Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“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?

“A license to steal, that’s what it’s like. I gotta hand it to you, Giselle.”

They were back at DKA, for some reason upstairs in the disused reception area from which the laundry’s billing had once come, rather than down at Kearny’s desk.

“Dan Kearny, if you try to put one of your fancy moves on Stan Groner after I as good as promised him—”

“We’re gonna have to be thieves, and tricky ones, to walk away from this one without a bloody nose.”

He spoke without his usual steamroller optimism. She had a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She had been delighted with herself at that unbelievable fifteen percent of recovered value. Why, if you took $25,000 as a median dealer cost per car, DKA would be paid $3,750 per recovery, plus expenses. Even when Kearny had pointed out they were talking about Gypsies here, she had just assumed the Great White Father would have a dozen ways to break the universal Gypsy solidarity against gadje attempts to pry information out of them. But now...

“Damn good car thieves, you mean?” she ventured hopefully.

“I don’t know what I mean.” Kearny was stone-faced as always, but after all these years she could read him as she could a case file report. “This is a lot of cars and a lot of Gypsies, Giselle. Or maybe I’m just getting old.”

“How are things at home?” she asked, surprising even herself. She just didn’t ask that kind of question of him.

He answered readily, if vaguely, “Spare-room couch.”

Giselle knew and liked Jeanne, had often taken care of the kids when they were growing up. “Is... it anything I can...” He just shook his head. The moment had passed. She ventured, “Wh... what’s our first move with the Gypsies?”

“You tell me.”

In a small voice, she said, “Check out all those references they gave the dealers, even though we know they’re false?”

“That’s a start. Put the skip-tracers on it right away. Use the after-school girls, too — forget about the legal letters for the time being. The Gyppos might have slipped up somewhere and given us a crumb. You can coordinate that part of the investigation from here in the office while the field men—”

“No,” said Giselle.

Kearny looked astounded, or as astounded as his tough, uninformative face could look. “No?”

“I want out in the field on this one. I’m the guy who went up there and—”

“You are, aren’t you?”

“—nailed Stan’s foot to the floor and—”

“You did, didn’t you?”

“—got us fifteen percent, and so I expect to...” She ran down when she realized that Kearny wasn’t arguing with her.

“Like I said, a license to steal.” She had to admit, he gave credit where credit was due. Or blame. “Stan wasn’t going to go over ten percent with me no matter what, because ten percent was the most I thought I could squeeze out of him. But he was in a panic and you were sore enough at me to believe you could get more — so you made him believe you could. Of course now we gotta find the cars...”

He stood, started pacing, abruptly sat down again.