The California Roll: A Novel

by John Vorhaus

  Usually to get online I just piggyback the wireless router of Rita and Cecilia, the pair-bonded ovarians who live in the downstairs half of my duplex. Today for some reason it wasn’t kicking a strong signal, so instead I jumped the WiFi from Java Man, the coffee joint at the base of the hill below. Good ol’ Java Man. You like to see a coffee chain giving Starbucks a run for their money.

  Checking a week’s worth of e-mail, I found the predictable ballyhoo of online casinos, penny stocks, and university degrees. Amid the spasm of spams, there was one I actually liked, from an outfit calling itself Charity Clearinghouse. They proposed to have you donate, through them, to charities of your choice—which donations are, of course, fully tax deductible. Now here came the pitch, a tangy twofer of money laundering and tax fraud. For every dollar you donate, they promise, you get half a buck back, deposited into an offshore online bank, whence you can online-shop or ATM back to cash or whatever, with ol’ Uncle Sammy ever none the wiser. Of course there’s no such thing as a free lunch, so Charity Clearinghouse admits to holding back a certain percentage of your donation for administrative services. But you’re okay with that; considering your prospective tax break, you still come out way ahead, as does your charity, with the IRS footing the bill, and when you think about it, isn’t that what damn big government should really be doing with your money anyhow? Hell, yeah!

  So, it’s the Haiphong phone book all over again, right? Unless you’re dumb enough not to realize that you’ll never see a buck back to your offshore online bank. And, depending on how you make your contribution (credit card is easiest, you are informed), your financials will be thoroughly harvested after the fact. But I liked this scam. I did. It preyed on cupidity, stupidity, munificence, and our national passion for screwing the IRS. In my neck of the weeds, that’s a perfect storm.

  I was thinking I might even arrogate the structure of the yak for myself, maybe dress it up in Santa clothes for Christmas. Did I feel guilty about stealing the intellectual property of some fellow artiste trompeur? Come on. There’s nothing new under the sun. You think Patrick Noochi invented the Spanish Prisoner? You think anyone did? It was probably around for centuries before it first popped up in print in 1910. Hell, I’ve run the game a dozen times myself, usually where I’m the title character, live and in person, on the lam from the law and desperate for you to take this here $20,000 certified check, in exchange, if you will, for just a little getaway green.

  Saying you can’t jack another snuke’s yak is like saying a writer can’t use Boy Meets Girl because Shakespeare (that old thief) got there first.

  Not that there wasn’t room for improvement. Something like … oh, I don’t know … a cover letter from a phantom CPA validating the dodge and urging you to lock up your deductions by year’s end. Nothing like a little “time is of the essence” urgency to light a fire under a mark. But even as I game-planned the gag, I knew I’d never take it out for a spin. And why? The same mental splinter as last night. For some reason, the idea just didn’t appeal. I told myself it had nothing to do with ripping off folks during the Santa season, but I think it probably did, a little. Every now and then my conscience pops up out of its burrow like a meerkat on the scout, and this was one of those times. So I mentally set it aside and went back to browsing my mail.

  I came across this, from one bricabrac@resender.com: “Hey, bourbon guy. What time is vespers? What do Adam Ant and Charles Bronson have in common? Put them all together, they spell Java Man closest 2 u. Bring shoe. Love, Cinderfuckingella.”

  Huh.

  Interesting.

  Well, bourbon guy was obviously me, the smartass who wanted Fighting Cock, the sour mash pride of Bardstown, Kentucky. Cinderfuckingrella was equally obviously Allie, if you’re willing to grant a come-fuck-me pump as analogous to a glass slipper, which I was. Vespers is Catholic evening prayers, so that’d be basically sunset. And the link between Ant and Bronson? Turns out they share the same birthday, November 3. Right around the corner, and why was I not surprised?

  I wondered how Allie could be sure that she’d e-mailed the right address, but then I realized it was probably a blanket blast, with nothing in the text to aught but puzzle a wrong recipient. Weirdass spam, they’d think as they junk-drawered it. The only one it would mean something to was me.

  But… “Java Man closest 2 u”? How did she know which Java Man was closest to me? (The one I could hit with a rock from here.) Had I mentioned it in passing? I replayed our conversation from the night before. One thing I’m good at is remembering what I’ve said, a somewhat indispensable skill to a professional who must keep the leashes of his lies untangled. Had I told Allie I lived in Silver Lake? No, I was sure not. Besides, what would that tell her? Java Mans abound here, six alone within the radius of the next dead cat. No, she had to know exactly where I lived. And she had to not mind that I knew she knew.

  This disturbed me. I’m used to looking over other people’s shoulders, gathering the data that makes me look so casually magic on the job. I don’t like it the other way around. With the enemies you make in this game, you don’t want them knowing where you live.

  Sometimes their poison-pen letters explode.

  So I keep my tracks well covered; someone who could uncover them was a bit of a concern just on general principle.

  And then telling me she’s doing it. That was just brazen. Brazen enough, of course, to set my alarm clock for Tuesday, which is what she wanted, no doubt. But I’d be busy till then. When I met Cinderfuckingella again, I’d know a thing or two about her, too.

  For starters, I did a web search, using the same ham-fisted Google tool she’d probably used. I hate Google. It returns such vague and random results. Allie H. Quinn lives in Rosedale, Manitoba, and plays province-level field hockey. Alyson (“call me Allie!”) Quinn has 346 friends on her MySpace page. There are 19,734 people in the United States with the first name of Allie. As for my particular Allie: nothing at first blush. So I dug a little deeper.

  The grift in the modern age ably employs the internet as another trick up its voluminous and fluttery sleeve. Especially useful are certain backdoor database search engines you can buy if you know where to look, or hack if you know how to hack. No point in taking down a bereaved widow, for instance, till you gauge the breadth, depth, and liquidity of her husband’s life insurance. Properly equipped, you can weevil into company records, university archives, any state’s DMV. You’re your own personal Freedom of Information Act. So I used available tools to apply a more rapier touch to my search for the increasingly mysterious Allie Quinn.

  Nothing. Nothing I couldn’t immediately dismiss as a false positive, anyway; I’m reasonably certain that Aileen O’Quinn was not my gal, less for the distant agnation of the name match and more for the fact that the octogenarian stroked out and died last week. Of course, there was no reason to believe that “Allie Quinn” was even remotely close to her real name, and growing evidence to suggest it was pure marzipan. But the fact that she’d phony up to me made her more vexing still. At this point, I had to assume she was working my same side of the street. But why was she working me?

  I attacked the info underground from a slightly different angle, accessing a national bunco photo database. It’s a fact of the grift that sooner or later you will get popped, which translates into fingerprints and mug shots. For the sake of protecting innocents from the predations of guys like me, law enforcement creates and circulates our profiles, including a list of our favorite snadoodles—check kite, parallel marriage, what have you. Say someone turns up in your Walmart parking lot working a hijacked-appliance dodge, where you think you’re buying a stolen stereo but all you’re actually buying is a box of rocks, which you’d have to be dumb as to go for that gaff, but whatever. In that case, your local Jake can sneak a perp snap and try to make a match. So you see, the internet not only works for us but against us. It’s a cat-and-mouse game. Jake thinks he’s the cat.

  Since men on the razzle outnumber women ten to one
, my search task was easier than if I’d been looking for, say, me. I’m in there, of course, with three known aliases, Milad Majid, Bo Nada, and Sretan Bo017Ei?, all of which happen to mean Merry Christmas in one language or another. They list my specialty as long con securities fraud, which I think is a little misleading. I short con, too.

  So sorting by gender was a given. I could have sorted also by age, but I didn’t. Though I thought Allie was contemporaneous to me—north of twenty-five—I couldn’t swear that she wasn’t ten years older. Or younger: I’ve known some precocious girls in the game.

  Their daddies teach them. It’s cute.

  Likewise, I didn’t filter for, say, geographic tendency or hair color, because quality mooks know to how keep moving and dye. And Allie Quinn, by her sheer absence from the realm of usual suspects, was starting to impress me as a quality mook. The more I virtually paged through the virtual pages, the more I became convinced I wasn’t going to find her there. An hour later, search complete, I knew: If Allie Quinn was on the razzle, she had yet to make the database.

  Two immediate questions came to mind. How did Allie know where I lived, and why did she want to meet? I mulled the second question first. It didn’t seem likely that her only interest was in getting her shoe back. Just to be sure, I inspected it closely, to see if it was a particularly pricey brand or had a secret compartment or was made of drugs or something. Nope. Just your run-of-the-mill Payless pump. So then what?

  In my experience, human motivation can be broken down to the four broad strokes of sex, love, money, and revenge. Everything else we chase—power, glory, information, exultation, stimulation—is just a subset of these. Like the sign says, “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can rent sex.” So was sex what she wanted? Was Allie on the make? We’ve already discussed the disangular cut of my jib. I’m not “boyfriend cute,” not even “sidekick cute,” really. Yes, I watch what I eat and stupidly believe that regular aerobic exercise will extend the span of my life, for what that’s worth. But I don’t kid myself—as catches go, I’m strictly catch and release.

  So then, not sex.

  Love, then? Love?

  Lovely.

  But not likely.

  Look, I believe in love. I understand that my father loved my mother, though ultimately the two of them were so the same that they repelled each other like like magnetic poles. At that, I’d have to say he loved the grift far better than he ever loved her, or me, for that matter. He loved being in the wind, and that was a love that took a lifetime to wean and nurture and grow. So love, real love, isn’t sudden. Or if it is sudden, it’s perverse, like when you meet someone you think can fix your broken parts or fill some hole in your life, and your defective brain misinterprets this as “love at first sight.” Was Allie capable of this kind of malformed stalker love? Could she have spotted me across a crowded room and said, “That’s the man to undamage me”? Unlikely. I had to credit her with more common sense and self-awareness, and certainly more cynicism, than that.

  So: not sex, not love, then money. But what money? How? You meet someone at a party, even a Hollywood Hills party where people have a loose enough grip on their cash, how do you know this random stranger has a sufficiently deep and accessible pocket? Well, you don’t know. You prospect. But what would Allie have seen at first glance that made her think of sinking an exploratory well in me? I’m what you call a hard mark, sufficiently chary to see the grift coming and get out of its way. And it shows. At least I think it shows. Around here we have a saying, “Only victims get victimized.” No way do I come off as a victim, unless that’s part of my grift, which at a Hollywood Hills Halloween party it definitely is not. If Allie’s in the game, she knows this. If she’s not in the game … well, what the fuck?

  Oh then, let’s say revenge. Let’s say she’s the sister of someone I mooked, and now she’s playing back at me. That had a certain logic, but it didn’t pass the sniff test for a couple of reasons. First, dumb runs in tight circles, and if you’re dumb enough to fall into a conhole, no one you know—not your sister, your best friend, your coworker, priest, or dog—is smart enough to play you back out. Second, someone on a revenge tip just wouldn’t be that open with her play. No, “Java Man closest 2 u” was either a big semaphore or a casual mistake, and it didn’t feel like a mistake. She’s on to me, wants me to know it, and knows I’ll figure that out.

  Bottom line: I’m being grift-wrapped for something I cannot yet see. But why?

  Why being a dry hole, I took a whack at how, or rather two hows. How did she know where I lived, and how did she arrange to meet me at a party that even I didn’t know I was going to crash? The connect-the-dots answer had to be: She’s been following me, looking for an opportunity to “meet cute.” (She was cute; and it crossed my mind to wonder whether I was spending all this psychic energy on her because she presented a threat or just because I liked thinking about her. I liked how she smelled. Vanilla.)

  I went to the living-room window and looked out. The view from my deck is spectacular, but the view out front, not so much. Just a pot-holed asphalt street, some jacarandas, and the flat facade of the garage across the way, with stairs going up along its side. A cat sunned himself on the bottom step. Apart from that, nothing. What did I expect? To see her casing me from some parked car, Garbo cigarette hanging from her lip?

  She doesn’t smoke.

  And she knows I don’t drink.

  But wait … something else. I replayed a part of our party conversation, the part where I said “libated” and she said it wasn’t a word, not that I cared. That was it. That “not that you care.” The sort of thing you’d say about someone only if you knew it was true. And she’d just met me.

  But she knew me.

  She’d made a study.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

  Grifters are hunters.

  We don’t like to be prey.

  5.

  the original mirplo

  A t a quarter to Vespers on Tuesday, I was just heading out to Java Man when my cell phone rang. I half entertained the fantasy that it would be Allie, coming clean, ’fessing up, solving the big mystery for me before I had to suffer the actual indignity of sloping downhill to the cafe. Or maybe just calling to remind me to bring the shoe. (Though how she’d have my phone number would be another mystery yet to be solved.) But a glance at caller ID revealed what I should have known: It was Vic Mirplo. The original Mirplo. Truly one of a kind.

  Mirplo is the worst sort of mook: careless, rash, sloppy, lazy, ignorant, reckless, feckless, dense, and disrespectful of the mark. Classically opinionated and ill informed, he has no tangible gift for the grift, yet fancies himself a master—or as he’s put it on more than one occasion, “an ascended Stairmaster”—of the craft. He vaguely understands that cons call for misdirection, but his idea of this is on a par with pointing and shouting, “Look, Halley’s Comet!” while he snatches an apple from a fruit stand. Nor is sophistication his strong suit: I’ve actually seen him try to pass photocopied and hand-scissored $20 bills on the daft logic that “the Treasury’s regular printer is on strike.” Thanks to this moronic convergence of ill-chosen career vector and sad lack of skills, Vic has been in and out of jail more times than is healthy for a grifter, but his scams are always so laughably low-rent that he’s never done hard time, which was good, because hard time would’ve cracked his fragile being like an egg.

  Vic was working a crude scalper scam outside Dodger Stadium when our paths first crossed. Lamely passing himself off as stadium security, he’d try to finesse tickets or cash or both—as “evidence”—out of unsuspecting sellers or buyers, and then basically just run like hell. Inept at selecting his victims (as he was inept at any decision more complex than paper or plastic), he had tried to put the touch on a pair of USC linebackers, who’d chased him down, roughed him up, and tossed him in a trash can. I saw the whole thing happen. I thought it was pretty funny.

  “What are you laughing at?” he asked as
he hauled himself out and wiped mustard stains from his already amply stained mulberry windbreaker.

  “You,” I said. “What the hell was that?”

  “A con,” he replied. “You wouldn’t understand.” I offered to buy him a beer and have him explain it. I just couldn’t resist learning about the grift from his nescient perspective.

  But it turns out that buying a Mirplo a beer is like feeding a stray cat. Unfortunately, you’ve made a friend for life.

  To befriend a Mirplo is to subject yourself to a never-ending cascade of need. He’d need money, food, booze, or dope. Or bail. Or a ride. A place to watch the big game. A place to crash. Or a present for his mother. And even when he’d try to return the favor, it would invariably go wrong. Once, he borrowed my car—“borrowed,” as in “took without asking”—so he could work the gas station con and get me a fill-up. In this snuke, you dress like a businessman and persuade the mark that you’ve been robbed and now must panhandle gas money or else—dire need—you’ll miss a vital sales call, lose the sale, have your wife’s dialysis cut off, whatnot. Only, Vic neglected to dress the part or convincingly play it, and one gas station attendant held him at bay with a baseball bat while the other called the cops. It cost me $256 to get my car out of impound.

  So why did I adopt him? I don’t know. An uncharacteristic fit of charity, perhaps. Though in fairness, he did occasionally prove useful, in a blunt-instrument sort of way. If you need, for example, someone to deliver an utterly unconvincing lie to a mark, or a bag of money to the wrong address, Vic is your man. And he does have a certain cataleptic charm, a sunny membrane of optimism utterly impermeable to reality—and equally oblique to critique: There aren’t too many people who will smile while you call them stupid to their face. And if they adore you, as Mirplo adores me with all the dopey loyalty of an Irish setter, you bask in their devotion. Approval, as noted, is a heady drug.