Cons, Scams, and Grifts Page 11

  Hec perked up. “The beating was about the tea,” he said. “But wily Wiley showed Winslett how to make it pay big time.”

  Giselle began, “Garth Winslett beat her up.”

  “And Wiley set this up,” said Hec with a shake of his head. “This is about DKA and the cars. He sends ’em to an ambitious D.A. who files a criminal assault case against Dan personally. Once Dan gets convicted of that, the Winsletts’ll bring civil suit against him personally and DKA as co-conspirator, and take you all down.”

  Giselle flipped the pen with which she had been taking notes neatly across the table to land by Hec’s fingers.

  “I hate him. So what’s our strategy on this? Dan’s in all sorts of trouble and—”

  “—and Hec is here on his white horse to save me.”

  “Maybe,” said Hec. “In a jury trial you never know.”

  Which didn’t make Giselle feel any too nifty about it all.

  seventeen

  What’s this message on my machine?” demanded Ballard when he finally got hold of Giselle. “Get in touch with you immediately, don’t come into the office under any circumstances? And then you’re too busy to call me back?”

  Actually, Larry was taking his ease in his broken-down easy chair with the phone to his ear, sipping a cup of his truly superb coffee; but trying to reach Giselle at the office for over two hours had gotten a little old, so he was passing it on.

  “Yeah, busy on a mess of your own making,” said Giselle. “Dan gets back from Chicago yesterday, and two hours later gets arrested on a complaint brought by the Winsletts, thanks to Casanova. Now it’s criminal charges—aggravated assault and a bunch of other things. You’re to keep out of sight as long as it takes, and that doesn’t mean sneaking off up the coast after abalone, or entering some karate tournament somewhere.”

  “Arrested? Dan? Criminal charges? Dammit, I told you I should go down to Pacifica and nose around for witnesses.”

  Her tone changed. “Listen, Hot Shot, you’ve done enough damage already. This is straight from Mr. K: don’t come in, don’t even call in except on the unlisted number as Joe Bush.”

  “Just great! I get laid off because the Winsletts are a couple of liars.”

  “For the time being you’re still on payroll. But stay in town in case I come up with something for you to do before the evidentiary hearing. If I can’t get hold of you, these days all will come off your accrued vacation time.”

  “Hey,” he said in a hurt voice, “Giselle Marc says stay in town, Larry Ballard stays in town. What do you think I am?”

  “I think you’re twisty as a snake and slippery as an eel.”

  “Okay.” He was now self-pitying. “Whatever you say.”

  He hung up the phone and was on his feet with such energy that he knocked his coffee cup off the arm of the easy chair into the wastebasket he had learned to leave there for that purpose. Pulling on his jacket, he headed for the door. Maybe, if he went out to Stonestown and bought Midori Tagawa lunch, he could talk her into taking the weekend off. Then they could just stay in bed together until Monday morning, doing what they did best.

  Trin Morales parked on slanting Filbert Street on Russian Hill. He locked up, trudged farther uphill to the narrow yellow apartment house where Colton Lewis had lived until just a few days before. Going around and around yesterday with the hostile old battleaxe landlady had got him nothing at all. Now, he was looking for a way to bypass her and snoop Lewis’s former apartment without her knowing anything about it.

  There was a truck from a commercial cleaning service parked three spaces down from the building. Just as Trin climbed the terrazzo steps from the street, a tenant came out. Trin caught the door just before it closed.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Cleaning service.”

  He didn’t look back to see if the man was watching him; that kind of guilty behavior gave you away every time.

  Trin puffed his way up the carpeted stairs to the third floor; someone had eaten sausage for breakfast. The smell made him hungry. As he hoped from seeing the cleaning service truck, the door to Colton Lewis’s evacuated apartment stood open. In the living room, a uniformed Latino was haphazardly running a vacuum cleaner over the wall-to-wall. Trin boldly strode across the room as if he belonged there. But before he reached the hallway to the bedroom, the cleaning man called at his back.

  “Hey! Morales! Where’s my twenty bucks?”

  Trin stopped dead. Hell, he knew that voice. Carlos Feliu. A stocky serious-faced man with a fat wife and six kids. He and Trin used to sometimes drink in the same bar on 21st Street. Trin’s gold tooth sparkled in his grin as he opened his arms wide to give Feliu a big abrazo. He stepped back to dig in his pants pocket and hand over the $20.

  “I would of paid you back long ago, Carlos, but I been sick. I’m just back to work.”

  “I can see you lost a lot of weight, man.”

  “Listen, I really need to find the guy used to live here—he skipped out with a car isn’t his. If you go down and tell the landlady you found a gold ring with an opal in it—and want to give it back, maybe she’ll give you a forwarding address.”

  “What if she wants to see the ring I didn’t find?”

  Trin twisted the gold ring with an opal in it off the finger of his own left hand. He handed it to Feliu. “Then you show it to her, Carlos. You found it under the bedside table.”

  “She’s gonna tell me she’ll see he gets it back.”

  Maybe Carlos wasn’t the man for the job. But Trin still thought it was his best shot.

  “Act suspicious. Let her think you suspect she’s just gonna keep it herself. You think there might be a reward and you want it.” Trin grinned his most engaging grin. “It’s worth the try—and another twenty.”

  Fifteen minutes later Feliu returned with a forwarding address for Colton Lewis on Gellert Drive in the City.

  “Hey, man! It worked. I acted real suspicious-like, didn’t trust her, see, and she got sort of mad. Like maybe she was sore because she hadn’t thought of the reward thing herself. But I just stood there playing the dumb Mexican peón, and finally she gave me the address and told me to get out of there.”

  Trin gave Feliu another $20 and slipped the ring back on his own finger. “Man, you’d make a good private eye yourself.”

  Driving back down to the Mission District with the address safely in his pocket, he thought, with an elation he hadn’t been able to feel in months, the Cisco Kid is back! And Colton Lewis is dog meat. Being cute and shifty, Lewis was still in town just as Giselle had surmised.

  But who was cuter and shiftier? Trin Morales. The Cisco Kid. And who was about to treat himself to a pizza rather than the Mex food he usually ate? Right again. Trin Morales.

  Since it was only 11:00 A.M., the pizza joint on Mission off 19th wasn’t yet crowded. Trin slid into a red-vinyl booth with a sigh of satisfaction. The slender, pretty Latina waitress came over with silverware and a napkin and a glass of water.

  “Can . . . can I help you, sir?”

  She had a quavery little voice like the squeak of a mouse, and stared at him as if he were a boa constrictor gonna swallow her up. He could smell shampoo on her long gleaming black hair, something flowery. Like her face, it was vaguely familiar.

  “Oh, ah, yeah. Gimme a small double-cheese double-salami thin crust. Individual. And a Diet Coke, too.”

  Forty pounds ago it would have been an extra-large thick crust with double everything, and he would have washed the whole thing down with draft beer. But his stomach had shrunk.

  Instead of writing down his order, the girl leaned down close to almost hiss, “Are you crazy, coming here? If Esteban hears you came to see me, he will—”

  Esteban! This was she, his sister! Milagrita! It all came back in a rush, her name, everything. He met her at a Cinco de Mayo dance, poured a lot of beer down her so she would pass out in his car. Then he took her to a hot-sheet motel out by the Cow Palace where he could always get a room for free becaus
e he had something on the guy who managed it.

  She got sick in the toilet a couple of times that night. Afterward when she started to sober up, there had been blood on the sheets. That excited him, and he banged her again.

  As he slid hurriedly out of the booth, she pressed a crumpled scrap of paper into his hand. Her voice was low.

  “Just leave a time and place on the answering machine at this number—I have to tell you things.”

  Outside in the colorful, bustling Latino crowds of Mission Street, Morales feared he might throw up into the gutter, like Milagrita that night in the motel room when she cried and told him that she’d been a virgin.

  Stop! Esteban, stop! You have killed him!

  He got into his car, slammed and locked the door. Did she think he was nuts? They set up a meet, Morales walks in with a big shit-eating grin on his face and his dick in his hand, there’s Esteban and all his buddies waiting, Morales goes home with his dick in a paper bag. If he goes home at all.

  He pulled out into traffic and drove toward his Florida Street apartment. She must have seen him around the neighborhood after that night, gotten his real name, and told her loco brother about him. Puta.

  But even as he muttered the word, he thought, Madre de Dios, how young had she been? Even now she looked only about sixteen.

  He hadn’t trusted anyone since his eighth birthday, why should he be stupid enough to start now? And a woman besides? Especially this woman. He wasn’t loco. Was he?

  eighteen

  When Midori saw Larry Ballard’s tall form threading its way toward her between the display tables, she shot a quick look around and relaxed: no sign of Luminitsa Djurik. Larry came up to her with his big sexy grin that made her go weak in the knees.

  “You wanna buy somethings? Big sale today.”

  He leaned close. “What I want to do is take you into a fitting room and toss your skirt up over your head and—”

  “Rarry!” She put a hand over the bottom half of her face and blushed bright scarlet, giggling.

  “But I’ll settle for buying you lunch at the Olive Garden.”

  Her face wreathed itself in smiles. She checked the tiny watch on her slim wrist. Ballard could feel himself getting hard just looking at her. Last night in bed, she had . . .

  “Just fifteen mo minutes, then I got a whole hour.”

  “Hey, Midori, where you been hiding Mr. Dreamboat?”

  Midori turned, worst fears realized. Luminitsa! Of the long legs and big firm breasts and gleaming red lips and glowing almond skin. And good English, too. It was all over, because once they’d seen Luminitsa, they always went back for more.

  “Is my friend, Rarry.” To Larry she said, eyes miserable, “Is Luminitsa. She work with me, she teach me everythings.”

  Ballard nodded and smiled. “Luminitsa.” She reminded him of someone, he couldn’t think who. Didn’t matter.

  A little old man with cheery faded blue eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles popped out from behind Luminitsa.

  “I’m Whit Stabler.” As he and Ballard shook hands, he added, “Anything you want, these ladies’ll take care of you.”

  “Anything, Whit?” asked Luminitsa with a throaty chuckle.

  Ballard tucked Midori’s arm through his to lead her across Nordstrom’s gleaming floors toward the front door and the Olive Garden, and away from Luminitsa. Midori sighed.

  “Luminitsa very beautiful.”

  “And old Whit reminds me of my grandpa. So what?”

  “You no want Luminitsa?”

  “Jesus, no. I know her type. If she’s nice to someone, it’s because she thinks she can use him. I bet she takes old Whit for a bundle before she’s through with him.”

  “You no want Luminitsa!” she repeated. “I very happy.”

  At 760 Golden Gate, the DKA clerical staff was stuffed into what had been a one-floor flat. The field men’s cubicles and Dan Kearny’s private cubbyhole and makeshift storage boxes for personal property removed from repos were all stuffed into the under-the-building garage. In a pinch, the garage could also temporarily store two sedans or three compacts.

  Here at 340 Eleventh Street, each of the two ground-floor rooms was bigger than the whole setup at Golden Gate. The field men were upstairs and there was room for twenty repos in the fenced lot out back. Giselle shared the windowless back room with the C/B, the fax, and the Internet computer. After school, teenage girls came in to churn out collection demands, legal notices, and skip letters; but their giggles and gossip were no more distracting than the twittering of a flock of sparrows. It was how Giselle herself had started out, more years ago than she liked to recall.

  Two men came in from the storage lot through the locked back door behind her without tripping the alarm. With a casual finger, Giselle pushed the intercom button that sent a silent CODE RED signal to Kearny in the front room. Then she saw they were Rudolph Marino and Staley Zlachi. Alarms would not slow them down. After the phone call where he didn’t identify himself, she should have expected the Gypsy King to drop by.

  “Piccina! Come va?” asked Marino with a big smile.

  Marino was using his Angelo-Grimaldi-the-Italian-lawyer persona today. Gleaming hair, gleaming oxfords, $2,000 suit, Patek Philipe watch. They had conned themselves into a brief but intense affair when their paths had crossed a couple of years back, then parted without permanent damage to either one. Giselle returned his smile.

  “Va bene,” she told him, then turned to scold Staley. “You hung up before I could say hello the other day.”

  “The last time I laid eyes on you, Giselle, you was all dressed up as a young Gypsy lad.”

  “A ternipè, you called it, right? In Stupidville, Ohio.”

  She was laughing at the memory when Dan Kearny came through the door from the front office hefting a tire iron. He skidded to a stop. He nodded casually to Staley.

  “Why didn’t you come in the front door like regular folks?”

  “Is serious business, the police are already involved.”

  “If they’re involved, we don’t want to be.” Then Kearny shrugged. “Aw, hell, come on in, this ought to be good.”

  Rudolph took Giselle’s arm. “You and I are not needed, cara. I only came along because I hoped to see you.”

  “You came along to get me out of the way so Staley can con Dan into doing something he’ll regret for the rest of his life.”

  He didn’t deny it. “I will buy you lunch at MC-Squared.”

  “Do they even serve lunch at MC-Squared?”

  “To us they do.”

  Josh Croswell was eating his lunch in the office, keeping his eye on the scanners, when a burly mid-50s Jew entered the jewelry store. He had Semitic eyes quick with intelligence, a grey-shot patriarchal beard, and an unobtrusive black skullcap. His blue suit was rumpled; his narrow tie was carelessly knotted.

  “I am addressing Mr. Joshua Croswell?” he asked.

  “You are,” piped Josh in his best customer’s voice.

  “Good.” With his heavy guttural voice, it came out as “Goot.” “Solly David from the Los Angeles Gemstone Mart.”

  “Am I glad to see you! Your e-mail message said—”

  Solly waved a small quick hand. “I hadda be up here today anyway, I thought I’d drop by, see can we do a little business.”

  Josh locked the front door, flipped the OPEN sign over to CLOSED, and led Mr. David back to the narrow cluttered office.

  “Pretty soft, retail, three hundred percent markup—you must be rakin’ it in. Me, I deal in fine gemstones, wholesale only, for the trade.” With a thick finger, Solly opened the flap of a small folded envelope. “Fine gemstones like this here one.” A glittering emerald slid out across the desk blotter. “Fifteen carats, rectangular, Portuguese step cut.”

  Josh stared at the stone, trying to pretend expertise.

  “Ah . . . are you sure that’s fifteen carats?”

  His very beard seemed to stiffen. “Get out the scales.”

&
nbsp; “Oh, no, no, no need of that,” Josh said quickly. “Um . . . how much are you asking? For the trade.”

  “It’s a bargain at seventy-five K,” said Solly carelessly.

  Seventy-five thousand! That was as much as Donny was offering Josh for it. He had to talk this guy down. With a jeweler’s loupe he peered intently into those brilliant depths.

  “Am I seeing an occlusion in—”

  Solly snatched the emerald back, highly offended.

  “This stone is not from outta Africa, it’s from Colombia, where all the best emeralds come from. Smuggled out from a mine in the mountains the Colombian emerald cartel don’t know about.”

  “Yes, it’s beautiful,” interrupted Josh, almost desperately, “but I’ve got a client here who’ll only go so high.”

  “Not my problem. Look at the color! That brilliant green comes from the high chromium content in stones from this mine. Seventy-five, first, last, and only offer.”

  “I was thinking more like thirty-seven-five,” said Josh.

  Solly shook his head sadly, took out his little envelope.

  “Forty-two-five,” said Josh.

  Solly paused. He checked his watch. He sighed. “Okay, fifty K an’ I don’t gotta take it home with me on the plane.”

  Josh sat down behind the desk, got out the corporate three-tier checkbook. He’d have the money back into the account before Mr. Petrick’s return. Fifty K against 75K: a net of $37,500 for him from the sale of the two emeralds, tax-free, plus his commission on the $12,500 half of the first sale that he would let Mr. Petrick know about. It was dead easy.

  “So Ephrem is dead,” mused Kearny.

  “You knew Ephrem?” Staley let his surprise show.

  “He’d hear things about the Lowara, the Kalderash, pass ’em along.” Dan added the lie glibly, “Never about the Muchwaya.”

  “Yeah, well, now he’s dead and the cops think Yana killed him. We gotta find her fast and first.”

  “I’ve got no problem with that.”