Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“There it is right over there, just needs a little shove to get it goin’...”

As he directed her across this almost deserted quadrant of the parking lot farthest from the track, he picked out an old Chev Corsica with a lot of room around it. He had her pull the Coupe de Ville up a few feet short of the rear bumper.

“You drive the Chevy, I’ll push it. The keys are under the front seat. It’s got a stick, it’ll start real easy.” The girl didn’t even hesitate in opening her door and getting out. Morales slid over behind the wheel. Because odds were that the Chevy would be locked, he added, “First, check the bumpers when I come up behind it. I wanna make sure they match...”

Estúpida! She obediently went to look at the bumpers. Even began waving Morales forward, her eyes on the space between the two cars.

Morales merely put the Caddy into reverse, backed up, then drove away from there in a wide arc that left the Gypsy girl yapping in his dust like an angry Pekingese. Back toward the freeway through the parking lots, avoiding the trailers where her old man probably by now had discovered the Caddy was missing. He would come back, drop the company car on a towbar later, when he could be sure the Gyp and his disgraced daughter had departed.

Well away from her, he stopped to check through the windshield for the Caddy’s I.D. number, which was fastened to the dashboard on a little plate. He looked for a match with the list he had stolen from the DKA file drawer that he now had on his clipboard.

Yeah!

Second blood.

Larry Ballard didn’t get to work many North Bay assignments because O’B couldn’t resist all that sunshine when the City was freezing its butt off under a layer of coastal fog. So driving up to Santa Rosa that Sunday afternoon, Ballard was struck by how the land developers had bought effective control of Marin County’s Planning Department when he wasn’t looking. Almost every hilltop sprouted its dense crop of duplexes and triplexes; north of San Rafael, where he remembered a little French restaurant with a duck pond, a hulking PG&E plant generated power for all those hillsides acned with high-density housing.

Marin needed a spotted owl of its own, and fast.

Speeding north into still-rural Sonoma County on the six-lane 101 freeway, Ballard found himself wondering if Beverly would ever let him back into her life. They’d fallen into an easy routine of double-dating with Bart and Corinne, a movie and a drink afterward, then he and Bev over to her place for...

Trouble was, he’d liked her a lot , sometimes thought they were in love with each other. But one or the other had always pulled back from a lasting emotional commitment. Now, all gone.

He came off the freeway in Santa Rosa looking for the ’30s-style stucco house at 15431 Redwood Highway. He’d stopped thinking of Beverly and had started thinking about work again. Well, maybe not totally about work. Speculating, instead, about the woman he had driven north to try and find.

Ballard hadn’t had to look up the address in the old case file; it had leaped into his mind when he had decided to seek out the beautiful Gypsy fortune-teller named Yana. Some three years before, Yana had given him a lead that had helped DKA save its license from the state.

That wasn’t all she’d given him. Against all known logic concerning Gypsies and gadje, Yana had gone to bed with him in the big motel down the road from the mitt-camp.

Just the one time; she didn’t dare do it again. She’d been sold in marriage at 13 to some mean Gyppo bastard for $3,000, and ever since had been living with him and his mother, Madame Aquarra. Madame Aquarra hated her guts, had been single-mindedly devoted to getting something on her so Yana could be kicked out of the house with her husband retaining the bride price.

But Yana was the only Gypsy contact Ballard could think of, so he had to talk with her. Or, if she wasn’t there any longer, with Madame Aquarra to find her. It had been night the other time, he’d spoken to the old woman for just a few moments, no way she would remember him now, three years later. Was there?

His speculations were academic: there was no 15431 Redwood Highway anymore. Just another stupid shopping mall. No one to ask where the mitt-camp might have moved to, and, it being Sunday, he couldn’t even run a gag on the local post office for a possible forwarding. Anyway, few Gyps were literate so they didn’t get much mail except government checks, anyway. Yana, he remembered, could only read phone numbers and street names, though she could fake newspapers and menus real well.

Since Madame Aquarra had an unlisted phone number, it took two hours to get a possible new address on her. Out in the burgeoning suburban sprawl west of Santa Rosa proper, where the old Calistoga Road meandered up off Cal 12 into the hills.

Spiritual Advisor, said the sign above the door, but it was a mitt-camp pure and simple. On the front porch of the stucco and red tile fake hacienda were primary-color ceramic pots, bright trashy tourist souvenir figurines and ashtrays, and an exquisite Delia Robbia ceramic medallion sunk in the stucco beside the door. A nearly life-size fuzzy stuffed gorilla sat in a wicker rocking chair with a dead cigar in his fist.

Ballard crunched across the gravel lot and up the three steps to the porch. He rang the bell. Bingo! Madame Aquarra, the mother-in-law. Smoking a long black stogie like the gorilla’s which she whipped out of sight behind her back when she saw a possibly paying customer at the door.

“Madame Aquarra knows all,” she intoned.

The same words she’d used three years ago. Obviously, she didn’t recognize the supposed cop, half-seen in the darkness, who’d whisked her daughter-in-law away for a night in the pokey. Considering what he and Yana had so joyfully done together until dawn, it had been more like a night of pokey-pokey-pokey.

Now he was acting confused.

“I’m looking for the other Madame Aquarra.”

She glared at him. Those same ice eyes, that same downy mustache adorning her upper lip, that same lustrous black hair, just slightly grey-shot, coiled about her head, that same extra fifty pounds stretching tight a bright silk skirt across her yard-wide derrière .

“There is no other Madame Aquarra. Down through the eons, in all lands during all centuries, there has always only been one Madame Aquarra at any one time to look into the future, to—”

“Damn!” exclaimed Ballard. “That’s too bad.”

“Too bad.”

Not quite a question, not quite a statement. Willing to be informed. Almost, if not quite, smelling money in it somewhere.

“Yep. In her twenties — rom like yourself—”

“What you know of the rom? ” she demanded quickly.

“I know they are the only true seers. I know only they are truly blessed with the second sight and the third eye.”

He didn’t know what he had just said, but Madame Aquarra seemed to like it. She nodded sagely.

“How do you know this?”

“The young rom woman I thought was Madame Aquarra. She told my fortune and eventually it made me quite a lot of money. I want her to have some of it.”

“She told you this fortune here? In my ofica ?”

Ballard thought fast. Yana obviously wasn’t here, and he knew the old gal hated her; so he shook a chiding finger at her.

“You’re testing me, aren’t you, Madame Aquarra? Of course not here in your ofica . In...” He waved his hand in a dismissive manner. “But she’s gone from there...”

He fell silent. Silence was useful: it might work even with this crusty old Gypsy woman driven by anger and greed.