The Big Con Read online

  The city had been granted a one-day respite from the El Niño rains, and for the first time in a long while the stars and moon shone in the night sky. I gave myself an hour and spent nearly all of it waiting outside the house. The few headlights that came down the street were either residents or folks zigzagging their way across the Valley to avoid the freeway. But one set of lights caught my attention. It appeared at the end of the street and slowed as it neared the house. Unless Lois’s ex-husband had traded in his pickup for a trendy, electric-cell vehicle, I was out of luck. The car purred to a near-silent crawl as it glided by where I was parked on the opposite side of the road. The driver had his head turned toward the house, so I couldn’t get a good look, but the Hearns house was clearly of great interest to him.

  I watched the taillights gain some distance as the car continued down the street, but then the brake lights went on as the driver slowed and turned the vehicle around to head back toward me. I ducked to get out of the glare of the oncoming headlights, but it turned out I didn’t need to because the driver switched them off long before arriving at the house. The vehicle nestled into an empty spot some thirty yards down the road and sat there for a few minutes.

  I didn’t have to get out to investigate because I was pretty certain I knew who was behind the wheel. My suspicion was confirmed some ten minutes later when the person got out and skulked in the dark under the ficus canopy. A slim shaft of moonlight briefly illuminated his face.

  Bronson Thibideux headed for the garage and then the walkway leading up to the front door. But then he surprised me and instead turned to the side of the house and disappeared into the darkness behind it.

  I watched the front windows of the house but saw no sign of any movement inside. After ten minutes of waiting in the car, to the point where the condensation obscured most of my view, I got out to investigate.

  I worked my way around the side of the house opposite from the way Bronson had gone, but kept as close to the structure as possible. It wasn’t exactly a burglar’s delight the way the moon lit up the yard. I stayed in the overhang’s shadow and passed three closed windows before coming to one left ajar. Half of the curtain hung outside and was darkening on the damp sill. Through the slat I watched a faint penlight dance around the room.

  Bronson moved from one of the back bedrooms to the next one, which served as a mini-office. I followed along outside the house. From the corner of the window I watched him alight on the accordion file folder that Hearns used to store all of his documents. Bronson riffled through the various compartments until his fingers stopped their dancing and pulled out a thick document, which he studied in the light. He apparently had found what he came for because he shoved the document inside his coat and made his way back through the house and straight out the main door.

  I waited five minutes before returning to my car because I wanted to make sure he was gone. Looping around the garage, I passed by the same window where I’d spied Hearns shove a large sheaf of bills into his pants pocket. The door to the freezer where the money was stored caught the moon’s steely half-light and glowed like a white beacon. I paused. It only caught the moonlight because it had been left open. I peered into the window and caught something else out of place in the immaculate garage.

  Something large and shapeless lay crumpled on the cement floor. I couldn’t see the ponytail but I knew who it was.

  I ran toward the front of the garage and tugged at the rolling door. It rattled open. I searched for the string serving as a light switch. A fluorescent light flickered on and revealed a grim sight.

  Hearns had clearly been worked over. His arm was bent at an unnatural angle and looked broken. I was certain he was dead, but the garish light seemed to jolt him out of his stupor. His eyes fluttered open and he attempted to move his broken arm to cover them but then thought otherwise.

  I quickly dialed 911 and gave them the relevant information.

  Hearns didn’t seem to to recognize me. If anything, he looked a little fearful.

  “It’s okay,” I told him, after hanging up the phone. “You remember me, right?”

  He looked far worse awake than when I’d feared him dead.

  “Remember we talked the other day?” I coaxed.

  He shut his eyes and parted his lips at the same time, but had only enough energy for one movement. His teeth were covered in a pink gouache and a deeper red at the gum line where the blood was thicker.

  “Dirty cops,” he groaned.

  “That’s right.” I smiled, recalling our mutual hatred for all things law enforcement. “Dirty cops. Who did this to you?”

  Despite my repeatedly asking him for a name, he said nothing more. He apparently had enough energy for just those two words. His chest swelled with long, slow breaths. I heard sirens in the distance and knew I had to act.

  “Hang in there,” I told him and ran back around into the house. I rushed to the room where Bronson had left the accordion file and thumbed through the slots. The sirens grew steadily louder. I needed to hurry up.

  I ran through phone bills, electric bills, cable bills, and then finally came upon bank statements. The sirens were deafening, which meant they were on the street. There wasn’t enough time to run back to my car, so I grabbed a handful of the most recent statements and stuffed them into my sock. I ran back to the front door and closed it behind me just as the first police cruiser pulled up.

  The officer who appeared first was justifiably suspicious and focused all his attention on me, barely acknowledging that a man was in critical condition on the floor of a garage a few feet away. The officer pointed out the victim to the arriving paramedics but continued to pepper me with questions.

  I made up a story about dropping in on Hearns to deliver my condolences for the death of his wife, but kept getting distracted by the weight in the sock under my pant leg. The bank statements were slipping. I manically adjusted my stance to keep them from falling out. It didn’t go unnoticed.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “What? Yeah, I’m fine. It was just such a surprise seeing him like that,” I said, trying to deflect.

  “No, you’re moving around a lot,” he said. “You been drinking?”

  “Me?”

  He waited for my response.

  “No, I worked today. I haven’t been drinking.”

  It didn’t look like he believed me. I needed to get his attention off of me.

  “You know,” I started, “there was one thing that seemed a bit off. Probably nothing but you never know.”

  He waited impatiently for me to tell him.

  “There was a suspicious-looking man here when I drove up.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yeah, he was in one of those fancy electric cars. Kind of hanging around the house when I got here. Didn’t think anything of it at the time but I took down his license plate if you want it.…”

  THE WEIGHT OF WISDOM

  I made the trek up to Pat Faber’s floor and swung by the break room for my morning coffee, planning to hang out there until I “bumped” into him coming in for the day. These casual encounters were the key to managing my personal brand, and since I was awake at this ungodly hour I might as well get credit for it.

  Rebecca and I had spent the night processing the latest developments. Arizona and Fitch’s “murdered” sister were dead ends, but Lois and the blackmail scheme were alive and well. What we couldn’t figure out was over what. Sitting in front of the fire, I stared into the flames as if the answer lay somewhere in the hot coals. And when it didn’t appear, I added more logs until we both had to push our chairs back from the excessive heat emanating from the hearth.

  “That’s it for me,” Rebecca whispered. She got up and padded off to bed. “You’re not going to figure it out tonight,” she admonished. “Get some rest yourself.”

  I didn’t heed her advice and spent the next couple of hours staring blankly into the fire, thinking about the woman down the hall. We had never openly ack
nowledged Rebecca staying at my place as a longer-term solution, but it was becoming just that. It was simply easier to have her nearby as we worked on unraveling the mess of Julie’s disappearance. The other reason never openly addressed was that I truthfully didn’t want her stay to end.

  I was afraid that once Rebecca returned to her life—either in the downtown hotel or across the city in Palos Verdes—our relationship would return to its previous state: that of two people who spent many hours together at work but for all intents and purposes were strangers. Rebecca and I had gotten into a nice routine around her treatments and the difficult hours after they were over. She never verbalized it, but I could tell how much she appreciated what I was doing for her. And I never told her just how good it felt to be needed. The fear underlying all of it, however, was a growing recognition that I couldn’t help with either of her problems.

  “First cup?” a smiling Pat Faber said to me, as I filled one of the communal mugs with coffee.

  With a stiff neck from having fallen asleep in the rocking chair, I had to turn my entire body to address him. But before I could answer, Pat surveyed the scene and answered his own question for me with a disappointed nod.

  “I just finished my breakfast,” he felt the need to add, and put his dirty bowl in the sink for someone else to load in the dishwasher. To Pat, work was about proving you did more than others. The fact that he had already had multiple cups of coffee and a bowl of instant oatmeal before my first mug confirmed his position as chief rock-buster on the chain gang.

  “I usually skip breakfast,” I countered pathetically. “So many meetings I often forget to eat!”

  It was a poor attempt at waving the “busy” moniker. Pat barely acknowledged it.

  “Where are we with P of O?”

  I knew he was referring to Julie’s outfit but I pretended to have to think about it for a moment. His unnecessary use of the acronym was a signal of strength that I needed to challenge by downplaying its significance.

  “P of O…” I repeated, waiting for him to spell it out for me.

  He didn’t oblige. The awkward silence started to reflect poorly on me, so I had to fill it.

  “Power of One!” I finally caught it. “Thought you were referring to one of the other really big initiatives we got going on,” I proffered as an excuse. “Yup, all good with them. Moving along, meeting the milestones, tracking well on the deliverables timeline.…”

  Pat didn’t have to say anything—I could hear the skepticism in his silent glare.

  I very quickly began to regret coming in early because I was wholly unprepared for a discussion with Pat on this topic. The last time we’d spoken I’d let him think we were moving forward with Power of One, knowing full well that I would get them to quit long before they ever ruined me with another display of inanity. But here I was in a position in which I had to actually defend them. The perversity of the corporate world was on full display—my survival was tied to making another man’s idea a success, and the person hammering me was the very buffoon who had the idea in the first place.

  I allowed all my frustrations to take over the moment. I was annoyed at being outplayed by this fool and at the growing reality that I couldn’t help a woman who really needed it. And those frustrations manifested themselves in my making bold statements that I knew I couldn’t deliver.

  “Hey, P-a-t,” I began, overly enunciating every letter in his name. I can’t be sure but I believe I even jammed a two-fingered point into his bony chest. “Make no mistake. You—will be—blown A-W-A-Y.”

  “I love the passion,” he commended. “Make sure you deliver.”

  I spent the next two hours shaking my head in disgust while staring at a blank screen in the quiet of my office. My assistant checked up on me after I skipped two straight meetings.

  “Are you not feeling well?” she asked. “I heard you moaning.”

  Her voice brought me out of a stupor.

  “I’ll be fine,” I told her, but didn’t really believe it. There was so little to be sanguine about when assessing the various outcomes to the entire affair. Julie was either dead or a crook or both. Without Julie, there was no consultant business. That left Rebecca on her own, sick, and woefully in debt, and it left me having to justify my highly visible promotion of such a claptrap outfit.

  “I’ll be fine,” I repeated, but this time I had to believe it.

  There was no other choice. The last thing Rebecca needed was a full severance of her only revenue stream. I decided I needed to save the contract for her. And to do that, I needed to actually deliver on the impossible—I needed to present Julie’s nonsense and make it zing.

  “Please cancel the rest of my meetings today,” I told my assistant. “There’s something I need to work on.”

  I went down into the bowels of the building to get the Power of One binders out of the trunk of my car. Hefting the first box out nearly pulled my feet out of my shoes. I decided not to risk a back injury and lightened the load. Taking out the first few rows of binders from the box revealed why it was so heavy.

  The bottom was lined with neatly stacked packs of hundred-dollar bills. The blue lettering that banded the packs screamed in the trunk light that each was worth ten grand.

  “Two-point-six million,” I said.

  Rebecca stared wistfully at the stacks of money. Badger grunted somewhere deep in his throat and then for some inexplicable reason felt the need to cup his balls in his palm. He caught our glances and quickly removed his hand.

  “Are you sure you’re okay keeping the money here?” Rebecca asked him.

  Badger nodded solemnly.

  “You think it will be safe?” I asked, already beginning to doubt the decision to bring the money to Badger’s. The back room of his office in Echo Park also served as his residence. It was a depressing space with no natural light and a mustiness that caught me in the back of the throat. I saw his suit hanging on a pipe next to a makeshift shower and understood the ever-present smell of mold whenever he wore it.

  “It is in my care,” he said, and bowed like some ancient warrior. “No harm will come to it.”

  “All this old-speak is actually making me more nervous than anything,” I told him.

  “Don’t worry,” he reassured me, “no one is breaking in here.”

  Unless there was a rash of refried-bean-can robberies in the neighborhood, I didn’t see why anyone would. That was partly the reason for selecting Badger’s “home” as the place to hide the money. No one would think to look for it here. Also, despite my misgivings about his lustful interest in the money, he was the only person I really trusted.

  I figured the money had to have been placed in the box by Julie, but there was a minute when I doubted even that. Although Rebecca and I had achieved a level of familiarity, there was still a distance between us that I felt I might never close. But, I reasoned, if Rebecca had known about the money, she certainly wouldn’t have let me drive all over town with it in the back of my trunk. And after the discussion we’d had about finances, I can’t imagine her tone would have been as dire if she had a spare couple of million in cash lying around.

  “Could this be from the sale of your company?” Badger asked, which was greeted with a quick laugh from Rebecca.

  Rebecca explained that Power of One’s intellectual property might be worth a little, the name itself a little more. But the only real “value” in the company was Julie herself.

  Once again I marveled at how nothingness could be worth so much.

  “The money had to come from somewhere,” I said. “Could Julie have been skimming?”

  “Julie did all of her reckless spending in plain sight,” Rebecca replied. “There was no concealing that part of her life.”

  I began to wonder if Julie was involved in something that plumbed a lot deeper than I first suspected. Lois’s murder and the secret stash of cash in her ex-husband’s freezer, the Bakersfield rendezvous with Fitch, the long-forgotten tragedy of an addict sibling who
disappeared from sight after her arrest, and the sudden reappearance of the bowling ball man all pointed to something that happened three decades in the past, one state over.

  “It has to be Fitch’s sister,” Badger surmised. “Some connection to that dope arrest.”

  Rebecca and I bandied a few jokes about Julie as a drug kingpin. Of the three, we were the only two who found it amusing.

  “Badger’s got a feeling about this one,” he intoned.

  “Badger doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” I mocked. “I agree there’s some connection—but Julie St. Jean dealing drugs? You forget she was living a quiet librarian’s life in Sierra Madre in the early 1980s. You really think she’s running drugs on the side?”

  “Listen, hondo,” he shot back, “explain why a junkie is holding that much product.”

  Badger referenced a detail that I remembered from my discussion with Detective Fortin. The felony charge indicated an intent to distribute a very large amount of drugs.

  “It couldn’t have belonged to the sister,” Badger explained. “It had to be someone else’s. Also, think about it a minute. How does someone like Maggie Fitch, who was living under an overpass at the time of her arrest, come up with the money to post bond on a felony drug charge? Only rich people can play that game.”

  Rebecca shot me a look. He was winning her over. And if I was being honest, the same was happening with me.

  “And after all these years Fitch finally decides it’s time to declare his sister legally dead?” Badger continued. “At the same time that he gets wrapped up in this affair? Don’t tell me they aren’t connected.”

  Something then caught my eye that confirmed Badger’s theory.

  I grabbed a stack of bills and thumbed through them. I did the same for the next stack and then a few more just to be sure. They all had the old design with the small portrait of Ben Franklin. And every bill belonged to a series no later than 1984.

  “Old money,” Badger said with a smile.

  ROOMMATES