32 Cadillacs

Chapter twenty-four

The aging rock musician bore the stylized stigmata of his tribe: a Gibson slung down his back on a worn leather strap; a bright felt-covered baseball-style cap loaded with glittery beads bill-backward on his shoulder-length hair; leather vest with more beads, big brass belt buckle of crossed miniature wheel lock pistols, faded jeans with the knees out, black scuffed combat boots. Obligatory shades.

“You see that there big ape?” he demanded of a little girl at the King Kong exhibit. “My daddy caught him for me.”

The little girl’s eyes got very big. She had blond hair and a gap in front where two teeth should have been. She lisped in wonder, “For you?”

He pulled the guitar around and strummed a simple chord progression and sang in a flat Bob Dylan sort of voice:

The mother, who thought he was part of the entertainment, laughed at his shouted last line as he lost his balance and steadied himself against her and lifted her wallet. The long drought was over. The Rock Musician, one of Poteet’s most potent personae, was scoring like the Golden State Warriors.

But when he was about to put the wallet back into her purse, some old grey-haired geek with a big jaw wanted to take their picture in front of the ape.

“Hey, sure, that’s great, man,” he mumbled, thinking, Get outta my face, geek, or I’ll knee-drop you for sure.

But, ever alert, he used the photo opportunity to slip the wallet back into the woman’s handbag — minus a couple of twenties, of course. The grey-haired guy ended up sitting next to him on the bus, real talkative and a real bug with that camera, click, click, click, all the damned time.

“My grandchildren are coming out from back east next week.” The old geek’s smile lit up a rather hard and heavy face. “So many things to do while they’re here, my wife sent me out on a little recon mission so we don’t miss anything.”

“Recon... that like a scoutin’ trip, Dad?”

“Very like,” agreed the grey-haired man solemnly.

He took so many pictures of everything and everybody that pretty soon Poteet sort of forgot he was there.

Click, click, click!

Up in the Bay Area, Eli Nicholas hauled the backseat out of the brand-new Fleetwood limo. Unlike Poteet, Nicholas absolutely would have known what a recon was, and actually did play the guitar professionally: on the weekends he strummed wild Gypsy tunes for a group of gadje amateur flamenco dancers in a neighborhood bar on El Cerrito’s San Pablo Avenue. He was a slight swarthy man with a lined joyful face and strong fingers callused by three decades on the strings.

During Vietnam those hands had learned another trade, one that led him to now have both back doors of the Fleetwood limo open and the backseat out on the concrete. Midday of a midweek workday, most of the parking slots under his Richmond apartment building were empty. The deserted area, backed by a high wooden fence, was well-hidden from the street. The afternoon was balmy, so both men, in work pants and shirt sleeves, were sweating lightly from pulling out the seat.

“Why under the backseat?” asked Rudolph Marino.

“It’s under where he would sit,” said Nicholas patiently.

Fact was, Marino was shook-up, nervous, a state of mind so foreign to him it was like a fever in his brain making it not work right. His biggest score, sure — but he only wanted to con some people, he didn’t want to blow them up.

From a cardboard box with a construction company’s logo on it, Nicholas was taking a foot-square sheet of whitish putty-like substance a quarter inch thick and backed with adhesive strips.

Marino asked almost shrilly, “What’s that?”

“Sheet C-4.” Nicholas said it casually as he was peeling away the protective layer from the adhesive.

“C-4? Plastique?”

“Yeah. Plastique. Ninety percent RDX, the most powerful chemical-composition explosive known, ten percent inert binders so it can be pressed into sheets like this here.”

He got into the back of the limo with the square of stolen explosive and, with the flat of one hand, began pounding the square casually down into place on the contoured metal floor where the seat would fit back in.

“Careful!” yelped Marino.

Nicholas ignored him to finish, then got back out of the car to squint at him through habitual cigarette smoke.

“Before we put the seat back in, I’ll push an electrical blasting cap down into the C-4. We’ll use a radio transmitter to detonate. When you want it to go off, you just attach a radio receiver preset to a certain band to the cap’s wires. You’ll have a pocket radio transmitter with you, so you just—”

“What if somebody else has a transmitter set to that band?”

“They won’t, but anyway, you connect the receiver to the blasting cap at the last second — in the garage. Then get behind a pillar and turn on your transmitter and...” He suddenly threw his arms wide with a joyful laugh, “POOF!”

PLOP!

The broken egg had slid down the curved side of the mixing bowl just a split second before something small and dark and gleaming and hunched dropped in after it.

“No,” said Ramon Ristick, “too slow. Way too slow.”

Yana fished the little dark gleaming pellet-like object out and palmed it. When she destroyed the next egg, the black object fell so smoothly that it landed in the bowl to glisten evilly up through the yolk as if it had preceded it.

“Perfect,” pronounced Ramon.

Yana broke another egg. “It has to be perfect every time.”

Ristik, watching her practice in glum silence, suddenly said, “I didn’t like what happened to Soma’s Allante.”

“That was Rudolph’s fault. I had to give Sonia to the gadjo after Rudolph threatened us...”

PLOP! Perfect yet again.

“He’ll know it was you told the gadjo where to look.”

“Maybe he’ll blame Ephrem again,” she said indifferently.

After two more, they scrambled and ate the eggs she had been practicing with, discussing when and with what trappings of the occult — and speculating for how much — they would work the poisoned-egg effect on Theodore Winston White. The Third.

Even from the outside, Theodore Winston White Ill’s house looked to Giselle like something out of Hammett’s “The Gutting of Couffignal.” Part stone, part wood, probably twenty-five to thirty rooms, three stories on grounds that were a wilderness of native California trees and shrubs able to thrive despite the now-broken drought.

Giselle had driven up a winding drive to the top of a Tiburon hill and climbed the broad stone stairway to the hardwood door. She banged the iron gargoyle-face knocker and turned away to look at the City, rising from the far side of the sparkling bay like a misplaced Camelot: distance lent it a bogus charm absent in close-up.

When the door was opened by a slender blond chap in his 30s, a big tiger-stripe tomcat scooted out between his legs and bounded off down the steps.

“It’s okay,” he said quickly, “he does it all the time.”

There was a moment of silence. Once the office-work crunch had eased, Giselle had been in a great hurry to follow up on her anonymous phone caller’s lead. So she had gotten White’s address from the tax assessor’s office at the Marin Civic Center, and had driven directly here without even phoning ahead. She had not even formulated a plan of attack or worked out her cover story.

So she cleared her throat and said, “Ah... I’m looking for Theodore Winston White the Third.”

“That’s me. Teddy White.”

“This might sound a little strange, but do you perchance know any Gypsies?”

His slightly too close-set eyes lit up. “Madame Miseria’s incredible, you know. She’s changing my life.”

It all fell into place. Madame Miseria. Ballard’s Yana, the Gypsy fortune-teller. Giselle’s anonymous caller obviously was some Gyppo opposed to Yana. Giselle smiled. Brilliantly. The kind of smile men felt all the way down to their toes.

“Mr. White, I’d love to drive you down into town and buy you an espresso,” she said.

Drinking muddy Turkish coffee in the office, Wasso Tomeshti could see his sister and mother and two cousins feeding the shopping frenzy surrounding his purloined color TVs. He’d priced the sets for quick cash sales, so was also collecting and pocketing the 7.25 % sales tax to help offset the bargain prices.

Wasso figured he had today and tomorrow before some officious bureaucrat came around asking to see his sales permits; so tomorrow he’d give E. Dana Straub her check and pack up his remaining sets and move on — to be gone by the time it bounced. No sweat about Sam Hood’s check bouncing — Hood didn’t know where to find him anyway. Life was good.

“Mr. Adam Wells?”

Tomeshti looked up from his paperwork — bogus optional service guarantees on the sets, also paid to him in cash — into cold grey eyes above a granite jaw. Cop face. But they couldn’t have got on to his scam yet, so...

So he said, “That’s me, King of the Cash Sale—”

The guy shook his head. “No. A Gyppo named Wasso Tomeshti.” He showed some I.D. “Private detective.” He held out his hand. “The keys to the Seville, Gyppo.”

The coin dropped. Yana’s call warning him that some P.I. might have a line to their Caddies. He was unworried. He was a big man, heavy-waisted and four inches taller than the square, grey-haired man’s five-nine. Never actually violent, but this gadjo couldn’t know that. He came around the counter.

“You better get to hell out of here, pal, before I...”

Hard-face merely picked up the phone and tapped out a number with such confidence that Tomeshti waited just too long.

“Yeah, gimme Sergeant Block in Bunco.” He listened to the canned voice saying, At the tone, Pacific Daylight Saving time will be, then said, “Larry? Dan Kearny here. I’m at...”

Tomeshti’s thick fingers depressed the hooks on the phone. Kearny laid those cold grey eyes on him once more.

“And my next call, Tomeshti, is to the guy you conned out of those three hundred TV sets.”

Kearny didn’t know if Tomeshti had conned the sets out of anybody or not, but it was a safe bet — and conmen were easily conned. Tomeshti slid the Seville keys across the counter.

Saying, “Goddam you,” in a heartfelt voice.

He followed Kearny silently out through the bedlam of the store, careful to arouse no hot-blooded rom hostility against him: what if the guy wasn’t bluffing? Sam Hood was the kind of man would live up to his name if he knew he’d been ripped off.

Wasso had left the Seville parked out in front as a sort of advertisement. Kearny opened the trunk and curbside doors.

“Please remove your personal possessions from the car.”

“Hey, listen, can’t we—”

“No.” Flat voice. No give. No leeway. “Just do it.”

Kearny watched as Tomeshti put his personal gear in a rather messy pile on the curb. Prospective customers were starting to gather around and watch also, highly diverted. In that neighborhood, repos were no novelty.

Wasso’s beautiful Seville pulled away, the radio blaring golden oldies. He turned sadly back to the store — and stopped dead. Facing him was brass-haired E. Dana Straub.

She bared all those teeth in a supposed smile. “I need the year’s lease payment in cash right now, Mr. Wells, instead of a check tomorrow,” she said with transparent ferocity.

Aw, hell.

Giselle Marc, back from Marin only twenty minutes ago, dropped the receiver onto the hooks and leaned back in her creaking swivel chair to slam a fist against her thigh in delight.

“Yes!” she exclaimed.

Still no callback from the limo people in L.A., but whammo! the St. Mark, the very first hotel she’d called (she’d had to start somewhere), had turned up an Angelo Grimaldi registered in one of their penthouse suites.

A day or two, scout his scam, take him down. But before that, using the wealth of information Teddy White, that sweet, simple, confused little rich boy, had just given her without knowing it, she’d take down his incredible Madame Miseria.

Yeah, she’d show Yana she couldn’t take Larry away from...

No, wait a minute, that was nonsense. This was strictly business. This was about purloined Cadillacs, not men.

Dammit, it was.

When the dice passed to Ephrem Poteet, he could feel a jolt like electricity run up his arm. He’d picked it up in the joint, had come to like it. And he just knew he was hot tonight.

“I shoot twenty,” he said. “Look out there, gimme room.”

Seven. He scooped up crumpled bills.

“Read ’em and weep, boys.”

The “boys” were another Gypsy and six gadje — three blacks, a Mexican, an Anglo, a Chinese — all of them in a closed poolhall on run-down Temple near Beaudry Ave. Poteet again rolled the dice out across one of the green felt tables.

“Gimme the news. Don’t hold nothing back!”

The dice bounced off Robert Byrnes’s classic, Standard Book of Pool and Billiards, resting on edge inside the far end of the table as a backstop, and tumbled to the felt showing two twos.

“Twenty says I can do it!”

He was covered. Rolled a nine.

“The point is four,” he chanted. He rolled again. “C’mon, little Black Joe. Hah! See that? I shoot the roll.”

The side bets were getting fierce. He rolled. Five.

“Feevy’s the point — fever in the south. I’m coming out.”

He came out. And sevened out.

Next point, eighter from Decatur.

Snake eyes. Crapped out.

And crapped out again... and again... and...

“Goddammit!” Ephrem Poteet muttered to himself.

He was trying to sober up (black coffee and chili dogs slathered with relish) in a little white tile, chrome and glass all-night hot-dog joint on Hollywood Boulevard. At the next table was a burly bearded man with a knitted cap pulled down over his ears and wearing heavy skiing mittens, reading that day’s LA. Times through sunglasses. Behind the counter was a soft-eyed Iranian who looked about 12 years old except for a fierce black mustache and a scar running down one side of his face from below his eye to the collar of his shirt. The place smelled of fried onions and dead hot dogs and stale coffee and sour milk.

The chili dogs and coffee weren’t working. Or were working too well. Poteet was coming down and didn’t want to. In the crap game he’d lost his case money, the day’s take from Universal, and the $100 in the mail from DKA the night before.

Goddammit.

A stack of photographs was slapped down to splay out across the shiny red Formica tabletop. Photos shot at Universal that very morning. He was in every one of them, every time with his hand in somebody else’s pocket or pocketbook. The voice jerked his eyes up to the man just settling down across from him.

“I turn these over to the cops, Poteet, and it won’t be back to T.I. for another vacation. It’ll be serious time upstate at Q for you, pal.”

The grey-haired old camera freak from Universal! Poteet half started from his chair. He’d knock the bastard down, knee-drop him to smash in his goddam ribs, snatch the photos...

“I wouldn’t,” said the man in a disinterested voice.

Poteet already knew he wouldn’t. He never did. Women, yeah. Them he could hit. Them he could beat up. But other men... He always thought he would, but when it was down-and-dirty in some alley... or in some Hollywood hot-dog joint...

He sat down again, heavily. He never had any luck. “Aw, Jesus Christ!” he moaned in disgust, almost to himself.

“No. Dan Kearny.”

Dan Kearny! During the years he’d been selling information to Dan Kearny over the phone, and hearing stories about him, the man had assumed almost legendary status in his mind. Kearny had once found a relative of Poteet’s hiding in Palm Springs under her brother’s wife’s maiden name.

The capped and gloved man at the next table suddenly heaved himself to his feet, glaring at them, and stalked away to a farther table muttering, “Goddam zoo at feeding time!” Kearny was picking up the photos and stuffing them into his inside jacket pocket. He tapped the pocket.

“These were just to get your attention — if you give me everything you have or can get on those Gyppo Cadillacs. Right now. Without stringing it out or getting tricky with me.”

“And you want it all for free,” said Poteet bitterly.

“No, our original terms stand. What I want it, is NOW.”

Hey, maybe there were angles to be worked here. He drank coffee, tried to figure percentages... and tried to meet those bleak eyes. No. Too much danger in them. As if to confirm it, Kearny again tapped the picture pocket suggestively.

Poteet sighed. “How’d you make out with Tomeshti?”

“In the barn.”

Of course. He wouldn’t have expected anything less from Dan Kearny. He leaned forward across the table, his decision made. Play it straight all the way. Dump the bag for Kearny and get more for him later. And from him. Hell, at $100 a car, Ephrem Poteet would make out all right.

“Okay. Seattle. Chicago. And tomorrow right here in Beverly Hills.”