32 Cadillacs

Chapter four

Rudolph Marino strode into the main branch of California Citizens Bank at One Embarcadero Center (Now Open Nine to Five Every Weekday to Serve You Better!) just as the doors swung wide for the start of the business week. Studious glasses dulled the fire in his eyes. His curls were muted and tastefully greyed at the temples. He looked as straight as Ted Turner.

Since a man was handling New Accounts, Marino scanned the other bank officers behind the metal and Formica railing. He chose a pretty, early-40s, round-faced woman with pouty lips. She wore floral perfume and pink-tinted glasses that magnified her eyes into a slightly surprised expression. She did not wear a wedding band. Her nameplate said HELEN WOODING.

“Ms. Wooding,” said Marino as he sat down across the desk from her, “I hope that I offer no offense when I say that you have very beautiful eyes.”

The beautiful eyes crinkled behind their tinted lenses. The ample bosom swelled beneath its white frothy blouse. It did not swell with indignation. “You’ve just made my week.”

His head was slightly inclined and his face held considered pleasure, as if he were a connoisseur tasting vintage wine.

“Western Wisconsin, am I not right?”

“Red Wing, Minnesota, just across the river. But how—”

“The accent. When I was a kid I used to spend summers at my uncle’s summer place in the Wisconsin Dells.”

Actually, he’d been a roughie with a carny traveling the Midwest county fair circuit. He shook himself like a man coming from a dream of childhood, and gave her a card. On it was ANGELO GRIMALDI in that sort of raised lettering that looks like engraving under casual examination. After his praise, the eyes behind the tinted lenses would be extremely casual.

“I am out here to your beautiful city from Manhattan seeking investment opportunities. Perhaps we can give our little yellow friends from across the sea” — he winked to emphasize the racial slur — “a bit of homegrown American competition.”

“In the banking business we know just what you mean, Mr. Grimaldi. What sort of opportunities are you looking for?”

“Real estate.”

The blue eyes glinted. “Since the quake, and with the recession, the Bay Area has tremendous bargains. If we can help with any suggestions...”

“I knew I picked the right bank,” Marino exclaimed, lightly slapping her desk with delight. “Next week I would be honored to take you to lunch...”

Her hand moved slightly, as if wanting to touch her hair. She restrained it. She said, “I would like that very much.”

“In the meantime...” From a thin glove-leather wallet he extracted two folded oblongs of paper, one pale green and the other pale pink. “I would like to open an account...”

The pink oblong was a certified check for $6,000, the green a certified check for $5,000, both payable to Blue Skye Enterprises. Helen Wooding’s practiced eye registered they were drawn on New York banks Cal-Cit did business with, but her mind was on that lunch and not on the intricacies of finance.

“We can certainly do that for you, Mr. Grimal—”

“Please. Angelo.” He flashed perfect teeth in a wide white grin. “B. L. Skye, the company founder, is from Wyoming, and he wanted Big Skye — but that title was too close to one that was already registered so he had to settle for Blue Skye.”

They laughed over that one together, and went through the paperwork together. She gave him the temporary checkbook.

“Helen, queries about the balance in my account will be coming in. I’ll be leasing a Cadillac, I like American quality, but I’d just as soon none of the dealers knew I’m shopping around with any of the others.”

“On customer accounts we only furnish the balance as of four, five, or six figures, low, middle, or high range.”

“Wonderful! And if I need to draw a few thousand in cash without prior notification...”

“A small branch bank might have trouble covering, but not here at San Francisco Main — so long as it is under ten thousand. Then we’d have the federal reporting requirement—”

He waved this away with a chuckle. “I’ll just have to find deals with a downstroke that’s under ten K...”

The fantastic pink beast squatted on its reinforced wooden riser as if it were a triceratops reconstructed in the days when paleontologists still put them together like lizards instead of rhinos. Overhead, around the perimeter of WONDERLy’s WONDERFUL WHEELS, long festoons of twisted gold foil shimmered and glinted and clacked in the hot desert wind. Flanking the antediluvian animal were twin posterboard signs:

The monster was 18.03 feet long (on a 10.75-foot wheel-base) and weighed 2.66 tons. Beneath a gleaming hood as long as a Yugo crouched 310 horses, generated by 365 cubic high-pressure-cooled inches that had a 4.0 bore and a 3.63 stroke. Its tailfins were right off one of Wernher von Braun’s rockets from those halcyon ’50s when the Army still ran the space program. Doubled twin headlights (an industry first soon to become an industry standard) stared out from chromium eye sockets. Outthrust rubber-tipped metal tusks parenthesized the grille’s toothy grin.

It seldom rains in Palm Springs, so the top on the 1958 Eldorado Biarritz convertible was lowered. Gawkers could check out the power steering and power brakes (with auto-release parking brake), the cruise control, the two-speaker radio with automatic signal-seeking tuner, the leather interior, the automatic windows. The restorer had even gold-anodized the large “V” on the hood and the “Eldorado” lettering on the trunk lid to return them to their original satiny gold finish.

In this fossil-fuel-conscious age, the lot was crowded with much newer, smaller, more efficient vehicles — mostly trucks and vans and subcompacts. Poster-paint lettering across their windshields pimped their stylistic allures, but the ’58 ragtop gas-guzzler was very definitely the star of the show.

Jeeter Pickett, an oily-faced, oily-haired, oily-mannered ’50s used-car salesman reincarnated in living color, lay in wait for customers brought in by the convertible. Preferably dumb little blondes he could take out into the desert for a test drive that would leave their dusty heel prints all over the headliners. He hadn’t nailed anybody in the old Caddy ragtop, not yet, but... But, oh wow!

Check out that sweet young thing just threading her way through the lesser cars toward it right now! Wearing five hundred bucks’ worth of summer frock so carelessly it might have been $19.95 off the pipe at Mervyn’s.

Pickett drifted across the lot to cut her off, ignoring the Fleetwood V-8 limo parked in the side street behind her. As he approached, he stared at her crotch. It was his belief that if you stared at a woman’s crotch — any woman’s crotch — when pitching her, you’d make your sale and make her as well.

Up close the girl was a thing of almost awesome beauty, with a shining blond Marilyn Monroe hairdo and a figure to match, but with startling dark brows and smouldering black eyes. Great tan. And with a mid-’50s innocence that sheathed, he was sure, a white-hot sensual core ready to be probed. Pickett could feel the probe against the front of his pants already.

Yeah! Or, in the spirit of the ’50s, Hubba Hubba!

She looked at him with soft little-girl’s eyes, she spoke to him in a soft little-girl’s lisp (with a soft little hint of exotic accent) that made him touch the talisman packet of Trojans in his pants pocket. “I want to buy that nineteen fifty-eight Cadillac convertible.”

“No, you don’t, little darlin’,” he beamed, “you want to buy this BMW Bavaria. Twelve thousand easy miles on her, belonged to a shut-in who only drove it to friends’ funerals. Zero to sixty in seven-point-four seconds, comes factory-equipped with—”

She said in exactly the same tone as before, “I want to buy that nineteen fifty-eight Cadillac convertible.”

“The BMW out of your price range?” He put his hand on her arm. “Well, little darlin’, you have come to the right place.”

She looked as if his hand were leaving a slime trail across her sleeve. Pickett and his hand ignored the look. Instead, they steered her toward an ancient paint-pitted Hyundai Excel that looked as if it had just been winched from a reservoir.

“Wonderful economy you want, wonderful economy you get! This little subcompact right here—”

She repeated patiently, “I want to buy that nineteen fifty-eight Cadillac convertible.”

“Little darlin’, that ragtop is just not for sale.”

“Of course it’s for sale. Everything is for sale.”

Pickett began urging her toward a GM pickup truck with a camper shell fitted inside the bed, letting his knuckles brush the side of her breast as he did.

Staring at his hand, a swarthy Arab-looking man in a black chauffeur’s uniform straightened up abruptly from the fender of the R/V. The Arab wore a black mustache eight inches from tip to tip; Pickett’s breath stopped in his throat when the man flipped open a horn-handled flickknife as long as his mustache. The blade made the knife seven inches longer.

The girl repeated, now somehow with menace, “I want to buy that nineteen fifty-eight Cadillac convertible.”

The Arab began cleaning his fingernails with his knife, but his eyes were honing themselves on Pickett’s throat. Pickett’s hand went limp on the blonde’s arm. His probe prolapsed.

“Look, it... it’s not for sale. Honest.” He had started to sweat. His voice had lost its jocularly suggestive tone. He put up a hand to tug at his suddenly tight shirt collar and momentarily shield his throat from the chauffeur’s knifeblade eyes. He found himself talking faster and faster in shorter and shorter sentences. “It’s a loaner. From the guy. Who restored it. We just borrowed. It to drum. Up trade. He spent. Over. Three. Years. Just—”

“Give her a price,” the chauffeur interrupted in a flat voice full of soft sibilants like Zachary Scott’s in The Mask of Dimitrios. “She will pay it.”

“But—”

“Give her a price.”

“Our promo still has a week to run—”

Dead eyes, dead voice. “The price.”

“Uh... sixty thousand?” Even filled with dread he couldn’t help overstating it by fifteen grand. He added quickly, “But if the guy who restored it don’t want to sell—”

“Then you will find a way to convince him,” said the blonde.

She snapped her fingers. The chauffeur immediately flicked shut the knife and produced a checkbook. The checkbook was in a folder made of thin beaten sheets of what looked like solid gold. The girl opened it and began writing.

“Sixty thousand... to Wonderly’s Wonderful Wheels...”

Pickett automatically said, “Ah, no no no. To, ah, Jeeter Pickett, but, ah... you can’t... I can’t... we can’t...”

The switchblade eyes again laid the edge of their cold gaze against Pickett’s throat. The woman ripped out the check as if it were Pickett’s jugular. The check, for $60,000, was on creamy bond as thick as a money clip.

“Fine,” she said, “that’s settled, then.”

Ten minutes later, pink slip denoting ownership in hand, she gave Pickett one momentary flash of golden thigh as she slid under the wheel of the pink monster. Then she was gone and he really looked at the check for the first time. It was drawn on the First National Bank of Bahrain, and by the name engraved on it he would never get to run his hand up that silken flesh.

Because the name was Turk or Moslem, or some damn thing. Her tan was not from the sun, but from the Levant. Opium traders, he bet. Her father made a lot of money importing heroin and married a blond American. His daughter spent the money under the protection of that life-taker with the mustache. Probably one of them eunuchs guarded the caliph’s harem, with his balls cut off so he couldn’t hump the merchandise.

Mean-looking mother. Course who wouldn’t be mean with his things turned into Rocky Mountain oysters?

But some of Pickett’s habitual jauntiness returned as he looked at the check one more time before folding it and putting it in his shirt pocket. No need to tell the restorer the selling price was sixty. Hell, the guy would be delighted to get $50,000 for his car. And no need to tell Wonderly, owner of Wonderful Wheels, anything at all. Jeeter Pickett would just keep the extra ten large for himself — camel jockeys were no match for a wheeler-dealer like him. Nossir.

Half a state north of Palm Springs, and twenty miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, Rudolph Marino walked into the Cal-Cit Bank on the corner of Fourth and Court streets in downtown San Rafael. He paused just inside the door of the modern glass and concrete building to scan the officers behind their desks.

The woman handling New Accounts would have won by a nose at Golden Gate Fields; her face should have whinnied instead of spoken. But his practiced eye noted there was no bra under her conservative dark blouse and no wedding band on her mid-40s finger. Her nameplate said RITA FETHERTON. Up close, her perfume was an aggressive musk. Perfect.

Marino walked over to her desk and sat down and crossed his legs and looked deep into her eyes and smiled.

“Ms. Fetherton, I hope that I offer no offense when I say that you have very beautiful eyes...”

A thousand in this account, then the same at the Cal-Cit branch in downtown Oakland over in Alameda County, then the same at the Cal-Cit branch in downtown San Jose. That would complete the necessary loop of banks: the City, the North Bay, the East Bay, the Peninsula/South Bay. Tomorrow, phone rooms.

The blonde slid over, the chauffeur got behind the wheel of the pink Cadillac. The stolen credit card with which the Fleetwood limo had been rented wouldn’t hit the lists until tomorrow, earliest. As the chauffeur pulled the ragtop out into traffic, the blonde took off her golden hair to become Yana.

“The schvartzes brag that if you could be black for just one Saturday night you’d never want to be white again.”

“Huh?” The puzzled chauffeur was driving one-handed while stripping off his mustache to become her brother Ramon.

“So the rom should say that if you could run just one Gypsy scam you’d never want to be a gadjo again.”

Then he understood. They both started to laugh.

“I’ll drop you at the airport and drive this back up.”

“Be sure and hide it when you get there,” she said. “Rudolph will be watching for my return, intending to steal it, and I don’t want to have to worry about him. Tonight is Teddy’s first candle reading, I want that to be perfect. He’s going to be my biggest score ever.”

“Until you become Queen.”

“Until I become Queen,” she agreed.

And right now she was riding in the pink 1958 Caddy that would assure she would become Queen. Rudolph Marino was out of the running for royalty before the race had even begun. He just didn’t know it yet.