Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Thirty-three

It was a bright, cool May Monday. At California-Citizens Bank’s outdoor lot below Telegraph Hill, gulls swooped and squawked, unseen traffic rumbled on the nearby Embarcadero. Stan Groner, president of the bank’s Consumer Loan Division, was holding the classic-car auction now, at the beginning of the week, because on a weekend the place would be jammed with the kind of old-car buffs who kicked tires and never tired of telling each other about the beauty they’d picked up for a bag of peanuts — and never bid on anything.

Today it was serious classic-car dealers, with a sprinkling of 20-something execs from Silicon Valley, kids with money to spend and nostalgia for a past they’d never known.

Dan Kearny watched as Groner, a pleasant-faced man of 42 with warm brown eyes, wearing a three-piece banker-conservative suit, worked the crowd before the auction started. The banker had learned some tricks a few months back, during the day they’d spent playing private eye together. For one thing, just how damned tough it was to get information out of people who didn’t want to give it to you. Obviously wanting something from DKA, he was trying to not be too obvious about it.

“Mr. K!” Stan exclaimed, pumping Dan’s hand with half-real, half-synthetic enthusiasm. “Lots of Wiley’s competitors here today looking for bargains.”

“Ex-competitors,” said Kearny. “Wiley’s out of business.”

Stan chuckled. “Giselle was around at the crack of dawn to grab that little red Alfa for herself.”

“I hope you gave her a good deal on it.” Then, since Giselle’s love affair with the red Alfa obviously wasn’t why Stan had asked him to come around today, he got his face close to Stan’s ear and spoke in his best sotto voce tough guy growl. “Who you want bumped off?”

“Bumped off?” exclaimed Stan in alarm. Then he got it, and actually started to blush. “Okay, so I... well, I want you to meet one of the bank’s overseas customers who has a problem I thought you could help with. He’s a baron. You’ll find out all about it at lunch.”

Ladies who lunch, thought Giselle rather giddily. She slid the gleaming red low-slung Alfa Quadrifoglio Spider to the curb in front of the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street, just as Sofia Ciccone came trotting down the broad front steps. Sofia was out of her SFPD uniform and into civvies for the occasion. Oh, let the printouts be in that white handbag slung over her shoulder!

Sofia stopped amid the river of fellow cops, lawyers, civilians, accused felons, and weepy relatives that flowed up and down the wide steps. Giselle touched the Alfa’s horn. Sofia’s mouth fell open in surprise at the sight of the sleek red car.

She got in with fluid grace, glittery earrings swinging, essentially unchanged by the years since they’d been dormmates at S.F. State. Her dark Italian eyes were round with wonder.

“I thought Kearny never let you guys drive repos.”

“No repo, Sofia. It’s mine!” Giselle checked her rearview and zipped the Alfa away from the curb with a throaty chuckle of engine, adding the classic, “And the bank’s.”

“How much?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“No way!”

“Way. So today it’s the Bocce Café to celebrate.”

Sofia squirmed her tidy bottom around in the pale leather bucket seat, sighed luxuriously, then looked over at Giselle with sudden suspicion. “Is it still the Bocce even if I wasn’t able to Xerox those records you wanted?”

“Hey, we’re celebrating my new car, remember?”

“Just testing,” Sofia grinned. “I got what you asked for.”

“But did you get what I need?”

“I don’t know what you need.”

Giselle stopped for the light at Sixth and Howard. A short dumpy Asian woman in cast-off clothes was taking a long, oblivious time to cross while deep in discussion with a tall thin black man.

“Some of those MamaSans make ten thousand dollars a day at the illegal food stamp trade,” Giselle observed. “The guy with her is obviously one of her runners. Where’s a cop when you need one?”

Sofia tossed her dark, shoulder-length hair back out of her eyes. “Be polite or I won’t tell you what I found.”

“Oh come on! Did you get anything salient?”

“After lunch,” said Sofia firmly. “If I lose my civil service pension ’cause I stole worthless records for you, I want to go down full of good Italian cooking.”

The three men were having lunch at the shining chromium-and-glass Fog City Diner on the waterfront. Baron Herbert Von Knottnerus-Meyer had thinning too-black hair combed across his scalp, muttonchop whiskers, a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, and a monocle on a black woven silk cord strung through his lapel buttonhole, a monocle that kept falling out of his right eye as he talked. He kept replacing it as he held forth, in a Prussian accent, about a certain class of animals descended from arboreal phalanger stock.

“All thirty species uff dot kangaroo, best known uff de marsupials, are found only in Australia unt New Guinea. Since development uff de young marsupial takes place partly in dot mother’s uterus unt partly in dot pouch, dere iss perhaps even something Freudian in deir reproductive strategy. Vould you not agree, Herr Kearny?”

“I have no opinion about it, Baron,” said Dan blandly.

“You do know vut a marsupial is, don’t you, Herr Kearny?”

“Pogo the Possum,” said Dan sagely, to Stan’s shocked expression and the Baron’s bewildered one.

“Possum? Dis I do not unterstand,” muttered the Baron.

“Little rat-tailed guy about as big as a cat.” Dan drew a quick sketch on his cocktail napkin. “Good eating where I come from. Got the stomach pouch for the kits and everything.”

“I vould like to see one,” said the Baron solemnly.

Groner said quickly, “The Baron is an amateur naturalist in the true sense of the word — he is devoted to animals...”

“Animals haff naturally goot manners,” agreed the Baron. “People dogs do not trust, vor instance, are chenerally untrustvorthy. How do dogs feel about you, Herr Kearny?”

“We get along all right. A little kick here, a little—”

“Goot. A joke.” He stood up, made the slightest of bows. “Iff you vill excuse me...”

The two men stared after the Baron’s stiff retreating back. He was heavy without being fat, his erect military posture causing rolls of flesh to form above the back of his tight shirt collar. Dan turned to look at Stan unbelievingly.

“People who dogs don’t trust are untrustworthy?”

“You gotta go along with me on this, Dan! He’s a major stockholder in one of the bank’s biggest international clients. Their deposits in our Berlin affiliate would make you weep.”

“What’s this company do?”

“Consults. The Baron is here on a security consultation for an American, a real heavy hitter in financial circles in L.A., who’s worried about his private art collection in the mountains behind Big Sur. The firm was recommended to him by a man in Hong Kong; they need to liase with someone local who can keep his mouth shut.”

“We’re private eyes, Stan, not security guys.”

“But you know a lot about security systems and alarms from getting in and out of places on the sly. I’ve watched you operate, remember? And you’re smart and a quick learner.”

“I’m the only guy you could think of on short notice?”

Stan cast a quick look down the long narrow diner toward the rest rooms. “His people came to me, personally, for an expert, so I vouched for you, personally, with the bank.”

“Who pays us, and how much?”

“The client pays the Baron’s people, they pay you — lots.”

“With Cal-Cit Bank guaranteeing our payment,” said Dan.

“That goes without saying,” Stan agreed airily.

Giselle asked, “You think Dirty Harry is really dirty?”

“He sure lies a lot.” Bart Heslip was sorting through the arrest records on Giselle’s desk. “He said it was a cop friend in Vallejo who told him Ephrem was a dip at Marine World.”

“Ephrem was a dip at Marine World.”

“Marine World’s security never notified the Vallejo cops about him. They didn’t know, so how’d Harry find out? He claims he didn’t know either Ephrem or Yana personally, but...”

Giselle scaled a file folder across the desk at him.

“He arrested Ephrem twice for reading palms without a license, Yana once for illegal fortune-telling.”

Bart, scanning the records, said, “Dirty Harry never showed up to give evidence, so both cases were dismissed.”

“Small potatoes if they slipped him a few bucks for the no-show,” she said.

“Yeah, but dammit, Giselle, there’s a lot of death going around in this one all of a sudden. Two old men are dead, Ephrem Poteet is dead — Yana’s the only one left standing.”

“Except for Dirty Harry,” said Giselle. “Get down to L.A., Bart, and find out what Ephrem was doing on the day he died.”

“Damn!” Bart exclaimed. “We should have asked your buddy Sofia for a mug shot of Yana.”

“I did. She said it was really hard for her to access closed files and get the mug shots out of them to copy.”

“I bet I’m gonna wish I had one to show around,” said Bart.