Joe Gores: 32 Cadillacs

“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.