The Tell-Tale Con

by Aimee Gilchrist

  “They didn’t tell me nothing. They blew me off. And when I called, like, the sixth time, they told me I’d probably never get it back.”

  “That sucks,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What did the woman in the fur coat look like?” I asked. “I mean, did you see her?”

  She took a long pull on her cigarette. “Yeah, I saw her. She looked like Mick Jagger in drag.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Rules of the Scam #9

  Know who you can lie to and who you can’t…

  “Mick Jagger in a wig, wearing a fur coat and driving a dinosaur Honda. Do you know someone who can draw a composite sketch of that one?”

  Harrison slumped back in the passenger seat. “Actually, what I saw wasn’t entirely unlike that. It was a woman, older, emaciated, wearing what looked like a wig and dark glasses, with massive lips.”

  “That could be a man or a woman. The car is a dead end. We don’t know who gave Nate the money. Basically, we’ve got nothing.”

  “I guess.” Harrison sounded as sullen as I felt.

  We got back on to Central and headed for home as the sun was falling. “Look, the way I see it we have the same three options we had before. You can try to explain this to the police, though we have absolutely nothing to substantiate it, and hope it doesn’t add to their suspicion that you killed Nate. Or we could forget it ever happened and hope that it’s all coincidence. Or we could keep looking. Try another angle. Look somewhere else.”

  “Where else? I’m not very good at mysteries, Talia. I never even read Encyclopedia Brown, or the Hardy Boys.”

  He did tell me he’d seen Scooby-Doo, despite Van Poe’s rules. Van would only like the show if there was a version of Scooby-Doo where the members of the gang go crazy and have two hours of carefully crafted hallucination scenes leading to a psychologically twisted ending that might or might not have been reality.

  “I don’t know. The car is a dead end. So where else can we look? We can assume Nate was killed by someone involved in all the crap he was doing. Or we can assume he was killed by the person who gave him that twelve thousand dollars. If we assume that, then we can make another assumption. All this is about you. No one else. Not Nate, not me, and not that lady who got her car stolen. Someone is out to get you. So the question becomes, why?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t think of anyone who would hate me enough to go through all this trouble.”

  I pulled into the heavy afternoon traffic headed into downtown. “Well, think smaller, maybe someone you might annoy, and we’ll move up from there. Maybe what seems minor to you is actually horrible in that person’s mind.”

  He sighed. “Okay. I’ll play. Um, the person who dislikes me the most in the world is Mitch Reber.”

  I didn’t bother trying to search my mind for a face to go with the name. “Who is Mitch Reber?”

  “Well, he’s a chess player.” Harrison seemed hesitant, like he wasn’t sure how to explain it to me, or he didn’t want to.

  “I don’t get it. You’re going to have to give me more.”

  “I used to play against him a lot. Back when I played.”

  Another long silence. Seriously? This was like pulling teeth. “So you don’t play chess anymore? Because that wasn’t the impression I got.”

  He glanced at me. “I don’t play competitive chess anymore.” He grabbed the arm of his seat as I coasted to a stop in front of The Library. I wasn’t sure he realized what he was doing.

  “So he was competitive chess player?” I prompted.

  Harrison’s head whipped in my direction. Obviously, I’d brought him back from wherever he’d gone for a moment. “Yes. We were both grandmasters. Highest ranked in our organization. But he had…a run of bad luck. He had trouble beating me.”

  “So that pissed him off enough to hate you?” Sounded stupid to me. Then again, I was the one who’d told him to start small.

  “No, I told you, I don’t think anyone hates me. But he sure doesn’t like me.”

  “So you beat him a bunch, and now he’s bitter?”

  “Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. He thought his game was improving. That his Elo rating would be better than mine in another year and that if he played me one more time he’d prove to the whole chess world that he was better.”

  First of all, I had no freaking clue what an Elo rating was, and I was pretty certain that I didn’t care. Secondly, I’d had no idea that Harrison had taken chess to quite that level. I thought he was just your average chess nerd. This was something else all together. Grandmaster sounded important, and an Elo rating sounded intimidating.

  “At any rate he was sure he could settle it once and for all. Only…I was quitting. I mean, last year I resigned from competitive chess before he could play me again. So it goes down forever that he never beat me. I thought he was going to have a stroke when he found out.”

  “Yeah, okay. I could see how that might be annoying if you were vain.”

  “Well, he is. He’s also very competitive. It drove him crazy that he never had a chance to beat me. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still pissed about that, and I retired over a year ago.”

  “Okay, this sounds like a decent lead. Where do we find this guy?”

  Harrison shrugged. “At the moment? I’m not sure. I’ll have to do some research. Chess involves a lot of tournaments. He could be anywhere.”

  “So.” I turned off the car. “You find out where this guy is. In the mean time, is there anyone else you can think of?”

  He twisted his mouth, deep in thought. Finally, he said. “Well, my step-mom. I think maybe she hates me.”

  My dad was obsessed with Yoko Ono. I had seen her picture hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. Harrison’s step-mom, Kanako Poe, Van Poe’s third wife, looked exactly like a young Yoko Ono. To the point that, after looking at dozens of pictures of her online at movie premiers and parties, I was certain she was doing it on purpose. She wore the same long flowing caftans made of some indeterminable natural fiber, the same sunglasses worn inappropriately indoors, the same long flowing hair parted down the middle. Even the same propensity for stupid hats.

  There weren’t a million pictures of her on the internet. There were tons more of Van alone, but I wasn’t interested in those. I scoured the internet, but there was very little info about Kanako. She was a Japanese American; her parents had sent her to UCLA at seventeen from Kyoto. She’d married Van two years ago in a private ceremony in the French countryside. From what I could tell, Harrison hadn’t been there. I didn’t know if that had been his choice or hers. Or maybe he’d been there and simply hadn’t been invited to be in the staged wedding pictures. Either way, every photo was Van, Kanako and half a dozen people who were unfamiliar to me.

  But all the information I found on her didn’t help me. She wasn’t crazy as far as I could tell. There was nothing in her very brief biographies to indicate she was likely to go on a step-son killing spree. I honestly didn’t know why Harrison thought she might hate him. Especially after claiming he was a hate-free zone the world over. Whatever the reasoning was, he’d immediately clammed up after spitting out that little tidbit and rushed off for the relative safety of his house.

  So I’d decided to do a little checking of my own. But there was nothing to see. With Kanako, anyway. Harrison himself was a different story. Of course, I’d forgotten the name of the dude who Harrison had told me about, but now that I knew Harrison was a gold-dipped chess nerd, rather than the garden variety type, I figured I could trace the guy by googling the names of the people Harrison had played before retiring.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out who the guy was. Mitch Reber was the John McEnroe of the professional chess world. So I like to watch tennis. Don’t judge me.

  The guy had been in fights with just about anyone he’d ever played. Despite my initial impression that we were talking about another kid, Mitch Reber was definitely no junior player. He was, like, forty, with a s
cruffy beard, wiry curls, and thin, wire-framed glasses that seemed much too small for his face. He was a good player by all the accounts I read, but his inability to control his temper colored his game and made him too aggressive. Though I couldn’t see how chess could ever be an aggressive game.

  I learned enough to know that he was now at the top of my suspect list. But why would he wait a year before lashing out at Harrison? Then, I got a teeny bit curious and started reading about Harrison’s stellar career rather than Mitch Reber.

  Harrison had been the youngest grandmaster in many, many years. I figured, considering the context, that grandmaster meant he was really good at chess, but to me it sounded like someone who played too much Dungeons and Dragons. He’d started playing the circuit at six years old. That sounded like it would suck. But I did have a moment of amusement looking at a grainy video of a tiny little Harrison playing chess at a small table in the middle of an arena against a man at least twenty years his senior. While he made his moves he kicked his legs back and forth. They were too short to reach the floor.

  I read a couple of articles about how sad everyone had been at Harrison’s decision to retire at sixteen. Then I read that since his departure, Mitch Reber and a Russian man named Ivar Gustapian had been fighting each other for the highest Elo score, which was some kind of rating system used to rank players. At the moment, Mitch Reber was finally winning. His score was still not higher than Harrison’s had been, but he was the current highest in the world. There were articles all over the internet suggesting that Harrison might come out of retirement at any moment, setting the chess world ablaze, like Justin Bieber suddenly dropping in on a middle school party.

  To Mitch Reber, this had to read like a slap in the face. First Harrison refuses to play him again by retiring, never allowing Reber to prove himself triumphant. Then, just when Reber has the chess world on a silver platter, the rumor comes along that Harrison might be back. If I were this dude, I’d have been annoyed too. But the real question was, was he pissed enough to kill?

  I had no way of knowing. Articles didn’t tell me much about the real Mitch Reber. Just like they didn’t tell me much about the real Harrison Poe. I couldn’t help but wonder why he’d made the decision to stop playing competitive chess. Clearly, he was like some kind of chess god. I could only find that embarrassingly nerdy and secretly impressive at the same time. Like Harrison as a whole, really.

  So we’d have to seek Mitch Reber out, and I’d have to speak to him directly to know. And I couldn’t do that until Harrison told me where we could find him. Until then, I could follow the cases we did know something about. I surfed the internet and discovered that the police still had no suspects in Nate’s murder, aside from Harrison, though they didn’t mention him. Nate had been shot once in the heart at close range by a .22 caliber pistol. The kind anyone could buy anywhere. There was no indication of forced entry and no indication he’d attempted to fight back at all. The police felt he’d known the murderer well.

  That suggested to me that they’d be back to see Harrison again before long. He’d move up from their theoretical list of suspects to their actual list. Some of the stuff Nate had written in his notes, and the things he’d done that the police still didn’t know about, made Harrison seem like a good suspect. Even to me, and I knew he hadn’t done it.

  I couldn’t find a police blotter about the stolen car, and there was almost nothing about our accident either, except a couple paragraphs in the human interest section talking about the danger of high school parking lots and the fact that Hollywood director Van Poe’s son had been “nearly killed” in a school parking lot incident. I wasn’t sure where the jump from injured leg to nearly killed happened, but bruised bones weren’t interesting news.

  Left without anything else to look up, I went to bed. But sleep didn’t come easy. In fact, it almost didn’t come at all. I refused to give into the urge to call Harrison on the cell and demand he tell me why he’d left the chess world. Or just to have someone to talk to while I couldn’t sleep. It was after four before I fell into a fitful sleep.

  Wednesday morning found me looking puffy, colorless and exhausted as I met Harrison at the car. I had no clue what the hell we were doing. But now that we were half-way in, I couldn’t see any way out but through to the other side. I had a very bad feeling that if Harrison went to the police and tried to tell them anything, it would give them another reason to suspect he might be responsible for Nate’s death.

  Once we were buckled, I started the car. “Is there any reason the police would truly believe you had a motive for killing Nate? Anything besides the fact you were there?”

  Harrison stared at me. “No.”

  “Look, I think maybe you should go to the police. I mean, heaven knows I’m not a fan of the authorities, but what are we doing? We don’t know anything. We could have blown this all out of proportion. Sure, it makes you sound a teensy bit crazy. But who cares? You’re a Hollywood kid. People assume you’re crazy. You haven’t been to rehab yet, so you can do this instead. If there’s something to see, they’ll find it.”

  He spent a moment staring at his backpack. “Okay.” He sounded reluctant.

  “Do you want me to take you to the police station right now?”

  I thought he might say no. But in the end he nodded. Then I felt bad, like I was a mean parent making my kid do something absolutely horrific. “What am I going to tell them?”

  Actually, I had no answer for that. After giving a moment’s thought, I said, “Well, don’t tell them about Nate. We can’t prove he’s the one who put the recorder in there anyway, and it draws attention back to you. It makes you look potentially guilty. We don’t want that. So I guess just that you have footage that suggests that the car hit you on purpose and that it’s a stolen car.”

  “That makes sense.”

  It was clear to me that if anyone in the world wanted to deal with the cops less than me at this moment, it was Harrison. But he didn’t argue. He sat, a silent lump in the passenger seat, thinking who knew what.

  The downtown police substation wasn’t that far from us, and it only took me a few minutes to get there. Harrison didn’t seem particularly willing to do this, but I didn’t have to prod him out of the car. We were hardly in the parking spot, between a police cruiser and a tan Cadillac, before he was out of the car and crutching his way inside. By the time I caught up with him, he was already giving our case number to the woman behind the desk who asked us to sit for a moment and wait.

  I’d been in a lot of police stations over the years when my mother or father had been arrested for one small-time scam or another. Or the two times that I had been picked up with them, but eventually released. They always got off in the end. Except this last time. Comparatively, this particular branch of the Albuquerque police was kind of fun. It had a whole mid-century vibe going on with brick planters, large plate glass windows and decades-old gold carpet.

  Finally, a woman, not the other lady cop from the crime scene or anyone from the accident, came out and waved us into her office. Inside her teeny glass cubicle the station turned uninteresting. This was just another generic office with cheap Ikea-style furniture and white tile floors. I liked it much better in the lobby.

  She sat down behind one of the desks. There were two more in the room, but no one else was there at the moment. Tall and a little bit overweight, she looked like a high school athlete who’d let herself go. She extended a hand, which was much larger than mine, and gave us both a firm handshake.

  It was second nature to me to read the signs that people kicked off. Over the years I’d learned instinctively to know one of most important tricks of the grifting trade. How to pick a good mark. And the first rule of picking a good mark was knowing who you could lie to and who you couldn’t.

  This woman wasn’t someone I could lie to.

  I mean, I could try, but she wasn’t going to believe me. She was not a person who was likely to believe any story I spun for her, no matter
how good and no matter how convincing it would be to almost any other person in the world. I could see her eyes assessing me the way I was assessing her. She was an anti-mark.

  It would behoove us both to let Harrison do the talking. This particular detective would be able to smell me coming a mile away.

  She steepled her fingers against her desk. “I’m Tanya Tabke. I didn’t take your original statement, but the two officers who did are out today.” She indicated to the empty desks. “So why don’t you bring me up to speed?”

  Harrison glanced at me, and I made a little gesture with my hand to let him know the floor was his. So he walked through the accident with the same detail he’d given the other cops, while Officer Tabke followed along with a file on her desk. When he’d finished she said, “Heather said you had something else to add.”

  “Yeah, I know this guy. He’s the head of the AV club, and his place backs up to the parking lot. He records the parking lot all the time.”

  She immediately perked up. “Does he?”

  “Yeah, like, twenty-four seven. Anyway, he has footage of the car and the plates. It’s sitting there, waiting for something. I think…well, I mean…I guess it was waiting for me.”

  She leveled him with a look that I was glad wasn’t directed at me. She was doing exactly as I had known she would. She was using her inherent bullcrap meter to evaluate Harrison’s story. Finally she sat back in her chair and nodded. “Let’s get this guy’s name and address. I’m going to get the tape and have a look. In the mean time, I think you two should be very careful.”

  She took Hector’s info and then turned to me. “Do you have anything to add, Miss Jones?”

  She’d gotten my name from the report, but that didn’t mean my stomach didn’t brutally twist hearing it come from the mouth of a cop. I shook my head wordlessly. Let her think I was shy.

  She evaluated me, too, though not with the laser beam stare she’d given Harrison. When she’d decided whatever she was going to decide about me, she shut the folder. “I’ll be in touch. Once again, I would advise both of you to use a great deal of caution.”