The California Roll: A Novel Read online

  So the phone rang, and it was Vic, and I answered, mentally girding myself for the inevitable onslaught of Mirplovian white noise. Nor was I disappointed.

  “Radar!” he shouted, “Guess where I am!” As I could hear a recorded voice in the background announcing the departure of the Border Flyer for San Diego, I guessed Union Station. “Damn, you’re good,” he said. “Hey, what are you doing right now?”

  “Wishing I hadn’t answered the phone.”

  “Yeah, great, fine, terrific. Listen, what do you think about this? I’m a passenger on a train, right? And I’ve got this bag, like a doctor’s bag, or maybe a briefcase, and I leave it on my seat, unattended. Go for a drink in the club car.”

  “Who’d buy?”

  “Ha fucking ha. Do you want to hear the grift or not?”

  “Go on.”

  “So okay, so when I come back, I look inside and, Whoa! My money’s all gone. Where did it go? Who stole it? And it was for my sister! Who’s a nun!”

  “Your sister the sister?”

  “That’s right. It was for orphans. Blind ones. Or no, not blind. What do you call it when the mouth’s all screwed up? Cliffed palate?”

  “Cleft.”

  “That’s the one. So anyway, I sob it up for a while, till the other passengers all pitch in to make me feel better.”

  “Or maybe just to shut you up.”

  “That works, too. What do you think? Class A con?”

  “But nobody messed with your bag.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “People will have seen that. They’ll know you’re lying.” Like everybody always knows a Mirplo is lying because that’s all a Mirplo ever does.

  “Oh. Oh, yeah, you’re right. Damn, I thought that one was foolproof.”

  “Depends on the fool.”

  “Shit. Damn. Where am I gonna get some money?”

  I suddenly had an idea. Probably a bad one, but when you can’t fight fire with fire, you fight it with fools. “I know where you can get some coffee,” I said.

  I waited for Vic on a side street around the corner from Java Man, and it wasn’t too long before he drove up in his forlorn Song Serenade, an exhausted Chinese beater he called Shirley Temple and loved with all the passion a man can have for a sedan as fundamentally flawed as he is. The driver’s door squealed a pained protest as he opened it and clambered out. With his greasy hair pulled back in a lank ponytail and a flannel shirt hanging from his bony chest, he had the look of a grunge junkie, Seattle, circa 1990. “What’s the gaff?” he asked, his eyes almost wet with excitement. “Who are we taking down?”

  “No gaff,” I said. “I just need you to check something out.” I gave him a description of Allie—cinnamon shag and those teal eyes being the key signifiers—and sent him in to see if she was there and who she was with. “Take your time,” I said. “Look around. Her team’ll be spread. See who she makes eye contact with.”

  “Got it,” said Vic. He started off, then turned back. “Uhm …” He rubbed his thumb against his fingers.

  I forked over a five spot. Vic cocked a brow. “What?” I said. “Not enough?”

  “Lattes don’t grow on trees, man.” I handed him a ten. He “forgot” to give back the five. Say this for a Mirplo: they work every inch of the grift.

  He sidled off. A few minutes later he returned, holding a cup the size of a tub. “Does this feel light to you?” he asked, hefting the drink. “It feels light to me. Why can’t they foam it all the way up?”

  “Hey, Vic, how heavy is foam?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yeah. I see your point.” He took a sip, and recoiled in pain, sloshing some of the drink on the ground, and some on his ratty jeans and bad sneakers. “Ow! Shit! I burned myself.” He eyed the cup speculatively. “Think I can sue?”

  “Later,” I said. “Did you see the girl?”

  “Yeah, no, she’s not there.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Dude. You send me in to check out a notable rack of lamb, and you don’t think I’ll spot her? She’s not there.” He got a faraway look in his eye as he mentally called up the scene inside Java Man. “There’s … let’s see … two goth-looking counterettes, one with bad acne, the other with a lip ring which I’m here to tell you does not do a thing for her look, some sad pud pounding away on his laptop, a Brian Dennehy-looking motherfucker by the door, and a creepy wedge with a sex offender goatee reading the New York Times.”

  “Did you check the bathroom?”

  “Does a dog fart? I’m not stupid, Radar.”

  “That’s debatable.”

  “And that’s beneath you. Who is she, anyway?”

  “Nobody. Just this chick I met.”

  “Well, she stood you up. Wanna go shoot stick? We could hustle.”

  “Vic, …” I was about to point out that you had to have some kind of skill to make the back end of a pool hustle work, but then I thought, Why bother? Talking to a Mirplo about strategy is like talking to two-year-old about sharing. “You go,” I said. “I’m gonna wait this out.”

  “I gotta say, man, it’s not like you to get hooked on trim.” Hooked on trim? Who talks like that? “But I’m not gonna leave you, buddy. I’ll be your wingman.”

  “Thanks anyway. I’ll be fine.”

  “Yeah, huh? But I’ve got no place else to go, and besides …” again the thumb-and-forefinger gesture. “… no scratch.”

  I sighed heavily. “Will twenty get you in the wind?”

  “You kidding? Twenty’ll get me half a hooker.” I paid Vic to leave, and I have to tell you, it didn’t feel half bad. Like taking care of a retarded brother. He drove off, his perilous Serenade coughing the blue smoke of an engine badly in need of a ring job. I went back to watching the Java Man, but no one of note came or went. Eventually I decided to go in and check it out for myself.

  I had to credit Vic’s observational skill. He’d nailed everyone in the place (except for the girl with the lip ring—I actually thought it worked). I ordered a coffee and read the inspirational quote on the cup: “The truth speaks with a trumpet voice.” That had some logic, but grift logic: If you can’t be right, be loud; if you’re loud enough long enough, you will appear to be right. I settled in at a wobbly round table by the window and occupied myself with someone’s cast-off crossword puzzle. This nimrod had arrived at naked as a synonym for succulent (it’s juicy), which made Alaska’s capital Nuneau.

  Okay, then.

  At first I kept half an eye on the door, but I soon became absorbed in the puzzle. I’m like a dog with a bone with these things. Once I get my teeth into one, I can’t let go. I was just figuring out that 23 across, linguistic keystone, was Rosetta, when I noticed the guy Vic had identified as a Brian Dennehy-looking motherfucker bending down beside me.

  He did bear a resemblance. The barrel chest, the jutting jaw, the close-cropped hair all gone to gray. I made him to be in his sixties but had to give or take a decade, for though he looked hale enough, there was a weary or distracted air about him, like he was feeling, I don’t know, maybe old before his time.

  “You dropped this,” he said, picking up a thick wallet from the floor and holding it in his beefy hand. It was a counterfeit Calvin Klein, which you could tell at a glance because the embossed lettering on the front read Calvin Klien. I knew where it came from. They sell them downtown in Santee Alley, along with $20 Bolex watches, Barbee dolls and Narlboro cigarettes.

  “That’s not mine,” I said.

  “Really? Because it was right under your chair.” He dropped it on the table. We made eye contact. This was unusual, for most strangers won’t look you in the eye, not even over a found wallet fat with cash.

  As for the wallet …

  “It’s really not mine,” I said. I reinforced the point by patting the bulge in my back pocket. “Turn it in at the counter. Maybe someone will claim it.”

  “Okay,” he said. He picked up the wallet, but awkwardly, so that it fell out of his hand and splayed open o
n the table. (I had to admire the deft clumsiness of the move.) We could both see that the credit card slots all were empty. “Strange,” he said. “There doesn’t appear to be any identification.” He picked up the wallet again and gave it a good going over—making a point, I thought, of showing me the sizable number of sizable bills inside. “Nothing,” he said after his inspection. “Just cash. Oh, and this.”

  I knew what “this” would be before he handed it to me: evidence of some kind that the money in the wallet was tainted or criminal and therefore not traceable or returnable. Sure enough, he passed me a creased and folded piece of paper, which bore columns of figures, including dollar amounts and numbers expressed as odds. “What do you think it is?” he asked.

  I played along. “Looks like a betting slip,” I said. “Whosever wallet this is, the guy makes book.”

  “Book?”

  “He takes bets illegally.”

  “Really?” The man’s eyes grew wide, as if I’d just fingered a white slaver or serial killer. “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  Lay it on a little thicker, why don’t you? I thought. But I let the man make his pitch. It had been a long time since I’d seen someone try to pull off a pigeon drop. I was interested to see how he’d set the hook.

  He played the guileless angle to the hilt, which isn’t typically how the pigeon drop goes down. Usually the wise guy leans heavily on cynicism and outrage, noting how he and the mark have an almost moral responsibility to keep the ill-gotten cash they’ve found. Still, even draped in innocence, he managed to hit all the classic pigeon-drop beats. Having verified that the money was both dirty and anonymous, he then phoned “a lawyer friend” for advice on how to proceed. The friend apparently suggested that we rathole the cash while we took the necessary legal steps to ratify our claim. Then came the bit about how both of us should put up some earnest money to demonstrate our good faith. At this point, his faux naïveté played particularly well, for my new best pal simply couldn’t see “any reason in the world” not to trust me—but his lawyer friend said to approach it this way, and in matters such as this, lawyers generally know best, right? I matched him innocence for innocence, and enthusiastically assured him that I had no problem fronting as much cash as necessary, but I hoped it wouldn’t be more than five hundred bucks, because that’s all I had on me. I looked to see if his eyes would give away his greed on this, but to his credit, he kept his “concerned citizen, slightly out of depth” mask firmly locked in place.

  All that remained at this point was for us to divvy the loot. He’d hold my earnest money and, “because I seemed trustworthy,” I could hold the wallet and its much larger sum. First, though, did we really feel comfortable with the wallet in plain sight? He asked one of the counter girls for a paper bag, which, of course, sets up the ol’ switcheroo, where a wallet full of cash becomes a wallet full of Yellow Pages pages.

  But we weren’t going to get that far. It was time to blow the guy’s cover.

  Because here’s the thing about coincidences: Generally, they aren’t. If I was waiting in a random Java Man for someone who knew suspiciously too much about me, and I “just happened” to get hit with a chestnut like the pigeon drop, the chances were vanishingly small that these two events were unconnected. So when the citizen returned from the counter, I took a stumbly step into him—and picked his pocket. A moment later, he was staring at two Calvin Klien wallets, lying side by side on the tabletop. One contained cash, though of course a grifter’s roll, with a few big bills for show and the rest just a whole bunch of ones. The other wallet contained money-cut pages from a Bible. Or no, not the Bible, the Book of Mormon, which I thought was an interesting touch.

  “Well,” he said with sheepish frankness, “that didn’t take you long.”

  “Nor would it,” said a voice by the door. Allie’s, of course. She crossed to us and cast a casual arm around the old man’s shoulder. “You have to remember, Grandpa: This is Radar Hoverlander, the brightest bulb on the bush.” Then she turned to me and said, “Hello, Radar. And where’s my goddamn shoe?”

  6.

  dishonest honesty

  I gave her the shoe. She stuffed it in a dilapidated Hello Kitty backpack, and patted my cheek. By way of thanks, I suppose. “Want some coffee?” she asked. “I’m buying.”

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “Oh, that you are, sweetie. Why do you think I tracked you down?”

  “The question,” I admitted, “has crossed my mind.”

  “Of course it has. Well, don’t worry. All will be made clear just as soon as I get my hands on a hammerhead.”

  “Hammerhead?”

  “Black coffee, extra shot.”

  “Won’t that keep you awake?”

  “Honey, nothing keeps me awake. When I want to sleep, …” She shot me a wink. “… I sleep.”

  She ordered her drink from one of the goth counterettes, while I and the man she’d identified as Grandpa stood on either side of an awkward silence. I sized him up a second time, in light of the new information. Grandpa? He looked old enough, but then again not. I wondered if grandpa was code for sugar daddy. After a moment, he said, “I’m Hines, by the way. Milval Hines.”

  “What kind of name is Milval?”

  “Family,” he said with the laconic shrug of a man who’s been asked that question many, many times before. It made me feel self-conscious. After all, it’s not like I’ve ever won the John Doe Prize for Everyday Names; I guess people who live in Radar-shaped houses shouldn’t throw stones. But Hines was already past it, on to other subjects. He asked with self-deprecation, “What gave away my play?”

  I didn’t know where to begin. To the trained eye, everything about his approach—the overly overt pigeon drop, the all-text-no-subtext betting slip, the call to the alleged lawyer—shrieked amateur antic. Even Vic would’ve done a better job; at least he’d have put some spin on the gaff, colored it up with distracting noise. Hines’s pitch had the wide, flat feel of a curveball that didn’t break. Truly it had been doomed from the start. But I didn’t feel like busting his chops, for who holds an amateur to pro standards? So instead I said, “You did fine. I’m just hard to mark. Like that one said,” I hooked a thumb in Allie’s direction, “I’m the brightest bulb on the bush.” This seemed to satisfy Hines, and the bubble of silence formed around us again.

  After a moment, Allie sauntered over, and when I say she sauntered, I mean she moved through space like she owned it, every bit of it, from the racks of vacuum-sealed coffee bags and Java Man T-shirts pinned up on the wall for sale all the way down to the atoms that comprised these things and the quarks and neutrinos that passed through them, and us, on their infinite voyage from wherever to fuckall.

  To put it more prosaically, she had that look of someone holding all the cards.

  She shivered theatrically. “It’s cold in here,” she said, though it was not, particularly. “Let’s go to your place.” A gesture with her cup, up and through the back wall of the Java Man, pointed roughly in the direction of my duplex.

  This could have been a bluff. It was possible that she knew approximately, like to the nearest Java Man, where I lived, without actually knowing the street address. So I prevaricated. “My place is a mess,” I said. “The maid hasn’t come since …”

  “The maid comes on Thursdays,” she said most matter-of-factly “She’s with a service, the Damsels of Dirt, and if she cleaned in the nude, I wouldn’t be surprised—perv—but in any case, she spends three hours at your place.” Allie fired out the address like pellets from a paint gun, “2323 Silver Sedge Road. From there she goes to Eagle Rock, to the condo of a day trader who, I know for a fact, has her clean in the nude.” She smiled at me sweetly. “Her name is Carmen. Strawberry margaritas loosen her lips.”

  I closed my eyes, then opened them again. I could feel muons and leptons passing through my body. “It’s a bit of a climb,” I said at last.

  “We don’t mind,” said Allie. “We
’re fit.”

  And fit they were. I took them the back way, the hard way, up a flight of steep, crumbly steps that ended about thirty feet below my back deck, and gave way there to a narrow path where it’s almost hands-and-knees time. You can get dirty; if you’re not careful, you can lose your footing and slide all the way downhill till the Dumpster behind the Java Man breaks your fall or, possibly, neck. But Allie took the ascent with the placid alacrity of an alpaca, not even breaking a sweat. Hines was less nimble but more stoic. I walked them around to the front of my place and let them in. It seemed weird, and not altogether comfortable, having guests in my home.

  I’m a terrible host. Are you supposed to offer people drinks? Snacks? What? The sort of characters who come to my place—Mirplo, his low-rent friends, random other bit players in the grift—usually bring their own, and it’s usually Steel Reserve and pork rinds. In fact, looking at my joint through strangers’ eyes, I suddenly became quite self-conscious. Damsels of Dirt notwithstanding, the place was congenially unkempt, with books and magazines scattered about, naked CDs pining for their cases, and piles and piles of unopened mail. Dust motes dancing in the last red rays of sunset gave the very air a shabby feel. I pointed the pair to a couch and hoped nothing would crunch when they sat. Then, to regain some semblance of cool, I grabbed a chair from the dining table, flipped it around backward, and straddled it, resting my head on my crossed arms and affecting the most convincingly who-gives-a-damn mien I could muster.

  “First things first,” I said. “Tell me how you found me. This conversation goes nowhere till you do.”

  Allie shrugged prettily. It occurred to me that she did most everything prettily. It should have occurred to me that this would be a problem. “I met a friend of yours,” she said. “Not long on social graces or, you know, brains. But he does sing your praises.”