Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

“Yes!” she exclaimed.

Still no callback from the limo people in L.A., but whammo! the St. Mark, the very first hotel she’d called (she’d had to start somewhere), had turned up an Angelo Grimaldi registered in one of their penthouse suites.

A day or two, scout his scam, take him down. But before that, using the wealth of information Teddy White, that sweet, simple, confused little rich boy, had just given her without knowing it, she’d take down his incredible Madame Miseria.

Yeah, she’d show Yana she couldn’t take Larry away from...

No, wait a minute, that was nonsense. This was strictly business. This was about purloined Cadillacs, not men.

Dammit, it was .

When the dice passed to Ephrem Poteet, he could feel a jolt like electricity run up his arm. He’d picked it up in the joint, had come to like it. And he just knew he was hot tonight.

“I shoot twenty,” he said. “Look out there, gimme room.”

Seven. He scooped up crumpled bills.

“Read ’em and weep, boys.”

The “boys” were another Gypsy and six gadje — three blacks, a Mexican, an Anglo, a Chinese — all of them in a closed poolhall on run-down Temple near Beaudry Ave. Poteet again rolled the dice out across one of the green felt tables.

“Gimme the news. Don’t hold nothing back!”

The dice bounced off Robert Byrnes’s classic, Standard Book of Pool and Billiards, resting on edge inside the far end of the table as a backstop, and tumbled to the felt showing two twos.

“Twenty says I can do it!”

He was covered. Rolled a nine.

“The point is four,” he chanted. He rolled again. “C’mon, little Black Joe. Hah! See that? I shoot the roll.”

The side bets were getting fierce. He rolled. Five.

“Feevy’s the point — fever in the south. I’m coming out.”

He came out. And sevened out.

Next point, eighter from Decatur.

Snake eyes. Crapped out.

And crapped out again... and again... and...

“Goddammit!” Ephrem Poteet muttered to himself.

He was trying to sober up (black coffee and chili dogs slathered with relish) in a little white tile, chrome and glass all-night hot-dog joint on Hollywood Boulevard. At the next table was a burly bearded man with a knitted cap pulled down over his ears and wearing heavy skiing mittens, reading that day’s LA. Times through sunglasses. Behind the counter was a soft-eyed Iranian who looked about 12 years old except for a fierce black mustache and a scar running down one side of his face from below his eye to the collar of his shirt. The place smelled of fried onions and dead hot dogs and stale coffee and sour milk.

The chili dogs and coffee weren’t working. Or were working too well. Poteet was coming down and didn’t want to. In the crap game he’d lost his case money, the day’s take from Universal, and the $100 in the mail from DKA the night before.

Goddammit.

A stack of photographs was slapped down to splay out across the shiny red Formica tabletop. Photos shot at Universal that very morning. He was in every one of them, every time with his hand in somebody else’s pocket or pocketbook. The voice jerked his eyes up to the man just settling down across from him.

“I turn these over to the cops, Poteet, and it won’t be back to T.I. for another vacation. It’ll be serious time upstate at Q for you, pal.”

The grey-haired old camera freak from Universal! Poteet half started from his chair. He’d knock the bastard down, knee-drop him to smash in his goddam ribs, snatch the photos...

“I wouldn’t,” said the man in a disinterested voice.

Poteet already knew he wouldn’t. He never did. Women, yeah. Them he could hit. Them he could beat up. But other men... He always thought he would, but when it was down-and-dirty in some alley... or in some Hollywood hot-dog joint...

He sat down again, heavily. He never had any luck. “Aw, Jesus Christ!” he moaned in disgust, almost to himself.

“No. Dan Kearny.”

Dan Kearny! During the years he’d been selling information to Dan Kearny over the phone, and hearing stories about him, the man had assumed almost legendary status in his mind. Kearny had once found a relative of Poteet’s hiding in Palm Springs under her brother’s wife’s maiden name.

The capped and gloved man at the next table suddenly heaved himself to his feet, glaring at them, and stalked away to a farther table muttering, “Goddam zoo at feeding time!” Kearny was picking up the photos and stuffing them into his inside jacket pocket. He tapped the pocket.

“These were just to get your attention — if you give me everything you have or can get on those Gyppo Cadillacs. Right now. Without stringing it out or getting tricky with me.”

“And you want it all for free,” said Poteet bitterly.

“No, our original terms stand. What I want it, is NOW.”

Hey, maybe there were angles to be worked here. He drank coffee, tried to figure percentages... and tried to meet those bleak eyes. No. Too much danger in them. As if to confirm it, Kearny again tapped the picture pocket suggestively.

Poteet sighed. “How’d you make out with Tomeshti?”

“In the barn.”

Of course. He wouldn’t have expected anything less from Dan Kearny. He leaned forward across the table, his decision made. Play it straight all the way. Dump the bag for Kearny and get more for him later. And from him. Hell, at $100 a car, Ephrem Poteet would make out all right.

“Okay. Seattle. Chicago. And tomorrow right here in Beverly Hills.”

It was midmorning of the next day. O’B drove his company car sedately along Bay shore Boulevard. At the foot of Geneva was the railroad siding from whence, if the circus was in town, elephants would parade trunk-and-tail, trunk-and-tail, all the way up to the Cow Palace from the Barnum & Bailey train.

O’B loved the circus. But he wasn’t after elephants today.

Gyppo Cadillacs. In fact, one particular hypothetical Gyppo Cadillac O’B had deduced was out there in the same way that an astronomer who sees there isn’t anything in a particular patch of space deduces it is holding a black hole.

The trail had been tortuous, but then O’B had a tortuous sort of mind. His last two days had been spent chasing a set of assumptions that went something like this: (1) since the Gyppos who had conned the $5,000 check out of Doc Swigart had then (2) turned around and blackmailed him into giving them (3) the medical documentation needed for storefront phone rooms from which (4) the Cadillac scam had been worked, then (5) it stood to reason that these same Gyppos already would have ended up with (6) one of the purloined Cadillacs as a reward. Right? Right.

That was the Cadillac O’B wanted.

First, he’d gone back up to Sonoma yet again to talk with the soils engineer named Oleson who owned that old Stampe biplane the Gyppos had so blithely sold to Rob Swigart. Oleson, alas, had never laid eyes on them so he couldn’t confirm Swigart’s description. But the kid who pumped gas for the airplanes maybe had and maybe could. At least he remembered a swarthy man and woman hanging around for a couple of days and driving an old car.

Aha! An old car! Please, let the kid be a car freak.

He was. Rusty old ’74 Plymouth Road Runner, green, with a wide flash running back from the headlights along the side under and then up behind the window to the roof. O’B remembered those Road Runners — he’d picked up enough of them for Fellaro Dodge/Plymouth/Chrysler on Geary Boulevard during their heyday.

He dared barely whisper it: license number, maybe?

And would you believe, the kid had a partial plate because it wore the same digits as the license on his Harley: 444.