32 Cadillacs

Chapter fifteen

Larry Ballard didn’t get to work many North Bay assignments because O’B couldn’t resist all that sunshine when the City was freezing its butt off under a layer of coastal fog. So driving up to Santa Rosa that Sunday afternoon, Ballard was struck by how the land developers had bought effective control of Marin County’s Planning Department when he wasn’t looking. Almost every hilltop sprouted its dense crop of duplexes and triplexes; north of San Rafael, where he remembered a little French restaurant with a duck pond, a hulking PG&E plant generated power for all those hillsides acned with high-density housing.

Marin needed a spotted owl of its own, and fast.

Speeding north into still-rural Sonoma County on the six-lane 101 freeway, Ballard found himself wondering if Beverly would ever let him back into her life. They’d fallen into an easy routine of double-dating with Bart and Corinne, a movie and a drink afterward, then he and Bev over to her place for...

Trouble was, he’d liked her a lot, sometimes thought they were in love with each other. But one or the other had always pulled back from a lasting emotional commitment. Now, all gone.

He came off the freeway in Santa Rosa looking for the ’30s-style stucco house at 15431 Redwood Highway. He’d stopped thinking of Beverly and had started thinking about work again. Well, maybe not totally about work. Speculating, instead, about the woman he had driven north to try and find.

Ballard hadn’t had to look up the address in the old case file; it had leaped into his mind when he had decided to seek out the beautiful Gypsy fortune-teller named Yana. Some three years before, Yana had given him a lead that had helped DKA save its license from the state.

That wasn’t all she’d given him. Against all known logic concerning Gypsies and gadje, Yana had gone to bed with him in the big motel down the road from the mitt-camp.

Just the one time; she didn’t dare do it again. She’d been sold in marriage at 13 to some mean Gyppo bastard for $3,000, and ever since had been living with him and his mother, Madame Aquarra. Madame Aquarra hated her guts, had been single-mindedly devoted to getting something on her so Yana could be kicked out of the house with her husband retaining the bride price.

But Yana was the only Gypsy contact Ballard could think of, so he had to talk with her. Or, if she wasn’t there any longer, with Madame Aquarra to find her. It had been night the other time, he’d spoken to the old woman for just a few moments, no way she would remember him now, three years later. Was there?

His speculations were academic: there was no 15431 Redwood Highway anymore. Just another stupid shopping mall. No one to ask where the mitt-camp might have moved to, and, it being Sunday, he couldn’t even run a gag on the local post office for a possible forwarding. Anyway, few Gyps were literate so they didn’t get much mail except government checks, anyway. Yana, he remembered, could only read phone numbers and street names, though she could fake newspapers and menus real well.

Since Madame Aquarra had an unlisted phone number, it took two hours to get a possible new address on her. Out in the burgeoning suburban sprawl west of Santa Rosa proper, where the old Calistoga Road meandered up off Cal 12 into the hills.

Spiritual Advisor, said the sign above the door, but it was a mitt-camp pure and simple. On the front porch of the stucco and red tile fake hacienda were primary-color ceramic pots, bright trashy tourist souvenir figurines and ashtrays, and an exquisite Delia Robbia ceramic medallion sunk in the stucco beside the door. A nearly life-size fuzzy stuffed gorilla sat in a wicker rocking chair with a dead cigar in his fist.

Ballard crunched across the gravel lot and up the three steps to the porch. He rang the bell. Bingo! Madame Aquarra, the mother-in-law. Smoking a long black stogie like the gorilla’s which she whipped out of sight behind her back when she saw a possibly paying customer at the door.

“Madame Aquarra knows all,” she intoned.

The same words she’d used three years ago. Obviously, she didn’t recognize the supposed cop, half-seen in the darkness, who’d whisked her daughter-in-law away for a night in the pokey. Considering what he and Yana had so joyfully done together until dawn, it had been more like a night of pokey-pokey-pokey.

Now he was acting confused.

“I’m looking for the other Madame Aquarra.”

She glared at him. Those same ice eyes, that same downy mustache adorning her upper lip, that same lustrous black hair, just slightly grey-shot, coiled about her head, that same extra fifty pounds stretching tight a bright silk skirt across her yard-wide derrière.

“There is no other Madame Aquarra. Down through the eons, in all lands during all centuries, there has always only been one Madame Aquarra at any one time to look into the future, to—”

“Damn!” exclaimed Ballard. “That’s too bad.”

“Too bad.”

Not quite a question, not quite a statement. Willing to be informed. Almost, if not quite, smelling money in it somewhere.

“Yep. In her twenties — rom like yourself—”

“What you know of the rom?” she demanded quickly.

“I know they are the only true seers. I know only they are truly blessed with the second sight and the third eye.”

He didn’t know what he had just said, but Madame Aquarra seemed to like it. She nodded sagely.

“How do you know this?”

“The young rom woman I thought was Madame Aquarra. She told my fortune and eventually it made me quite a lot of money. I want her to have some of it.”

“She told you this fortune here? In my ofica?”

Ballard thought fast. Yana obviously wasn’t here, and he knew the old gal hated her; so he shook a chiding finger at her.

“You’re testing me, aren’t you, Madame Aquarra? Of course not here in your ofica. In...” He waved his hand in a dismissive manner. “But she’s gone from there...”

He fell silent. Silence was useful: it might work even with this crusty old Gypsy woman driven by anger and greed.

“Madame Aquarra knows of whom you speak,” she admitted in a suddenly mellifluous voice. “And of course Madame Aquarra knows the way in which she released your power so that you found financial success. So...”

Ballard just stood there beaming at her, his hands in his pockets. He had her. Goddammit, he had her! Or her greed did.

“So give me your gift for her and I will get it to her.”

Ballard slowly moved his head from side to side, still without speaking, still with that silly grin on his face. The sudden anger he had hoped for suffused her features: yes! She hated her daughter-in-law hard enough to sell her out to a gadjo.

“How much for her?” Madame Aquarra demanded bluntly.

He brought his hand out of his pocket clutching two $50 bills. Madame Aquarra stared at them, then met his bland eyes with her angry ones. A shiver ran through him. She was a powerful presence despite her venality.

“Madame Miseria. San Francisco.”

He gave her a single fifty. Silently. She spoke again, as if he were physically dragging the words out of her.

“North Beach.”

Madame Miseria. Now he remembered her sign in... Romolo Place, that was it. He got around the City a lot, he knew most of the streets well. So Madame Miseria was Yana. Hot damn!

He gave Madame Aquarra the other fifty. Who immediately exclaimed: “Go! Find her! Destroy her! Rip her eyes out!”

Then Madame Aquarra slammed the door in his face.

Ballard went down to his car both elated and uneasy. He had found her — unless the old lady had conned him. No. She had stopped believing his story of a reward, she thought the gadjo wanted to bust Yana for something. Her hatred had fused with her greed and she had dropped dime on her daughter-in-law.

So it looked as if Yana had gotten away from her — and one way or another must have taken her bride price with her.

Ballard’s unease came from the fact that he’d parked where Madame Aquarra could get his license number if she were so inclined. He didn’t believe in Gypsy curses, but he did believe in the efficiency of their information network.

He drove off thinking, Maybe I ought to get word back to her that something really terrible has come down on Yana. That would make her happy and perhaps forget all about Larry Ballard.

Which would make Larry Ballard sleep better that night.

Sleep that entire weekend had been in short supply for Ken Warren. Somehow he had gotten it fixed in his head that those three days were some sort of test for him. Show Dan Kearny that he was a real carhawk, and the DKA job would be his.

There is a surprising number of things a guy with his sort of handicap can do to keep the bills paid, and Warren had done most of them, from civilian contract worker in Vietnam twenty years before (nobody with his kind of speech impediment could get into the military, he’d tried hard enough), to migrant laborer, to stevedoring on the docks, to pushing a big-rig, to, of all things, bartending.

But repoman was what he liked best, he was really good at it if they didn’t try to make him talk to people. He got to use his smarts when he was a repoman. He got to figure out what the other guy had done and was going to do next. There was excitement and challenge and now and then intense danger. The perfect job.

Not that he’d faced any danger this weekend.

The woman with the can of coffee had taken off.

The guy with the big boyfriend hadn’t come back.

But lots of other people had been home. Pedestrians now, every one of them. The guy in Fairfax in Marin County, up on the hill with the dirt road, who’d wanted to argue about his truck until Warren had picked him up under the arms like a baby and set him on a shelf in his garage as if he were a can of paint.

“Gnaw gnhew nthtay nere nhtil Ahm ghawn.”

The guy didn’t look like he understood the words, but he stayed there on the shelf as Warren drove away in his pickup.

The man and his wife down in Burlingame on the Peninsula with the twin his-and-hers Buick Reattas and the vicious watchdog. Warren had stolen the first Buick at 3:00 A.M., the second at 3:30, the first from the driveway, the second from the carport, without even waking up their Rottweiler in the backyard. In fact, he’d tied a big red bow he’d found in the back of one of the repos to the gate of the dog’s pen as a little joke.

There had been one hairy moment in San Francisco’s Castro District when a crowd of hostile gays had been watching him break into a Ford Aerostar van. But some guy had helped chill them out, and then, when Ken was about to drive away, had handed him the keys! The registered owner. He’d just stood there watching Ken take it, ashamed to admit being behind in his payments.

Then that other guy down South of Market, who had jumped on the hood of his own Plymouth Laser and spread his topcoat wide in front of the windshield in an attempt to keep Warren from driving it away. The Laser hit a phone pole, but still ran, so it came off better than the guy on the hood: he’d ended up in SF General with breaks and contusions and a bad case of gutter mouth from French-kissing a sewer grate.

No, the problems Ken Warren had faced hadn’t been the subjects whose cars he was taking. The first was that along about 5:00 A.M. Monday he had run out of gas — him, not his car — and had fallen asleep on stakeout at 25th Ave and El Camino del Mar in Seacliff. The lady with the Beemer 535i never showed, and he woke bleary-eyed and fog-frosted at 6:30. He washed and shaved in the men’s room at the Seacliff Motel up behind Sutro Heights, even had toast and coffee in their dining room before driving unwillingly back toward the DKA office.

Unwillingly, because that’s where his other problem was waiting. He hadn’t had a key to the DKA garage, so he’d street-parked the cars he’d repossessed around the block the office was on. Worse than that, when he’d run out of parking places he’d left the final repo right-angled across the sidewalk with its front bumper nudging DKa’s heavy garage door.

He bet Dan Kearny was going to be really steamed about that.