Joe Gores - 32 Cadillacs

Beautiful Arab woman, posing as an American blonde.

Or beautiful Gypsy woman named Yana, posing as an Arab?

Elaborately casual, she asked, “Who’d you repo it from?”

“No repo. Just storing it for a friend for a few days.”

“A Gyppo friend?” she asked flatly.

Ballard seemed to exude sexual smugness. “You know how it is, Giselle, I massage her back and she massages mine. Yana came through for me the other night with a lot of info...”

Yana came through the other night? Just say Yana came the other night. While Giselle, to her eternal shame, was down on the corner hanging around under a streetlamp like Lili Marlene. Never again, not for Ballard, not for any man.

“Don’t be disgusting,” she said to him.

Why didn’t he... Of course! She’d never told him about the Caddy lifted in Palm Springs! She’d wanted to track that lead down herself. He didn’t know its significance. She walked around the car, peering inside, opening doors, kicking tires, secretly memorizing the I.D. number inside the driver’s door.

“What do you figure it’s worth?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “Classic ragtops in this condition can bring a lot of bucks, I know that.” He looked over at her. “How’d you make out with the great Grimaldi hunt?”

“He’s, um... no sign of him yet.” She was glad to lie to him; he was sleeping with Ms. Gyppo Slut and bragging about it.

“Too bad. The President’s gone, that means he’s probably worked his scam and taken off.” He patted her arm. “I know how much you wanted to nail that limo. But hey — we ought to be knocking off a bunch of Gyppo cars in the next few days. I’ll leave some assignments on your desk—”

“Don’t bother! I’ll find my own cars!” She whirled away to storm quickly into the office.

Now what the hell was bugging Giselle? Ballard turned to the ’58 Eldorado as if for an answer, but it told him nothing. Not yet.

After just forty minutes on the phone to Palm Springs, Giselle had Jeeter Pickett’s calculated Fonzie-voice in her ear, asking about her measurements as if he had one hand in his pocket and she were Dial-a-Porn. All that ended when she asked about the ’58 pink ragtop Eldorado.

“Them goddam Ay-rabs!” he erupted. “I’m not ever gonna get beyond what they did to me!”

Working off his debt over that damned car, he was still peddling used iron at Wonderly’s Wonderful Wheels, instead of raking in big bucks over to the Mercedes agency in Palm Desert where he belonged... Giselle brought him back to the main points: first, the Eldorado’s I.D. number; second, could the Arabs have been Gypsies posing as Arabs?

— How’m I gonna remember a car I.D. number, doll?

Well, could the bodyguard’s mustache have been fastened on with spirit gum?

— Wasn’t looking at his mustache, doll, was looking at that flickblade of his.

How about the woman’s blond hair? Maybe a wig?

— Wasn’t looking at her hair... a greasy chuckle, Leastwise not that hair, you get my meaning, doll...

Giselle kept patiently at it, emerged with the following:

The number, gotten from the original loan agreement for Wonderly’s HAPPY DAYS promo, matched the one on the Eldorado in the storage lot.

The woman, minus blond wig, was Yana.

The man, minus mustache and flickblade, was Ramon...

So out in the DKA lot was the car grabbed by Yana for some arcane Gypsy purpose, and then hidden at DKA by Ballard. She was hiding it from someone — almost certainly Rudolph. Could Giselle ask Larry to find out all the whys? No. By this time he was too far gone to lift a finger against his little Gyppo.

But now Giselle had her own Gypsy intimate, and the one thing Yana seemed to have that he didn’t was this pink Eldorado. So wouldn’t he tell her all about it if she showed up driving it?

Yes! She didn’t stop to think about the situation any more than that, she just checked that Larry was elsewhere, got her pop keys and hotwire, and headed for the lot.

Why had Giselle’s reaction to the pink Eldorado been so casual? Why had her rejection of Yana’s easy repos been so angry? Ballard was at a second-floor window, taking a break from laboriously typing REPO ON SIGHTs on the Gyps Yana had given him, when the ragtop, top down, shot out into Eleventh Street with Giselle’s unmistakable blond head behind the wheel.

Ballard took the stairs three at a time, was into his company Ford by the time she was jinking over to Ninth Street a few blocks up, lost her at Market, briefly spotted her going up the Larkin Hill, caught a flash of pink turning into California.

So. Heading for the luxury hotels atop Nob Hill. He slowed going by the Cathedral Apartments where Brigid o’shaughnessy once gave Sam Spade the runaround; when Giselle turned in at the St. Mark, he immediately dropped his own car into the Masonic Auditorium garage across from Grace Cathedral.

A few minutes later he sauntered into the St. Mark, making himself bland. She was not in the lobby, nor in the coffee shop. He drifted into the Garnet Room past its purple velvet rope. One of Scott Joplin’s tinkling piano rags tinged the air with sadness when he caught sight of Giselle’s gleaming blond hair and exquisite profile bent forward intently toward the handsome guy across the table from her.

In the lobby Ballard found a discreet chair, tried to think it through. The handsome guy was swarthy and black-haired and looked like an Italian mobster. Sure as hell, the Gyppo calling himself Angelo Grimaldi whose complicated long con — give that one to Kearny — apparently wasn’t finished yet.

Real name, obviously Rudolph something.

What the hell was she doing with him? Working him to find out where he’d stashed the limo? Or working him for the other Gyppos’ Cadillacs and not trying to find where he’d stashed the limo? Or... Ballard, conveniently ignoring his own identical arrangement with Yana, shied away from that particular or .

He felt a little grimy staking her out — Giselle, for God’s sake! — but he was driven by an emotion he didn’t even know he was feeling, let alone that the emotion was jealousy.

“Won’t they recognize me as the underambassador’s wife who was too dumb to know her own car?”

“The Secret Service left when their President left.”

“What about hotel management? If one of them should—”

“They never saw you. To them that woman was a terrorist, remember?” Rudolph Marino chuckled. God, he was a handsome brute! For his part, he was charmed to be telling a gadjo woman things he would never tell a rom woman, not even Yana. “Besides, I haven’t explained to you yet what happened to you...”

Giselle was getting high on Cordon Rouge, not their first bottle. “Whatever happened to her , if they see me here—”

“What happened is that I offed her.”

“You what ?”

Giselle’s delighted squeal made him cover her pale long-fingered hand with a brown muscular one. He sighed theatrically.

“Alas, she is now somewhere in the Pacific with scrap iron tied to her ankles. Now, if they see me with a beautiful blonde, merely...” He kissed his fingertips. “Cherchez la femme.”

Giselle finished her champagne and frowned sternly. She had something to ask him. And tell him, too. This was, after all, a business conference. Not like Ballard with his bimbo.

“First, Rudolph, why did you run all of those Caddies through one bank? If you’d used different banks, with different central computer systems, you would have had more time to...”

She stopped because Marino was chuckling in embarrassment.