32 Cadillacs

Chapter seven

Giselle Marc and Dan Kearny usually shared the day’s first cup of coffee while going over the probable shape of DKa’s day; but when the phone rang early on Thursday morning, their chat had degenerated into a verbal brawl because Kearny had asked whether Ballard was showing up for work yet.

“He’s still home, Dan. Still has that lousy headache.”

“From a concussion?” His voice was disbelieving. “I think he’s on a toot.” Kearny’s slang was mired in the ’40s. He added illogically, “And if it is a concussion, he got it falling down drunk in some barrel house. He’s been working too many cases with O’B lately — try to bend an elbow with that guy and pretty soon you’re dipping your beak in paint thinner.”

“You should see the lump on Larry’s forehead.”

“All I see is his caseload getting fat without him doing anything about it. Hell, he’s got four new assignments without twenty-four-hour first report, and sixteen others that—”

“I could pick up the slack on those unworked first-report cases,” said Giselle quickly around her cup, as if muffling the words might keep Kearny from really hearing them.

“I need you here in the office. Besides, you’ve been acting so unprofessional lately that you can’t keep up with the cases you’ve got.”

“Just what is that supposed to mean?” she demanded coldly.

Kearny fired up a cigarette, watching her slyly past the smoke. “I hear your galfriend Maybelle is doing more than just living in the backseat of that Connie of hers.”

Giselle dunked a doughnut in frosty silence. Her emotions were still tender from the scene with the Brit, and here was Kearny, just as she’d known he would, zeroing in on the very thing that had caused that painful rift in her personal life.

“She’s on the hustle.” When Giselle didn’t dignify this with a reply, he added, “The Mary Magdalene lay. And eventually I gotta tell the bank about it.”

Giselle stood up abruptly; she didn’t want to think about Maybelle losing her car all over again, this time for good.

“I have to get to work,” she said. Which is when the phone rang. Already on her feet, she snatched it up and snapped into it, “Daniel Kearny Associates.”

“Tellkearnyineedhimuphererightawaynohesitationsnoexcusesrightnowfiveminutesorimcallingholstromauto recoverybureau...”

She picked out a word here and there from Stan Groner’s long high scream of anguish, enough to know Kearny was wanted at the bank and wanted now.

She said, “I can’t understand a thing you’re saying, but I recognize your note of hysteria.”

“Goddammitgisellewereouthundredsthousandsmillions...”

“I still can’t understand you but we’ll get on it right away,” she said crisply, and hung up.

“Get right on what?” demanded Kearny. “Who was that?”

“Wrong number.”

“Wrong number? I just heard you say that we’ll...”

Giselle was already gone down the office with long, clean-limbed strides. She’d handle this one herself, and show Kearny just who the real professional was around here. She made an abrupt left turn through the sliding glass door to the back office that was her domain, then kept on going right out the back door and into the storage lot where her company car was parked.

Kearny morosely smoked another cigarette, stubbed it, took a slurp of coffee. Stone cold. The phone rang just as he reached for it to bitch at Giselle about the coffee, so he snatched it up to snarl at it. It snarled at him first.

“DAMMIT, KEARNY, WHY AREn’t YOU HERE YET?”

“Fine, Stan, thanks for asking. How’s the family?”

“DAMMIT, I TOLD GISELLE I NEEDED YOUR BUTT HERE RIGHT—”

“Giselle? When?”

Some of the hysteria was fading from Groner’s voice. He must have looked at his watch. “Well, maybe like only fifteen, twenty minutes ago, but this is... oh, here she is now...”

“Giselle? There?”

“At least she knows how to respond to a client...”

He was talking to an empty phone: Kearny was on his way.

What the hell did that woman think she was doing?

But Dan Kearny was too old a hand to let a bank man’s panic panic him, so he parked in the usual lot and strolled across Battery to the glittering marble and glass monolith of One Embarcadero Center. It was one of those San Francisco spring mornings, clear and bright and crisp without a hint of fog, that make the gulls swoop and squawk raucously and dive-bomb passing pedestrians for handouts.

He wandered through the Consumer Loans Division, nodding to a man here and winking at a woman there, whatever her age and shape and marital status. It was ritual, like the bottle of decent bourbon each of them got, man and woman alike, at Christmastime. He knew that most of the women would have preferred a box of Sees chocolates, but candy didn’t fit the DKA image. DKA was the rough-and-ready crew that took all the assignments the bank’s men were scared of, closed out all the cases the other repo agencies struck out on. Kearny wanted the bank people to get a whiff of predator whenever DKA padded by.

The door with STANLEY GRONER — PRESIDENT-CONSUMER LOANS DIVISION gold-leafed on its pebbled glass hissed shut behind him with a pneumatic sigh. Groner was a traditionalist: the dark-paneled room had sporting prints on the walls, heavy hardwood and leather furniture, art deco lamps. Only thing missing was a brass spittoon beside the antique oak desk.

“Here I am, Stan, now what...”

Groner, a normally placid and pleasant-faced man of 42, addicted to soft tweeds and knitted wool ties, was walking around his desk in tight circles. His arms were waving and his normally warm brown eyes were casting fell looks and foul toward the couch from behind his hornrims. Kearny took the ire to be directed neither at Giselle, sitting there rifling a manila folder, nor at her cigarette smouldering on the chrome smoking stand at her elbow. So Groner apparently was upset by the messy stack of files on the coffee table in front of Giselle.

Cigarette? Kearny thought belatedly. Damn! Giselle had started smoking again.

But he said only, “Files,” and then added, “so?”

Giselle answered for Groner, excitement sparkling in her eyes like diamonds.

“Last Friday, Dan, the Bay Area’s twenty Cadillac dealers, from Ukiah down to Salinas, wrote conditional sales contracts on thirty-one new Cadillacs. The works — Allantes, Broughams, De Villes, Fleetwoods, Eldorados, Sevilles, even a special-order stretch limo from Jack Olwen on Van Ness.”

In a hushed voice, Kearny began, “You mean to tell me—”

“Yeah. Skips. All thirty-one of them. By these files, dead skips.” In finance parlance, a “skip” is someone who has literally “skipped out” — usually with mortgaged property, such as a car, he has not yet paid for. A “dead” skip is one on whom there are no apparent live leads for finding him and bringing him back. “Eight financed through this office, eight through Cal-Cit San Rafael, eight through Oakland, seven through San Jose.”

Kearny turned. “How’d you get onto it so quick, Stan?”

“The downs bounced,” groaned Groner.

“All thirty-one of them?” Kearny was disbelieving.

“They were drawn on only four accounts,” said Giselle. “One account at each branch.”

“But... credit checks... reference and employment and residence verification...”

Groner’s speaking voice was normally high-pitched; now it was pitched even higher, tumbling out excited words with fire-hose pressure and speed.

“Hell, Dan, you know the drill!” He was pacing again. “We make a big show of checking references, but it costs us a hundred bucks a head if we do a thorough credit check of all prospective car buyers. If we don’t check anything out, and prorate the collection and repossession costs over all our auto contracts, it costs us twenty bucks a head. So we trust the dealers’ credit managers to size the person up, make a few phone calls... But this...” He waved an unbelieving hand. “They hit every damn Caddy dealer in the Bay Area, every one!”

Giselle started to giggle. “Blue Skye Enterprises. All four accounts were in the name of—”

“Blue Skye?” Kearny had joined her at the coffee table to flick through the files. He looked up at Groner in amazement. “Come on, Stan, I know you don’t pay your bank officers very much, but when a guy waltzes in and wants to open an account called Blue Skye —”

“What can I say? Apparently he looks like Omar Sharif in his Doctor Zhivago days, and went to women AVPs in each case. All four still swear he just couldn’t have been conning them.”

“I’d like to meet this guy,” said Giselle thoughtfully.

Kearny was scanning the files as his computer brain was assessing, assimilating, relating with the bewildering speed of close to forty years — he’d ridden an old single-speed bike to his first repossession — of chasing deadbeats and absconders and embezzlers and outright thieves. He stiffened abruptly.

“Something?” Giselle asked with sharpened attention.

Groner was saying, “Cal-Cit Bank is out one-point-three-two-five million dollars, retail.”

Kearny was saying, “The names.”

Giselle checked the files again. She said in measured tones, “Oh... my... God...”

“I need those cars back to keep my job! I don’t care what you do to get them, how many laws you have to break, what—”

“What it costs,” inserted Kearny smoothly.

“I didn’t say that.” The kvetcher was magically transformed into the hard-nosed bank unit president again. “I can’t go over a flat rate per car of—”

“No flat rate. Ten percent of gross value recovered for each vehicle, dealer cost, with expenses over and above—”

“Ten percent!” Groner clutched at his heart dramatically. “How can you even suggest doing that to me?” He turned to Giselle as if to display his bleeding heart. “How can he even suggest ten percent to me? Me? Plus expenses, yet?”

“How about eight percent?” asked Giselle sweetly.

Groner looked over at Kearny. He said, “I thought she was with you.”

“So did I.” Kearny grabbed Giselle’s arm and hustled her into a corner of the room. “What’re you trying to do to me?”

“Show you how it’s done.”

She pulled free, went back across the room as Stan the Man began judiciously, “Eight percent, that doesn’t sound half—”

“Good enough,” Giselle agreed briskly. “I agree. Eight percent wouldn’t even cover field costs, let alone factoring in DKa’s agency expenses — prorated office overhead, field equipment upkeep and replacement, licenses, salaries, the various insurances we have to—”

“Overhead? Insurance?” Groner had his hands up in front of him, the left one vertical, the right palm-down, bouncing against the left’s stiffened fingertips. “Time out! Time out! You know the bank’s policy is to pay only a fixed repo fee to cover that stuff, plus field time and expenses, not—”

“Not this time,” said Giselle.

Kearny ventured, “Twelve-point-five would be—”

“Not nearly enough.” To Groner she said, “I don’t see us doing it for under twenty percent of gross recovery, Stan.”

“Twenty percent?” shrieked Groner. “Not even Christ come down from His cross to find our cars would get twenty percent! Okay, maybe, just maybe, twelve and a half, but...”

Behind Groner’s back, Kearny was signaling Giselle wildly to take it. She paid him no attention whatsoever.

“Seventeen-five-oh and a wonderful bargain, Stan.”

He crossed his arms on his chest in a gesture of finality. “I’ll have to go to Holstrom Auto Recovery Bureau if you won’t take... fifteen percent. That’s absolutely as far as I’ll go.”

“And all expenses.”

“And all expenses.”

“You’ve got a deal,” said Kearny very quickly. He added, “We’ll need keys for all the cars, tagged with vehicle I.D. numbers, model, and color...”

Groner nodded solemnly. He sighed.

“Why are you guys being so tough on this, Dan?”

Giselle said, “There’s just nothing in here for us to go on — just the dope on the cars from the dealers. Every reference is phony. Jobs, home addresses, friends, credit information — all of it is phony.”

“You don’t know that, you just know that the downs bounced. Yet here you are, demanding guarantees...”

“We do know that.” She glanced over at Kearny, who was silent, so she merely added, “Thirty-one Cadillacs, Stan.”

“Even so.” Groner had gone back behind the bastion of his desk. “There aren’t going to be that many new Cadillacs around this town with the dealer stickers still on them to justify—”

“Around this town?” Kearny looked up from trying to close the leather straps on the bulging briefcase. “Uh-uh. Nope.” He enlightened Groner with a single word. “Gypsies.”

Stan Groner stared at him for a full thirty seconds before muttering, “Dammit, Dan, it can’t be! I mean—”

“All thirty-one of them. Gyppos, working in concert.”

After a long moment of assimilation, Groner slowly nodded in acceptance of this horror — Kearny was the expert. He put his head down on his arms as if he were very, very tired.

Anyone involved in big-ticket retail sales knew that giving credit to one Gypsy was exactly like burning the money. So what was giving $1.325 million credit to thirty-one Gypsies like?