The Con Artist

by Fred Van Lente

  The mob and I lumbered across the tracks and through the archway proclaiming the entry to the Gaslamp Quarter. The first few blocks of bars and restaurants were crammed with revelers of the Nerd Mardi Gras: a brass band in Syfy Channel shirts blasted a Sousa-style version of “The Imperial March” at krumping Stormtroopers. A small SDPD command pod rose up on a scissor lift over the scrum like a Walmart panopticon.

  Beyond Island Avenue the con crowd thinned out considerably. As I trudged up the hill along the brick-lined sidewalk of Fifth Avenue, I was stuck behind an old Mexican woman in a track suit and carrying a cane, who was trying to walk a pitbull not much older than a puppy. The dog kept turning and biting at the leash and her owner kept clucking at her.

  “No, no, Mama,” the old lady said. “No más.”

  Yellow Pedicab was on G Street between a vape shop and a Brazilian steakhouse. The storefront window was plastered with testaments to the benefits of advertising on a pedicab and a DRIVERS WANTED sign hung on the door.

  I stepped inside and took off my sunglasses so I could see. The place was dark, with bikes and pedicabs hanging along three walls like carcasses at a butcher shop. The place reeked of grease and rubber. A white guy, whose skin was leathered in a very specific way that only Sun Belt white guys have, was cursing to himself in the middle of the room as he pulled the tire off a rim to get to the flat tube shriveled up underneath.

  “Pardon me?” I said once, then again, louder, until the man looked up as he pulled the deflated tube out of the tire like a bra through a sleeve. He had circular wireframe glasses and shoulder-length hair that began somewhere near the middle rear of his skull; if you could yank his hairline forward, I was pretty sure it would adjust into a Beatles bowl cut.

  “You a driver?” the bike guy said.

  “No, but now that you mention it—”

  “All our cabs are rented out now, man. You wanna drive, you’re gonna have to take it up with the drivers themselves. Good news is most guys got kids, they take trips, they want to take the night off, they’d be happy for you to take over for a day, make a few extra bucks.”

  “No, I don’t want to drive, I’m actually looking for a specific driver.”

  “Why?” Bike Guy flashed a grin. “You a cop?”

  “No, I just—”

  “You don’t look like a cop.”

  “Well, there’s a really good reason for that.”

  Bike Guy’s eyes narrowed. “Process server?”

  “No.”

  “Repo man?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. I’m a passenger—was a passenger. I really need to speak with a driver I rode with last night. She’s a woman, with blonde hair—”

  “Oh, so that’s how it is.” Bike Guy nodded slowly. “You’re a stalker.”

  “No, I swear to God, I’m not. It’s just important I get in touch with her. She can really help me with something really, really important.”

  “What is it?”

  I shook my head. “Look, it wouldn’t mean anything to you, man. But it means everything to me. And—it is absolutely nothing weird or creepy, I promise.”

  Bike Guy shook his head too. “No can do, brah. For one thing I know all our drivers, and there ain’t any chicks workin’ for us right now.” He held up a hand. “It’s not because we discriminate, it’s because no chicks have applied recently.”

  “Okay, but what if she isn’t one of your regulars, what if one of your regulars rented their bike to her. Could I maybe talk to whoever had your bikes last night—”

  “No can do, brah,” Bike Guy said again. He picked up a clipboard off the counter and held it to his chest; it must have been the list of drivers.

  “Aw, c’mon—”

  “Sorry, man, that’s, like, driver/dispatcher confidentiality and shit.”

  I opened my mouth to say there was no such thing, but immediately knew it was futile. I turned to leave, then turned back again. “Wait. If you know all your drivers, why did you ask if I was a driver when I first walked in?”

  “That was a test, man. To make sure you weren’t a cop or a perv.” Bike Guy pointed the clipboard at me and peered over his glasses. “ ’Cause I don’t talk to neither.”

  * * *

  – – – –

  Neither cop nor perv, I stood on the sidewalk outside Yellow Pedicab and let pedestrians jostle me while I stared pointlessly at traffic. Seemed like my investigation had been stymied before it even really began.

  A pedicab approached from down G Street, its driver out of his seat, calves outlined like eggplants as he manfully pumped the pedals, five hundred pounds of human distributed between a pair of con-goers seated in the Starfleet Captain’s chair with wheels behind him, their faces completely obscured by the mammoth Attack on Titan–branded swag bags in their laps.

  As the cab rolled past, a symbol on the back made me do a double-take: it was line art of a muscular superhero, with a saipan hat completely covering his head, pulling a rickshaw holding an old dowager whose own head was covered by his fluttering cape.

  That sparked something in the deepest recesses of my brain—I whipped out my sketchbook and flipped through the pages until I found my drawing of the pedicab driver. Completely subconsciously, perhaps my eye was drawn to its vague racism, I had made a point of capturing that same symbol from a sticker on the side of the Mesoamerican throne.

  By the time I looked up, the Starfleet pedicab was already gone, but that was okay: I had an idea. I typed “library” into the Maps app and was delighted to find the main branch was literally around the corner from where I stood. San Diego was a pretty small town when you got right down to it.

  The main library was impressively cavernous, all metal and glass, cleverly concealing any visible evidence of books. Two homeless guys played chess near the wall-to-ceiling windows.

  “We close in ten minutes,” one of the front desk librarians said before I could even get through the door.

  “No problem. Where are your phone books?”

  She pointed, and I found. Turning the tissue-thin paper of the San Diego Yellow Pages made me feel like I was churning butter at Colonial Williamsburg. There looked to be six or seven businesses listed under PEDICABS, including a picture ad for Super Rickshaw.

  I could have just ripped out the page, but that would have triggered my well-honed guilt complex. Up the main escalator I found a photocopier and fished some coins out of my pocket and copied the whole page.

  “Kicking it old school,” I muttered as the huge ancient machine rumbled through its task with a sliding light and ungodly racket. “Kicking this Hardy Boys shit old school, yo.”

  * * *

  – – – –

  I deemed my efforts sufficiently impressive to be rewarded with beer. I found a lovably awful dive bar back on G Street that had just the one tap, defiantly dedicated to Bud Light. I paid for a cold pint and sat alone in a corner booth, my butt crinkling on its descent.

  I reached into my jeans and removed the search warrant I had shoved in my back pocket while riding down in the Space Elevator:

  “The People of the State of California to any peace officer in the county of San Diego,” it read, “Proof by affidavit having been made before me by Detectives (Sam and Twitch, whatever their real names were), San Diego Police Department demonstrates that there is substantial probable cause pursuant to Penal Code section 1524 for the issuance of the search warrant, as set forth in the affidavit attached hereto and made a part hereof as is fully set forth herein, you are, therefore, commanded to make search at any time of day, good cause being shown herefore, of room 1134 at the Hilton San Diego Downtown/Bayfront, 900 Bayfront Court…”

  I set the paper aside. “Probable” and “cause” were the two words that leaped out at me. Probable cause that I shot Danny Lieber to death. Two words I had heard in countless TV shows and movi
es, but had never applied to me, personally, in real life, and now they chilled me to the bone.

  I had to find a way to make my cause more improbable.

  I called the number for Super Rickshaw, but got a recording about office hours, which were 9 to 5. It was currently 7:30. No opportunity to leave a message was offered before the robot hung up on me.

  Did I really have to gumshoe this girl down myself? After all, I wasn’t exactly poor. I had mid-five figures in checking this very instant. My current rootless lifestyle meant my overhead was laughably low. As a man of means, I could do what men of means did, which was hire other men to do the shit I didn’t want to do for me.

  I googled “San Diego private investigator” and was impressed to find so many that they merited a Top Ten list on Yelp. I could probably find someone before heading over to the con tomorrow morning, assuming one call to the Super Rickshaw offices didn’t clear up this whole mystery.

  The fact that I had developed a plan of action that wasn’t completely moronic put my mind at ease. I decided on the spot that this deserved to be further rewarded with additional beer.

  * * *

  – – – –

  I stayed at the bar until sunset, not sure what to do next. Normally I would amble over to the Marriott pool area and discover which old friends were hanging out, but in light of recent developments I wanted to stay as far away from there as possible. Ultimately I decided to try my luck at the Grand Hyatt bar next to the Marquis, which had been the main pro hangout for the decade prior to the Marriott’s ascendance.

  As I went back down the hill to the convention center area, I tried Becca Kurtz’s number. I got more than a busy signal, but it was a leave-a-message from her, so I did:

  “Hey, Becca, it’s Mike again. I, uh, wow. I’m glad I got through to you. I can only imagine what you’re going through right now.”

  I stumbled over my last few words because I had stopped on a corner and turned back and was certain I was being followed.

  “I’m really sorry about Ben. I was gonna ask if you wanted to talk about it, but…I think the truth is…I need to talk about it?”

  And not by the sort of people you wanted to be following you: they were big, scary white dudes with shaved heads and anarchic beards and tattoos on their necks, none of which were likely to say “Mom.” If they had been wearing furs instead of leather they would have looked like they had just come home from a long, hard day of sacking monasteries.

  “I know you must have a lot on your mind right now, but if you could possibly…uh…call me…”

  When I turned the corner I glanced back and saw the men striding purposefully toward me, increasing in pace. I could see vivid Gothic script of the same word inscribed across both of their Adam’s apples:

  M E H

  Our eyes met at the same time and the MEH twins instantly lunged for me. I dove sideways into the street without looking at traffic, causing a Lexus to screech to a halt and the driver to scream high-pitched invectives at me. The bikers, not quite as suicidally mindless as me, looked both ways before crossing the street and got caught behind a double-decker bus blaring Tears for Fears. “COSPLAY KARAOKE” was emblazoned on one side. On the upper deck a guy in very realistic Doctor Doom armor clanked his way through the band’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

  “Fancy meeting you here,” said a voice in front of me. I nearly ran at the sight of its source, thinking that these two had brought one of their blonde Aryan gun molls with them. But it took me less than a second to recognize Katie Poole.

  “You going to the H4H party too?” she said with a smile and jerked a thumb at the open doors of the hotel directly to our left, all potted palms, red carpets, and bronze nymphs.

  “Uh, yes, yes I am,” I said, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her into the lobby.

  “I think it’s on the roof—oh, here we go,” Katie said, and walked toward an elevator dedicated via signs to the Sky Lounge. In front of its doors stood a large bouncer in a tuxedo and a chipper middle-aged woman holding a clipboard and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “HEROES 4 HEROES,” a charity that helped down-on-their-luck comics creators with medical and other life-changing expenses. It was a substitute for the insurance none of us had, or were ever offered, as we toiled away for decades in the comic strip mines.

  “Are we on the list?” I said, glancing behind me.

  “The email said as long as we had a collection bin on our tables, we’d be on the list,” Katie said. Heroes 4 Heroes handed out Tupperware bins with their logo on it, and creators in Artists’ Alleys were supposed to ask their fans to contribute money as tips for signatures or sketches. I intermittently remembered to do this during the day; most fans, God bless them, did so without prompting.

  Katie gave our names to the H4H volunteer, who checked them off her clipboard. “Yup, you’re all good—have fun, and thanks for your help,” she said. The bouncer very slowly walked over to the Sky Lounge elevator and very slowly pressed the call button, which, I hoped and prayed, heralded its very slow descent to the lobby.

  “How’s your show going?” Katie asked, totally oblivious to my mounting panic. “It’s really slow for me, man. I feel like people are paying less for commissions. Maybe it’s the economy? I just feel like there’s so much competition for the dollar in San Diego. But maybe it’s just me. I worry I peaked on Mister Mystery. That would suck if my whole career was downhill from here.”

  I kept looking back toward the lobby entrance to see if my hirsute pursuers appeared. I didn’t spot them before the elevator doors opened with a ding. I grabbed Katie by the arm and dragged her inside.

  “Boy, someone really wants to get his drink on,” she laughed. “Don’t get too excited, tough guy, I’m pretty sure it’s a cash bar.”

  As the elevator doors closed I saw the MEH brothers break into a sprint right at me—but the bouncer stepped forward and blocked them.

  I breathed a sigh. What the hell was that all about? Did it have anything to do with the whole Danny Lieber business, or had Goodreads reviewers started deploying death squads?

  The elevator doors opened to the Sky Lounge, which provided a predictably spectacular panorama of the city skyline. A turquoise Olympic-size reflective pool shimmered in the center of the roof, around which creators and editors and publishers clustered, drinks in hand. Cleverly projected on the side of a glass office tower across the street were huge photos of the many creators that H4H had helped over the years. None of them were household names, not that comics generated many of those beyond someone like Stan Lee. The graying heads and brown-spotted faces were attached to barely remembered names from the credit boxes on the splash pages of my youth, writers and pencillers and inkers and colorists and letterers who toiled away when comics were still mostly staples of spinner racks in drugstores and foot-level shelves in cigar shops. They had been successful in their days as weavers of childhood adventure, but were not among the lucky few who broke into wider acceptance in novels or movies. Some had given it the old college try, lighting out to Hollywood, but got only a couple Saturday morning animation gigs here or there. They discovered the hard way that breaking into another medium like television was as difficult as breaking into comics in the first place; and by the time they had no choice but to return to comics, comics didn’t want them anymore. The generational turnover was quick in the comics pages, when styles no longer what the readers wanted were overtaken by younger, newer models, closer to the ages of those readers, as I had done to Ben K and Katie Poole had done to me. For these guys, once old age set in, with its myriad tiny ailments and its several major ones, their savings had been spent and their current earning power was all but nil. It was left to charities like H4H to step in and pay for their treatments, from dialysis to chemotherapy. These golden-aged artists literally depended on the kindness of strangers; but thankfully the artists were no strangers to the fans who dona
ted to their cause—no, these were grateful readers, grown up and able to give back to those who had provided them with so much grist for adventure and laughter when they were younger.

  I was surprised, in that it made me stop and stare, that one of the photos of the elderly comics creators on the side of the nearby building was of Benjamin “Ben K” Kurtz.

  As I stood there stunned looking at Ben’s photo, another artist—I’m not going to say his name, but anyone in the industry would know it immediately—passed by and patted me on the back.

  “ ‘Atta boy,” he said, and kept walking to the other side of the roof before I could ask what exactly I had atta’d.

  A widow’s-peaked caterer handed me a Jameson on the rocks.

  “Thanks?” I said.

  “Thank your friend at the bar,” the waiter said, pointing in the direction of the northern end of the pool, where a bar was flanked by two potted palmettos. Ian Smallwood was leaning there, a twinkle in his eye. He raised his glass in my direction and mouthed what I thought was:

  Well played.

  I started to walk over to ask him what the hell was going on but Allan Boelle, the director of Heroes 4 Heroes, stepped in front of me with an oustretched hand. Before landing his current gig at H4H, Allan had bounced around the comics industry in a variety of roles—retailer, editor, marketer, animation writer—as had many before him. Comics was the stranger with candy of careers: once you agreed to get into the white van, you never got out again. Allan had told me once his mother wanted him to be a doctor, and you could see why: he had big, sad eyes, horn-rimmed glasses, a graying Afro, and a calm singsong of a voice. He was exactly the sort of person you wanted to tell you that you had cancer. Odds are he’d sound like he felt really bad about it.

  “Sorry for your loss,” he said to me in a well-practiced funeral director purr.