Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Thirty-four

Waiting to take Midori to a late lunch in the Stonestown Mall before going to talk to Geraldine Tantillo, Larry saw a familiar face. Whit Stabler, who reminded him of his grandpa less than before because of his costly but too-youthful duds. Larry went over to shake the old gentleman’s hand.

“I’m sorry,” stammered Whit. “I don’t... do I know you?”

“No reason to remember me, sir. We met just the one time through Luminitsa.”

The rather vague blue eyes sharpened. “That Luminitsa! She’s some babe, eh? She’s real good to me.” He dug an elbow into Larry’s ribs. “Magic salt in the soup. Better’n Viagra.”

“Magic salt,” agreed Ballard. Poor old guy was losing it.

He looked around for Midori, but it was Luminitsa who came up to hook her arm possessively through Whit’s.

“What lies have you been telling my beautiful Larry?”

“He told me you were some babe,” said Ballard.

“Well, that’s no lie!” she said with a laugh so wide it showed her back teeth. She gave Whit a little tug. “Come on, you, let’s get you home for your nap.” She winked bawdily at Larry over her shoulder as they went off.

Over fresh Mex at Chevy’s, Midori said, “Luminitsa say she been taking poor Mr. Stabler to see the doctor, but she no ought to sleep with him. He pretty sick, she maybe hurt him?”

“Sick how?” asked Ballard around a big bite of burrito.

“Something called leukemia, maybe?”

“That’s sick, all right,” agreed Larry sorrowfully. He liked the old banty rooster who wasn’t giving up without a fight.

“Luminitsa say she gonna maybe have to take leave of absence to take care of him if he keep on getting worse sick.”

Geraldine Tantillo had called in sick — the first day of work she had missed since starting her job at JeanneMarie’s beauty salon. She sat in front of the window of her one-room walk-up under the eaves of this old five-story Victorian in Dolores Heights, bawling her eyes out.

Last night, as she was getting ready for the workweek, someone knocked on her door. She opened it and perfidious Ariane, beautiful of face, beautiful of hair, tall and willowy but with a luscious bosom, peach-soft skin, and lo-o-o-o-ong legs, fell into her arms.

“I’m back!” cried Ariane, covering her face with kisses.

Geraldine somehow extracted herself from the embrace, and somehow found the strength to say coolly, “Where’s my seven thousand dollars?”

Ariane collapsed loosely into Geraldine’s woven wicker chair. “It’s all gone. Every penny.” She made a wan gesture. “I barely had enough left for the flight back from Cabo.” She brightened. “But now the two of us are together again!”

“There is no ‘us,’ ” said Geraldine coldly. “I’ve rebuilt my life, I can’t let you take it away again. Just... go.”

Ariane sneered, “I will go. I always hated this place. Back in Iowa there are real people who care about a person!”

And ten minutes later she was gone — with a check for $400 to cover plane fare to Dubuque she probably would use on clothes. It cleaned out Geraldine’s account, and here she sat on the edge of her lonely bed, crying with great abandon. She knew, deep down inside, that Ariane was manipulative and destructive, but...

There was a knock on the door.

Geraldine went to the door steeling herself for another confrontation. But it was a man, big and blond and handsome. She remembered him from JeanneMarie’s salon.

“My name is Larry Ballard,” he said.

“My name is Milagrita,” said a quiet little voice at Giselle’s elbow. “The nice English girl in the front office said I should come talk to you.”

A pretty girl, eighteen or nineteen, Latina, probably Mexican. Long black gleaming hair and big eyes brimming with intelligence. A summery blouse with a ruffled neckline and a swirly skirt. Giselle reached for the application forms.

“We don’t have any openings right now, but...”

“It is nothing like that.” She sat down unbidden in the chair across the desk. She had a great deal of natural dignity. “I must find Trinidad Morales.”

The usual sad little boy-girl story? This girl somehow didn’t seem the type to get into trouble, but Giselle spoke as if she had never heard the name before.

“Trinidad Morales? I’m afraid I don’t—”

“He works here. He is a repoman. I was his driver on the night of the repossessed Acura. Some men want to kill him.”

“Kill him?”

“They are led by my brother.”

It suddenly made sense. The gang that had beaten Morales almost to death had been led by a Latino bent on vengeance for a wronged sister.

“Last Saturday night he came into the pizza place where I work. He did not know I would be there. My brother and his compadres were there and chased him, but he escaped.”

Giselle hadn’t seen Morales all day. “Are you sure?”

“Sí. They came back afterward, very angry because he got away. They do not know he works here, so you must tell him — do not go home. Be careful. They truly plan to kill him.”

Giselle leaned back in her swivel chair.

“I think you’d better tell me everything,” she said.

“I would be honored,” said Milagrita with a suddenly dazzling smile.

Afterward, Giselle pointed to the private phone on her desk, the one that didn’t go through the switchboard.

“Milagrita, you ever need me, you call this number, okay?”

They were having tea. And even in that postage stamp of an apartment, pouring from an old ceramic teapot with a tannin-browned crack running down its bulbous side, Geraldine was doing a splendid job of it. She might cry again when she was alone, Larry knew, but meanwhile she was the perfect hostess.

He began, “So you were working at a mortuary...”

“The chic San Francisco beauty salons wouldn’t hire me.” She gestured down at her ample self. “The mortuary was all I could get. I hated it, all those poor dead people...”

Ballard drank tea and ate butter cookies while she told him how she had met Yasmine Vlanko at Sappho’s Knickers — Yana, obviously, the recognizable rose by any other name. Yasmine had promised a great change in Geraldine’s life if she quit her job. She did, and lo and behold, here came the job at Jeanne-Marie’s — where Geraldine had been turned down flat the previous year.

“This Yasmine Vlanko, where might I find her?”

“I don’t know how to reach her.” She was blushing; true love was rearing its beautiful head. “Oh, how I wish I did!”

So did Ballard. Yana had wanted something this girl had, and for damn sure it wasn’t lesbian love.

Yana emerged into Sutter Street from Brittingham’s Funeral Parlor with Becky Thatcher’s long strides, and the caution made necessary by last Friday night’s glimpse of Rudolph Marino. Tonight, this very minute, he might be waiting around the corner on Polk Street. But she had a debt to pay.

She stopped at a mom-and-pop grocery store for a purchase, asking the Punjabi proprietor to open the can for her and put on it one of the pink plastic covers displayed by the cash register. In Olive Alley behind the Greek café, she removed the taffy-colored wig and put it in her bag.

“Me sem athè,” she said in low-voiced Romani. “I am here.”

The big feral tomcat leaped up lightly from a garbage pail to balance on the windowsill with his broad whiskered face a foot from Yana’s. He stared at her with his one golden eye.

“What have you to tell me?” she asked, still in Romani.

The cat seemed to purr and meow at the same time. Yana shut her eyes to let the images pass behind her lids. Yes. Somehow she knew positively that Rudolph had seen her. Then why hadn’t he... She opened her eyes. Even from here she could see a reddish brown smear on the far wall, some sprinkles on the alley floor. Dried blood. A meeting. Rudolph. The cat.

She straightened up and ran her hands through her long black hair, untangling it where it had been stuffed up under the wig. She dragged the heavy black mane across the cat’s back.

“Čin tu jid’, cin ádá bálá jidin,” she said to him. “So long live thou, long as this hair shall live.”

She removed the pink plastic top from the big can of tunafish, set it on the lid of one of the garbage pails, returned the wig to her head, and left the alley, her obligation discharged.

Larry Ballard was halfway through a light karate workout at the Ninth Avenue dojo when the answer struck him. Geraldine told him more than she realized over tea two hours earlier. He hurried through his shower, jumped into his clothes, perfunctorily bowed to his sensei, and trotted the three blocks to his car.

Yana’s meeting with Geraldine at the lesbian bar had not been just a chance encounter. She knew just what sort of mumbo-jumbo would get Geraldine to quit her job, so, after finding Geraldine a better job with JeanneMarie, Yana could take the mortuary job. A great place to hide out, disguised and under a phony name. Okay, so his logical construct only suggested that she might be working at Brittingham’s, but he was sure he was right.

Thirty seconds after Yana disappeared into Polk Street, Ballard parked in the lot for Brittingham’s Funeral Parlor on Sutter. He paid his respects to the remains of a Mrs. Henrietta Henderson, whom he had never seen before, dead or alive. Lugubrious Carter Brittingham IV was waiting to shake the mourners’ hands as they emerged from the viewing room. Larry contrived to be the last one out.

Brittingham said unctuously, “She has gone to a better place.”

Ballard nodded, a dumb show of grief, then brightened.

“Auntie Henrietta sure looks natural, doesn’t she? Whoever did her hair and makeup is a true artist. I’d really like to thank her for making Auntie look so good.”

“Our cosmetician? Sorry to say, she’s gone for the night.” Then Brittingham was moved to an incautious moment of genuine emotion. “Yes, she’s a jewel, isn’t she? A, um, er, hillbilly girl from Arkansas named Becky Thatcher...”

Ballard felt an unexpected emotional wrench. Becky Thatcher. The heroine of Tom Sawyer. When he first met Yana at her mother-in-law’s boojo room in Santa Rosa almost eight years ago, Yana was teaching herself to read. She was doing it with a dictionary and a simplified grammar-school edition of Tom Sawyer.