Cons, Scams, and Grifts Read online

  “Pardon my French,” interrupted Guildenstern, “but why would the Archbishop give a shit whether one of his flock got scammed by a Gyppo fortune-teller? Ain’t going to crystal-gazers against the precepts of Holy Mother Church, like that?”

  “Hate the sin but not the sinner,” said Grimaldi. “This Madame Miseria was posing as . . . well, as a Catholic nun. In habit. At the cathedral. The victim, an elderly parishioner, believed she was contributing to Renew 2000, and even though her money is gone, she still refuses to believe that, um, Madame Miseria was not a genuine nun. As a result, she is rethinking her very considerable generosity to Mother Church.”

  “So the Archbishop brought you into the picture to help maintain the cash flow?” Rosenkrantz guffawed. “Sounds like a clear case of assault and barratry to me.”

  Grimaldi gave him an icy look. “Since Madame Miseria is obviously not here, I bid you gentlemen good day.”

  When he was gone, Guildenstern said, “Why don’t flies buzz Italian lawyers?”

  “Even flies got some pride.” Rosenkrantz frowned. “You think maybe that guy’s a little slick for the holy-water crowd?”

  “We’ll soon find out.” Guildenstern punched out a number on his cell phone. “And since this Yana Poteet is our number one suspect for scragging her husband, at the same time we’ll get us a search warrant all proper-like to enter the premises.”

  Before a uniform arrived with the warrant, they learned that the Archdiocese had never heard of anyone named Grimaldi. When the landlord opened the apartment, they found an expensive crystal ball glowing with an eerie blue light in the duikkerin room. On the kitchen stove they found a frying pan full of incense smoldering on low heat. Guildenstern turned it off. In the bedroom, Rosenkrantz opened the closet door with his fingertips. A diaphanous dress in brilliant red, yellow, and purple hung from a rod facing the room. He held it up in front of him on its hanger.

  “Is it me?” he asked.

  Guildenstern, dragging a chair under the old-fashioned light fixture in the middle of the ceiling, snorted in disgust.

  “Get useful. Gimme a hand here.”

  Rosenkrantz steadied the chair. Guildenstern studied the fixture at close range. He grunted. “Dust, not dollars.”

  Only dust in the other light fixtures, too. They took turns washing their grimy hands at the kitchen sink. They did not find either Madame Miseria or Yana Poteet.

  “That blonde rubbed me the wrong way,” said Guildenstern.

  “I liked her. The daughter I never had.”

  Belated alarm scrunched up Guildenstern’s features.

  “No back door to this dump, we’re comin’ in the front, and this blonde is sittin’ in the waiting room.” He suddenly snarled, “The daughter you never had! Between us, forty-five freakin’ years on the force an’ we watch our suspect waltz right past us out the door in a blond wig. Now I’m pissed.”

  Rosenkrantz nodded. “What do you call two policemen buried up to their necks in sand?”

  “Not enough sand,” said Guildenstern hollowly.

  Yana rode a 38 Geary/Fort Miley Muni bus away from her invaded ofica. It stopped to let an old woman off where the great onion-shaped spire of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Virgin glinted gold in the sunshine. A little priest with a black habit and a bobbed grey ponytail used a big carton of candles to push open one of the twelve-foot-high gilded doors.

  Three wise-eyed recent-émigré Russian teenagers got on the bus. They would have been baiting Madame Miseria in an instant; Yana, in her business suit, glasses, blond wig, and attaché case, drew only indifference. They were foreigners, but they had one another. She had nothing. She could no longer be Madame Miseria. She could no longer be Yana Poteet. Since she had been ejected from the Muchwaya, she could no longer even be a Gypsy. At times like this, yearning for the kumpania was like a lingering terminal illness. She had made a fateful decision when she learned to read. It had been a skill like any other, something that would enable her to go somewhere in life, win a place of honor in the tribe, and some of the advantages of the gadjo world. Instead, the gadjo knowledge had put a barrier between her and the Muchwaya. They had become uncomfortable with the change in her, and called it ambition. Whatever it was, she could see herself how far it had removed her from tribal wisdom and racial cunning. They had been gozever to ban her.

  Now Ephrem was dead, his poor, sad silly cache above the light fixture rifled. And she had no nation, no tribe, no clan, no kumpania. Her brother, Ramon, would help her if she asked him, not because she was his sister but because he feared her powers. At heart he would always be a loyal Rom. Why endanger his standing with the tribe? It was up to her to make the final break from them or be swept under.

  But she was so weary. The words of the dying Gypsy came back to her. “Bury me standing—I’ve been on my knees all my life.”

  seven

  It was dawn. Trinidad Morales, barefoot, nude, carefully pulled aside dusty cream drapes with little roses on them to look out into Florida Street. Madre de Dios! He never really expected it, but there was someone sitting in a car outside . . .

  One of them? He swiped a hand down his smooth brown face. Until the beating, a well-fed, round face with a gleaming gold tooth and hard little eyes that missed nothing. The tooth still gleamed, the eyes still missed nothing: but were they hard?

  Down inside, where it mattered, he was no longer hard.

  And without that, what was he? A conejo, a scared little rabbit. Even, perhaps, a cobarde—a coward. He’d always heard that a really tough professional-type beating took away something that you never got back, but he’d never believed it. Now he did.

  The four of them had jumped him outside this apartment. He remembered the husky Latino opening the car door in front of him . . . The terrible blows to the kidneys . . . Dimly, the kicking boots, the wash of blood on the concrete . . .

  And the face, brown like his own, so close to his as he lay bleeding on the sidewalk. Whispering the words . . .

  You touch my sister, man, ever again, you with the dead.

  Might as well be. With the dead. He hadn’t touched any woman since then, because she might be the woman. Who had she been? Junior high school girl? Wetback chica? Neighborhood kid? Taquería waitress? Any of them, no matter how vulnerable to a man like Morales, might have a tough, fanatic, vindictive brother with a posse of his own.

  It was not knowing which way to look that unmanned him.

  That and the brown, whispering face so close to his.

  With the dead, man.

  He went into the bathroom, shivering in the morning chill, to reach around the plastic shower curtain and turn on the hot water so the stall would get good and steamy.

  He’d told Kearny after they’d hit the auto dealership that he had to go home because he didn’t feel good. That had been a lie. Physically, he’d never felt better. The lost weight, the convalescent’s diet, the months of rehab . . .

  But deep down inside, he was scared. Before the beating he would have looped back on his own backtrail, followed them until he had identified them, then dealt with them, one by one; for each, a beating for a beating. In fact, when the medics thought he was going to die, hatred of a face and a name—Esteban—pulled him through. But later hatred turned to fear. Coming back here late from repo work some night, would he find them outside this apartment waiting for him in the darkness?

  Stop, Esteban! Stop! You have killed him!

  The girl’s voice. But not her face. Not her name.

  Trinidad Morales, unfeeling, cold-eyed, cold-hearted tough guy, once one of the best dam’ repomen around, was too goddam scared to go looking for the man who had done this to him.

  Because this Esteban, whoever he was, had many amigos . . .

  While Trin Morales had none.

  Receptionist Jane Goldson’s desk was by DKA’s front door, Kearny’s at the far end of the office. In between were the skip-tracers and clerical staff who faced the street through steel
-meshed windows. In case of legal trouble, Jane could stall while Kearny slipped upstairs or out the rear door to duck service.

  Giselle was stuck behind Dan’s desk while he was out of town and the rest of the field men were out running down those scrumptious classic cars. As office manager she recognized the necessity of it: as a field agent she didn’t have to like it.

  Ballard plunked down in the client’s seat across the desk.

  “I noticed the look on your face when you were behind the wheel of that sweet little red Alfa,” he said. “What d’ya think that STATO license plate stands for? Status symbol?”

  “ ‘Stato’ is ‘state’ in Italian, the car’s an Alfa Romeo, ergo, Alfa State, and you’re right, that’s what that little car puts me into, a state of bliss.” She sighed. “I can’t afford it.”

  “It’ll go for only six, seven K at auction, and I bet Stan the Man would give you terms, maybe even knock down the price.”

  She shook off her longing. “You have anything for me?”

  “Like a classic car repo?”

  “Exactly like that.”

  They’d worked together for some nine years; there had been a time when they’d thought . . . but friendship and professional regard were better in the long run. The moment passed long ago.

  “We got no paper trail,” said Larry.

  She lifted resigned shoulders while indicating the files open on the desk in front of her. “You get behind this desk and find one, Hotshot. I’ll go into the field and have some fun.”

  “Yo mama,” he said. He hiked his chair closer. “I talked with Stan at the bank yesterday. For some reason, they don’t want to auction off the classics we’ve already brought in.”

  “He wants a full set. I’d love to have ’em all in the barn by the time Dan gets back from Chicago.”

  Ballard’s frown drew vertical lines between his hard blue eyes and above his hawk nose.

  “Wiley lives in a nice ’hood. What bothers me is him showing up in that Toyota at the dealership. I thought he’d be driving a classic.”

  “You’re a genius, Larry! The Corolla’s gotta be his wife’s ride, bought and paid for. They switched cars.” She grabbed the phone. “I’ll check the registration and run them both through a credit rating service for relatives and references.”

  Larry was on his feet. “I’ll go out and chat up his neighbors, then call in for whatever you dig up.”

  “Call in? You?” She laughed. “That’ll be the day.”

  The hunt was on; suddenly she felt fine. She didn’t even miss her cigarettes. She forgot she was still behind a desk.

  The Wileys’ brown-shingle two-story at 313 El Camino del Mar had an under-the-house garage and the steeply slanted roof wore a brass weather vane in the shape of a frisky whale. Two square bays gazed out through white-curtained double windows.

  Ballard wore a drab tie with a small, tight knot as hard as a Calvinist’s mercy, and a nondescript blue suit five years out of date. Unneeded clear-glass specs peeked out of his breast pocket. He carried the private eye’s greatest prop, a clipboard.

  Plod up terrazzo steps, ring-ring. A dissatisfied woman in her thirties, obviously just got husband and kids off, sitting down with the newspaper and her third cup of coffee.

  “Good morning, ma’am. I’m with the Underwriters Bureau. We’re conducting interviews in selected upscale San Francisco neighborhoods about the make and model of automobile each member of your household drives . . .” And her neighbors’ cars? Nothing.

  Buzz-buzz. A seventy-something retiree with bristling eyebrows.

  “Good morning, sir, here’s my card—the Underwriters Bureau of the National Auto Agency. We’re surveying . . .” No.

  Knock-knock. A brown face, tight, reserved, watchful.

  “Good morning, ma’am . . . Oh. No habla inglés? The lady of the house is . . . Yes, I see, thank you . . .”

  On his seventh house, across the street and down three from Wiley’s, he caught a break: a lanky teenager with a spotty chin and an almost-shaven head was home with the flu, Classic Coke in hand. Jeans three sizes too big just barely hung on snakelike hips. Loud rap music came to the door with him.

  “I’ve been watching you work the street for the last hour, and you never write anything down on that clipboard.”

  Little brother is watching.

  “Between you and me, I’m a repoman after information.”

  “Cool! Remember that movie on cable—Repo Man? This one scene, Harry Dean Stanton is hiding out in a hospital room and he gets away just before the cops bust in. One cop says, ‘Where is he?’ just as the preacher on the TV over the bed says—”

  “ ‘He is risen.’ ” Ballard had his arms spread wide like the Sermon on the Mount. They both burst out laughing.

  “So whose car are you after?”

  “Big John Wiley’s.”

  “That jerk? He drives a ’62 Corvette roadster, white body with a red interior, 327/auto trans, Wonderbar radio, all original. Yesterday morning he went off in his wife’s Corolla, she left in the ’Vette. ’Cause of you, right?”

  Bingo. “Have you seen the Corvette around since?”

  He shook his head. “Another lady looked like Mrs. Wiley only younger drove her home about noon in a 2000 gold Saturn so new it still had paper plates. She stayed a couple of hours.”

  Larry shook the boy’s hand. Smart kid. Observant kid.

  “You ever want a job as a private eye, give us a call.”

  “I’m going to college in the fall.” The boy said it in an almost disappointed voice. “Harvard.”

  They usually were, though not always Harvard.

  Larry called in. “Like you thought. They switched cars.”

  “Terrif!” said Giselle, sounding just like Kearny. “Eloise has a sister in Pacifica, Mrs. Ellen Winslett. A week ago she registered a new—”

  “—gold Saturn?”

  “I told you that you guys always have all the fun.”

  “Seven’ll get you twenty Wiley’s wife tucked the ’62 ’Vette in her sister’s garage to leave us scratching our—” He stopped. “What’s that Pacifica address?”

  “Just a sec, something on Palmetto Ave—”

  “North Pacifica. This isn’t one of those houses red-tagged when the bluffs started sliding after all that rain in January and February, is it?”

  “Palmetto is back from the bluffs.” She gave him the number, then added the favorite line of Kathy Onoda, who had been her predecessor as DKA office manager until a CVA had cut her down at the ripe old age of twenty-nine. “Go gettem, Bears!”

  eight

  The delegates to the annual convention of the National Finance Adjusters, Investigators, and Repossessors crowded the sprawling new Congress Plaza Hotel and Convention Center on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, toddling town, meat-packer to the world, fog on little cats’ feet, etc. A plush air-conditioned conference room insulated them from the unseasonable May heat wave.

  Over the decades the National had gone respectable. In the early years it had been skits that made fun of deadbeats and racial minorities in smoke-filled back rooms. When the dawn came up like thunder from Kalamazoo across the lake, you woke to a horrible, splitting, hangover headache with a woman from some raucous after-hours Rush Street strip-joint sharing your bed.

  Now, Dan Kearny just wanted to get back to San Francisco so he could oversee the recovery of the missing classic cars. Maybe he could slip out, find a phone . . .

  But the man at the podium said, “And now, with no further ado, I give you our featured speaker, DKA’s own Dan Kearny . . .”

  No heat wave at Pacifica. Plenty of sun, but a strong onshore breeze to bring in chilly air, and soon, an afternoon fog bank unusual for May. More like August. Slanting Palmetto had some of the most breathtaking ocean views anywhere in the Bay Area, but the developers had, as usual, built the houses facing each other across the street instead of the blue Pacific. Duh.

  The wide slanting drivewa
y of the ranch-style Winslett house held a 2000 gold Saturn with paper plates. The attached one-car garage was shut. Because the Corvette was in there?

  Larry pulled a U-ie, parked, got out with his repo order in one hand, in the other a set of pop keys, two heated and bent screwdrivers, and a three-prong hotwire. Tools of the trade now almost as classically outmoded as the ’62 ’Vette itself.

  No kids playing in the street, no curtains twitching on the windows facing Larry from the far side of the road. He cupped his hands to peer in through the Winsletts’ garage-door window.

  Yeah! The Corvette was between him and a washing machine against the back wall making dissonant slosh-gurgle harmony with the adjacent dryer’s thunk-whirl. He swung up the overhead door to slightly spronging springs. Give him sixty seconds . . .

  Not to be. The inside door was nudged open by the hip of a very pretty blonde of about twenty-five who backed in toting a double-armload of dirty laundry. When she saw Ballard, she dropped her laundry. He almost held up crossed forefingers to ward off evil: pregnant women were dynamite, and she was extremely pregnant. But the best defense was always a quick offense.

  “Mrs. Ellen Winslett?”

  At her name, the panic began ebbing from her face. “Y . . . Yes?”

  He dug out a DKA card, remembering too late that it was one of Kearny’s; he’d run out of his own. “I’m, uh, Dan Kearny, here to take physical custody of this Corvette. It is out of trust and California-Citizens Bank has put out a recovery order on it.”

  “I’m . . . I can’t . . . It isn’t our car . . .”

  “Exactly. Out of trust and in the hands of a third party. I’m glad you understand.” The washer stopped. Against the continuing thunk-whirl of the dryer, he said, “Can I get those clothes out of the washer for you, ma’am?”

  “No, I wait until the dryer’s stopped before— Say, are you allowed to just come onto someone’s property like this—”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am”—making it up as he went along—“under California chattel-recovery rule 19350E we can enter any unlocked garage to effect recovery of the bank’s legal property.”