DKA File 04 32 Cadillacs by Joe Gores

Author:Joe Gores [Gores, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446562348
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-06-26T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

With Kearny gone off somewhere, Giselle had been stuck behind her desk all day. Now, 7:00 P.M., the after-school girls had abandoned the automatic typewriters, the skeleton night staff had arrived—and Giselle was still here. And cranky.

The limo outfit in L.A. hadn’t called back. Dan Kearny hadn’t called in, no idea where the big bum was. Ballard was probably playing footsie with his red-hot Gypsy mama and getting all sorts of hot leads, while Giselle hadn’t even time to ask any hotels if they had an Angelo Grimaldi registered, or to check out who Theodore Winston White III in Marin might happen to be.

And on top of everything else, she still hadn’t found a new cleaning service whose work she’d trust, and the scrap paper was piling up and… oh, to heck with it for tonight. She reached for her purse. Field men were in and out all night, but when she worked the office she liked to be gone before seven. As she stood up, her personal phone that didn’t go through the switchboard rang. Kearny. Finally. She picked up.

“Dammit, Dan, where are—”

“Yeah, where the hell is he?” Stan Groner. Pissed.

“Stan!” She put delight and surprise in her voice. “You’re working late. You want to talk with Dan? He just—”

“Don’t try to con me, Giselle. He missed a ten o’clock this morning, and Jane said he’s out of town. Now, where is—”

“Hot lead on the Gyppos,” she ventured promptly.

“Hot?” he asked in a slightly mollified voice, then turned hard again. As hard as Stan could get. “It better be hot. I’m getting a lot of heat myself, from the president of the bank.”

“Hey, we got three of them already, Stan. What do—”

“Three out of thirty-one.” He became his old querulous self. “What’d you guys do to that one Ballard got, Giselle?”

Since the Sonia Lovari lead had been dug up by Ballard, he had been credited with the Allante.

“We… he got it in front of an Indian bar, Stan,” she said over the clatter of auto typewriters in the big echoing room.

“Indian bar? The Gyppo sold it to an Indian?”

“No, no—her street scam is posing as an Indian. Collects for nonexistent Native American charities and keeps the money.”

“Jesus!” Giselle could almost see him shaking his head. “If they’d put that much energy into working they’d be—”

“Yeah. Rich. But would they have so much fun?”

“Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“The side with the big bucks.”

“Right answer,” he chuckled. “Listen, I want to see Kearny here tomorrow morning, ten o’clock. I mean it, woman.”

Giselle grimaced. She had put down her purse and gotten a cigarette lit while they had been talking.

“I’m not sure he’ll make it, Stan. To tell the truth, we’re not in communication with him right now. Will I do?”

“I wasn’t a married man, I’d take that as a proposition.”

“Sure you would,” she said, and laughed.

Giselle liked Stan, a lot, and knew he would back them as far as he could with the other bank officials. In the midst of her warm thoughts about him, he ruined her evening.

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