Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“For sure.”

“What the hell, the President’s comin’ in a few days, I won’t be payin’ any attention to Gyppos for a while. Everybody on Bunco’ll be workin’ the downtown pickpocket detail.”

“Trying to catch the politicians in the act?”

“Hell no, the dips’ll be workin’ the crowds an’...” He stopped, belatedly realizing it had been a joke. He started to bellow with laughter. “Haw! Haw! Haw! Tryin’ to catch the politicians in the act! That’s good.”

Giselle knew she’d had about all she could take of Dirty Harry Harrigan, but she had one more question.

“Any other Cadillac stories making the rounds?”

“Now you mention it, a bunco guy down to Palm Springs sent out flyers on a restored classic nineteen fifty-eight pink Eldorado ragtop got conned out of some used-car salesman.” More guffaws. “Car salesman’s out the money ’cause the Caddy wasn’t his to sell — just borrowed by his boss for a promo!”

“Conned by Gypsies?” Giselle was leaning forward intently.

“Ay-rabs. Gal had a bodyguard with a big ol’ knife, they scairt the guy into takin’ a check an’ signin’ over the pink an’ they just drove that ragtop right outta there.”

“I take it the check bounced.”

“Higher’n the Transamerica tower.”

“Was it drawn on a San Francisco bank?”

“Naw. Arabia. Bahrain, somethin’ like that.”

Giselle was frowning. “Then why’d he circulate it to you? A few hundred dollars on a con game—”

“Few hundred? Try sixty thousand ! Goddam Ay-rabs.”

These goddam Ay-rabs interested Giselle vitally. It was easy to print phony checks that said Arabia, and there just were not a whole bunch of Arab con women around.

“Could the woman have been a Gypsy posing as an Arab?”

“Couldda been, I s’pose, but why would she take the chance? You’re talkin’ felony theft here. Gyps don’t want old cars — it’s always this year’s Caddy to tool around in.”

True. And yet... and yet... there was something here.

Maybe something like this: a Gypsy King is dying and a Gypsy who is using an odd pseudonym — one Kearny thinks has been created for a major sting already in place — recklessly endangers or at least complicates the sting by setting up a band of fellow Gypsies to hit a bank for a fleet of new Cadillacs.

Why? Because it’s to Grimaldi’s advantage that they drive those Cadillacs back to the Gypsy King’s funeral?

Next, a classic pink 1958 Eldorado ragtop worth $60K is conned out of a used-car salesman — surely not your typical easy mark — by someone who could have been a Gypsy posing as an Arab. A big-time felony for a car not usually of interest to Gypsies.

To give Grimaldi an edge in choosing the new King?

But how could a ’58 ragtop do that? She had to be missing some vital element. All of a sudden, Giselle wanted to talk to that used-car salesman in Palm Springs.

And wanted to know about that special-order limo Angelo Grimaldi had scored from Jack Olwen Cadillac.

And wanted to check whether any of the better San Francisco hotels had an Angelo Grimaldi registered.

Because if the Gypsy calling himself Grimaldi had a major con going, it surely would be timed to the President’s arrival. The cops, tied up in crowd control as Dirty Harry had said, would be much less likely to catch the scam before it was too late.

A lot of ifs and mights and maybes, but they all added up to one thing: Grimaldi could still be here in San Francisco, waiting for the President’s arrival. And if he was, Giselle Marc was going to nail him to the wall and...

She was brought crashing back to earth by Dirty Harry’s dirty voice in her ear, his dirty hand on her arm.

“Listen, girlie, I got this one-eyed snake in my pants...”

Too much. She didn’t really mind whatever dirty little fantasies he might have about her, but it was intolerable he thought she might want to share them. This particular girlie was going to have to do something about Harry’s dirt...

“Okay, okay, you win — I’ll admit it, you’ve got me intrigued.” She added wickedly, “Come over to my place tonight, seven-thirty... I’ll leave the street door unlocked...”

Even as she had given him a phony name, so she gave him a phony address, that of the Sappho Self-defense Dojo. Ballard, brown belt that he was, had told her in slightly awed tones about this extremely militant feminist lesbian martial-arts support group on Clement Street.

When Dirty Harry Harrigan swaggered into the place that night without knocking, she was sure they would give him, if not the sort of evening he fantasized, almost certainly the sort of evening he deserved.

As Giselle was dashing heatedly off in several directions at once to look for Angelo Grimaldi, Rudolph Marino, cool as geometry, was looking for her. Oh, not for her specifically, but, through his SFPD contact, for the repomen who had knocked off the two Gypsy Cadillacs over the weekend.

He used a St. Mark lobby payphone; by now he routinely phoned from his suite only for room service and wake-up because the switchboard would be monitoring his calls. He asked for his tame cop in the gruff voice snitches so often have.

“Marino,” he said when the man answered, gave the pay-phone number, hung up. When it rang three minutes later, he asked it, “What do you have?” then listened, nodding. “Morales... Marc... DKA? Which stands for... I see... Daniel Kearny Associates...”

He kept on listening. So Yana had been right. The same agency had picked up both cars. Bad news and good news. Bad news because the private detectives must indeed have figured out that it was Gypsies who had hit the bank for the Cadillacs. Good news because he could keep this information from Yana while feeding DKA information about her kumpania until she panicked and brought that ’58 ragtop into the open where he or his people could grab it...

“ Giselle Marc?” he exclaimed to the phone, surprised.

One of the repomen was a woman? He grinned whitely to himself. There wasn’t the woman born he couldn’t get next to.

Well, maybe Yana.

“Gerry Merman... yes... I understand... a journalist doing a piece about Gypsies... I see... free-lance...”

He hung up, frowning. Then he smiled. Gerry Merman, writer. Giselle Marc, repowoman. He’d never heard of a repo woman , but he liked her moves, posing as a free-lance writer to get a line on Grimaldi without tipping DKa’s investigation. Free-lance, so if the cop had a highly unlikely I.Q. power surge and became suspicious, he couldn’t check out her cover story.

Just her bad luck that Harry Harrigan, SFPd’s Bunco Squad Gypsy specialist, also happened to be the cop in Marino’s pocket. But her good luck that now he, Rudolph Marino, soon to be King of the Gypsies, would be feeding her info about Yana’s kumpania .

Nothing about Stupidville, of course. If she learned of it, Giselle Marc sounded plenty smart enough to show up and grab some Caddies from a rom encampment called to name their new King upon the death of their old.

Their old King was not all that near death, actually, but Dr. Crichton, making his rounds, was worried about him all the same. Poor old Karl didn’t seem to have a lot of will to live, and now the department store’s insurance company was involved and insisting, in this age of skyrocketing medical costs, on more tests being run before they would okay even current expenses.

Bad for his patient, bad all around.

What Crichton didn’t know was that Barney Hawkins, Democrat National Assurance Company’s adjuster, was at that moment in Staley’s room shoving ballpoint pen and release form under his aged nose. Hawkins had bad teeth and was overweight, with just a fringe of hair around the back of his head as if he had been tonsured for the religious life. Shifty brown eyes that Staley met with a hurt and hurting old-man’s candor and bewilderment.