Joe Gores - Cons, Scams, and Grifts

She was infectious. Brittingham chuckled himself.

“You’re hired, Miss Thatcher.”

It wasn’t until noon that Hec could get away from court to join Dan Kearny and Giselle Marc for a council of war in the guaranteed privacy of DKA’s upstairs reception area. Hec listened attentively as Dan asked Giselle, “What did you do with Larry after the Winsletts showed up?”

“Took him off the classic cars right away,” said Giselle. “Tomorrow he’ll be back on his regular cases—”

“No. I don’t want him coming into this office at all until this thing is settled. Not even at night to type reports. Find him some work where he doesn’t have to show up for any reason.”

“Okay. For what it’s worth, he says the Winslett woman was totally cooperative, gave him the keys, even served him tea in the garage. The man he described coming down the street as he left matches Winslett himself.”

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.

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.