32 Cadillacs

by Joe Gores

  The man chuckled. “At the price we’re gettin’, we gotta stack ’em, then they haul ’em.” He had a Midwest accent. What did they call them here in Florida? Snowbirds? “It’s all part of the contract.”

  “Offered you a real good price, huh?”

  “The best. He comes in with a big crew, does it, and gets out again in a single day.”

  “But he didn’t finish the job today,” O’B pointed out.

  “One day to strip ’em, the next day to roof ’em. Homeowners association pays him after the old shingles are already stripped. Ted, he insisted on that, didn’t want nobody to say they paid for something they didn’t get.”

  “I bet he insisted,” said O.B. A nice touch, that.

  The man looked at him shrewdly. “You’re in the market for a roofer, you can’t beat Ted’s prices.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “Secretary of the association, feller named Hank Sawtell, he lives right down the street, twenty-seven sixty-eight, he’ll have all the dope. Has the association books right there in his house. Say, you want some iced tea? The missus…”

  O’B begged off, hurried away. The trouble was, the roofs were already off and Ted’s Roofers wouldn’t be back to the subdivision in the morning to replace them. Not then, not ever. He was speeding down the wide curving suburban street, dodging kids’ toys and picking up house numbers off mailboxes, because his only hope was that Ted—surely, Kalia Uwanowich—hadn’t scored and soared yet. Soared a long way from here.

  He needn’t have worried; Ballard should have been there to bitch about the luck of the Irish. Parked in front of 2768 was a spanking-new red Allante hardtop with Florida plates.

  O’B parked around the next corner out of sight, got out the dealer key and his repo order with the Allante’s I.D. number on it. He confirmed the I.D., got in, fired it up. In the rearview, just before he passed out of sight around the curve of the suburban street, he saw a swarthy man sprinting down Sawtell’s walk, waving his arms and yelling.

  See you in Stupidville, baby.

  O’B dropped the paperwork and keys for his rental car into a mailbox, notified the cops of the repossession, checked out of his motel, and headed north and west for Iowa.

  * * *

  Nanoosh Tsatshimo had started out in his 20s with an instant rechroming scam he’d learned from a great-uncle who’d had a wealthy and sympathetic gadjo take him into his home and pay for his education. Such men, called rai by the Gypsies, were considered part father, part fool.

  Anyway, the great-uncle had been good at chemistry, and had taught Nanoosh how to dissolve mercury in a weak nitric acid solution and then apply it to something made of copper. The nitric acid ate a little of the copper, which formed an amalgam with the mercury. This gave the piece a shiny surface like chrome or silver plating.

  But it was a short con, because the nitric acid goes right on eating away, so after a few hours it destroys the mercury amalgam and the item looks like copper again. As he got older himself, Nanoosh began to search for a long con without those short departures. He found it in gold and silver electroplating.

  Soon he was selling “solid silver” flatware; soon after that, lead plates (same approximate weight as solid gold) electroplated with a micrometer-thin layer of real 24-carat yellow Saudi gold. It could be gotten cheaply in Arabia with the right connections, and the plates could be sold as solid gold.

  Now he could set up and sell the whole season in one place, having calibrated almost to the day when the microscopic layer of gold or silver would wear through to show the base metal beneath.

  Tonight he had an appointment in Lincoln Park with a man who wanted a service for twenty of solid-gold plates and flatware. The mark was a 26-year-old stock futures options player who had just gotten his seat on the Exchange and a condo overlooking Lake Michigan. The mark planned to screw blind the old Jew in the skullcap who ate kosher and kept the holy days—not knowing the old Jew was really Nanoosh, who planned to maybe leave him his pants.

  Nanoosh used Lake Shore Drive north to go get him.

  * * *

  Bart Heslip had his window open and the Cubs game on the car radio as he drove south on Lake Shore Drive. The old skull-capped Jew who maybe wasn’t Jewish at all deserved another look.

  As always as he drove, his eyes were busy on cars passing in the other direction, some unconscious computer in his skull ticking them off, ready to register only if one of the big, dark, bulky cars he was passing was the Nanoosh Tsatshimo Fleerwood.

  Lincoln Continental… Acura Legend sedan LS… Mercedes-Benz 300… Buick Riviera… Chrysler Imperial… Lexus LS400… Infiniti Q45… BMW 750iL… Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special…

  His old skull-capped Jew behind the wheel! Bart was in the fast lane: even as his mind registered car and driver, he was spinning the wheel and slamming the brakes to put the Seville into a controlled skid. Bounce! thunder! crash! across the grassy center-divider, goose it, hit pavement, tires shrieking, he had it, back on the highway but in the northbound lane.

  Eight cars behind the Fleetwood. One car back by the 31st Street intersection. Crowding its tail where Lake Shore splits at Cermak. Ran it off the road not far from the aquarium.

  Nanoosh, his nephew, and two young Gypsy bucks in the backseat came boiling out of the Fleetwood even as Bart slammed the Seville to a stop behind it.

  Nanoosh bellowed, “WHADDA HELL YOU T’INK—”

  Bart roared, “I’M FROM THE BANK AND I’M TAKING THAT CAR!”

  “The bank? The California bank?”

  “Cal-Cit, you bet.” Bart was flying on an adrenaline rush. It was the right car! “Take out your personal crap—”

  That’s when the nephew of Nanoosh made a bad mistake. He threw a punch at Bart. Bart slipped it, snapped his head back three quick times with three left jabs, breaking his nose on the second, then came up with a good right cross to put him away.

  Nanoosh stayed out of it, leaned placidly against the fender to watch his young Gypsies take Bart apart. But they were bloody and reeling, Bart had only a skinned cheek and a fat lip when the cops arrived, a salt-and-pepper team of suits who came up with only nightsticks because it seemed that kind of beef.

  Nanoosh quickly put his skullcap back on. “We are on our way to temple, the black man runs me off the road, tries to steal my car. My sons they defend me…”

  That’s when Nanoosh’s nephew made another terrible mistake. Still half-blinded by tears from his broken nose, ashamed of the tears, he swung at the black cop because he thought the cop was Bart. Black is black, right?

  Wrong. Thwock!

  Nightstick on skull. He folded.

  “Peaceful repossession,” panted Bart. “They’re Gyppos.”

  The black cop started to laugh as he put the cuffs on the recumbent nephew. “Peaceful repossession?” He laughed again. “That’s a damned nice right cross you got there.”

  “Used to scuffle for a living,” said Heslip.

  “We’ll take the lot of them in,” said the white cop.

  * * *

  Bart talked the black cop into not charging the nephew with anything worse than disturbing the peace, then spent a half hour side by side with Nanoosh on a hard wooden bench at the cophouse.

  “You’re the one from this afternoon,” said Nanoosh finally.

  “Yep,” said Bart.

  “How’d you know to look for me in Chicago?”

  Bart just shrugged and looked wise.

  “It was them fucking Lovellis, wasn’t it?”

  Bart looked even wiser.

  “I knew it! Son of a bitch bastards! Well, let me tell you something about them…”

  Bart stayed silent, looking as wise as Solomon, which he proved to be—Nanoosh told him all about the Lovellis.

  Finally, the cops admitted that Bart was Bart, that the Fleetwood was a Fleetwood, that Cal-Cit Bank was a bank, and that Bart was indeed their legal representative.

  “I want to thank you guys a lot
for your help,” he said. “I’ll just take my cars and—”

  “What about the writ?” asked the white cop.

  Not being a Chicago boy himself, Bart said, “What writ?”

  “The writ, the writ, the long green writ!”

  Maybe not Chicago born, but no hayseed. Fifty each to the salt-and-pepper team, then from his expense roll Bart started dealing twenties like a hand of cards, one to every cop in the station house. Ten cops, ten twenties. Pick a card, any card.

  Back at his motel just across the river from the Loop on South Canal, he found Larry Ballard’s message about Stupidville. He left Larry a more urgent message of his own, got the number of the Jersey motel where Ken Warren would be staying, and finally looked up truck rental outfits to call in the morning.

  Bart Heslip had a PLAN.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Ken Warren had been born in Jersey City, within a mile of Journal Square; his father had worked for Colgate. So he had few illusions about the place. Before returning Sarah Walinski’s Dodge Charger to Andy Anhut’s A-One Autos on Kennedy Boulevard, he put something bulky in his topcoat pocket and called a taxi. He gave the cabby an address near Anhut’s, and enough money to keep him waiting there. Ken himself waited across the street from the lot until the two burly salesmen—they looked more like made men—had gone to lunch. Only then did he drive in.

  At the back of the lot he went up three wooden steps and into a little frame office strung with dismal glittery tinsel. Inside was a scarred wooden desk bearing a telephone, a heap of curly black hair the size of a Norway rat, and the shoes of a man reading a skin magazine. Looking at him, Ken remembered a Sunday school phrase about Jacob’s brother Esau: He was an hairy man.

  In almost every respect, Andy Anhut was an hairy man. It sprouted above his eyes, it tufted from his nostrils and ears, it matted the backs of his simian fingers and wrists, it curled exuberantly in the open V of his sport shirt and made a nest for the gold medallion on his chest.

  Almost every respect. He was bald as a billiard ball. A squashed-down billiard ball with a cigar screwed into the middle of it. He sprang to his feet and clapped the Norway rat to his head when Ken’s shadow fell across his magazine.

  “Whadda fuck ya doin’ sneakin’ up?” he yelped.

  Ken sent the DKA invoice spinning across the desk with a flick of his wrist, and leaned forward. He was taller, broader, meaner than Anhut; no man can look tough adjusting his toupee.

  “Ngcahsh,” expelled Ken.

  “Cash? Wadda fuck ya mean?” That seemed to be Anhut’s favorite phrase. He was out from behind the desk with the invoice, heading for the door. “Lemme see the fuckin’ unit.”

  Ken waited. Outside, Anhut was snapping and nipping at the Charger’s heels like a terrier driving a cow at sunset. He came back shaking his rat-nest head.

  “Naw, naw, naw, fuckin’ car’s in terrible shape, I’ll give ya fifty bucks for your trouble an’—”

  Ken stepped away from the desk and put his hand in his topcoat pocket. The hand looked larger in there than a hand should look unless fisted around some bulky object. Anhut, caught up short, stared at him, measuring him. Then he shook his cue ball again.

  “Nah,” he muttered to himself. He bared his teeth in a death-rictus grin. “My boys come back from lunch, they’ll—”

  Ken jerked his hand from his pocket with something in it. Anhut went back an involuntary step. Ken’s hand put on the edge of the scarred wooden desk… a red ripe tomato.

  Anhut blanched as if someone had dipped him in boiling water and peeled him like… well, like a ripe tomato. To the mob, a Jersey tomato was dynamite—literally. A juicy red stick of overage, unstable dynamite. The tomato sitting on the edge of his desk was a statement that DKA, though a west coast firm, was connected on the east coast.

  Statement or bluff? Well, Ken was heading for the door.

  “Wait!”

  Anhut cursed and brought out a huge roll of cash money, counted off enough hundreds, threw them on the desk. Ken didn’t ask for a receipt. He rode the cab back to his motel to pack, but there was a message from DKA. According to Ephrem Poteet, a Gyppo woman named Pearso Stokes was working the midtown Manhattan banks out of a silver Eldorado with M.D. plates on it.

  Warren paid another night on his room, because Jersey prices beat New York prices, then rented a little red Toyota and headed for Manhattan. He’d just blown off a Jersey City used-car dealer with hardly a word being spoken and no overt physical threats made! It had to be a first. And now he was chasing Gyppos just like the rest of the gang!

  * * *

  Just about when Ken was paying the Holland Tunnel toll-taker on the west bank of the Hudson, Giselle was parking her company car on Teddy White’s hilltop in Tiburon. She had his $75,000 in a plastic suitcase, but left it locked in the car until she could ease Teddy into her revelations about Madame Miseria.

  She pushed the bell and Teddy opened the door and the same big tiger-stripe tomcat scooted out between her feet and bounded down the steps. Teddy even started again, “It’s okay, he does it all…” before exclaiming, “Oh! Ms. Marc! Hello.”

  “I, ah, wanted to tell… that is, I have something to…”

  Teddy looked five years younger, two inches taller, and his face eased of all the lines of pain. He came by her out onto the stoop, leaving the door open.

  “Let’s sit out on the steps to talk, this sun is so nice.”

  Giselle sat with her feet primly together, smoothing her skirt down over her knees almost nervously.

  “I… have something to tell you about Madame Miseria. She knew your name, all about your stepparents and your dead real parents because…” She cleared her throat. “She got it all from her brother. He picked your pocket in that bar—”

  “Not possible,” said Teddy. “But please—go on…”

  “The bleeding dollar bill—when you went to get the bowl of water, she just substituted one soaked with red dye for the one you’d put on the table.”

  “Of course she didn’t,” he said, untouched. “But even if she had, that’s what convinced me my money actually was cursed.”

  The big tomcat came up and started to rub against Giselle’s calf and purr. She scratched the back of his head and behind his ears absently. She was fuming.

  “The poisoned egg—that was just sleight of hand. She had the devil’s head in her hand when she broke your egg. She just dropped it into the bowl and—”

  “Where is all this leading, Ms. Marc?”

  “It was all a series of cons,” she said stridently. “I bet she burned up a bunch of money that night too, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. Five thousand dollars.”

  “Five…” Giselle got control of her voice. She said very precisely, “She didn’t burn up that money, she kept it. She and her brother just burned up a different envelope full of—”

  “Paper bag.”

  “What?” Her voice was shrill.

  “It was a paper bag full of money she burned up. But…” He gave her that goofy grin of perfect peace again. “But even if she kept the money, she would be entitled to it.”

  “I… don’t understand. If she conned you and—”

  “She cured me. Better than any doctor could have done.”

  Giselle sighed. Out between Angel Island and Alcatraz a big oil tanker down to its marks was waddling in with a bellyful of crude for the Standard Oil Refinery at Point Richmond.

  “Okay,” she said briskly. “She cured you. But also, two nights ago, she took you out to the graveyard in Tam Valley and there you and she buried a great deal of money in your stepfather’s grave. Seventy-five thousand dollars, to be exact.”

  Teddy stood up abruptly. Suddenly there was panic in his eyes. “You didn’t dig it up…”

  Giselle started to say yes, then checked herself. She stood also. She put a gentle hand on his arm.

  “Ramon Ristik did.”

  His reaction was totally unexpected. He started to laugh.<
br />
  “No he didn’t. You’re mistaken.”

  “I saw him dig it up!”

  “You couldn’t have,” he said with total conviction, “because I’m still here.”

  “You’re still… I don’t understand.”

  “That money was put there for the demons. If anyone digs it up, I die. But since I am still alive…” He flapped around awkwardly on the stair like a drunk in a dancing-chicken suit. “And cured…”

  Giselle was finally getting it. “So if someone should return seventy-five thousand dollars to you—”

  “I wouldn’t take it. Because it wouldn’t be mine. Mine is buried in my stepfather’s grave.” A sudden sly grin. “Besides, if Ramon took the money, how did you get hold of it?”

  “I took it first, and substituted another garbage bag full of torn-up paper for it?” It was a question, not a statement.

  “Ramon wouldn’t be satisfied with torn-up paper,” said Teddy delightedly. “So, if you have any money in your car, it isn’t mine. The demon has mine.” He chuckled. “And I’m cured.”

  Giselle found herself standing on the steps alone with the cat. It was a nice cat. She scratched it behind the ears. It was a nice day. Teddy was a nice man. Yana was not a nice woman. But then neither was Giselle Marc a particularly nice woman. She remembered a line from a favorite kid’s book of her childhood. A book about a goldfish seeing the world.

  “Sunny Sunfish wiggled his tail and wondered.”

  Giselle wondered if she was wiggling her tail on the way down the stairs to the car.

  * * *

  Dan Kearny wondered if he’d ended up in that place Peter Pan went back to—Never-Never Land, that was it—instead of the executive offices of the St. Mark Hotel. Lined up across the desk from him like the Three Stooges were the hotel’s General Manager, Corporate Counsel, and Head of Security. All because he’d just thumped their satchel full of money down on the desk.

  “There it is, gents, all of it. The seventy-five thousand dollars a man calling himself Angelo Grimaldi extorted—”

  “That’s a great deal of money,” said the heavy-set one, Gunnarson, the manager.