by Peter Craig
“You went out to the lake alone. Just to what—go fly-fishing?”
She finally faced him across the dim room, but without her eyes focused, like he was only some sound in the dark.
“Oh Jesus, baby. You don’t fly-fish in a lake. And no, I had a lot on my mind.” Jerry put his arm around Kevin and shouted, “He thinks it’s funny! At least somebody around here has got a sense of humor.”
Colette’s eyelids were swollen. Kevin couldn’t imagine how his father failed to see the wreckage of papers, broken lamps, and clothes in the room, like a storm had blown through a shattered window. When Kevin left the room, he expected shouting to start, but they were silent all night.
The following morning, over breakfast, Jerry seemed to have accepted that Colette was angry, but his normal run of apologies and promises did nothing more than stiffen her in the chair. Beyond the fact that the car had been towed and the clock was ticking on Minneapolis, he didn’t seem to remember details of his own story. Colette asked him if his hickey had come from a squirrel, and he replied that he had bumped into a tree branch.
“I think her husband came home,” she said quietly. “And you had to throw on whatever clothes you could find, because yours were scattered around. And then you ran outside and voilà: the car’s been towed. That’s the one true part.”
“I don’t think you want to call me a liar, Colette.”
“You’re a professional liar.”
“Yeah, but this is different. I only lie when there’s money involved.”
She stared down, licked her lips, and said: “Then we’ll have to find out how much I’m worth.”
That afternoon she kept to herself in the hotel’s lounge, reading at a far table and refusing drinks from men at the bar. Passing her on the way back to the room, Kevin asked if she was okay. She responded with a curt, “Of course,” giving him the same vacant look that she had shown his father.
That afternoon, beside the theaters in a mall, Kevin stole her a gold pin from a jewelry store. He felt a gust of nostalgia as he looked at two identical items, flipped one perfectly into the inside fold of his sleeve, and placed the other back in its spot. But when he looked at the pin later, it was a tacky scarab, fit only to melt down and fill a tooth. He knew Colette would consider a tasteless gift to be worse than a devalued I love you—for he now believed that the dividing line between suitors and stalkers could often be determined by an appraisal. So he tied it into his shoelaces like a cocooning insect.
When Colette found him that evening, she glanced at it and said nothing. Squinting, with only business in her voice, she said, “I’m going to need your help with a scam. Your father isn’t doing anything but fronting some cash, that’s it. You don’t have to think, and you don’t have to be on anybody’s side. I don’t need your heart or your soul—I just need a decent pair of hands.”
FIFTEEN
For her first solo assignment, Colette was determined to find the per-fect mark. In Madison, Wisconsin, she left the new hotel disguised as a student wearing a backpack, a knit cap, and a douse of patchouli oil. She quickly filled a legal pad with observations about various candidates: a classics professor, a claims adjuster, and a presumed surgeon who later turned out to be a distinguished-looking hospital janitor.
Jerry passed the entire first day in a grim bar, hidden from daylight, scraping wet labels off his beer bottles. He hated this university hamlet with its bike paths of joggers and baby carriages, a lake full of pedal boats. “All these little rosy-cheeked punks make me want to blow up a juice stand.”
He complained across the bar that his woman was going to kill him with visions of grandeur. To Kevin, he added, “She’s never going to be satisfied with a wallet, let’s put it that way. She’s going to want some poor bastard’s whole life. Whoever she picks for this little con of hers, she might as well marry him.”
He stared vacantly at a football game on the shelf above the bar.
“Look—I know what you’re thinking, Kevin, so don’t say it. She’s a very smart girl. And it’s hard to be too intelligent when you’re a woman. They get spoon-fed even more bullshit than we do. It drives any girl nuts who’s smart enough to notice it, and that’s why all intelligent women are insane—write that down if you have to. They live in little shoe-box prisons of perfumed horseshit.”
He swigged the last dregs from his bottle, then nodded his chin at the bartender. “But she’s got to stop fucking around and just admit some things. She’s a greedy bitch. Personally, it’s a pain in the ass; but professionally, it’s high praise. She just doesn’t direct her energy. All this setup now: she’s got to find Mr. Right, and everything has to be as perfect as her wedding. This is a job. Look at our bartender—you think he goes home and writes in his diary about that bottle of scotch? No. And neither should we. We pick one asshole off a pedal boat, ride him for a few Gs, and get out of town.”
“Then why let her do it?”
“Look, I’m going to tell you something and it doesn’t leave this bar. Okay? I’ve had a lot of partners, a lot of—business associates—and in some ways Colette’s the best I ever worked with. She’ll turn a store clerk inside out; she’ll get people so hyped up they’ll listen to anything she says. You’ve got this crazy ability with details, little technical things—but that woman can read the landscape like nobody I’ve ever seen. Ask her a few questions after she leaves a giant store. She can describe the look on everyone’s faces from women’s wear all the way to sporting goods. She can look at twenty clerks and pick the one who’ll run a hot card. She’s got that sense of people. But, see, it also scares her. Like being too stoned in a crowd or something, and she needs somebody to walk her through it. Anybody who sees too much stops being able to move. You wind up being one of those video-store clerks with a 160 IQ, or this bartender over there—he was a fucking summa cum laude.”
As the bartender looked over at this, frowning, Jerry toasted his empty beer and said, “Yeah, one more, Einstein.”
Two weekends before Halloween, Colette asked Kevin for a favor. She wanted him to turn his technical expertise to the ancient and underappreciated craft of pickpocketing, which would be a helpful shortcut in a scam she described as “a ballet colliding with an opera.” True to his usual form, Kevin practiced the new skill intensely. He hung coats and pants over chairs, bumped them, and lifted out wallets. She replaced his dummy wardrobe with a baggy blue suit. As she hung this suit from doors and shower stalls, it began to have its own haunting personality, startling Kevin when he woke up to find it dangling from the curtain rack, or mocking him from a standing lamp, its pockets always refilled, its wallet hidden among the lumpy decoys of breath mints and folded-up papers. During each practice run the suit waited for him across the hotel room like an unwavering enemy in a duel.
By the third night, Kevin needed work on a moving target. Colette played the mark, sauntering across the room. Kevin would bump her, dip his extended fingers into the pocket with a scissoring motion. After an hour, she said, “Stop feeling me up, Kevin. And you have to be quicker than that. More fluid.”
It was an exciting and agonizing dance routine, rehearsed into the giddy hours of the night. But Colette was in no mood for joking, not when he playfully frisked her, especially not when he bypassed a coat to wedge his fingers into the back of her tight designer jeans. “If you can’t stay focused for this—tell me. I have a hundred contingency plans here.”
“I can, I can. I promise. No problem whatsoever—no more messing around.”
While she was asleep, Kevin grew so curious about this perfect mark that he climbed out of bed to snoop through her notes. With turbulent penmanship she had sketched so many details about the man’s daily patterns, indulgences and weaknesses, tastes and merits, that Kevin felt a pang of jealousy.
Meets lover for lunch,
Does all the talking—
Hides wedding ring
Inside alligator wallet.
Some observations read to Kevin like l
ittle cramped haiku:
Red Mercedes-Benz
Backseat: books, flowers, papers
Never carries cash
The following night Colette returned, threw down her bag and hat, then leaped up and danced on the bedsprings. They were in business. She pronounced her mark the worst and richest man in Wisconsin.
When Kevin began to piece together some of her plans through the growing pile of notes, receipts, carbons, and mail, he was astounded by the way she seemed to work her con in reverse. She had operated on the theory that the most expensive jewelry store in town would attract a significant percentage of philandering husbands. He asked her about this while they were practicing one morning, and she nonchalantly replied, “Diamonds are pure guilt or lust—to any man except Liberace.”
The mark was a university professor and, apparently, a noted author. Like an eager freshman, Colette was thrilled by each new discovery, purchasing his novels and reading them in her bed with a scrunched, horrified face, happy to proclaim that he was a talented but pompous writer who had completely objectified his female characters. Over the next thirty-six hours she used the man’s bloated ego to dig up more information than on all their Dumpster dives combined. Posing as a journalist, a student from freshman lit who had a nagging question (and obviously a schoolgirl’s crush), and, at last, a woman from the payroll office who had lost the files on him, she could easily have written the man’s biography. She developed for him a deep and almost erotic hatred.
He was having an affair with a graduate student, it seemed, and Colette had known this since the first day he’d browsed through the jeweler’s like a circling hawk. Intending to bilk the man out of some ungodly sum, she referred to his wife and young lover as if they were her teammates; and sometimes, eerily, she would begin speaking to his wife while reading through the course work or plotting out schemes.
“You know, Darcy, this literature racket is a joke,” she said. “Every woman in these books is a suicidal idiot: Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina. It’s like this guy is teaching a class on easy marks.”
She woke Kevin before dawn on the morning of “phase one,” and reviewed with him a calendar that predicted the mark’s activities in fifteen-minute intervals. She had a map of the university, annotated with flourishes of her handwriting, and she explained to Kevin that today was the day. Posing as her mark’s mistress, she had called around town to change a reservation, and—like a hacker eventually stumbling onto a password—she had found the exact restaurant where they were set to meet for lunch.
Just as she had predicted, the mark emerged from Helen White Hall at a few minutes after ten, bought coffee at a nearby stand, and began heading across the crowded quadrangle. The man was in his mid-fifties, gray, with shaggy eyebrows and a stocky build that seemed to give his walk an added crotchety seriousness.
Dressed in a tie-dyed shirt and a knit Rastafarian hat, Kevin pushed off and began trailing the mark on his skateboard. Colette’s notes were accurate down to the exact path he walked and the crosswalks he used. He headed through the shops along State Street to buy his mistress a gift, and as she had hoped from his days of covert browsing, he ducked into Good’s Jewelers. Just as she’d said, he came back out through the revolving brass doors hiding a bag in his overcoat pocket.
Kevin could perceive only enough of this scam to admire her eye for detail: he even recognized the overcoat. The mark stood on the corner sipping his coffee, trained to ignore the droves of students around him, his tie a crimson pennant in the brisk wind. Kevin pushed off and began scuttling downhill toward him. He swerved among pedestrians, zeroing in on the mark, the light just changing from green to yellow, the students with their backpacks and books stepping off the curb. Kevin’s fingertips tingled, the board clattered under his feet, and his vision reduced into a predator’s narrow focus until everything became blurry around the edges of his target.
With a thud Kevin skated right into the man, intentionally knocking the coffee onto his shirt. Scrambling and muttering apologies in the parody of a stoner’s voice, Kevin patted all around the man’s coat and pockets. In the midst of this orchestrated tangle, Kevin was most surprised by the intimacy of the act: the man smelled like cigars and bleach; his body was soft under the girdle of a tight blue shirt. After a few explosive heartbeats, he was back on the board, skating away, and the mark still sat on the ground, disoriented among a pack of other students in similar psychedelic shirts. The bottom of the mark’s coat pocket had left a trace of lint under Kevin’s fingernail; and the wallet was warm and scaly and felt vaguely alive. He crumpled the jewelry store bag in his fist, and said to a passing group of girls: “I’m a magician. I’m a grandmaster, a black belt—Bruce Lee. Oh, I’m a bad man.”
From around the bend Colette was approaching in sunglasses, a scarf tied over her head and a rolled-up newspaper tucked under her arm. The quality of her strut, the angle of her raised chin, the tilted smile—all filled Kevin with such a gust of joy and affection that he broke into laughter. He skated to her and slipped the wallet and crumpled bag into the fold of the newspaper. Around the next corner, he sat and caught his breath on a bus-stop bench. Everyone stared at him. “I’m an all-star,” he boasted to the other people around the bus stop. “Don’t worry, I’m not crazy, ma’am. I just aced all my finals. I’m summa cum laude.”
That evening, pretending to be the wife, Colette called every credit card company to go over suspicious charges on the cards. She made a list of places the professor had bought gifts, claiming anyone arrogant enough to have an affair on a Visa card deserved worse than the “evil poetry she was about to unleash upon him.”
Though Kevin was not entirely sure what she planned next, he explained the con as best he could to his father, sitting beside him in the bar where Jerry had long since gained the status of a grumpy regular. “She’s already got enough information to take the guy for a lot—she can do his signature, she’s got all his info. But for some reason she’s waiting on something else. Weirdest thing, Dad—I go to all this trouble to steal the guy’s wallet and some fancy necklace, and she drops it off at the lost and found of the restaurant where he had lunch. She had it a couple hours at the most. Then she calls his office, pretending to be a waitress, leaves a message with his secretary. Says someone found it. She didn’t steal a thing but a couple of receipts, and the mark never even reported the cards missing.”
“Face it, Kevin. It’s a disaster. I’m losing hundreds every day just on her back-to-school wardrobe.”
Just that night Colette bought new clothes, and when Kevin saw them hanging around the room, each dress and coat in the thin membrane of its wrapper, he worried that she was planning to elope with the mark. She bought a gold wedding band that closely resembled his ring, so snug that she had to slide it on with Vaseline.
“Why does it need to be that tight?” asked Kevin.
“Because I’m with child.”
She asked Jerry to play one simple role: check out of the hotel on that afternoon, load the car, and meet them at six-thirty, when they would leave town immediately. “Probably with every cop in the city on our tail,” he said.
Kevin’s job was to follow her from store to store throughout Madison and create diversions. But the task was complicated, and she briefed him on the various tendencies and psychological profiles of salespeople all over the town.
Before dawn Colette was already getting dressed. She had duct-taped folded shirts over her belly and now unrolled panty hose that she squeezed over the bulge. Once assembled in her lavender maternity dress, she appeared to be somewhere in the second trimester, and for a while she practiced a gooselike walk with an arched back. With makeup she emphasized the plum coloring of the circles under her eyes, thinned out her normally heavy lower lip with pale contours, and ground in the powder of an anemic complexion.
It was a blustery morning, wind tugging the trees, chapping Kevin’s nose, when they set out in their bundled coats and scarves, Colette looking ten years older f
rom the makeup and her changed movements. The stores were just opening.
Quickly Kevin began to understand the first layers of her scheme. In a couple of hours with the “lost” wallet, she had created six department store accounts off his Visa while pretending to be his young girlfriend. She had already run up massive charges. Now, after taking a few days to learn the schedules of clerks, careful to make sure she faced a different staff, she returned as his wife. She complained that she had found receipts but never seen any of these elaborate gifts—mink stoles and diamond earrings—“What on earth is going on here?” If any salesman was unsure of her tragic position and her loutish husband, she would break into tears. To any man she would become both lost and flirtatious, playing on any protective impulse and begging him to “bend the rules.”
“Let’s close that account, please. I don’t need any more humiliation. And I’ll need you to change the billing address for those charges. You see, my husband is going to be moving out soon. I won’t tolerate this. Here’s where he’ll be. It’s our house in the Berkshires—maybe this bill can greet him there.”
The sympathetic salesmen diverted enormous credit card bills to a random address in Massachusetts buying Colette added weeks while she further played her tortured status to add other items onto the accounts. At a Robinsons-May, Colette had scouted a righteous and bitter young saleswoman, who willingly colluded to charge another thousand dollars to the professor’s Mastercard, using only the number, the expiration date, and his wife’s tremulous signature.