Joe Gores: 32 Cadillacs

“Emergency notification?”

“Me. Margarete Klenhard.” Her real name was Lulu Zlachi, as Karl’s was Staley Zlachi, but what’s in a name? She laid a hand on her heart. “For more than fifty years I am his wife.”

“Insurance?”

“We have none. We are poor folk. We—”

“No insurance.” Typing. “That’s going to be a prob—”

The department store manager cut in hurriedly, “Ah, the store will be... ah... handling monetary matters in, um...”

On the floor above, Staley was being rolled into the X-ray room on a blanket-covered gurney. Two husky orderlies in green gowns carefully took hold of the ends of the sheet on which he lay and slid Staley onto the cold metal table. The X-ray machine hulked over him like some obscene metal vulture. At the move, he cried out.

The hovering nurse made a distressed sound in her throat.

“We have to turn him on his side.” To Staley she said, unwillingly, “Sir, can you—”

Staley only groaned. The orderlies gingerly began to turn him. He shrieked with the pain and fainted just as Lulu burst through the door. The nurse grabbed her to keep her from throwing herself upon her husband’s silent form like a dishonored Roman upon his sword. Lulu could only stand there, weeping copious tears and mauling her purse, as the vulture lowered its electronically charged beak to Staley’s ashen flesh.

In San Francisco, Bart Heslip got out of his DKA company car because Sarah Walinski had just pulled her year-old Dodge Charger up across the sidewalk on the other side of the narrow Richmond District street. Sarah had beautiful taffy hair but was built like a bridge piling and had a face like a firedoor, with rivets for eyes. Since she was a skip out of New Jersey with the Charger, and had skipped again after running a previous repoman off with an axe, Heslip had a REPO ON SIGHT order for her car.

He was not afraid of playing hatchet-tag with Sarah: he’d won thirty-nine out of forty pro fights before deciding ten years before, then age 24, that he would never be middleweight champeen a de woild. At least not without having his brains scrambled into instant Alzheimer’s.

So he’d traded his boxing gloves for a set of repo tools. Man-hunting for DKA gave him the same exhilaration and challenge he’d formerly gotten in the ring: out in the field it was still one-on-one, you against him. Or her. May the best person win.

One sack of groceries was out of the backseat and Sarah was reaching for the second to take into her rented half of the pastel stucco duplex row house when Heslip spoke cheerily to her back. “Sarah, I’m sorry but I have to take your car.”

She whirled to glare at him. “How the goddam hell’d you find me, you goddam bleep-bleep-bleep-bleep nigger?”

Heslip was indeed black; plum black, in fact, with kinky hair and a thin mustache and the trained fighter’s wide bunchy shoulders and natural physical arrogance. He’d been called all the bleep-bleep words before, by men who’d subsequently taken nourishment through a straw; but you couldn’t bust a woman’s chops, not even if she outweighed you by fifty pounds.

He said only, “You know how it is with us darkies, Sarah. We always out dere on dat street jivin’ away, yessiree ma’am.”

Jiving indeed. He’d already won, because he’d slipped into the driver’s seat while she’d been bleeping away. Thus — unlike his timid-souled predecessor — he had control of the situation before it got out of hand. The keys were in the ignition and the engine was running. This would be the easiest grab of the month.

“Oh, take the goddam thing! Just lemme get the rest of my goddam groceries outta the goddam backseat...”

A charmer. Heslip drummed the steering wheel with patient fingers, then finally started to twist around in the seat.

“Sarah, if you need help with—”

The three-pound can of coffee, slammed lustily against the side of his head like a hurled rock, split his scalp as if it were a ripe apple. The blow knocked him right out of the car. Through double vision and dripping blood ( drip grind, he thought confusedly), he saw 200-pound Sarah slither into the front seat like a sea lion going into the water off Seal Rock. He thought he heard shrieking tires, dreamed he smelled burning rubber...

They were taking the twelfth stitch in Bart Heslip’s scalp before he woke up again, fiat on his back at SF General.

Lying naked on his back in the sex-rumpled bed, watching Marla the Check-in Clerk dress by the soft light from the bathroom, Rudolph Marino congratulated himself. His questions, apparently casual but as skillful as his lovemaking, had obliquely confirmed that his plan for the hotel would work.

Marla caught his eyes and gave him a slow, sensual smile as she squirmed into her pantyhose.

“That New York jet-lag didn’t slow you down any, Angie...”

He pursed his lips in a little kissing motion. “Who could be anything but tireless with such beauty to spur him on?”

He had called her at the reception desk directly after checking into his suite. She had met him in the Garnet Room for a drink on her meal break, and that had led to this. He hadn’t known whether she would be useful or not. She had been.

“From the moment I saw you, cara, I had to possess you.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed, kissed him again, long and passionately. It was she who finally came up for air.

“I knew I was going to regret getting dressed so fast.”

“There are other times, cara, ” he said.

Cara. Darling. One of the dozen words he knew in Italian.

He let her kiss him once more, was out of bed as the door closed behind her, calling Housekeeping for a maid to bring fresh sheets, flushing the condom, jumping into the shower for a needle spray first hot as a chili pepper, then cold as a kidney stone.

Gadje women were unclean.

But useful.

He got dressed in front of the 5:00 P.M. news, becoming alert at the item about the President’s forthcoming visit to San Francisco. That visit was why Marino was here, checked into this particular hotel. Yes! He went out to find a payphone from which to make his phony bomb threat in the phony Arab gutturals.

He returned to word of their fallen King.

Meanwhile, the smell of hot grease was, like Banquo’s ghost, following Trinidad Morales up the trash-cluttered stairs over a 24th Street taqueria in the Mission District. Morales was 35, heavy-set, with small precise hands and feet and sly brown eyes and broad white teeth, a front one glinting with gold when he undamped his thick lips from around his habitual cheap cigar.

Trin had quit DKA almost six years ago — “quit” was his euphemism for getting his butt booted into the street by Dan Kearny — had gotten himself his own P.I. license, and had opened an office down here off Mission in the Spanish-speaking end of town. On the door he had put:

No more skip-tracing and repos for Trin Morales. Divorce work. Insurance frauds. Electronic snooping. Betrayed wives ready to get even for their husbands’ infidelities by clocking a little motel time of their own with the investigator who’d wised ’em up to them cheatin’ hearts. People who had said too much on a bugged phone willing to cross a brown palm with silver for discreet silences. The meaty stuff with the perks on the side.

It hadn’t quite worked out that way. Puffing his way to the top of the stairs, Morales found his landlord, an Anglo with a face like a toothache, installing a new lock on his office door. A lock for which Trin would not have a key.