Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“What you doing to my Karl?”

Hawkins addressed a rude word to both of them and walked out without responding to either. Three minutes later, after reassuring Lulu that they had not harmed her husband in any way, Crichton also departed. Lulu sat down in the chair beside the bed with her purse on her lap.

“Did I stay away long enough, Liebchen ?”

“Perfect,” said Staley.

“Any trouble with the needles?”

“There never is if you know they’re coming.” In his youth, accidental falls had been his specialty; he knew all about how to control his reaction to the needle jabs of reflex testing.

“The spinal tap?”

Staley groaned very loudly. They both laughed.

The spinal tap that might have exposed their scam, because the fluid would have been clear, was safely behind them. Lulu opened her purse and took out some Nestle’s chocolate bars with bits of almond and toffee in them, Staley’s favorite.

As he munched one of them, Lulu said, “That insurance man is gonna make us a nice offer in a few days.”

“And you’ll make him make us a lot nicer offer a few days after that.”

Staley said it complacently, with not a little pride in his voice at his wife’s abilities. He finished the bar and licked his fingers and started on a second one.

“I think tomorrow, maybe, you start word to the rom that I’m sinking fast. Prob’ly ain’t gonna last out next week...”

“I think that’s best,” agreed Lulu comfortably. She stole a sidelong look at her lord and master, and added slyly, “Think it’s maybe time for a Queen of the Gypsies again? I been hearing good things about that Yana out there in San Francisco...”

“I don’t know, my dumpling,” said Staley judiciously. “I’ve been following the career of young Rudolph Marino...”

Marino and the other three sat in a semicircular window booth with a curved red leather seat, their backs to the glass. The maître d’ had RESERVED signs on the flanking booths and on the tables in front of them. A balding man’s waterfall fingers cascaded Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue from a piano against the mirrored sidewall that was framed in thirty-foot-high red plush drapes. He had outlived his youthful self on the placard outside by a quarter-century, although his hair had not. Marino, against the others’ objections to meeting in the Garnet Room, had said the piano would jam any listening devices pointed their way.

Redheaded Shayne, Hotel Security, smeared out his half-smoked Marlboro and fired up another.

“Your meeting, your agenda, Grimaldi.”

Marino paused for a moment. They hadn’t panicked and gone to the authorities, or by this time relay teams of Secret Service interrogators would be sweating him under bright lights in some anonymous federal office building downtown. But they hadn’t accepted Angelo Grimaldi’s offer yet, either; and the President was due in a couple of days.

So, another turn of the screw. He made his face devoid of expression and spoke from the corner of his mouth, tight-lipped.

“Assassination plot.”

That almost did it. Harley Gunnarson went white around the mouth. If something happened to the President in a hotel he was managing... He had to clear his throat to speak.

“They plan to... to kill the President? In my hote—”

“Yes. You could notify the Secret Service now , of course,” said Marino. “But...”

Smathers, lips parted, bird-bright eyes gleaming like those of a whiskey jay spotting a shiny coin, couldn’t resist.

“But what?”

“You already didn’t tell them about the bomb threat—”

“There haven’t been any more,” pointed out Shayne.

“That doesn’t negate the one there was.”

Dull, unimaginative Shayne, focus among them of opposition to Marino’s sting, stubbed out his just-lit second cigarette. His resistance seemed to have given Gunnarson back some of the bluster the word “assassination” had scared out of him.

“I’m not so sure,” Gunnarson said. “What if that threat was just some kook who thought he’d get his kicks making it? We have only your word that the Saladin even exist...”

Shayne added, “With the Secret Service guys and my own security people on watch, nobody can get through to do anything to the President anyway.” He pressed his point. “So yesterday we decided that we don’t need you or your ‘people’ on this.”

Gunnarson concurred by refusing to meet his eyes, so Marino turned to Smathers, who lathered his little hands with the invisible soap of distress and squeaked, “I’m not management! As corporate counsel I can only advise! This decision was reached over my most strenuous objections! I was overruled!”

Marino had been counting on the tiny desiccated attorney, but now saw he’d been wrong. Well, he hated to waste such a beautiful vehicle, but his limo had been gotten as the final convincer, and this was the biggest sting of his life. So, better go over to Richmond and get it wired up by Eli Nicholas, who had served in ’Nam.

He slid out of the booth and smiled down at them. None of the faces was really happy. The limo would do it for sure.

“Your funeral,” he said in his slightly grating Joisey voice. “Or rather, the President’s.” He started away, then turned back. “You’re gonna get bloody on this one, y’know.”

It was a hell of a good exit line, even if he had stolen it from Lethal Weapon .

Giselle and Ballard planned to talk about Gypsies over a drink at Fifi’s on Union Street, but Ballard was late and Giselle, because of that pesky concussion he’d suffered, was feeling almost... maternal about him. Which was silly, since they’d worked together for eight years and were great friends. Friends . There could never be anything... personal between them.

It was just that he seemed so vulnerable and...

He also seemed to be twenty minutes late, she thought, but even her irritation was mild. Just like that Larry.

Leaving her wine and newly purchased pack of cigarettes and disposable lighter on a table facing Union Street through plate glass, she wormed her way through noisy bar drinkers to the payphone. Jane Goldson’s noncommittal “Hello?” was the response prescribed for all unlisted DKA skip-tracer numbers.

“Jane? Giselle. Did Larry call in to say that he’s still planning to meet me at Fifi’s?”

“There’s a message for you, luv, but not from Larry. From dear old Mr. Anonymous.” Her cheery cockney voice changed to a reading singsong: “ ‘In Tiburon. Theodore Winston White the Third.’ ”

Whatever that meant. She said, “I’m impressed — the Third, yet. But nothing from Larry...”

“No — well, a message for him, actually. A woman.” Jane giggled. “Sexy-sounding wench, she was.” The singsong again. “ ‘Rainbird Lounge. Tonight.’ ”

Larry’s call was none of her business, and Giselle’s own anonymous call couldn’t be about Gyppos. The only informant she had spoken with was Dirty Harry, who didn’t have her real name or number. Besides, Theodore Winston White III was no Gypsy name.

Just to be sure, she tapped out 411. No listing for White in the Tiburon/Belvedere area. No listing for him anywhere in Marin County. And no way until tomorrow to run him down through the Civic Center records in San Rafael.

Sonia Lovari was 32 and looked 19, and helped nature along with simple artifice: since she had a short chunky body and swarthy skin and a round face with an inappropriate beak of a nose, she plaited her long hair into a single lustrous black braid that reached to the small of her back, wore jeans, run-over cowboy boots, and a fringed jacket of phony buckskin. Thus attired, she neatly fit the gadjo stereotype of squaw woman.