Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“All right, Grimaldi. Come in and say your piece.”

Marino sauntered past him, hoping that a penthouse suite at $900 a day carried enough weight for Gunnarson to run a check on him before calling the cops. It did: neither the big redheaded guy nor the little shrunken guy wore cop eyes.

Gunnarson gestured brusquely at the redhead, who had chiseled features and stupid blue eyes. His wide blue suit coat was unsuccessfully tailored to hide the gun under his arm.

“Shayne. Hotel Security.”

Another gesture at the shrunken man, whose rounded dome had thinning strands of grey hair combed sideways across it in a vain attempt to hide its geodesic nakedness. For at least 75 of his 80 years he would have carried no hayseed in his pockets.

“Smathers. Corporate attorney. Now what the devil do—”

“Corporate doesn’t cut it with me,” said Marino.

He figured Smathers as the man with the moxie, but he had to be sure. The old man blinked bluejay eyes, bright and amoral and full of surprising mischief behind their rimless specs.

“Too old?” he demanded in a piping, birdlike voice. “No fire in the belly? No starch in the pecker?” His chuckle was bigger than he was. “Sonny, I was a Chicago D.A. busting scumbags like you before you were born.”

“Christ, my mistake,” said Marino with Grimaldi’s tough New York inflection. He gently shook a tiny birdlike hand clawed by arthritis. “Maybe it’s these other two clowns who should drift.”

Smathers’s smile drew a thousand fine creases in his aged face. “Now they’re here, let’s humor ’em and let ’em stay.”

Marino shrugged, hooked a hip over a corner of Gunnar-son’s big messy desk. Yeah, Smathers was the Man.

Shayne rumbled, “We looked you up, wise guy.”

“In the ten minutes since I knocked on Gunnarson’s door?”

“Computers. Fax machines,” snapped Gunnarson. “We found out that back in New York you’re just some two-bit shyster, some sort of glorified corporate sharpshooter—”

“And that I’m on a fishing trip in the Maine woods where I can’t be reached, right?” Marino clasped his hands around his knee in relaxed command, looked from face to face. “I gotta ask, do I look like the kind of guy goes fishing in Maine?”

Shayne said, “Why don’t we just call the San Francisco cops and tell ’em we have the guy phoned in the bomb threat? We—”

“Better yet, call the Secret Service. They’re the men who guard the President, right?”

Marino grinned into their sudden silence. Yeah! They hadn’t reported the original bomb threat! Not to anyone! Report it and watch the Secret Service keep the President from coming anywhere near the St. Mark? Maybe keep him from coming anywhere near San Francisco? No way. A hotel man’s P.R. nightmare.

“The threat was telephoned in by the Saladin,” he said. “Iraqi fanatics whose name will appear on no Mideast terrorist flowchart but who have unlimited funding and a plan. Since the threat was for the future and wasn’t repeated, you didn’t report it to the feds. You could have. You should have. Now it’s too late.” He held up a hand. “No, I don’t know the Saladin’s plan, because nobody’s paid me to know it. But if—”

“If?” Smathers’s bluejay eyes gleamed. The smart ones were the easiest to fool; they conned themselves.

“If the hotel hires us, I’ll learn it, and then my people will deal with the Saladin. And protect the hotel’s name.”

Gunnarson sneered, “Just who the hell are your people?”

This was the moment he was there for. He spoke mainly to Smathers and the little old man’s wicked sense of conspiracy.

“Why, the Organization, of course. The Gangsters. The Mob. The Bad Guys. The Outfit. I’m Mouthpiece for the Mafia, get it?” Now he was all the Bronx. “We find these guys an’ we smoke ’em for you — all for only seventy-five large.”

Gunnarson, aghast, began, “We couldn’t possibly—”

But Marino, with a wink at Smathers, was already leaving. Of course they’d need more persuading; but why have a stretch limo custom-made to the exact specifications of the President’s own if not for a little extra persuading at the right time?

Yana, dressed in jeans and a pastel turtleneck, was getting ready for Teddy White’s second candle reading. The first had been a great success; because of the strength of the curse, she’d had to use eighteen candles at $50 each. Tonight she would be burning another eighteen candles — this time at $100 each.

For her, preparing to cast out demons did not, as it did for a Catholic priest, involve confession and absolution, nor spiritual exercise to strengthen the soul and cleanse impurities from the psyche. Yana, before getting into her low-cut silver gown that shimmered like fish scales, merely reviewed again what Ramon had gleaned from Teddy’s wallet and garbage.

Theodore Winston White III hadn’t heard that Yuppiedom, that phenomenon of the ’80s that had put Sharper Image on America’s corporate map, was now considered déclassé . He still thought the one with the most toys wins.

So he drove an Alfa-Romeo Quadrifoglio Spider. He drove a Lexus LS400. When up in the snow, he drove a Toyota 4Runner equipped with mud and snow tires, all the luxury option packages, a ski rack, and a side pocket full of lift tickets for Squaw and Incline and the Village — even though he didn’t know how to ski.

Receipts and prescriptions in the garbage, along with ads, Godiva chocolate wrappers, throwaways, coffee grounds (whole-bean fresh-ground French Roast/Guatemalan, of course), showed that:

Teddy worked out three days a week with a personal trainer, Linda Perry, at the World Gym in Kentfield, while wearing sweats with the legend Live Well, Eat Right, Die Anyway on them.

When not at the gym, Teddy wore Armani suits, Versace sportswear, custom-made dress shirts, Valentino ties, Dior underwear, Bally shoes.

Teddy belonged to the Mount Tarn Racket Club and the Pacific Union Club and, through his late adoptive father, the Bohemian Club.

Teddy had credit cards from I Magnin’s and Neiman Marcus, the American Express Goldcard, Gold MasterCard, and Visa Gold (three different lending institutions each), Tire Systems, Discover Card, the Pacific Bell phone card, the AT&T phone card, the Sprint phone card, and the MCI phone card.

Teddy had travel pass cards from Travel Access and Western Airlines (Travel Pass II) and American Airlines and Alaska Airlines and United Airlines. Hertz, Avis, and Budget, of course.

Not that he ever used any of them.

Teddy subscribed to The New York Times and Time and Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal and National Review and Playboy and Penthouse and Skin Diver and Esquire and GQ and Spy .

Not that he ever read any of them.

Teddy had check guarantee cards from seven different banks.

Not that any of them were much good. Between his monthly trust checks from the bank, he pretty much ran on empty.

Teddy also looked pale and was losing weight, and, most promising, had begun getting acupuncture treatments for a mild sciatica attack from a Chinese woman doctor named Wu.

And Teddy even now was on his way in for his second candle reading. Showing that Teddy, despite all the sophisticated trappings of his Yuppiedom, was a fool.

“He is here,” said Ramon in low tones from the doorway.

“I’ll get dressed. Keep him waiting in the hall.”

Even that was carefully calculated. The hallway was dim, the incense overpowering. An opened window behind the plush drapes made it clammy and stirred the old-fashioned crystal lampshades into an incessant tinkling contrived to unnerve. Teddy was indeed unnerved: sitting in the half-dark, shivering and squeezing his hands, he jumped and twitched like a galvanized frog when Ristik suddenly appeared before him.