Cons, Scams, and Grifts

by Joe Gores

  A repoman out there in the field all by his lonesome had to make his own decisions. E.T. couldn’t phone home. R.K. couldn’t handle that. Kearny let him go.

  R.K. belatedly turned on Knottnerus-Meyer.

  “And just who the hell are you supposed to be?”

  The Baron drew himself up to his full impressive height that equaled R.K.’s, monocle and sneer firmly in place.

  “I am de expert brought from Chermany to examine de Xanadu security. Herr Marr hass informed you uff my coming. Vhy haff you not demanded to see my credentials?”

  “I, ah, oh, er . . . Mr. Marr briefed me on your description.”

  “How could he? Herr Marr hass not yet met me. My contact iss wit California-Citizens Bank.” He turned to snap at the guard, “You—vut are you gawking at? Return to your post. Ven your relief arrives, drife de vehicle back to de compound.” To R.K. he said, “Ve shall valk de grounds.”

  The trio walked across the tightly mown lawn toward the facility. R.K. was slapping his swagger stick across the palm of his left hand with exaggerated precision, rebuilding self-esteem.

  Kearny saw that the shrubbery had been planted well back from the wall, creating a six-yard-wide dead zone. He began looking for concealed sensors. Yep. He pointed out one of them as they passed beneath it. Knottnerus-Meyer followed his gaze.

  “Vut iss it?”

  “Infrared sensing devices in the trees with interlocking arc sweeps of the cleared areas. The sensors pick up the body heat and movement of even a squirrel and sound the alarms.”

  The Baron turned to R.K. “You shall please to demonstrate de vorkings uff dese infrared sensors.”

  “Yeah, sure, Baron—it’ll be my pleasure.”

  R.K. spun and threw a sudden right-hand uppercut at Kearny’s jaw. Dan slipped it. The momentum of R.K.’s missed punch carried him forward. Dan stuck out a foot. R.K. tripped over it and, arms semaphoring for balance, went down face-first.

  Sirens screamed. Whistles blew. There were startled shouts from inside the building.

  Even before he got up, R.K. was scrabbling at his belt. He got his cell phone up to his face, shouted into it, “FALSE ALARM! FALSE ALARM! THIS IS FADED ROSE PETAL! FALSE ALARM, GODDAMMIT!”

  “Faded Rose Petal?” asked Dan.

  R.K. scrambled to his feet. “Fuck you, you sack of shit!”

  “A most zatisfactory demonstration,” said Knottnerus-Meyer in an impeccably neutral voice. But Dan saw, or imagined he saw, a twinkle in his eye. At that moment Dan Kearny started to like the Baron. Who said, “Ve shall continue our tour.”

  Larry’s phone call caught Giselle once more at Kearny’s desk. He said, “Listen, I think somebody’s sleeping in the personal property room. I was up there this morning early to get a cap and the cot was messed up. When I came back, it had been made up.”

  Trin Morales, she thought. Had to be. Sacking out at DKA to avoid the pack of vengeful Latinos on his trail. She still hadn’t laid eyes on him, but she knew he was around. He was turning in field reports and had made a dandy dead-skip repo in the Castro over the weekend. But Larry didn’t need to know any of that, not the way he felt about Morales.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you,” she said. “Last Friday night Rudolph spotted Yana on Polk Street!”

  “Not surprising,” said Ballard. “Yana’s setting hair and painting faces on corpses at Brittingham’s Funeral Parlor in Sutter Street. I’m staked out here now to follow her home when she gets off work. I just got the lead yesterday.”

  “Lead from whom?”

  “Not our clients, that’s for sure. If Rudolph spotted her in Polk Street, why wasn’t the place flooded with Rom within fifteen minutes? There aren’t enough Gypsies in this thing, Giselle.”

  “Maybe because they think working in a funeral parlor is not a right livelihood for a Gypsy woman?”

  “We know damn well they think that. But Yana’s already marime. It’s about what they’d expect from her.” He paused. “I wonder if the rest of the Gypsies know Staley, Lulu, and Rudolph are looking for Yana?”

  “You mean like perhaps what they are really after is the money and stuff Poteet hid in the light fixture?”

  “Something like that. Looking for Yana on the sly. I’d sure as hell hate to turn her up for them and find out they plan to sell her to the cops for money or something.”

  “They wouldn’t . . .” Giselle ran down. She said slowly, “They didn’t tell us about Ephrem picking pockets at Marine World, did they?”

  Art Gallery A was on Xanadu’s first floor. Kearny was no connoisseur, but even from the doorway he recognized the quality of the tapestries that covered the temperature-controlled walls. Knottnerus-Meyer was staring at one depicting the Christ child in his mother’s arms, holding a chalice made of gold thread crusted with woven jewels. In the background a covey of winged angels strummed away on harps and mandolins.

  “De real Flemish Mystic Vine tapestry. Priceless. Dere iss an inferior copy in vun uff de Apostolic Palaces in Rome.” The Baron checked the edges of the tapestries and around the bases of the sculptures carefully displayed on their pedestals. “Bernini’s terra-cotta Charity mit Four Children, Algardi’s Baptism uff Christ.” He turned to snap at R.K. Robinson, “Dere iss no individual security on any uff dese treasures.”

  “None needed,” said R.K. with a smirk. He gestured them out, then passed his hand up and down in the open doorway. “Nothing, see?” He took his cell phone off his belt, told it, “Activate Security Circuit One for Art Gallery A.” He turned to the Baron. “Now you try it.”

  Knottnerus-Meyer passed his hand up and down in the open doorway. Immediately the alarm bells sounded.

  State-of-the-art, thought Kearny. Invisible light beams from sensors in the door frame, three across and two vertical. Nobody could slip through them.

  Knottnerus-Meyer nodded thoughtfully. “Goot,” he said.

  The works in Art Gallery B were much more ancient than in the first one. Kearny stopped, caught by a frieze of a woman’s head and a bull’s head displayed side by side.

  “A double herm uff de goddess Isis unt her offspring de Apis Bull,” said the Baron. “Early Dynasty Egyptian. Unt dese . . .” He indicated display cases of pitchers and urns and vases with ears. “Oinochoe, olpe, krater, amphora, kylix, hydria. Greek. Classical Period. Again, priceless.”

  As they started out, R.K. said, “Here’s what I didn’t show you in Art Gallery A.” He told his cell phone, “Activate Security Circuit Two for Art Gallery B,” then said to the Baron, “You got a ballpoint pen?”

  The Baron removed a pen from one of the pockets of his shooting jacket. “Uff course. But vut—”

  “Just toss it into the room, Baron, if you would.”

  When the pen hit the floor, an alarm sounded raucously.

  “Deactivate,” said R.K. to his cell phone. The alarm fell silent. He said to the Baron, “The same in every room. Pressure-sensitive floor-plates. A mouse would set ’em off.”

  Knottnerus-Meyer reacted predictably.

  “But vut if vermin vere to get into dis facility?”

  Bart Heslip picked up a rental car at the Burbank airport, then called Giselle up in San Francisco.

  “I just remembered—when Dan braced Poteet for information down here during the Cadillac caper, he was picking pockets at Universal Studios.”

  “In a series of disguises,” exclaimed Giselle with sudden excitement. “A cowboy, a country singer, a southern colonel . . . No gorilla, but . . .”

  It took Bart nearly an hour just to get through Universal’s maze of interlocking bureaucracies to the head of security in a third-floor office overlooking the wet and wild Jurassic Park ride. His name was Jonathan James and he was almost as black as Bart, tall and lanky and wearing horn-rims. Unlike Bruckner at Marine World, he was curt, on the edge of hostility.

  “My kid has soccer practice in forty minutes,” he said.

  “I’ll only take ten,” promised Bart.

 
; James looked over Bart’s I.D. “Private eye, huh?” He gave a thin-lipped chuckle. “We’re fresh out of Maltese falcons.”

  “How about a gorilla who’s also a dip?” asked Bart. “This guy always dresses up as somebody else—a cowboy in a ten-gallon hat, a sort of rockabilly character with a guitar—”

  “Son of a bitch!” James came forward in his chair. “Southern colonel, too! I remember all of them! But—”

  “They were all our boy,” said Bart. “And we think he’s back down here again from the Bay Area.” He figured James wouldn’t waste his time on Poteet if he knew the man was dead and no longer a threat to Universal. “You have a lot of pockets picked about a month ago?”

  “Jesus, yeah, we did. But no gorilla. We thought it was an organized gang that hit us hard and then moved on. Had no idea it was just one guy.” As James worked his computer, he added, “We had a Smokey the Bear on staff, entertaining the kids in the tram lines . . . Hey! No employment records for Smokey . . .”

  “That would have been him, all right,” said Bart.

  James forgot all about his son’s soccer practice. He even scanned Ephrem Poteet’s picture into their security system for future reference. Bart pressed him further.

  “We think he’s been living somewhere in the Silver Lake district and probably handed everything off to someone between here and there. You got any ideas?”

  James drummed thoughtful fingers on his computer table. “Some of the unmarried grips and P.A.’s like to drink at a raunchy bar called the Hurly Burly on North Whitley in Hollywood. A guy looking to score at Universal might get a lot of hot tips there just by hanging around and listening to them gossip. And the bartender looks like a Gypsy to me.” He suddenly laughed. “Yeah, I know—racial stereotyping.”

  “Don’t we all?” said Bart.

  He shook James’s hand and departed. Later for the Hurly Burly. First, Etty Mae Walston, Ephrem’s snoopy ex-neighbor.

  thirty-seven

  Knottnerus-Meyer insisted on examining every room, even though security was the same in each. Finally, R.K. led them to the second-floor stairs past strategically placed hallway-scanning cameras.

  “Live feed twenty-four/seven to Security Control Center.”

  On the second floor, he stopped in front of a solid steel door without a knob. There was an I.D. card-reader slot in a shiny stainless-steel panel beside it.

  “Security Control Center,” said R.K. in hushed tones.

  Getting into the spirit of the thing, Dan asked innocently, “No fingerprint match? No retinal scan?”

  R.K. slid a stiff plastic I.D. card into the reader slot.

  “No need for either one of ’em. The operator freezes the door if he sees anyone suspicious trying to come at him.”

  The door popped open a scant two inches, shut itself behind them with a slight POOF of air.

  It was the damnedest security setup Kearny had ever seen. More complex than the skyrooms above the Vegas casinos, if not quite so state-of-the-art. Banks of monitors, rows of lights, buttons and switches for each of the pressure pads and interlocking invisible laser beams inside the various galleries, and for the infrared heat and motion detectors outside.

  Seated at the control module was the duty officer, a uniformed cipher with a rice-pudding face and raisin eyes. He demonstrated with his joystick, zooming in on a monitor screen, slowing down, speeding up, and freezing the action. Dan Kearny turned to R.K.

  “No heat and motion detectors inside the building?”

  “Not necessary with the outside perimeter sensors.”

  The Baron’s attention had been caught by a panel set slightly to one side which had on it only a big red knob and a small black button.

  “Most uff de equipment iss self-evident, but vut iss dis?”

  “Pull that red knob, and steel shutters drop down over all the doors and windows except for the front door and a stairway from the third-floor barracks. The off-duty guards live and sleep up there.” R.K. pushed the inconspicuous black button. A piece of wall slid up to reveal a steep narrow stairway going through the ceiling. “From there they have access to the helicopter landing pad on the roof.”

  “Let’s take a look,” said Kearny.

  They found a military-style barracks with six single cots down each side of the room, green-metal floor lockers between them, the usual pinups and photos on the walls above them.

  One end of the room was a lounge area with a pool table, a couple of armchairs, and a home entertainment center with a stereo system and a flat-screen TV for viewing videos and DVDs. There was even a shelf of paperback books. Nobody was there. R.K. waved a hand around.

  “Off-duty personnel are at the mess hall at this hour.”

  At the other end was a spacious enclosed cubicle with a regular closet and its own shower and sink and toilet.

  “My quarters,” said R.K. stiffly.

  No pinups here. No books, either, although Dan half-expected to see a copy of the Universal Code of Military Justice on the night table. But there was none.

  Beside the cubicle was a rough staircase of two-by-fours with one-by-eight stair treads to a heavy door in the roof.

  “To the helipad,” said R.K. “It cannot be unlocked from in here, only from the roof or from the Security Control Center.” He took his cell phone off his belt. “Baron, if you wanna—”

  “Dot iss not necessary,” said the Baron. “Ve vill go down unt you can introduce Herr Kearny to Freddie vhile I question your man on de control panel.”

  Freddie. A nickname for a sculpture? A painting? Some humongous gemstone? Dan was about to find out why he was here.

  “You’re the boss,” R.K. said sourly. He paused at the head of the stairs beside a black button similar to the one on the control panel. “They can use this to get down and defend the Control Center if the door is somehow blown open.”

  Both men nodded. It was a good system. They went down. As R.K. led Dan to a door across the Security Control Center, the Baron said to the duty officer, “You vill please to show me de Surveillance Room from vhich Freddie iss monitored.”

  It was a box of a room, sterile and modern, with only one door and no windows and nobody in it. Above the door was a scanning camera. An empty cage of black iron bars took up most of it, with a wooden partition across the back forming a small room they couldn’t see into. A mirror of one-way glass in a side wall let anyone in the Observation Room monitor this room without being seen himself unless he wanted to fade out the mirror effect so the window would be two-way.

  R.K. said to Kearny, “Meet Freddie,” and began making an unearthly racket by running his swagger stick rapidly back and forth across the bars of the cage. He probably had done the same with his nightstick across cage bars in Walla Walla.

  Dan didn’t know what response this might have brought from the prisoners, but here the result was instant and dramatic. A full-grown male orangutan bounded out from behind the partition to hurl himself against the bars, trying unsuccessfully to get at R.K. with a hairy, muscle-banded arm. Orangutan. Freddie. Now the Baron’s monologue about apes made sense.

  R.K. was acting very much like Freddie, leaping around, poking at the orangutan with his swagger stick.

  “Yeah, c’mon, c’mon, you lousy ape, try an’ get me!”

  Freddie tried, he really did, but R.K. stayed just inches from his grasp. He went to a ring of keys hanging from a peg on the wall. He jangled them, grinning.

  “C’mon, don’t you want the keys? C’mon, try an’ get ’em!”

  Kearny, fed up, grabbed him by the collar and threw him back against the wall. R.K. fumbled at his holster, but Knottnerus-Meyer’s icy tones came over some hidden loudspeaker.

  “Dot iss quite enough uff dis disgraceful display.”

  R.K. froze with his pistol halfway out, then guiltily thrust it back. Freddie was leaping up and down and crowing for joy. He began manipulating his hands at Dan in what almost looked like sign language.

  “Is he tryi
ng to say something to me?”

  “Are you nuts? He’s a friggin’ ape, for Chrissake.”

  Knottnerus-Meyer’s disembodied voice came again, his guttural German accent heightened by the speakers.

  “You vill immediately come out uff dere, both uff you. You haff disturbed Freddie quite enough.”

  “I’m not gonna forget this, shithead,” whispered R.K.

  “Don’t,” said Dan Kearny.

  Knottnerus-Meyer was waiting. “Herr Kearny, come in here.”

  He drew Dan into the Observation Room. The one-way window showed the partitioned area. Beside a cot in one corner were a few large rubber toys. Beyond that was a chair and a computer desk with a terminal, keyboard, screen, and printer. The keyboard was equipped with a bewildering array of outsize lights and buttons and symbols rather than letters.

  Freddie was tearing around the enclosed area, still highly agitated. He picked up a big red rubber ball, squashed it several times between his long-fingered hands, then threw it against the wall. He threw himself down on his bunk on his back. Milled the air with his arms and legs. Gradually, he quieted. Finally, he got off the bunk and went over to his work station and seated himself at the console. He began punching in data with great confidence. Each time he hit a button, a tone sounded. Symbols appeared on his screen.

  “Before Freddie,” said Knottnerus-Meyer, “dere vere language experiments mit chimpanzees unt Koko, dot female gorilla vut chooses certain keys on a computer’s auditory keyboard.”

  “Something like what Freddie’s doing in there?”

  “Nein. It iss clear Freddie hass gone beyond dot. I haff been told dot his trainer in Hong Kong hass taught him whole sentences. Dot iss vhy Herr Marr bought dot ape; he iss unique.” He paused. “But now a man in Rome plans to steal him.”

  “Why?” said Kearny bluntly.

  Knottnerus-Meyer gave a heavy Germanic shrug. “Vut does it matter? Maybe a dispute in ownership. Dot man in Hong Kong alerted Herr Marr to de thief. Dot iss vhy ve are here.”

  When she saw his black face, Etty Mae Walston started to give Bart Heslip a noseful of door; then she saw his detective license. It developed Etty Mae had been a fan of some mid-50s NBC TV series called Meet McGraw that featured a lantern-jawed actor named Frank Lovejoy as a sort of P.I.