32 Cadillacs

Chapter five

In Stupidville that same night, Staley Zlachi thrashed and turned in his semi-private hospital room (courtesy the department store down whose escalator he had fallen) and then began crying out as if in drugged sleep. The nurse peeked in, withdrew; Lulu was there to wipe his fevered brow with a corner of her shawl.

In San Francisco, Ristik hid the pink Cadillac, Yana held Teddy’s first candle reading, Marino read the classifieds for storefront rentals, and Dan Kearny took Jeannie out to dinner. Without the glue of the kids living at home to hold it together, Kearny’s marriage had begun leaking sawdust at the seams. Time for a little candlelight of his own, and wine, and romance.

But they squabbled at the restaurant.

They squabbled on the way home.

They squabbled in the bedroom.

Instead of romance, Dan Kearny got the couch in the spare room he’d converted into an office a few years back — never realizing that this office-in-the-home neatly epitomized a great deal of what was going wrong with his marriage.

O’B was also dining out with his wife that evening, also in search of domestic felicity: Bella was pissed because O’b’s most recent night out with the boys had been three days long. Since Bella was as Italian as O’B was Irish, and loved her stuffed cannelloni the way he loved his double Bushmills with water back, O’B had thought, a little candlelight, a little Chianti at that new Italian family-style restaurant on Taraval, and later, in the bedroom, a little romance...

But they squabbled at the restaurant (it had a full bar).

They squabbled on the way home (O’B ran a red light).

They didn’t squabble in the bedroom only because O’B, after observing sagely that he must have gotten some bad ice, passed out in the middle of getting undressed. Staring at her snoring spouse, Bella was more pissed than ever.

Giselle Marc was going out to dinner with a Brit (visiting prof of English lit at SF State) whom she’d recently taken to letting hold her hand while reciting poetry at her by candlelight — candlelight yet again! — in his Oxford accent. She felt so good she thought she just might let him finally seduce her.

You see, May belle had come in and redeemed her 1991 Connie, proving Dan Kearny wrong — which meant he was going to be, at least temporarily, a lot easier to work with. God knew where Maybelle had gotten the cash, but why look a gift horse in...

Oh-oh. Maybelle’s Connie was parked near a fireplug on Turk Street. And around the corner on Divisadero, in front of a ribs joint, was all 250 pounds of Maybelle, poured into a tight cheap red satin dress slit up a thigh the size of a Clydesdale’s. Vamping arthritically at anything male that strolled by, like Julia Roberts waiting for Richard Gere to show up. Damn the woman! And damn Dan Kearny, too: Giselle could already see the smirk on his face, already hear the laughter in his voice.

Then at the restaurant the Brit insulted her intelligence by trying to pass off Sonnet 116 — “The Marriage of True Minds,” that one, for God’s sake! — as his own. It was all too much: she poured fumé blanc down the front of his trousers and stalked out yelling she couldn’t abide an incontinent man.

Larry Ballard’s evening began beautifully when Beverly Daniels, a pert little blonde with big blue eyes and a dancer’s figure, picked him up in her yellow Nissan 280Z. He once had repossessed it from her, then had worked out a payment schedule so she could get it back. Beverly stood the same scant inch above five feet that Ballard stood below six, but somehow they fit together wondrous well on a horizontal plane. Which Ballard fully intended they should attain before the night was over.

Then everything went to hell. Blame it on Pietro Uvaldi, or maybe Dan Kearny — all Ballard did, after the movie and the pizza, was suggest they “swing by” the Montana...

“Don’t you do this to me,” said Beverly.

“Do what to you? All I said was—”

“I know what you said,” she snapped savagely.

Beverly had some justification. Their first date had ended with her all alone in Ballard’s car while members of a rock group called Full Moon Madness — whose Maserati Bora coupe Ballard had just snatched — tried to drag her out through the window without opening it first.

“This time isn’t like that at all,” he explained. “I even have a key for this one.”

And he told her about Pietro Uvaldi, the wispy little decorator at the Montana with the $85,000 Mercedes. If they could get into the under-the-building garage, and the car was there, it would be a piece of cake. Of course Ballard didn’t mention either the shotgun or Pietro’s poopsie, Freddi of the cellophaned hair and leather underwear, so Beverly couldn’t factor them into the equation until it was much too late.

A tenant was using his electronic door-opener when they arrived at the Montana; they swept into the garage on his rear bumper. He parked, they cruised, and there was the Mercedes, gleaming in a far corner like the Holy Grail!

“Just like you said — a piece of cake.” Beverly secretly got off just a little on the excitement of stealing cars.

Ballard opened the door of the Mercedes with the key he’d gotten from the dealer, and did a somersault. He managed to hit the concrete floor in some sort of shoulder roll, cushioning the shock; but he was still dazed when he staggered to his feet to try and block Fearsome Freddi’s second attack with a wobbly shiko dachi defensive stance, one hand at shoulder level in shotei, the other horizontal across his stomach in nukite.

Freddi didn’t know from martial arts: he slammed his arms up inside Ballard’s defense and smashed his head into Ballard’s face. Luckily, Ballard ducked so their skulls met forehead-to-forehead, or he would have been a wasteland from ear to ear.

Undaunted, Freddi got in a rib-crushing front bear hug; Ballard countered by slamming his cupped palms against Freddi’s ears. Freddi dropped him, screaming with the pain of almost ruptured drums. Ballard made a shambling run for the open door of Beverly’s little yellow sports car, yelling as he went.

“GO GO GO GO GO!!!”

As he tumbled in and slammed the door, Beverly WENT WENT WENT WENT WENT — but not before the heel of Freddi’s hand holed the windshield in a shower of plastic-coated safety glass. Trying to peer through the remaining opaque starburst, Beverly hit a post, ripping off the left front fender and bending the axle. She backed off and goosed it again, even more terrified than Ballard. The wheel was wobbling. By some miracle, another resident had just entered and the overhead steel mesh door was still clanking down as she zipped through.

Well, not quite zipped through. The reinforced lower edge of the descending door hooked under the front edge of the z’s roof just above the shattered windshield and stripped it back like opening a can of sardines.

Beverly kicked Ballard out of the car right there in front of the Montana and drove off in tears. He had to walk six blocks just to find a cab. When he finally staggered into the sanctuary of his apartment, with a blinding headache and a red welt the size of a bread plate on his forehead, he threw up all over the front-room rug from the effects of his concussion.

Only Bart Heslip, of DKa’s minions, had a totally satisfactory evening. His forever lady, Corinne Jones, who was a warm golden brown to his plum black and had a Nefertiti profile right off an Egyptian wall painting, fixed him soul food while making big over his damaged face and stitched pate. Then she took him to bed for the sweetest loving this side of paradise.

All of this without ever once bringing up the old tiresome I-told-you-so subject of finding some other line of work.