by Joe Gores
Him and her off in a corner giggling at each other’s dirty jokes like a couple of schoolgirls… Neither one of them ever told off-color jokes to anyone else. It was like their little minority secret together, and…
Aw, dammit to hell, anyway.
Ballard was musing in an awed voice, “One-point-three-two-five million bucks!”
“Until this morning, when Stan finally collated all the contracts, the bank didn’t know how bad they’d been stung. And until we told ’em, they didn’t know it was Gypsies who’d hit them.” Kearny slapped his palm on the files on the butt-scarred desktop. “These don’t have a single name, address, credit reference, residence or work address that’s genuine.”
“But they look wonderful,” said Giselle. “The dealer credit managers did everything right, made all the requisite background phone checks—work adds, home adds, personal refs, pay experience with other lenders. Everything. They all checked out. On paper and over the phone, pure as the driven snow.”
“Like a certain Colonel Buford Sanders, USAF Retired,” said Ballard slyly.
They looked at O’B and laughed. DKA had repo’d nine Caddies from the larcenous colonel before he took an insurance company for $275,000 in a fake injury accident scam. O’B went after him, but instead of proving the con, ended up being an affidavit eyewitness in support of the colonel’s fraudulent claims.
“I’ll still nail that guy one day,” O’B muttered darkly.
“Maybe we ought to hire him,” said Kearny.
“Why Cal-Cit Bank?” demanded Heslip.
Kearny stood stock-still for a moment.
“Damn good question, Bart.”
Giselle added a note to the list on her shorthand pad. “Hmmm… yes… He could have gone to four different banks—going to branches of the same one made it a lot harder because he put himself in a time bind. He had to make the withdrawals and deposits in cash all in one day so the bank’s in-house computer wouldn’t catch up with him before bank-close. Why?”
“I’m still bothered by that non-Gypsy pseudonym for their main man,” said O’B.
Heslip said, “Yeah, he’d have to have valid-looking I.D., just in case he got questioned on one of the ten-thousand-buck withdrawals—but why not use a familiar Gyppo pseudonym?”
“Maybe he already had the Grimaldi I.D. for some other scam he was working,” said Kearny. “Giselle…”
She was already writing it in the notebook. Ballard, still catching up, asked, “How did they work the phones? It’s a lot more sophisticated than pigeon drops or Jamaican switches.”
“In each area,” said Kearny, “all the purchasers used the same sets of phone numbers to confirm all false credit data and false personal and business references on the applications.”
“Why four phone rooms? Why not just one?”
“They were working across area codes, and they’d want to keep everything local to help avoid raising suspicions.”
“If you hustle cars for a living in the middle of a recession,” said O’B cynically, “how suspicious are you gonna be when you’re looking at the commission for a forty-K sale?”
Ballard: “Phone rooms—how do they help us?”
Heslip: “Somebody had to rent the rooms to them.”
Giselle: “And Pac Bell had to put in the phones.”
O’B; “All places to start.”
Kearny stood up abruptly.
“Okay, that’s enough for tonight. We’ve got a packet for each of you with all the information we’ve got so far, plus dupe keys and info on all the vehicles. Each of us runs down whatever leads he develops himself, but meanwhile check out any Caddy with paper plates that fits the description of any car on this list.”
“How tough do we get?” asked Ballard.
“As tough as we have to.”
Heslip muttered, “A felony a week if we need it or not.”
“Current workloads?” asked Giselle.
“Turn ’em in tomorrow morning, reports current, for reassignment. I want to be able to get someone else out on them over the weekend so our regular billing doesn’t suffer.”
“Not Uvaldi,” said Ballard hotly at the same time that Heslip exclaimed, with equal heat, “Not Walinski.”
“Don’t be a sap, Larry,” said O’B. “Let somebody else get the next headache.”
“Turn ’em in day after tomorrow,” snapped Kearny. “All of ’em. From now on all our energies have to be focused on the Gyppos.”
Ballard and Heslip exchanged looks that said: we got tomorrow to drop a rock on Uvaldi’s Mercedes and Walinski’s Charger. Kearny caught the look but said nothing. He wouldn’t have wanted his men to feel any other way. Getting even was better than getting screwed without intercourse, every time.
On the other hand, they were going to have to move damned fast on the opposition. Being Gyppos, those guys wouldn’t be standing still.
CHAPTER NINE
The black stretch Caddy whispered up Taylor to the blinking yellow light at California. Behind the wheel was Rudolph Marino in another $1,200 suit. Inbound traffic streamed across in front of him as he edged the limo farther up the steep incline. Ignoring a glaring old woman in a cloth coat who shook a fist at him, he violated the pedestrian walk to swing down California Street with his right blinker on.
Thirty-one brand-new Cadillacs—and no way the bank could ever find out who had them or where any of them were! The sheer brilliance of that scheme alone ensured him immortality in the legends of the rom. Plus this audacious hotel scam, another first; nobody could stop him from becoming King of the Gypsies.
But just in case, he would find the thirty-second Cadillac, the pink ragtop, and take it away from Yana to present as his own for the King to be buried in.
Cool shadow swept over the limo on the down-ramp to the St. Mark garage. After parking, he rode the escalator up to the lobby. Beyond the rest rooms and phone bank, he pushed open a door marked HOTEL EMPLOYEES ONLY; thanks to unwitting Marla the Check-in Clerk, he knew which of the four offices to enter and who to ask for.
A very decorative secretary wearing colored contacts and Obsession and a man-tailored blue pinstripe suit with enormous shoulders was putting the plastic cover on her computer when he came through the door. Wearing that perfume to work, she had to be sleeping with her boss.
“Angelo Grimaldi. One of your penthouse suites.” Marino had chosen the end of business hours to heighten drama and tension. He pointed at her intercom, put into his voice the sort of steel his role demanded. “Harley Gunnarson. Now.”
“Sir, I’ll have to call hotel security if you don’t—”
“Ten days ago a terrorist death threat was phoned to this hotel. Do you want that threat carried out?”
Tense minutes later, Gunnarson, the St. Mark manager, opened his door to stand there frowning. He was a heavyweight mid-50s with thinning hair and piercing eyes and a hawk nose; the sort of man who looks soft and then beats you straight sets at handball.
“All right, Grimaldi. Come in and say your piece.”
Marino sauntered past him, hoping that a penthouse suite at $900 a day carried enough weight for Gunnarson to run a check on him before calling the cops. It did: neither the big redheaded guy nor the little shrunken guy wore cop eyes.
Gunnarson gestured brusquely at the redhead, who had chiseled features and stupid blue eyes. His wide blue suit coat was unsuccessfully tailored to hide the gun under his arm.
“Shayne. Hotel Security.”
Another gesture at the shrunken man, whose rounded dome had thinning strands of grey hair combed sideways across it in a vain attempt to hide its geodesic nakedness. For at least 75 of his 80 years he would have carried no hayseed in his pockets.
“Smathers. Corporate attorney. Now what the devil do—”
“Corporate doesn’t cut it with me,” said Marino.
He figured Smathers as the man with the moxie, but he had to be sure. The old man blinked bluejay eyes, bright and amoral and full of surpri
sing mischief behind their rimless specs.
“Too old?” he demanded in a piping, birdlike voice. “No fire in the belly? No starch in the pecker?” His chuckle was bigger than he was. “Sonny, I was a Chicago D.A. busting scumbags like you before you were born.”
“Christ, my mistake,” said Marino with Grimaldi’s tough New York inflection. He gently shook a tiny birdlike hand clawed by arthritis. “Maybe it’s these other two clowns who should drift.”
Smathers’s smile drew a thousand fine creases in his aged face. “Now they’re here, let’s humor ’em and let ’em stay.”
Marino shrugged, hooked a hip over a corner of Gunnarson’s big messy desk. Yeah, Smathers was the Man.
Shayne rumbled, “We looked you up, wise guy.”
“In the ten minutes since I knocked on Gunnarson’s door?”
“Computers. Fax machines,” snapped Gunnarson. “We found out that back in New York you’re just some two-bit shyster, some sort of glorified corporate sharpshooter—”
“And that I’m on a fishing trip in the Maine woods where I can’t be reached, right?” Marino clasped his hands around his knee in relaxed command, looked from face to face. “I gotta ask, do I look like the kind of guy goes fishing in Maine?”
Shayne said, “Why don’t we just call the San Francisco cops and tell ’em we have the guy phoned in the bomb threat? We—”
“Better yet, call the Secret Service, They’re the men who guard the President, right?”
Marino grinned into their sudden silence. Yeah! They hadn’t reported the original bomb threat! Not to anyone! Report it and watch the Secret Service keep the President from coining anywhere near the St. Mark? Maybe keep him from coming anywhere near San Francisco? No way. A hotel man’s P.R. nightmare.
“The threat was telephoned in by the Saladin,” he said. “Iraqi fanatics whose name will appear on no Mideast terrorist flowchart but who have unlimited funding and a plan. Since the threat was for the future and wasn’t repeated, you didn’t report it to the feds. You could have. You should have. Now it’s too late.” He held up a hand. “No, I don’t know the Saladin’s plan, because nobody’s paid me to know it. But if—”
“If?” Smathers’s bluejay eyes gleamed. The smart ones were the easiest to fool; they conned themselves.
“If the hotel hires us, I’ll learn it, and then my people will deal with the Saladin. And protect the hotel’s name.”
Gunnarson sneered, “Just who the hell are your people?”
This was the moment he was there for. He spoke mainly to Smathers and the little old man’s wicked sense of conspiracy.
“Why, the Organization, of course. The Gangsters. The Mob. The Bad Guys. The Outfit. I’m Mouthpiece for the Mafia, get it?” Now he was all the Bronx. “We find these guys an’ we smoke ’em for you—all for only seventy-five large.”
Gunnarson, aghast, began, “We couldn’t possibly—”
But Marino, with a wink at Smathers, was already leaving. Of course they’d need more persuading; but why have a stretch limo custom-made to the exact specifications of the President’s own if not for a little extra persuading at the right time?
* * *
Yana, dressed in jeans and a pastel turtleneck, was getting ready for Teddy White’s second candle reading. The first had been a great success; because of the strength of the curse, she’d had to use eighteen candles at $50 each. Tonight she would be burning another eighteen candles—this time at $100 each.
For her, preparing to cast out demons did not, as it did for a Catholic priest, involve confession and absolution, nor spiritual exercise to strengthen the soul and cleanse impurities from the psyche. Yana, before getting into her low-cut silver gown that shimmered like fish scales, merely reviewed again what Ramon had gleaned from Teddy’s wallet and garbage.
Theodore Winston White III hadn’t heard that Yuppiedom, that phenomenon of the ’80s that had put Sharper Image on America’s corporate map, was now considered déclassé. He still thought the one with the most toys wins.
So he drove an Alfa-Romeo Quadrifoglio Spider. He drove a Lexus LS400. When up in the snow, he drove a Toyota 4Runner equipped with mud and snow tires, all the luxury option packages, a ski rack, and a side pocket full of lift tickets for Squaw and Incline and the Village—even though he didn’t know how to ski.
Receipts and prescriptions in the garbage, along with ads, Godiva chocolate wrappers, throwaways, coffee grounds (whole-bean fresh-ground French Roast/Guatemalan, of course), showed that:
Teddy worked out three days a week with a personal trainer, Linda Perry, at the World Gym in Kentfield, while wearing sweats with the legend Live Well, Eat Right, Die Anyway on them.
When not at the gym, Teddy wore Armani suits, Versace sportswear, custom-made dress shirts, Valentino ties, Dior underwear, Bally shoes.
Teddy belonged to the Mount Tam Racket Club and the Pacific Union Club and, through his late adoptive father, the Bohemian Club.
Teddy had credit cards from I Magnin’s and Neiman Marcus, the American Express Goldcard, Gold MasterCard, and Visa Gold (three different lending institutions each), Tire Systems, Discover Card, the Pacific Bell phone card, the AT&T phone card, the Sprint phone card, and the MCI phone card.
Teddy had travel pass cards from Travel Access and Western Airlines (Travel Pass II) and American Airlines and Alaska Airlines and United Airlines. Hertz, Avis, and Budget, of course.
Not that he ever used any of them.
Teddy subscribed to The New York Times and Time and Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal and National Review and Playboy and Penthouse and Skin Diver and Esquire and GQ and Spy.
Not that he ever read any of them.
Teddy had check guarantee cards from seven different banks.
Not that any of them were much good. Between his monthly trust checks from the bank, he pretty much ran on empty.
Teddy also looked pale and was losing weight, and, most promising, had begun getting acupuncture treatments for a mild sciatica attack from a Chinese woman doctor named Wu.
And Teddy even now was on his way in for his second candle reading. Showing that Teddy, despite all the sophisticated trappings of his Yuppiedom, was a fool.
“He is here,” said Ramon in low tones from the doorway.
“I’ll get dressed. Keep him waiting in the hall.”
Even that was carefully calculated. The hallway was dim, the incense overpowering. An opened window behind the plush drapes made it clammy and stirred the old-fashioned crystal lampshades into an incessant tinkling contrived to unnerve. Teddy was indeed unnerved: sitting in the half-dark, shivering and squeezing his hands, he jumped and twitched like a galvanized frog when Ristik suddenly appeared before him.
“Yana is now prepared to receive you.”
The boojo room was stifling with incense and the waxy smoke of eighteen candles, as if hell itself breathed out contagions.
“You have come,” said Yana in a deep voice almost not her own. Her eyes gleamed ferally. Tonight her lips were very red, overripe—slightly obscene fruit ready to be bitten.
“I… yes, I… tonight you… you…”
“Sit.”
Teddy sat down across the little table from her. The room was dim; there was no crystal ball. Yana took his hands; already there was familiarity in this action, the shared intimacy of trysting lovers, an implied security that made her necessary.
She shut her eyes. Her silver gown shimmered as her body began a sinuous, unnerving, snakelike undulation by candlelight. Sweat rolled down between her half-bared breasts. The incense made Teddy’s head ache, made him want to lick away those rivulets of sweat, made him, for God sake, start to get an erection!
But then Yana cried out, “Chi mai diklem ande viatsa!” in a voice now definitely not her own. A voice deep, thick, guttural, almost male. “Chuda. Che chorobia.”
Terror made him bold. He had to know, “What does it mean?” he demanded. “What are you saying to me?”
S
he was silent. Her body had stopped writhing, She seemed not even to breathe. Her eyes were open again. In the dim light the pupils subsumed the irises, leaving only obsidian buttons that stared at him without blinking, not even once.
“I see a snake. In your buttocks. Down the back of your leg. Beware. A yellow woman touches you.” Her voice was male, throaty, threatening. Her face worked. “Needles. Beware.”
“My sciatica,” breathed Teddy. There was no way she could have known. She was indeed psychic. “My acupuncturist—”
“The yellow woman has made you sick.”
Teddy’d had the flu twice since he had started with Madam Wu. He’d gotten prescriptions for it.
“She has caused you to be… no! The snake inside your body is not from her! But… the snake grows…”
There it was again. The snake. Her words terrified him. A snake. Inside him. Growing. “You mean canc…” He had difficulty with the word. “Cancer?”
“The same snake killed your mother.”
He leaned forward, his fingers tight about her wrists. “My real mother died of cancer?”
“It is you who speaks of cancer. I speak of the snake.” Obsidian eyes, reptile eyes, the eyes of a snake. Flat, black, unwinking, without pupils. “From beyond the grave your mother warns you.” Her face, her eyes softened. “May she sleep well.”
Teddy had always known, in his heart of hearts, that his real mother was dead. Now Madame Miseria had confirmed it.
“I am but a conduit. The spirit speaks through me. She says you have much money… that is not really yours.”
“My mother’s spirit? My real mother says that I…”
But Yana’s head had fallen on her chest. Her fingers were lax in his. Her mouth had fallen open as if in profound sleep, but she was breathing rapidly, shallowly, like a person in great pain. She suddenly sprang straight up from her chair.
“Mene!” she cried, words she had memorized from the Old Testament she had loved when learning to read. “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin!”