Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

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.

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.