Joe Gores: 32 Cadillacs

“No. It is too dangerous.” She sank back down as if exhausted. “It is fifty dollars for the reading. You can pay my brother. If you insist upon a candle reading, it can be done... but it is dangerous for both of us...” Her eyes were dull with dread. “I hope that you do not return for it. Some things are best not known. Good night.”

“No, wait! Madame Miseria, please! I... I must know...”

But she was gone through one of the plush walls.

When the downstairs door closed behind the reluctant Teddy, Ristik found his sister at the kitchen stove, switching off the gas flame under the frying pan full of smouldering incense that had filled the ofica with its heavy cloying odor. He gave her half the $50, pocketed the rest.

“You should have hooked him hard, tonight, Yana! We could have gotten a couple of hundred bucks—”

“He will be back. We will take him through a candle reading... no, two... a poisoned egg... a cemetery dig...”

“How do you know he’ll be back? How do you know he has that kind of dough? Like I told you on the phone, I just cut into him in the Pink Flesh, I thought—”

“You said on the phone that he lives in Marin County. You said that all his credit cards were Goldcards. And a poor man would not reflexively insist on being called Theodore Winston White the Third. ” She tapped him on the arm. “Go over to Tiburon tonight, Ramon, learn what you can. He will be back.”

Just then the phone rang. With word about their fallen King.

Word was: Staley the King was perhaps dying!

Word was: Staley had told his wife, Lulu, that if worse came to worst, he wanted an encampment in Steubenville to choose his successor before he went. Word was: he wanted to be buried in a perfectly restored pink 1958 Cadillac convertible like the one he’d driven to his coronation thirty-four years before...

Today such a vehicle would run you, oh, say, $46,000 and change on the open market. If you could even find one. Of course no Gypsy in the entire history of the world has ever bought anything on the open market.

Buying is for the gadje .

Buying is for when you can get what you want no other way.

Buying, in short, is a sucker’s game. And no rom , ever, believes he is a sucker. For dealing with the straight world, the gadjo world, the non-Gypsy motto is: Gadje gadje, si lai ante Rom san — outsiders are only outsiders, but we are the rom.

In other words, Do them before they do you.

Dan Kearny, at his desk long after office hours, was trying to clear the meager post-quake billing so he could meet payroll at the end of the month. He paused, frowning, at an employment app with the name KEN WARREN on it, then remembered the big guy talked like Donald Duck with a cold — GnYm Kgen Gwarren — and filed the application in the waste-basket.

“Good,” said a rich and oily voice from behind him. “That means you got room on the roster for me.”

Trin Morales moved forward on small, almost delicate feet to plunk down his considerable bulk in the hardback chair beside Kearny’s desk.

“Trin. How’s tricks?”

The chair creaked in protest as Morales stretched to drop one of his business cards on the desk and shake a cigarette from Kearny’s pack. He lit up and blew out the match and dropped it on the floor. Neither man had offered to shake hands.

“Never better.”

“That’s why you’re coming around looking for work.”

Morales shrugged with Latin expressiveness. “Slow month.”

“What I hear,” said Kearny, “is that you got locked out and had your phone jerked for nonpayment.” He turned the business card over with blunt fingers. Trin’s unlisted home phone number was scrawled on the back in pencil. “What I hear is that the Bureau of Collection and Investigative Services up in Sacto might pull your license for unethical conduct.”

“Just like they tried to pull yours a few years back,” sneered Morales, then added defensively, “you ever catch me with my hand in your pocket when I was working for DKA?”

“ Catch you? No. You’re a damned good investigator, Morales, I’ll give you that, but you’re trouble. I dumped you for trying to get into that Latina girl’s pants, Maria something, Maria Navarro, that was it. Threatening to have her kids taken away from her if she didn’t put out for you...”

“Aw, hell, Kearny, I was just clowning around—”

“Larry Ballard didn’t think so.” The two field men had come to blows over Maria. Kearny went on, “Put it this way, Trin...” A quick flick of his fingers scaled the card into the wastebasket on top of Ken Warren’s employment app. “Don’t call me — I’ll call you.”

The disgruntled Morales departed in a swirl of Mexican epithets, and Kearny went in search of other game. Such a grand start was too good to pass up. He found Giselle outside under one of the anti-theft spotlights set at strategic intervals around the perimeter of the storage lot, itemizing the personal property in Maybelle Pernod’s Lincoln. Neither thought it strange that the other was there long after office hours.

Hey, wait a minute. In Maybelle’s Lincoln?

The invariable DKA procedure was to remove all the personal property from the repossessed vehicle, right down to an opened box of Kleenex, itemize it, box it, and lock the box in a labeled storage bin. Giselle was leaving it in the Continental.

“Why aren’t you boxing that property?” snapped Kearny.

“Because Maybelle told me she would be redeeming the car in a few days.” Kearny opened his mouth to interrupt, but Giselle held up an imperious palm. She had the same stubborn look on her face that Larry Ballard got when enmeshed personally with some subject’s plight. “Dan, she’s a fat old black woman who’s never had anything remotely resembling this car before. God knows why the dealer put the loan through or the bank approved it in the first place, but—”

“Box that stuff,” he ordered. “Label it. You know damn well she’s never going to come up with fifteen hundred clams to redeem this boat. She’s better off without it, anyway.”

“I know nothing of the sort,” said Giselle acidly.

“Grow up.” Kearny indicated the blankets swirled messily across the backseat of the car. “Can’t you see she’s been sleeping in this thing?”

“Of course she has! Why do you think she needs it back?”

“So we can repo it again, and run up even more charges on her?” He nodded in mock admiration. “Now I get your drift.”

“Dammit, Dan, you know that isn’t...”

But Kearny was gone. He took a final turn through the ground-floor offices, savoring the lingering smell of fresh paint and his delicate filleting of Giselle, then climbed the narrow stairs beyond the partition behind his desk. At the top, a typewriter was clacking unevenly. He went around the counter and through the gate to the unused reception area. Light spilled from two open doorways down the hall.

In the first of the field men’s offices he found Bart Heslip typing reports. The left side of Bart’s lower lip stuck out so far he looked like a bigmouth bass with a hook in its jaw. The left side of his head was shaved and had a bulky white oblong around it. His left eye was narrowed and bloodshot.

“TKO in the first?” suggested Kearny.

Heslip’s lip came out even farther. Then he suddenly broke down and started the high hee-hee-hee laughter that went with his detachable black field hand patois .

“Lawdy Lawdy, Marse Dan’l, when she done bash me wif dat coffee can, Ah thought Ah was goin’ deef, Ah mos surely did.” He dropped the dialect, said darkly, “I went right back out there from the hospital, but she’d cleared out. The front door was standing wide open when I got there. The place was stripped.”