The Con Artist

by Fred Van Lente

  She looked me over. “No.”

  “Get Preston,” Samus snapped at Scarlet Witch, who had resumed her post peering between the curtains.

  “Preston’s busy,” Scarlet Witch said. “And not, like, in a good way.”

  I floundered desperately for words. “You told me about the forest—in Poland. At the kiss statue. On Wednesday night?”

  “Its title is Embracing Peace.” Her expression didn’t change. “Right, you’re sketch guy. You were flirting with me.”

  “Maybe a little. But that’s not important right now. I really need your help—”

  “We got a strict no-stalker rule here, dude. Out, now,” Samus said, walking over and reaching for my shoulder.

  “Oh, shit!” Scarlet Witch said from the curtain. “The cops are making the audience line up along the wall…and Preston is bringing the plainclothes guys over here.”

  “Cops?” the ex-Xenomorph said.

  “What do we do?” one of the dancers said.

  “Put a shirt on!” someone yelled behind the changing curtain.

  I did a doubletake as the pedicab driver dashed behind the sheets separating the changing area from the rest of the space. She reached a flimsy wooden door and threw it open to a short connecting hallway that ran the length of the building. She opened a door on the opposite wall and entered some kind of bar storage room, packed high with kegs and cases of Bud Light tallboys, fitfully illuminated by buzzing fluorescent lights.

  She sensed movement and realized someone was following her—me. She stopped, turned, and stuck out her chin. “Listen, buddy, you know you’re not getting laid tonight, right?”

  “Not my motivation. I swear. I just really need to talk to you. Super quick. But away from here. Obviously.” I told her my name and extended a hand.

  She stuck her arm out straight and shook mine. “Christina.”

  I nearly yanked my hand back like I’d been shocked. “What did you say?”

  “Krystyna. With a K and two Ys.” She raised a brow. “You got a problem with that?”

  “No,” I said, “not at all. Not in the least.”

  “Look, I can’t stop you from following me. But you don’t want to be anywhere near me if they catch up.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I’m in this country on a student visa that expired six years ago.” She opened the storeroom door and we were in the loud, crowded sports bar next to Rule 34, with two hundred TVs all tuned to the same Padres away game. She made a beeline to the side exit, and I had to dodge tray-carrying waitresses and roaming drunks to keep up.

  Part of me thought I should tell her that it wasn’t ICE busting the club but SDPD looking for me. But another, much larger part of me concluded it was unwise to make her any less inclined to let me tag along than she already was.

  * * *

  – – – –

  “…and so, because I was with you when this guy was being killed, you’re my alibi.”

  For that murder, I didn’t say out loud.

  We were making our way as far from Rule 34 as possible, down a deserted stretch of Eighth Avenue. A cockroach scuttled brazenly down the sidewalk with us, so big that at first I took it for a cigar with legs. A tall homeless guy with Einstein hair admonished an empty Dasani bottle with his finger, shaming it in front of the heaping trash bags filled with its recyclable brethren lashed to a nearby shopping cart.

  “It’s not like I looked at my watch or anything,” Krystyna said.

  “So?”

  “You say we were together at the same time this guy was getting shot, but I don’t know that for a fact.”

  “You don’t keep, like, a log for fares or—”

  “Are you crazy? As long as they get their cut at the end of the week, Super Rickshaw could care less who we take where. They don’t even let us accept credit cards. Nothing written down. All cash. Makes it easier for them to cheat on their taxes.”

  “Crap.”

  “It would be our word against the cops’ is what I’m saying.”

  “Still…”

  “Cops don’t care about anyone’s word but their own.”

  “Look. I can’t do nothing because it all seems hopeless. I can’t think that way, I’m not wired to—”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you just because it’s hopeless. Hopeless causes are kind of my whole thing.”

  “Seriously? Oh, wow. Thank you. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have no desire to get you in trouble with Immigration.”

  “But you don’t want me to talk to Immigration, right? I don’t have any problem with San Diego PD. My California driver’s license is legal. I mean, so far as they know.”

  “That’s great. I have just one more favor to ask you.”

  Krystyna arched an eyebrow. “You want me to open a vein?”

  “That won’t be necessary. I was wondering if you could find me a charger to juice up my phone and uh…I need a place to crash?”

  “The cops are really coming after you that hard, huh?”

  “I’m afraid so. I want to come to them on my own terms.”

  “You’re going to turn yourself in and what, I’m coming with you as a witness?”

  “Something like that. But not, I don’t think, until…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to walk in there with just an alibi. I need the story. The real story. Who the killer is. And I think I’m very close to being able to do that.”

  One end of Krystyna’s e-cig glowed as she sucked on the other. “You’re real lucky my life just happens to be super boring right now.”

  * * *

  – – – –

  They were going to hang me. That much was certain.

  I could hear the murmur of their anger and the crackle of their torches through the shades I had pulled over the windows in a futile attempt to keep them from knowing I was inside.

  But I wasn’t fooling anybody. They knew. In my mind’s eye I could see them throwing the noose over the thickest branch of the half-dead sycamore in the front lawn outside. I heard the sputtering protest of the horse they led beneath the tree. They’d sit me in his saddle as the rope was placed around my neck.

  Dad was in the room with me while I feverishly drew by lantern light, worry permanently etched on his face.

  My dad was doing his clucking and sighing, his where-did-I-go-wrong-with-him routine. I had an entire issue of Mister Mystery laid out across the dining room table—twenty pieces of art board with the Atlas Comics logo in the corner, one for each page of the final printed book. I was desperately making corrections to the inks before the mob got inside. I had my Wacom tablet propped up on the kitchen counter where the Ben K originals were displayed as reference. I was doing my best to fix my drawings so they looked exactly like the great master’s. I was breathing heavily, sweat dripping from my brow; I worked as quickly as I could so no perspiration would fall on the pages and smudge or spot them. Still, I was pleased with what I’d drawn. I could convince the mob outside, I knew I could.

  I could convince them that I was more valuable alive than dead.

  Dad shook his head. “I told you you had no talent for this. I mean, you have talent. Pure aesthetic talent. But not the temperament. Entertainment is all about telling others what they want to hear. You’re too stubborn for that. I’ve always told you, your mind is better suited for academia.”

  “Like yours?”

  Dad laughed. “They’re not after me, now, are they?”

  “You’re too pessimistic. You’ve been a pessimist my whole life. I know I can do this.”

  “You don’t get it. They’re never going to love you the way you want them to love you. And they’re never going to love you as much as they love Ben K.”

  I stood back, chest heaving, and surveyed my work.

/>   Then I nearly cried out loud.

  The amazing adjustments I thought I had been making were, in fact, ugly scrawls that looked like graffiti, or like the scribbles of an emotionally disturbed child. I looked down at my hand and dropped my drawing implement with a shout. In the darkness I hadn’t grabbed a thin Copic marker but a thick crayon from a toddler’s oversized box. Too late I realized I’d been defacing my artwork like the wall of a men’s room.

  I turned to the corner where Dad was sitting, planning to head off his inevitable snide comment with one of my own, but he was gone.

  With a deafening roar the door to the house imploded and the mob poured in, all grasping hands and screaming mouths, backlit by the dancing orange of all the effigies of me on poles outside. My time was up: there was no way to placate them, no room in their rage for mercy. Then they were upon me.

  I didn’t sit upright with a gasp when I woke, like in the movies; muscle groups don’t work that way (try it sometime). But my eyes flew open and I breathed heavily and listened to my heart thump for a good four minutes before I finally was able to move.

  The Padres promotional blanket that served as my bedding slid off my body as I sat up on the black leather Ikea couch. The sliding glass doors that faced Imperial Beach had no curtains, so frosted sunlight, inert in an early-morning Southern California gloom, owned the room. My chest heaved as I surveyed my surroundings, a squatters’ delight of overflowing ashtrays, half-eaten take-out cartons, a last-generation television hooked up to a duct-taped Playstation 3, and whatever furniture the occupiers had reclaimed from the streets.

  The Uber driver that Krystyna (I still can’t get over that) hailed to take us here turned out to be one of her housemates. Their six-bedroom McMansion was among numerous casualties of the most recent housing collapse, a flipped property that had flopped. The owner, some international real estate consortium, calculated that it was cheaper to leave it and the other sprawling homes in the development empty and take the tax write-off rather than absorb the massive loss to unload it at current market value. One of Krystyna’s other housemates was sleeping with the guy whose job it was to check in once a month and chase squatters like her out. As long as she could put up with his chronic bad breath and questionable taste in gold chains, she and her likeminded misfit friends could live here rent free.

  Adrenaline still drummed through my veins from the nightmare. I got up and went to the glass doors to look out at the surf patting the white sand with its eternal rhythms of there-there-there-there. I checked Christine’s phone, which I had plugged into the wall with Krystyna’s charger: 100%.

  I dropped back down onto the couch. In the distance, one of Krystyna’s innumerable housemates—a United Nations of illegal immigrants and runaways recovering from or very much succumbing to significant drug problems—snored high and loud, almost proudly.

  All at once, the acute terror of the unreal dream faded, replaced with the chronic dread fostered by the sheer shittiness of my actual real-life situation. I groaned and rubbed my eyes.

  I am going to have to get drunk tonight.

  * * *

  – – – –

  So, it looked like I was going to miss all of Sunday at the convention. Oh, well. If any of the organizers discovered my Artists’ Alley spot unstaffed it would not augur well for the continued grandfathering of my table. But prison was probably worse, so c’est la vie.

  Fortunately, Sunday is always the deadest day at any con, even capital-C Comic-Con. It’s invariably Family Day, when parents are encouraged to bring their kids, often at a reduced ticket price, and kids notoriously do not have much money. The diehards empty their wallets the first few days, so business is pretty slow—just kids pawing at everything on your table, assuming it’s all free. I usually spend con Sundays hunched over my Bristol, banging out commissions.

  Hiding out in Krystyna’s squatter beach mansion, there was no reason for me not to do the same. Fans had given me good money for an original artwork; since I had their email addresses, I could track them down from any Undisclosed Location and snail-mail their finished piece. So I took my pencils and my markers and my Bristol, went out onto the sand-scattered porch facing the Pacific, found an unbroken beach chair, and went to work.

  I also had one comission for myself, something inspired by my dream, something I suspected would serve me especially well in the near future.

  I was halfway through this personal commission when Krystyna emerged from the house in a cloud of pot smoke. She was wearing overall shorts and a white shirt with a sunflower on it.

  “So, how long have you lived like this?” I was in the zone and perhaps not as circumspect as I could have been.

  Krystyna’s brow lowered. “What do you mean, like this?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like—no judgment, I swear!” I held up my hands defensively. “Like, you know…” I could feel myself digging my grave deeper and deeper. “Like squatters. Beach bums.”

  “We are beach bums.”

  “You don’t have any family back in Poland? With your illegal status, I bet it’s hard to go home to visit.”

  “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know anything about my family. What’s your problem, man?”

  “I know I don’t. That’s why I’m asking. I guess…” I swallowed. “You said you’ve been doing this a long time, right? Five or six years?”

  “Yeah?”

  “And, I mean, is it worth it? The wandering?”

  “What do you mean, is it worth it?”

  “What…” Even I knew I wasn’t talking about her anymore. “Do you see an end to it? A purpose?”

  “Are those the same thing?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  She thought about it, sipping her coffee, smoking a cigarette, looking at the beach. “We’re not moving toward anything. When I was a stupid kid I thought I had a purpose I wasn’t fulfilling. At first I wanted to be a painter, and one day sophomore year I saw a sketch Picasso did when he was seventeen. I wasn’t that good yet so I dropped out of the program. I felt I was so far behind already. What was the point? I had a boyfriend who was in a band, so I had that going for me. It’s so cliché, but I thought that was so hot. He came here and I followed, because I didn’t think I had a purpose without him. I think that scared him. He didn’t want the responsibility. But he didn’t have the guts to break up with me, so he just started cheating. It wasn’t hard for him. He was in a band, after all.”

  I thought of Christine and Danny. “Is that why they cheat? To make you break up with them?”

  “He did. He sure as hell wasn’t going to break up with me. Change scared him too much. God knows it scared the shit out of me. So he just tried to…layer onto our relationship. By, you know, adding sluts.” She chortled. “When I found out and said I’d forgive, oh man. You should have seen the look on his face. Pure fear.”

  I smiled. “So he did break up with you, in the end?”

  “No, not in so many words. He was such a pussy. God. I don’t know which one of us was the bigger coward. The best he could do was keep me from going with them on their next tour, up to San Francisco, Portland, Seattle—”

  “Where they hit it big?”

  “Are you kidding? They never made it back from that tour. I mean, the band didn’t. A few of the members did. I don’t know what happened. Probably nothing happened. They decided it was time for new lives. My guy never came back from Vancouver. I think he’s an illegal immigrant in Canada now.”

  “But you stayed here.”

  “I did. I had made friends, the crash happened, this place opened up, and…” She made her signature shrug. “It’s home. What can I tell you? It’s home. A good life is its own purpose. That’s all you need. I know it sounds stupid but it’s true.”

  “You don’t have a vagabond life. This place is the end of your wandering.” />
  She laughed, snarfing on the butt. “Man!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t sound so happy for me.”

  “It’s not you I’m worried about.”

  * * *

  – – – –

  The texts from Dirtbag started around ten o’clock in the morning.

  “Dude, where r u”

  10:25 AM.

  “Did u here about Christine?”

  11:15 AM.

  “Just let me know you’re OK”

  12:05 PM.

  “I’m going to con, swinging by your table, let me know if you want me to get anything”

  12:45 PM.

  “Dude cops were at your table. Asked if I seen you. Watch yr ass.”

  Krystyna popped out at lunchtime to run errands and I went into the kitchen, winding my way around the surfboards and drying wetsuits lying on the dining room table and chairs to the haphazardly stocked fridge. In addition to doggie bags with various housemates’ names written on them I found an open packet of bologna and Miracle Whip Light that passed the smell test. There wasn’t any bread so I just spread mayo on a stack of deli meat, which I then rolled into the most Caucasian burrito ever. I ate it with a smile of Caligula-like decadence.

  Not long after one o’clock I unplugged Christine’s iPhone from the wall. As I did, I noticed a piece of paper stuck between the phone and its hard plastic monkey case. I wriggled it out with my meager fingernails:

  “MEATWALL—Pop Con Management • Representation • Security”

  My blood ran cold. I remembered what Buddy from Buddy’s Art had said when I asked him where he got the Ben K piece:

  “You don’t know?”

  Possible translation:

  You don’t know your own wife sold it to me?

  I opened Christine’s contacts and in the Search field typed the number of Meatwall co-owner Terrence Lawson from the business card.

  One contact found: