32 Cadillacs

Chapter sixteen

When Dan Kearny got to the office at 7:33 Monday morning, he was really steamed. Some idiot had nosed a car across the sidewalk to block the DKA storage garage door. And wouldn’t you know, there wasn’t a single parking place in either direction where he could leave his car until he could move this one.

After double-parking in the street with the blinkers on, he went through the office deactivating the alarms, then out the back to unlock the heavy wooden sliding door and flick the switch on the little motor that rumbled it aside. Grumbling to himself, he got the car started and was backing it out into the street when Giselle double-parked behind it, boxing him in.

“What’s that doing here?” she demanded.

“My very thought. I’m going to leave it in the street for the cops to tag and tow—”

“You can’t. Until we turned in our files last week, I was carrying the paper on that one.”

“I’ll be damned!” said Kearny/ “It must have been in that fistful of cases I gave Ken Warren on Friday. He must have grabbed it over the weekend and parked it here because he didn’t have a garage key. Not too shabby for a new man.”

“There’s another one of mine across the street.”

“Got two? Hey, terrif!” He paused, suddenly uneasy. “Ah, listen, Giselle, I fired the cleaning service on Friday.”

“You what? Why didn’t you wait until I found somebody else who we can count on to—”

That’s when O’B drove up and half got out of his car.

O’B had spent most of Saturday at the airfield up in Sonoma, trying to get a line on the Gyppos who had “sold” the ancient biplane to Doc Swigart — no luck — most of yesterday in the Old Clam House under the freeway near the Army Street off-ramp, and most of last night in an ail-night steam-room on Market Street soaking clam juice out of his system.

One foot on the blacktop, he craned cautiously over the roof of his car as if he were still hung over despite his fresh-scrubbed, russet look from the steam. He shamelessly gargled his r’s for his best Blarney-stone brogue — a gone-slightly-to-seed Irish potato with bloodshot eyes.

“Faith an’ bejesus, an’ ’tis the wee leprechauns who’ve been busy this blessed weekend.”

“Meaning what, exactly?” demanded Kearny, though he was starting to get an idea that he already knew.

“Makin’ all the shoemaker’s shoon in the night an’ slippin’ away at first light.”

“How many of ’em are yours?”

O’B came around his car to slap a lean freckled hand on the hood of a green Cutlass Supreme right in front of the office.

“This.” He turned and pointed down the block. “That one. And that pickup over there from Marin. Two more around the corner...” He grinned at Kearny. “Maybe now you appreciate just how much work I turn out in the course of a day’s—”

Kearny had just begun pointing out that someone else had repossessed all those cars assigned to O’B, not the Irishman himself, when Larry Ballard drove up.

Ballard already had been around the block and through little one-block Norfolk Alley behind, and there was not one damned parking place to be found. Usually, early on a Monday morning, there’d be a dozen free.

And now this, people standing around in the middle of the street waving their arms. What was going on? A convention?

Or maybe it was trouble. Yeah, there were Kearny, Giselle, O’B... some guy’s car blocking the garage... He squealed to a stop behind O’b’s car and piled out, feeling behind the seat for his tire iron, only then belatedly realizing that nobody was there except the DKA crew. He went up to them.

“What happened?”

Kearny swept his arm around in an all-encompassing gesture. “How many of ’em were assigned to you, Larry?”

For the first time Ballard began checking license plates.

“Ill... be... damned...” He shook his head. “I see those his-and-hers Buicks from down the Peninsula, I bet I hit that address a dozen times without getting a sniff of those cars, just a big damn dog who tried to bite off my—”

“Don’t say it!” exclaimed Giselle in alarm.

“—foot,” finished Ballard, then said in equal alarm to O’B, “Nobody grabbed our Mercedes from Pietro, did they? I—”

“I didn’t see it.” O’B turned to Kearny, “How many guys did you have out in the field over the weekend, Reverend?”

Before Kearny could respond, Bart Heslip drove up.

He bounced out of his car like answering the opening bell.

“Who got run over?”

“Last week’s cases,” said Ballard.

“I don’t get it.”

“Somebody did. Repeatedly.” Then it was Ballard’s turn to wave his arm around like Balboa on a peak in Darién. “How many do you recognize, Bart?”

Surprise widened Heslip’s eyes.

“That Laser with the front end bashed in was one of mine.”

“I hope we didn’t do the bashing,” said Kearny quickly.

“I couldn’t say. I never laid eyes on the car while I was carrying the assignment. I’d started to think the guy was made out of smoke...” He interrupted himself in sudden panic. “Nobody got Sarah, did they? If I spent my weekend chasing Gyppos without a sniff and somebody knocked off that Charger—”

“I didn’t see it on the street,” said Ballard. “Unless it’s inside—”

“The guys I had out over the weekend didn’t have keys to the garage,” said Kearny.

Heslip’s eyes had lit on another of the parked cars. “Hey, there’s that Aerostar van, the one that—”

“Out in the Castro,” nodded Giselle, who had assigned the case to him in the first place.

“I only had it for a week,” said Heslip defensively. “With all the other cases I was working—”

“The guy who got it only had it for a weekend,” Kearny interrupted in his most offensive manner.

Heslip was indeed offended. “What guy?”

“I only had two men out, and one of them is a green pea who just started Friday. So probably Morales—”

Just then Morales drove up in one of the Gyppo Caddies!

Instead of being grateful, Kearny, that chingada, was on him like a junkyard dog.

“What are you doing with that Cadillac?”

“Driving it,” smirked Morales as he got out. He’d driven it the whole weekend, Jesus, what a boat! Power everything. “Bringing it in to make out my report and—”

Ballard had been looking through the windshield to check the I.D. number against their Gypsy Cadillac master list.

“Yeah, it’s one of ours,” he said in a crestfallen voice. “But what’s this bastard doing working for us again, anyway?”

“Chinga tu madre, maricón! You wanna go ’round right—”

Heslip got between them but Ballard was ready to go — last time Morales had knocked him down, this time that wouldn’t be so easy for him. Ballard was older, wiser, fitter, with a few years of karate under his belt.

Not that karate, come to think of it, had made much difference to Fearsome Freddi of the leather underwear.

Ignoring the ruckus, Kearny said, “We needed a couple of extra men to pick up the slack on the files you turned in so you guys could work the Gypsy stuff.”

“Only a couple of extra men?” Giselle was looking around with a dazed expression. Apparently all the parking places were filled with repos. “Two guys? All this?”

But Kearny had remembered all over again that Morales wasn’t supposed to even know about the Gypsy cases, let alone be working any of them.

“You snooped those Gypsy files!” he stormed. “That’s what you were doing when I saw you in the front upstairs office on Friday afternoon! Dammit, Morales, I want—”

“Hey, I got one, didn’t I?” Morales jerked a thumb at Ballard. “That’s more than hotshot here did over the weekend.” He stepped closer to Kearny, an insinuating look on his face. “Listen, I bet you’re offerin’ everybody a bonus on each Gyppo car they turn, right? Now it seems to me that if I was workin’ Gyppo cases along with the rest of the guys...”

“No bonuses, and I can’t trust you anyway,” said Kearny flatly. “Not on something like this. You were hired to pick up the slack—”

“I’d still like to know who repo’d all these cars, since it obviously wasn’t any of us,” said O’Bannon.

That’s when Ken Warren drove up.

He knew it, he just knew it. The car he’d left in front of the garage door now was backed halfway into the street, and Kearny was waving his arms at some Mexican dude in the middle of a bunch of people like maybe there’d been an accident.

He didn’t remember a Spanish surname on any of the cases he’d worked, but he’d been knockin’ ’em off pretty fast, he couldda forgotten a name. He’d never gotten a crack at so many easy repos in his life. These DKA guys must really talk to the man, like Kearny had said, instead of just grabbing cars.

Ken Warren really liked just grabbing cars.

He double-parked his company car like everyone else had, and sort of tiptoed down toward the group. Hey, they were all operatives, he bet. In fact, he bet he could figure out who was who just from reading the reports on the cases he’d been handed.

He couldn’t place the Mex guy, but the Mick with red hair and freckles and boozer’s face, that had to be O’Bannon, the one signed himself O’B.

The black guy he’d seen fight, that was Bart Heslip. Not very marked up for an ex-pro middleweight.

Kearny had said the tall good-looking blond lady was Giselle Marc, office manager. She also worked the field — he couldn’t blame her there, that’s where the action was.

And the lean handsome muscular guy, must do a lot of surfing or SCUBA-diving to have his hair bleached almost white like that, he had to be Ballard.

Inevitably, Kearny saw him. Came over working his face and waving his arms just as he’d been doing at the Mexican guy a couple of minutes ago.

“Warren, what the hell were you doing over the weekend?”

Giselle breathed, just loud enough for Kearny, “What do you think he was doing? Proving he is the greatest carhawk the world has ever known.”

The rest of them had turned to stare at Warren as if he were from another planet — and he hadn’t even opened his mouth yet. He shifted uneasily from foot to foot, trying to figure out what Kearny wanted him to answer. Then inspiration struck.

“Hey, Mr. Kearny, Ah gnthalk ta gha man!”

Kearny astounded him by busting out laughing. And then clapping him on the shoulder and demanding, “You talk to all the men?” He seemed to be getting the hang of the way Ken spoke.

“Well, no, juth nthoz who—”

“How many cars did you grab since Friday afternoon?”

He didn’t have to consult his case files to answer that one. He’d counted them up during breakfast. “Nthevnteen.”

“Seventeen?”

“Yeah.”

“Police reports?”

“Yeah.”

“Condition reports?”

He’d completed those over breakfast and he’d rather show than tell, so he held out the sheaf of completed forms. Kearny looked at them, then nodded and turned to the rest of them still standing around staring as if they were at Fleishacker Zoo.

“Ken Warren,” said Kearny with a flourish, then added with masterful understatement, “he’ll be covering for you while you work the Gypsy accounts.”

“For all of us?” asked Ballard.

“Him and Morales, yeah.” Kearny gestured at the repo-crowded street. “You got a problem with that, Larry?”

“Hell no, no problem, I just wondered how one guy...”

Ballard ran down. The guy had repo’d seventeen cars in three days! That was a decent score for a decent field man in a decent month. For the first time in his professional life he felt something akin to awe for another man’s work besides Kearny’s; the Great White Father, of course, was always the best. He stepped forward and stuck out his hand to Warren.

“I’m Larry Ballard.”

“GnYm kGen Gwarren.”

Then they were all crowding around and shaking his hand and clapping him on the shoulder, like football players mobbing the guy who took the opening kickoff and ran it back for a touchdown. Warren suddenly understood why they had been staring at him. Not because they’d heard he talked funny. Hell no. Because they were impressed.

For the first time in his life, the very first time, Ken Warren felt he was part of a group that didn’t give a damn how he talked. However he did it, he spoke their language.

Kearny said, “Okay, Warren’s got reports to write and cars to get back to the dealers. Giselle and Trin each have a Gypsy Cadillac to do the same with. The rest of us, the Gyppos aren’t going to waste any time spreading the word that someone dropped a rock on a couple of their boats over the weekend.”

“Hell, Dave,” said O’B, “they were both gotten on drivebys. Maybe the Gyppos’ll figure the law of averages just caught up with them. Only so many new Caddies on the street—”

“You really believe that?” demanded Kearny in disbelief.

“Nah.”