The California Roll: A Novel Read online

  And next: dry heaves!

  By the time I got done puking, I had pretty much remembered why booze and I don’t get along. A hot shower mitigated my feeling of imminent demise, but my subsequent shave brought me face-to-mirror with—let’s face it—an incipient victim of the grease and fleece. I guess at this point my brain started to function again, because I couldn’t help asking myself, but fleece what? What did I have that Allie wanted? It couldn’t be just money: If the girl had enough talent to ease in an (I flattered myself enough to claim) expert grifter like me, she could painlessly bank bigger against easier marks.

  This took me back to revenge, and I spent some time squeezing orange juice and mulling the possibility of a con within a con within a con, at the bottom of which downward spiral would lay yours most humbly truly, victimized by a prior victim, or said victim’s proxy. But, again, I couldn’t make it add up. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but it also works best as fast food. Get in, get well, get out. If Allie was setting up a revenge tip, she was taking too long and playing too loose. Besides, she genuinely seemed to like me, and while the affectation of affection is a notable tool of the grift, this just didn’t feel like that. I had to trust my judgment, and my judgment told me that, behind and beneath everything as yet both revealed and unrevealed, Allie was having as good a time with me as I with her. I felt less like a victim and more like a …

  Partner.

  Partner?

  Partner!

  It wasn’t revenge she wanted, and it wasn’t my money. It was my expertise. Somewhere beyond this current con, I was suddenly certain, lay a grander, more complex snadoodle, for which Allie was either grooming me or testing me or both. Suddenly I wasn’t angry anymore, and I didn’t want to tell the skirt to take a hike. I just wanted to prove myself worthy.

  But how to go about this? Reveal that I’ve broken her code? That would only prove I was half smart: smart enough to figure out what’s going on, but not smart enough to keep my trap shut. No, for the sake of appearance, I’d have to maintain the appearance of Radar Hoverlander, aka Ryan Paradox Reed, running a Merlin Game for the amusement and edification of Milval Hines, grandfather (or, now come to think of it, maybe not) to a most formidable fellow snuke.

  Oh, and by the way, not fall in love.

  Which might be harder than I thought, for Allie was cute and clever, an excellent liar—a trait I admire—and steps ahead of me at every turn so far. She was a puzzle. And we know how much I like those. The question was, how far was I willing to go to solve this one? Or to put it another way, if Allie Quinn was the La Brea Tar Pits to my lumbering mastodon, how heavily could I step on the crust without tumbling into the goo?

  Weirdly, my first order of business was to apologize to Mirplo, not so much because I regretted hurting his feelings (which is like hitting a dog on the skull; it really doesn’t penetrate) but to make sure he didn’t say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Also, let’s face it, an apology was in order: Vic said I’d been sloppy, and sloppy I’d been. Was I really that ensorcelled? Or was Allie just really that good? Sure, I’d been suspicious, but not nearly suspicious enough. Radar’s radar, it seemed, was on the fritz. Well … reboot, clean slate, fresh start. There’s no room in the grift for regret. If you’ve made a mistake, you just try to learn from it and move on.

  I called Mirplo, told him he was right. Allie was easing me in, and it was going to take a certain amount of deftness to ease myself out. Mirplo, fancying himself the Lord of the Deft, told me he’d be standing by to help out any way he could. I felt certain that the best way he could help was by standing well out of the way, but I just thanked him for being such a loyal friend. And kept it in the back of my mind that he might be useful at some point. As I said, a Mirplo is a blunt instrument, but sometimes a blunt instrument is exactly the tool you need.

  Next I did what I should have done in the first place, a little research on Milval Hines. I found no damning evidence online, but I knew that didn’t mean anything. Self-affirming background backups, as we’ve already determined, are part of a grifter’s basic playbook, and radarenterprizes.com is exhibit A. So Hines was at the very least “he of whom he spoke.” I hoped he was on the level, or at minimum had a level side, because for the Merlin Game to work, I’d need a broad swath of his contacts, and contacts of his contacts, and contacts of his contacts of his contacts. If he was all smoke, we were game-over before we began.

  When you don’t know how else to act, act like nothing’s wrong. I had already put together the first layer of the Merlin Game, and with Allie posing as my betrothed, I could now reach out to Hines’s clients, peers, and professional associates, spreading the pitch virally from friend to friend of friend to friend of friend of friend to the ultimate iteration of an investment pool deep and broad enough to sustain the game.

  I got in touch with Hines and, still playing bent mentor, instructed him to write me a letter of introduction. I guided him to the type of language the marks respond to, phrases like “revolutionary new method,” “proven track record,” “earn your trust,” and so on. The key to this missive was that it offered information and asked for nothing in return, which is the surest way I know to flank a mark’s natural Maginot. At the end of the day, the pitch boiled down to what it always does in the Merlin Game: Watch the kid pick winners and decide for yourself if he knows his stuff.

  While he worked on that, I made my first pick, a newish company called Longhorn Turbines, which went around converting West Texan landowners into wind farmers. Lots of wind in West Texas; I actually thought this company had a chance to go, but for my purposes, it didn’t really matter. There’s only two ways for a stock to go, up or down, and whichever way it moved, half my herd would think me a winner. Stock rise, stock fall, Radar cull herd, game go on.

  I had my hands full over the next two weeks, establishing my database, picking my arbitrary winners or losers, building my fictive website, setting up the crucial endgame investment mechanism, and always selling, selling, selling. After Hines’s initial letter of introduction, I took over direct communication with the mooks, defining myself as someone with a frank interest in getting stupid rich and inviting everyone along for the ride. This may strike you as a bogus pitch, and I’m sure it struck some of my marks that way, but it was necessary to introduce and reinforce this element in order to prep everyone for the key moment when they put all their money in one big pot for one big push. For some, the accuracy of my picks was enough, but others needed the ol’ VPM, * so that when the time came, they would invest with 100 percent confidence. Why do you think they call it a confidence game?

  Then, one afternoon, Allie stopped by my apartment and invited me down the hill for coffee. Of course I was wary, but of course I cloaked this and accepted her invitation with the distracted air of a man of my hectic agenda. We clambered down to Java Man, got hot wet somethings, and settled in at an outdoor table shaded by a taupe umbrella adorned with the Java Man logo, a caveman with a club in one hand and a latte in the other.

  “Radar,” she said without preamble, “I’m worried.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” I assured her. “Everything’s right on script.”

  “It’s not that. It’s Grandpa. He’s starting to freak me out. He’s become totally obsessed with the grift. He’s reading all these books,” she said. “Everything he can get his hands on. It’s all he talks about, too. ‘Glim dropper’ this, ‘barred winner’ that. I don’t even know what half this stuff means.” At that my “false” alarm sounded, for I was certain she knew exactly what these scams were and how they operated. You don’t get good at the grift without first being a good and thorough student of the game, and while I sentimentally clung to the remote possibility that Allie was a true innocent, my instinct said otherwise, especially when the very words out of her mouth rang as tinny as a toy piano.

  But I played it straight. “So he’s become a buff,” I said. “Wasn’t that the whole point of the exercise? Give Gram
ps his walk on the wild side?” She nodded solemnly, or possibly mock-solemnly. “I don’t think it’s a problem,” I continued, “unless he starts tipping his mitt.” This was a risk some grifters ran, where they got so proud of their tweaks that they couldn’t resist crowing or showing off. It’s like a poker player showing a successful bluff. Good for the ego; bad for the bankroll. “Is he doing that?”

  “No,” said Allie. “He’s keeping his contacts at arm’s length, just like you told him to.”

  “That’s good.” I had explained to them that when we ultimately burned down the house—concluded the con, that is—Hines would have to come off as burned as everyone else. He’d have to play shocked and dismayed, and sell it well enough to convince his victims that he was a victim, too. Something on the order of “Reed seemed like such a nice young man. I can’t believe he’d do such a thing to us all.” Innocence, in other words, was his exit strategy, and it needed protecting.

  Allie took a sip of her drink. “You don’t understand,” she said. “He’s gone all random. Know what he tried the other day? Something called the vase bump?”

  I laughed out loud. She darn near got a spit take out of me.

  The vase bump is one of the most basic and stupid scams there is, where you buy a cheap vase, forge a receipt from a high-end antique store, then stumble into a mark on the street and drop and break the damn thing. If you get irate enough or sorrowful enough—and I’ve seen both methods work—certain dimwits will pay you to replace the vase. If it’s no sale, you just throw the pieces in a paper bag and try again elsewhere. As I said, it’s a pretty lame game (and thus a Mirplo favorite), and the thought of Hines going around running it struck me as majorly goofy. Maybe he really had gone random.

  But, again, Allie not knowing what a vase bump was? Did she really expect me to buy that?

  “How’s his mental health?” I asked.

  “He’s not old enough to be senile.”

  “Granted. It’s just, over time some people sort of lose their internal editor. Stop hearing the voice that tells them not to do stupid things.”

  “Yeah, that sounds about right,” said Allie. “Radar, I think we should pull the plug.”

  This genuinely surprised me. We were deep into the Merlin Game, no more than a week away from burning down the house. I’d already set up the offshore account to which we’d funnel the mooks’ monies, and I’d arranged the wash-back lines that would get the cash into our hands as clean as a nun’s underwear. I figured we were looking at something like a hundred grand apiece. Not bad for a few weeks’ work, and also not the kind of earn you suddenly turn your back on.

  Never leave money lying on the table, right?

  But also: wheels within wheels within wheels. If Allie were a true innocent, it would make sense to want to bail Gramps out of his bad new hobby, but she wasn’t, so it didn’t. Once again, I found myself trying to decrypt her hidden agenda, my effort complicated by the fact that I really didn’t know who she was and what level of deception she was operating on. Did she really want to end the gaff, or did she just want to reinforce her concerned-granddaughter image? Still, there’s such a thing as oversolving the problem, so I reverted back to my default value: Play it straight. If I were exactly who I was, I asked myself, how would I react right now?

  “Look,” I growled, making a manifest effort to keep my voice low and under control, “just because Gramps has lost a few grapes from his vine, there’s no reason to get cold feet. We pull the plug now, we lose all the front-end investment, not to mention a considerable payday. Do you know what opportunity costs are?”

  “No.”

  “Revenues lost through wasting time.”

  “If you’re saying you want to be paid for your time—”

  “I’m saying,” I said, parceling a smidge of impatience into my voice, “that we see the thing through.”

  She looked at me with a puppy’s remorse. “I never really intended for things to go this far, Radar. I think I never thought they would. You really are good at what you do.”

  Smoke up the ass kind of tickles, but I kept the conversation perking along on the text level. “Look,” I said, “this is the best Merlin Game I’ve ever run. It has everything going for it. Shaky economic times, qualified leads, and a solid insider’s in. It’s going to wrap with a handful of extremely live ones out there primed and ready to wire transfer their fool asses off. We can’t let them off the hook now. Karma won’t allow it. The universe demands that they balance their stupidity with poverty. If you and g-diddy have suddenly developed a case of the yips, that’s your problem, not mine. You can run along. I’ll bring the fucking game home by myself.”

  I was going for the tough-guy grifter thing, coming on strong enough to pop some kind of reaction out of her. Well, I got one.

  She burst into tears.

  Dumped her drink in my lap.

  And left.

  I wondered if this meant the engagement was off.

  * * *

  *verbal prostate massage

  * * *

  11.

  the afterparty snuke

  I suppose that if I’d taken Allie’s tears at (streaming down the) face value, I’d have felt bad about hurting her feelings or whatever. But just as I was capable of dialing up some fake anger, I considered Allie capable of croco-dialing in some fake tears. Was I taking a risk by causing a rift? Could she not have chosen to drop a dime on me just then—outed the Merlin Game to the SEC or whoever? Maybe … but only if my whole read on her was wrong and she really was a citizen. Otherwise, well, she knew I wouldn’t give up the Merlin Game without a fight; ergo, a fight was what she wanted. The question was why—a question, I confess, I was getting kind of tired of asking. Maybe when I played the anger card it wasn’t all card. If so, that was a bad sign, a sign of tilt, or loss of control. Was Allie that under my skin? Was my chosen strategy of seeming to play right into her hands really just playing right into her hands?

  At least I had this going for me, that just as Allie knew I wouldn’t walk away from the Merlin Game, I knew she wouldn’t either. Sooner or later (and it would have to be sooner because the house was about to burn down) she’d be back on my doorstep, either with a go-along, get-along apology or her real reason for wanting to kill the gaff.

  Meantime, Mirplo asked me to pitch in on one of his street plays, and I agreed because I owed him for shining the sodium vapor light on Allie and also because I needed to let my subconscious chew on the deepening mystery of Allie’s self-contradictory moves, and the equal mystery of my self-contradictory feelings. As it happens, the back of my mind works better when the front of my mind is occupied. So I helped Vic stooge off some afterparty passes at a rock show at the Nokia Theatre.

  The beauty of this scam is, your mark won’t even know he’s been snadoodled until after the show is over and he tries to get into a backstage afterparty that either won’t honor his bogus credentials or doesn’t exist to begin with. You, meanwhile, are gone baby gone, so there’s nothing he can do at that point except swallow the loss. Hell, he probably paid too much for the tickets to begin with, so what’s a little more out-of-pocket pain? Besides, he got the whole fun of anticipating the afterparty throughout the entire show, and that’s not nothing, right? Or am I just rationalizing?

  Vic had run this game before, and I had to admit he was pretty good at it, maybe because he could relate so effortlessly to the low-wattage rock fans he targeted. Also, he picked his spots, favoring the kind of bands whose fans favor altered states. In this case, it was a Somnifer show, Somnifer being one of these eclectic jam bands who definitely sound better if you’re high.

  Vic had cheesed up some phony laminates on lanyards and cooked up a story about how he worked at the William Morris Agency and had peeled off these party favors from a stack intended for the agency’s A-list clients. Naturally, he would tell the marks, he couldn’t go himself, lest he run into one of his bosses or the pampered elite. But there was no reason some true So
mnifer fans couldn’t rub shoulders with their idols, right? For a price, of course.

  I know what you’re thinking. Someone would have to be phenomenally stupid or astoundingly stoned to fork over good money to such a transparent scam. No shortage of stupid or stoned at a Somnifer show, but even at that it was a hard play to drive home, unless you had someone to validate your parking. Someone who reeked of undercover cop, say. That’s where I came in.

  I watched from a distance as Vic made his pitch to a couple of buzzed treetops in tie-dyes. The girl was a long, skinny stick of a thing; her companion the kind of guy who’s in good shape now because he’s young and doesn’t have to work at it, but you just know that in a couple of years, the weekly game of Ultimate Frisbee will fight a fast losing battle against Kettle Chips, Entenmann’s, and beer. They seemed interested but couldn’t find any reason to believe that the passes were anything other than exactly what they were: total Photoshop fabricats. This was the tipping point of the grift. They wanted to believe. They just needed some evidence, and the flimsiest would do. But Vic couldn’t provide it. As the man with the merchandise, if he insisted the passes were real that would just cast doubt into their addled minds.

  So I moved in for the bust.

  “Hello, girlfriend,” I said, clapping my hand on the back of Vic’s neck in the classic jovial-but-not-really manner of cops everywhere.

  “Oh, shit,” said Vic.

  “What’s going on?” asked the girl.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said the guy.

  “Don’t move,” I said, and flashed my badge.

  That’s right: badge. This, too, was a fabricat, or more precisely a pawn shop purchase. Close examination would have revealed it to be the hardware of a Shasta County deputy sheriff, but who had time for close examination when I shut the badge wallet with a copperly swift snap, then leaned on Vic with all the snark and sneer I could muster? “You fuckin’ mook!” I said. “How many times have I told you not to scalp on my beat?”