Groner’s speaking voice was normally high-pitched; now it was pitched even higher, tumbling out excited words with fire-hose pressure and speed.
“Hell, Dan, you know the drill!” He was pacing again. “We make a big show of checking references, but it costs us a hundred bucks a head if we do a thorough credit check of all prospective car buyers. If we don’t check anything out, and prorate the collection and repossession costs over all our auto contracts, it costs us twenty bucks a head. So we trust the dealers’ credit managers to size the person up, make a few phone calls... But this...” He waved an unbelieving hand. “They hit every damn Caddy dealer in the Bay Area, every one!”
Giselle started to giggle. “Blue Skye Enterprises. All four accounts were in the name of—”
“Blue Skye?” Kearny had joined her at the coffee table to flick through the files. He looked up at Groner in amazement. “Come on, Stan, I know you don’t pay your bank officers very much, but when a guy waltzes in and wants to open an account called Blue Skye —”
“What can I say? Apparently he looks like Omar Sharif in his Doctor Zhivago days, and went to women AVPs in each case. All four still swear he just couldn’t have been conning them.”
“I’d like to meet this guy,” said Giselle thoughtfully.
Kearny was scanning the files as his computer brain was assessing, assimilating, relating with the bewildering speed of close to forty years — he’d ridden an old single-speed bike to his first repossession — of chasing deadbeats and absconders and embezzlers and outright thieves. He stiffened abruptly.
“Something?” Giselle asked with sharpened attention.
Groner was saying, “Cal-Cit Bank is out one-point-three-two-five million dollars, retail.”
Kearny was saying, “The names.”
Giselle checked the files again. She said in measured tones, “Oh... my... God...”
“I need those cars back to keep my job! I don’t care what you do to get them, how many laws you have to break, what—”
“What it costs,” inserted Kearny smoothly.
“I didn’t say that.” The kvetcher was magically transformed into the hard-nosed bank unit president again. “I can’t go over a flat rate per car of—”
“No flat rate. Ten percent of gross value recovered for each vehicle, dealer cost, with expenses over and above—”
“Ten percent!” Groner clutched at his heart dramatically. “How can you even suggest doing that to me?” He turned to Giselle as if to display his bleeding heart. “How can he even suggest ten percent to me? Me? Plus expenses, yet?”
“How about eight percent?” asked Giselle sweetly.
Groner looked over at Kearny. He said, “I thought she was with you.”
“So did I.” Kearny grabbed Giselle’s arm and hustled her into a corner of the room. “What’re you trying to do to me?”
“Show you how it’s done.”
She pulled free, went back across the room as Stan the Man began judiciously, “Eight percent, that doesn’t sound half—”
“Good enough,” Giselle agreed briskly. “I agree. Eight percent wouldn’t even cover field costs, let alone factoring in DKa’s agency expenses — prorated office overhead, field equipment upkeep and replacement, licenses, salaries, the various insurances we have to—”
“Overhead? Insurance?” Groner had his hands up in front of him, the left one vertical, the right palm-down, bouncing against the left’s stiffened fingertips. “Time out! Time out! You know the bank’s policy is to pay only a fixed repo fee to cover that stuff, plus field time and expenses, not—”
“Not this time,” said Giselle.
Kearny ventured, “Twelve-point-five would be—”
“Not nearly enough.” To Groner she said, “I don’t see us doing it for under twenty percent of gross recovery, Stan.”
“Twenty percent?” shrieked Groner. “Not even Christ come down from His cross to find our cars would get twenty percent! Okay, maybe, just maybe, twelve and a half, but...”
Behind Groner’s back, Kearny was signaling Giselle wildly to take it. She paid him no attention whatsoever.
“Seventeen-five-oh and a wonderful bargain, Stan.”
He crossed his arms on his chest in a gesture of finality. “I’ll have to go to Holstrom Auto Recovery Bureau if you won’t take... fifteen percent. That’s absolutely as far as I’ll go.”
“And all expenses.”
“And all expenses.”
“You’ve got a deal,” said Kearny very quickly. He added, “We’ll need keys for all the cars, tagged with vehicle I.D. numbers, model, and color...”
Groner nodded solemnly. He sighed.
“Why are you guys being so tough on this, Dan?”
Giselle said, “There’s just nothing in here for us to go on — just the dope on the cars from the dealers. Every reference is phony. Jobs, home addresses, friends, credit information — all of it is phony.”
“You don’t know that, you just know that the downs bounced. Yet here you are, demanding guarantees...”
“We do know that.” She glanced over at Kearny, who was silent, so she merely added, “Thirty-one Cadillacs, Stan.”
“Even so.” Groner had gone back behind the bastion of his desk. “There aren’t going to be that many new Cadillacs around this town with the dealer stickers still on them to justify—”
“Around this town?” Kearny looked up from trying to close the leather straps on the bulging briefcase. “Uh-uh. Nope.” He enlightened Groner with a single word. “Gypsies.”
Stan Groner stared at him for a full thirty seconds before muttering, “Dammit, Dan, it can’t be! I mean—”
“All thirty-one of them. Gyppos, working in concert.”
After a long moment of assimilation, Groner slowly nodded in acceptance of this horror — Kearny was the expert. He put his head down on his arms as if he were very, very tired.
Anyone involved in big-ticket retail sales knew that giving credit to one Gypsy was exactly like burning the money. So what was giving $1.325 million credit to thirty-one Gypsies like?
Chapter eight
“A license to steal, that’s what it’s like. I gotta hand it to you, Giselle.”
They were back at DKA, for some reason upstairs in the disused reception area from which the laundry’s billing had once come, rather than down at Kearny’s desk.
“Dan Kearny, if you try to put one of your fancy moves on Stan Groner after I as good as promised him—”
“We’re gonna have to be thieves, and tricky ones, to walk away from this one without a bloody nose.”
He spoke without his usual steamroller optimism. She had a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. She had been delighted with herself at that unbelievable fifteen percent of recovered value. Why, if you took $25,000 as a median dealer cost per car, DKA would be paid $3,750 per recovery, plus expenses. Even when Kearny had pointed out they were talking about Gypsies here, she had just assumed the Great White Father would have a dozen ways to break the universal Gypsy solidarity against gadje attempts to pry information out of them. But now...
“Damn good car thieves, you mean?” she ventured hopefully.
“I don’t know what I mean.” Kearny was stone-faced as always, but after all these years she could read him as she could a case file report. “This is a lot of cars and a lot of Gypsies, Giselle. Or maybe I’m just getting old.”