Of course if Sam Hood, even tough as he was and with his underworld connections, had known this turkey was a Gyppo, he would have jumped from the Caddy and sewn his pockets shut. But he didn’t.
“I’d love to show you around the place,” Wells was saying regretfully, “but I’m doing lunch at LAX with a couple of Japanese investors between planes. So we’d better—”
“There’s Jap money in this?” asked Hood, awed for sure.
“Nah, they don’t fool with penny-ante crap like this. We got a seven-golf-course deal cooking that...” He broke off to laugh. “No you don’t. Enough said about that.” He opened his door. “I see the foreman there, can you wait for just a minute?”
Tomeshti was already out of the car and walking over to a man checking things off on a clipboard. He pointed at the roof.
“How high is that?”
The workman frowned at him. “Who the hell are you?”
“Who the hell am I?” Tomeshti took a step closer and pounded a fist into his other hand. “A taxpayer, that’s who.” He started away toward the Seville, then turned back to point at the nonplussed workman and yell, “And don’t you forget it, pal!”
He got back in, pushing blood into his face to flush it.
“Trouble?” Hood couldn’t help asking as they pulled away from the curb in a harsh shriek of rubber.
“Nah — it’s just that you say three hundred TV sets are coming tomorrow, the rooms gotta be ready, does he say they’ll be ready? Hell no. He says...” He shook his head, then brightened. “To hell with all that. Let’s go over to your office and sign that contract for those TVs. I’ll take delivery tomorrow no matter what the damn foreman says. And pay you for all three hundred sets right then.” He looked over at Sam Hood as the big Caddy lanced through the Ventura Boulevard traffic. “A check on the corporation account is all right, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said a dazzled Sam Hood. “Money in the bank.”
Dan Kearny’s rental Cutlass took the Silver Lake off-ramp from the Hollywood Freeway to a wide messy street of narrow messy retail businesses with wide messy signs over them. Furniture stores. Karate studios. Doughnut shops. Hairdressers. Clothing stores spilling racks out across the sidewalk full of the sort of flowered sport shirts that make you want to roll a pack of cigarettes up in one sleeve. Mostly brown faces crowding the sidewalks, a lot of Habla Español signs.
After an hour of cruising he spotted the billboard:
Beneath that was:
Kearny thought he got a glimpse of the con, and started to chuckle. He found an open meter, parked and locked, walked back. Bright sunlight, tempered with acrid smog felt in nose and throat, was hot on the shoulders of his San Francisco-weight wool suit. He looked into the empty storefront through recently washed windows. Floor fresh-swept, racks waiting to receive their sale TVs. Sales counter in the back, glassed-in office partition behind that. Realtor’s sign still in the window. Phone number and an address in the next block.
No Cadillac in the narrow dirt parking lot out in back, not that Kearny had expected any when he saw the empty showroom. He wove his way through the polylingual crowd to the realty office; he had to know who Tomeshti was and when he would show.
Dusty pictures of commercial bargains nobody wanted crowded the front windows. Inside it was a narrow storefront with four battered hardwood desks down one wall and a manager’s office in the rear. Latinas at two of the desks, the others empty.
A blonde with metallic hair that could break a fingernail came up from the office. She reeked of musk and greed. Too many teeth, a face-lift that hadn’t helped blunt her icepick eyes.
“E. Dana Straub. ’Nye do for ya?”
“The empty storefront in the next block—”
“Din’t you see the billboard?”
“Televisions factory-direct?” He shrugged. “Place is empty right now, today, and right now, today, it’s just what I need for my retail electronics store.”
E. Dana Straub got a look compounded equally of greed and regret. “Mr. Wells has already signed the contract.”
“Danny Wells?” demanded Kearny in delight. “I can—”
“Adam Wells.”
“Oh. But don’t matter — I’ll sublease from him instead.”
“The terms of his lease stipulate no sublets.”
Kearny brought out his flash roll — a hundred wrapped around a couple of dozen ones — and leaned suggestively across the counter with a dirty look in his eyes.
“Lease contracts can get lost...”
She sighed regretfully. “We remodeled to meet his needs, and Mr. Wells is moving his stock in tomorrow. At the end of the week he’s giving me a check for the entire year’s lease...”
Calling himself Wells... be here tomorrow...
Kearny put his roll away and shook her hand heartily, a good loser. E. Dana Straub had a warm sweaty palm. Out in the smog-browned sunlight, he thought that the Gyppo had to be very good indeed to con that stainless-steel lady into nothing down, pay at the end of the week — when both he and his hustled TV sets would be gone and she’d be stuck with her remodel.
It had been a lousy day for Ephrem Poteet on the Universal Tour shuttle buses. Every woman he sized up had her purse zipped, every man had his wallet in his front pants pocket instead of on his hip, and none of the kids was bratty enough to give the natural diversions he needed while he made his dip.
A lousy day. Less than a hundred bucks in seven hours.
The trouble’d begun when he’d donned the maintenance uniform and lifted all those wallets that one afternoon. So much extra security as a result of it that he was reduced to working only two days a week; even then he’d had a couple of close calls and been saved only by his disguises. He’d given his big score to the ponies, and now was barely making the rent. Kearny’s $100 a car was suddenly looking damned good.
As he thought that, Dan Kearny went into the Universal City Post Office across Lankershim from the studio to check through the semi-opaque window of Poteet’s P.O. box. Not even junk mail. Already picked up today? Still, worth a shot now he was here; it was the only place he could make physical contact with his man.
Behind the counter was a strikingly handsome black man in postal uniform, likely an actor waiting to be discovered. Kearny gave him the used red window envelope with its canceled stamp. Inside was his blank sheet of letterhead, now with five $20 bills folded into it and Poteet’s handwritten box address showing through the window.
“This was lying under the bank of boxes. Guy must have dropped it when he picked up his mail.”
“Sure. Thanks. I’ll put it right back.”
Kearny went back outside and, sheltered from the hot sun by an overhanging tree, sat in the Cutlass to keep observation on the P.O. boxes through the big plate-glass window. If Poteet did come in to check his, being a Gypsy he would be sure to spot anyone hanging around in the post office lobby itself.
Leaving the special-effects demo without scoring yet again, Poteet felt sudden rage roil up inside. Tomeshti driving around in a new Caddy, him riding the stinking bus. Well, he had a line on three other cars besides the Seville, and over the next weeks he would feed them to DKA, hundred bucks a pop, getting even with goddam Yana for making all this necessary...
He left Universal through the Main Gate, just in case someone was lying in wait for him at the Studio Tour gate. Maybe he would get drunk tonight, get in a fight. Get the bastard on the ground, knee-drop him — you could crush a guy’s ribs that way, even kill him. Yeah! Grrr! Everybody said the Gypsies were conmen, nonviolent — but he’d done a hard deuce at Walla Walla during which he’d learned a thing or two. He’d show ’em.