by Joe Gores
Staley repeated with new emphasis, “We gotta find her.”
“Jesus, I can’t believe this! You’re trying to hire DKA to find a missing Gyppo girl before the cops do?”
“You find people all the time.”
“For banks and big corporations.”
“Finding is finding.”
“I trust banks and big corporations.”
Staley tried to look hurt, then they both had to chuckle.
“Look, Mr. Kearny, act like Yana is one of those Cadillac cars you chased all over the country to take away from us. We’ll even pay you a repo fee for her on top of time and mileage, just the same as if she was a automobile. Full load. No discount.” He took a big roll of greenbacks out of his pocket and dropped it on the desk. “A good deposit up front.”
It was the goofiest idea Dan had ever heard of, and it came from the twistiest man he had ever known. But he liked Staley, there was a hell of a lot more going on here than saving a Gypsy girl from a murder charge, and he wanted to find out what it was.
“Okay. I can put one man on it full-time—”
“Who? Who you gonna put on it?”
Kearny could see no harm in telling the truth. “Ballard.”
“Wonderful! He outwitted Rudolph Marino, how many men ever done that? I couldn’t ask for no better recommendation.”
“Okay,” Dan said. “Now we gotta talk terms.”
That took another hour and sadly depleted Staley’s roll of coarse notes thrown so confidently on the desk. When the haggling was complete, they shook hands on the deal.
Giselle, hearing all about it after her return from her lunch, asked a bit snidely, “You’re going to let Larry start up all that stuff with Yana again?”
“He’s gotta find her first.”
Giselle shrugged, then chuckled.
“I wish I could have been here to take a photo of it.”
“Photo of what?” demanded Dan suspiciously.
“You and Staley. The devil shaking hands with himself.”
Dan Kearny was not amused.
nineteen
Asober, rejuvenated O’B was questioning people on Toyon Court as they got home from work. At the naked taxi driver’s house the door was flung open by a slender pretty barefoot blonde in tight jeans and a scoop-neck sweater that advertised her lack of a brassiere. Her lean face almost burned with intensity.
“You’re the redhead was askin’ questions about Tim Bland.”
“Guilty.”
In the living room, that morning’s Chronicle was a paper blizzard across a sagging chintz couch facing the TV. She swept the paper to the floor, sat down, gestured at O’B to join her. The couch smelled of chips, stale beer, sweat, tobacco.
“Jake’s sty,” she said. “He’s a fuckin’ pig. Oink oink.” On the coffee table was a shaker and a full martini glass. “I’m Vix as in vixen. You want a drink?”
“I’m O’B as in I’m on the wagon.”
“I oughtta be.” She shook out a Virginia Slim, lit up, blew smoke from the corner of her mouth away from him, took a hefty slug of her drink. She blinked. “Whew! I musta forgot to wave the vermouth bottle at this one. You a friend of Tim’s?”
The moment of truth so often faced when you were trying to get information rather than just thug a car. Take a chance.
“I want to take his car away from him.”
“That dark green Panoz kit car?” she demanded avidly. He’d chosen right. She said, “No wonder he took off when I mentioned you’d been askin’ Jake questions about him.”
“Any idea where he might have gone?”
She stood, drained her martini in a single gulp, began walking with quick, angry strides about the living room.
“When Jake’s working overtime, bastard Tim likes to drive me in his precious car up to his old man’s cottage in Sonoma so he can spend the weekend shoving that cigarette-size dick of his into me.” She hurled her martini glass into the fireplace, shattering it, yelled, “G’wan, get outta here, ya nosy bastard!”
O’B got out before she threw the martini shaker at him. He could be in Sonoma by 11:00 P.M.. Check on a phone listing for the father. Cruise the grid of downtown streets. He didn’t know what a Panoz looked like, but Sonoma wouldn’t have more than one.
Geraldine Tantillo nursed her glass of white wine in Sappho’s Knickers. One week ago, at this very table, strange, exotic Yasmine Vlanko told her to quit her job and promised to show up tonight at ten and change Geraldine’s life forever. Geraldine had quit the job, the hour had arrived—but no Yasmine. Geraldine sighed. Ariane all over again.
“Hello, Geraldine,” said the deep, rich, contralto voice.
Dark, beautiful, mysterious Yasmine, sexy in her skintight black leather, was sitting across the table from her.
“How did you . . . I . . . I thought you weren’t . . .”
“I said I would be here.”
Geraldine tamped down her hopeless passion: Yasmine had to remain celibate if her strange powers were to be effective.
“What . . . what happens now?” Geraldine asked timidly.
Yasmine leaned toward her. Her perfume was more like an incense than a scent. “Now I help you,” she said. “As I promised. Then you will not see me again.”
“No!” Geraldine was aghast. “You can’t just—”
“If I am here for you to lean on, you will never develop fully as a woman. You will never find another lover who will nourish you.” She sang in a low, liquid voice:
“Predzia, csirik leja,
Te ná tráda m’re píranes.”
She then sang the translation:
“Fly my bird—fly, I say,
Do not chase my love away.”
“I . . . I don’t understand.”
“It refers not to a real bird, but to a cloud in the east on Whitsunday—which would mean you would find no lover that year. Should I stay, I would be that cloud in the east for you.”
She slid a sheet of paper across the table.
“That is the address of JeanneMarie Broussard et cie, a beauty salon on Spruce Street in Laurel Heights. They will expect you there at nine on Monday morning to start work at ten.”
Geraldine cried, “I know this place! I tried to apply for work there, they wouldn’t even talk to me. How did you—”
She looked up from the paper, sudden dread constricting her throat. Rightly so. Yasmine Vlanko had vanished.
Yana Poteet sank back in her seat on the almost empty downtown Market Street streetcar. A light raincoat hid the tight fuck-me black leather. Her slumped position and the scarf swirled around her head added fifteen years to her age. But inside she was jubilant. She’d pulled it off! She had an honest job in the gadjo world and a safe place to live in that same world.
Deciding she should work at a mortuary, following Geraldine from work, scoping out which of Geraldine’s buttons to push. Conning Meryl Blanchett into getting Geraldine a job at JeanneMarie Broussard et cie. Easing Geraldine out of the job she hated and into the new one with JeanneMarie. Geraldine might even find the new life Yana had promised her. Who could know?
She pulled the cord, left the streetcar at the transit transfer point on Seventh and Market so as to not walk too directly to Columbine Residence for Women on Breen Place above the old Main Library. Single women only, no men above first-floor administration, and you had to check in before midnight, no matter what your age.
White-haired, stern-faced Mrs. Newman was already behind the check-in table set four-square across the entryway.
“Good evening, Mrs. Newman,” said Yana gravely.
“Good evening to you, Miss Thatcher,” Newman said, beaming at the taffy-haired Yana. Such a wholesome girl.
Working in a mortuary was unclean employment for any Rom, but the women’s residence was spic and span. No cop, no Gypsy, no husband in L.A., if still alive, would ever think of looking for her at either place. In many ways she was more comfortable right now as a hillbilly lady named Miss Bec
ky Thatcher from Arkansas’s Ouachitas Mountains than she would be as a Muchwaya Romni.
In her room, she removed her raincoat and saw Yasmine Vlanko in the mirror. She felt anger. She could thank Ephrem Poteet for putting her through the last two weeks. He was causing her even more trouble dead than alive.
By an effort of will she calmed herself. Za Develesa, Ephrem, she whispered. Go with God.
twenty
Stroll south from the Ferry Building on the once-proud Embarcadero, and you will run into a new, gentrified water-front of high-price condos and inset-tile walkways and lampposts with wrought-iron scrollwork. Stroll north, and you will run into the almost-desperate carnival-house gaiety of Pier 39, and, beyond that, Fisherman’s Wharf crowded not with the crab and salmon fishermen of yesteryear, but with tourists.
Midway between these two extremes, shoehorned in between two empty piers abandoned as the shipping moved away to other ports, is a tiny, forgotten waterfront bar called the Marlin Spike, where it is always 1947. You drink straight shots with longneck beer chasers, you eat steak sandwiches on crusty French rolls with a side of fries, and nobody has ever heard of cholesterol. Above the bar is a faded ten-foot-long photo of thirty naughty bare-butted women wearing only sailors’ caps and middy blouses, winking bawdily over their shoulders at the camera.
It was nearly midnight when Nanoosh Tsatshimo slid into the high-backed booth in a corner overlooked by no windows. This con, as this city, was new to him: he usually worked silver-plating schemes in Chicago’s teeming South Side where the Jewish working-class ghetto rubbed elbows with the black working-class ghetto. He took a long, grateful gulp of the proffered icy beer.
“You have chosen well,” he said.
Immaculata Bimbai was in her foreign countess mode tonight.
“We can speak freely here. The bartender is one of us.”
In Immaculata’s jewelry-store cons, youthful Lazlo, her little brother, usually carried luggage as a bellboy, or carted around empty boxes from upscale shops. Immaculata had made him a major player for the first time; he could no more contain his excitement than a puppy can contain its wriggling.
“How did it go?” he demanded eagerly.
Immaculata said to him sharply, “Show respect, Lazlo. This is an important man in our kumpania—an elder.”
Lazlo muttered his abashed apology; Nanoosh merely grinned.
“My children, let me tell you. First, I was never any closer to L.A. than Rudolph’s house in Point Richmond.”
Lazlo said, “How did you make the jewelry-store guy think you were there?”
“Rudolph did it with his computer. He says e-mail responses on the Internet can seem to originate from wherever you say they originate.”
“So he sent the guy an e-mail that was supposed to come from that Los Angeles Gemstone Mart you made up?”
“Exactly, Immaculata. He was kuriaio—he was greedy, he wanted to make all his money at once. I told him I wanted seventy-five thousand dollars for the emerald, and he offered only thirty-seven-five. Then . . .”
And with exquisite timing, Nanoosh fell silent.
“Don’t do that to us, Nanoosh!” pleaded Immaculata. Her life was jewelry-store cons; if this one came off as hoped, she foresaw great things in it for her and Lazlo.
Nanoosh, milking his moment, said, “Then I took his check.”
“His check?” exclaimed Immaculata, appalled. “No! Cash!”
Was this how he conned ’em back there in Chicago? If so . . .
“Certified,” said Nanoosh.
And started to laugh as his thick fingers upended his crumpled Safeway shopping bag. Thick sheafs of banded green-backs spilled out on the tabletop.
“How much?” Lazlo asked. He looked even younger than he had while playing Donny, the nerd from Silicon Valley.
“Fifty thousand,” said Nanoosh in phony indifference.
“Take out my twenty-five thousand seed money, and that’s twenty-five net,” breathed Immaculata. She was still as beautiful as she had been while playing May, the putative bride; but with her own character back in her face and eyes, she looked closer to her real 32 than to May’s 22. “That’s eight thousand two hundred and fifty for the Muchwaya—”
“And five thousand, five hundred eighty-three and change for each of us three,” supplied Nanoosh.
Immaculata, her busy fingers already opening the packets, said with a sort of wonder, “And we didn’t break a single law.”
Several vineyards around the small wine-country town of Sonoma have tasting rooms that bring throngs of tourists and Bay Area locals during daylight hours. Flowers are everywhere. General Vallejo’s home and grounds have been rigorously preserved. The bakery’s French bread lures San Francisco insomniacs to Sonoma at 6:00 A.M. so they get it hot from the oven. Picturesque shops and restaurants try to hang on to tradition while catering to the tourist buck. It is a mostly successful attempt.
But now, on these small-town, weeknight streets, everything was closed except a lone bar facing the town square. No car moved, no pedestrian strolled. To O’B, parked on the far side of the square from the bar and staring across its ponds and playground, dominated by the 1800s town hall, Sonoma looked like a 1950s movie set. He felt frustrated. He had already checked the only phone directory available, back at the crossroads leading into town; no Blands listed. And he couldn’t really ask anyone questions anyway. If Tim Bland had local ties, a question might inspire a phone call that would alert him to the search.
A patrol car pulled up beside O’B. The lone cop stuck a square, tough, sleepy-looking face out of his window.
“You need any help, sir?” Both question and voice were courteous; but the eyes were the cynical cop’s eyes issued with the uniform at every police academy’s passing-out parade.
O’B took a chance. “You know a guy named Tim Bland?”
“Don’t ring a bell. Why you lookin’ for him?”
Just what he didn’t want, a curious cop. He said quickly, “Tim and my kid sister had a fight. She’s damn near forty, he’s thirty, and now she’s sorry, and she wants me to find him tonight . . .”
The cop yawned involuntarily. “Family,” he grunted, and departed. O’B sighed. He hadn’t eaten anything since lunch.
After thinking long and hard, Trin Morales left his apartment in his usual circuitous fashion, at DKA surreptitiously switched into a 1997 Honda Accord repo awaiting transport back to Skokie, Illinois. Driving repos, ever, was strictly against DKA policy; but who cared about the rules? Trin was maybe talking his life here. He left a phone message for Milagrita to catch the Mission Street BART—Bay Area Rapid Transit—at the 23rd and Mission station in time to reach the Ocean Avenue station at 2:00 A.M. Take the covered walkway to Geneva Avenue. Be alone.
Trin got to the Ocean Avenue BART station, way out where Geneva passes over the 280 freeway, at 12:30 A.M. Drove the whole neighborhood, noting every pedestrian, checking parked cars for heads backlit by the headlights of approaching vehicles.
Nobody had the station staked out.
By 1:15 A.M. he knew every parked car, every shadow that could hold a man, every possible approach. He parked on San Jose facing Geneva, where he could see the BART station pedestrian overpass with a turn of his head. He slumped behind the wheel and waited.
With a start, O’B sat bolt upright behind the wheel still slant-parked on the Sonoma square. Not again! Asleep just like last time—not booze, at least, just exhaustion—but just like last time, Tim Bland could have driven by him a dozen times.
He checked his watch with bleary eyes. One-fifty A.M. Bar-close time. Bland wouldn’t be driving by this night. Just time to walk across the park for an O’Doul’s and a couple of bags of pretzels at the General Vallejo to sustain him on the long frustrating empty-handed drive home to the city.
The pseudo-Spanish mission bar had lots of old drawings of Vallejo’s hacienda when it had been that Spanish officer’s stronghold, and of San Francisco’s Presidio when it still
had been a Spanish fortification. Old muskets and sabers were crossed on the walls; there were Bowie knives, sombreros, serapes, and, hanging from a cross rafter, a pair of cracked Spanish leather officers’ boots complete with big-roweled spurs.
All that was missing was the mark of Zorro, and a husky man with a deeply lined face was trying to put that on the tall lean blonde behind the bar. His deep tan stopped in an abrupt line two inches above his eyes; obviously, out in all weather with a wide-brimmed hat pulled down on his head.
As O’B slid onto a stool, the guy said, “Aw, c’mon, Sonja, it’s Friday an’ I know your old man’s out of town until Monday. It’s party time!”
Sonja had high cheekbones, blue eyes full of mischief, and thin red lips curved with humor. She was dressed frontier style: tight jeans, high-heel boots of tooled leather, a red-checked cowboy shirt with the top three buttons undone, a bandanna around her shapely brown throat. Hmmm. Just Tim Bland’s type.
She leaned across the bar and stuck her face quite close to that of the husky man.
“Gus, I don’t know what the hell gave you the idea that I cheat on my husband, but if I did it sure as hell wouldn’t be with you.” She winked at O’B as she pointed Gus toward the door. “Closing time, big boy. Go home and give Carmen my love.”
“She’s at her ma’s place in Salinas for the weekend, that’s the trouble.”
“Then go home and lock yourself in the bathroom with a Hustler.” As Gus shambled out, she gave O’B an apologetic smile. “Sorry, Red, but last call is already past.”
O’B put a ten-dollar bill on the bar.
“A couple of bags of pretzels and an O’Doul’s? The ABC can’t bust you for that. I’ll even drink from the bottle.”
“Nonalcoholic O’Doul’s? Oh, what the hell—okay.”
She got the bottle from the cooler under the back bar, flipped off the top, set it down with two bags of pretzels. He drank deep as she went around turning off lights and the jukebox and brought the house phone up from behind the bar. O’B spun his stool around back-to-the-bar to give her the illusion of privacy.
