Cons, Scams, and Grifts Page 9

  “May I be of assistance?”

  “I . . . we . . .” The girl colored, and the man picked it up. “My, ah, fiancée . . . Ah, we would like to see some, ah, rings.”

  “Diamonds, of course?” Josh was already indicating two trays of their most expensive items. “I think you will find—”

  “Oh Donny, they’re all so gorgeous!”

  “Yes, ah, they sure are, darling. We’ll make the final choice together, but I want you to come up with the possibles.”

  Donny moved farther down the counter with a slight head-jerk. Josh followed. The girl was so engrossed in the locked display case of rings that she barely noticed them.

  “My fiancée’s name is May,” Donny said in a low voice.

  Josh almost said, And the month is May. So? But he merely kept his expression of polite interest. Donny was impatient.

  “She was born in May. Her birthstone is the emerald.”

  The light dawned. “You want to get her an emerald ring.”

  “No.” Donny made a quick negative gesture. “May will be using her grandmother’s diamond wedding set, but I want to surprise her with an emerald. A good emerald.”

  “All of our gemstones are of excellent quality,” said Josh, thinking of one they had in the safe that looked wonderful but that . . . well . . . according to Mr. Petrick, had some hidden flaws not apparent to Josh himself. “I have something in the office that I think might be exactly what you’re looking for.”

  A relieved and boyish smile lit up Donny’s features.

  “Cool. I’ll be looking at rings with May.”

  The emerald was impressive and big—15 carats. Josh kept an eye on the surveillance camera as he extracted it in its chamois bag from the safe, but May and Donny were heads-together over the diamonds, oblivious to all about them.

  Donny said to Josh, “We can’t make up our minds over three of these, so if we could see them together . . .”

  Josh unlocked the cabinet, set out the trays with their choices. He kept keen-eyed watch as May examined the rings with awe and wonder on her face.

  “Can we . . . can you set aside . . . ah . . . hold all three of them for us until I can get my mom in to help us decide?” Anxiety filled her face and voice. “I mean, if you sold one of them before Mom saw them, well, then I’d always wonder if . . .”

  “We will put them safely aside for you, madam.”

  “May darling, you’ll be late for the bridal shower if—”“Oh my God!” She hugged Donny, kissed him so quickly that she got the air an inch from his face rather than his lips, and careened out of the store on her teetery high heels, one hand holding her ridiculous red hat on her head, calling behind her, “That little bar off the St. Francis lobby at five o’clock.”

  Donny leaned eagerly toward Josh. “Okay, let me see it!”

  With the solemnity of a medieval bishop bringing out a local saint’s miracle-working gallstone, Josh removed the chamois bag from his pocket. He opened the drawstring. The 15-carat emerald slid out across the felt on the glass top of the display case to lie winking like an idol’s eye in a Sax Rohmer novel.

  “Is it all right to pick it up?”

  Josh gave him a calculatedly condescending chuckle.

  “Certainly. Body acid from your fingers cannot damage a gemstone.” Donny had laid it reverently on his open palm. “It has a typical emerald cut—rectangular girdle with truncated corners. But . . .” Josh took the stone back, turned it over so it looked like a tiny Aztec pyramid. “See the cuts like steps from the girdle, the flat top of the stone, to the culot at the point? A Portuguese step cut, giving the maximum number of facets when you look down into the stone. Most unusual.”

  Josh had expended his emerald expertise. He didn’t know that the low price his boss put on the stone was because of a slight yellow tinge and an occlusion hidden within its depths. But his scanty knowledge seemed all that was needed.

  “How . . . ah, what does it cost?”

  Mr. Petrick, Josh knew, would be delighted if he could sell the stone at $12,500 retail. But if Josh could move it for more, Mr. Petrick needn’t hear of the extra money.

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars,” he said decisively. “As is. Of course a setting would cost—”

  “No, no setting,” exclaimed Donny with a sort of alarm, “I don’t want it made into a ring or anything. Just the emerald itself. So May can choose exactly how she wants to wear it.”

  Josh could barely keep the glee and greed from his voice.

  “Then you wish to purchase it?”

  “Do I . . . Oh, yeah, sure! It’s so great!”

  Josh would not only collect commission on the $12,500 of the sale he was going to tell Mr. Petrick about, but also pocket the entire $12,500 he wasn’t. Now came the sticky part.

  “How did you wish to . . .”

  Before Josh’s astounded eyes, Donny jerked up his shirt to show a canvas money belt strapped around his lean middle. From its pockets he began pulling great wads of fifties and hundreds.

  “We’ll take the money over to your bank so you can make sure it isn’t counterfeit . . .” He paused, obviously struck by a thought that alarmed him. “You do gift-wrap, don’t you?”

  fourteen

  By day, Woodside wore a much more benign, bucolic aspect than on a dark and stormy night. Green and rolling fields stretched forever, white-fenced, dotted with expensive show horses and rambling homes like English country estates.

  Everything bucolic except Larry Ballard’s big mouth.

  “I can’t wait to see where you got shot in the rear,” he said from behind the wheel of his truck, not for the first time.

  “That’s ear, not rear,” gritted Bart. Man, it would almost have been worth it to walk down here from the City to retrieve his car, rather than have to listen to Ballard.

  “But the blood on that Ferrari’s leather driver’s seat suggests you were sitting on your wound—”

  “Slow down, slow down, it’s right up here,” snapped Bart.

  The Bear Gulch sign seemed quite visible by daylight. A BMW convertible was just turning in. Larry put on his blinker.

  “In the inky darkness the owl of death hoots. Blood spurts from Curt Hero’s shot rea—”

  “I’m warning you, Ballard.”

  They followed the BMW through the opened gate and up the road. Bart’s eldery DKA Ford Taurus was still in the turn-off beside the road. Larry pulled in behind it.

  All four tires were flat.

  Bart sighed and started to get out. “Don’t say anything, okay? Just call me a tow truck.”

  “Now?” Larry got out and punched the Triple-A button on his cell phone. Then he told Bart, “Okay, you’re a tow truck.”

  “Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk.” Bart crouched to examine the tires. He straightened up. “Tell Triple-A we’ve got four slashed tires and only one spare. Tow truck driver’s gonna have to bring an extra wheel so he’ll have two tires to tow it in on.”

  “How the hell did they know it was your car?”

  Bart grimaced in near-agony. “I left Giselle’s hotsheet in plain sight on the front seat.” Before Larry could open his mouth, he added, “Don’t even think about saying it.”

  “It,” said Larry, and started laughing so hard he had to repeat everything twice to the Triple-A road service agent.

  Never ever live this one down. Never in a thousand years.

  Trin Morales plunked himself down across Kearny’s desk from Giselle. Hadn’t slept worth a damn last night.

  “What do you have for me?” asked Giselle crisply. She liked Trin a bit better now that some of his cockiness was gone.

  “Colton Lewis has skipped from the Russian Hill address,” he said. “No wife, no kids, he was renting furnished.” He made a fly-away gesture with a stubby brown hand. “Vroom. Oklahoma stickers on his suitcase.”

  “I doubt that. If he’s driving one of those classic cars, Lewis will be lying doggo somewhere in the City with it. I bet Big John Wiley still thi
nks of all of those demos as his.”

  Actually, she knew how hard this kind of assignment was. Even if this guy Colton had a missing classic, which one?

  “I’ll get one of the girls to do a DMV check for any cars Lewis might actually own. Meanwhile, get on the neighbors, see if they know what he drives.”

  For a moment his old superior smirk almost curved Trin’s thick lips. “I did that yesterday. Nobody could remember.”

  “So write a field report about it, Hot Shot.”

  Morales grunted and levered himself from his chair. As he disappeared up the stairs, Kearny’s private line rang.

  A thick male voice asked, “Kearny there?”

  “Not at the moment. If I could take a message—”

  “You know when he will be?”

  “If you could tell me what—”

  Click.

  The voice had sounded like that of Staley Zlachi, the King of the Gypsies. But why would he be in town? And why calling Dan? She shrugged. If it was important, he’d call back.

  Josh Croswell was on top of the world. He had sold a flawed emerald for twice what it was worth and was going to report only half the take to his boss. But then super-nerd Donny walked into the store with a worried look and no May on his arm. Josh found a suitable expression to paste on his face.

  “I guess you’ve come to a decision about which diamond ring you want . . .”

  “No, I’m here about the emerald. We’ve got big trouble.”

  “Ah . . . the store policy is, ah, no returns after—”

  “Returns?” Donny was frowning. “Oh, no, no, I don’t want to return it. I want to buy another one just like it! May says she wants to set them side by side in a platinum brooch.”

  A huge jolt of adrenalin whirled through Josh. He thought: I can hit some of the gem-exchange Internet Web sites that Mr. Petrick uses. There have to be 15-carat stones around, maybe even one or two with that unusual Portuguese step cut. I can fill this order. Donny was still talking.

  “You find me an emerald that May’s Mom can’t tell from the other one, and I’ll pay you $75,000 for it. In cash.”

  Seventy-five thousand! And Mr. Petrick wasn’t due back until next week. Find that duplicate stone, sell it to Donny for 75K, and keep the net money for himself!

  He couldn’t get Donny out of the store fast enough. After he put up the CLOSED sign, he rushed back to the office, and started scanning the gemstone Web sites on the net for emeralds at offer. Finding nothing even close, he put out his own message:

  Wanted immediately: single emerald, rectangular, 15 carat, Portuguese step cut . . .

  Geraldine Tantillo exited through the impressive inset portico—flanked by four double sets of Ionian Greek pillars—of Brittingham Funeral Directors. She was a somewhat over-weight woman in her late 20s, and could hardly wait to get to a lesbian bar on 20th off Castro for her nightly glass of white wine. She was beat. Came from hating your job. She lived just a few blocks away from the bar and it had become her local. She could nurse a single white wine through a whole evening, the girls were friendly, and the bartenders knew her name. Just like Cheers.

  Sappho’s Knickers was a warm, narrow place that kept the lighting dim, the drinks strong, and the old-fashioned juke loaded with romantic oldies made for dancing cheek-to-cheek. The dance floor was so tiny that while dancing with one girl you’d be rubbing butts with another. A turn-on indeed for a lonely lesbian lady from Dubuque.

  Not that Geraldine did much dancing with anyone: she was too shy to ask and not pretty enough to often get asked. But tonight she had been there only a half an hour when the most beautiful woman she had ever seen sat down across from her.

  “I am Yasmine Vlanko,” the woman said.

  Yasmine Vlanko was ageless: she could have been 18, she could have been 48. Her hair was long and black and lustrous, her eyes deep pools, her teeth small and gleaming between beautifully rounded lips. Her lithe full-bosomed figure was clad in skintight black leather, like Emma Peel wore in the old Avengers show that sometimes still appeared in rerun.

  “And I’m Geraldine Tantillo.”

  Poor Geraldine knew instantly that she was in love. As if sensing this, Yasmine leaned toward her across the table.

  “Please, do not form fantasies about me, Geraldine. I am celibate because I have dark and powerful energy fields that shift in dangerous ways when I have sex with anyone.” Indeed, Geraldine could feel that energy enveloping her. Yasmine continued, “I felt your energy from across the room. You are troubled. I often can help those in trouble. A year ago you came to San Francisco from . . .” She shut her magnificent eyes for the moment, opened them. “Somewhere in the Midwest . . .”

  “I . . . Dubuque, Iowa,” Geraldine heard herself saying. “I had a good beauty salon job in Dubuque, and I had a secret lover—Ariane. I was happy. But Ariane said she . . . yearned for the open minds and heady freedoms of the west.”

  “And she betrayed you.”

  “On our second weekend here.” Geraldine realized that tears were running down her cheeks. “She ran off with a hot-eyed Latina salsa dancer and my seven thousand dollars in savings.”

  “So you were stranded,” murmured Yasmine Vlanko.

  “Yes. And finding a job was horrible.” She gestured at herself. “I’m shy. I’m overweight. I have no color or clothes sense. Not a problem in Dubuque, but here, all the beauty salons are run by Vietnamese or French or Italian women who hire by nationality or percentage of body fat, I’m not sure which. Not one of them would even take my app. I finally got a job in a funeral home doing cosmetic and hair work on corpses.”

  “And you have hated every minute of it,” said Yasmine. She reached across the table to take both of Geraldine’s hands in hers. She closed her eyes. She crooned something under her breath. She opened her eyes again. “Quit your job,” she said. “Then meet me here a week from tonight at ten o’clock—and I will change your life forever.”

  She let go of Geraldine’s hands. She stood. Geraldine stood also, impelled by forces she couldn’t understand.

  “Here,” said Yasmine. “One week from tonight. If you have quit your job, your life will be changed forever.”

  And, somehow, she was gone.

  fifteen

  The Ferrari was in the barn, safe and sound. But the Great White Father was going to be unhappy when he saw this month’s expense account, thought Bart Heslip as he zipped north on the beautiful Junipero Serra freeway. A tow job, four new tires—all had been slashed too ferociously to be saved. He fingered his discreetly bandaged ear. It was itching.

  The Taurus started missing. He checked the gas gauge. Half-full. Now backfiring. It was a repo out of Minnesota that Kearny bought as a company car after the client balked at transporting charges back to Minnetonka.

  He swung the now badly limping car into the Trousdale off-ramp in Burlingame, which took him down through tree-crowded residential tracts to El Camino Real, the Royal Road of the old Spanish missions. Eventually he found a gas station with an attached garage. He told the mechanic what to look for.

  The sandy-haired kid was wiping his hands on a bright red cloth as he came back into the office where Bart was gulping down a Diet Pepsi because he liked the bubbles going up his nose.

  “Yeah, well, you were right. They sugared your gas tank. Sugar got carried to the distributor, the plugs, the pistons— everything. It formed a glaze. It’s like rock candy in there. You’d have to pull the engine, dismantle it, steam-clean it— which costs a hell of a lot more than that old car’s worth.”

  * * *

  Meryl Blanchett had just returned to her Chestnut Street flat from taking Milli on her morning walk to the Presidio Wall. The phone was ringing when she entered the room. It was an unlisted number, so Meryl picked up immediately. A wonderfully remembered voice spoke.

  “Meryl, it is I.”

  “Madame Miseria!” she cried. “Thank God! I keep calling you, but nobody answers. And you haven’t cashed my chec
k yet.”

  “I am not going to cash it—ever—because of the wonderful thing you are going to do for me. You have your hair done once a week at JeanneMarie Broussard et cie.”

  “Yes, but how—” Meryl broke off with a surprisingly girlish giggle. Yana could picture the flush of embarrassment mantling her pleasant cheeks. “But of course, you can see anything you want to see in your crystal ball . . .”

  “And many things I do not wish to see,” said Yana. “I also know that you have great influence with JeanneMarie.”

  “I have gotten quite a number of the other docents at the Legion of Honor to patronize her shop, it is true . . .”

  “Here is what you must do,” began Yana. As it was not quite new moon, Meryl could not yet know that Yana’s spells and potions were worthless in binding the feckless Theodore to her.

  Meryl instantly agreed. Of course.

  Dan Kearny stepped through the front door of DKA wearing his new blue suit, bought in Chicago, and a lightning-pattern tie a saleswoman had told him was the latest thing. Jane Goldson came out of her chair behind the reception desk. She was slight and slender, with a veddy British accent and a skirt that stopped a foot above her knees. Her legs were excellent. To the eternal sorrow of the field men, she would never go out with any of them. She held out an inch-thick stack of phone messages.

  “Welcome home, Mr. K. These are the ones who wouldn’t talk with Giselle. Only Mr. K for them. And Mr. Groner has been doing a bird over the missing classic cars from UpScale Motors.”

  He thanked her while starting down the busy office past the mostly female skip-tracers and credit checkers and phone workers. It was good to be back. Giving that keynote speech at the convention had been a bearcat. Standing ovation, but still . . .

  “Dan!” Giselle was looking at him from across his own desk. “Great suit. Killer tie. How was Chicago?”

  He reclaimed his swivel and tossed his batch of messages down on the blotter. “Terrif. Listen, Giselle, what’s this Jane tells me? That Groner’s on the warpath?”