32 Cadillacs (27 page)

Because this wasn’t just a Gyppo, this was, for God’s sake, Paul Bunyan! Seven feet tall and three wide, black curling beard,
black curling hair, snapping black eyes, wearing a red plaid lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled up almost to the shoulders
and even carrying an axe in one hand.

Well, a sledgehammer, really, but at a time like this who the hell cared?

O’B frantically worked his keys, at the same time calling, “
From the bank, from the bank, about your auto loa
—”

The sledgehammer came whistling in an arc through the open window at his head, wielded by a Schwarzenegger arm lumped and
knotted with muscle. O’B ducked; as the sledge took out the windshield from the inside, he threw himself across the soft leather
seat, jerked the door handle, and slid headfirst out the far side of the car as the huge man grunted with the effort of his
next swing. This one knocked the door off the glove box an inch behind O’B’s departing right heel.

O’B ran around to the front of the car, held up a placating palm. His other hand rested on the hood of the car.

“You don’t understand! I’m from the bank. I’m not a car thief, I’m the legal repre—”

The sledge smashed in the hood where his hand had been a moment before. He ran back around to the driver’s side as his pursuer
yelled, “You sonna beech, I gonna
kill
you!”

Jesus, that huge guy was fast. O’B fled down the side of the car with Paul Bunyan tight behind. Swinging.

CRUNCH!
Driver’s door.

SMASH!
Rear door.

THUD!
Trunk lid.

O’B was able to dive back in through the rider’s side to get in a couple of twists with the next key because the sledge stuck
for a moment in the hole it made in the trunk. The next blow just missed his ankle and demolished the Eldorado’s C/D player
and tape deck as O’B dove out again.

Going around the front of the car as the big guy came out the driver’s side, yelling, “
Gypsies are supposed to be nonviolent!
”

Paul Bunyan paused to rip out the front seat and throw it across the street.

“I’ll GYPSY YOU, BASTARD SONNA BEECH…”

As O’B ran yet again, the sledge smashed in the headlights and grille. Back through the car, twist another key,
the motor started
, leave the key there, out again, run around it again, there went a hubcap wobbling away across the street, a blow at his
legs took out the muffler. Back inside, slapped it into gear, crouched in the bare space behind the wheel,
goosed
it.

Gimpy-gimpy jerk-jerk but fast, must have bent an axle somehow, goddamnedest Gypsy he’d ever…

“
KILLYOUK1LLYOUK1LLYOUKILL YOU
KILL… YOU… KILL… YOU… KILL.… YOU
.…
kill.… you
.… kill……”

THUDS, CRASHES, CRUNCHES
as Paul Bunyan ran alongside belaboring the Eldorado with his hammer. O’B finally began pulling away. Just as he reached
the corner, Paul Bunyan threw the sledge after him, SMASH, there went the rear window…

Safely away.

*   *   *

Jackson B. Gideon, president of California Citizens Bank, had a poor big devil of a stomach that, like Cyrano’s nose, marched
on before him by a quarter of an hour. He also had John L. Lewis eyebrows crawling like hairy caterpillars around the top
of his face, a beaked fleshy nose, pouting lips Sly Stallone would have killed for, and two chins with a third working on
its growth portfolio. He splayed out of his dove-grey wool double-breasted suit the way a sausage splays out when you cut
its skin.

“It just won’t do,” he said. “It just won’t do at all.”

They were in the bank’s cul-de-sac storage lot behind an old factory backed up against the base of Telegraph Hill. Ballard,
whose butt still hurt and who thought he was there to be praised for his good work, not reamed out by a bank president, started
to speak— but Stan Groner cut in smoothly.

“Well, J.B., they
did
recover the car under very difficult conditions, and—”

“And the city wants to bring suit against the bank.”

Ballard was astounded. “What the hell for?”

“New door for the precinct house,” explained Stan. “New light fixture. New front steps. New balustrade. New—”

“They were trying to kill me, for God sake!”

“Would have been cheaper if they had,” sniffed J.B.

Not that the bank had any intention of paying the city one red cent—J.B. had elucidated the policy at that day’s board meeting—but
field men had to be kept firmly in their place.

He added in disdain, “Since it occurred in the course of a recovery action by Daniel Kearny Associates, I feel that the costs
should come out of your company’s recompense.”

“Now just a damned…”

Stan Groner caught Ballard’s eye and shook his head slightly. Ballard stopped talking, face rich with unspent anger. Gideon,
that smug bastard, had never been out in the field in his life, what did he know?

Stan had once been the same way. But they’d gotten him liquored up at one of Kearny’s infamous spaghetti feeds, and had taken
him out on a salty repo in the Hunter’s Point housing projects, where a favorite sport at the time had been shooting windows
out of Muni buses. Sitting behind the wheel, Bart Heslip had read the repo’s operating manual aloud to Groner by dashlight,
hoping to find out how to release the handbrake, while the registered owner had been running upstairs for his shotgun.

They had made it away with nothing worse than a trunk lid full of buckshot, but Stan had been on their side ever since. Even
now he was trying to pour oil on the troubled waters.

“I’m sure this sort of thing won’t happen again, J.B. Gypsies are nonviolent creatures who…”

His voice was drowned out by a terrible racket echo-chambered and amplified by the sounding-board walls of the deserted factory.
RATTLE!
of loose tinwork,
COUGH!
of ruptured muffler, SCRAPE! of rubber on pounded-in fenders,
BANG!
of misfiring engine,
THUNK-THUNK
of flattening tire.

All eyes turned toward the cacophony of noises coming their way; all breaths were bated. Somehow, all three of them knew.

Yes. Oh yes indeed. O’B. In a brand-new Eldorado.

Brand-new? But how could this be? Fenders smashed in, a tire flat. The top was crushed down to the window tops, the windshield
was gone, the door panels were pounded in, the trunk was flattened, the hood was history, the grille was gone, various fluids
dripped as smoke rose from both ends of the car.

O’B stepped gently on the brakes as he came up level with them. The engine died with a
pop, pop, grunt, grunt, poof
… silence. He had found a plastic bucket somewhere to upend where once the sleekly upholstered seat had been, and was hunkered
down on it, under the flattened roof, as he drove the car. He shoved a shoulder against the door to open it. The door fell
off with an agonized
CLANK!
of overstressed metal.

Totaled.

O’B stepped out and said jauntily to Stan, “The lighter still works, Reverend.”

“But… but… but… this… this can’t be… be… one of
ours
…,” Groner managed to stammer out.

“It can. It is. He beat it to death trying to get me.”

“Gypsies are nonviolent,” snapped J.B. in his nastiest give-the-teller-hell voice.

Stan the Man wilted into Stan the Boy. Ballard turned red trying to keep from laughing. O’B, who had made out a condition
report when he had stopped to get the plastic bucket seat, held the completed form out to J.B. Gideon with a straight face.

“If you’ll just sign for it, Reverend, I’ll be on my way.”

Gideon stared at him with real hatred, then turned to Stan the Boy. “I will expect you in my office in sixty minutes, Mr.
Groner,” he said thickly. “We have a great deal to discuss.”

He stalked unevenly away across the rubble-strewn storage lot. Stan ran after him for a few paces, but Gideon was already
in his Lexus LS400 and slamming the door with eloquent rage. The car sped off. Stan turned blindly back to O’B, who was laughing,
and Ballard, who was too solemnly checking the car’s serial number against his list of the Gypsy cars’ I.D. numbers.

“I’m ruined,” groaned Groner.

O’B guffawed and shoved the condition report under his nose. Stan started to automatically scrawl his signature across the
bottom of it, but Ballard held up a detaining hand.

They both turned to look at him.

“What?” demanded O’B a bit shrilly. The expression on Ballard’s face had made the laughter die on his lips.

Ballard waved an airy hand at the Cadillac. “This isn’t one of our Gyppo cars. Its I.D. number isn’t on our list.”

O’B turned bone white. His freckles looked like measles against that suddenly ashen skin. “But… it has to be…”

“Okay, you’ve had your fun,” said Groner. “Now go
give the man back his car
—and get me the right one. Right away. Reverend.” Then Stan the Man started an ugly chortling sound.

He was laughing.

D
ona Dulcinea Inez Mattheu Duchez Escobar, incredibly beautiful and incredibly wealthy Brazilian coffee heiress—recently widowed—passed
through the gilt-edged motor-driven plate-glass door of
bascom’s (rome, london, paris, amsterdam, beverly hills)
. Even in parlous economic times, these first few blocks of Rodeo Drive north of Wilshire in Beverly Hills are… well, Rodeo
Drive. Occasionally Worth Avenue in Palm Beach
pretends
to the crown, but… after all, Florida…

The diminutive button-eyed youth behind Dona Dulcinea wore the Beverly Wilshire’s distinctive livery and was festooned with
boxes: square boxes, oblong boxes, oval boxes, boxes large and boxes small, boxes flat and boxes deep, boxes broad and boxes
skinny. All bearing labels from the most exclusive shoppes and boutiques up and down Rodeo Drive.

“My hotel has call,” announced Dona Dulcinea imperiously.

Her hotel hadn’t, but nonetheless Monsieur Bascom himself surged forward with her entrance, practiced eye agleam at the compulsive-shopper
possibilities suggested by all those boxes.

“Ah, yes, of course, Madam…”

“
Dona
Dulcinea Inez Mattheu Duchez Escobar of São Paulo. Brazil.” Her accent made “Bretheel” of the final word. Monsieur Bascom
inclined his beautifully greyed
coiffeur
as she added, “Someone should help the…” She gestured helplessly at the bellhop. “Mmmm, how you say, young servant man…”

M. Bascom was already snapping his fingers without looking around. He had a patrician face with a thin nose pinched at the
sides, and thin lips that could by a sycophantic pucker become a rosebud or by simple compression a white line of fury.

“Could the word be ‘bellhop,’ madam?”

“
Sim!
Bellhop! The hotel has give…” She broke off, looking extremely sexy as she almost giggled. “No, has
lend
me the bellhop to help with my…” She rolled around the word on her tongue. “… mmm, buying. You sell diamonds,
não?
”

“Yes, of course. We sell…
diamonds
.”

Bascom gave the final word the reverence usually reserved for all the names of God. His snapped fingers had brought a magnificent
salesman to help the bellboy jettison all those boxes as M. Bascom led the fair Dulcinea to the gleaming glass cases where
bascom’s
most stunning creations dwelt in luxury.

“If one could inquire as to madam’s diamond needs…”

Again that charming almost half-giggle. “I no really know… but I weel when I see!” Her eyes got very wide and round and her
mouth formed a lovely little “O.” “But whatever you show me must be most… tasteful. Nothing, mmm… vulgar,
não?
The absolute… how does one say…”

“
Crème de la crème?
” suggested Bascom.

“
Sim. Exactissimo.
”

Bascom had little Spanish and less Portuguese, so he found himself utterly charmed by Dona Dulcinea’s accent as she went through
thirty minutes of brooches, earrings, and necklaces “not quite right” for her needs. Of course, since he had an addiction
to scoring sexually with wealthy women no matter what their age or looks, he was already in thrall to the Dona’s bounteous
feminine charms. Finally, he suggested that if she could perhaps tell him the occasion she sought to enhance with diamonds
…

Sim
, but could she have a glass of Pellegrino, perhaps… ver’ hot in here…

Refreshed and restored, she explained that it was a little—pronounced “leetle”—somet’ings for her first dinner party at the
hacienda
since the death… close to tears here… of her beloved “hoosban’” eighteen months before…

Dwelling on this untimely death made her feel “a leetle faint” again, but she recovered quickly when he showed her loose teardrop
diamonds set in gold which could be worn as singlets, clustered as a pendant, worn around the neck on a gold chain…

Yes! Dona Dulcinea’s interest quickened at the sight of them.

For some time the bored bellhop had been following them around the store, staring at the wonders being displayed, but unfortunately
was just too far away to help catch Dona Dulcinea when she swooned and fell heavily against M. Bascom.

As her unexpected dead weight bore Bascom to the floor, her hand struck the edge of the velvet display tray upon which the
diamonds nestled. Teardrops flew in every direction. Before the salespeople could converge, the bellhop was crouched beside
her, mouth working as in distress, cradling her head with his hands.

He gulped back tears. Immediately, her beautiful dark eyes fluttered open and she gazed deep into M. Bascom’s blue ones.

“I am so ver’ sorree,” she said in a little voice. The eyelids fluttered again. “The loss… of my hoosban’… sometime it has
seem… I cannot… go on…”

More Pellegrino, a few minutes in a brocaded chair by the office, and Dona Dulcinea was much restored. But too upset to, mmm,
how you say, do more shop today. For now, she would return to the Beevairly Weelsheer to rest…