32 Cadillacs

Chapter forty-four

In those same predawn hours that the DKA boys dug the grave for the contraband black jumpsuits and artistically sawed-off shotguns Bart had bought in Chicago, Lulu Zlachi was practicing some artistry of her own on Staley in his room at Stupidville General Hospital. The rom would be descending on the place at first light, and the King had to be ready to receive them.

“Hey, that stuff feels good,” exclaimed Staley.

“It is good,” she said complacently. “A mix of St. Ives Swiss Formula Firming Mask and Johnson’s Baby Oil. Mineral clay — make you look good and beautiful.”

“Make me look good and dead,” grinned Staley.

Lulu smoothed more of the mixture onto his hands and face. “Good and almost dead,” she amended.

“Close enough so they’ll believe I’m gonna go any minute?”

“But not so close you can’t have a miraculous recovery.”

Yes, it was a thin artistic line indeed that Lulu walked. Or rather, smeared.

At 9:00 A.M. a terrifically hung-over O’B, with only hazy recollection of the previous night’s events, was brought over from the four-cell town jail to the county courthouse and arraigned before Judge Konrad Spitz on charges of lewd and lascivious conduct and possession of pornographic materials.

Thank God, there was Dan Kearny himself, wearing a suit and a tie and a sour expression. What did he have to be so sore about? O’B was the one with the headache, wasn’t he? And sundry itches that suggested the jail needed a good fumigating.

Judge Spitz was a white-haired man with muttonchop whiskers and wire-frame glasses. He peered over them first at O’B and then at the two complaining officers.

“All right, what do we have here?” he asked.

Lloyd and Frank testified as to what had happened the night before. The whole courtroom was laughing — mostly drunks up from the tank, and their lawyers — when they had finished.

Dan Kearny cleared his throat and said, “Your Honor, may I address the court?”

“And you are, sir?”

“Daniel Kearny from San Francisco, Your Honor. This man is in my employ. We are in town to try and recover a number of illegally obtained automobiles from the Gypsies in the encampment south of Steubenville. In his capacity as a private detective, Mr. O’Bannon recovered a car from a Gypsy in Florida...”

Kearny explained away the pornographic material found in O’b’s trunk. O’B had been on the bluff, not to ogle Gypsy women, but to ogle Cadillac cars. It was unfortunate that...

Et cetera.

O’B then explained that he had inflated the doll so he would look like a harmless necker rather than a tough private eye, but he had dropped his flashlight and...

Judge Spitz began, “From the look of your eyes, sir—”

“You ought to see them from in here, Your Honor.”

Kearny looked stormy, but Judge Spitz allowed himself a small grin. Then he turned to Frank and Lloyd.

“Gentlemen,” he said in a deceptively soft voice, “I know of no law against parking with an inflatable latex doll. Especially since you arrested Mr. O’Bannon outside the city limits.” He leaned forward and roared, “Outside your jurisdiction!” He SLAMMED down his gavel. “Dismissed.”

Kearny and O’B crossed the street in silence to the Dew Drop In Coffee Shop (“Wake Up with Our Bottomless Cup”), where the waitress found them a booth in the corner so bright light couldn’t pierce O’b’s sunglasses. He tried a little levity.

“What I really need, Reverend, is a Bloody Mary.”

“Buy it on your own goddam time!” snapped Kearny.

“Listen, Reverend, I saw a lot of Cadillacs out there last night. When the rest of the crew gets here—”

“You won’t see them there this morning. It’s all over town — redheaded Irishman claiming he was repoman from San Francisco getting busted on the cliffs overlooking the Gyppo encampment! All the Cal-Cit cars are gone.”

“Gone where?” asked O’B stupidly. His head was even worse.

“Why the hell didn’t you just keep your mouth shut last night? You knew I’d be here to bail you out.”

“I... don’t remember what I said,” admitted O’B sheepishly.

“Well, you’ll have a lot of time to figure it out on the plane back to San Francisco,” said Kearny.

“What do you mean?”

“G’wan. Get out of here. Screw up somewhere else.” He suddenly stood, throwing some money on the table to cover their coffees. “I mean it, O’B. I’m sick of your goddam boozing.”

Alone in the booth, O’B sipped his coffee and tried a little toast. One bite was all he could stomach.

Hell, his drinking wasn’t that bad. Just social. He could take or leave it alone... couldn’t he?

As O’B wandered disconsolately back to the hotel to sleep it off — Kearny wouldn’t really send him back to California, would he? — Kearny himself was trying to think of a way to salvage the situation. He knew what he wanted to do, he just didn’t know how to arrange... But once again, necessity inspired genius. Kearny had an idea. Maybe even a brilliant one.

He went in search of Alvin Crichton, M.D.

Until Kearny saw him, Doc Crichton thought he was going crazy. The hospital grounds, park areas, rooms, hallways, and elevators were jammed with Gypsies. Gypsies in droves, paying no attention to visiting hours, eating and drinking everywhere, passing their food and drink around, spilling it on the floor, bothering staff and patients alike.

Swarthy-skinned, brightly dressed, clamorous Gypsies. The cacophony was deafening, defeating, head-splitting. In a hospital! His hospital! What were they doing here?

Well... stealing.

Everything movable, portable, or salable in the way of hospital furnishings and equipment. Several of them had been stopped trying to dismantle the X-ray machine and cart it away. Apprehended, they just grinned and shrugged and walked off — to be instantly lost in the throng of other Gypsies.

And a shifting population of some fifty rom seemed to be crowded into the room of his patient Karl Klenhard at any given moment. On the bed lay Staley, eyes mostly closed, looking ghastly, his fishbelly skin slightly tinged with almost luminous green, as if he already had started to decompose.

He lifted his eyelids with difficulty. His voice rasped in his throat. “It is... so good for you... all,” he managed. “So good... so loyal...”

Lulu chimed in, “Please, your gifts — if you could take them to Three Forty-seven Riverview Avenue where we were staying when Staley... when Staley...”

She broke down and started to sob. A dozen Gypsies supported her to her chair beside her husband’s bed. Voices were clamoring, making so much noise that no one heard the door open behind them or saw Dr. Crichton framed in the opening.

“Mr. Klenhard!” Crichton’s voice burst out. “Mrs. Klenhard! What is this all about?”

Staley quickly shut his eyes and played — almost literally — dead. Lulu quickly took over. “The meanin’ of what, Doctor? These are friends, relatives, come to pay their respects—”

“They’re Gypsies! You’re Gypsies!”

“Even Gypsies gotta have relatives and friends, Doctor,” she said reasonably. “They heard that my husband was sick, they come to pay their respects—”

“They’re destroying my hospital and I won’t have it,” said Crichton. “You have to get them out of here.”

Staley opened his eyes. He said in a weak voice, “Well, gee, Doc, if that’s the way you feel about it...” His voice quavered, his fingers plucked wanly at the coverlet. “I thought you was my friend...”

But Crichton was not to be swayed.

“I’m sorry, but you’ve gotten your settlement from the insurance company, a very fine settlement, and you now can afford private care facilities if you have not recovered...”

From the corridor outside came a nurse’s voice.

“Make way here, please! We have a patient here. Make way, please. Coming through...”

There was stirring in the Gypsies crowding the doorway and spilling out into the corridor. A gurney was thrust through them into the room. On it was a sheet-covered middle-aged man with grey hair and a heavy face and a strong profile. He was very pale, and looked almost as sick as Staley was pretending to be.

“This man is post-op and needs quiet to recover from surgery,” said Crichton. “I have to ask your friends—”

He was drowned out by angry denunciations from the Gypsies, who were, however, in their turn drowned out by Lulu’s voice.

“Romale — men of Romany.”

The formal salutation grabbed their attention; silence fell. The nurse, ignoring them all, was transferring her patient from the gurney to the bed. Lulu was going on in quieter tones.

“This man, he’s sick, he’s got a right. If you stay, you gotta be quiet...”

Staley opened his eyes again. In his weak voice, he said, “Tonight, at the encampment, I’m gonna choose my successor...”

His eyes drooped shut and he fell silent. The nurse completed her work with the patient in the next bed, and she and Crichton departed.

Out at the encampment a feature writer from the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune, calling herself Gerry Merman, was interviewing Gypsies for an in-depth look at the ritual of choosing a new King. She was a tall blonde and she was getting a lot of good stuff from the rom women. Gypsies are never averse to sympathetic publicity, and this one was a sucker for their stories and opinions.

“Honey, we Gypsies gotta live together because we can’t make it apart.”

“What about love affairs with gadje?” asked the reporter in an oddly nervous voice.

“Sure, some of us have ’em — but they never last,” said a young girl who looked like a heavily made-up disco queen. “I had a gadjo lover once, but I was too lonely.”

“Join the group,” said Merman.

Everybody laughed.

A girl recently married, alone with her, said, “I gotta get pregnant quick as I can. Right now I live with my husband’s parents, and it’s killing me. I’m just a servant to them.”

It was the old women, however, who were most vocal — and most opinionated. One who called herself Aunt Bessie invited Merman into her trailer for tea. She waved a vile cigar while explaining why the Gypsies stayed apart from the mainstream.

“We send our kids to your schools, what happens? They get beat up! Or they get raped by black men! I’d be crucified like Jesus before I’d let my granddaughter go to school.”

Scribbling madly in her reporter’s narrow fat notebook in shorthand learned as a part-time after-school girl working at DKA, Giselle found herself wishing she really were a journalist. Some of the stuff she was getting was really good.

Well, she wasn’t a journalist. She was a detective.

And a woman, too. A woman not getting what she so desperately desired, a glimpse of Rudolph Marino.

Or even a glimpse of the pink Cadillac; because wherever that car was, Rudolph would not be far away.