time to look into the future, to—”

“Damn!” exclaimed Ballard. “That’s too bad.”

“Too bad.”

Not quite a question, not quite a statement. Willing to be informed. Almost, if not quite, smelling money in it somewhere.

“Yep. In her twenties—
rom
like yourself—”

“What you know of the
rom?
” she demanded quickly.

“I know they are the only true seers. I know only they are truly blessed with the second sight and the third eye.”

He didn’t know what he had just said, but Madame Aquarra seemed to like it. She nodded sagely.

“How do you know this?”

“The young
rom
woman I thought was Madame Aquarra. She told my fortune and eventually it made me quite a lot of money. I want her to have
some of it.”

“She told you this fortune here? In my
ofica?
”

Ballard thought fast. Yana obviously wasn’t here, and he knew the old gal hated her; so he shook a chiding finger at her.

“You’re testing me, aren’t you, Madame Aquarra? Of course not here in your
ofica
. In…” He waved his hand in a dismissive manner. “But she’s gone from there…”

He fell silent. Silence was useful: it might work even with this crusty old Gypsy woman driven by anger and greed.

“Madame Aquarra knows of whom you speak,” she admitted in a suddenly mellifluous voice. “And of course Madame Aquarra knows
the way in which she released your power so that you found financial success. So…”

Ballard just stood there beaming at her, his hands in his pockets. He had her. Goddammit, he had her! Or her greed did.

“So give me your gift for her and I will get it to her.”

Ballard slowly moved his head from side to side, still without speaking, still with that silly grin on his face. The sudden
anger he had hoped for suffused her features:
yes!
She hated her daughter-in-law hard enough to sell her out to a
gadjo
.

“How much for her?” Madame Aquarra demanded bluntly.

He brought his hand out of his pocket clutching two $50 bills. Madame Aquarra stared at them, then met his bland eyes with
her angry ones. A shiver ran through him. She was a powerful presence despite her venality.

“Madame Miseria. San Francisco.”

He gave her a single fifty. Silently. She spoke again, as if he were physically dragging the words out of her.

“North Beach.”

Madame Miseria. Now he remembered her sign in… Romolo Place, that was it. He got around the City a lot, he knew most of the
streets well. So Madame Miseria was Yana. Hot damn!

He gave Madame Aquarra the other fifty. Who immediately exclaimed: “Go! Find her! Destroy her! Rip her eyes out!”

Then Madame Aquarra slammed the door in his face.

Ballard went down to his car both elated and uneasy. He had found her—unless the old lady had conned him. No. She had stopped
believing his story of a reward, she thought the
gadjo
wanted to bust Yana for something. Her hatred had fused with her greed and she had dropped dime on her daughter-in-law.

So it looked as if Yana had gotten away from her—and one way or another must have taken her bride price with her.

Ballard’s unease came from the fact that he’d parked where Madame Aquarra could get his license number if she were so inclined.
He didn’t believe in Gypsy curses, but he did believe in the efficiency of their information network.

He drove off thinking, Maybe I ought to get word back to her that something really terrible has come down on Yana. That would
make her happy and perhaps forget all about Larry Ballard.

Which would make Larry Ballard sleep better that night.

*   *   *

Sleep that entire weekend had been in short supply for Ken Warren. Somehow he had gotten it fixed in his head that those three
days were some sort of test for him. Show Dan Kearny that he was a real carhawk, and the DKA job would be his.

There is a surprising number of things a guy with his sort of handicap can do to keep the bills paid, and Warren had done
most of them, from civilian contract worker in Vietnam twenty years before (nobody with his kind of speech impediment could
get into the military, he’d tried hard enough), to migrant laborer, to stevedoring on the docks, to pushing a big-rig, to,
of all things, bartending.