Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

Or had up until then.

O’B spent his Friday on the phone rooms. He started out in the morning by dropping around to the Public Utility Commission offices looking for a field investigator named Sturrock with whom he once had worked at a collection agency.

“Hey, Reverend, how’s tricks?”

“O’Bannon, you old devil, what are you doing around here?”

O’B leaned close enough for Sturrock to smell the bourbon he’d swished around his mouth in the men’s room.

“Well, I’m, ah, lookin’ for work...”

Sturrock, that subservient ferret of a man, immediately darted down his burrow to safety. “Damn, O’B, you know with the recession and all, we don’t have even entry-level jobs...”

Then, of course, guilty about dropping his old buddy like a used condom over that drinking problem, he had to take O’B around to meet the other field men before easing him out the door. Lots of heavy male guffaws, bluff manly hellos, mano a mano slaps on the shoulder, macho hearty handshakes all around — and O’B came away with four of the investigators’ business cards he was after.

Each was worth its weight in gold because of the miniature — but official — Public Utility Commission seal in the corner.

At the phone company’s gaudy blue building flanking Islais Creek, O’B pulled a soft wool cap down over his red hair before facing the uniformed guard on the door. This was a big red-faced galoot with mean little eyes who loved his pinch of power.

“Yeah, you wanna see who and why?”

Even as he spoke, the guard was examining the backside of a passing secretary with casual lust. Out came O’b’s first card, William Ready, P.U.C., Field Investigator. Inspired by the guard’s gaze, out came O’b’s repoman voice and face. Out came O’b’s hand to finger the cloth of the guard’s jacket.

“Nice uniform. You rent-a-cops got a nice soft touch here, watch the door, watch the girls go in and out.” Leaned close, let the guard smell his two-margarita lunch. “Watching ’em a little too close, pal? We been gettin’ complaints...”

A guilty whine, “Listen, I don’t know what you—”

“You’re gone in a New York minute you screw with me, pal.”

O’B sauntered on without signing in, flashing the second card — P. Dana Anderssen — from office to office until he got to Ms. Pegeen Gibson and knew he was home free. The lass had milk-white Irish skin and a fine peasant bosom and round cheeks and looked like she’d cop to a middle-aged redheaded man with a tired drinker’s face and a rich line of Irish blarney. Besides, the phone company loved to cooperate with the P.U.C. — when it didn’t cost them anything.

“Hey, Red, how did a carrot-top like you end up with a name like Anderssen?”

“I think it was the Vikings, raiding our coastlines and having their way with our Irish lasses, Pegeen o’ Me Heart,” grinned O’B. He was sprawled in the chair beside her desk. “Besides, Pegeen Gibson? ‘Beautiful Pearl’ in Gaelic — and a last name like a martini with an onion in it?”

“Maybe it’s a pearl onion.” She dimpled nicely looking at him. “Does anyone still drink martinis, Red?”

“Not with me. Bushmills with a water back.”

“I wish all the investigators were like you. Harry was telling me on coffee break that this really nasty P.U.C. man—”

“I bet it was Will Ready,” said O’B quickly. He was very glad his red hair had been under the soft plaid cap now folded in his topcoat pocket. “Trouble at home, makes him hostile.”

Then, amenities observed, O’B got down to the storefront phone rooms. He mentioned nothing about Cadillacs, Gypsies, DKA, or Cal-Cit Bank.

“What I don’t see is the P.U.C. involvement,” said Pegeen.

O’B didn’t see it either, now she mentioned it. Bright lass, this. He wished he’d worked on his cover a little better. Who expected a sharp mind in a bureaucrat?

“Urn, a massive scam is being played on old people with Medicare payments due them, which makes it P.U.C. because the cons have been set up from these phone rooms.”

She bought it, and brought up on her screen the eight phone numbers that Stan Groner had gotten for O’B from the bank’s files. This being Head Office for Pac Bell, Pegeen’s computer had them all.

She looked up at O’B. “What is it you need to know?”

“Who the phones were listed to. How they got them on such short notice with no waiting period. The addresses where they were installed, plus landlords’ names. If they listed references of any sort, who they were, and their phones and addresses.”

Her fingers flew over the keyboard, Pegeen frowning at the information being scrolled up. O’B stood up to look over her shoulder. He had never mastered a word processor and knew he never would, but he could read the screen and was already writing things down on his clipboard.

“This is very strange,” she said. “For quick installation, you have to prove a medical emergency of some sort...” She scrolled again. “ ‘Sick child’... ‘aged parent’... ‘retarded son’... ‘mother dying of cancer.’ Those are all valid. And they produced the required To Whom It May Concern’ letter from an M.D. But they all listed themselves as businesses — Tom’s Paving, Sally’s Dress Shoppe, Harry’s Air-conditioning, Mary’s Catering — and gave each other as references. And ...”

Now O’B was glad she was a quick-minded woman. She was doing his work for him. “And?”

“Eight different phones, four different locations, four different counties, three different area codes — but the same San Francisco doctor. Rob Swigart, M.D.”

“Four Fifty Sutter,” observed O’B. “Doc Swigart must be one tired pup, running around the entire Bay Area on his rounds.”

Doc Swigart had his shingle out at 450 Sutter, a medical-dental building with a prescription pharmacy on the ground floor. At that rent, he was no fly-by-night, so maybe he had been gotten at because he had a reputation to uphold.

Not yet four o’clock, the worthy doctor might still be probing and poking and billing outrageously up there on the fifth floor. He was. The nurse-receptionist was a big woman in a crisp white smock, with laughing eyes and an open face. Dr. Swigart was in but much too busy to see Mr... Morrell, was it? Without an appointment? Out of the question. There were other patients waiting... O’B laid his third P.U.C. card on her desk.

“David Morrell of the Public Utilities Commission,” he said primly. “Investigative branch. Telephone fraud.”

She was frowning, but in puzzlement rather than hostility. She stood up behind her desk. She was nearly six feet tall.

“Well, I’ll go tell him, but I don’t see what—”

“Give him this list, too.” O’B was writing the addresses of the phone rooms on her memo pad. “It might save a little time.”

The addresses obviously meant nothing to her. She disappeared through the door behind her desk. To return two minutes later with the smile gone from her eyes and voice. The addresses obviously had meant something to Doc Swigart.

“The doctor can fit you in now,” she said coldly.

Rob Swigart, M.D., was late 40s, lean, laid-back, sandy-haired, with quizzical eyes and a warm worried style of speech nonetheless conveying that here was a busy man. He came into the examining room holding the P.U.C. card in one hand and O’b’s handwritten list in the other, as if they were urine specimens.

“See here,” he checked the card, “Morrell. I don’t—”

“Whadda the Gyppos got on you, Doc?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”