Cons, Scams, and Grifts

Thirty-six

R.K. Robinson, the veins standing out at his temples and his big jaw muscles knotted, was not looking at the surprised Knottnerus-Meyer. He was glaring at Dan Kearny.

“R.K.,” said Dan affably, “long time no see.”

“Not long enough, you fuck,” snarled R.K.

The gate guard was relaxed now, the dogs along with him. The Dobermans sat on their haunches watching the proceedings with interested eyes and their tongues hanging out.

A few years back, following his stint as a Walla Walla state prison guard, R.K. had drifted south to San Francisco and Dan had hired him as a repoman with DKA. He was big enough, and tough enough, and had to have some moderately hairy balls to have been a screw at Walla Walla. But he didn’t work out. R.K. needed structure in the workplace. Rules and regulations posted on the wall, on-shift at eight, off at five, chicken on Sunday, a gun on his belt and a nightstick to slap against his palm.

A repoman out there in the field all by his lonesome had to make his own decisions. E.T. couldn’t phone home. R.K. couldn’t handle that. Kearny let him go.

R.K. belatedly turned on Knottnerus-Meyer.

“And just who the hell are you supposed to be?”

The Baron drew himself up to his full impressive height that equaled R.K.’s, monocle and sneer firmly in place.

“I am de expert brought from Chermany to examine de Xanadu security. Herr Marr hass informed you uff my coming. Vhy haff you not demanded to see my credentials?”

“I, ah, oh, er... Mr. Marr briefed me on your description.”

“How could he? Herr Marr hass not yet met me. My contact iss wit California-Citizens Bank.” He turned to snap at the guard, “You — vut are you gawking at? Return to your post. Ven your relief arrives, drife de vehicle back to de compound.” To R.K. he said, “Ve shall valk de grounds.”

The trio walked across the tightly mown lawn toward the facility. R.K. was slapping his swagger stick across the palm of his left hand with exaggerated precision, rebuilding self-esteem.

Kearny saw that the shrubbery had been planted well back from the wall, creating a six-yard-wide dead zone. He began looking for concealed sensors. Yep. He pointed out one of them as they passed beneath it. Knottnerus-Meyer followed his gaze.

“Vut iss it?”

“Infrared sensing devices in the trees with interlocking arc sweeps of the cleared areas. The sensors pick up the body heat and movement of even a squirrel and sound the alarms.”

The Baron turned to R.K. “You shall please to demonstrate de vorkings uff dese infrared sensors.”

“Yeah, sure, Baron — it’ll be my pleasure.”

R.K. spun and threw a sudden right-hand uppercut at Kearny’s jaw. Dan slipped it. The momentum of R.K.’s missed punch carried him forward. Dan stuck out a foot. R.K. tripped over it and, arms semaphoring for balance, went down face-first.

Sirens screamed. Whistles blew. There were startled shouts from inside the building.

Even before he got up, R.K. was scrabbling at his belt. He got his cell phone up to his face, shouted into it, “FALSE ALARM! FALSE ALARM! THIS IS FADED ROSE PETAL! FALSE ALARM, GODDAMMIT!”

“Faded Rose Petal?” asked Dan.

R.K. scrambled to his feet. “Fuck you, you sack of shit!”

“A most zatisfactory demonstration,” said Knottnerus-Meyer in an impeccably neutral voice. But Dan saw, or imagined he saw, a twinkle in his eye. At that moment Dan Kearny started to like the Baron. Who said, “Ve shall continue our tour.”

Larry’s phone call caught Giselle once more at Kearny’s desk. He said, “Listen, I think somebody’s sleeping in the personal property room. I was up there this morning early to get a cap and the cot was messed up. When I came back, it had been made up.”

Trin Morales, she thought. Had to be. Sacking out at DKA to avoid the pack of vengeful Latinos on his trail. She still hadn’t laid eyes on him, but she knew he was around. He was turning in field reports and had made a dandy dead-skip repo in the Castro over the weekend. But Larry didn’t need to know any of that, not the way he felt about Morales.

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” she said. “Last Friday night Rudolph spotted Yana on Polk Street!”

“Not surprising,” said Ballard. “Yana’s setting hair and painting faces on corpses at Brittingham’s Funeral Parlor in Sutter Street. I’m staked out here now to follow her home when she gets off work. I just got the lead yesterday.”

“Lead from whom?”

“Not our clients, that’s for sure. If Rudolph spotted her in Polk Street, why wasn’t the place flooded with Rom within fifteen minutes? There aren’t enough Gypsies in this thing, Giselle.”

“Maybe because they think working in a funeral parlor is not a right livelihood for a Gypsy woman?”

“We know damn well they think that. But Yana’s already marime. It’s about what they’d expect from her.” He paused. “I wonder if the rest of the Gypsies know Staley, Lulu, and Rudolph are looking for Yana?”

“You mean like perhaps what they are really after is the money and stuff Poteet hid in the light fixture?”

“Something like that. Looking for Yana on the sly. I’d sure as hell hate to turn her up for them and find out they plan to sell her to the cops for money or something.”

“They wouldn’t...” Giselle ran down. She said slowly, “They didn’t tell us about Ephrem picking pockets at Marine World, did they?”

Art Gallery A was on Xanadu’s first floor. Kearny was no connoisseur, but even from the doorway he recognized the quality of the tapestries that covered the temperature-controlled walls. Knottnerus-Meyer was staring at one depicting the Christ child in his mother’s arms, holding a chalice made of gold thread crusted with woven jewels. In the background a covey of winged angels strummed away on harps and mandolins.

“De real Flemish Mystic Vine tapestry. Priceless. Dere iss an inferior copy in vun uff de Apostolic Palaces in Rome.” The Baron checked the edges of the tapestries and around the bases of the sculptures carefully displayed on their pedestals. “Bernini’s terra-cotta Charity mit Four Children, Algardi’s Baptism uff Christ.” He turned to snap at R.K. Robinson, “Dere iss no individual security on any uff dese treasures.”

“None needed,” said R.K. with a smirk. He gestured them out, then passed his hand up and down in the open doorway. “Nothing, see?” He took his cell phone off his belt, told it, “Activate Security Circuit One for Art Gallery A.” He turned to the Baron. “Now you try it.”

Knottnerus-Meyer passed his hand up and down in the open doorway. Immediately the alarm bells sounded.

State-of-the-art, thought Kearny. Invisible light beams from sensors in the door frame, three across and two vertical. Nobody could slip through them.

Knottnerus-Meyer nodded thoughtfully. “Goot,” he said.

The works in Art Gallery B were much more ancient than in the first one. Kearny stopped, caught by a frieze of a woman’s head and a bull’s head displayed side by side.

“A double herm uff de goddess Isis unt her offspring de Apis Bull,” said the Baron. “Early Dynasty Egyptian. Unt dese...” He indicated display cases of pitchers and urns and vases with ears. “Oinochoe, olpe, krater, amphora, kylix, hydria. Greek. Classical Period. Again, priceless.”

As they started out, R.K. said, “Here’s what I didn’t show you in Art Gallery A.” He told his cell phone, “Activate Security Circuit Two for Art Gallery B,” then said to the Baron, “You got a ballpoint pen?”

The Baron removed a pen from one of the pockets of his shooting jacket. “Uff course. But vut—”

“Just toss it into the room, Baron, if you would.”

When the pen hit the floor, an alarm sounded raucously.

“Deactivate,” said R.K. to his cell phone. The alarm fell silent. He said to the Baron, “The same in every room. Pressure-sensitive floor-plates. A mouse would set ’em off.”

Knottnerus-Meyer reacted predictably.

“But vut if vermin vere to get into dis facility?”

Bart Heslip picked up a rental car at the Burbank airport, then called Giselle up in San Francisco.

“I just remembered — when Dan braced Poteet for information down here during the Cadillac caper, he was picking pockets at Universal Studios.”

“In a series of disguises,” exclaimed Giselle with sudden excitement. “A cowboy, a country singer, a southern colonel... No gorilla, but...”

It took Bart nearly an hour just to get through Universal’s maze of interlocking bureaucracies to the head of security in a third-floor office overlooking the wet and wild Jurassic Park ride. His name was Jonathan James and he was almost as black as Bart, tall and lanky and wearing horn-rims. Unlike Bruckner at Marine World, he was curt, on the edge of hostility.

“My kid has soccer practice in forty minutes,” he said.

“I’ll only take ten,” promised Bart.

James looked over Bart’s I.D. “Private eye, huh?” He gave a thin-lipped chuckle. “We’re fresh out of Maltese falcons.”

“How about a gorilla who’s also a dip?” asked Bart. “This guy always dresses up as somebody else — a cowboy in a ten-gallon hat, a sort of rockabilly character with a guitar—”

“Son of a bitch!” James came forward in his chair. “Southern colonel, too! I remember all of them! But—”

“They were all our boy,” said Bart. “And we think he’s back down here again from the Bay Area.” He figured James wouldn’t waste his time on Poteet if he knew the man was dead and no longer a threat to Universal. “You have a lot of pockets picked about a month ago?”

“Jesus, yeah, we did. But no gorilla. We thought it was an organized gang that hit us hard and then moved on. Had no idea it was just one guy.” As James worked his computer, he added, “We had a Smokey the Bear on staff, entertaining the kids in the tram lines... Hey! No employment records for Smokey...”

“That would have been him, all right,” said Bart.

James forgot all about his son’s soccer practice. He even scanned Ephrem Poteet’s picture into their security system for future reference. Bart pressed him further.

“We think he’s been living somewhere in the Silver Lake district and probably handed everything off to someone between here and there. You got any ideas?”

James drummed thoughtful fingers on his computer table.

“Some of the unmarried grips and P.A.’s like to drink at a raunchy bar called the Hurly Burly on North Whitley in Hollywood. A guy looking to score at Universal might get a lot of hot tips there just by hanging around and listening to them gossip. And the bartender looks like a Gypsy to me.” He suddenly laughed. “Yeah, I know — racial stereotyping.”

“Don’t we all?” said Bart.

He shook James’s hand and departed. Later for the Hurly Burly. First, Etty Mae Walston, Ephrem’s snoopy ex-neighbor.