“Mr. Klenhard!” Crichton’s voice burst out. “Mrs. Klenhard! What is this all about?”
Staley quickly shut his eyes and played — almost literally — dead. Lulu quickly took over. “The meanin’ of what, Doctor? These are friends, relatives, come to pay their respects—”
“They’re Gypsies! You’re Gypsies!”
“Even Gypsies gotta have relatives and friends, Doctor,” she said reasonably. “They heard that my husband was sick, they come to pay their respects—”
“They’re destroying my hospital and I won’t have it,” said Crichton. “You have to get them out of here.”
Staley opened his eyes. He said in a weak voice, “Well, gee, Doc, if that’s the way you feel about it...” His voice quavered, his fingers plucked wanly at the coverlet. “I thought you was my friend...”
But Crichton was not to be swayed.
“I’m sorry, but you’ve gotten your settlement from the insurance company, a very fine settlement, and you now can afford private care facilities if you have not recovered...”
From the corridor outside came a nurse’s voice.
“Make way here, please! We have a patient here. Make way, please. Coming through...”
There was stirring in the Gypsies crowding the doorway and spilling out into the corridor. A gurney was thrust through them into the room. On it was a sheet-covered middle-aged man with grey hair and a heavy face and a strong profile. He was very pale, and looked almost as sick as Staley was pretending to be.
“This man is post-op and needs quiet to recover from surgery,” said Crichton. “I have to ask your friends—”
He was drowned out by angry denunciations from the Gypsies, who were, however, in their turn drowned out by Lulu’s voice.
“Romale — men of Romany.”
The formal salutation grabbed their attention; silence fell. The nurse, ignoring them all, was transferring her patient from the gurney to the bed. Lulu was going on in quieter tones.
“This man, he’s sick, he’s got a right. If you stay, you gotta be quiet...”
Staley opened his eyes again. In his weak voice, he said, “Tonight, at the encampment, I’m gonna choose my successor...”
His eyes drooped shut and he fell silent. The nurse completed her work with the patient in the next bed, and she and Crichton departed.
Out at the encampment a feature writer from the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune, calling herself Gerry Merman, was interviewing Gypsies for an in-depth look at the ritual of choosing a new King. She was a tall blonde and she was getting a lot of good stuff from the rom women. Gypsies are never averse to sympathetic publicity, and this one was a sucker for their stories and opinions.
“Honey, we Gypsies gotta live together because we can’t make it apart.”
“What about love affairs with gadje?” asked the reporter in an oddly nervous voice.
“Sure, some of us have ’em — but they never last,” said a young girl who looked like a heavily made-up disco queen. “I had a gadjo lover once, but I was too lonely.”
“Join the group,” said Merman.
Everybody laughed.
A girl recently married, alone with her, said, “I gotta get pregnant quick as I can. Right now I live with my husband’s parents, and it’s killing me. I’m just a servant to them.”
It was the old women, however, who were most vocal — and most opinionated. One who called herself Aunt Bessie invited Merman into her trailer for tea. She waved a vile cigar while explaining why the Gypsies stayed apart from the mainstream.
“We send our kids to your schools, what happens? They get beat up! Or they get raped by black men! I’d be crucified like Jesus before I’d let my granddaughter go to school.”
Scribbling madly in her reporter’s narrow fat notebook in shorthand learned as a part-time after-school girl working at DKA, Giselle found herself wishing she really were a journalist. Some of the stuff she was getting was really good.
Well, she wasn’t a journalist. She was a detective.
And a woman, too. A woman not getting what she so desperately desired, a glimpse of Rudolph Marino.
Or even a glimpse of the pink Cadillac; because wherever that car was, Rudolph would not be far away.
Chapter forty-five
It was dusk and nearing the end of visiting hours when the nephew of the sick man in the next bed arrived for a visit. A tall blond man with strong features, he plumped his uncle’s pillows while telling all about his trip from Nebraska.
“I drove straight through so I could see you tonight. My partners already had left for California with the merchandise.”
“Terrif!” exclaimed the sick man. His voice was remarkably strong for one operated on that afternoon.
Meanwhile, Staley was about ready to depart for the encampment. He held out a shaky hand to his wife. “My love, can you find a gurney for them to...”
“HIM!” yelled a Gypsy just coming into the room. All eyes turned to him, but he was pointing at the nephew of the sick man in the other bed. “He’s THE CAR THIEF WHAT TOOK MY CADILLAC!”
Tucon Yonkovich never got to finish. Larry Ballard hit the doorway running, bursting through the gathered Gypsies like flood stage through a dam. Half a hundred Gypsies took out after him, shrieking their wrath. Even Staley, forgetting the iron-haired, iron-faced man in the other bed, hit the floor running to go see the fun.
“Staley!” yelled Lulu in warning.
He turned to stagger back to bed, but it was much too late.
“Remarkable recovery,” said Dan Kearny with a hard-faced grin. “Almost miraculous.”
Staley gave a little shrug — what could he do? He’d just forgotten himself after all those weeks in that goddamned bed.
“You too,” he said.
Kearny nodded. “How you gonna keep the Gyppos from finding out you’ve been scamming them from the beginning?”
He was at the closet taking out his clothes. Staley made a gesture and Lulu went out, closing the door behind her.
“How indeed?” said Staley tentatively.
Larry Ballard was running for his life on the floor below, a corridor full of Gypsies in hot pursuit. He kept trying to slow them down by throwing anything he could find into their path — a waiting room lamp, an abandoned gurney, an unused Murphy stand without any plastic IV bottles, an empty laundry hamper.
But whoever he took out of the chase, there were fifty still in it. Seeking the emergency stairs, he skittered into a cross-corridor under the nose of a nurse wheeling an old gentleman in a wheelchair with a blanket across his knees. He’d hit full stride before he realized he’d turned the wrong direction. The stairs were the other way.
Rooms right and left, worse traps than the hallway, linen closet, ditto, rest rooms, ditto, the shouting throng was closing in on him, the dead-end wall loomed ahead.
With an open window. Ballard started to yell when he was ten feet from it, hit his stride like a hurdler, leaped out feet-first, ready to tuck and roll when he hit the ground below. Instead, with a bone-jarring impact, he landed right in the backseat of an open convertible tucked away behind the hospital.
“OOOF!”
The car leaped forward. Ballard could hear the diminishing yells of the Gyppos hanging out of the window behind him, even as he felt himself over for anything broken. The driver jerked around to stare wide-eyed over his shoulder at whatever had landed in his car. The driver was Rudolph Marino! The car was the pink Caddy! Recognition widened the eyes of both men.