32 Cadillacs (23 page)

“What the hell do you think I—”

A brick whizzed by his head to scar the Caddy’s paintwork. Cars were coming up on either side of them, the one on the right
running with one set of wheels on the sidewalk, the other in the gutter. It hit a power pole and was out of the running, but
another swerved around it to keep coming.

Giselle slewed into 16th Street as if she knew where she was going. Ballard hoped to hell she did; he didn’t have a clue.
He tried to pull himself inside, but the pursuer swerved in to crush him between the cars. He jerked up tight against the
side of the Caddy as metal ground metal just below him.

Giselle screamed the Allante into broad Third Street, ran the red at the next intersection, horn blaring. They were outrunning
their pursuers: the Caddy’s big V-8 generated a lot of power. But a car shot across Third directly in front of her, she hit
the brakes, slid almost sideways down the street, so numb by this time that she felt only a mild detached curiosity about
whether she would miss it or not.

She did, but the skid had let the Indians catch up. They were cutting in, forcing her to the curb, roaring war chants.

But she was there! Horn blaring, she jumped the curb. Ballard, still half out of the car, hung on for dear life as the Allante
leaped up three concrete stairs at a steep 45-degree angle to splinter the double doors at their head with its front bumper.
A tire went BANG! The old-fashioned globe light above the cophouse door
POPPED!
to drift sharded glass down on them.

Uniformed cops, wearing astounded, half-scared faces, poured out of the Southeast precinct house past the Allante with guns
in their hands. This flushed the covey of pursuing Indian cars, which burst out in every direction with squealing tires.

Ballard had managed to get his feet on one of the steps by this time, too dazed to know his ripped pants were puddled around
his ankles so he was buck-ass naked from the waist down. He was waving his arms around in front of him, panting as if he’d
just run a footrace.

“Peaceful repossession, peaceful repossession!” he yelped at the dozen guns’ big unwinking eyes staring at him.

“The hell you say,” drawled the Irish desk sergeant.

“From… the Rainbird… Lounge…”

“Ah,” said the sergeant in soft understanding, and holstered his weapon. All the cops knew the Rainbird. After a moment, the
rest followed suit, putting their guns away also.

Giselle staggered around the car from the driver’s side, blood running down her chin from her bitten lip.

“I checked… I.D. number… we got… right car…” Then she saw Ballard and laughed weakly. “So this… is how it’s done… maestro?”

“It got done,” said Ballard with great dignity.

Looking at Giselle looking at Ballard, the sergeant said, with Irish rectitude, “Hey, Sam Spade, better get your pants on.”

Ballard, suddenly realizing his condition, jerked his pants up with a savage gesture.

And shrieked in pain as the rough fabric scraped across innumerable splinters to drive them deeper into his bruised and lacerated
rear end.

B
ecause Giselle was out in the field chasing Gypsies, Dan Kearny was stuck in the office with all the routine paperwork they
usually shared. And it was making him feel old.

Time was, his field agents needed him to clean up their messes; now, he’d trained ’em to be the best in the business.

Time was, at Walter’s Auto Detectives—before he founded DKA with Giselle and O’B and Kathy Onoda, God rest her soul—
he
was the best field agent in the business.

Now … Old. Mighty old.

His phone rang. Jane Goklson’s voice was in his ear. “A man calling himself Ephrem Poteet is on line—”

Kearny, suddenly twenty years younger, punched into the blinking red light. “Whadda ya have for me?”

A recognized chuckle and heavy tones came at him over the wire. “Always right to business with you, ain’t it, Kearny?”

“
Gadje
manners.”

“Okay. Los Angeles. Silverlake District. Wasso Tomeshti. TV sets. And I’ll take my hundred bucks now, up front.”

“Not for that you won’t. I need more. What’s the scam?”

“Factory-direct to consumer. That’s all you get.”

Kearny recognized finality, but more than that, had a flash of inspiration.

“Your hundred’s in the mail.”

He hung up, sat there behind his desk. Fired up a Marlboro, forgot to shake out the match until the flame touched his fingertips.
In all the years he’d dealt through various P.O. boxes with Poteet, they had never laid eyes on each other. He took a puff
of his cigarette.

“No,” he said aloud. “Not enough. Not nearly enough.”

Not this time. This time he needed leverage, or Poteet would string out his info for weeks in an attempt to raise the $100-per
ante—while the subject Gypsies scattered like quail.

Right now Poteet was calling the shots, and Dan Kearny didn’t like anyone calling the shots on him.

He didn’t like feeling old, either.

He shook his heavy silvered head, chuckled, jerked open a drawer to grab out one of the made-up Gypsy folders with everything
they knew on each Cadillac. He didn’t have a set of keys cut for the cars, but what the hell? Stay hungry.

As he went past Jane’s desk, she piped up cheerily, “Where to, Mr. K? Your meeting with Stan at the bank isn’t until—”

“Cancel it.”

“But—”

“And hold my calls.”

“But—”

“Hold tomorrow’s calls, too.”

“But…”

“And maybe the day’s after that.”

From her wastebasket he grabbed a discarded
FINAL NOTICE
window envelope with a canceled stamp on it—a shocking-red envelope designed to catch a delinquent’s eye—and took a sheet
of letterhead from her desk. Then he was gone.

*   *   *

Few would recognize Wasso Tomeshti in sleek Mr. Adam Wells.

Wasso Tomeshti was a greasy-curled
rom
who wore a heavy curled mustache with a day’s beard, bright shirts, a brick-red bandana around his thick throat, and black
jeans tucked into the tops of black leather hack boots. Mr. Adam Wells, his finest creation, wore a painfully close shave,
too much cheap cologne, a gangrenous three-piece electric-green suit, a purple and gold plaid shirt, a paisley tie mostly
orange, and black loafers.

“Want a little air?” Mr. Adam Wells asked expansively.

“No, I’m fine,” said Sam Hood.

If Sam Hood thought Adam Wells sleazy—a compliment in Sam’s book—he also knew Adam Wells was making enough of those big fat
greasy bucks everyone yearned for to tool along Ventura Boulevard in a white Seville STS four-door notchback that went for
$40,000 stripped. And this baby was
loaded
. Ultra-soft leather seats, hand-fitted to the car with French upholstery seams; air, Delco AM/FM stereo deck and C/D player,
custom phaeton roof, power everything … still had paper plates and the new-car smell.

Like riding on a cloud.

“Trade every year,” Wells was bragging. “One a these, then a Lincoln Town Car, then a Chrysler Imperial.” A chuckle. “Gotta
keep the Big Three going, y’know.” Sam Hood knew. He also knew he wanted some of Wells’s big fat greasy bucks. Wells added,
“Yeah, strictly American, that’s me.”

“Except for TV sets?” Sam put a sly question mark on it.

“The TV sets are
business
” Wells slapped the steering wheel with beringed fingers. “This here is personal. This here is love of country.” He gestured
with the stogie. “There she is, just ahead.”

“She” was a nearly completed motel on the south side of the Boulevard near Tujunga that damn near popped Sam’s eyes out of
his head. Behind it rose green-foliaged hills studded with million-dollar homes. There was an obscene amount of construction
going on along Ventura, but none of it was more opulent than this block-square U-shaped motel complex.

Wells pulled the Seville over to the curb to gesture.

“In the middle there’s gonna be a fountain. Palm trees, lots of shrubbery. We got a Spago’s coming in, shops, boutiques, indoor
an’ outdoor pool, sauna, a World Gym …”

Having a little trouble with his voice, Sam asked, “How many color TV sets did you say you’re gonna need from me?”

“I didn’t, but maybe three hundred to start. Sure, that’s chicken feed, but we’ll double-deck next year and’ll need another
five hundred. Not much even then, I know, but—”

“No, no—no job too small,” said Sam quickly.

You bet your butt, thought Wasso. Three hundred would clear out this
gadjo’s
stock on hand—he’d checked. That’s why Wasso had picked him even though he might be connected. A dangerous man, perhaps,
but hungry enough to be stupid.

When Wells had wanted “a few” color consoles for “his” motel at a discount off the already low wholesale delivery price that
was Sam’s stock-in-trade, Hood had pictured a couple dozen run-down units huddled around a postage-stamp pool with dead bugs
floating around in it. But
this
…

This
was money in the bank. His entire stock in one transaction! Since all his TVs fell off the back of the truck, anyway—with
the driver’s reimbursed cooperation—he was going to make a dizzying amount of money off this turkey.

Of course if Sam Hood, even tough as he was and with his underworld connections, had known this turkey was a Gyppo, he would
have jumped from the Caddy and sewn his pockets shut. But he didn’t.

“I’d love to show you around the place,” Wells was saying regretfully, “but I’m doing lunch at LAX with a couple of Japanese
investors between planes. So we’d better—”

“There’s Jap money in this?” asked Hood, awed for sure.

“Nah, they don’t fool with penny-ante crap like this. We got a seven-golf-course deal cooking that…” He broke off to laugh.
“No you don’t. Enough said about that.” He opened his door. “I see the foreman there, can you wait for just a minute?”

Tomeshti was already out of the car and walking over to a man checking things off on a clipboard. He pointed at the roof.

“How high is that?”

The workman frowned at him. “Who the hell are you?”

“Who the hell am I?” Tomeshti took a step closer and pounded a fist into his other hand. “A taxpayer, that’s who.” He started
away toward the Seville, then turned back to point at the nonplussed workman and yell,
“And don’t you forget it, pal!”

He got back in, pushing blood into his face to flush it.

“Trouble?” Hood couldn’t help asking as they pulled away from the curb in a harsh shriek of rubber.

“Nah—it’s just that you say three hundred TV sets are coming tomorrow, the rooms gotta be ready, does he say they’ll be ready?
Hell no. He says…” He shook his head, then brightened. “To hell with all that. Let’s go over to your office and sign that
contract for those TVs. I’ll take delivery tomorrow no matter what the damn foreman says. And pay you for all three hundred
sets right then.” He looked over at Sam Hood as the big Caddy lanced through the Ventura Boulevard traffic. “A check on the
corporation account is all right, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said a dazzled Sam Hood. “Money in the bank.”

*   *   *

Dan Kearny’s rental Cutlass took the Silver Lake off-ramp from the Hollywood Freeway to a wide messy street of narrow messy
retail businesses with wide messy signs over them. Furniture stores. Karate studios. Doughnut shops. Hairdressers. Clothing
stores spilling racks out across the sidewalk full of the sort of flowered sport shirts that make you want to roll a pack
of cigarettes up in one sleeve. Mostly brown faces crowding the sidewalks, a lot of
Habla Español
signs.

After an hour of cruising he spotted the billboard:

Beneath that was:

Kearny thought he got a glimpse of the con, and started to chuckle. He found an open meter, parked and locked, walked back.
Bright sunlight, tempered with acrid smog felt in nose and throat, was hot on the shoulders of his San Francisco-weight wool
suit. He looked into the empty storefront through recently washed windows. Floor fresh-swept, racks waiting to receive their
sale TVs. Sales counter in the back, glassed-in office partition behind that. Realtor’s sign still in the window. Phone number
and an address in the next block.

No Cadillac in the narrow dirt parking lot out in back, not that Kearny had expected any when he saw the empty showroom. He
wove his way through the polylingual crowd to the realty office; he had to know who Tomeshti was and when he would show.

Dusty pictures of commercial bargains nobody wanted crowded the front windows. Inside it was a narrow storefront with four
battered hardwood desks down one wall and a manager’s office in the rear. Latinas at two of the desks, the others empty.

A blonde with metallic hair that could break a fingernail came up from the office. She reeked of musk and greed. Too many
teeth, a face-lift that hadn’t helped blunt her icepick eyes.

“E. Dana Straub. ’Nye do for ya?”

“The empty storefront in the next block—”

“Din’t you see the billboard?”

“Televisions factory-direct?” He shrugged. “Place is empty right now, today, and right now, today, it’s just what I need for
my retail electronics store.”

E. Dana Straub got a look compounded equally of greed and regret. “Mr. Wells has already signed the contract.”

“
Danny
Wells?” demanded Kearny in delight. “I can—”

“Adam Wells.”

“Oh. But don’t matter—I’ll sublease from him instead.”

“The terms of his lease stipulate no sublets.”

Kearny brought out his flash roll—a hundred wrapped around a couple of dozen ones—and leaned suggestively across the counter
with a dirty look in his eyes.

“Lease contracts can get lost…”

She sighed regretfully. “We remodeled to meet his needs, and Mr. Wells is moving his stock in tomorrow. At the end of the
week he’s giving me a check for the entire year’s lease …”