Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Twenty

Stroll south from the Ferry Building on the once-proud Embarcadero, and you will run into a new, gentrified water-front of high-price condos and inset-tile walkways and lampposts with wrought-iron scrollwork. Stroll north, and you will run into the almost-desperate carnival-house gaiety of Pier 39, and, beyond that, Fisherman’s Wharf crowded not with the crab and salmon fishermen of yesteryear, but with tourists.

Midway between these two extremes, shoehorned in between two empty piers abandoned as the shipping moved away to other ports, is a tiny, forgotten waterfront bar called the Marlin Spike, where it is always 1947. You drink straight shots with longneck beer chasers, you eat steak sandwiches on crusty French rolls with a side of fries, and nobody has ever heard of cholesterol. Above the bar is a faded ten-foot-long photo of thirty naughty bare-butted women wearing only sailors’ caps and middy blouses, winking bawdily over their shoulders at the camera.

It was nearly midnight when Nanoosh Tsatshimo slid into the high-backed booth in a corner overlooked by no windows. This con, as this city, was new to him: he usually worked silver-plating schemes in Chicago’s teeming South Side where the Jewish working-class ghetto rubbed elbows with the black working-class ghetto. He took a long, grateful gulp of the proffered icy beer.

“You have chosen well,” he said.

Immaculata Bimbai was in her foreign countess mode tonight.

“We can speak freely here. The bartender is one of us.”

In Immaculata’s jewelry-store cons, youthful Lazlo, her little brother, usually carried luggage as a bellboy, or carted around empty boxes from upscale shops. Immaculata had made him a major player for the first time; he could no more contain his excitement than a puppy can contain its wriggling.

“How did it go?” he demanded eagerly.

Immaculata said to him sharply, “Show respect, Lazlo. This is an important man in our kumpania — an elder.”

Lazlo muttered his abashed apology; Nanoosh merely grinned.

“My children, let me tell you. First, I was never any closer to L.A. than Rudolph’s house in Point Richmond.”

Lazlo said, “How did you make the jewelry-store guy think you were there?”

“Rudolph did it with his computer. He says e-mail responses on the Internet can seem to originate from wherever you say they originate.”

“So he sent the guy an e-mail that was supposed to come from that Los Angeles Gemstone Mart you made up?”

“Exactly, Immaculata. He was kuriaio — he was greedy, he wanted to make all his money at once. I told him I wanted seventy-five thousand dollars for the emerald, and he offered only thirty-seven-five. Then...”

And with exquisite timing, Nanoosh fell silent.

“Don’t do that to us, Nanoosh!” pleaded Immaculata. Her life was jewelry-store cons; if this one came off as hoped, she foresaw great things in it for her and Lazlo.

Nanoosh, milking his moment, said, “Then I took his check.”

“His check?” exclaimed Immaculata, appalled. “No! Cash!”

Was this how he conned ’em back there in Chicago? If so...

“Certified,” said Nanoosh.

And started to laugh as his thick fingers upended his crumpled Safeway shopping bag. Thick sheafs of banded green-backs spilled out on the tabletop.

“How much?” Lazlo asked. He looked even younger than he had while playing Donny, the nerd from Silicon Valley.

“Fifty thousand,” said Nanoosh in phony indifference.

“Take out my twenty-five thousand seed money, and that’s twenty-five net,” breathed Immaculata. She was still as beautiful as she had been while playing May, the putative bride; but with her own character back in her face and eyes, she looked closer to her real 32 than to May’s 22. “That’s eight thousand two hundred and fifty for the Muchwaya—”

“And five thousand, five hundred eighty-three and change for each of us three,” supplied Nanoosh.

Immaculata, her busy fingers already opening the packets, said with a sort of wonder, “And we didn’t break a single law.”

Several vineyards around the small wine-country town of Sonoma have tasting rooms that bring throngs of tourists and Bay Area locals during daylight hours. Flowers are everywhere. General Vallejo’s home and grounds have been rigorously preserved. The bakery’s French bread lures San Francisco insomniacs to Sonoma at 6:00 A.M. so they get it hot from the oven. Picturesque shops and restaurants try to hang on to tradition while catering to the tourist buck. It is a mostly successful attempt.

But now, on these small-town, weeknight streets, everything was closed except a lone bar facing the town square. No car moved, no pedestrian strolled. To O’B, parked on the far side of the square from the bar and staring across its ponds and playground, dominated by the 1800s town hall, Sonoma looked like a 1950s movie set. He felt frustrated. He had already checked the only phone directory available, back at the crossroads leading into town; no Blands listed. And he couldn’t really ask anyone questions anyway. If Tim Bland had local ties, a question might inspire a phone call that would alert him to the search.

A patrol car pulled up beside O’B. The lone cop stuck a square, tough, sleepy-looking face out of his window.

“You need any help, sir?” Both question and voice were courteous; but the eyes were the cynical cop’s eyes issued with the uniform at every police academy’s passing-out parade.

O’B took a chance. “You know a guy named Tim Bland?”

“Don’t ring a bell. Why you lookin’ for him?”

Just what he didn’t want, a curious cop. He said quickly, “Tim and my kid sister had a fight. She’s damn near forty, he’s thirty, and now she’s sorry, and she wants me to find him tonight...”

The cop yawned involuntarily. “Family,” he grunted, and departed. O’B sighed. He hadn’t eaten anything since lunch.

After thinking long and hard, Trin Morales left his apartment in his usual circuitous fashion, at DKA surreptitiously switched into a 1997 Honda Accord repo awaiting transport back to Skokie, Illinois. Driving repos, ever, was strictly against DKA policy; but who cared about the rules? Trin was maybe talking his life here. He left a phone message for Milagrita to catch the Mission Street BART — Bay Area Rapid Transit — at the 23rd and Mission station in time to reach the Ocean Avenue station at 2:00 A.M. Take the covered walkway to Geneva Avenue. Be alone.

Trin got to the Ocean Avenue BART station, way out where Geneva passes over the 280 freeway, at 12:30 A.M. Drove the whole neighborhood, noting every pedestrian, checking parked cars for heads backlit by the headlights of approaching vehicles.

Nobody had the station staked out.

By 1:15 A.M. he knew every parked car, every shadow that could hold a man, every possible approach. He parked on San Jose facing Geneva, where he could see the BART station pedestrian overpass with a turn of his head. He slumped behind the wheel and waited.

With a start, O’B sat bolt upright behind the wheel still slant-parked on the Sonoma square. Not again! Asleep just like last time — not booze, at least, just exhaustion — but just like last time, Tim Bland could have driven by him a dozen times.

He checked his watch with bleary eyes. One-fifty A.M. Bar-close time. Bland wouldn’t be driving by this night. Just time to walk across the park for an O’Doul’s and a couple of bags of pretzels at the General Vallejo to sustain him on the long frustrating empty-handed drive home to the city.

The pseudo-Spanish mission bar had lots of old drawings of Vallejo’s hacienda when it had been that Spanish officer’s stronghold, and of San Francisco’s Presidio when it still had been a Spanish fortification. Old muskets and sabers were crossed on the walls; there were Bowie knives, sombreros, serapes, and, hanging from a cross rafter, a pair of cracked Spanish leather officers’ boots complete with big-roweled spurs.

All that was missing was the mark of Zorro, and a husky man with a deeply lined face was trying to put that on the tall lean blonde behind the bar. His deep tan stopped in an abrupt line two inches above his eyes; obviously, out in all weather with a wide-brimmed hat pulled down on his head.

As O’B slid onto a stool, the guy said, “Aw, c’mon, Sonja, it’s Friday an’ I know your old man’s out of town until Monday. It’s party time!”

Sonja had high cheekbones, blue eyes full of mischief, and thin red lips curved with humor. She was dressed frontier style: tight jeans, high-heel boots of tooled leather, a red-checked cowboy shirt with the top three buttons undone, a bandanna around her shapely brown throat. Hmmm. Just Tim Bland’s type.

She leaned across the bar and stuck her face quite close to that of the husky man.

“Gus, I don’t know what the hell gave you the idea that I cheat on my husband, but if I did it sure as hell wouldn’t be with you.” She winked at O’B as she pointed Gus toward the door. “Closing time, big boy. Go home and give Carmen my love.”

“She’s at her ma’s place in Salinas for the weekend, that’s the trouble.”

“Then go home and lock yourself in the bathroom with a Hustler.” As Gus shambled out, she gave O’B an apologetic smile. “Sorry, Red, but last call is already past.”

O’B put a ten-dollar bill on the bar.

“A couple of bags of pretzels and an O’Doul’s? The ABC can’t bust you for that. I’ll even drink from the bottle.”

“Nonalcoholic O’Doul’s? Oh, what the hell — okay.”

She got the bottle from the cooler under the back bar, flipped off the top, set it down with two bags of pretzels. He drank deep as she went around turning off lights and the jukebox and brought the house phone up from behind the bar. O’B spun his stool around back-to-the-bar to give her the illusion of privacy.

“I’m closing up now, the last guy’s just leaving,” Sonja said behind him in a low, throaty voice. “When you get here, stick your head in and I’ll come out. I don’t want to stand around outside waiting, Tim — you don’t know what this town’s turned into.”

Right on. Tim didn’t know Sonoma, liked tall lean blondes, and screwed other guys’ wives. O’B drained his O’Doul’s, picked up his pretzels, waved off his change, and headed for the door.

“Thanks, Sonja,” he called as he went out.

Sprint across the square for his car? No. Play the odds. He stepped back into the shadows of a narrow alley that led to a courtyard of small shops and cafés.

Seven minutes brought the throaty growl of a sports car. It stopped with its dark green hood just visible from O’B’s ambush. Panoz kit car. Left in the street with the motor running as Bland crossed the sidewalk.

Tim Bland pulled open the door of the General Vallejo to stick his head in, and O’B walked unhurriedly out of the alley. He slid into the cockpit of the low gleaming green car crouched like a leopard in the street. Slamming it into gear, he fishtailed away around the square with Tim Bland’s shouts of outraged astonishment shredded by the wind of his passage.