Cons, Scams, and Grifts

by Joe Gores

  “How we gonna get them to do our looking for us? Last time around they was hunting us down like dogs.”

  “This time around we’re gonna hire ’em,” chortled Staley.

  twelve

  The spring fog came over the crest to flow down the eastern slopes of the Coast Range, and it was a dark and stormy night.

  Well, not stormy, but man was it dark. And foggy. Bart Heslip pulled into a closed Standard station on Woodside Road to study his battered Thomas Guide Atlas for San Mateo County. Keep on Woodside right through town, maybe a mile, and Bear Gulch Road went off to the right.

  Beyond town it was inky, no streetlights: horse country, big-tree country, sprawling-estate country. Most of the roads and lanes and drives leading off Woodside didn’t seem to have any street signs on them, at least not street signs that Bart Heslip was able to see.

  Out near Sears Lake, Woodside Road just . . . ended. He got turned around and went back, his wipers on intermittent, driving five miles an hour with his flashlight angled out the open window so he could eye every track and driveway and road coming in from, now, his left. Cold wet early-hours air brought grass and horse smells and beaded his face and sent a shiver through him.

  Finally. A brush-obscured sign: BEAR GULCH ROAD.

  He backed up, turned in. Narrow blacktop, twisting and turning up the slanting side of a tree-covered hill. Dark, dripping foliage, drifting fog. A quarter of a mile in, the road widened to a flat area the size of a basketball court, with a black steel gate set in concrete and flanked by chain link fences. By the gate was a board with a number pad beside an intercom phone. No good without the correct combination.

  Bart sighed, backed into the rear right corner of the lot, and settled down in the forlorn hope of somebody coming in or going out of Bear Gulch Road at one in the morning.

  The 1995 Panoz kit car, sleek and low and gleaming ($39,995 on Giselle’s hotsheet), made a hard right past a redheaded guy asleep in his car on Toyon and into the carport to park over the oil stain O’B had noted earlier. The car was one of the greatest tools in Tim Bland’s seduction kit, but not the only one. Tim was in his early thirties with dark good looks and crisp shiny black hair and bright very direct blue eyes that sold many used cars to female customers; many found him handsome and slightly dangerous and went to bed with him. One would tonight.

  Bypassing his apartment, he walked down the blacktop in the drifting mist, his shoes scraping subdued echoes from the tarmac. He had sold the woman’s husband a Honda, one thing had led to another, so now he had something juicy and frustrated and available waiting right on his doorstep.

  He’d called ahead, so he went by the unlocked door and into the living room already rock hard. The night taxi driver’s blond wife was waiting for him, leaning forward over the back of the davenport wearing only black lace crotchless panties and a lascivious expression. He entered her from behind, spent almost immediately. They went into the bedroom and Bland sat down on the side of the bed to unlace his shoes. He had plenty of time to finish her off before her old man’s shift ended at 6:00 A.M.

  She knelt on the bed behind him.

  “You’ll get a kick, Mr. Wonderful said some redheaded guy woke him up in the middle of the day with a lot of questions.”

  “Yeah?” Bland spoke with scant interest. He had long since decided that you only had to seem to listen to women.

  “Questions about you.”

  Bland was suddenly all attention. “About me?”

  “What kind of car you drive, where you were, like that. Jake ran him off.” She reached around him with eager fingers. “Hurry up, honey, you got my motor running . . .”

  Bland was indeed hurrying. He was already off the bed, pulling up his pants. He had no doubt at all that the redheaded man asleep in his car up on Toyon was after the Panoz.

  “Listen, Vix, I gotta go. Be out of town for a few days.”

  “Whadda ya mean, outta town?” Anger was clouding her face. “You got your rocks off, what about my rocks?”

  Bland knotted his shoelaces. “Save ’em till I get back.”

  “Save ’em?” she shrieked. “Why you rotten . . .”

  Her curses followed him out of the house. There were a thousand Vixens in this world, only a few Panoz cars. Twenty minutes later he was swinging the sleek shiny auto up out of Toyon Court past poor slumbering O’B, who obviously had overpoured during his late lunch with Zack Zanopheros.

  Bart Heslip, out of his car to shadow-box beside the front fender, had just knocked out Oscar de la Hoya with a really nifty combination when approaching lights and swelling engine noise swung the Bear Gulch Road gate silently inward. Immediately after a Lexus exited, Bart drove through as the gate swung shut.

  The blacktop hairpinned back upon itself half a dozen times in the first mile of steep, heavily wooded hillside. A big mule deer buck, eight nascent points of velvet-covered scimitar antler adorning his head, poised on the edge of challenge in Bart’s headlights for two breathless heartbeats. Then he threw his black nose into the air and bounded off down the slope.

  Around another hairpin, so tight and steep there was a mirror set at its apex to let drivers see approaching vehicles, a pair of fat-butt raccoons scuttled across in front of him. Their masked bandit faces wore sneers and their beer bellies rolled from side to side as they scrambled up the slope with their thieves’ honor intact.

  Bart parked a dozen yards beyond the luminous numbers 7 and 2 tacked to a tree on the right-hand side of Bear Gulch. He killed engine and lights, sat listening to the night sounds and the creak of the cooling engine. Then, leaving Giselle’s hot-sheet on the front seat, he locked up his DKA Taurus and started back toward the driveway, disappearing down the hillside carrying only his repo tools and a flash.

  A petite orange tiger-stripe cat was sitting in rapt attention beside a decorative koi pond in front of the rambling redwood-and-stone house. Obviously the Pussy Galore purloined by Romeo Ferretti from his former partner Chuckie up in San Francisco. Big slow drifting submarine shapes below the dark surface held the cat enthralled. The good life, cat-style.

  Yeah! Bart’s careful flashlight showed the Ferrari parked in plain view, its nose against a stone-and-concrete retaining wall at the end of a widened-out parking apron. The top was up; moisture had collected on the sleek coachwork.

  No visible lights in the house, but their bedroom might be over the two-car garage facing the driveway. Bart boldly tried the driver’s side door. Unlocked. Didn’t even have to use his picks on the old-fashioned wind-wing such cars sported. When he opened the door, the light under the dash showed him a stubby between-seats gear shift. He reached in, popped it into neutral. Hand brake already set. He swung the door almost shut without slamming, so the interior light would go out. Piece of cake.

  That’s when the rude beast inside the garage started roaring and slamming itself against the closed overhead door. But Bart already had the Ferrari’s raised hood resting on his back, leaning into the engine compartment with his flashlight between his teeth. He clipped the hotwire to the distributor, found the hot post of the battery, laid the third prong of the wire against the double posts of the solanoid.

  rrrRRRrrr rrrRRRrrr rrrRRRrrr VROOOOOOOOOM!

  A window went up. He stepped back and slammed the hood.

  “Stop! Thief!”

  Stone chips flew behind his right shoulder, crack! and crack! again. Something touched his left ear with a hot finger. A third shot merely spattered more stone chips.

  A voice shouted, “No! Herb! My God, don’t shoot my car!” Bart had dropped and rolled in tight against the side of the Ferrari away from the house. Ablaze with excitement, he swung the door open above him and snaked himself into the driver’s seat. He’d never been shot at before—not in earnest. It was terrifying and exhilarating.

  He couldn’t back the low-slung Ferrari up to the street without bottoming out, and the bank wanted its car back in one piece. He did a classic bootlegger’s turn on the concre
te apron to end up facing the steep driveway for his run up the slope.

  A two-hundred-pound Rottweiler, obviously raised on raw liver—raw human liver—raced from the garage to launch itself at his still-open door. Bart kicked out savagely just as the massive beast left the ground. His heel slammed into the short crinkled nose, the dog spun away going yowp! yowp! yowp! in astonishment. People didn’t do that to him: he did that to people.

  Bright-beam lights shone in Bart’s rearview and another powerful engine roared behind him. Coming up into slanting Bear Gulch Road, he swung right, uphill, running without lights, racing past his own parked car. Over the crest, out of sight, stop!, kill the engine, hope they turned downhill.

  Downhill, his pursuers might catch up with him before the gate could open at his approach. Since the Ferrari was on no cop’s hotsheet, only DKA’s, they could shoot him and get away with it—but officer, we thought he was a car thief.

  He went on, using his lights now. Away clean. After a mile, he became aware of a dull throb in his nicked ear. Lucky the upholstery was leather. Easy to clean the blood off it.

  O’B came up behind the wheel of his car with a start. Four A.M., two hours after bar-close. Head full of ache, mouth full of the all-too-familiar dirty sweatsocks. He checked the carport. Empty. He groped in the glove-box for his emergency flask, tipped it up to his lips. Empty, too. Damn!

  Tim Bland wasn’t coming back tonight. Time to go find a twenty-four-hour gym with a sauna, soak out the alcohol. His wife, Bella, was going to be really pissed. O’B drove away into the fog.

  thirteen

  The fog had broken early; sunshine blessed the Marina District’s wide quiet morning streets. When Harriet Nettrick’s doorbell rang at North Point and Broderick, she saw on her terrazzo stoop two young nice-looking men she took to be Latino. Each carried a workman’s long metal toolbox. The panel truck in the driveway wore the familiar Water Department logo.

  She opened the door. The one with FRANK sewn above his tan uniform’s pocket said, “Mrs. Nettrick? We’re from the Water Department. A chemical contaminant has gotten into the pipes for this area and we have to eliminate it. Can we come in?”

  She opened the door. “My goodness, I hope it isn’t—”

  “The kitchen, ma’am?” He was all business. “Syd, you go check the upstairs bathroom.”

  Syd went up the stairs as Frank followed Harriet to the kitchen and across its old-fashioned inlaid white tile floor to the sink.

  “Could you get me a water glass, please, ma’am?”

  While holding the glass under the cold water tap he let a fragment of crumbled Alka-Seltzer slide down its inside, then turned to her with the glass of foaming liquid in hand.

  “This isn’t the way your water usually looks, is it?”

  Harriet put her hand to her breast in shock. “Oh my Lord!”

  Down on his knees in front of the sink, Frank opened his toolbox. It held wrenches and screwdrivers, rolls of soldering wire and electrician’s tape, and any number of odd-looking tools. For the next twenty minutes he was under there, twisting things, grunting, tapping metal tubing with the back of his small pipe wrench, having Mrs. Nettrick hand him a variety of objects from the tool kit. Finally Syd appeared in the doorway.

  Frank demanded, “Were the bathroom pipes corrupted?”

  “Level three.”

  “Same here. We got it in time!” He went back under the sink, tightened something, gave a couple of grunts, backed out awkwardly, stood up to wipe his hands on a maroon cloth from his back pocket. He rinsed out the glass, filled it anew, and held it up before Harriet’s dazzled eyes.

  “See that? Crystal clear.” And he drank it down to show her how innocuous it had become.

  Because they were such nice boys, who had saved her from who knew what lurking chemical horror, Harriet wanted to tip them even though they solemnly assured her it was not necessary.

  Several hours later she realized all her cash and credit cards from the purse she had left beside her easy chair in the living room were gone, as was the money from her bedside table. So were her silver and jewelry.

  At about the same time the kumpania took its share of Frank and Syd’s take.

  While Mrs. Nettrick was calling SFPD Bunco—much too late, of course—diminutive Midori Tagawa was almost selling sweet old Mr. Stabler the wrong size shirt.

  This was at the menswear department of the big fancy Nordstrom’s department store in the Stonestown Mall way out off 19th Avenue. The shirt was a red and black check lumberjack with a brown cloth log cabin sewn to the back of it. Midori was still heavy-lidded and almost languid from yesterday’s lovemaking with Larry Ballard, still unfocused.

  “Midori, are you sure that’s the right size for him?” asked a low voice in her ear.

  For a second Midori thought it was an inner voice, a Zen sort of thing, then realized it was the other saleswoman on the men’s department floor, a Guatemalan of Baltic origins with the exotic name of Luminitsa Djurik.

  Midori blushed and put her hand over the lower part of her face. She giggled nervously. “I no so good at sizes yet.”

  “I am,” said Luminitsa. She was a long-legged, slenderly voluptuous woman with long black shiny hair and dark exotic eyes and an oval face. She raised her voice so Stabler could hear her. “This shirt is preshrunk, sir, so there is no need to buy a size too large against shrinkage in the first wash.”

  “Say again, miss?” He gave them a small, sweet smile. He was short and shaky, but his faded blue eyes behind severe gold-rims bubbled with good cheer, and his silvery hair had an absolutely stunning pewter sheen. “The hearing’s the second thing that goes when you get old.”

  Luminitsa moved in for the kill, a warm big-sister smile on her gleaming red lips. Midori knew this was a common tactic, taking over the sale a new salesperson had already made and grabbing the commission. But she was secretly grateful: it was so easy to lose face by not pleasing a customer.

  “Grab those two young guys just coming in,” urged Luminitsa sotto voce as she turned away with the old man firmly in tow, her arm through his. Her dark eyes gleamed, her almond skin glowed. “You come over here, Mr. Stabler, I have some other things you’re just gonna love.”

  “Mr. Stabler, that was my dad,” he said spryly. “I’m Whit, that’s short for Whitney . . .”

  After she had sent Whit Stabler away with a shopping bag full of menswear, Luminitsa asked Midori, “How’d you do with those college kids?”

  “They no buy anythings. They just keep asking to take me out fo drink after work.”

  “You gotta be more aggressive, kid. You won’t even make your draw unless you get in there and make people want to buy. I put everything Whit bought on your number, by the way.”

  Midori’s hand started up to cover the bottom part of her face. “But I only talk to him about that one shirt . . .”

  Luminitsa pulled the hand back down.

  “You aren’t in the land of the rising sun here, kiddo. People think either you got bad teeth or you’re hiding something. Fair is fair, he was your customer. But next time he comes in he’s mine, girl!”

  “How you know he come back, Luminitsa?”

  “Once they’ve seen Luminitsa, they always come back.” Larry Ballard, he come back for more of Midori last night. Maybe he come back again tonight, too. He say he come back. Maybe he no able to get enough of Midori. But to be safe, she better make sure he didn’t see Luminitsa.

  The intercom buzzed. Victor Marr said curtly, “Yes?”

  “Hong Kong is on the scrambler phone, sir.”

  Marr picked up to hear Kahawa’s flat, dry, sibilant voice.

  “Marr-san, Brantley has heard rumors that the man in Europe is planning to try and recover what he considers his property.”

  “Does he know this man’s identity?”

  “No,” said Kahawa. “But he suggests you beef up security . . .”

  “My security up on the mountain is excellent,” said Marr col
dly.

  “Mr. Brantley has a great deal of experience in security matters—before the Colony was reunited with Mainland China. He has used a security specialist from Germany and found him very satisfactory.”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” said Marr. “Get his name for me, and I’ll hire him to double-check our precautions.”

  * * *

  Josh Croswell was a tall, slim man of 31, with a ready handshake and a smile full of wonderful teeth. Cultured and elegant outside of business hours, he had cried when Evelyn Cisneros retired as prima ballerina of the San Francisco Ballet. But when the young couple entered the store, he circled like a shark smelling blood in the water around a crippled seal. A pair of crippled seals; a lot of blood.

  Croswell’s jewelry patter was like the man himself, precise and practiced and so sincere. He knew little about fine gems, but the upscale tourists shopping this Post Street store knew less.

  This pair was almost laughably perfect. Computer types up from Silicon Valley to the big bad city to celebrate either an engagement or a wedding; and either way, ready, nay, eager to pledge their troth by spending some of that Internet IPO money. Almost as eager as Josh was to help them spend it.

  The man was maybe twenty-four, with dark hair parted in the middle and slicked straight back to give his face a surprised look. His glasses were heavy horn-rims and his fingernails were manicured.

  The girl could not have been over twenty-two, slight and honey-blond and shy, clinging to his arm as they came through the door. Life had not yet written any interesting messages on her perfect face, but she had a figure that deserved a porno Web site of its own. Not Josh’s gender of preference, but he could go either way. Right now he was strictly business, at his smarmy best.