Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“Out!” she yelled over the noise.

“Aw, Bev, can’t we talk about i—”

“ Out, or I’ll throw you out. Jacques.”

Heads were turning, eyes were staring. Jacques sighed and took off his apron and dropped it on top of the beer cooler. Small, wiry, quick, balding, he once had been a diver with Cousteau. He and Ballard had SCUBA-dived together, they took karate from the same master — but he was Beverly’s partner.

Ballard said placatingly, “Bev, it was an accident .”

“My beautiful car.” Fire blazed in her eyes. Her lips were a thin enraged line. “Jacques. Do something.”

Ballard began, “The insurance—”

“ Insurance? The car is totaled. Totaled! I don’t want insurance! I want my—”

Ballard lost it. “Why do you have to be such a sorehead? I mean, if the insurance’ll buy you a new car—”

The blazing eyes were on Jacques now. “If you won’t throw this bastard out of here...”

Jacques made little nodding, placating gestures toward her. He took Ballard’s arm and spoke in his elongated Gallic vowels.

“Larree, better you to go...”

Ballard let himself be herded out. If he wanted to patch it up with Beverly, he couldn’t fight her partner: he’d lose whichever of them ended up on his back in the gutter. Outside, with the doors swinging back and forth behind them, Jacques released his arm with a fatalistic French shrug.

“Larree, how can you reason with her maintenant? You should have telephoned first—”

“I did. Five times. She hung up each time.”

He said illogically, “Just as I said. So there is no reasoning with her now. Maybe never, hein? ” He added, with bourgeois practicality, “ Peut-être this is the end. Fin .”

“Yeah. Fin . Shit.” Ballard started rapidly away down the street, then turned back to add, “Pardon me, merde ,” before going on again.

He drove right to the Montana, slid a tire iron up his jacket sleeve, and walked through the garage checking out the parked cars. No more Mr. Nice Guy for Larry Ballard.

No Mercedes for Larry Ballard, either. Twelfth floor, leaning on the doorbell for a timed two minutes. Nobody home. He printed CATCH YOU LATER in block letters on a business card that he stuck, bent, between doorknob and doorjamb.

Give the little toad something to think about.

For the rest of the night he sat in his car across the street from the garage entrance, dozing, listening to Live 105, The Rock of the Nineties, feeling blue about Beverly. She couldn’t seriously have dumped him tonight, just like that, could she? In public and everything, just because her car...

Rising sun woke him. People were leaving for work; no trick at all to get inside for another walk-through before admitting he wasn’t going to get the Mercedes. In two hours it would be assigned to someone else.

But as he drove away, he brightened: anybody who was going to get that car away from Pietro and his poopsie was going to have to be a better carhawk than Larry Ballard.

And Ballard had just enough ego to feel there weren’t too many of them fellers around.

A few hours earlier, while Ballard dreamed of hypersteroid Freddies going out twelfth-story windows in leather underwear without benefit of parachutes, Bart Heslip drove south through San Francisco on the post-midnight-deserted James Lick Freeway. His white teeth gleamed in anticipation as he took the Silver Avenue off-ramp into the outer Mission.

Just after lunch he’d gotten a new lead on Sarah Walinski from the skip-tracers. Until she’d waved her magic axe at the other guy’s head, Sarah had been a shift-worker at Bonnard Die-Cutting on Tennessee across from the site of the old Bethlehem Shipyards. Heslip had timed his arrival at Bonnard to chat in the noontime cafeteria with people who’d worked Sarah’s shift. A Polish woman as old as water had beckoned him to her table.

“Hey, you. Ya want get hold Sarah Walinski? Hey, talk Mel Larson. A driver.” She held up a hand with forefinger and index finger crossed. “Sarah and Mel like that...” She began moving her fingers in a shocking graphic rhythm and burst into raucous laughter. “Hey, that’s Sarah on top.”

After making sure Larson was out on his truck, Heslip used an insurance scam to learn from a bright-eyed personnel woman that Larson lived off Silver Ave, near the green postage stamp of Portola Playground. Tall skinny three-story wooden row-house that needed paint, ROOMS FOR RENT on the front door and a street-level one-car garage beneath. He checked through the dusty window. Empty. But fresh oil on the floor and junk shoved back against the walls showed a car was being parked in there.

The landlady had more chins than Chinatown, hawsers for ankles, and got more religion than a jackleg preacher when Heslip asked her about Sarah sleeping over.

“Oh my goodness, no! I keep a respectable house here...”

The Chicano who ran the little madre y padre down the street sang a different song. Si, Sarah live in the white house needs paint. Si, she lock up her car in that garage at night. Y caramba, she buy her liquor by the gallon.

Heslip did not turn in the new address at the office when he went back to DKA. He wouldn’t do that until he’d gotten his final shot at Sarah himself: no tomorrow for him on this case. He tossed an old yellow Plymouth with only half a transmission on his towbar and, out at Larson’s place, dumped it in front of the still-empty garage. He stuck a note hand-scrawled on cheap paper under the wiper arm: im sorry wont run pleez dont call cops.

Late tonight, when Sarah came back from whatever bar she was getting sloshed in, she would find the old Plymouth in front of her garage and, he hoped, being drunk and careless, would park the Charger in the street. From whence, Heslip thought as he drove through the night, he now would pluck it like an apple.

The Charger wasn’t there. Nor on any adjacent street. He ended up down the block with a good view of the house, waiting for the bars to close. And sort of hoping that when she came, Larson would be with her, drunk and belligerent: he had begun to feel like hitting someone male, his own size or larger, several times very rapidly in the face.

Not to be. At sunup, as Larry Ballard drove morosely away from the Montana on the far side of town, Heslip was still sitting there, chilled and stiff and also empty-handed. No Sarah. No Charger. And at ten o’clock he would have to go back to the office and hand her file over to someone else.

Wait a sec! At 9:45 the landlady, shopping bag in hand, laboriously made her way down the front steps on her swollen ankles. She waddled obliquely across the street to his car, panting from such exertion. Heslip rolled down his window.

“Young man,” she said, “I wish I’d told you the truth about that woman yesterday. She has been living with Mr. Larson, and she’s a fat lazy slob who all she does is lay around and drink hard liquor and never change the sheets. And all they’d ever do after he got home from work was drink and fight up there in his room until all hours.”

Noting the change of tenses, Heslip said, “Swell.”

“Last night, along about ten o’clock, they had a terrible row an’ she threw him down the stairs. Broke three of his ribs an’ give him a concussion. Amb’lance come an’ everything. Din’t even go to the hospital with him — just packed up an’ left. I seen you sittin’ out here all last night and still here this morning, an’ I just thought it was my Christ’an duty to tell you she was gone.”

After she was gone. After he’d sat there all night.