32 Cadillacs (7 page)

*   *   *

The blonde slid over, the chauffeur got behind the wheel of the pink Cadillac. The stolen credit card with which the Fleetwood
limo had been rented wouldn’t hit the lists until tomorrow, earliest. As the chauffeur pulled the ragtop out into traffic,
the blonde took off her golden hair to become Yana.

“The
schvartzes
brag that if you could be black for just one Saturday night you’d never want to be white again.”

“Huh?” The puzzled chauffeur was driving one-handed while stripping off his mustache to become her brother Ramon.

“So the
rom
should say that if you could run just one Gypsy scam you’d never want to be a
gadjo
again.”

Then he understood. They both started to laugh.

“I’ll drop you at the airport and drive this back up.”

“Be sure and hide it when you get there,” she said. “Rudolph will be watching for my return, intending to steal it, and I
don’t want to have to worry about him. Tonight is Teddy’s first candle reading, I want that to be perfect. He’s going to be
my biggest score ever.”

“Until you become Queen.”

“Until I become Queen,” she agreed.

And right now she was riding in the pink 1958 Caddy that would
assure
she would become Queen. Rudolph Marino was out of the running for royalty before the race had even begun. He just didn’t
know it yet.

I
n Stupidville that same night, Staley Zlachi thrashed and turned in his semi-private hospital room (courtesy the department
store down whose escalator he had fallen) and then began crying out as if in drugged sleep. The nurse peeked in, withdrew;
Lulu was there to wipe his fevered brow with a corner of her shawl.

In San Francisco, Ristik hid the pink Cadillac, Yana held Teddy’s first candle reading, Marino read the classifieds for storefront
rentals, and Dan Kearny took Jeannie out to dinner. Without the glue of the kids living at home to hold it together, Kearny’s
marriage had begun leaking sawdust at the seams. Time for a little candlelight of his own, and wine, and romance.

But they squabbled at the restaurant.

They squabbled on the way home.

They squabbled in the bedroom.

Instead of romance, Dan Kearny got the couch in the spare room he’d converted into an office a few years back—never realizing
that this office-in-the-home neatly epitomized a great deal of what was going wrong with his marriage.

*   *   *

O’B was also dining out with his wife that evening, also in search of domestic felicity: Bella was pissed because O’B’s most
recent night out with the boys had been three days long. Since Bella was as Italian as O’B was Irish, and loved her stuffed
cannelloni the way he loved his double Bushmills with water back, O’B had thought, a little candlelight, a little Chianti
at that new Italian family-style restaurant on Taraval, and later, in the bedroom, a little romance…

But they squabbled at the restaurant (it had a full bar).

They squabbled on the way home (O’B ran a red light).

They didn’t squabble in the bedroom only because O’B, after observing sagely that he must have gotten some bad ice, passed
out in the middle of getting undressed. Staring at her snoring spouse, Bella was more pissed than ever.

*   *   *

Giselle Marc was going out to dinner with a Brit (visiting prof of English lit at SF State) whom she’d recently taken to letting
hold her hand while reciting poetry at her by candlelight—candlelight yet again!—in his Oxford accent. She felt so good she
thought she just might let him finally seduce her.

You see, Maybelle had come in and redeemed her 1991 Connie, proving Dan Kearny wrong—which meant he was going to be, at least
temporarily, a lot easier to work with. God knew where May-belle had gotten the cash, but why look a gift horse in…

Oh-oh. Maybelle’s Connie was parked near a fireplug on Turk Street. And around the corner on Divisadero, in front of a ribs
joint, was all 250 pounds of Maybelle, poured into a tight cheap red satin dress slit up a thigh the size of a Clydesdale’s.
Vamping arthritically at anything male that strolled by, like Julia Roberts waiting for Richard Gere to show up.
Damn
the woman! And damn Dan Kearny, too: Giselle could already see the smirk on his face, already hear the laughter in his voice.

Then at the restaurant the Brit insulted her intelligence by trying to pass off Sonnet 116—“The Marriage of True Minds,” that
one, for God’s sake!—as his own. It was all too much: she poured
fumé blanc
down the front of his trousers and stalked out yelling she couldn’t abide an incontinent man.

*   *   *

Larry Ballard’s evening began beautifully when Beverly Daniels, a pert little blonde with big blue eyes and a dancer’s figure,
picked him up in her yellow Nissan 280Z. He once had repossessed it from her, then had worked out a payment schedule so she
could get it back. Beverly stood the same scant inch above five feet that Ballard stood below six, but somehow they fit together
wondrous well on a horizontal plane. Which Ballard fully intended they should attain before the night was over.

Then everything went to hell. Blame it on Pietro Uvaldi, or maybe Dan Kearny—all
Ballard
did, after the movie and the pizza, was suggest they “swing by” the Montana…

“Don’t you do this to me,” said Beverly.

“Do what to you? All I said was—”

“I know what you said,” she snapped savagely.

Beverly had some justification. Their first date had ended with her all alone in Ballard’s car while members of a rock group
called Full Moon Madness—whose Maserati Bora coupe Ballard had just snatched—tried to drag her out through the window without
opening it first.

“This time isn’t like that at all,” he explained. “I even have a key for this one.”

And he told her about Pietro Uvaldi, the wispy little decorator at the Montana with the $85,000 Mercedes. If they could get
into the under-the-building garage, and the car was there, it would be a piece of cake. Of course Ballard didn’t mention either
the shotgun or Pietro’s poopsie, Freddi of the cellophaned hair and leather underwear, so Beverly couldn’t factor them into
the equation until it was much too late.

A tenant was using his electronic door-opener when they arrived at the Montana; they swept into the garage on his rear bumper.
He parked, they cruised, and there was the Mercedes, gleaming in a far corner like the Holy Grail!

“Just like you said—a piece of cake.” Beverly secretly got off just a little on the excitement of stealing cars.

Ballard opened the door of the Mercedes with the key he’d gotten from the dealer, and did a somersault. He managed to hit
the concrete floor in some sort of shoulder roll, cushioning the shock; but he was still dazed when he staggered to his feet
to try and block Fearsome Freddi’s second attack with a wobbly
shiko dachi
defensive stance, one hand at shoulder level in
shotei,
the other horizontal across his stomach in
nukite.

Freddi didn’t know from martial arts: he slammed his arms up inside Ballard’s defense and smashed his head into Ballard’s
face. Luckily, Ballard ducked so their skulls met forehead-to-forehead, or he would have been a wasteland from ear to ear.

Undaunted, Freddi got in a rib-crushing front bear hug; Ballard countered by slamming his cupped palms against Freddi’s ears.
Freddi dropped him, screaming with the pain of almost ruptured drums. Ballard made a shambling run for the open door of Beverly’s
little yellow sports car, yelling as he went.

“GO GO GO GO GO!!!”

As he tumbled in and slammed the door, Beverly WENT WENT WENT WENT WENT—but not before the heel of Freddi’s hand holed the
windshield in a shower of plastic-coated safety glass. Trying to peer through the remaining opaque starburst, Beverly hit
a post, ripping off the left front fender and bending the axle. She backed off and goosed it again, even more terrified than
Ballard. The wheel was wobbling. By some miracle, another resident had just entered and the overhead steel mesh door was still
clanking down as she zipped through.

Well, not quite zipped through. The reinforced lower edge of the descending door hooked under the front edge of the Z’s roof
just above the shattered windshield and stripped it back like opening a can of sardines.

Beverly kicked Ballard out of the car right there in front of the Montana and drove off in tears. He had to walk six blocks
just to find a cab. When he finally staggered into the sanctuary of his apartment, with a blinding headache and a red welt
the size of a bread plate on his forehead, he threw up all over the front-room rug from the effects of his concussion.

*   *   *

Only Bart Heslip, of DKA’s minions, had a totally satisfactory evening. His forever lady, Corinne Jones, who was a warm golden
brown to his plum black and had a Nefertiti profile right off an Egyptian wall painting, fixed him soul food while making
big over his damaged face and stitched pate. Then she took him to bed for the sweetest loving this side of paradise.

All of this without ever once bringing up the old tiresome I-told-you-so subject of finding some other line of work.

F
riday. Show time. Even though they had nine hours because the banks were open until 6:00
P.M.
on Fridays, Marino could allow only one and a half hours for his people to work the dealers in each area. They had to do
it all in one day to keep ahead of the bank’s computers. He got the jump on his own part of the operation by strolling into
the massive-pillared pseudo-Greco temple that housed Jack Olwen Cadillac on what was left of San Francisco’s Auto Row just
as the doors opened at 8:30.

“Ah, Mr. Grimaldi,” exclaimed Sales Manager Danny McBain as he scurried up, “here for your limo?”

Marino grinned. “You said first thing Friday, so…”

“Ready and waiting for you.”

Marino’s Cadillac had been special-ordered from a limo-maker in Los Angeles to specifications he had gotten from a Gypsy in
D.C. after a long hard barter. Of course it didn’t really have the Kevlar armor-plating and polymer bulletproof windows of
the real McCoy, but it
looked
like it did, which was all Marino deemed necessary for the St. Mark Hotel scam to work.

They crossed the display floor toward the finance office, past a husky, cement-dust-coated laborer, swarthy and vaguely middle-European
looking. His red satin warmup jacket had 49ERS WORLD CHAMPIONS across the back. He was kicking the tires of a Fleetwood coupe—one
of those with the formal cabriolet roof.

“What’s the sticker on this here baby?”

“Thirty-two-four base, Mr. Kaslov. Of course…”

“As she stands,” said Kaslov gutturally. “No extras, nuttin’ like that. I can swing eight down…”

McBain chuckled and said to the man he knew as Grimaldi, “They always kick the tires—as if that’s going to tell them one damned
thing about the quality of the car!”

Grimaldi chuckled also, in polite agreement. At three minutes to nine he drove the limo out into O’Farrell, one-way inbound,
crossed Van Ness on the light, and was gone. Behind him he left a downstroke check for $9,800 drawn on the Blue Skye account
in Cal-Cit Main at One Embarcadero Center. At that moment the check was good as gold; in ninety-three minutes it would he
as good as, oh, say, the $8,000 check the artistically cement-dusted Kaslov would write on the same account at about the same
time.

*   *   *

The San Francisco phone room was in a storefront on Turk, half a block short of what had once been and would again have been
the Central Freeway’s Gough Street on-ramp if they hadn’t decided to tear down the earthquake-damaged skyway. Yana had refused
the use of her
ofica
because she was working the Teddy White scam out of it, and didn’t want the location compromised.

She and Ristik expected calls on seven cars. Three from Jack Olwen—Marino’s phony paperwork on his limo scam had gone in earlier—two
from Freeway Cadillac in Colma, two from Wilson Cadillac/Porsche/Audi Motor Car Company on Burlington’s aptly named Cadillac
Way. San Francisco, first of the day, was the linchpin of the operation: if it went well there, reasoned the surprisingly
superstitious Gypsies, it would go well all over.

The first call came in at 8:53. Yana answered musically with the last four digits of the number.

“Three-four-six-two, good morning.”

“Is this Acme Construction?”

“Yes, sir, it certainly is.”

“This is Jack Olwen Cadillac on Van Ness—”

She interrupted with a delighted laugh.

“I bet Greg Kaslov is in there buying a car.”

The caller paused for a moment. “Well, yes, he is, but…”

“It’s all he and Joanna have been talking about for the last six months—getting their Fleetwood…”

“Well, they’re finally doing it. I was calling to verify employment, but…”

She laughed again, not a care in the world. “Greg’s been here for twenty-two years. He was the first man Mr. Arnold hired
when he came back from Vietnam…”

The other phone rang while she was still pouring honey on Kaslov’s head. Ristik picked up. There was no trace of Gypsy gutturals
in his voice.

“Eight-oh-seven-six,” he said. “Credit Department? Just a moment, I’ll switch you.”

Yana had just finished with Jack Olwen Cadillac. She stabbed the glowing 8076 extension button on her phone and said, “Trans-Universal
Credit, how may I help you?”

She thumbed quickly through the stack of papers on the desk as she listened, plucked one out, scanned it.

“Yes, we are carrying the paper on Mr. Stokes’s home in the three hundred block of Third Avenue…” She rattled the papers
realistically near the phone. “Twelve years, excellent pay, has never missed a payment, has… um… No. Has never even paid
a late penalty.”

On the other phone, Ristik was saying, “Listen, I’ve known Sally Poluth my whole life. She’s godmother to our kids… No, I
didn’t know she was buying a car, but with the insurance from Ritchie’s death she sure as hell can afford one…”