“Listen, girlie, I got this one-eyed snake in my pants...”
Too much. She didn’t really mind whatever dirty little fantasies he might have about her, but it was intolerable he thought she might want to share them. This particular girlie was going to have to do something about Harry’s dirt...
“Okay, okay, you win — I’ll admit it, you’ve got me intrigued.” She added wickedly, “Come over to my place tonight, seven-thirty... I’ll leave the street door unlocked...”
Even as she had given him a phony name, so she gave him a phony address, that of the Sappho Self-defense Dojo. Ballard, brown belt that he was, had told her in slightly awed tones about this extremely militant feminist lesbian martial-arts support group on Clement Street.
When Dirty Harry Harrigan swaggered into the place that night without knocking, she was sure they would give him, if not the sort of evening he fantasized, almost certainly the sort of evening he deserved.
Chapter nineteen
As Giselle was dashing heatedly off in several directions at once to look for Angelo Grimaldi, Rudolph Marino, cool as geometry, was looking for her. Oh, not for her specifically, but, through his SFPD contact, for the repomen who had knocked off the two Gypsy Cadillacs over the weekend.
He used a St. Mark lobby payphone; by now he routinely phoned from his suite only for room service and wake-up because the switchboard would be monitoring his calls. He asked for his tame cop in the gruff voice snitches so often have.
“Marino,” he said when the man answered, gave the pay-phone number, hung up. When it rang three minutes later, he asked it, “What do you have?” then listened, nodding. “Morales... Marc... DKA? Which stands for... I see... Daniel Kearny Associates...”
He kept on listening. So Yana had been right. The same agency had picked up both cars. Bad news and good news. Bad news because the private detectives must indeed have figured out that it was Gypsies who had hit the bank for the Cadillacs. Good news because he could keep this information from Yana while feeding DKA information about her kumpania until she panicked and brought that ’58 ragtop into the open where he or his people could grab it...
“Giselle Marc?” he exclaimed to the phone, surprised.
One of the repomen was a woman? He grinned whitely to himself. There wasn’t the woman born he couldn’t get next to.
Well, maybe Yana.
“Gerry Merman... yes... I understand... a journalist doing a piece about Gypsies... I see... free-lance...”
He hung up, frowning. Then he smiled. Gerry Merman, writer. Giselle Marc, repowoman. He’d never heard of a repowoman, but he liked her moves, posing as a free-lance writer to get a line on Grimaldi without tipping DKa’s investigation. Free-lance, so if the cop had a highly unlikely I.Q. power surge and became suspicious, he couldn’t check out her cover story.
Just her bad luck that Harry Harrigan, SFPd’s Bunco Squad Gypsy specialist, also happened to be the cop in Marino’s pocket. But her good luck that now he, Rudolph Marino, soon to be King of the Gypsies, would be feeding her info about Yana’s kumpania.
Nothing about Stupidville, of course. If she learned of it, Giselle Marc sounded plenty smart enough to show up and grab some Caddies from a rom encampment called to name their new King upon the death of their old.
Their old King was not all that near death, actually, but Dr. Crichton, making his rounds, was worried about him all the same. Poor old Karl didn’t seem to have a lot of will to live, and now the department store’s insurance company was involved and insisting, in this age of skyrocketing medical costs, on more tests being run before they would okay even current expenses.
Bad for his patient, bad all around.
What Crichton didn’t know was that Barney Hawkins, Democrat National Assurance Company’s adjuster, was at that moment in Staley’s room shoving ballpoint pen and release form under his aged nose. Hawkins had bad teeth and was overweight, with just a fringe of hair around the back of his head as if he had been tonsured for the religious life. Shifty brown eyes that Staley met with a hurt and hurting old-man’s candor and bewilderment.
“Whazzis?” he mumbled in his overmedicated way.
“Just a release,” oozed Hawkins. “So your medical bills will be paid and you can stay here in this nice hospital until you’re all better.”
Staley had taken the pen, but now it slipped from his lax fingers and his head tilted down to one side as if he suddenly were dozing off from his medications. He gave a snore.
“Here, don’t do that. Just sign the form...” Victory seemed near and Hawkins made the mistake of grabbing an ancient shoulder and shaking him. “Hey, old man, wake—”
Staley reared up screaming. Hawkins jumped back, startled, to carom off the solid bulk of Lulu, who had been waiting in the bathroom for Staley’s shriek to bring her charging out.
“What you do to my husband?”
As she grappled with the dumbfounded adjuster, the door burst open and in rushed Crichton and the redheaded, freckled nurse who accompanied him on rounds.
“What’s going on in here?”
The nurse had Lulu by the arms to hold her back from Hawkins, who was exclaiming, “This crazy old broad attacked—”
“I was in bathroom, came out, he was shaking my Karl—”
“Shaking him?” Crichton, livid, shoved the adjuster back across the room. “You’re shaking him? This man has a spinal injury from a fall down an escalator and you’re shaking him?”
Staley moaned loudly from the bed. All eyes turned. “Want me to sign some paper,” said his wan old-man’s voice.
Crichton knew Hawkins only all too well. “A release form?”
“My Karl is not gonna sign no release forms,” Lulu said in loud abrupt tones. “The lawyer told me that he shouldn’t—”
“Lawyer?” cried Hawkins in alarm. “What lawyer?”
“The lawyer who said I should sign a paper with him.”
“Don’t do that,” said Hawkins with a terrible intensity. He’d had a shitty litigation loss-ratio last year, he didn’t need this. “Don’t sign any contracts with any lawyer—”
“Why not?”
“Well, ah, he’ll, ah, take half of what you get from us. He’ll, ah, cheat you. Just let us make you an offer and—”
Staley groaned again from the bed. Lulu said immediately, “My Karl in too much pain to be thinking about anything like that right now.”
“Out,” snapped Crichton, “everybody out. The nurse is here to give the patient a sponge bath.” He laid a gentle hand on Lulu’s shoulder. “You too, Mrs. Klenhard. Go get a cup of coffee at the cafeteria. Come back in half an hour or so.”
Outside in the corridor, Hawkins glowered after Lulu’s retreating form. “Y’know her old man’s faking it, Doc.”
“Nonsense.”
“I tell you he’s faking it.” He riffled the papers in his hand. “Not one X ray here that’s worth a damn.”
“Not unusual; patients with acute pain can’t lie still for X ray. I’ve conducted manual physical exams that more than—”
“Manual exams don’t cut it with me, Doc.”
“The man is nearly eighty years old! He fell down an escalator in a store you insure—”
“I want a spinal tap.”
After a long, angry pause, Crichton said icily, “I make the determination of which tests should be run on my patients.”
“Oh yeah? We’ve been through this before, Doc. I always go to the hospital chief administrator, and he always says...”