32 Cadillacs (42 page)

Nanoosh quickly put his skullcap back on. “We are on our way to temple, the black man runs me off the road, tries to steal
my car. My sons they defend me…”

That’s when Nanoosh’s nephew made another terrible mistake. Still half-blinded by tears from his broken nose, ashamed of the
tears, he swung at the black cop because he thought the cop was Bart. Black is black, right?

Wrong.
Thwock!

Nightstick on skull. He folded.

“Peaceful repossession,” panted Bart. “They’re Gyppos.”

The black cop started to laugh as he put the cuffs on the recumbent nephew.
“Peaceful
repossession?” He laughed again. “That’s a damned nice right cross you got there.”

“Used to scuffle for a living,” said Heslip.

“We’ll take the lot of them in,” said the white cop.

*   *   *

Bart talked the black cop into not charging the nephew with anything worse than disturbing the peace, then spent a half hour
side by side with Nanoosh on a hard wooden bench at the cophouse.

“You’re the one from this afternoon,” said Nanoosh finally.

“Yep,” said Bart.

“How’d you know to look for me in Chicago?”

Bart just shrugged and looked wise.

“It was them fucking Lovellis, wasn’t it?”

Bart looked even wiser.

“I knew it! Son of a bitch bastards! Well, let me tell you something about
them
…”

Bart stayed silent, looking as wise as Solomon, which he proved to be—Nanoosh told him
all
about the Lovellis.

Finally, the cops admitted that Bart was Bart, that the Fleetwood was a Fleetwood, that Cal-Cit Bank was a bank, and that
Bart was indeed their legal representative.

“I want to thank you guys a lot for your help,” he said. “I’ll just take my cars and—”

“What about the writ?” asked the white cop.

Not being a Chicago boy himself, Bart said, “What writ?”

“The writ, the writ,
the long green writ!
”

Maybe not Chicago born, but no hayseed. Fifty each to the salt-and-pepper team, then from his expense roll Bart started dealing
twenties like a hand of cards, one to every cop in the station house. Ten cops, ten twenties. Pick a card, any card.

Back at his motel just across the river from the Loop on South Canal, he found Larry Ballard’s message about Stupidville.
He left Larry a more urgent message of his own, got the number of the Jersey motel where Ken Warren would be staying, and
finally looked up truck rental outfits to call in the morning.

Bart Heslip had a
PLAN
.

K
en Warren had been born in Jersey City, within a mile of Journal Square; his father had worked for Colgate. So he had few
illusions about the place. Before returning Sarah Walinski’s Dodge Charger to Andy Anhut’s A-One Autos on Kennedy Boulevard,
he put something bulky in his topcoat pocket and called a taxi. He gave the cabby an address near Anhut’s, and enough money
to keep him waiting there. Ken himself waited across the street from the lot until the two burly salesmen—they looked more
like made men—had gone to lunch. Only then did he drive in.

At the back of the lot he went up three wooden steps and into a little frame office strung with dismal glittery tinsel. Inside
was a scarred wooden desk bearing a telephone, a heap of curly black hair the size of a Norway rat, and the shoes of a man
reading a skin magazine. Looking at him, Ken remembered a Sunday school phrase about Jacob’s brother Esau:
He was an hairy man.

In almost every respect, Andy Anhut was an hairy man. It sprouted above his eyes, it tufted from his nostrils and ears, it
matted the backs of his simian fingers and wrists, it curled exuberantly in the open V of his sport shirt and made a nest
for the gold medallion on his chest.

Almost
every respect. He was bald as a billiard ball. A squashed-down billiard ball with a cigar screwed into the middle of it.
He sprang to his feet and clapped the Norway rat to his head when Ken’s shadow fell across his magazine.

“Whadda fuck ya doin’ sneakin’ up?” he yelped.

Ken sent the DKA invoice spinning across the desk with a flick of his wrist, and leaned forward. He was taller, broader, meaner
than Anhut; no man can look tough adjusting his toupee.

“Ngcahsh,” expelled Ken.

“Cash? Wadda fuck ya mean?” That seemed to be Anhut’s favorite phrase. He was out from behind the desk with the invoice, heading
for the door. “Lemme see the fuckin’ unit.”

Ken waited. Outside, Anhut was snapping and nipping at the Charger’s heels like a terrier driving a cow at sunset. He came
back shaking his rat-nest head.

“Naw, naw, naw, fuckin’ car’s in terrible shape, I’ll give ya fifty bucks for your trouble an’—”

Ken stepped away from the desk and put his hand in his topcoat pocket. The hand looked larger in there than a hand should
look unless fisted around some bulky object. Anhut, caught up short, stared at him, measuring him. Then he shook his cue ball
again.

“Nah,” he muttered to himself. He bared his teeth in a death-rictus grin. “My boys come back from lunch, they’ll—”

Ken jerked his hand from his pocket with something in it. Anhut went back an involuntary step. Ken’s hand put on the edge
of the scarred wooden desk… a red ripe tomato.

Anhut blanched as if someone had dipped him in boiling water and peeled him like… well, like a ripe tomato. To the mob, a
Jersey tomato was dynamite—literally. A juicy red stick of overage, unstable dynamite. The tomato sitting on the edge of his
desk was a statement that DKA, though a west coast firm, was connected on the east coast.

Statement or bluff? Well, Ken was heading for the door.

“Wait!”

Anhut cursed and brought out a huge roll of cash money, counted off enough hundreds, threw them on the desk. Ken didn’t ask
for a receipt. He rode the cab back to his motel to pack, but there was a message from DKA. According to Ephrem Poteet, a
Gyppo woman named Pearso Stokes was working the midtown Manhattan banks out of a silver Eldorado with M.D. plates on it.

Warren paid another night on his room, because Jersey prices beat New York prices, then rented a little red Toyota and headed
for Manhattan. He’d just blown off a Jersey City used-car dealer with hardly a word being spoken and no overt physical threats
made! It had to be a first. And now he was chasing Gyppos just like the rest of the gang!

*   *   *

Just about when Ken was paying the Holland Tunnel toll-taker on the west bank of the Hudson, Giselle was parking her company
car on Teddy White’s hilltop in Tiburon. She had his $75,000 in a plastic suitcase, but left it locked in the car until she
could ease Teddy into her revelations about Madame Miseria.

She pushed the bell and Teddy opened the door and the same big tiger-stripe tomcat scooted out between her feet and bounded
down the steps. Teddy even started again, “It’s okay, he does it all…” before exclaiming, “Oh! Ms. Marc! Hello.”

“I, ah, wanted to tell… that is, I have something to…”

Teddy looked five years younger, two inches taller, and his face eased of all the lines of pain. He came by her out onto the
stoop, leaving the door open.

“Let’s sit out on the steps to talk, this sun is so nice.”

Giselle sat with her feet primly together, smoothing her skirt down over her knees almost nervously.

“I… have something to tell you about Madame Miseria. She knew your name, all about your stepparents and your dead real parents
because…” She cleared her throat. “She got it all from her brother. He picked your pocket in that bar—”

“Not possible,” said Teddy. “But please—go on…”

“The bleeding dollar bill—when you went to get the bowl of water, she just substituted one soaked with red dye for the one
you’d put on the table.”

“Of course she didn’t,” he said, untouched. “But even if she had, that’s what convinced me my money actually was cursed.”

The big tomcat came up and started to rub against Giselle’s calf and purr. She scratched the back of his head and behind his
ears absently. She was fuming.

“The poisoned egg—that was just sleight of hand. She had the devil’s head in her hand when she broke your egg. She just dropped
it into the bowl and—”

“Where is all this leading, Ms. Marc?”

“It was all a series of cons,” she said stridently. “I bet she burned up a bunch of money that night too, didn’t she?”

“Yes. Five thousand dollars.”

“
Five
…” Giselle got control of her voice. She said very precisely, “She didn’t burn up that money, she kept it. She and her brother
just burned up a different envelope full of—”

“Paper bag.”

“What?”
Her voice was shrill.

“It was a
paper bag
full of money she burned up. But…” He gave her that goofy grin of perfect peace again. “But even if she kept the money,
she would be entitled to it.”

“I… don’t understand. If she
conned
you and—”

“She cured me. Better than any doctor could have done.”

Giselle sighed. Out between Angel Island and Alcatraz a big oil tanker down to its marks was waddling in with a bellyful of
crude for the Standard Oil Refinery at Point Richmond.

“Okay,” she said briskly. “She cured you. But also, two nights ago, she took you out to the graveyard in Tam Valley and there
you and she buried a great deal of money in your stepfather’s grave. Seventy-five thousand dollars, to be exact.”

Teddy stood up abruptly. Suddenly there was panic in his eyes. “You didn’t
dig it up…
”

Giselle started to say yes, then checked herself. She stood also. She put a gentle hand on his arm.

“Ramon Ristik did.”

His reaction was totally unexpected. He started to laugh.

“No he didn’t. You’re mistaken.”

“I
saw
him dig it up!”

“You couldn’t have,” he said with total conviction, “because I’m still here.”

“You’re still… I don’t understand.”

“That money was put there for the demons. If anyone digs it up, I die. But since I am still alive…” He flapped around awkwardly
on the stair like a drunk in a dancing-chicken suit. “And
cured
…”

Giselle was finally getting it. “So if someone should return seventy-five thousand dollars to you—”

“I wouldn’t take it. Because it wouldn’t be mine. Mine is buried in my stepfather’s grave.” A sudden sly grin. “Besides, if
Ramon took the money, how did you get hold of it?”

“I took it first, and substituted another garbage bag full of torn-up paper for it?” It was a question, not a statement.

“Ramon wouldn’t be satisfied with torn-up paper,” said Teddy delightedly. “So, if you have any money in your car, it isn’t
mine. The demon has mine.” He chuckled. “And I’m cured.”

Giselle found herself standing on the steps alone with the cat. It was a nice cat. She scratched it behind the ears. It was
a nice day. Teddy was a nice man. Yana was not a nice woman. But then neither was Giselle Marc a particularly nice woman.
She remembered a line from a favorite kid’s book of her childhood. A book about a goldfish seeing the world.

“Sunny Sunfish wiggled his tail and wondered.”

Giselle wondered if she was wiggling her tail on the way down the stairs to the car.

*   *   *

Dan Kearny wondered if he’d ended up in that place Peter Pan went back to—Never-Never Land, that was it—instead of the executive
offices of the St. Mark Hotel. Lined up across the desk from him like the Three Stooges were the hotel’s General Manager,
Corporate Counsel, and Head of Security. All because he’d just thumped their satchel full of money down on the desk.

“There it is, gents, all of it. The seventy-five thousand dollars a man calling himself Angelo Grimaldi extorted—”

“That’s a great deal of money,” said the heavy-set one, Gunnarson, the manager.

The little wizzled-up one, Smathers, the corporate counsel, cleared his throat. “Yes. A great deal of money, Mr.…” He looked
at the business card in his hand. “Mr. Kearny.” He smiled a toothy smile. “But guests leave their valuables in the safe at
the front desk—not here in the manager’s office.”

“But it’s not my money,” said Kearny with a great show of reason. “It’s
your
money.”

The big redheaded one, Shayne, with the gun under his arm, suddenly said, “I don’t know what sort of games you guys play back
there in Washington, Kearny, but out here—”

“Washington?” Kearny jerked a thumb at his own chest. “Like the card says, Daniel Kearny, licensed private detective right
here in San Francisco…”

Gunnarson waved him silent with almost a smirk.

“You’re a licensed private investigator from California. We accept that.” He opened his hands and beamed. “So why won’t you
accept that we never had a guest at this hotel named Angelo Grimaldi? No Angelo Grimaldi ever tried to extort money from us.
And we certainly—”

“His real name is Rudolph—”

“
Please.
And we certainly never gave any Angelo Grimaldi any seventy-five thousand dollars.” He turned to look at his two associates,
and chuckled. “Why, we wouldn’t keep our jobs very long if we went around dishing out free cash to just anyone who came through
that door, would we, fellows?”

They also laughed. Dan Kearny looked from face to face. Never-Never Land? Alice down the rabbit hole, for Chrissake!

“Grimaldi told you that a blond terrorist was going to blow up the President and he said he killed her and dumped her body
in the ocean…” They were all staring at him blandly. He added with a dash of desperation, “The blonde isn’t dead—she’s my
office manager, for Chrissake! I can get her in here—”

“A terrorist for an office manager?” Smathers made little tutting noises with his birdlike mouth. “I don’t know if this is
a bet, or a prank, or what, Mr. Kearny, but we’re busy men…”

Shayne picked up the satchel, clicked it shut, and slammed it against Kearny’s chest so Kearny had to grab it or let it fall
to the floor. And he suddenly understood.