Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“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.