Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Fifteen

The Ferrari was in the barn, safe and sound. But the Great White Father was going to be unhappy when he saw this month’s expense account, thought Bart Heslip as he zipped north on the beautiful Junipero Serra freeway. A tow job, four new tires — all had been slashed too ferociously to be saved. He fingered his discreetly bandaged ear. It was itching.

The Taurus started missing. He checked the gas gauge. Half-full. Now backfiring. It was a repo out of Minnesota that Kearny bought as a company car after the client balked at transporting charges back to Minnetonka.

He swung the now badly limping car into the Trousdale off-ramp in Burlingame, which took him down through tree-crowded residential tracts to El Camino Real, the Royal Road of the old Spanish missions. Eventually he found a gas station with an attached garage. He told the mechanic what to look for.

The sandy-haired kid was wiping his hands on a bright red cloth as he came back into the office where Bart was gulping down a Diet Pepsi because he liked the bubbles going up his nose.

“Yeah, well, you were right. They sugared your gas tank. Sugar got carried to the distributor, the plugs, the pistons — everything. It formed a glaze. It’s like rock candy in there. You’d have to pull the engine, dismantle it, steam-clean it — which costs a hell of a lot more than that old car’s worth.”

Meryl Blanchett had just returned to her Chestnut Street flat from taking Milli on her morning walk to the Presidio Wall. The phone was ringing when she entered the room. It was an unlisted number, so Meryl picked up immediately. A wonderfully remembered voice spoke.

“Meryl, it is I.”

“Madame Miseria!” she cried. “Thank God! I keep calling you, but nobody answers. And you haven’t cashed my check yet.”

“I am not going to cash it — ever — because of the wonderful thing you are going to do for me. You have your hair done once a week at JeanneMarie Broussard et cie.”

“Yes, but how—” Meryl broke off with a surprisingly girlish giggle. Yana could picture the flush of embarrassment mantling her pleasant cheeks. “But of course, you can see anything you want to see in your crystal ball...”

“And many things I do not wish to see,” said Yana. “I also know that you have great influence with JeanneMarie.”

“I have gotten quite a number of the other docents at the Legion of Honor to patronize her shop, it is true...”

“Here is what you must do,” began Yana. As it was not quite new moon, Meryl could not yet know that Yana’s spells and potions were worthless in binding the feckless Theodore to her.

Meryl instantly agreed. Of course.

Dan Kearny stepped through the front door of DKA wearing his new blue suit, bought in Chicago, and a lightning-pattern tie a saleswoman had told him was the latest thing. Jane Goldson came out of her chair behind the reception desk. She was slight and slender, with a veddy British accent and a skirt that stopped a foot above her knees. Her legs were excellent. To the eternal sorrow of the field men, she would never go out with any of them. She held out an inch-thick stack of phone messages.

“Welcome home, Mr. K. These are the ones who wouldn’t talk with Giselle. Only Mr. K for them. And Mr. Groner has been doing a bird over the missing classic cars from UpScale Motors.”

He thanked her while starting down the busy office past the mostly female skip-tracers and credit checkers and phone workers. It was good to be back. Giving that keynote speech at the convention had been a bearcat. Standing ovation, but still...

“Dan!” Giselle was looking at him from across his own desk. “Great suit. Killer tie. How was Chicago?”

He reclaimed his swivel and tossed his batch of messages down on the blotter. “Terrif. Listen, Giselle, what’s this Jane tells me? That Groner’s on the warpath?”

She sat down across from him. “Nothing like that, Dan. He just keeps calling for reports so he’ll know when to set up the auction of the classic cars. He wants to move them all at once. Last night Bart got the Ferrari convertible down in Woodside. They took a shot at him, but didn’t hit the car.” She told him of Bart’s adventures, ending with, “Anyway, he and Larry had to call a tow truck—”

“If he thinks he’s going to stick the tires on his expense account, after pulling a stupid stunt like that...” His private line rang. He snatched it up, said, “Yeah?” into it.

“They sugared the gas tank, too,” said Heslip’s voice.

After a strangled pause, Kearny said with disgust, “Maybe you can raise one of the other field men and bum a ride in.” He threw the receiver in the direction of the phone. As Giselle was replacing it correctly, he said, “How are we doing otherwise?”

The young, taffy-haired woman in the old-fashioned pinch-waist yellow and brown plaid suit and run-over black pumps paused on the sidewalk in front of Brittingham Funeral Directors. Tugging at her mid-calf skirt, she stared up at the impressive inset portico flanked by four double sets of Ionian Greek pillars. Brittingham’s had been serving San Francisco from the same location on Sutter Street between Larkin and Polk since 1850, and to date, not one of their clients had ever come back to complain about their work.

Carter Brittingham IV, great-great-grandson of the founding Brittingham, was standing in the hallway outside the crowded Evergreen Room waiting for the Reverend Dickson, who was, of course, pro forma late. Dickson was a difficult man of God — indeed, in his darkest, most secret moments, Brittingham thought of him as the Reverend Dickhead.

Seeing an Arkie-looking woman enter, Brittingham glided toward her, speaking in a deep, soft, almost sepulchral voice.

“If you could tell me your Loved One’s name, madam—”

“Loved One?”

Her voice had some sort of regional twang; apart from lips smeared a garish red, that small oval face should have had a dusting of freckles across the bridge of the nose but didn’t quite. Slanty eyeglasses that had gone out in the 1970s gave her the slightly goofy, off-kilter look of a tipsy church organist.

“The, ah, Departed whom you wished to—”

“Oh, no, I’m looking for Mr....” Her voice had an upward inflection that made it a question. “Brittingham?”

“I am he,” said Brittingham with admirable brevity.

He was a slightly soft, fulsome man over six feet tall, impressive in striped pants and cutaway dark coat, gleaming plain-tip black Oxfords, and black silk tie knotted in a full Windsor.

She stuck out a firm hand which he found himself taking.

“Becky Thatcher,” she said. “From a little bitty town in the Ouachitas Mountains of Arkansas. I’m looking for a job.”

Brittingham shuddered inwardly. “I’m very sorry, Ms. Thatcher, but we have no openings of any—”

“Isn’t anybody better’n me on hair and makeup for corpses.”

This stopped Brittingham cold. It was very difficult to find cosmeticians who could — or would — adequately wash and set the hair of the Departeds, let alone make up their poor, cold, dead faces. And the girl he’d had for almost a year had, the day before, suddenly quit.

He considered Becky Thatcher’s taffy hair piled in curls on top of her head, the pigeon-toed stance in the scuffed shoes, the garish lipstick, the jangly costume jewelry. Any corpse this little hillbilly sent up to him might well come out looking either like a strumpet or a gigolo. But he needed someone now.

“So, um, what... er... qualifications?”

“I’ve been to beauty school — didn’t graduate, Mama took sick and we needed the money so I went to work for the local undertaker. Mr. Toombs. He taught me to make up corpses real pretty for God. Toombs, isn’t that just the name for a man who buries people, though? Anyway, he was the coroner, too, so I’ve worked on every sort of people — fell off of a silo, mashed flat by a semi, gut-shot by someone thought they was a deer—”

“Oh my,” he said, “we don’t get many Departeds like that at Brittingham’s.” He paused. “Well, I don’t suppose it would do any harm for you to fill out an employment application...”

The Reverend Dickhead chose that moment to come in from the street bearing several layers of unction.

“Carter, Carter, my dear man, may God bless, sorry I was detained, but a man of God is at the mercy of...” His eyes focused on Becky Thatcher, surreptitiously caressed the body accented by the pinch-waist suit. “Ummm, whom have we here?”

Becky dropped him the hint of a curtsy.

“Reverend, I know you and Mr. Brittingham are gonna be real busy, so if you could spare him for just one teensy second...”

With one small hand she drew Brittingham a few feet down the hall, out of the Reverend’s earshot.

“I’ll fill out them forms and all later, but couldn’t I just sort of... try out today? I really need the work.” Her eyes turned merry behind the slanty glasses. “You don’t like what I do, you don’t owe me a thing. What can you lose?”

What indeed? His assistant, Harvey Parsons, would be there to see she didn’t do anything outré to one of their Loved Ones.

Giselle Marc had hitched her chair closer to Kearny’s desk, and had been talking steadily. Since DKA’s life’s blood was finding people who had defaulted, defrauded, or embezzled from banks, bonding companies, lending institutions, or insurance conglomerates, and taking their unpaid-for chattels, she had a lot to go over with Kearny. An hour later she was down to a final folder. She opened it on the desk.

“Okay, the classics from UpScale Motors. We started out looking for seven of them after Ken scored that little 280Z. Larry got the Corvette roadster out of Wiley’s brother-in-law’s garage down in Pacifica the day after you left.”

“Any trouble?”

“Not with the repo, no.” She already was losing her enthusiasm at his return. “But, ah, Dan, something happened that might come back to bite us. A few hours after Larry took the Corvette, the brother-in-law and his very pregnant wife stormed in here with a bunch of Polaroids they said showed—”

She was interrupted by the arrival of three men through the back door. Two of them were cops who now and then shagged cars through police records for DKA. The other...

“You Kearny?” snapped the one she didn’t know.

He had strands of thin black hair combed sideways to cover a spreading bald spot and his small black mustache looked pinned to his sallow face like a tail pinned to a birthday party donkey.

Kearny said, “Tom. George. How are the families?”

The stranger yapped, “I’m the one you gotta worry about, wise-ass. Sergeant Willis Franks of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department. You’re under arrest for aggravated assault and wanton destruction of property. On your feet, buster.”

Tom and George winced. Kearny said, “Let’s see some tin.”

Franks pulled out his shield wallet and displayed his badge. Kearny nodded and stood up.

“Pacifica?” he asked Giselle as if the cops weren’t even there. She nodded. “Okay, get Hec Tranquillini on the horn and have him meet me at the San Mateo County Courthouse.” He looked at Franks. “The holding coop’s still in South City, isn’t it?”

Franks nodded, taking the cuffs off his belt.

“You don’t need those,” said Tom.

Franks got a mean cop look in his eye. “Assistant D.A. Scarbrough said to bring him in fast and bring him in hard. I don’t know what that means to you pussies up here, but in San Mateo that means the cuffs.”

“You ain’t in San Mateo,” George pointed out.

Kearny winked at Giselle, said, “Hec, pronto,” and went out with the San Mateo cop firmly holding his arm.