The chili dogs and coffee weren’t working. Or were working too well. Poteet was coming down and didn’t want to. In the crap game he’d lost his case money, the day’s take from Universal, and the $100 in the mail from DKA the night before.
Goddammit.
A stack of photographs was slapped down to splay out across the shiny red Formica tabletop. Photos shot at Universal that very morning. He was in every one of them, every time with his hand in somebody else’s pocket or pocketbook. The voice jerked his eyes up to the man just settling down across from him.
“I turn these over to the cops, Poteet, and it won’t be back to T.I. for another vacation. It’ll be serious time upstate at Q for you, pal.”
The grey-haired old camera freak from Universal! Poteet half started from his chair. He’d knock the bastard down, knee-drop him to smash in his goddam ribs, snatch the photos...
“I wouldn’t,” said the man in a disinterested voice.
Poteet already knew he wouldn’t. He never did. Women, yeah. Them he could hit. Them he could beat up. But other men... He always thought he would, but when it was down-and-dirty in some alley... or in some Hollywood hot-dog joint...
He sat down again, heavily. He never had any luck. “Aw, Jesus Christ!” he moaned in disgust, almost to himself.
“No. Dan Kearny.”
Dan Kearny! During the years he’d been selling information to Dan Kearny over the phone, and hearing stories about him, the man had assumed almost legendary status in his mind. Kearny had once found a relative of Poteet’s hiding in Palm Springs under her brother’s wife’s maiden name.
The capped and gloved man at the next table suddenly heaved himself to his feet, glaring at them, and stalked away to a farther table muttering, “Goddam zoo at feeding time!” Kearny was picking up the photos and stuffing them into his inside jacket pocket. He tapped the pocket.
“These were just to get your attention — if you give me everything you have or can get on those Gyppo Cadillacs. Right now. Without stringing it out or getting tricky with me.”
“And you want it all for free,” said Poteet bitterly.
“No, our original terms stand. What I want it, is NOW.”
Hey, maybe there were angles to be worked here. He drank coffee, tried to figure percentages... and tried to meet those bleak eyes. No. Too much danger in them. As if to confirm it, Kearny again tapped the picture pocket suggestively.
Poteet sighed. “How’d you make out with Tomeshti?”
“In the barn.”
Of course. He wouldn’t have expected anything less from Dan Kearny. He leaned forward across the table, his decision made. Play it straight all the way. Dump the bag for Kearny and get more for him later. And from him. Hell, at $100 a car, Ephrem Poteet would make out all right.
“Okay. Seattle. Chicago. And tomorrow right here in Beverly Hills.”
Chapter twenty-five
It was midmorning of the next day. O’B drove his company car sedately along Bay shore Boulevard. At the foot of Geneva was the railroad siding from whence, if the circus was in town, elephants would parade trunk-and-tail, trunk-and-tail, all the way up to the Cow Palace from the Barnum & Bailey train.
O’B loved the circus. But he wasn’t after elephants today.
Gyppo Cadillacs. In fact, one particular hypothetical Gyppo Cadillac O’B had deduced was out there in the same way that an astronomer who sees there isn’t anything in a particular patch of space deduces it is holding a black hole.
The trail had been tortuous, but then O’B had a tortuous sort of mind. His last two days had been spent chasing a set of assumptions that went something like this: (1) since the Gyppos who had conned the $5,000 check out of Doc Swigart had then (2) turned around and blackmailed him into giving them (3) the medical documentation needed for storefront phone rooms from which (4) the Cadillac scam had been worked, then (5) it stood to reason that these same Gyppos already would have ended up with (6) one of the purloined Cadillacs as a reward. Right? Right.
That was the Cadillac O’B wanted.
First, he’d gone back up to Sonoma yet again to talk with the soils engineer named Oleson who owned that old Stampe biplane the Gyppos had so blithely sold to Rob Swigart. Oleson, alas, had never laid eyes on them so he couldn’t confirm Swigart’s description. But the kid who pumped gas for the airplanes maybe had and maybe could. At least he remembered a swarthy man and woman hanging around for a couple of days and driving an old car.
Aha! An old car! Please, let the kid be a car freak.
He was. Rusty old ’74 Plymouth Road Runner, green, with a wide flash running back from the headlights along the side under and then up behind the window to the roof. O’B remembered those Road Runners — he’d picked up enough of them for Fellaro Dodge/Plymouth/Chrysler on Geary Boulevard during their heyday.
He dared barely whisper it: license number, maybe?
And would you believe, the kid had a partial plate because it wore the same digits as the license on his Harley: 444.
Of course just the digits, without the letters, were useless, because there had to be about a zillion different three-letter combinations on California license plates ending in 444.
Dead end in Sonoma. But what about San Francisco? The reluctant Doc Swigart should have gotten back his canceled $5,000 check by this time.
Swigart, now that O’B wasn’t really a P.U.C. investigator, didn’t want to cooperate. O’B picked up the phone to call the worthy doctor’s wife and tell her all about how stupid her husband had been. Then, like magic, Swigart managed to dig out the canceled check.
Used to open an account (closed again as soon as the check had cleared) at an American West Bank on Geneva Ave near the Cow Palace. The check endorsed on the back with, and the account briefly opened in the name of... Tucon Yonkovich!
A Gypsy name. Could Tucon be guilty of one of those gaffes even the best occasionally make when dealing with doctors — whose credulity is legend among conmen because they believe they can never be wrong? Could Tucon have chanced his real name because he needed the check to clear before it could be stopped?
O’B stayed on the line while SRS in Sacramento computer-checked DMV records for possible driver’s license and auto registration data linking Yonkovich, Tucon, with a 1974 Plymouth Road Runner whose plate ended in 444. Yeah! Tucon had been thusly stupid. Such a car was registered to him in the 300 block of Oriente, Daly City — which O’B knew lay just south of the San Mateo County line near the Cow Palace. As the bank where Tucon Yonkovich had cashed Swigart’s check was near the Cow Palace.
By now the Road Runner doubtless had been sold to somebody in a bar; but eventually the Caddy should turn up at that address.
A wrecking crew was tearing down an old white frame house in the 300 block of Oriente. For one dismal moment O’B feared it was his house: the subject address. No. Four doors away. And squatting right on the subject address was a new Eldorado two-door notchback with paper plates. What could be sweeter?
O’B, pulses quickening though he’d done this thousands of times, parked his company car around the corner and got out with his ring of keys coded to all of the Gyppo Cadillacs.
The Eldorado was unlocked with the driver’s-side window down. O’B began running his keys, not even bothering to shut the door — the window was frozen open until he found the right key, anyway. Besides, Gyppos were talkers, not fighters, and O’B figured he could hold his own with any talker who ever lived.