The Big Con Read online

  I seized on that moment to slide off my stool and quietly whispered in Rebecca’s ear to follow me. We headed for the bathroom but went right past it. We scampered through the storage room and emerged in the back parking lot.

  We hustled into my car and pulled around front. Standing under the SOHAR sign, the garish red light illuminating the top of his bald head, was the bowling ball man. He glared at me as I sped past his Cadillac and out onto the main drag and headed back toward Los Angeles.

  The rain came sideways with such ferocity that I thought the passenger window would shatter. With each gust my car seemingly lifted up on its tires, the steering wheel becoming that much easier to turn. I fought the urge to overcompensate and jerk the car back into position, a move that had sent many a vehicle down into the gulley.

  Authorities had to be near the point of closing the pass, but we continued on. We rode up on another pod of blue whales, their red taillights looming ahead. I caught Rebecca settling further into her seat, as if slightly lower in the vehicle was a safer place to be. While the wind gusts sent my sensible sedan off course a mere inch or two, they grabbed the broad sides of the trucks and rocked them back and forth.

  Blue lights flashed in my mirror, and instinct led me to tap the brakes first. My heart sank at the prospect of a forced wait in traffic that could very well extend long into the night. I saw visions of a dank motel and separate beds and a sick woman far away from her next treatment. My foot pressed on the accelerator.

  Glancing in the rearview mirror, I saw the comforting visual of two police cars slaloming up the hill at an ever-decreasing pace. The intended effect was a growing mass of car and truck headlights piling up behind them. The pass was officially closed, and we had made it through.

  Nearing the crest, my windshield wipers stuttered over icy buildup on the glass.

  “It’s snowing,” Rebecca whispered.

  The large, wet flakes got caught up briefly in my headlights before melting into the black mass of the asphalt. My foot slowly depressed the accelerator and we gained ground on the semis. Passing the first one, I glanced over at Rebecca but got no indication that she wanted me to slow down.

  The pull of wanting to be home tugged at both of us. It guided us up and over the crest and drew us down into the Valley and all the way back to Eagle Rock, where a rain-glistened sedan with two Palos Verdes detectives inside sat waiting for us with the news that Julie St. Jean was dead.

  GARDENIAS

  Rebecca watched the footage on one of the detective’s phones. To anyone passing by, it would have looked like a couple of chums killing time with mindless kitten videos. But this video was shot on a closed-circuit camera on a bridge over the Long Beach shipyard. In the early morning fog, a lone figure in a black coat walked up the incline toward the bridge’s broad humpback. There the figure disappeared in the mist.

  “Footage from the other end doesn’t have anyone coming back,” the detective added.

  Rebecca showed no reaction to either the video or the detective’s comment. I took my cue from the two men, who respectfully looked down or turned away altogether to give her the space to absorb the news in solitude. Glancing around the room, my mind drifted to mundane thoughts of distraction—the ash in the fireplace needed to be swept out, and the place overall was due for some tidying as it had gotten unusually cluttered, with drawers open and books off the shelf.

  “It could be anyone,” Rebecca finally spoke.

  One of the detectives sat up quickly to refute her claim but the younger one showed more maturity and secretly signaled to hold back.

  “Naturally, it could be anyone,” he began, but clearly didn’t believe his own words. “We’ll begin searching the harbor in the morning once we have daylight.”

  It sounded like there was more to be said.

  “But?” I prodded.

  “We have a strong inclination to believe it was Ms. St. Jean,” he explained, even though there was no body to substantiate his statement. His partner grew impatient.

  “We have visual evidence that it was her,” he blurted.

  After shooting his colleague a cold glare, the detective tapped his phone and presented Rebecca with a grainy photo of an older woman in a black coat. She looked straight up into the camera as if aware of its presence tucked under one of the girders.

  “This was taken at the start of the bridge,” he said.

  “An eyewitness also confirmed he saw Ms. St. Jean walking on the bridge,” his partner added.

  “Who was it?” I asked, but was unprepared for the quick response.

  “What do you need that information for?” the impatient detective asked. He wasn’t about to let my dumb questions prolong an unwanted visit to the other side of town in the middle of the night.

  “It would be helpful to know,” was all I could muster for a response.

  “We don’t need his name,” said Rebecca, saving me from further embarrassment. “It’s her.”

  The room fell silent.

  Somewhat to my surprise, Rebecca divulged a few of the details that she had previously withheld from the police, particularly the affair between Lois and Julie and the potential blackmailing scheme that arose from it. Even the impatient detective with one eye on the door settled in for this portion and took out his notebook to capture the new information. They looked pleased to finally have a narrative, made up or otherwise, that drove the facts around the murder and suicide. Working to fill in several gaps in the story, they asked questions about Julie’s proclivity for violence. They were trying to determine if Lois’s murder was planned or an act by a desperate person.

  “She was never violent with me,” Rebecca replied, an answer that divulged nothing on the surface but kept the door open for anyone wanting to believe otherwise.

  As the detectives continued to probe, I watched Rebecca with an observer’s distance and tried to make sense of what she was doing. Previously, she hadn’t portrayed the potential blackmailing scheme as anything so dire as to warrant committing murder. According to Rebecca, Julie placed her dalliances and the complications arising from them somewhere on the level of forgetting a wedding anniversary. But the way Rebecca now conveyed it to the detectives elevated it much further on the severity scale. She wanted them to believe that Julie murdered Lois and then took her own life because of it. I followed what she was doing but couldn’t figure out why.

  The detectives had only five distinct questions in them but they asked twenty-five variations of each. Some would say it was deliberate in order to bring to the surface any inconsistencies in her answers. Others would say it was simply out of incompetence. Either way a ten-minute interview took two hours. Rebecca was a willing participant, but I wasn’t. My eyes grew heavier with each repeated question-and-answer until I finally succumbed and fell asleep.

  “We’ll be in touch, ma’am,” said a voice, rousing me from my nap. I rose with them and walked the detectives to the door. There were more pleasantries as the cold night air brought some clarity back to my head. The young detective was almost halfway down the walk when I called him back.

  “Detective,” I said, then lowered my voice. “You’re going to search for the body tomorrow?”

  “As soon as there’s daylight,” he replied, but picked up on the unstated question and continued. “There’s a lot of ship traffic under that bridge,” he intoned. That simple statement spared me the grim details of what likely happened to the body but also told me that the likelihood of finding it was slim to none. “I’m sorry,” he added.

  Rebecca was already heading to bed by the time I went back in the house.

  “You were pretty chatty,” I scolded.

  “They’re looking for answers, just like us.”

  “You gave them misleading ones.”

  “You went along with it.”

  “While I was awake.”

  “We both know Julie’s not dead.”

  I certainly had my doubts. These were borne mainly out of the events rela
yed to us by the detectives but also out of what I knew about Julie. Over the years, I’d seen her backed into a corner when it looked like our firm was finally going to move in a new direction with employee engagement. She never panicked. She quietly and confidently prepared for a fight that she always won.

  I grew to fear her at those times.

  “It’s unlikely they’ll find her body,” I said.

  “More than unlikely,” Rebecca corrected. “She was here tonight.”

  “How do you know?”

  Rebecca gave a wistful half-smile.

  “I can still smell her perfume.”

  Julie’s lingering presence lifted Rebecca’s spirits, but it lowered mine. The hope of a simple resolution grew dimmer with each development. If Rebecca was right, Julie had staged her suicide—which meant she never wanted to be found. And now there was a new wrinkle: As I studied the untidiness of the room, I realized that Julie had been looking for something.

  What that was I didn’t know.

  A BREAK FROM THE MUNDANE

  Fifteen seconds into the phone call to Phoenix, it was readily apparent that Detective Richard Fortin had a personality fitting for the common nickname of his given one.

  “Who?” He made me repeat my name for the third time, at which point he added, “Never heard of you.”

  “I know, sir,” I explained, “we’ve never met before.”

  “Then why are you calling me?”

  He overlooked the fact that technically he had called me, or in any case had returned the message I’d left on his answering machine.

  “What’s this about again?” he peppered.

  The retired detective interrupted my attempts to explain why I was reaching out to him with more questions, which he rattled off with barely any time in between for replies. As I struggled to get a word in, I got the sense that he found this act quite entertaining. I conjured up the image of an old man, some seventeen years off the force, utterly bored with retirement and oddly grateful to have this little one-sided sparring session with a stranger on the phone. Perhaps it reminded him of the good old days, when he could talk over anyone he damn well pleased in an interrogation room. I didn’t want to begrudge him a respite from the drudgery of retirement, but I also didn’t want to be a pushover and be bullied.

  “Hello?” he asked into the phone after I stopped responding. “You still there?”

  I smiled to myself for having read him correctly and because of how quickly his tune changed. There was a little fear in his voice that this pest on the phone might buzz off and actually leave him alone.

  I let that fear hang in the air for a few seconds longer.

  “I’m here,” I replied.

  “Oh, I thought you’d hung up.”

  I gave him a little more silence just so he didn’t think he could launch into another one of his bullying rants.

  “What do you need from me, Mr. Restic?” he finally asked, sounding compliant enough to remember my name and in a tone that felt genuine. It was time to get straight to the purpose of my call. I dropped a few names Badger had supplied me with; this seemed to work because the detective immediately relaxed on the phone. I then asked about Margaret Fitch.

  “Maggie?” he confirmed. “She was a part-time prostitute and a full-time drug addict. Lost her teeth at twenty-five and what little beauty she had long before that.” It sounded all too similar to her loser brother in Bakersfield. “She was one of our regulars. I knew her before I made detective. Every time you pick them up,” he reminisced, “you give them the same old song-and-dance about cleaning up, getting back on track. She wasn’t a bad girl inside. You warn them that they have to change their ways or else. Else what?” he asked rhetorically, perhaps even recalling the response he got from Maggie every time he uttered the warning at two in the morning. “You think there’s no way the human body can keep taking that kind of abuse, that it’s only a matter of time before we find them dead somewhere, but goddamn if they don’t just keep showing up year after year!”

  The detective gave a half-wheeze, half-laugh. It took him a moment to collect himself.

  “We crossed paths again years later when I made detective,” he remembered. “I was working narcotics. Picked her up on a felony possession charge.” Detective Fortin recalled the arrest with remarkable accuracy. I knew this because I had a copy of the arrest report in front of me, courtesy of Badger. How he secured this sort of documentation was a question I left unasked. It seemed the prudent path.

  “Enough for intent to distribute,” he continued. “This was back in the War on Drugs days when it wasn’t a good time to be getting caught.” Detective Fortin reflected on a detail that had piqued my interest when reading the report. “I’ll admit, the size of the score was a little strange for Maggie, but you sort of learn never to question what an addict can do. For all I know she stole it from someone.”

  The old detective finally grew tired of answering so many questions and thought he’d reverse roles for a minute or two.

  “Why the interest in Maggie after all these years?”

  I explained how her brother Jimmy had recently been murdered in Sierra Madre, likely because of his connection to a blackmailing scheme.

  “Never earned an honest dollar in his life,” the detective commented.

  “Did you know him well?” I asked.

  “Not really. He was a punk kid who grew up into a punk adult and then left Phoenix. You say he lived in Bakersfield?”

  “Yes.”

  “Their loss, our gain” was his summation of Fitch’s impact on the world.

  “His friends said he came into some money recently.”

  “He had friends?”

  I explained that Fitch talked a big game about coming into a hefty amount of money. Some of his friends believed him, most didn’t. But they all heard how bitter he was—there should have been more. “People seem to think he got it from his sister.”

  There was a long pause. It was now my turn to check in on the voice at the other end.

  “I’m here,” the detective answered.

  I allowed myself to get excited as this development had gotten the wheels spinning in the old cop’s head. I queued up several questions about the Fitch siblings and then several more that would probe their relationship with Julie St. Jean. Perhaps this was the thread I had been searching for that linked all these seemingly disparate characters.

  “What do you think of that claim?” I asked.

  “Sounds like the rants of a good-for-nothing who’s convinced himself the world’s at fault for all of his failures.” After a short pause, he added sadly, “Sorry, didn’t mean to be so coldhearted. I’ve just heard that pitch too many times.”

  “So there’s no chance Maggie came into some money?” I asked.

  “Let’s put it this way,” the detective answered with conviction, “if Maggie had any money there was only one place it went.”

  “I see,” I responded, as only a non-addict can in areas they know nothing about. I had one more question but it was more out of an impulse for tidying up than any real need for information. “What about the claim that his sister was murdered?”

  “Could have been.”

  “But?”

  “But we’ll never know. She never appeared for her court date.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Detective Fortin said she was held in custody for a few days and eventually was let out on bail. No one ever saw her again. He figured she was dead.

  “I always felt like there was something more to that case,” he said, but then quickly doused whatever spark flared deep down in his investigative soul. “Was she murdered?” he asked for me. “Who knows.”

  Out of respect for the deceased, he left off the last part:

  “Who cares?”

  Our phone call was coming to an end, although it had really ended long before the official conclusion. When I’d gotten Detective Fortin’s name from Badger, I’d hoped the past in Arizona would
provide the details I needed to make sense of what was happening today in Los Angeles.

  “Does the name Julie St. Jean mean anything to you?”

  “Who?” he answered, snuffing out what little hope of a connection I had left.

  I should have hung up fifteen minutes earlier but felt oddly guilty at denying the old detective a break from his day to reminisce about a time when his life was a little more eventful. I lit the spark but then had to extinguish it.

  “I don’t want to take up more of your time,” I told him as a way to disengage, but then wished I had chosen different words because I knew the response that was coming.

  “Hell, I got nothing but time.”

  A SHARED DISLIKE

  I spent the afternoon in yet another review of the dismal employee engagement survey. It was as if management couldn’t accept the results and thought further review of them would somehow change the numbers. For this round they included some of the actual people quoted in the survey. The parade of low-level associates misinterpreted the invitation as a legitimate call for their opinions.

  One young woman was particularly passionate while explaining how the organization didn’t take her development seriously. She described how important it was to marry her personal development—“two-thirds of the way back to my pre-baby weight”—with her professional one. The poor thing’s voice cracked and her neck grew splotchy as she expressed how “abandoned” she felt. There was a lot of head-nodding in the room but disappointment was clear on the faces of the committee members. They weren’t getting what they wanted: a convenient justification on which they could pin the low scores.

  After work, I decided to waste an extra fifteen minutes in standstill traffic with a detour to Burbank. I had placed several calls to Hearns and never heard back, so I hoped to catch him in his garage. The stash of money in his freezer and the rendezvous with Fitch in Bakersfield told me he wasn’t exactly being truthful and I needed to figure out why.