Giselle had driven up a winding drive to the top of a Tiburon hill and climbed the broad stone stairway to the hardwood door. She banged the iron gargoyle-face knocker and turned away to look at the City, rising from the far side of the sparkling bay like a misplaced Camelot: distance lent it a bogus charm absent in close-up.
When the door was opened by a slender blond chap in his 30s, a big tiger-stripe tomcat scooted out between his legs and bounded off down the steps.
“It’s okay,” he said quickly, “he does it all the time.”
There was a moment of silence. Once the office-work crunch had eased, Giselle had been in a great hurry to follow up on her anonymous phone caller’s lead. So she had gotten White’s address from the tax assessor’s office at the Marin Civic Center, and had driven directly here without even phoning ahead. She had not even formulated a plan of attack or worked out her cover story.
So she cleared her throat and said, “Ah... I’m looking for Theodore Winston White the Third.”
“That’s me. Teddy White.”
“This might sound a little strange, but do you perchance know any Gypsies?”
His slightly too close-set eyes lit up. “Madame Miseria’s incredible, you know. She’s changing my life.”
It all fell into place. Madame Miseria. Ballard’s Yana, the Gypsy fortune-teller. Giselle’s anonymous caller obviously was some Gyppo opposed to Yana. Giselle smiled. Brilliantly. The kind of smile men felt all the way down to their toes.
“Mr. White, I’d love to drive you down into town and buy you an espresso,” she said.
Drinking muddy Turkish coffee in the office, Wasso Tomeshti could see his sister and mother and two cousins feeding the shopping frenzy surrounding his purloined color TVs. He’d priced the sets for quick cash sales, so was also collecting and pocketing the 7.25 % sales tax to help offset the bargain prices.
Wasso figured he had today and tomorrow before some officious bureaucrat came around asking to see his sales permits; so tomorrow he’d give E. Dana Straub her check and pack up his remaining sets and move on — to be gone by the time it bounced. No sweat about Sam Hood’s check bouncing — Hood didn’t know where to find him anyway. Life was good.
“Mr. Adam Wells?”
Tomeshti looked up from his paperwork — bogus optional service guarantees on the sets, also paid to him in cash — into cold grey eyes above a granite jaw. Cop face. But they couldn’t have got on to his scam yet, so...
So he said, “That’s me, King of the Cash Sale—”
The guy shook his head. “No. A Gyppo named Wasso Tomeshti.” He showed some I.D. “Private detective.” He held out his hand. “The keys to the Seville, Gyppo.”
The coin dropped. Yana’s call warning him that some P.I. might have a line to their Caddies. He was unworried. He was a big man, heavy-waisted and four inches taller than the square, grey-haired man’s five-nine. Never actually violent, but this gadjo couldn’t know that. He came around the counter.
“You better get to hell out of here, pal, before I...”
Hard-face merely picked up the phone and tapped out a number with such confidence that Tomeshti waited just too long.
“Yeah, gimme Sergeant Block in Bunco.” He listened to the canned voice saying, At the tone, Pacific Daylight Saving time will be, then said, “Larry? Dan Kearny here. I’m at...”
Tomeshti’s thick fingers depressed the hooks on the phone. Kearny laid those cold grey eyes on him once more.
“And my next call, Tomeshti, is to the guy you conned out of those three hundred TV sets.”
Kearny didn’t know if Tomeshti had conned the sets out of anybody or not, but it was a safe bet — and conmen were easily conned. Tomeshti slid the Seville keys across the counter.
Saying, “Goddam you,” in a heartfelt voice.
He followed Kearny silently out through the bedlam of the store, careful to arouse no hot-blooded rom hostility against him: what if the guy wasn’t bluffing? Sam Hood was the kind of man would live up to his name if he knew he’d been ripped off.
Wasso had left the Seville parked out in front as a sort of advertisement. Kearny opened the trunk and curbside doors.
“Please remove your personal possessions from the car.”
“Hey, listen, can’t we—”
“No.” Flat voice. No give. No leeway. “Just do it.”
Kearny watched as Tomeshti put his personal gear in a rather messy pile on the curb. Prospective customers were starting to gather around and watch also, highly diverted. In that neighborhood, repos were no novelty.
Wasso’s beautiful Seville pulled away, the radio blaring golden oldies. He turned sadly back to the store — and stopped dead. Facing him was brass-haired E. Dana Straub.
She bared all those teeth in a supposed smile. “I need the year’s lease payment in cash right now, Mr. Wells, instead of a check tomorrow,” she said with transparent ferocity.
Aw, hell.
Giselle Marc, back from Marin only twenty minutes ago, dropped the receiver onto the hooks and leaned back in her creaking swivel chair to slam a fist against her thigh in delight.
“Yes!” she exclaimed.
Still no callback from the limo people in L.A., but whammo! the St. Mark, the very first hotel she’d called (she’d had to start somewhere), had turned up an Angelo Grimaldi registered in one of their penthouse suites.
A day or two, scout his scam, take him down. But before that, using the wealth of information Teddy White, that sweet, simple, confused little rich boy, had just given her without knowing it, she’d take down his incredible Madame Miseria.
Yeah, she’d show Yana she couldn’t take Larry away from...
No, wait a minute, that was nonsense. This was strictly business. This was about purloined Cadillacs, not men.
Dammit, it was.
When the dice passed to Ephrem Poteet, he could feel a jolt like electricity run up his arm. He’d picked it up in the joint, had come to like it. And he just knew he was hot tonight.
“I shoot twenty,” he said. “Look out there, gimme room.”
Seven. He scooped up crumpled bills.
“Read ’em and weep, boys.”
The “boys” were another Gypsy and six gadje — three blacks, a Mexican, an Anglo, a Chinese — all of them in a closed poolhall on run-down Temple near Beaudry Ave. Poteet again rolled the dice out across one of the green felt tables.
“Gimme the news. Don’t hold nothing back!”
The dice bounced off Robert Byrnes’s classic, Standard Book of Pool and Billiards, resting on edge inside the far end of the table as a backstop, and tumbled to the felt showing two twos.
“Twenty says I can do it!”
He was covered. Rolled a nine.
“The point is four,” he chanted. He rolled again. “C’mon, little Black Joe. Hah! See that? I shoot the roll.”
The side bets were getting fierce. He rolled. Five.
“Feevy’s the point — fever in the south. I’m coming out.”
He came out. And sevened out.
Next point, eighter from Decatur.
Snake eyes. Crapped out.
And crapped out again... and again... and...
“Goddammit!” Ephrem Poteet muttered to himself.
He was trying to sober up (black coffee and chili dogs slathered with relish) in a little white tile, chrome and glass all-night hot-dog joint on Hollywood Boulevard. At the next table was a burly bearded man with a knitted cap pulled down over his ears and wearing heavy skiing mittens, reading that day’s LA. Times through sunglasses. Behind the counter was a soft-eyed Iranian who looked about 12 years old except for a fierce black mustache and a scar running down one side of his face from below his eye to the collar of his shirt. The place smelled of fried onions and dead hot dogs and stale coffee and sour milk.