Cons, Scams, and Grifts

by Joe Gores

  “I tell your brother I wait long enough, he will come back,” sneered Jorge’s hate-filled voice from above and behind her. “Instead, you come to meet your lover. Even better! I’ll tell Esteban I see you through the window getting undressed.”

  She squirmed around to look up at him in the semidarkness. Jorge was handsome in the Ricky Martin mode, and vain about it. Curly black hair, dark expressive eyes, a shapely nose, a full-lipped, vulnerable mouth. He made her sick.

  “Esteban will not believe you.”

  But she knew her brother would. Thank the Virgin, it didn’t sound as though Jorge had thought of looking for something that would tell him where Trin worked. She stood up gingerly. She had never been so terrified, but she must not let it show.

  “I shall leave now,” she said formally in Spanish.

  But Jorge seized her and smeared his sneering face against hers, mouth open and tongue darting. Instinctively, she brought her knee up between his legs. It was mostly ineffectual, but he grunted, loosened his grip; she ran for the kitchen. He was on her from behind, spun her around, his fist broke her nose and chipped two of her front teeth. He hit her again, in the belly.

  She felt darkness engulfing her. She had no breath, no strength, no will to resist. For a long time there was only him on top of her, thrusting and grunting his harsh triumph.

  She was sprawled face-down on the couch. Blood from her mouth stained the fabric. She knew only pain. Jorge grabbed her long black hair to jerk her head back.

  “You ain’t ever gonna tell your brother what you made me do to you tonight, little whore.” He held up his cell phone. “You just gonna call Morales and tell him you waiting for him with your legs spread. After I call Esteban and tell him Morales is coming here, you gonna leave right away, comprende ?”

  “But Esteban will kill him!” she whimpered.

  “No, I gonna do that. Then, any time I say, you will come crawling.” He thrust the phone into her hands. “I know a little whore like you has got a secret number you can call your lover.”

  She didn’t, but she knew he wouldn’t believe her. She had only one little forlorn hope. “I . . . all right. I . . . I’ll call.”

  * * *

  Giselle, working late, was just leaving her desk when her private phone rang. A small, pain-filled, Spanish-accented voice exclaimed weakly in her ear, “Trin! I’m so glad I caught you.”

  Milagrita! In trouble! Thank God she had given the girl her private number. Giselle sat back down, grabbed a memo pad.

  “Keep talking to Morales,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “At your place,” Milagrita said in a sad parody of banter.

  “Is someone there with you?”

  “Of course. And waiting for you.”

  “Jorge?” Milagrita’s silence was confirmation. “Are you hurt?” Silence. “Raped?” More silence. Giselle thought of calling an ambulance, then realized the first priority had to be getting her away from Jorge. “Can you leave there?”

  “Soon as you can, querido,” she said with a ghastly giggle.

  “Bryant and Twenty-second? In ten minutes?” That was two blocks from Morales’s apartment, only three blocks from S.F. General Hospital’s Emergency and Trauma Center.

  “I can hardly wait,” said Milagrita faintly.

  Where was Morales? If he was out in the field, and went home to his apartment, he’d run right into the ambush. If he was here, it would be all right.

  Morales was lying on the cot in the personal property room in his underwear, reading a Spanish language newspaper. When Giselle stuck her head in, he started up in alarm. She waved him back to his place.

  “I know you’ve been sleeping here, it’s okay. I was just looking for Mr. K—”

  “Like hell.” Morales swung his stockinged feet to the floor. “I heard you tell him good night half an hour ago.” He grabbed her arm with shocking speed and strength at odds with his almost feminine intuition of her distress. “What’s wrong? Has something happened to Milagrita?”

  She shook him off. “Never mind that. Just don’t go home, all right? They’re waiting there for you.”

  “Jorge done something to her,” Trin said with certainty.

  She didn’t reply, just ran out, leaving him fumbling under the cot for his shoes. She clattered down the stairs. Ballard, coming in the back door, stopped dead at sight of her face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “A little Spanish girl has been raped. I’ve got to—”

  “Need help?”

  “No.” She paused. “Yes. She’s the sister of the guy who beat up Morales.” She jerked her head at the stairs. “Keep him here, Larry. He wants to face those thugs all alone.”

  Ballard’s face went dead. “He can fight his own fights.”

  She ran out the door for her Alfa. Too many minutes had passed already. As she left the garage, Ballard was unconcernedly strolling back across the street to his truck.

  She yelled out of her window, “You’re a real turd, Larry!”

  Ballard watched her roar away down Eleventh Street. She was wrong, dammit. Fucker deserved all things bad. Didn’t he?

  He got into his truck, turned on his C/B radio.

  Jorge waited just inside Trin’s front door, watching the street through the filmy curtain. Esteban was parked in front of the apartment, Manuel was hidden in a recessed entry a few houses to the south, Pedro hidden in a similar recess to the north. No car passed. No window curtain twitched. No one walked the street. These four were known and dreaded in the neighborhood.

  And here came stupid Morales, parking and walking across Florida Street right into the trap. Jorge swaggered down the steps of the apartment, baseball bat in hand. Morales stopped, looking up. Esteban, unseen, silently got out of his car right behind Morales. Like last time—only now Esteban had a knife.

  Morales told Jorge, “Your mother gives blow-jobs to dogs.”

  Esteban, grinning, knife in hand, said to Trin’s back, “And you are a pig to be butchered, maricón.”

  Trin whirled around. Manuel and Pedro were moving in from the sides. Morales was boxed in and all alone. He put his back to a wrought-iron railing flanking the sidewalk.

  “Come and get it,” he said to them all, fists clenched.

  They came. They got it.

  Because three other men materialized out of the night behind them as Trin gaped in surprise. One was tall and blond and muscular. One was shorter and black and wide as a door. One was huge and quick and hard-faced. None of them was shy.

  Ken Warren grabbed Manuel by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants, ran him out into the middle of Florida Street, and spun like a shot-putter to hurl him bodily against the side of a parked car. Manuel’s face broke the car’s window. The car’s window returned the favor.

  Bart Heslip had already driven a tremendous kidney punch into Esteban’s unprotected back. Esteban screamed and dropped his knife and would have fallen down except Heslip slapped him up against his own car and began pumping combinations into him.

  Meanwhile, Larry Ballard’s yawara stick, the medieval Buddhist monks’ lightning bolt of Siva, flicked the bat out of Jorge’s hand. “Take him, Morales!” Larry shouted, and sent the yawara stick spinning after Pedro. It swept the fleeing man’s legs out from under him. Then Ballard was on him.

  No science, no finesse to Trin’s attack on Jorge: head-butts, elbow smashes, steel-toed work boots. Jorge’s nose went from shapely to mushroom in one awful instant. Blood and teeth flew in several directions at once. Trin only stopped kicking the inert mass on the sidewalk so he could crouch down and bring his face close to what had been Jorge’s face. It was crying.

  “You ever touch Milagrita, you will eat your own cojones,” said Morales. “You believe what I say to you, man?”

  The crying mess somehow was able to mouth, “Sí.”

  Trin stood up. He met Ballard’s gaze. Ballard must have called the others on the C/B radio from his truck. And they had come.
The two men nodded almost formally to each other.

  Manuel was unconscious in the middle of the street.

  Pedro was unconscious in the middle of the sidewalk.

  Esteban was erect against the side of his own car, but only because Bart was holding him up so he could deliver his line.

  “We know where you live, pal,” he said in soft menace.

  And let go. Esteban could finally fall down. He did.

  For the first time in his life, Trinidad Morales had his own band of amigos, his own posse. From somewhere not too far off came the sound of police sirens. Ken Warren spoke.

  “Hngleth nyetta hehl hnougtta hneer!”

  So they got to hell out of there.

  Just before the sedatives put her under, Milagrita managed to mumble to the S.F. General Emergency Room doctor that she didn’t know who had done it. Just . . . someone in an alley . . .

  Giselle was equally vague. Never saw her before in my life. Good Samaritan, that’s all. Found her, brought her in.

  forty-two

  The Colonial Hotel, a three-story mellow red-brick building at 550 Washington Street, was built in 1911 to furnish rooms and meals for workers at the nearby Standard Oil facility. After declining for decades and finally being gutted by fire, in 1978 it was renamed, restored, renovated, and reborn along with the rest of Point Richmond.

  Now it had a huge sign on top spelling out HOTEL MAC. The double front doors had a canopy over them bearing the same name in bold white letters. Through big flanking leaded windows that looked out on Washington Street could be seen drinkers at the bar on one side, loungers in the lounge on the other.

  Johanna Knudsen and Alberto Angelini went up to the second-floor dining room. A burly maître d’ in a flowery sport shirt seated them at a choice table under one of the carefully restored stained glass windows. By that time, Johanna had waved or exchanged a word with no fewer than seven of her clients.

  She was pleased to be lunching with such a remarkably handsome man. Who insisted she throw her diet to the winds and order the most expensive dishes on the menu—with dessert.

  She groaned, “You’re going to ruin my figure.”

  “It will take a great deal more than honey garlic lamb chops to do that, cara mia,” grinned Angelini. What an utterly charming man he was! “And the salmon is from your native Norway, it must be good for you, no?” It wasn’t until they were drinking coffee and feasting on rich gooey slices of Snickers pie that he laid a hand on his chest and said, “Johanna, in my heart I have every belief that you have solved my travel problems.”

  So did she: Johanna loved being ingenious for the rare client who appreciated how clever she could be.

  “I can schedule your people separately on a scheduled airline. There aren’t enough individual seats next week to Rome, but Alitalia has daily eleven-and-a-half-hour nonstops to Milan that do have room.”

  “That is even better than Rome!” he told her. Which was true. “I have relatives in Milan.” Which was a lie.

  “Great! Your people can be spread out over three or four days and half a dozen flights. All I need are their names and credit card information. They all have their passports?”

  “But of course.”

  “And they don’t need visas for Italy.” She grinned. “The best news is that each fare is only nine hundred twenty-two dollars plus tax, round-trip. That’s really good for last-minute reservations at this time of year!”

  “It is indeed.”

  Angelini took an envelope from the inside pocket of his suit and laid it on the table. “Here are the names. I shall give you my credit card later.”

  “I’ll get busy then. You are all going to Italy, Alberto.”

  “Benissimo! You are extraordinary, cara mia! ”

  Dan Kearny looked at the handpicked troops assembled after-hours in DKA’s big back office. O’Bannon and Giselle were listening to an intent Bart Heslip. Ballard and Morales stood in front of the mainframe computer, beers in hand, chatting as if they were pals. “Sorry to hear about your lady, Trin.”

  “. . . just came from the hospital,” Morales said. “She’s doing better, man. Takin’ her home to her mother’s on Tuesday.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  Of the DKA regulars, only Ken Warren was not there. He had located the last outstanding classic car, the $95,000 1970 Aston Martin Volante; it had been legitimately sold by UpScale Motors to a man named Adam Zeccola the day before DKA’s raid, but no payments had been made to the bank. Ken had dug up a lead on him in Medford, Oregon, and was driving up to drop a rock on the car before Zeccola could move somewhere else.

  Kearny walked to the middle of the room. “Okay, guys, let’s get to it.” He looked at Morales. “Trin. The truck?”

  “It’ll get there. Maybe not back, but—”

  “It doesn’t have to get back. Clean?”

  “Yeah. Outfit back in Jersey we repo’d it for is gone—they got firebombed in a mob dispute last month. No way to trace it back to us.”

  He swung his gaze to Heslip. “Bart. The dental mirrors?”

  “Ten of them. Adhesive putty fixed to the handles.”

  “And the crossbow and the expanding-head quarrel?”

  “Yassuh, boss.”

  “Clown around.” Dan turned to Giselle. “The skyrockets?”

  “With a fuse to lead to the cab of the truck. Got ’em out in the Sunset from an illicit fireworks guy on Nineteenth Ave.”

  “I thought he blew himself up last year.”

  “Same part of town, different guy.”

  Kearny nodded. “O’B. The firecrackers?”

  “A hundred strings. Same guy Giselle dealt with.”

  “Okay,” said Kearny, “I’ve got the talcum powder, and the fishhooks strung every ten feet on the Primacord.” He looked at Ballard. “Larry. The steel ball bearings?”

  Kearny was wired. They all were. Ballard suddenly thought, We’re in a caper movie here. Flat delivery, keen glances, tight clipped sentences. In his mind played the faint far strains of the Mission: Impossible theme. Of course, he was a little old to be Tom Cruise. But then, Tom Cruise was a little old to be Tom Cruise.

  “Eight dozen, like you said. And I found two of those dart pistols that shoot little sticks with rubber suction cups on the ends in that magic and trick shop in the Marina. They’re almost collectibles now, but they’ll work great.”

  “The Baron is furnishing the tranquilizer darts,” said Kearny. “He tells me the dosage is tricky. And I’ve got the grappling hooks. Anything I’m missing?”

  “The shaving cream,” said Giselle. “I’ve got that—two cans. What about the uniforms?”

  “The Baron’s dropping them by tomorrow morning.” Giselle’s private phone rang. Sitting on the edge of her desk, she turned to pick up and heard the jangle of gold coins. The Gypsy messenger from Yana Poteet! She looked quickly around, then hunched over the phone with the woman’s voice in her ear.

  “Two nights from now, midnight, Jackson Playground on—”

  “On Mariposa?” Giselle clapped a hand over her careless mouth: she wanted to beat Larry to Yana. She wanted to beat everyone to Yana. Probably because Yana had chosen to communicate with her, not Larry or anyone else.

  “Yes. Wait for the Gypsy outside the park,” the gentle voice was going on. “She will take you to the Undertaker.”

  The Gypsy had to be this woman, the Undertaker had to be Yana. “Fine,” said Giselle, afraid to slip again. But she needn’t have worried. When she hung up, Kearny was still talking and everybody was still listening.

  “The Baron has already learned that three guards will be taking off for Memorial Day on Monday. That makes our—”

  “Zloppy zecurity!” barked Ballard in his best S.S. Storm Trooper voice. “Unt zeir ties are crooked!”

  Kearny plowed on, ignoring him. “Questions? Comments? Objections?” Nobody spoke. “Okay. It goes down two nights from now. Sunday night.”

  No! screamed Giselle.<
br />
  But the scream was silent, inside her head only. At last she was getting her chance to get out into the field again on the greatest, most exciting caper that DKA had ever planned—and it was on the night she had just committed to meet with Yana. She couldn’t change her mind now. For some reason, she really needed to hear what Yana had to say.

  “This Sunday?” she managed to get out, tight-lipped. “My parents are coming up from San Diego for the holiday. I can’t let them down again.”

  “It’s okay,” Dan said quickly, relief hidden in his voice.

  I just bet it is, thought Giselle. The old male bonding thing yet again. All the boys eager to go out and play with their toys with no woman along to lend some sanity to the proceedings. Well, she had her own P.I. license, didn’t she? Sunday night she was going to go out and use it and act like a private eye all on her own.

  forty-three

  Sunday night, a few minutes before midnight, Giselle parked behind a Porsche and in front of a Mercedes on Mariposa Street across from Jackson Playground. Scattered up and down the street were other expensive cars. When she got out of the Alfa, the streetlight on the corner showed her the buxom Gypsy woman who had approached her in the DKA lot a few nights before.

  “We are going to the House of Pain,” she told Giselle. “Stay close to me.”

  They fell in behind two stylish mid-40s women who went down the street and turned in at a ramshackle faded-yellow warehouse wearing a broker’s FOR SALE sign with a big red vertical SOLD slapped across it. Another Silicon Valley buyout. The inevitable aluminum-framing and double-glazing could not be far behind.

  One of the women tugged at the old wooden door, which slid wide on well-greased runners. The place was cavernous, stretching into obscurity, echoing with a murmur of voices—all feminine—and slapping sounds she couldn’t identify.

  A woman in black leather shone a flashlight into the well-dressed women’s faces, passed them through. Giselle and her guide next. Giselle blinked against the light as they went in.