32 Cadillacs

Chapter twenty

Giselle and Ballard planned to talk about Gypsies over a drink at Fifi’s on Union Street, but Ballard was late and Giselle, because of that pesky concussion he’d suffered, was feeling almost... maternal about him. Which was silly, since they’d worked together for eight years and were great friends. Friends. There could never be anything... personal between them.

It was just that he seemed so vulnerable and...

He also seemed to be twenty minutes late, she thought, but even her irritation was mild. Just like that Larry.

Leaving her wine and newly purchased pack of cigarettes and disposable lighter on a table facing Union Street through plate glass, she wormed her way through noisy bar drinkers to the payphone. Jane Goldson’s noncommittal “Hello?” was the response prescribed for all unlisted DKA skip-tracer numbers.

“Jane? Giselle. Did Larry call in to say that he’s still planning to meet me at Fifi’s?”

“There’s a message for you, luv, but not from Larry. From dear old Mr. Anonymous.” Her cheery cockney voice changed to a reading singsong: “ ‘In Tiburon. Theodore Winston White the Third.’ ”

Whatever that meant. She said, “I’m impressed — the Third, yet. But nothing from Larry...”

“No — well, a message for him, actually. A woman.” Jane giggled. “Sexy-sounding wench, she was.” The singsong again. “ ‘Rainbird Lounge. Tonight.’ ”

Larry’s call was none of her business, and Giselle’s own anonymous call couldn’t be about Gyppos. The only informant she had spoken with was Dirty Harry, who didn’t have her real name or number. Besides, Theodore Winston White III was no Gypsy name.

Just to be sure, she tapped out 411. No listing for White in the Tiburon/Belvedere area. No listing for him anywhere in Marin County. And no way until tomorrow to run him down through the Civic Center records in San Rafael.

Sonia Lovari was 32 and looked 19, and helped nature along with simple artifice: since she had a short chunky body and swarthy skin and a round face with an inappropriate beak of a nose, she plaited her long hair into a single lustrous black braid that reached to the small of her back, wore jeans, run-over cowboy boots, and a fringed jacket of phony buckskin. Thus attired, she neatly fit the gadjo stereotype of squaw woman.

Sonia shook the one-pound coffee can with the slot in the top and MIWOK INDIAN SUPPORT GROUP — GIVE WHAT YOU CAN pasted around it. She kept it almost empty at all times; a few lonely coins rattling around inside attracted sympathy.

“The Miwoks are starving, sir. The Great Spirit will bless you if—”

“Everybody’s starving,” snapped the man she’d stopped.

He obviously wasn’t. Florid face, fat stomach, three-piece suit, three-martini breath. Sonia welcomed the challenge. An argument always made other people stop and listen.

“Not like my people, sir. We—”

“You can’t kid me — the last of the Miwoks died off last year!” he said with inaccurate belligerence. “Ishi, that was his name! There was a movie on Showtime about him—”

Sonia, who had never heard of Ishi, interrupted with glib and equal inaccuracy. “Ishi was a Tamalpais Miwok. We are Coast Miwok.” In her eyes were Native American patience and pain. “There are only thirty-three of us left — the same number as our dear Savior’s years when He was crucified.”

A crowd of curious commuters was gathering. The man looked around and saw only sympathy for Sonia on the attentive faces. He muttered under his breath while digging in his pants pocket for a crumpled bill to stuff into her tin can.

“Here, for Chrissake.”

“The Great Spirit blesses you, sir.”

But it was a Bay Area Rapid Transit guard, not the Great Spirit, who materialized behind her to lay an ungentle hand on her shoulder. “No panhandling in the BART station, sister.”

Undismayed, Sonia displayed the bogus Chamber of Commerce “registered charity” badge that she’d paid a Gypsy documenter in San Jose $50 for. She didn’t know what it said, not knowing how to read, but it always worked like a charm.

“I’m not panhandling, sir.”

The guard’s hostility had lessened. He gestured at the broad yellow line at the edge of the platform where the silver bullet-shaped BART projectiles would come roaring past.

“You still can’t solicit in the BART station — it’s just too dangerous for the customers.” He gestured. “But you can do it upstairs, at the street entrance.”

“I’m sorry. This is my first day. I’m only nineteen.”

He hesitated. “Miwok, huh? I heard you say—”

“Only thirty-three of us are left, sir.”

“Aw, what the heir?”

The guard shoved a dollar in the slot. Sonia thanked him and managed to rattle two more donations into her coffee can on her way up to the Market/Powell entrance. The streetlights were on and the stream of BART commuters had thinned to a trickle; until Memorial Day brought summer’s tourist wave, she had to depend on the locals. Five more minutes, she’d quit for the day.

Rattle-rattle.

Clink.

“Great Spirit bless you, ma’am.”

The Miwok scam was a new one for her; for years, up and down the coast, she’d done Navajos. But last month she’d been forced to spend an afternoon hiding out from a Marin County bunco cop at the Miwok Museum in Novato; since she couldn’t read the captions under the displays, she’d followed around a schoolteacher explaining the exhibits to her second-graders. Sonia had immediately switched scams. In the Bay Area, she reasoned, local Miwok was bound to arouse more sympathy than far-off Navajo.

Still rattling her collection can, she started up the hill toward the Sutter-Stockton garage where she’d left her $50,000 Allante with its 4.5-litre V-8 engine and front-drive traction control system. Tonight, as usual, she’d swing over to the Rainbird Lounge for a little Miller time. Their happy hour always gave her useful bits of redskin lore and turns of phrase, and no one would come looking for her car there.

When she got the Georgia plates she’d applied for, the repossessors Rudolph Marino had warned her about would no longer threaten her Allante. And meanwhile, Rudolph would soon be King.

Leaving bitch Yana out in the cold where she belonged.

Larry Ballard was sitting opposite Giselle’s glass of wine and pack of cigarettes when she got back from the phone. The red lump on his forehead was just about gone; all that remained was a slight reddish discoloration as if he’d gotten too much sun. Back to his old handsome self. Time to quit thinking Florence Nightingale thoughts about him, she didn’t know why she was having them in the first place. Just silliness.

She shook her head ruefully. “I’d better change brands so I won’t be so predictable.”

“Or quit using disposable lighters.”

“They give me the illusion the smoking is also disposable.”

“I thought it was. Last I’d heard, you’d quit again.” When she answered only with a shrug, he gestured at the huge plate-glass picture window. “Fifi’s. I always feel like a French poodle at a dog show in this joint.”

“You’re sounding more like Dan every day.”

“Yeah, sure. You get anything on Grimaldi from Harrigan?”

“Nothing. He said that if any Gypsy was operating with that name in San Francisco, he’d know about it.”

“Except one is and he doesn’t.” Ballard paused. “You’ve been told the story about him, haven’t you? They started calling him Dirty Harry in Vice, ’cause he was dirty — extorting money and tail from hookers in the Tenderloin. When he got transferred to Bunco his gross probably dropped fifty percent.”

“He’s still plenty gross enough for me.”

“Dirty Harry put a move on you?”

They fell silent when the waitress brought Ballard’s mug of draft beer, an automatic professional caution rather than any real worry about being overheard. But still they waited until she departed. Giselle lit a new cigarette, fumbling the lighter as she remembered the man’s eyes crawling over her like spiders. Ballard grinned at her.

“Don’t feel bad — he’d screw mud.” To the look on her face, he added with quick diplomacy, “Not that I mean you’re—”

“I think you think you just paid me a compliment.”

She stubbed her just-lit cigarette in irritation. She didn’t like their patter; she felt as if she were flirting with Larry. Good old solid Larry Ballard, for God sake! What was the matter with her? To cover her discomfort, she told him about the blind date she’d set up for Harrigan. Ballard broke up.

“So Dirty Harry’ll show up at the Sappho Self-defense Dojo with his pocket full of condoms and his hand on his—”

“He did make a couple of interesting remarks,” Giselle said quickly. “Three, actually. First, there’s a rumor that the Gypsy King is dying back in the Midwest somewhere...”

“Which would explain Grimaldi interrupting his other operation for the Cadillac grab! Yeah! Go back in style to choose the new King...” He drank beer, added thoughtfully, “We need to know who, when, where. Maybe I can get a line on—”

“Harrigan wasn’t really interested, so I couldn’t be too interested myself, seeing as I’d just passed myself off as a free-lance journalist trying to dig up a story on—”

“Dirty Harry happen to mention a Gyppo named Rudolph?”

“No.” She couldn’t stop herself. “Why?”

Ballard grinned in an extremely sappy manner. “Oh, someone else mentioned him, that’s all.”

A sexy-sounding wench, Jane had said. Three years ago, a beautiful Gyppo fortune-teller’d had Ballard walking around with his tongue dragging the ground for a couple of weeks after DKA had put mob attorney Wayne Hawkley out of business for good.

“Your little Gyppo crystal-gazer from Santa Rosa?” she couldn’t help demanding snidely.

Ballard frowned at her from behind his beer mug. What was this? Old Giselle gets out in the field and all of a sudden starts getting competitive about sources like any other repo-man?

“Why do you ask?”

Giselle just shook her head and drank her Chablis, appalled at herself. She changed the subject yet again.

“Dirty Harry also said that some heavy-duty bad-guy Gyppos have been moving in from New York and Chicago...”

Ballard’s momentary irritation seemed forgotten. “That fits, too. My informant said Rudolph had just hit town. She’s never seen him, doesn’t even know his last name, but—”

Again, Giselle couldn’t stop herself. “She says.”

“Why would she lie?” He licked foam from his upper lip and started trying to connect up the dots, one of the main hazards of the detective game — the irresistible urge to make all the data you had somehow fit together. “Think this Rudolph character could be Angelo Grimaldi?”

“Why not? Anyway, I’ll check registrations for the Grimaldi name at the top hotels in town. If he is setting up some elaborate scam, it’ll be timed to the President’s visit...”

“Yeah. The cops’ll be too busy on security and crowd control to check out every con game in town.”

Giselle had finished her wine. She leaned toward him.

“I’ve already talked with Danny McBain at Jack Olwen Cadillac about Grimaldi’s specially built limo. He said—”

“Specially built how?”

“Jack didn’t know, the work was done by an outfit down in L.A. I’ve got a call in to them now.”

“What was his description of Grimaldi?”

“Same as the bank’s. Tall, lean, soulful eyes...”

“Man of my dreams.” He added, a bit distractedly, “What’s the third thing Harry told you about?”

Giselle started to tell him, then pulled herself up short. Uh-uh. She’d always thought the competition between field men for the best monthly recovery record was childish macho nonsense, but now she understood the rivalry. When you were on the street, you wanted to be the best on the street. And who knew what Larry might pass on to his little Gypsy bimbo...

No, the Eldorado, though only a tenuous lead, was her lead, she wasn’t going to...

Who was she kidding? She wasn’t going to tell him about the 1958 pink convertible the Gyps might have snatched in Palm Springs for only one reason: because Ballard wasn’t going to cop to his Gyppo crystal-gazer. It was simple as that.

She said, “Jane Goldson gave me a message for you. A woman. Wouldn’t leave her name.”

Ballard made impatient gimme-gimme gestures. When she stayed silent, he burst out, “Jesus Christ, Giselle, what the hell is it with you tonight? Every time I—”

“ ‘Rainbird Lounge. Tonight.’ That was it.”

It seemed hardly enough, but Ballard started grinning from

ear to ear, that same foolish Tom-Sawyer-about-Becky Thatcher kind of grin he’d used a minute ago.

“I’ll be damned,” he said softly, “she came through.” To Giselle’s cynically raised eyebrows, he added abruptly, “Yeah, her. Yana. Madame Miseria. My crystal-ball gazer from three years ago. My Gypsy informant. The one I paid a hundred bucks to this afternoon. There. You happy now?”

“You paid her one hundred dollars on the come?” The office manager in Giselle was genuinely offended at the idea of $100 being given to anyone — let alone some Gyppo princess — for information not only not tested for accuracy but not yet even received. “I suppose you think one of the Caddies will be parked outside the Rainbird with the key in the ignition and the engine still warm.”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“That’s an Indian bar, you know. American Indian. Indians and Gyppos don’t exactly love each other.”

“O ye of little faith,” he intoned in a pious inflection borrowed from O’B. He seemed to be having the time of his life, which made him very irritating.

She snapped abruptly, “I’m coming with you on this one.”

“Like hell.”

“I want to see the look on your face when there’s no Gyppo Cadillac.”

Ballard was silent for a moment. Then he smiled a slow superior smile. “Tell you what. You pay for the drinks here, and buy me dinner afterward, and you’re on.”

“The hundred dollars broke you, huh?”

“I’ve got three bucks.”

“That’s my Larry. Always a sucker for a woman with more in her bra than in her brain.”

And there was a wonderful thing for Giselle Marc with an MA. in history to say, she thought as they stood up. Quite enough out of you for one night, young lady, thank you very much.

As she scattered paper money across the table to cover their drinks and the tip, Ballard said abruptly, “I’m gonna really enjoy this. Eight lousy months in the field against my eight years, and you think you know all about it. Well, tonight, Giselle, the old maestro’s gonna show you how it’s done.”