Joe Gores: Cons, Scams, and Grifts

“Get dressed, baby,” he said. “We don’t have much time.”

Most classic car dealerships take their restored autos on consignment, or buy them outright. Big John didn’t have the cash for that, so Cal-Cit Bank lent him the capital needed for the stock to attract high-tech Gen-X buyers, using the cars themselves as collateral. As a car was sold, Big John was supposed to pay off the bank loan on that particular vehicle.

Lately he’d sort of forgotten about those repayments, until Stan Groner, VP Business Loans, got tired of missing cars and missing cash and being out on a limb. He told Kearny to raid UpScale, grab all the cars on the lot, and auction them off.

Eloise was awake by now. “What’s the matter, Johnny?”

“Cal-Cit Bank is hitting the dealership.”

She was out of bed, throwing on her clothes.

“Those shits! What do you want me to do?”

“Drive the ’Vette down to Pacifica and lock it in your sister’s garage and forget it’s there. Get her to drive you home and tell her to forget it, too. I’ll drive to UpScale in your heap with some bucks — repomen were born with their hands out.”

“What about our salesmen?”

“Screw the salesmen, they’re on their own.”

“Of course screw them. But they’re all driving cars from your lot as demos. If we can hide those cars too until—”

“Good thinking.” Big John paused in the doorway. “Warn them from your car phone on the way down to Pacifica.”

At UpScale Motors, the first of the auto transporters was backed into the open gate with its ramp down. Kearny’s crew was opening cars and firing them up. Giselle plunked down into the icy leather seat of a sweet little red ’88 Alfa Romeo Spider Quadrifoglio with personalized plates reading STATO. She keyed awake the dashboard’s bank of red and yellow lights. The engine growled. She liked this car!

Kearny was standing beside the transporter ramp, clipboard in hand, marking them off. Heslip and Morales had the first two aboard; Ballard waited his turn in a Maserati Bora Coupe. Kearny came over to the Alfa, leaned down as Giselle opened the window.

“When this one is on the truck, Giselle, sneak into Wiley’s office and get the names and addresses of his salesmen. We’ll grab the demos they’re driving before they can hide ’em.”

Ballard, whose flooring reports of cars out of trust at Up-Scale had stirred Groner to action, grinned and jerked his head at a Corolla rolling to a stop beyond the fence.

“Do it the easy way — here’s Big John himself.”

Kearny walked through the gate to meet Wiley, who was out of his car and waving his arms and yelling.

“Get those cars off that transporter! Just last night I personally handed Mr. Groner a check for—”

“I spoke with Mr. Groner eight minutes ago,” lied Kearny blandly. “And...” He made a slashing motion across his throat.

Big John drew him away to where the transporter shielded them from the others. “There really is some mistake here.”

“Yeah, and you made it. You’re out of trust with Cal-Cit Bank on twenty-seven cars worth over seven hundred K.”

Big John’s hand brought out a roll of greenbacks, casually.

“Several of these cars are already sold — they just need final detailing before delivery.” He pressed a fistful of bills into Dan Kearny’s hand with his deal-closing smile. “I just bet you’re a man who likes a few bucks under the table.”

Kearny grinned like a wolverine, but his eyes were suddenly the coldest Big John had ever faced — and, being in the used-car trade, Big John knew his cold eyes. Kearny opened his hand. The ocean wind coming up Geary whipped away the dead presidents like a politician’s promises.

“You bet wrong,” Dan Kearny said.

Benny Lutheran, a heavy-bodied blunt-faced man of German heritage, bragged that he could close a deal with a dead man. As he came down Geary his car phone buzzed. He picked up.

“Benny Lutheran.”

“Benny — Eloise Wiley.”

Benny was passing the Coronet Theater. He put on his turn signal and his oiliest salesman’s voice. “Eloise!” It was the first time she’d called him since last year’s Christmas party when she was drunk in the storeroom and let him put his hand down the front of her peasant blouse. “Meet you in the storeroom?”

“The bank is closing down the dealership,” she said.

Benny had already started his turn into UpScale. “Later,” he said, dropped his cell phone, slammed on his brakes, hit reverse, and squealed backward out of the open gate.

Ken Warren was already running for his Dodge Ram. He had recognized the sporty little vintage 1975 280Z from the hot-sheet. A salesman was driving it as a demo and was trying to keep it as his own. No way, man!

Benny Lutheran made a screaming right turn off Geary into the first street he came to, Beaumont Avenue. Beaumont dead-ended a block uphill at Turk. Turn left, and Turk was a straight shot to Divisadero. Jink over a block to Golden Gate, and he’d be one-way inbound all the way to Market Street.

So he whipped left into Turk, accelerated — and stood on the brakes in a scream of smoking rubber. The cross-walk was flooded with students on their way to early classes at the Lone Mountain Campus of U.S.F. A black-haired pixie-faced girl in a red warm-up jacket gave him an exuberant finger.

Pissed off, Benny twisted to look over his shoulder before gunning the Datsun in reverse. Three inches from his back bumper hulked the repoman’s truck. Benny’s door was opened, a vise-grip hand reached in; suddenly he was standing in the street beside his car with his shirtfront rumpled. The students had stopped to watch. The girl in the red jacket jeered at him.

“You gonna take that? Paste him one in the mouth!”

At the same time the repoman said, “Ahng taktin nat cah!”

Hey, this guy was some kind of retard! Retards, Benny knew from five minutes of a PBS special he’d caught, were gentle souls and stupid besides. He was as tall as the retard, and outweighed him by thirty pounds. And Miss Pixie-Face was watching.

So he threw a looping right hand at the retard’s jaw. It was a good right. It connected. It hurt his hand. It didn’t seem to hurt the retard’s jaw.

Thunk! Bright colors. Benny, feeling sick, was sitting on broad tan steps leading from Turk Street up to the lofty spires of Lone Mountain College, holding Miss Pixie-Face’s handkerchief to his broken nose. His tear-blurred eyes saw a wavery form standing over him. It waggled a finger in his face.

“Hnew hnit — an htay ner!”

Again, Benny didn’t understand a word the guy said, but he just knew, in his heart of hearts, that only an idiot would stir from that spot just then. And Benny Lutheran was no idiot.

Nor was the retard. Not even a retard, in fact. Just one hell of a tough carhawk with a speech impediment, helping to put Wiley’s UpScale Motors out of business.

On the other hand, San Francisco’s Homicide Squad was never out of business. Their cup was always full, pressed down and overflowing. But even Homicide cops have to eat, right? So at ten-fifteen that same morning, Rosenkrantz, the bald one — the only way, somehow, that Beverly could tell him from Guildenstern — was at Jacques Daniel’s Saloon waiting for salami and Swiss on a French roll, lettuce, mayo, pickles, hold the mustard.

Beverly and Danny got together while working at the St. Mark as cocktail waitress and bartender, bought a failing neighborhood bar on 21st Avenue and Lincoln Way, and renamed it Jacques Daniel’s because of their names, Beverly Amy Daniels and Jacques Daniel Marenne. They had taken it from fern-and-Tiffany-glass back to new old-fashioned San Francisco saloon: polished brass bar rails, a C/D player masquerading as a jukebox, a clientele that talked IPOs despite the March Nasdaq meltdown.