Still rattling her collection can, she started up the hill toward the Sutter-Stockton garage where she’d left her $50,000 Allante with its 4.5-litre V-8 engine and front-drive traction control system. Tonight, as usual, she’d swing over to the Rainbird Lounge for a little Miller time. Their happy hour always gave her useful bits of redskin lore and turns of phrase, and no one would come looking for her car there.
When she got the Georgia plates she’d applied for, the repossessors Rudolph Marino had warned her about would no longer threaten her Allante. And meanwhile, Rudolph would soon be King.
Leaving bitch Yana out in the cold where she belonged.
Larry Ballard was sitting opposite Giselle’s glass of wine and pack of cigarettes when she got back from the phone. The red lump on his forehead was just about gone; all that remained was a slight reddish discoloration as if he’d gotten too much sun. Back to his old handsome self. Time to quit thinking Florence Nightingale thoughts about him, she didn’t know why she was having them in the first place. Just silliness.
She shook her head ruefully. “I’d better change brands so I won’t be so predictable.”
“Or quit using disposable lighters.”
“They give me the illusion the smoking is also disposable.”
“I thought it was. Last I’d heard, you’d quit again.” When she answered only with a shrug, he gestured at the huge plate-glass picture window. “Fifi’s. I always feel like a French poodle at a dog show in this joint.”
“You’re sounding more like Dan every day.”
“Yeah, sure. You get anything on Grimaldi from Harrigan?”
“Nothing. He said that if any Gypsy was operating with that name in San Francisco, he’d know about it.”
“Except one is and he doesn’t.” Ballard paused. “You’ve been told the story about him, haven’t you? They started calling him Dirty Harry in Vice, ’cause he was dirty — extorting money and tail from hookers in the Tenderloin. When he got transferred to Bunco his gross probably dropped fifty percent.”
“He’s still plenty gross enough for me.”
“Dirty Harry put a move on you?”
They fell silent when the waitress brought Ballard’s mug of draft beer, an automatic professional caution rather than any real worry about being overheard. But still they waited until she departed. Giselle lit a new cigarette, fumbling the lighter as she remembered the man’s eyes crawling over her like spiders. Ballard grinned at her.
“Don’t feel bad — he’d screw mud.” To the look on her face, he added with quick diplomacy, “Not that I mean you’re—”
“I think you think you just paid me a compliment.”
She stubbed her just-lit cigarette in irritation. She didn’t like their patter; she felt as if she were flirting with Larry. Good old solid Larry Ballard, for God sake! What was the matter with her? To cover her discomfort, she told him about the blind date she’d set up for Harrigan. Ballard broke up.
“So Dirty Harry’ll show up at the Sappho Self-defense Dojo with his pocket full of condoms and his hand on his—”
“He did make a couple of interesting remarks,” Giselle said quickly. “Three, actually. First, there’s a rumor that the Gypsy King is dying back in the Midwest somewhere...”
“Which would explain Grimaldi interrupting his other operation for the Cadillac grab! Yeah! Go back in style to choose the new King...” He drank beer, added thoughtfully, “We need to know who, when, where. Maybe I can get a line on—”
“Harrigan wasn’t really interested, so I couldn’t be too interested myself, seeing as I’d just passed myself off as a free-lance journalist trying to dig up a story on—”
“Dirty Harry happen to mention a Gyppo named Rudolph?”
“No.” She couldn’t stop herself. “Why?”
Ballard grinned in an extremely sappy manner. “Oh, someone else mentioned him, that’s all.”
A sexy-sounding wench, Jane had said. Three years ago, a beautiful Gyppo fortune-teller’d had Ballard walking around with his tongue dragging the ground for a couple of weeks after DKA had put mob attorney Wayne Hawkley out of business for good.
“Your little Gyppo crystal-gazer from Santa Rosa?” she couldn’t help demanding snidely.
Ballard frowned at her from behind his beer mug. What was this? Old Giselle gets out in the field and all of a sudden starts getting competitive about sources like any other repo-man?
“Why do you ask?”
Giselle just shook her head and drank her Chablis, appalled at herself. She changed the subject yet again.
“Dirty Harry also said that some heavy-duty bad-guy Gyppos have been moving in from New York and Chicago...”
Ballard’s momentary irritation seemed forgotten. “That fits, too. My informant said Rudolph had just hit town. She’s never seen him, doesn’t even know his last name, but—”
Again, Giselle couldn’t stop herself. “She says.”
“Why would she lie?” He licked foam from his upper lip and started trying to connect up the dots, one of the main hazards of the detective game — the irresistible urge to make all the data you had somehow fit together. “Think this Rudolph character could be Angelo Grimaldi?”
“Why not? Anyway, I’ll check registrations for the Grimaldi name at the top hotels in town. If he is setting up some elaborate scam, it’ll be timed to the President’s visit...”
“Yeah. The cops’ll be too busy on security and crowd control to check out every con game in town.”
Giselle had finished her wine. She leaned toward him.
“I’ve already talked with Danny McBain at Jack Olwen Cadillac about Grimaldi’s specially built limo. He said—”
“Specially built how?”
“Jack didn’t know, the work was done by an outfit down in L.A. I’ve got a call in to them now.”
“What was his description of Grimaldi?”
“Same as the bank’s. Tall, lean, soulful eyes...”
“Man of my dreams.” He added, a bit distractedly, “What’s the third thing Harry told you about?”
Giselle started to tell him, then pulled herself up short. Uh-uh. She’d always thought the competition between field men for the best monthly recovery record was childish macho nonsense, but now she understood the rivalry. When you were on the street, you wanted to be the best on the street. And who knew what Larry might pass on to his little Gypsy bimbo...
No, the Eldorado, though only a tenuous lead, was her lead, she wasn’t going to...
Who was she kidding? She wasn’t going to tell him about the 1958 pink convertible the Gyps might have snatched in Palm Springs for only one reason: because Ballard wasn’t going to cop to his Gyppo crystal-gazer. It was simple as that.
She said, “Jane Goldson gave me a message for you. A woman. Wouldn’t leave her name.”
Ballard made impatient gimme-gimme gestures. When she stayed silent, he burst out, “Jesus Christ, Giselle, what the hell is it with you tonight? Every time I—”
“ ‘Rainbird Lounge. Tonight.’ That was it.”
It seemed hardly enough, but Ballard started grinning from
ear to ear, that same foolish Tom-Sawyer-about-Becky Thatcher kind of grin he’d used a minute ago.
“I’ll be damned,” he said softly, “she came through.” To Giselle’s cynically raised eyebrows, he added abruptly, “Yeah, her. Yana. Madame Miseria. My crystal-ball gazer from three years ago. My Gypsy informant. The one I paid a hundred bucks to this afternoon. There. You happy now?”
“You paid her one hundred dollars on the come?” The office manager in Giselle was genuinely offended at the idea of $100 being given to anyone — let alone some Gyppo princess — for information not only not tested for accuracy but not yet even received. “I suppose you think one of the Caddies will be parked outside the Rainbird with the key in the ignition and the engine still warm.”