Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Ten

The intercom on Kearny’s desk buzzed. Giselle flicked the switch. Jane Goldson’s clipped British voice came tinnily from the other end of the room. She was speaking in low tones.

“There’s a Mr. and Mrs. Winslett here to see Mr. Kearny and they have their knickers in a twist.”

Watching them come down the office toward her, Giselle heard a lot of alarm bells going off.

Winslett was a big bristling man, six feet and over 240 pounds, with a red lined face and a stubbly brown beard and the wide mouth and glittering blue eyes of a blustering, first-class bully. A not unfamiliar type in the repo trade.

The woman was petite, big with child, with long straight blond hair and a face that normally would have been very pretty. But she had a split lip and a swollen purplish jaw and a black eye and a feverish look. Her short-sleeved maternity dress was grease-smeared on the left hip. Her left elbow was skinned. Giselle could almost smell the fear coming off her.

A lot of alarm bells.

“I wanna see a fucker named Kearny!” yelled Winslett. “Look what he did! My wife is eight months pregnant and—”

“You’re saying he assaulted her?” Giselle was furious.

“Punched her out, knocked her down — after he took an axe to my garage door. Then he stole my brother-in-law’s car.” He slapped down a sheaf of Polaroid photos on the desktop. “I got pitchurs. So what’re you gonna do about this?”

Giselle turned to the almost-cringing blonde.

“Mrs. Winslett, are you saying our field man did this to you in the course of effecting a totally legal repossession?”

Her good blue eye — the one not swelled shut — met Giselle’s steely gaze with a sort of panic. She spoke in a half-whisper. “I... it happened like my husband says.”

As Giselle started out of her swivel chair imperiously, Winslett’s ham-size hand came up to push her back down. But his arm was halted in mid-movement by a hand as large as his own. He was staring into Ken Warren’s slate-cold eyes.

Ellen touched Giselle’s arm, her face pleading. “Please.”

They looked at each other, woman to woman.

Giselle said, “Kenny. It’s all right.”

Warren released the arm, jerked a thumb at the door.

“Hnowt!” he barked. “Hnah!”

Winslett wavered, then grabbed his wife’s wrist, yanked her after him so hard she almost cried out. As they went through the back door that led to the street, Ken Warren started after them.

Giselle called sharply, “No, Kenny, let it lie!”

“Na’ll knust mnake hsnure hney gnow.”

Make sure they go. She sat down shakily. She desperately needed a cigarette, but didn’t have one. What in God’s name had Larry done down there in Pacifica? And where was he?

Larry parked in the fenced lot behind the office. He felt loose and easy and had a foolish grin on his face. Two hours with Midori. He went in to sit down across from Giselle.

“What did you do down there in Pacifica?” she demanded.

The look on Giselle’s face got through even his post-Midori euphoria. “Do? The Corvette was there so I took it.”

“Street-parked?”

“In the garage. What—”

“Garage locked?”

“No. The overhead was down but it wasn’t—”

“Mrs. Winslett was in the garage with you?”

“Yeah, she came in with a load of dirty laundry just when I was hooding the Corvette. Why the third degree? Did I forget to genuflect when I came in?”

“Why did you use Dan’s name?”

“I gave her one of Dan’s cards ’cause I was out of—”

“Winslett says you took an axe to the garage door, which was locked, that his wife walked in on you during the repo, and that you beat her up so you could get away with the car.”

Well, hell, and he had liked the woman, too. “Did she show you any bruises or scrapes or anything?”

“Larry, she’d been beaten up, believe me. Really bad. A black eye and a split lip, bruised jaw, skinned elbow...” Giselle was thinking like the office manager of a hard-nosed repo agency again instead of an empathetic woman. “We’re in trouble. They’ve got our card, they’ve got photos of the axed garage door, I bet they’ve got photos of her all banged up...”

“I’ll go down and talk to the neighbors tonight. Somebody’ll have seen him chopping at that door himself—”

“You’ll not go near that place, Larry Ballard! You’ll not go near Pacifica. And you’re off the classic cars right now.”

“Hell, I don’t want to back off those classics, I—”

“She’s Wiley’s wife’s sister, for God sake! You stay away from that house and those cars!”

In the early years of the last century, word of something like Ephrem Poteet’s murder, probably at Yana’s hands, would have traveled up and down the highways and byways in the old Gypsy patteran (leaf) or trail language.

Are the campfire ashes still warm? Has rain partially obliterated footprints and wagon ruts? Drop a handful of grass at a crossroads. Draw a cross with chalk or look for one made with two sticks (always check which arm is longer). A notched stick, a woven pattern of twigs in a low bush, feathers stuck on a tree, hairs from a horse’s tail, a strip of bark, a rag...

Nobody used patteran anymore, not in the States, but the phone was the Gypsies’ new trail language. Most still defiantly could not read or write, but all of them could talk. Devèl, how they could talk! And the talk was of nothing except Ephrem Poteet’s death at the hands of his wife, Yana. Then word went out that a pomana would be held for Ephrem in Point Richmond.

He died in L.A., they had no body to bury, and since his meager possessions had been impounded as evidence, they could not be burned or smashed in the traditional Romi way. But still they would have their ritual feast of fruits and grains in his honor even without a body to lie in state with gold pieces on its eyelids.

Just at dusk before the streetlights came on, they drifted up the hill to Rudolph Marino’s dark-shingled house in Point Richmond across the Bay from San Francisco. They were relatively few in number, maybe a dozen, with no small children; the event was solemn and few of the kumpania had known Ephrem personally.

Rudolph was living in Point Richmond because most of the permanent Muchwaya residents of the Bay Area lived in Richmond, and because his Florida hotel scam collapsed and he had to get out of Palm Beach quick. He was wary of leaving his footprints across the plush carpets of upscale hostelries for a while.

Point Richmond, once called East Yard, was the oldest part of that East Bay city. In the 1970s, its houses, stores, restaurants, and churches were repainted, restored, and revived. It was sandwiched between the San Rafael — Richmond 580 skyway — beyond which lay the Chevron oil refinery — the railway yards, and the slowly awakening Richmond harbor.

In matters of ritual, nobody was more exacting than Lulu. It was she who had organized the pomana. But Staley wanted to use the occasion for his own purposes after his conference with Willem. What he planned was for the good of the kumpania; but like any monarch, he knew that his subjects needn’t always know everything he was doing on their behalf. This was the ideal time to unveil the plan. The most influential members of the tribe were here.

Yana was a major if covert topic of gossip among the Romni preparing the traditional meal.

In the modern appliance-filled kitchen a willowy teenage girl named Pearsa Demetro began to lay out the Tarot cards, softly chanting an old Gypsy incantation from Tuscany in a clear high voice:

Lulu shushed her, and to the accompanying giggles of the other teenagers added sternly, “Yana’s husband is dead, so a song about cursing your husband is close to marime.”

But as soon as Lulu turned away to tend the stove, Pearsa laid out another card, studied it, then started another stanza.

“No more!” exclaimed Lulu, really angry this time. “You don’t know how powerful that is!”

“But Mami ” — she used the honorary term for grandmother — “I don’t have a husband. I’m just practicing.”

Like Yana, Pearsa had been born with a caul over her head, which gave her many powers — the second sight among them. So Lulu could not bring herself to object when the girl chanted the final stanza.