32 Cadillacs

Chapter nineteen

As Giselle was dashing heatedly off in several directions at once to look for Angelo Grimaldi, Rudolph Marino, cool as geometry, was looking for her. Oh, not for her specifically, but, through his SFPD contact, for the repomen who had knocked off the two Gypsy Cadillacs over the weekend.

He used a St. Mark lobby payphone; by now he routinely phoned from his suite only for room service and wake-up because the switchboard would be monitoring his calls. He asked for his tame cop in the gruff voice snitches so often have.

“Marino,” he said when the man answered, gave the pay-phone number, hung up. When it rang three minutes later, he asked it, “What do you have?” then listened, nodding. “Morales... Marc... DKA? Which stands for... I see... Daniel Kearny Associates...”

He kept on listening. So Yana had been right. The same agency had picked up both cars. Bad news and good news. Bad news because the private detectives must indeed have figured out that it was Gypsies who had hit the bank for the Cadillacs. Good news because he could keep this information from Yana while feeding DKA information about her kumpania until she panicked and brought that ’58 ragtop into the open where he or his people could grab it...

“Giselle Marc?” he exclaimed to the phone, surprised.

One of the repomen was a woman? He grinned whitely to himself. There wasn’t the woman born he couldn’t get next to.

Well, maybe Yana.

“Gerry Merman... yes... I understand... a journalist doing a piece about Gypsies... I see... free-lance...”

He hung up, frowning. Then he smiled. Gerry Merman, writer. Giselle Marc, repowoman. He’d never heard of a repowoman, but he liked her moves, posing as a free-lance writer to get a line on Grimaldi without tipping DKa’s investigation. Free-lance, so if the cop had a highly unlikely I.Q. power surge and became suspicious, he couldn’t check out her cover story.

Just her bad luck that Harry Harrigan, SFPd’s Bunco Squad Gypsy specialist, also happened to be the cop in Marino’s pocket. But her good luck that now he, Rudolph Marino, soon to be King of the Gypsies, would be feeding her info about Yana’s kumpania.

Nothing about Stupidville, of course. If she learned of it, Giselle Marc sounded plenty smart enough to show up and grab some Caddies from a rom encampment called to name their new King upon the death of their old.

Their old King was not all that near death, actually, but Dr. Crichton, making his rounds, was worried about him all the same. Poor old Karl didn’t seem to have a lot of will to live, and now the department store’s insurance company was involved and insisting, in this age of skyrocketing medical costs, on more tests being run before they would okay even current expenses.

Bad for his patient, bad all around.

What Crichton didn’t know was that Barney Hawkins, Democrat National Assurance Company’s adjuster, was at that moment in Staley’s room shoving ballpoint pen and release form under his aged nose. Hawkins had bad teeth and was overweight, with just a fringe of hair around the back of his head as if he had been tonsured for the religious life. Shifty brown eyes that Staley met with a hurt and hurting old-man’s candor and bewilderment.

“Whazzis?” he mumbled in his overmedicated way.

“Just a release,” oozed Hawkins. “So your medical bills will be paid and you can stay here in this nice hospital until you’re all better.”

Staley had taken the pen, but now it slipped from his lax fingers and his head tilted down to one side as if he suddenly were dozing off from his medications. He gave a snore.

“Here, don’t do that. Just sign the form...” Victory seemed near and Hawkins made the mistake of grabbing an ancient shoulder and shaking him. “Hey, old man, wake—”

Staley reared up screaming. Hawkins jumped back, startled, to carom off the solid bulk of Lulu, who had been waiting in the bathroom for Staley’s shriek to bring her charging out.

“What you do to my husband?”

As she grappled with the dumbfounded adjuster, the door burst open and in rushed Crichton and the redheaded, freckled nurse who accompanied him on rounds.

“What’s going on in here?”

The nurse had Lulu by the arms to hold her back from Hawkins, who was exclaiming, “This crazy old broad attacked—”

“I was in bathroom, came out, he was shaking my Karl—”

“Shaking him?” Crichton, livid, shoved the adjuster back across the room. “You’re shaking him? This man has a spinal injury from a fall down an escalator and you’re shaking him?”

Staley moaned loudly from the bed. All eyes turned. “Want me to sign some paper,” said his wan old-man’s voice.

Crichton knew Hawkins only all too well. “A release form?”

“My Karl is not gonna sign no release forms,” Lulu said in loud abrupt tones. “The lawyer told me that he shouldn’t—”

“Lawyer?” cried Hawkins in alarm. “What lawyer?”

“The lawyer who said I should sign a paper with him.”

“Don’t do that,” said Hawkins with a terrible intensity. He’d had a shitty litigation loss-ratio last year, he didn’t need this. “Don’t sign any contracts with any lawyer—”

“Why not?”

“Well, ah, he’ll, ah, take half of what you get from us. He’ll, ah, cheat you. Just let us make you an offer and—”

Staley groaned again from the bed. Lulu said immediately, “My Karl in too much pain to be thinking about anything like that right now.”

“Out,” snapped Crichton, “everybody out. The nurse is here to give the patient a sponge bath.” He laid a gentle hand on Lulu’s shoulder. “You too, Mrs. Klenhard. Go get a cup of coffee at the cafeteria. Come back in half an hour or so.”

Outside in the corridor, Hawkins glowered after Lulu’s retreating form. “Y’know her old man’s faking it, Doc.”

“Nonsense.”

“I tell you he’s faking it.” He riffled the papers in his hand. “Not one X ray here that’s worth a damn.”

“Not unusual; patients with acute pain can’t lie still for X ray. I’ve conducted manual physical exams that more than—”

“Manual exams don’t cut it with me, Doc.”

“The man is nearly eighty years old! He fell down an escalator in a store you insure—”

“I want a spinal tap.”

After a long, angry pause, Crichton said icily, “I make the determination of which tests should be run on my patients.”

“Oh yeah? We’ve been through this before, Doc. I always go to the hospital chief administrator, and he always says...”

“The bottom line,” finished Crichton hollowly.

The bottom line. If the insurance company refused to pay Klenhard’s running medical expenses, the hospital would transfer the old man to a county-run facility that Crichton regarded as little better than a snake pit. He sighed in resignation.

“He has to agree to the spinal tap.”

“Okay. But right now. Before that wife of his gets back.”

The two men stared at one another with cordial mutual loathing. Crichton sighed and turned away. Hawkins smiled at his back. The old woman was the steel in the combination. With her out of the way, the old man would be putty in his hands.

The nurse had finished both Staley’s sponge bath and that amazing nurses’ feat, changing his sheets with him still in them.

Crichton dismissed her, said gently, “We’ve been discussing your case, Mr. Klenhard. We want you to submit to a spinal tap.”

“What’s that?” Staley was looking apprehensively from face to face for those answers not found in words alone.

“I draw fluid from your spinal cord to test whether—”

“Draw? What’s that, draw?”

“Siphon off,” put in Hawkins impatiently.

“Like with a needle?”

“Yeah.”

“A big needle?”

“Yes,” said Crichton suddenly, “a very big needle.”

“It’s gonna hurt, ain’t it? A lot?” Staley’s chin had gotten determined and his eyes had gone mule-stubborn. “I ain’t gonna do it, I can’t stand no more pain.”

“Mr. Klenhard—”

“No.”

Staley looked straight ahead as if alone in the room. Crichton took Hawkins to the window. Outside, April showers had come their way to bring the flowers that bloom in May.

“You heard. He can’t stand any more pain.”

“He wouldn’t have known about any more pain if you hadn’t tipped him off,” snarled Hawkins. “A little needle prick—”

“Have you ever had a spinal tap, Mr. Hawkins?”

“No, but—”

“I thought not. I sincerely hope I get a chance to give you one. Meanwhile, I can’t chance it over his objections.” He amended, “I won’t chance it. With his sensitivity to any added pain, the tap could result in further permanent injury.”

“Further? I’m telling you, Doc...” The adjuster paused for a moment. Then he said in a low voice, “Okay, I’ll accept reflex tests if administered right now in my presence.”

“The same objection applies,” said Crichton in equally low tones. “Any added pain—”

“If he’s as bad off as he’s claiming, he won’t feel a thing. If he does inadvertently show pain, Doc, either we got us a miracle right here in River City... or he’s been faking it all along. Right?”

Crichton hesitated. There had seemed no way Klenhard could profit from faking serious injury, but now the store manager had brought in his insurance company with the possibility of a settlement. Might not a destitute septuagenarian looking at a penniless old age be motivated to attempt insurance fraud?

“Okay,” Crichton said abruptly, “I’ll go along with it.”

They turned from the rain-streaked window back to the bed, where Staley seemed to have fallen asleep again.

“Mr. Klenhard.” No reaction. Louder. “Mr. Klenhard.”

Staley stirred and opened his eyes. “Mama?”

“No. It’s Dr. Crichton. We won’t have to do the spinal tap after all, Mr. Klenhard, but we are going to have to perform some alternative tests on you right here in your bed.”

“Like the last time? Bendin’ an’ standin’ an’—”

“No. This will be with... sharp instruments.”

“Needles?”

“Little needles. Like straight pins. And scrapers.”

“See if I feel ’em, huh?” said Staley surprisingly, then added, more surprisingly, “Okay, if it’s gonna help...”

Crichton put down the covers and bared Staley’s legs and feet. He scraped them, seeking reflex reaction. Then, at Hawkin’s insistence, he jabbed needles into the soles of the feet. Through it all, Staley lay on his back, motionless and relaxed, staring at the ceiling. He finally spoke.

“You can start anytime you want, Doc. I’m ready for it.”

“We’re finished,” said a triumphant Crichton. He added to Hawkins, “Faking it, huh?” as Lulu appeared.

“What you doing to my Karl?”

Hawkins addressed a rude word to both of them and walked out without responding to either. Three minutes later, after reassuring Lulu that they had not harmed her husband in any way, Crichton also departed. Lulu sat down in the chair beside the bed with her purse on her lap.

“Did I stay away long enough, Liebchen?”

“Perfect,” said Staley.

“Any trouble with the needles?”

“There never is if you know they’re coming.” In his youth, accidental falls had been his specialty; he knew all about how to control his reaction to the needle jabs of reflex testing.

“The spinal tap?”

Staley groaned very loudly. They both laughed.

The spinal tap that might have exposed their scam, because the fluid would have been clear, was safely behind them. Lulu opened her purse and took out some Nestle’s chocolate bars with bits of almond and toffee in them, Staley’s favorite.

As he munched one of them, Lulu said, “That insurance man is gonna make us a nice offer in a few days.”

“And you’ll make him make us a lot nicer offer a few days after that.”

Staley said it complacently, with not a little pride in his voice at his wife’s abilities. He finished the bar and licked his fingers and started on a second one.

“I think tomorrow, maybe, you start word to the rom that I’m sinking fast. Prob’ly ain’t gonna last out next week...”

“I think that’s best,” agreed Lulu comfortably. She stole a sidelong look at her lord and master, and added slyly, “Think it’s maybe time for a Queen of the Gypsies again? I been hearing good things about that Yana out there in San Francisco...”

“I don’t know, my dumpling,” said Staley judiciously. “I’ve been following the career of young Rudolph Marino...”

Marino and the other three sat in a semicircular window booth with a curved red leather seat, their backs to the glass. The maître d’ had RESERVED signs on the flanking booths and on the tables in front of them. A balding man’s waterfall fingers cascaded Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue from a piano against the mirrored sidewall that was framed in thirty-foot-high red plush drapes. He had outlived his youthful self on the placard outside by a quarter-century, although his hair had not. Marino, against the others’ objections to meeting in the Garnet Room, had said the piano would jam any listening devices pointed their way.

Redheaded Shayne, Hotel Security, smeared out his half-smoked Marlboro and fired up another.

“Your meeting, your agenda, Grimaldi.”

Marino paused for a moment. They hadn’t panicked and gone to the authorities, or by this time relay teams of Secret Service interrogators would be sweating him under bright lights in some anonymous federal office building downtown. But they hadn’t accepted Angelo Grimaldi’s offer yet, either; and the President was due in a couple of days.

So, another turn of the screw. He made his face devoid of expression and spoke from the corner of his mouth, tight-lipped.

“Assassination plot.”

That almost did it. Harley Gunnarson went white around the mouth. If something happened to the President in a hotel he was managing... He had to clear his throat to speak.

“They plan to... to kill the President? In my hote—”

“Yes. You could notify the Secret Service now, of course,” said Marino. “But...”

Smathers, lips parted, bird-bright eyes gleaming like those of a whiskey jay spotting a shiny coin, couldn’t resist.

“But what?”

“You already didn’t tell them about the bomb threat—”

“There haven’t been any more,” pointed out Shayne.

“That doesn’t negate the one there was.”

Dull, unimaginative Shayne, focus among them of opposition to Marino’s sting, stubbed out his just-lit second cigarette. His resistance seemed to have given Gunnarson back some of the bluster the word “assassination” had scared out of him.

“I’m not so sure,” Gunnarson said. “What if that threat was just some kook who thought he’d get his kicks making it? We have only your word that the Saladin even exist...”

Shayne added, “With the Secret Service guys and my own security people on watch, nobody can get through to do anything to the President anyway.” He pressed his point. “So yesterday we decided that we don’t need you or your ‘people’ on this.”

Gunnarson concurred by refusing to meet his eyes, so Marino turned to Smathers, who lathered his little hands with the invisible soap of distress and squeaked, “I’m not management! As corporate counsel I can only advise! This decision was reached over my most strenuous objections! I was overruled!”

Marino had been counting on the tiny desiccated attorney, but now saw he’d been wrong. Well, he hated to waste such a beautiful vehicle, but his limo had been gotten as the final convincer, and this was the biggest sting of his life. So, better go over to Richmond and get it wired up by Eli Nicholas, who had served in ’Nam.

He slid out of the booth and smiled down at them. None of the faces was really happy. The limo would do it for sure.

“Your funeral,” he said in his slightly grating Joisey voice. “Or rather, the President’s.” He started away, then turned back. “You’re gonna get bloody on this one, y’know.”

It was a hell of a good exit line, even if he had stolen it from Lethal Weapon.