32 Cadillacs (19 page)

Ballard felt his excitement rising. If he could just get some leads from her… “There are over thirty cars,” he said.

“Of course if I am to ask around, perhaps learn something about their activities, where you might find some of these Cadillacs
… I would lose money… be in some danger…”

“Hundred bucks for every recovery we make,” said Ballard promptly, with no disillusionment in his voice. She would surely
want payment hand-to-hand, and when hands touched…

She was leaning forward again, eagerly, like a child, excitement and intrigue in her eyes, as if the prospect of money had
rekindled her personal feeling for him. She laid her open hand palm-up on the table. She almost giggled again.

And actually said, “Cross my palm with silver.”

Ballard hesitated but a moment, then dug out his money clip and counted five twenties into her palm. That left him with three
bucks. She closed her hand around the money.

“I wish to prove my heart is true,” she said, “so I will find you a car, today. After today, if I have information for you
I will leave a message only we will understand, and you will come, and I will tell your fortune, and you will—”

“—pay you for the reading,” finished Ballard.

“And only you and I will know of it, no one else! I will be your… what do the police say? Your snitch!” She smiled complacently
and leaned back in her chair. The $100 had disappeared. She glanced casually beyond him and added with delight, “And here
is Ramon with the tea!”

Ristik came through the draperies with his tray again, as if just coming from the kitchen rather than lurking and listening
behind the curtains. Ballard ignored him, wondering hopefully what else Yana might come to be for him besides his snitch.

T
he two cheap metal plaques were placed so they would be facing anyone who sat down across the desk from the broken-down swivel
chair in the narrow cubicle. One read, INSPECTOR HARRY CALLAHAN, with, underneath it,
Dirty Harry
. The other read, FEEL SAFE TONIGHT—SLEEP WITH A COP.

“Pretty good, huh?” demanded a voice behind her.

Giselle turned. The man wore an off-the-rack suit and Polo aftershave obviously applied in the men’s room after seeing that
she was good-looking. The cheap suit said honest cop; the Polo, and the leer he was giving her despite his wedding band, said
son of a bitch. Said, to Giselle, don’t trust the cheap suit.

She stuck out her hand and said, on that insight’s impulse, “Inspector… Callahan? Gerry Merman, free-lance journalist. I
want to do an article about the Gypsies, and—”

“Harrigan, not Callahan. Bunco.” Going around the desk, he ignored her hand but not what she had down the front of her blouse.
“The other guys gave me that plaque ’cause my name is Harry an’ I get all the dirty jobs.” To her silence he added, “You know,
Dirty Harry Callahan… in the movies…”

Giselle finally nodded. Harrigan was the SFPD Gypsy man, and despite his wandering eye she needed his help.

“Clint Eastwood,” she supplied.

“Yeah. As for the other plaque…”

“Very clever,” she agreed too quickly.

“Yeah.” A little sourly.

He lit a cigarette and leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. Early 40s, Irish, red hair faded to pink by the
grey in it, face full of sexual predation. Would once have been good-looking and would have known it, still would never regard
his mirror with less than full approval.

Just the reverse of O’Bannon’s bright blarney Irish coin.

“So, Gerry, you wanna do an article about me an’ the Gyppos. Well, lemme give you an example…”

Two retired brothers, both in their 80s, lived in one of the showplace homes across the Boulevard from the Marina Green. A
his/her pair of Gyppos had come knocking on their door claiming to be from the French Hostel welfare department…

“Musta staked ’em out an’ followed ’em home, ’cause these old guys belonged to the hostel, all right—but they’d never heard
of any welfare department there…”

Giselle realized that Bunco was even more depressing than Homicide. At least death had a hard truth. In Bunco it was all lies,
lies to vulnerable old people who thought they had been helping the police catch a bad guy by cleaning out their trust account,
only to learn they had given their life savings to some slime who’d dreamed up a new wrinkle on the pigeon drop.

“Anyway, the woman talks to ’em, prob’ly hints around about
doin
’ ’em, y’get my drift…” He was leering at her through his cigarette smoke. “Meanwhile, her partner is goin’ through the house.
Gyppos know how to
smell
money. One old guy had thirteen hundred cash in the inside pocket of one of his suits in the closet, his brother had five
hundred. That’s eighteen hundred bucks!”

“Incredible,” said Giselle, to be saying something.

“But the Gyppos made one mistake. They stole a gold pocket watch off the dresser, an old antique job. So of course I nailed
’em when they tried to pawn it.”

“Of course.” But her irony was unrecognized.

“Yeah, well, that’s the kinda thing I do every day. As for what I do at night…” With another leer, he gestured at the plaque.
“Interested?
Feel safe tonight. Sleep with
—”

“I already feel safe at night.”

She needed a cigarette, badly; but Dan Kearny was being such a pain about it that she’d quit again. Thank God for her impulse
to give Harrigan a false name and profession. Any call from this man to any woman on earth for any reason whatsoever would
be an obscene phone call.

“You wanna feel even safer, girlie, you give ol’ Harry a call—he practices safe sex.” He started to guffaw, said again, “Safe
sex. Course if a broad answers, hang up.”

More guffaws. A broad. His wife. To hell with it. She took one of his cigarettes. Of course Harry was right there with a lighter,
hoping for another peek down her blouse. Wouldn’t you just know, the lighter was an old-fashioned Zippo with the 82nd Airborne
crest on the side? She stubbed out the cigarette after one puff. It tasted like she was smoking an old tire. Wouldn’t you
just know that, too? You sin and it isn’t even any fun.

She asked, “You hear anything about a Gypsy calling himself Angelo Grimaldi working the Bay Area lately?”

“Grimaldi?” He shook his head. “No Gyp’d choose Grimaldi, they go for short Anglo-Saxon names—Adams, Marks, Wells…”

“Great-looking, mid-thirties, charms professional women…”

“A class act?” Harrigan lit up again. “Now I
know
he ain’t a Gyp. Gyppos can’t bring off a class act. And he ain’t local, either, I can tell you that. I know all the local
Gyps.”

“He’s around,” Giselle insisted. “Our angle is that this is a really unusual Gypsy we can build a story on.”

“Yeah, well, they re putting the squeeze on welfare scams in New York and Chicago, so a lotta Gyppo scum is coming into California
lately from over there. Maybe—”

“The land of opportunity,” said Giselle wryly.

But it was his first interesting remark. Maybe Grimaldi was a recent arrival. Not for welfare scams, surely, but…

“They bring any news with them?”

“They might be gonna have to pick a new King—there’s some rumors the old one’s dyin’ back in the Midwest…”

Better yet. A dying King would answer Kearny’s questions about the timing of the Cadillac scam. The Gypsies would want new
cars to go back in style to the huge encampment of Gypsy
vitsas
and
kumpanias
necessary for selecting a new King.

“This dying King—who? Where? When?”

“Who knows, who cares, why bother?” His eyes were now unbuttoning her blouse. “Back in the Corn Belt somewhere.”

She had to be careful; cops were notorious moonlighters, many of them as free-lance repomen, she didn’t want to give him any
hint about thirty-one Bay Area Cadillacs up for grabs. But she also needed whatever info he might have. So, turn it around.

“Any stories making the rounds about Gypsies with a whole fleet of new Cadillacs, maybe heading this way?”

“A fleet of ’em? Headin’ our way? Don’t I wish. A man could make himself extra loot knocking off those babies.” He stubbed
his butt. “But nah. I’d of heard of ’em, for sure.”

“For sure.”

“What the hell, the President’s comin’ in a few days, I won’t be payin’ any attention to Gyppos for a while. Everybody on
Bunco’ll be workin’ the downtown pickpocket detail.”

“Trying to catch the politicians in the act?”

“Hell no, the dips’ll be workin’ the crowds an’…” He stopped, belatedly realizing it had been a joke. He started to bellow
with laughter. “Haw! Haw! Haw! Tryin’ to catch the politicians in the act! That’s good.”

Giselle knew she’d had about all she could take of Dirty Harry Harrigan, but she had one more question.

“Any other Cadillac stones making the rounds?”

“Now you mention it, a bunco guy down to Palm Springs sent out flyers on a restored classic nineteen fifty-eight pink Eldorado
ragtop got conned out of some used-car salesman.” More guffaws. “Car salesman’s out the money ’cause the Caddy wasn’t his
to sell— just borrowed by his boss for a promo!”

“Conned by Gypsies?” Giselle was leaning forward intently.

“Ay-rabs. Gal had a bodyguard with a big ol’ knife, they scairt the guy into takin’ a check an’ signin’ over the pink an’
they just drove that ragtop right outta there.”

“I take it the check bounced.”

“Higher’n the Transamerica tower.”

“Was it drawn on a San Francisco bank?”

“Naw. Arabia. Bahrain, somethin’ like that.”

Giselle was frowning. “Then why’d he circulate it to you? A few hundred dollars on a con game—”

“Few hundred? Try
sixty thousand!
Goddam Ay-rabs.”

These goddam Ay-rabs interested Giselle vitally. It was easy to print phony checks that said Arabia, and there just were not
a whole bunch of Arab conwomen around.

“Gould the woman have been a Gypsy posing as an Arab?”

“Couldda been, I s’pose, but why would she take the chance? You’re talkin’ felony theft here. Gyps don’t want old cars—it’s
always this year’s Caddy to tool around in.”

True. And yet… and yet… there was something here.

Maybe something like this: a Gypsy King is dying and a Gypsy who is using an odd pseudonym—one Kearny thinks has been created
for a major sting already in place—recklessly endangers or at least complicates the sting by setting up a band of fellow Gypsies
to hit a bank for a fleet of new Cadillacs.

Why? Because it’s to Grimaldi’s advantage that they drive those Cadillacs back to the Gypsy King’s funeral?

Next, a classic pink 1958 Eldorado ragtop worth $60K is conned out of a used-car salesman—surely not your typical easy mark—by
someone who could have been a Gypsy posing as an Arab. A big-time felony for a car not usually of interest to Gypsies.

To give Grimaldi an edge in choosing the new King?

But how could a ’58 ragtop do that? She had to be missing some vital element. All of a sudden, Giselle wanted to talk to that
used-car salesman in Palm Springs.

And wanted to know about that special-order limo Angelo Grimaldi had scored from Jack Olwen Cadillac.

And wanted to check whether any of the better San Francisco hotels had an Angelo Grimaldi registered.

Because if the Gypsy calling himself Grimaldi had a major con going, it surely would be timed to the President’s arrival.
The cops, tied up in crowd control as Dirty Harry had said, would be much less likely to catch the scam before it was too
late.

A lot of ifs and mights and maybes, but they all added up to one thing: Grimaldi could still be here in San Francisco, waiting
for the President’s arrival. And if he was, Giselle Marc was going to nail him to the wall and…

She was brought crashing back to earth by Dirty Harry’s dirty voice in her ear, his dirty hand on her arm.

“Listen, girlie, I got this one-eyed snake in my pants…”

Too much. She didn’t really mind whatever dirty little fantasies he might have about her, but it was intolerable he thought
she might want to share them. This particular girlie was going to have to do something about Harry’s dirt…

“Okay, okay, you win—I’ll admit it, you’ve got me intrigued.” She added wickedly, “Come over to my place tonight, seven-thirty
… I’ll leave the street door unlocked…”

Even as she had given him a phony name, so she gave him a phony address, that of the Sappho Self-defense Dojo. Ballard, brown
belt that he was, had told her in slightly awed tones about this extremely militant feminist lesbian martial-arts support
group on Clement Street.

When Dirty Harry Harrigan swaggered into the place that night without knocking, she was sure they would give him, if not the
sort of evening he fantasized, almost certainly the sort of evening he deserved.

A
s Giselle was dashing heatedly off in several directions at once to look for Angelo Grimaldi, Rudolph Marino, cool as geometry,
was looking for her. Oh, not for her specifically, but, through his SFPD contact, for the repomen who had knocked off the
two Gypsy Cadillacs over the weekend.

He used a St. Mark lobby payphone; by now he routinely phoned from his suite only for room service and wake-up because the
switchboard would be monitoring his calls. He asked for his tame cop in the gruff voice snitches so often have.

“Marino,” he said when the man answered, gave the payphone number, hung up. When it rang three minutes later, he asked it,
“What do you have?” then listened, nodding. “Morales… Marc… DKA? Which stands for… I see… Daniel Kearny Associates…”

He kept on listening. So Yana had been right. The same agency had picked up both cars. Bad news and good news. Bad news because
the private detectives must indeed have figured out that it was Gypsies who had hit the bank for the Cadillacs. Good news
because he could keep this information from Yana while feeding DKA information about her
kumpania
until she panicked and brought that ’58 ragtop into the open where he or his people could grab it…