The Big Con Read online

  “We pull them up from the garage.”

  “If I gave you a description of a guest would you be able to get the car she used?” I asked.

  “If it’s still here,” he said.

  I described Julie St. Jean to him but didn’t get past the words “woman with white hair.”

  “Talks like a man?” he asked. “Yeah, I remember her. Nice lady,” which meant she had tipped him well. “She took the Lincoln.”

  “Was she with anyone?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “How long did she have the car?”

  “I never saw her come back but the office in the garage would know.”

  “Or you could get that information for me,” I suggested, and made a move for my wallet. The punk waited for me to actually get it out and start thumbing through the larger bills before he replied.

  “Happy to be of service,” he said, smiling.

  “Do you use this bank?” I asked Rebecca.

  We delayed checking her in to another hotel until we followed up on the leads from the navigation system in the hotel courtesy car. I was able to narrow down the timeframe when Julie had used the vehicle so that Rebecca and I could retrace her steps on Saturday afternoon in the hopes that a narrative would emerge. One did, but it wasn’t exactly a welcome one.

  The trail began at a chain drugstore in Highland Park and then led to the mall in Glendale. After that it was a sporting goods store just north on Pacific. The following entry brought us across the 134 to an address on Lake Avenue in Pasadena. It housed an old bank with a name that recalled the agrarian times of its founding. The only thing “agricultural” remaining in Pasadena these days were the pots of organic basil growing on condominium balconies.

  Rebecca shook her head as we idled in the red zone across the street from the bank.

  “I’ve never used it.”

  A clear but disheartening picture of the hours after Lois was murdered was forming—it was of someone preparing to go on the run. The next stop put to rest any doubts I might have had of that fact.

  The address led us to a large shopping center in El Monte, just off the 10 Freeway. It was anchored by a car dealership and ringed by auto accessory parts stores and cut-rate insurance outfits. We stared at the rows of new and “like new” cars on display and the markdown prices screaming in fluorescent green numbers across their windshields.

  “Maybe they’ll tell us what kind of car she bought,” Rebecca suggested, pointing at the small collection of cheap suits huddling under large golf umbrellas. The pack had already picked up our scent and was starting to disperse.

  Rebecca had apparently come to the same conclusion as I had about Julie going on the lam.

  “They might not give us information on a customer,” I said, watching the chubby alpha male make a beeline for our car.

  “We could bribe them,” said Rebecca.

  “Have to figure out which is the crooked one.”

  I watched the approaching man lean over to give a peekaboo smile. He looked at us like wounded prey that he couldn’t wait to get to overpay on a vehicle with a dirty title. Naturally, that car would be pitched as having had a single, elderly owner who kept it in a covered garage and only took it out for weekly bingo nights.

  “Easier to pick out the honest one,” Rebecca reasoned, and got out to greet the man. She cut right to the chase. I watched her describe Julie with an outstretched hand denoting her height and a sweep of the hair describing her white mane. The man nodded and disappeared inside. He returned fifteen minutes later with a slip of paper, which was exchanged for some agreed-upon amount of money.

  “A 2001 tan Saturn,” Rebecca told me.

  This was the side of Rebecca I knew best. It was the only side I knew, really. While Julie St. Jean was the face of, and brains behind, Power of One, Rebecca made sure it all ran well. For that she was given the thankless label of “the person who gets stuff done.”

  In a lot of ways this arrangement was no different than the one I endured at work. The common complaint among the “idea guys” in upper management was that they needed more time to strategize, but they were constantly being dragged into too much execution. The worst label anyone could levy on another leader was to refer to them as “tactical.”

  I deeply resented this view. As someone who’d made a career with the proverbial shovel digging the proverbial ditch—albeit our ditch was in a climate-controlled skyscraper and didn’t involve any real physical labor—I vowed that should I ever get to their level, I would do things differently. Recently granted a new role in upper management, I proceeded to do no such thing.

  Strategizing was just too damn easy.

  But I still felt guilty. And because of that I found myself overextending my role when I offered to knock on the door of the final address on the list from the navigation system. The house was on a flat, unkempt street in Baldwin Park. The rains had brought lush patches of weeds to its otherwise barren front yard and washed away a year’s worth of dust from the once-white stucco walls.

  I was starting to regret my offer to take the lead. This wasn’t the best of neighborhoods and the house itself was less than inviting. Near the door was a large sign that informed trespassers they weren’t wanted. And if that warning wasn’t heeded, there was another sign featuring a German shepherd who didn’t look the friendly type. A third sign lay against the railing and appeared to advertise a for-sale-by-owner vehicle.

  I skirted several puddles on my way to the entrance. Faced with a larger puddle, I secretly wished I hadn’t worn my nice shoes. I attempted a casual hop but came up a half-foot short and a splash of muddy water soaked my pant bottoms.

  “Damn it,” I muttered, wiping at some of the large spots with my hand. When I finally looked up I was greeted with a blank stare from a rail-thin Latino with a shaved head. He stood under the overhang of the roof and the rain had drawn a dark line a few inches from where his bare feet stood on a dry step. He carried a baby in his arms. He or she lay limply against the man, lost in a deep sleep. The few drops of rain that caught the pudgy bare leg didn’t seem to bother either of them. For some reason, the man was more threatening holding a newborn than he would have been holding a weapon.

  “I’m looking for someone. Older lady with white hair, talks like a man. About this high,” I said, and gestured up to a midpoint on my chest. “I think she might have visited you on Saturday.” And just for the hell of it, I added, “She’s wanted in connection with a murder.”

  Of all the responses he could have made, this one surprised me.

  “That abuelita couldn’t kill no one,” he said dismissively.

  “So you know her?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t say I know her, but I talked to her,” he explained.

  The man suddenly got very chatty. He told me how he’d run a classified ad for a portable grill that Julie was apparently interested in. He described the exchange, but there weren’t any details of much significance, except that he did drop repeated bits about the long drive to Reno she was apparently planning.

  “She mentioned needing chains on her car tires or something,” he said. “I’m from LA, man. I don’t know shit about the snow.”

  I began to feel bad for the baby, whose legs were turning a splotchy crimson in the cold air. I interrupted the man and thanked him for his time.

  Back in the car, I turned the heat up. My clothes were now wet from standing in the drizzle. I cupped both hands over one of the vents.

  “Well?” Rebecca asked.

  “Well, we know what kind of car she’s really driving,” I said, pointing to the for-sale sign. “A 2003 silver Nissan Sentra. And we know the one place she isn’t heading for is Reno, Nevada.”

  Julie would have known that buying a car from a dealer, even a disreputable one like the lot we visited earlier, would have required certain documents that she couldn’t afford to produce if she wanted to keep her movements secret. A private purchase made much more sense. I reasoned th
at she met the man at a public place and the dealer parking lot right off the freeway made a likely spot.

  “Then what’s this the guy gave me?” Rebecca asked, holding up the slip of paper from the used-car salesman.

  “He made a quick hundred off of you,” I told her.

  “It was only fifty,” she said, but still looked disappointed.

  The transaction between Julie and the vehicle’s owner probably happened right there in the lot. And given the nature of the transaction, it should have ended there. But according to the time on the courtesy car’s navigation, she went to the seller’s home address two hours later. I had an idea what that could mean but didn’t share it with Rebecca.

  My suspicion was that there were two transactions that day—one for the car and one for something else that required a little time to get. That chatty seller with the obvious attempts to throw me off Julie’s scent convinced me that whatever she bought wasn’t legal and didn’t require an ID and a three-day background check to purchase.

  CADILLACS

  We drove north on the 605 toward the foothills which were shrouded in rain clouds. The road technically ran right through the San Gabriel River, but after decades of engineering marvels, the river had been transformed into a series of dams, watersheds, and reservoirs that channeled the rain off the mountains and ran it all the way to the ocean. Normally bone dry, the sun-bleached boulders were buried beneath gray water, and the sluices that I once thought were permanently rusted shut were now open to relieve the pressure building behind them.

  Our last stop that day didn’t come from the list of addresses on the navigation system. Earlier that morning, I’d logged into my firm’s digital document center and pulled up any and everything we had on Julie St. Jean. For once, my firm’s hyperparanoia of being sued actually came in handy.

  Manic documentation of everything we ever did was a hallmark of the company. We once had an entire floor dedicated to file storage, but when the cost became unmanageable, we went through the arduous task of digitizing every sheet of paper once stored there. Now I had every document at my fingertips with a quick search in the database.

  I started with thirty years of invoices paid out to Power of One. This caused me to waste twenty minutes calculating and then resenting the annualized gross income made off the back of my firm. I stopped counting when it reached the eight-figure mark. That was an impressive amount to fritter away, if my assumptions about their financial state were accurate.

  I then moved to the personnel files and found the original W-9 that Julie had first filled out when she was a one-woman shop doing executive coaching with Pat Faber. The tax form had some very valuable information, including her social security number, her city of birth (Vero Beach, Florida), and the date she was born. I had to check the math when figuring out her age because it didn’t seem right. By this record she was nearly seventy years old, but to me she didn’t look a day over fifty. I found myself subconsciously touching the sides of my head where I knew the gray hairs were coming in faster than I wanted them to. As a septuagenarian, Julie had thirty years on me and far more grays but she also looked like she could take me handily in a fight. The last bit of helpful information on the W-9 was an address in Sierra Madre, a hippie enclave nestled in the mountains just northeast of Pasadena.

  We took the road up, a straight two-mile stretch of such perfect pitch that if you rolled a marble from the top it might not stop until it hit San Diego. I watched the outside temperature gauge on the dashboard as it dropped one degree for every half-mile we traveled. Oaks lining the road slowly gave way to towering pines and foreshadowed the mountain retreat that awaited us. At the crest was the L-shaped downtown, forever a decade late in whatever trendy fad was happening down below.

  “Says to keep heading north,” Rebecca instructed.

  Instead, I turned west.

  “You’re supposed to take that street all the way up.”

  “Shortcut,” I said, even though I had never been in this town before and didn’t know any of the streets. I wanted to get off the main drag and onto quieter streets to see if the Cadillac was still behind us.

  I’d noticed it back in Baldwin Park and then again as we got off the freeway. There weren’t that many old Coupe DeVilles driving around Los Angeles outside of the occasional cholo lowrider, so it was easy to spot. I couldn’t quite get a good look at the driver but it appeared to be the same bowling ball of a man who barged into Rebecca’s hotel room. As I made a series of turns that got us deep into a residential area, I glanced in the mirror to see if it was still back there.

  “Is someone following us?” Rebecca asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I lied.

  I directed us back toward our initial destination but made periodic checks in the mirror to see if the Caddie had reappeared. It hadn’t.

  The roads narrowed as we entered the part of Sierra Madre that clawed its way into the foothill canyons. A log sign indicated the fire warning level and for once it was firmly pointing to green. The prior year, a careless hiker had caused a small fire that took out a stretch of the forest and a few houses. That was modest in terms of damage, but the bigger danger came after the flames were put out. The scorched earth, already bone dry from years of drought, had nothing to hold it in place without the trees and their roots. All it would take was one extended rainstorm to loosen the earth from the bedrock and half the mountain would come down like a lava flow of black mud. And the houses would come with it.

  Unlike the perfect symmetry of the grid down below, up here they put the streets where nature dictated. The result was a narrowing lane constantly bending around giant boulders, and only when that wasn’t feasible did you see the drill holes where the dynamite had been inserted. We got to the street indicated on Julie’s original W-9 form and were greeted with a temporary sign that said only residents’ cars were allowed beyond that point. It didn’t look like two cars could fit on the road anyway, so I pulled over under a set of sprawling sycamores and parked. The rain collected on their large brown leaves sent big drops down onto the roof of my car, each one sounding like a muzzled gunshot.

  We were going to have to make it the rest of the way on foot, but one glance in Rebecca’s direction caused me to reconsider. She didn’t look well, despite her protests that she was fine. There was an ancient general-store-style coffee shop at the beginning of the street, and I suggested we grab a bite to eat. She was more tired than I thought because she acquiesced without much of a fight.

  The place didn’t look like it had been redecorated in fifty years. There were about ten tables topped with picnic-checkered vinyl tablecloths. An entire wall was covered in perforated board and shelving that displayed cheap ceramics and other used knickknacks for sale. A potbellied stove in the corner provided the heat for the entire place.

  Several locals’ gazes lingered on us but they quickly returned to their coffees and conversation. Rebecca and I sat at the counter on a couple of stools. The elbows of countless customers had worn perfectly spaced out circles across the length of the Formica top. A mirrored rack opposite us held coffee mugs with names inscribed on them, which I assumed were for regulars. I spotted one with “Julie” on it, but doubted it belonged to the woman we sought.

  An old man behind the counter approached with a pot of coffee and laid out two mugs without names on them. It was assumed that anyone sitting at the counter was there for one purpose—a cup of joe. We didn’t disagree.

  “You want menus?” he asked, but before I could answer he informed us that they didn’t have any. Instead, he pointed to a chalkboard on the wall with about six items to choose from. We each ordered soup and a sandwich.

  “Been open a long time?” I asked when the old man returned with our food. He didn’t dignify my question with a response. Instead, he held up the pot of coffee as an offer for a refill. I nodded, then asked him if he knew someone from this area.

  “Know lots of people,” he informed me.

  “Her na
me is Julie St. Jean?”

  I detected a slight hiccup in his otherwise smooth coffee pour.

  “Sounds familiar,” he replied, but I got the sense he knew more than he was letting on.

  “She lives up the road here, right?”

  “Used to,” he corrected.

  “When did she move out?” I asked.

  “I just work here,” he said, laughing, and filled up Rebecca’s mug. “I’m not the Hall of Records.”

  He tried to play it off as a joke, but my questions were clearly unwanted. He found something more pressing to do and left us to our lunch.

  Atmosphere can sometimes trump quality, as it did when the warm shop with the woodstove pumping heat on our backs somehow managed to make two shitty grilled cheese sandwiches and bowls of canned tomato soup taste like the ones from fond childhood memories.

  “Like my mom used to make,” I said, holding up the half-eaten sandwich. “Where’d you grow up, Rebecca?”

  “A long ways from here.”

  I wasn’t surprised by the vague response. We’d spent the better part of the day together but our conversations never managed to go very deep. Even the foolproof method of two individuals sitting in traffic in a locked car couldn’t get her to open up. It was deliberate, but I didn’t know why.

  “Where’s Julie from?” I pressed, even though I already knew she was born in Vero Beach.

  “Back east,” she said casually.

  “Everything but Hawaii qualifies for that,” I replied.

  “I can’t remember. Florida, I think.”

  “You guys are married, right?” I laughed.

  I was being a smartass but there was a legitimate question in there, one I had been asking other same-sex couples for years. Once the state recognized gay marriage—and the health insurance benefits that came with it—there was an influx of requests by our employees to put their significant others onto the company health plan. It fell upon my group to weed out the frauds, an impossible task of determining if couples were “legitimate” in the traditional sense of the term or if an employee was just seizing the opportunity to offer his loser roommate free health insurance. The answers Rebecca gave me were not indicative of two people in a lifelong bond of love and devotion.