Joe Gores - Cons, Scams, and Grifts

The baby gurgled with glee while reaching out exploratory pudgy fingers toward Heslip’s dark visage. Apparently Poogie hadn’t seen too many of the brothers in his short lifetime.

Stooping to get mauled, Bart couldn’t help asking, “HRH?”

“His Royal Highness.”

Ballard said, “We understood the Mihais lived here.”

“Oh, no, an old man named Brian Glosser had it before...” She paused uncertainly. “You’d better talk with my husband. He handles the finances.” She raised her voice. “Honey?”

Justin MacGregor also had reddish hair and freckles, but he was nearly seven feet tall. His arms under a short-sleeved striped shirt looked as if they had a heart and lungs of their own. His testosterone rumble sounded like a freight train going through a tunnel. No wonder his wife had answered the door so carelessly at night. Mighty Joe Young was on guard.

“Better take Himself off to bed, sweetie.” Watchful blue eyes swung back to Ballard and Heslip. There was challenge in them neither man felt like taking up, not in this lifetime. “You boys look a little old to be working your way through college.”

Heslip explained they were trying to find a Nadja Mihai who had given this address to a Novato woman back in April.

“And you are who, exactly?”

They hauled out their P.I. registration cards. The big man looked the I.D.’s over carefully, then gestured them to chairs in the living room and switched off the TV with the remote.

“Who’d you say? Mihai?”

“Punka and Nadja,” said Ballard.

“Yeah, well, they’re brother and sister, not husband and wife. Nadja was married to old Brian Glosser. He had Alzheimer’s and just sort of wasted away. Punka, the brother, took care of the old man while Nadja was at work.”

“You know where that was?” asked Ballard.

“She never said.”

Bart brought out his photo again. “Is this Punka?”

“That’s him, okay,” agreed MacGregor.

“And did you have any trouble with your title papers?”

MacGregor gave him a sharp, almost suspicious look.

“Yeah,” he finally said. “But just a couple of weeks ago it got straightened out. The Realtor told us we’re going to escrow. That’s why we’re finally moving all our stuff in.”

Jacques Daniel’s was Friday night jumping. Beverly’s partner, Danny — short, quick, muscular, and French — had a sun-browned face and dark piratical eyes. He set bottles of designer beer on their table around behind the jukebox, and laid a hand on Bart’s and Larry’s shoulders. The three of them had been through some things together.

“On the house tonight, mes amis. It is not certain, but Beevairly is perhaps enceinte. Pregnant.” He held up a hand. “It is still a secret, hein ? Until we are sure.”

After Danny had hurried away, Larry said, “Isn’t that great? Things are working out for one of my ex-ladies.”

They poured beer, drank, and their mood darkened.

“Whadda we got here, Larry?” asked Bart. “Ephrem and Yana are husband and wife in Vallejo, brother and sister here. In both places we got an old man with Alzheimer’s who died of a wasting disease and left his worldly goods to Yana.”

“We can’t be sure that Nadja is Yana,” said Larry a little desperately. “You didn’t get a positive I.D. of her—”

“Only because I didn’t have her picture. Husband — or brother — Punka sure as hell is Ephrem. Positive photo I.D. from three different people. Both deals stalled over a problem with the title papers after Ephrem suddenly disappeared. Two weeks later he turned up in L.A. — stabbed to death. Almost immediately, both buyers got word that the title papers were now available so the sales could go through.”

“Goddammit, Bart! Yana just isn’t... she wouldn’t just go around murdering people. She was never about just money.”

“She seemed to me to be only about money.”

It was a wake, of sorts, for the Yana Poteet they thought they had known. And in an odd way, for their own innocence.

As Larry and Bart drank beer in solemn memory of the Yana they thought they had known, the real Yana, temporarily taffy-haired and temporarily Becky Thatcher, was still at Brittingham’s Funeral Parlor, working Grecian Formula into the hair of a midlife bicyclist run down by an early-morning garbage truck.

Yana usually rode buses to and from Brittingham’s, but tonight she felt so good about the job she’d done on her final Beloved of the week that she decided to walk home. Delighting in the sights and sounds, she went down Polk Street through the Friday evening crowds with the long swinging stride she thought a Becky Thatcher from Arkansas’s Ouachitas Mountains might have.

Suddenly she felt the cold wind she could never ignore blow through her, emptying her, making her feel hollow and close to death. She turned blindly in at a tiny Greek café called the Parthenon, and saw, reflected in the moving glass as she pulled the door open, Rudolph Marino coming down Polk Street toward her! She slipped into a chair in the dark rear of the room and watched like a cat as he passed, in earnest conversation with a big handsome 60-something gadjo with ashy-blond hair and a dark suit of European cut.

That didn’t mean a thing. Yana slupped thick black Greek coffee and wolfed a wedge of honey-dripping baklava while thinking things through. Her one break was in being an outcast: any contact with one who was marime was forbidden. That should stop Rudolph from ridding himself of the gadjo and coming after her himself, unassisted.

Yellow hair and slanty glasses and a toed-in walk, she decided, would not deceive Rudolph’s keen eyes. So the only question was: had Rudolph seen her? The cold wind blowing through her body had already told her the answer.

Just a glimpse of a taffy-haired gadja going into a Greek greasy spoon. But that gadja moved like Yana. Had been Yana? Willem was saying, “Next week we will set it in motion and soon will have—” when Rudolph interrupted him in Romani.

“A woman with pale brown hair who moves like a cat...”

“Yes. I saw her enter the Greek café.”

“I think she is the murderous Yana — the one Staley told you about. She does not know you. If she comes out, follow her. I will do the same if she tries to leave by the rear exit.”

No rear exit. Only an alley fire door that would sound an alarm if opened. But over the sink in the filthy, cramped, and stinking ladies’ room was an opaque window with chicken wire embedded in the glass. Though her hands were strong from shampooing the hair of dead people, Yana could not open the window’s dirt-encrusted latch. She tried the buckle from her purse strap. The buckle bent, skinning her knuckles.

How could she have gotten so careless? Because in handling corpses she had broken so many Gypsy taboos that she had a feeling of false security in her freedom from the Romi code? Would any Rom believe she would do such things?

The window went up with a squawk like a garroted parrot. Someone tried the locked door. A guttural male voice called out.

“Hey, whatta hell you do in there?”

Stavros the Greek. As she climbed up on the sink, Yana made loud vile retching noises in her throat.

“I am very sick,” she yelled, “from the street sweepings you serve as baklava. Go away. If you make me come out, I will vomit on the floor in front of your customers.”

There was thunderous frustrated pounding on the door, then muttered Greek curses retreating down the hallway.

She already had her hips and legs out through the window, was squirming around facing into the room. Her skirt rode up to her waist as she slid down the rough exterior wall. From the lid of a garbage pail a scarred old coal-black feral alley cat examined this intruder into his domain with his surviving eye. He was huge and lithe and scruffy and obviously had owned the two short blocks of Olive Alley for a very long time.