Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Nine

Heslip was buying Giselle lunch at a new fancy SOMA restaurant. Ballard was dropping off the Wiley Corvette at the Cal-Cit Bank storage lot below Telegraph Hill. And salty old repoman O’Bannon was across the Golden Gate getting himself lost while searching for an UpScale salesman named Timothy Bland. Lost in the Marin County community whose local fire truck he had once repossessed for a truck-sales company. Oh shame! Oh woe!

Bland was supposed to be living on Toyon off Currey. What could be simpler, even on Tam Valley’s steep, heavily wooded, impossibly twisty house-crammed streets?

Except Currey Avenue didn’t intersect with Toyon after all. O’B decided, after a lot of map study, that Toyon came off Currey Vista. It didn’t. Then it had to come off Currey Lane. No, Currey Lane came off Currey Vista.

So Toyon had to come off Curry Vista. It did. Except its street numbers didn’t come anywhere near the number Ken Warren got from Benny Lutheran of the broken nose. But on a narrow blacktop lane called Toyon Court that dipped discreetly downhill off Toyon, O’B found the number he had been given for Tim Bland.

It was a two-story redwood duplex clinging to the downhill side of the street with steel fingernails. The concrete floor of the empty double carport beneath the duplex wore an encouraging puddle of oil. A classic would lose more oil than a new car.

Nobody home at Bland’s lower apartment. Nobody home upstairs, either, except a grey and white tabby cat O’B could just hear meowing through the double-glassed front door.

Work the neighborhood, ask questions of everyone in sight. Except there was no one in sight, and Tim Bland could be driving any one of the seven missing classics — or none of them.

Pardon me, sir, I’m looking for a guy driving a car. Sure.

The next house downslope was a typical California hillside cantilever: the carport on the roof and the bedrooms in the basement. An old woman with mad eyes held up her cell phone just inside the door and repeatedly pantomimed punching 911.

O’B went away. She’s somebody’s mother, boys, you know.

The next cookie in the jar was a heavyset guy who answered the door in mid-afternoon wearing only morning breath. He would never star in a porno flick, that was for sure.

“Yeah, whadda fuckya wan’?”

“I’m trying to get in touch with Mr. Bland—”

“Earn a hones’ livin’ you come aroun’ knockin’ on my door.”

“Could you tell me what kind of car Mr. Bland—”

“Push a hack nights, pay my taxes, don’ beat th’ wife.” Wife? Loneliness could do strange things to a woman. “Summich sold me a lemon of a Honda once. Summich ain’t home.”

Slam! Sound of sliding deadbolt. And nobody home at either of the other two houses. Sometimes it went that way.

Go get some lunch, scattering corn behind him so he could find his way back again. Then just keep checking the address until Tim Bland showed up. Or, abysmal thought, didn’t show up.

O’B climbed wide wooden stairs to Houlihan’s restaurant on Bridgeway, and sipped nonalcoholic O’Doul’s in the bar while waiting for his table. Until 1937, Sausalito was a sleepy little Portagee fishing village with only the ferries connecting it to San Francisco across the Bay. Then the Golden Gate Bridge went and ruined everything by making it accessible by auto.

A voice at his elbow eerily echoed his thoughts.

“Things descend to awful goddam hell.”

Zack Zanopheros was a private eye who organized court cases for prominent defense attorneys. He was a grinning bearded compact man O’B’s own age, whose bright, zestful eyes crinkled up at the corners when he smiled. He wore a cashmere sports jacket, dark slacks, and shiny black loafers with tassels. He plunked his half-emptied bottle of Beck’s down on the polished mahogany.

“Let me buy you a beer.”

O’B returned his grin. “Sure. How’s tricks, Reverend?”

“I let the computers do the work and I play a lot of tennis. How’s the repo business?”

“We still get to go out and thug cars.”

Zack nodded sadly. “You can’t do that by computer.” A half-hour later he was still toasting “the good old days,” when the loudspeaker intoned, “Zack, party of one.”

“Let’s make it a party of two,” Zack said quickly.

Only when the maître d’ led them to one of the front-window tables that faced the far gleaming tumble of San Francisco across the Bay did O’B realize that Zack had been buying him full-bore Beck’s instead of O’Doul’s.

Aw, shucks! What was a fellow to do?

Staley Zlachi strolled with other midday patrons through the turnstile at the San Francisco Zoo — still called by old-timers the Fleishacker Zoo — and paused at the top of the concrete steps. He watched glowing pink flamingos dip black scimitar beaks into the wading pool. The hot grease from the concession stands smelled good to him, as did the clean, rank animal smells. From the primate house came the booming hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo of a howler monkey. He moved on to the orangutan habitat, where the dominant male, hulking and dish-faced, was out on the ramp leading to their concrete house.

“Magnificent, isn’t he?” asked an accented voice.

The man was bulky but very fit, early 60s, dressed with European punctiliousness in a dark solid-color suit, somber tie, white shirt, and highly polished black shoes. He had a large square head and ashy hair slightly thinning over the forehead. His blue eyes were sad and piercing and merry all at once.

“Orangs were mentioned in the Linnaeus classification texts of 1766, but the first individual was not brought to Europe until the nineteenth century. Now they are extremely rare in the wild, even though extremely intelligent.” He sighed. “Habitat destruction is making them extinct.”

Only then did Staley turn so they could shake hands. As he did, a woman and three small children bundled up against the chill ocean breeze came up to the railing near them. The two men immediately switched to Romani.

“How are you, Willem? What is this I hear about Rita?”

Willem chuckled. “It is true. In the fall she will marry a gadjo, a fine Italian lad. I know, I know, you do not approve. But remember...” The bundled-up family moved on. The two men returned to English. “I am didákái — half-gadjo — myself. All gadjo by blood, but by upbringing—”

“The story is legendary,” said Staley. “You were an orphan, six years old, on the open roads of Holland during the war. Mami Celie scooped you up and made you part of the vitsa.”

“Grandma Celie.” Willem shook his head fondly. “How I loved that woman! She taught me how to live with one foot in the Rom world and the other in the gadjo world. She dealt in the G.I. black market at Porte Portese so I could go to school. But I forget my manners. How are you, Staley? And Lulu?”

“We’re fine.” He paused sadly. “Well, we got a situation. One of our kumpania killed her husband in cold blood. We think there’s a lot of money involved.”

Willem crossed himself while shaking his head. “Money is good but murder is bad, very bad, bad for all Romi everywhere.”

“We gotta deal with it. To do that we gotta find her first. Trouble is, she’s living in the gadjo world and knows how to avoid us. She’s very smart.”

“You need some gadje to help you look.”

Staley’s eyes suddenly flashed. “Hey! Maybe you got something there! I know this guy...” He paused. “But hey! What about my manners? You’re here for our help with a recovery problem of your own.”

They ate cheeseburgers and fries and drank coffee at one of the little round tables near the concession stands. The hot grease not only smelled good, but tasted good to Staley, too. Willem told him all about Robin Brantley in Hong Kong, and Victor Marr, and the Yakuza gangster named Kahawa.

“What could Robin do? The Yakuza threatened his life.”

“And now Marr has it here in California.”

“At a fortified mountaintop facility near Big Sur.” He told Staley all he had learned about Xanadu. “Brantley says he is willing to help. But will he stand fast and not falter, not go to Marr through his fear of physical violence?”

“We gotta bigger problem,” said Staley. “The way you describe this Xanadu, my people just don’t have the sort of training and expertise ya need to get into a place like that.”

“Ah, Staley, there is always a way,” said Willem gently.

And sure enough, there was. Another hour of talk between these two sly men, and they had it. A crazy way. A brilliant way. A Gypsy way.

Ballard meant to go right back to the office after dropping off the Corvette, he really did. But he’d been at the dojo again until 2:00 A.M. the previous night, practicing for his first-degree black belt, then had been up early to check out Big John Wiley’s neighborhood. The day had snowballed from there.

So he decided to go home to his two-room studio apartment facing Golden Gate Park across Lincoln Way, make himself a pot of his signature coffee, grab a shower and shave and change of clothes. Then he could pull an all-nighter if he got any hot leads.

As he started up the hall wrapped in a cloud of steam and a big shaggy towel, Midori Tagawa came in the street door behind him. For two years he had shared the shower and bath with this porcelain-doll Japanese exchange student who rented the tiny back apartment. During those same two years he intermittently waged a gently unsuccessful seduction campaign against her.

“Hello, Larry, no see you, long time.” In her high little voice, soft as eiderdown, it was more like, “Herro, Rarry.”

He bowed elaborately. “Ah so, long time. How’s school?”

“Cost a lot. I got part-time job now.”

He had lent Midori a semester’s tuition, hoping she’d maybe pay him back in exquisite golden flesh. But her bookkeeping was scrupulous and her body remained inviolate. A few months ago they came close. He caught her coming from the shower wrapped in just a towel, which slid down her body just as she disappeared into her apartment. Accident? Deliberate? He’d been involved elsewhere at the time, so he’d never tried to find out.

“Menswear,” Midori added obscurely.

“Menswear?”

“Nordstrom’s, Stonestown. Sell menswear.”

Ballard had on very little menswear. Just his towel. And there was a draft in the hallway of the old two-story Victorian. A shiver ran through him.

“You cold,” Midori said quickly. “You come fo tea.”

“I’m not dressed for it,” said Ballard.

That’s when his towel fell off. Through no conscious agency of his own, honest. But still, revealing the tumescence of long abstinence and the remembered tantalizing glimpse of Midori’s taut ivory haunches and glowing golden thighs all those months ago. She put a hand up over her mouth and giggled.

“You come as you are, Rarry.”

Then that exquisite little hand reached out and took hold of Rarry’s distended handle and led him down the hall to mutual ecstasy in her tiny, scrupulously neat apartment.