Cons, Scams, and Grifts

by Joe Gores

  “We don’t have any openings right now, but . . .”

  “It is nothing like that.” She sat down unbidden in the chair across the desk. She had a great deal of natural dignity. “I must find Trinidad Morales.”

  The usual sad little boy-girl story? This girl somehow didn’t seem the type to get into trouble, but Giselle spoke as if she had never heard the name before.

  “Trinidad Morales? I’m afraid I don’t—”

  “He works here. He is a repoman. I was his driver on the night of the repossessed Acura. Some men want to kill him.”

  “Kill him?”

  “They are led by my brother.”

  It suddenly made sense. The gang that had beaten Morales almost to death had been led by a Latino bent on vengeance for a wronged sister.

  “Last Saturday night he came into the pizza place where I work. He did not know I would be there. My brother and his compadres were there and chased him, but he escaped.”

  Giselle hadn’t seen Morales all day. “Are you sure?”

  “Sí. They came back afterward, very angry because he got away. They do not know he works here, so you must tell him— do not go home. Be careful. They truly plan to kill him.”

  Giselle leaned back in her swivel chair.

  “I think you’d better tell me everything,” she said.

  “I would be honored,” said Milagrita with a suddenly dazzling smile.

  Afterward, Giselle pointed to the private phone on her desk, the one that didn’t go through the switchboard.

  “Milagrita, you ever need me, you call this number, okay?”

  They were having tea. And even in that postage stamp of an apartment, pouring from an old ceramic teapot with a tannin-browned crack running down its bulbous side, Geraldine was doing a splendid job of it. She might cry again when she was alone, Larry knew, but meanwhile she was the perfect hostess.

  He began, “So you were working at a mortuary . . .”

  “The chic San Francisco beauty salons wouldn’t hire me.” She gestured down at her ample self. “The mortuary was all I could get. I hated it, all those poor dead people . . .”

  Ballard drank tea and ate butter cookies while she told him how she had met Yasmine Vlanko at Sappho’s Knickers—Yana, obviously, the recognizable rose by any other name. Yasmine had promised a great change in Geraldine’s life if she quit her job. She did, and lo and behold, here came the job at Jeanne-Marie’s—where Geraldine had been turned down flat the previous year.

  “This Yasmine Vlanko, where might I find her?”

  “I don’t know how to reach her.” She was blushing; true love was rearing its beautiful head. “Oh, how I wish I did!”

  So did Ballard. Yana had wanted something this girl had, and for damn sure it wasn’t lesbian love.

  Yana emerged into Sutter Street from Brittingham’s Funeral Parlor with Becky Thatcher’s long strides, and the caution made necessary by last Friday night’s glimpse of Rudolph Marino. Tonight, this very minute, he might be waiting around the corner on Polk Street. But she had a debt to pay.

  She stopped at a mom-and-pop grocery store for a purchase, asking the Punjabi proprietor to open the can for her and put on it one of the pink plastic covers displayed by the cash register. In Olive Alley behind the Greek café, she removed the taffy-colored wig and put it in her bag.

  “Me sem athè,” she said in low-voiced Romani. “I am here.”

  The big feral tomcat leaped up lightly from a garbage pail to balance on the windowsill with his broad whiskered face a foot from Yana’s. He stared at her with his one golden eye.

  “What have you to tell me?” she asked, still in Romani.

  The cat seemed to purr and meow at the same time. Yana shut her eyes to let the images pass behind her lids. Yes. Somehow she knew positively that Rudolph had seen her. Then why hadn’t he . . . She opened her eyes. Even from here she could see a reddish brown smear on the far wall, some sprinkles on the alley floor. Dried blood. A meeting. Rudolph. The cat.

  She straightened up and ran her hands through her long black hair, untangling it where it had been stuffed up under the wig. She dragged the heavy black mane across the cat’s back.

  “Čin tu jid’, cin ádá bálá jidin,” she said to him. “So long live thou, long as this hair shall live.”

  She removed the pink plastic top from the big can of tunafish, set it on the lid of one of the garbage pails, returned the wig to her head, and left the alley, her obligation discharged.

  Larry Ballard was halfway through a light karate workout at the Ninth Avenue dojo when the answer struck him. Geraldine told him more than she realized over tea two hours earlier. He hurried through his shower, jumped into his clothes, perfunctorily bowed to his sensei, and trotted the three blocks to his car.

  Yana’s meeting with Geraldine at the lesbian bar had not been just a chance encounter. She knew just what sort of mumbo-jumbo would get Geraldine to quit her job, so, after finding Geraldine a better job with JeanneMarie, Yana could take the mortuary job. A great place to hide out, disguised and under a phony name. Okay, so his logical construct only suggested that she might be working at Brittingham’s, but he was sure he was right.

  Thirty seconds after Yana disappeared into Polk Street, Ballard parked in the lot for Brittingham’s Funeral Parlor on Sutter. He paid his respects to the remains of a Mrs. Henrietta Henderson, whom he had never seen before, dead or alive. Lugubrious Carter Brittingham IV was waiting to shake the mourners’ hands as they emerged from the viewing room. Larry contrived to be the last one out.

  Brittingham said unctuously, “She has gone to a better place.”

  Ballard nodded, a dumb show of grief, then brightened.

  “Auntie Henrietta sure looks natural, doesn’t she? Whoever did her hair and makeup is a true artist. I’d really like to thank her for making Auntie look so good.”

  “Our cosmetician? Sorry to say, she’s gone for the night.” Then Brittingham was moved to an incautious moment of genuine emotion. “Yes, she’s a jewel, isn’t she? A, um, er, hillbilly girl from Arkansas named Becky Thatcher . . .”

  Ballard felt an unexpected emotional wrench. Becky Thatcher. The heroine of Tom Sawyer. When he first met Yana at her mother-in-law’s boojo room in Santa Rosa almost eight years ago, Yana was teaching herself to read. She was doing it with a dictionary and a simplified grammar-school edition of Tom Sawyer.

  thirty-five

  Dan Kearny and Knottnerus-Meyer flew into Monterey in a high-winged ARV Super2 with a tricycle landing gear suitable for the small wind-blown airport. If security conditions at Xanadu were satisfactory, the Baron would jet back to Germany over the Pole in the morning. If not, then . . . Well, he hadn’t confided what his next step would be if his findings were negative.

  The Baron seemed happy to let Dan Kearny do the driving of the rented Nissan Xterra SUV that awaited them at the airport.

  “I haff an international driver’s license, but I’m used to dot Autobahn. I haff heard dis Big Sur iss very . . . rustic.”

  “Where we’re going sure as hell is,” agreed Kearny.

  He was dressed for the backcountry; hanging from his neck were the binoculars he used at the racetrack. One of his lace-up hiking boots had a survival knife scabbard stitched to the outside. The scabbard was empty: Kearny had burned a hole right through the knife’s blade trying to jump-start a repo with a bum solenoid one stormy night on the north coast above San Francisco.

  The Baron was dressed as if he were going grouse-hunting, right down to one of the plaid deerstalker caps made famous by Sherlock Holmes. All he lacked was a shooting stick.

  Kearny began, “Should we call ahead to let them know—”

  “Our arrival must be a surprise,” stated the Baron coldly. “Vut sort uff security expert are you?”

  Not much of one, thought Dan, but he said, “They already know we’re coming, right?”

  “Not de day uff our arrival.” Knottnerus-Meyer paused dramatically. “Today is
s dot day.”

  Dan drove out the Carmel Valley through rolling horse country with rambling houses perched on the hillsides. Some thirty miles south, well into the rugged pine-covered terrain flanking the eastern slope of the Los Padres National Forest, he pulled off to consult the map.

  “Our road turns west into the Coast Range at a T-junction just short of a little burg called Sycamore Flat. Exactly two point three miles from the junction our gravel track goes off to the north.”

  It did. Immediately, it began climbing and twisting through a stately mixture of hemlock, fir, and blue spruce. Kearny put the SUV into four-wheel. Knottnerus-Meyer screwed his monocle into his eye, took a deep breath of the bracing air.

  “De Black Forest iss more orderly,” he observed.

  Kearny took the Xterra around yet another hairpin turn to yet another switchback and mashed the brakes. They skidded to a stop in a cloud of grey-white dust two feet from a partial road cave-in. He backed and filled, turned, went on.

  Knottnerus-Meyer, who had been hanging on with whitened knuckles, said abruptly, “Brachiation proved to be de key to de survival uff de great apes.”

  “Brachiation?” asked Dan.

  The Baron unclawed his right hand from the crash bar to wiggle his fingers in illustration.

  “Using deir hands. Svinging below de branch rather dan running along de top uff it. De apes dat made de adaptation survived, dose dot did not vent extinct. At least tventy-two pithecoids disappeared, thirteen species in Africa alone.”

  “I’m really glad to hear that,” said Dan.

  “Goot! You make another joke!”

  Another rise put them at the top of the world. Dan stopped the Xterra. To the east was spread out California’s great central valley, robbed of detail by distance. Far beyond was the Sierra, a long dark uneven band running along the horizon.

  To the west, the Pacific. The horizon was ruler straight, two blues meeting without mingling, so distant the surface looked like glass. Closer in, Kearny knew, breakers would be smashing on black rocks, spume would be flying, gnarled black Monterey cypresses would be twisted into frozen agony by the never-ending wind, gulls would be swooping and skirling like bagpipes against the clamor of the sea. Up here all was stillness and serenity.

  “Looks like we made it,” said Kearny.

  “Magnificent!” breathed Knottnerus-Meyer. The monocle had fallen from his eye to dangle forgotten on his chest.

  They were at one end of a vast mountain meadow. Close-packed sedges and grasses waved in the cool high-country air. At the far end stretched ten acres of achingly green grounds dotted with artfully planted shrubs, bushes, and hardwoods, crowded on three sides by pine forest. All of it enclosed by a formidable cyclone fence.

  Dan raised his binoculars, adjusted them. Around the inside of the fence ran a single-lane dirt vehicle track. No petunia borders for Victor Marr. Their gravel road wended its way across the mountain meadow to stop abruptly at an electrified gate topped with barbed wire. The glaring white three-storied flat-roofed futuristic building in the center of the compound could have been a mortuary.

  A guard was strolling a pair of leashed Dobermans along the crushed-gravel walk between the building and the gate. Kearny lowered his glasses. “You’d need an army to bust in there.”

  “Indeed.” Knottnerus-Meyer abandoned his monocle for a pair of miniature opera glasses from his jacket pocket. After a moment, he lowered them. “Indeed,” he said again.

  Larry Ballard’s props were few: a blue windbreaker hanging open over a tieless white shirt; dark glasses; a billed delivery-man’s cap from the DKA personal effects storage room; and a bouquet of long-stemmed calla lilies from a Sutter Street florist.

  He waited in his car until Carter Brittingham IV went to lunch. Wouldn’t do for Brittingham to run into the grief-stricken nephew of poor old Mrs. Henderson so soon again.

  Ballard picked a name off the list inside the mortuary door, poked his flowers and capped head into the reception room. A somberly dressed woman in her 30s was using her handbag mirror to put on cherry-red lipstick. Mirror and lipstick were whisked from view when Larry spoke.

  “Paul Weissman?”

  She consulted her own list. Her half-made-up mouth made him think of Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns.” “Viewing room six at seven-thirty this evening. I can take those flowers—”

  “No can do. I gotta personally deliver ’em to a Ms.… ah, Becky Thatcher. For inclusion in Mr. Weissman’s casket.”

  “With the Beloved?” She looked mildly surprised, then shrugged, losing interest. “The stairs at the end of the hall, past the NO ADMITTANCE sign. She’ll be down there somewhere.”

  Larry tipped his cap to her—a nice touch, he thought—and turned away. She was already bringing the lipstick and mirror up from below her desktop. She wouldn’t remember him past the Kleenex blot of the lips. Good. A short attention span was one of the great boons to private detectives.

  At the foot of the stairs was a door that, when opened, led into the embalming room. The cold white sterile blare of overhead fluorescents wiped out every shadow. Ballard squinted his eyes against instant headache and crinkled his nose against the acrid chemical odors of old-fashioned embalming.

  A husky kid with a shaved head and a ring in his ear was bending over a cadaver on a stainless steel table, scalpel in hand. He whirled at Larry’s entrance, advanced with menace.

  “You can’t come in here!”

  “Mind the scalpel, I’m not dead yet.” Hell, hadn’t he won a fight with a Gypsy knife-juggler? “I’m supposed to get these flowers to a Becky Thatcher. You don’t look like her.”

  After a moment, the man shrugged and pointed with the scalpel. “She’s prettying up a stiff in the next room.”

  The tiled floor had a large circular meshed drain in the middle of it. Larry eased an eye around the edge of the window in the door the embalmer had indicated. If she saw him she would split. In the next room a white-smocked, taffy-haired woman was applying eyeliner to a dead woman wearing a green taffeta dress. Taffy-Hair stepped back to get the effect of her ministrations, and was Yana.

  Larry turned away, flowers still in hand, the harsh light behind him casting his shadow through the window onto a pastel wall. Upstairs, he put the calla lilies on a casket in a viewing room, and departed. The great Yana hunt was over.

  Yana had glanced toward the door to the embalming room just as some deliveryman with an armful of flowers was turning away from the observation window. The silhouette of his exaggerated profile on the wall gave her Larry Ballard’s nose and chin despite his peaked cap and sunglasses.

  She was already taking off her crisp white medical coat and surgeon’s gloves. A year or two ago, when DKA took thirty-one Cadillacs away from the Gypsies when nobody else could even find them, she had been impressed. Especially with Larry. Now, when the Gypsies had to find Yana in the gadjo world, who would they turn to? DKA, of course.

  Devèl, Ballard was good at what he did! But it didn’t matter how he’d found her. She had to be gone from here and from her room at the Columbine within the hour. She was so fast out of Brittingham’s that she saw Ballard’s broad, tapered back as he walked up Sutter toward his car. She turned the other way, toward Polk Street. To go where? No enchanted alley cat to help her out this time. But maybe . . . just maybe . . .

  The uniformed guard was waiting for Dan and the Baron with the two Dobermans outside the closed gate. He had his holster flap unbuttoned and his hand on his pistol butt. The guard dogs strained at their leashes with delighted fury. An open Jeep raced from behind the building on the dirt track inside the perimeter fence.

  The Baron said, “Ve shall please to get out now.”

  Kearny opened his door, the guard released the dogs. Dan jerked his leg back in and slammed the door just as the Dobermans smashed against it. But damned if Knottnerus-Meyer hadn’t already opened his door and was stepping out.

  “Dogs are genuine optimists,” he said. “Alvays
cheerful.” The dogs flew around the front of the SUV to attack. Dan had to admit some slight hope the man would get mauled. He was so damned smug, so sure of himself, so damned . . . Teutonic.

  But the Baron said in a low voice, “Are ve so ill-behaved?”

  Hecate and Charon skidded to a stop. Hecate rolled over onto her back, legs in the air. Knottnerus-Meyer leaned down and scratched the proffered tummy. Kearny got out of the SUV gingerly. The guard pressed forward, angry and astounded. The Baron straightened. The mild look was gone. He screwed in his monocle, suddenly extremely Prussian.

  “Your top shirt button iss open,” he said coldly. “Your boots do not haff a sufficient shine. Your uniform does not haff a sufficient press.” He gestured at the fawning Dobermans. “Choke collars on guard dogs are not permitted at dis facility.”

  Just then the Jeep came tearing up the dirt track to skid to a stop, spilling out a burly uniformed figure. He had a gun at his belt and a swagger stick in his hand.

  “YOU SON OF A BITCH!” he yelled.

  thirty-six

  R.K. Robinson, the veins standing out at his temples and his big jaw muscles knotted, was not looking at the surprised Knottnerus-Meyer. He was glaring at Dan Kearny.

  “R.K.,” said Dan affably, “long time no see.”

  “Not long enough, you fuck,” snarled R.K.

  The gate guard was relaxed now, the dogs along with him. The Dobermans sat on their haunches watching the proceedings with interested eyes and their tongues hanging out.

  A few years back, following his stint as a Walla Walla state prison guard, R.K. had drifted south to San Francisco and Dan had hired him as a repoman with DKA. He was big enough, and tough enough, and had to have some moderately hairy balls to have been a screw at Walla Walla. But he didn’t work out. R.K. needed structure in the workplace. Rules and regulations posted on the wall, on-shift at eight, off at five, chicken on Sunday, a gun on his belt and a nightstick to slap against his palm.