32 Cadillacs (41 page)

“All right, I got a little… upset last time,” he said. “But
goddammit
…” He got control of his voice. “But I have to get this thing settled.” He turned to Lulu. “Mrs. Klenhard, you have to see
my position—”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars,” said Staley in sepulchral tones. Lulu kept silent.

“That just isn’t reasonable, Mr. Klenhard. Now, the offer I made last time, twenty-five thou—”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars,” said Staley.

“Okay, because I gotta close this one out, thirty—”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars,” said Staley.

Hawkins’s veins and eyes were beginning to bulge again. He had stopped, squarely facing Staley on the bed. Even though Staley’s
eyes were closed, it was
mano a mano.
Lulu was out of the loop and glad of it. Staley had never lost
mano a mano
in his long life.

“Thirty-five—”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

“
Forty,
and that’s the last—”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

“Goddam you, fifty, and if you think—”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

“Fifty-five—”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

Hawkins was red as a turkey wattle. “Sixty—”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

“Son of a bitch bastard, sixty-five—”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars.”

Hawkins threw up his hands in defeat. He’d like to choke the scrawny old bastard to death, but the wife would probably kill
him and his company would have to pay for his burial.

“All right!” he yelped. “All right all right all right! You win! Seventy-five…”

Staley at last opened his eyes. Was that a twinkle deep in their opaque depths? “Acceptable,” he said.

Barney Hawkins left the hospital within seven minutes of his humiliating capitulation. As he drove south out of town along
the river, he sneered at all the bums and drunks and hoboes and homeless who were congregated in some hick farmer’s field
back under the bluff… Except, Christ, he might soon be one of them. He had made a $75,000 settlement when the home office
was expecting $15,000! Beaten by some 77-year-old fart you had to move from place to place with a shovel!

Which old fart at that very moment was polkaing his lady in a breathtaking whirl around his hospital room to oompah music
from the radio, both of them giggling like teenagers, until the sound of Dr. Crichton’s footsteps in the hall sent them scurrying
to hit their respective marks in their little domestic farce, his the bed, hers the chair.

Seventy-five thousand dollars.

Yes!

T
he burly Jew in the skullcap took the tarnished metal object from the black man’s fingers and said to his young bright-eyed
assistant in Yiddish,
“Vi heyst dos?”

“Vaz.”

“Yo, yo, vaz,”
he said impatiently. He moved the vase slightly.
“Zilber?”
The assistant shrugged. He turned back to the black man. “You want to know if this is a silver vase?”

The black man grinned. “
Yo?
Good word.” He gestured at the beat-up-looking vase. “How much to get it replated, or whatever you call it?”

The Jew turned the object over with his fingers, looking up with probing eyes. “Old family heirloom, I suppose?”

“Yeah, sure, somethin’ like that. Look, bro, you don’t wanna do it—”

“And you think it is silver.”

“Ain’t it?”

“No.”

“Well, shit, then, whut you be wastin ma time for?”

The black man snatched back the battered vase to swing away through the street crowd on this part of Chicago’s South Drexel
Boulevard near the university, where the Jews’ secondhand stalls catered to South Side blacks. He heard something with
zilber
in it that ended with a laugh and
narish schvartz. Zilber
had to be silver and he knew
schvartz
was black man.
Narish
probably was something like dumb or stupid—which he wasn’t.

So he swung back to say, “African-American, hymie,” then pushed his way on down the street with the worthless vase he had
bought at another street stall an hour before.

*   *   *

Was the skull-capped Jew really a Jew, wondered Bart Heslip as he blew on his coffee to cool it, or a Gypsy posing as a Jew?
Chicago’s blacks often had tensions with the Jews, but they had no time at all for Gyppos. A skullcap and a few scraps of
Yiddish did not make a Jew; and laughing at the dumb black who didn’t know his stolen vase wasn’t silver was more Gyp than
Jew.

Meanwhile, he’d been in Chicago for nearly twenty hours with no luck at all in finding the elusive Tsatshimo and his equally
elusive four-door 4.5-liter V-8 fuel-injection Fleerwood sedan. Since metalworking and electroplating plants had yielded zero
results, in desperation he’d started working the street stalls, looking for people selling gold and silver plates at prices
that guaranteed they weren’t gold or silver. So far, also zero.

Bart sighed and gulped his coffee. There still was something about the old Jew that hadn’t rung quite right. Maybe tonight,
come back for a second look…

*   *   *

O’B was feeling desperate himself down in the Sunshine State. He’d found out that (a) Florida developers could destroy wetlands
with the best of them, and (b) local Florida governments would sell out to them even quicker than their counterparts in California.
What he hadn’t found was a Gypsy named Kalia Uwanowich and a new Cadillac Allante hardtop.

And now he’d gotten a call from Giselle telling him to drop everything and hightail it to Iowa for a Gyppo encampment. Hence
the desperation, because O’B had his pride. He didn’t want to show up without Kalia Uwanowich’s Allante. What had some far-out
Frog writer once said? That genius was not a gift, but the way one invents in desperate situations? Out of his desperation
was born his wonderful invention, a new way of looking at his problem.

He’d been acting as if Uwanowich really
was
a roofing contractor. Acting as if he really
would
be buying large quantities of roofing materials. Uwanowich was running a Gypsy scam. He wasn’t going to roof anything. He
wasn’t going to buy anything. He was going to rip off a subdivision.

So O’B had started to look at
existing
subdivisions with homeowners’ associations. These associations set up neighborhood Crime-Watch programs, told you what color
you could paint your house, how often your lawn had to be mowed. Why wouldn’t a homeowners’ association—stick with him here—tell
its members that all their houses had to get reroofed at the same time? Why wouldn’t they contract to have it done, collective
bargaining being a lot cheaper than individual deals?

It was worth a shot.

And west of Tamarac, on a tract between West Atlantic Boulevard and the Sawgrass Expressway, O’B saw thirty roofs without
shingles, without even the tar paper that goes on under shingles. Even better, discarded shingles were lying all over lawns
and sidewalks and even out into the streets.

In front of one house a tall fortyish man with reddish hair and a long pink homely face was picking up ripped-off shingles.
O’B sauntered up as he dropped the armful on a stack beside his driveway. He straightened up with a hand to the small of his
back, then wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve.

“See you’re getting your roof done,” said O’B.

“Yep.” He squinted up at the roof along with O’B, and waxed eloquent on his subject. “Ted’s Roofers had a sixty-man crew out
here today, rippin’ off shingles from all the houses.”

“I thought roofers usually carted away the old shingles.”

The man chuckled. “At the price we’re gettin’, we gotta stack ’em, then they haul ’em.” He had a Midwest accent. What did
they call them here in Florida? Snowbirds? “It’s all part of the contract.”

“Offered you a real good price, huh?”

“The best. He comes in with a big crew, does it, and gets out again in a single day.”

“But he didn’t finish the job today,” O’B pointed out.

“One day to strip ’em, the next day to roof ’em. Homeowners association pays him after the old shingles are already stripped.
Ted, he insisted on that, didn’t want nobody to say they paid for something they didn’t get.”

“I bet he insisted,” said O.B. A nice touch, that.

The man looked at him shrewdly. “You’re in the market for a roofer, you can’t beat Ted’s prices.”

“Where do I find him?”

“Secretary of the association, feller named Hank Sawtell, he lives right down the street, twenty-seven sixty-eight, he’ll
have all the dope. Has the association books right there in his house. Say, you want some iced tea? The missus…”

O’B begged off, hurried away. The trouble was, the roofs were already off and Ted’s Roofers wouldn’t be back to the subdivision
in the morning to replace them. Not then, not ever. He was speeding down the wide curving suburban street, dodging kids’ toys
and picking up house numbers off mailboxes, because his only hope was that Ted—surely, Kalia Uwanowich—hadn’t scored and soared
yet. Soared a long way from here.

He needn’t have worried; Ballard should have been there to bitch about the luck of the Irish. Parked in front of 2768 was
a spanking-new red Allante hardtop with Florida plates.

O’B parked around the next corner out of sight, got out the dealer key and his repo order with the Allante’s I.D. number on
it. He confirmed the I.D., got in, fired it up. In the rearview, just before he passed out of sight around the curve of the
suburban street, he saw a swarthy man sprinting down Sawtell’s walk, waving his arms and yelling.

See you in Stupidville, baby.

O’B dropped the paperwork and keys for his rental car into a mailbox, notified the cops of the repossession, checked out of
his motel, and headed north and west for Iowa.

*   *   *

Nanoosh Tsatshimo had started out in his 20s with an instant rechroming scam he’d learned from a great-uncle who’d had a wealthy
and sympathetic
gadjo
take him into his home and pay for his education. Such men, called
rai
by the Gypsies, were considered part father, part fool.

Anyway, the great-uncle had been good at chemistry, and had taught Nanoosh how to dissolve mercury in a weak nitric acid solution
and then apply it to something made of copper. The nitric acid ate a little of the copper, which formed an amalgam with the
mercury. This gave the piece a shiny surface like chrome or silver plating.

But it was a short con, because the nitric acid goes right on eating away, so after a few hours it destroys the mercury amalgam
and the item looks like copper again. As he got older himself, Nanoosh began to search for a long con without those short
departures. He found it in gold and silver electroplating.

Soon he was selling “solid silver” flatware; soon after that, lead plates (same approximate weight as solid gold) electroplated
with a micrometer-thin layer of real 24-carat yellow Saudi gold. It could be gotten cheaply in Arabia with the right connections,
and the plates could be sold as solid gold.

Now he could set up and sell the whole season in one place, having calibrated almost to the day when the microscopic layer
of gold or silver would wear through to show the base metal beneath.

Tonight he had an appointment in Lincoln Park with a man who wanted a service for twenty of solid-gold plates and flatware.
The mark was a 26-year-old stock futures options player who had just gotten his seat on the Exchange and a condo overlooking
Lake Michigan. The mark planned to screw blind the old Jew in the skullcap who ate kosher and kept the holy days—not knowing
the old Jew was really Nanoosh, who planned to maybe leave him his pants.

Nanoosh used Lake Shore Drive north to go get him.

*   *   *

Bart Heslip had his window open and the Cubs game on the car radio as he drove south on Lake Shore Drive. The old skull-capped
Jew who maybe wasn’t Jewish at all deserved another look.

As always as he drove, his eyes were busy on cars passing in the other direction, some unconscious computer in his skull ticking
them off, ready to register only if one of the big, dark, bulky cars he was passing was the Nanoosh Tsatshimo Fleerwood.

Lincoln Continental… Acura Legend sedan LS… Mercedes-Benz 300… Buick Riviera… Chrysler Imperial… Lexus LS400… Infiniti
Q45… BMW 750iL…
Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special
…

His old skull-capped Jew behind the wheel! Bart was in the fast lane: even as his mind registered car and driver, he was spinning
the wheel and slamming the brakes to put the Seville into a controlled skid. Bounce! thunder! crash! across the grassy center-divider,
goose it, hit pavement, tires shrieking,
he had it
, back on the highway but in the northbound lane.

Eight cars behind the Fleetwood. One car back by the 31st Street intersection. Crowding its tail where Lake Shore splits at
Cermak. Ran it off the road not far from the aquarium.

Nanoosh, his nephew, and two young Gypsy bucks in the backseat came boiling out of the Fleetwood even as Bart slammed the
Seville to a stop behind it.

Nanoosh bellowed,
“WHADDA HELL YOU T’INK—”

Bart roared,
“I’M FROM THE BANK AND I’M TAKING THAT CAR!”

“The bank? The California bank?”

“Cal-Cit, you bet.” Bart was flying on an adrenaline rush.
It was the right car!
“Take out your personal crap—”

That’s when the nephew of Nanoosh made a bad mistake. He threw a punch at Bart. Bart slipped it, snapped his head back three
quick times with three left jabs, breaking his nose on the second, then came up with a good right cross to put him away.

Nanoosh stayed out of it, leaned placidly against the fender to watch his young Gypsies take Bart apart. But they were bloody
and reeling, Bart had only a skinned cheek and a fat lip when the cops arrived, a salt-and-pepper team of suits who came up
with only nightsticks because it seemed that kind of beef.