Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

The trouble was his towbar. New, it had cost him $396.83 including sales tax, and he just knew every son of a bitch in the world would like to steal it. So he wrapped the towbar in an old horse blanket he found in the trunk of the Seville, left the keys with the blond-headed car-parker, and sauntered across a tiled patio filled with fragrant flowers and green sprays of foliage and small carefully tended trees in great terra-cotta pots.

Inside Pacific’s Edge were thick carpets and a two-tiered dining room with low redwood-beamed ceilings and slanted skylights of tinted glass. He paused at the reservation table. A beautiful brunette with Betty Boop curls dancing beside her cheeks stared up at him in undisguised astonishment.

Seeing heavy boots, blue-check shirt, thick moleskin trousers resistant to the battery acids often encountered when hotwiring under the hood. Smears of grease on his face and hands. Cradling something metal and lumpy wrapped in a horse blanket as if it were a baby rescued from a Dumpster.

To her, Ken Warren looked big, dumb, and dangerous.

And sexy. She asked faintly, “May I... help you, sir?”

“Hndinna,” he got out.

She shivered slightly. She could just feel this inarticulate tree falling on her in the night, but Ken didn’t notice. He was staring out over the tops of the down-slope trees outside, awed by the incredible sunset dying on the Pacific rim.

“Dinner for one? Very good, sir. Ah... would you like to check your...” She wasn’t quite sure what sort of metal monster he was clutching to his chest, but it looked vaguely automotive. Ken shook his head, so she added brightly, “I’m sure your, um, will be safe at your table, sir.”

Heads turned, heads were shaken, as Ken followed her down to the very front corner of the lower level in front of the wide picture windows. She didn’t care. She was feeling a tingle in the loins very like that felt by Pietro Uvaldi after Ken had slapped him in the face and wrenched the shotgun away from him.

A waiter in crisp black and white showed up to hold Ken’s chair for him. Before sitting down, Ken put his towbar very carefully in the chair facing him across the pastel tablecloth.

“Would you like something from the bar to start, sir?”

Ken shook his head conscientiously. He was driving. The waiter nodded and handed him a menu. “Enjoy your meal,” he said.

Ken did. The kind of meal he hadn’t known existed. His appetizer was a seafood carpaccio served with Chinese black beans, his entree a brochette of scallops and shrimp on a spicy cilantro parsley beurre blanc . The salad had flowers in it — actual flowers! His raspberries were the best he’d ever tasted.

When he finally left the restaurant, he gave his last $20 bill to the hostess. He didn’t get home until four in the morning, making it only by siphoning gas from the Seville into the Fleetwood’s tank — the dinner had taken his cash, all of it.

Maybelle woke up when he dragged into the apartment; they sat up until dawn as she extracted from him every last bit of his adventure. Then a crazy thing happened. She threw her big fat mammy arms around him and hugged him close and wept down his shirt. Good tears. The kind they cry in romance novels.

Craziest of all, Ken found himself crying right along with her.

Talk about the luck of the Irish .

Trinidad Morales spent Friday night slipping the old banana to his chiquita , then very early Saturday morning had to go out a window when chiquita’s husband came home unexpectedly. So with the early sun creating long black low-angle shadows across the pavement despite the morning chill, he found himself strutting along Olvera Street puffing his cheap cigar, overnight bag in hand as if he had just hit town, unwittingly projecting earnest, honest, and stupid — none of which he was.

“Pardon me, sir...” A diffident Spanish voice at his elbow. Morales turned.

A tall thin stooped man in a brown suit, apparently a Chicano like himself. Worried brown eyes and a bandido mustache that bracketed his mouth like an inverted horseshoe.

“Yes?” Also in Spanish.

The man looked around nervously, edged a little closer.

“I am... Sir, I need...” Another look around. “Do you know an attorney, sir? One of our own people whom I can trust?”

Morales stood stock-still for a moment, the soft birdsong of Spanish voices around him, the smoke from his cigar rising straight up into the morning air. Then he shook his head sadly.

“Sir, I am sorry,” he said, raising his overnight case slightly, “but I have only just arrived from.:”

He stopped, suddenly as secretive as the tall stooped sad man beside him. The man found a faint smile. “From elsewhere,” he supplied.

“You misjudge me,” said Morales a little stiffly. “I was born in this country, I have money in the bank, transferred here from Florida so I can open a business with my brother-in-law who is a very fine taco cook. I am most sorry I cannot help you...” A delicate pause. “The Yellow Pages, perhaps?”

A violent headshake. “No! I cannot trust anyone unknown with this. I have something... I need advice that...” They were walking through the crowds, the tall man stooped and almost whispered in his ear, “I am an illegal, sir.”

“For this you need no attorney unless you are caught.”

The lips came closer yet, the voice lower still. “But sir, I have won the lottery!”

Morales stopped dead, gaping in surprise. Then he grabbed the thin man’s arm and hustled him across the narrow street to a playground flanked by an elementary school with vivid murals painted on its walls. They sat down on a concrete bench facing the street, where no one could approach them unseen.

“The California lottery?”

“Yes. Last Wednesday’s.”

“Jesus, man, that’s worth...”

The man put his long narrow hand on Morales’s thick blunt one to make him lower his voice. Morales nodded, pulled a folded L.A. Times from the side pocket of his rumpled suit coat, found last Wednesday’s winning number, proceeded in quieter tones.

“You hold that ticket? That one right there?”

“I do, sir.”

Greed shook his voice. “Let me see it.”

The man got out an ancient cheap imitation-leather wallet. From it he removed a battered lottery ticket. It was bent and folded and soiled from being taken in and out of the worn billfold many, many times, but it bore Wednesday’s date and unmistakably matched the winning number from Wednesday’s drawing.

“Blood of Christ!” said Morales in an awed voice that prevented it from being a curse. “That jackpot is seven million dollars! Even if others also hold the winning number...”

The man returned ticket to wallet, wallet to pocket. “You see now my problem. If I present myself with the ticket, being an illegal, perhaps instead of getting my money I will be seized and held by the immigration and sent back to my country.”

“Why not get someone else to cash in the ticket for you?”

“I know no one in this city, sir, except you.” A delicate pause. “And even you, I do not know your name, sir.”

“Morales. Trinidad Morales.”

“Jesús Zaragoza.”

They shook hands, then sat on their bench in companionable silence, contemplating the problem in the unhurried, Spanish way. A distinguished middle-aged gentleman who also looked Latin, wearing a three-piece suit and a dark tie and highly polished black shoes, sat down on the adjacent bench. He took off his old-fashioned Borsalino and with his display handkerchief mopped the brow thus exposed.

Immediately, a couple of pigeons fluttered to the bricks at his feet and strutted about, cooing and cocking sharp eyes at him as if anticipating his 79-cent Big Bite of Granny Goose popcorn. While scattering fluffy white kernels he caught the eye of Morales and Zaragoza. He gave them a small courtly bow.