The Big Con Read online

  “How long have you been in the Palos Verdes house?”

  “Seven years come March. Well, Julie lived in the house long before I moved in,” she clarified.

  “But you two have known each other for a long time.”

  “Since the eighties.”

  “And together for…?”

  “Since the eighties.”

  I wanted to define my question by adding the word “romantically” but decided against it.

  “Julie never mentioned Sierra Madre?”

  “Not that I can remember,” she answered.

  By my records, Julie had lived at the address up the road—or claimed she lived here on the W-9—for almost seven years. It seemed unrealistic that someone wouldn’t mention it at least once, even in a casual conversation. And it was equally odd that her wife lacked any curiosity about the discovery at all.

  “You know, you’re allowed more than three words per answer.”

  I said it lightly but couldn’t mask my growing frustration.

  “I don’t like talking about myself,” she said.

  “I’m just trying to learn more about Julie. The more I do, the better the chances that we find her.”

  “You’re curious about her but I don’t think knowing her past is going to help you understand her.” She spun on the stool to face me. “I’m not trying to be difficult. You can ask all you want about me and Julie but just know that we never delved into the past, so I won’t be much help. Our relationship is very much of the present.”

  “That sounds like consultant gobbledygook,” I said. It also sounded like more Julie nonsense, but I let that go unsaid. “You’re telling me you and Julie never asked each other about your lives before you met each other?”

  Rebecca shook her head. “The past lies, too, you know.”

  I called for the check. The old man had his back to us but responded very quickly, as if anticipating the request. I wasn’t too surprised because the entire time we were there, I got the sense that he was listening in on our conversation.

  BUTTERFLIES

  We made our way up the street on foot. I now understood the reason for the restrictions—the road was only wide enough for one car and there was nowhere to turn around. Even the “driveways” were short strips where one could barely pull a car in with enough room to spare to not have your bumper ripped off by passing vehicles.

  The homes were packed tightly together and featured small porches and chalet-like carved trim, vestiges of their former lives as weekend hunting lodges. Wealthy families from Pasadena and Los Angeles would come up here to escape the heat of summer and potentially bag a deer or maybe just catch some trout for dinner.

  We passed several homeowners installing long planks at the end of their driveways. I realized that all of the homes had this peculiar addition—a set of pipes at each side of the driveway entrance into which the heavy planks could slide to form a temporary wall. I asked one of the homeowners about it. He gestured warily toward the top of the hill.

  “Keeps the mud out,” he said.

  The street suddenly felt more menacing, as if around any of the bends could come a flash flood of mud that would sweep us down the hill. The newly formed walls made the whole thing into a sort of channel and blocked off all attempts of escape. I wanted off that road.

  The house was a green and brown structure, a little more worse for wear than its neighbors. The driveway was empty and there were no lights on inside. We walked up the short set of stairs to the front porch, whose boards sagged slightly under our feet. There was no doorbell. I pulled open a dusty screen door and knocked on the door behind it.

  “Looks abandoned,” Rebecca said behind me.

  I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I followed the porch around the length of the house and descended ten steps to a concrete landing in a micro-backyard that was small even by Brooklyn-brownstone standards. A moss-covered oak tree ensured this area never got sun. The run-off channel bordered the back of the house and drowned out all sounds.

  The half-basement underneath the house had at some point been converted into a living space. I cupped my hands over the glass door and peered inside. The room couldn’t have been more than twelve by fifteen feet. It was an odd shape as it followed the contours of the bedrock it was built into. The far “wall” was actually a giant boulder, cleaned and sealed and unmoving until the next Ice Age pushed it farther down the hill.

  The room wasn’t furnished but it was decorated in a sort of Turkish theme with woven rugs, long cushions on the floor, and a large number of throw pillows. All it needed was a brass hookah and yataghan to complete the Ottoman aesthetic.

  As eccentric as all this was, it was the artwork that caught my eye.

  I tried the door handle and found it unlocked. I entered the room and studied the drawings on the wall. They were mostly abstract, of what appeared to be butterflies, rendered in familiar charcoal by a familiar hand. Although not signed, they were undoubtedly drawn by the visioning artist, Lois.

  There had to be almost twenty versions of the same butterfly drawing, each with a date inscribed in the corner. Some were taped to the wall, but given the limited space, many more were piled on the floor. I picked up a stack and flipped through them. Only when I came upon a graphic portrait of a woman lying on her back, her legs slightly open, her eyes as naked as the rest of her body, did I realize that the other drawings didn’t depict butterflies but something much more salacious.

  The subject’s bone-white hair, cast against a shadowy background, clearly identified her.

  I let the drawings slip from my hands and suddenly felt queasy as I realized I hadn’t stumbled on an artist’s studio but a well-used lover’s den. Julie may have preferred Eastern spiritualism for her coaching sessions, but when it came to lustful encounters with an employee, she was all Middle East.

  I was so distracted by the drawings that I didn’t notice the dark lump nestled in the pillows along the far wall. My eyes strained to see into the part of the room that was so dimly lit from the outside. I slowly approached and pulled back one of the giant pillows and found a man slumped face down on the cushion. There was something sticky on the pillow I was holding, and I realized too late that it was his blood, masked perfectly by the pillow’s burgundy shade. I dropped the pillow and stared at my crimson-stained hand.

  “YOU!” a voice shouted behind me, so startling that I lurched upward and cracked my head on the rock overhang. There was that moment when I was fully aware of the pain about to come but for a blissful half-second I felt nothing. I reached up to touch my skull and comfort the impending throbbing.

  The voice didn’t like that.

  “Don’t you move!” it shouted. “Get down on the ground.”

  A second voice repeated the same instruction but with a few expletives thrown in. I surmised from the excessive shouting that they were cops.

  “Look, fellas, this area…it’s a little dirty,” I said, and tried to back up without provoking them. “If I could just step out here—”

  It seemed they didn’t need much prodding because I was immediately bull-rushed and tackled to the floor. The Turkish throw pillows were soft but the million-year-old boulder wasn’t. For the second time in the span of thirty seconds my head cracked on the stone. I lay face down in the cushions as what felt like a dozen sets of knees tried to prove how flexible a human spine can be. One of those knees found the back of my neck and pressed my face further into the cushions.

  I didn’t know what was more unnerving—the fact that my face was buried in pillows from a crime scene or that it was in pillows that Julie St. Jean had used in her elaborate lovemaking sessions.

  After being frisked and having my pockets emptied of belongings, I was led out in handcuffs to an idling cruiser in the street. The excitement drew all the neighbors out of their warm houses and into the rain. The inhabitants of Sierra Madre were more of a mackinaw-and-rain-slicker crowd than golf-umbrella types.

  I scanned the sea of red
and yellow coats but didn’t spot Rebecca. I did, however, see the counterman from the coffee shop. Still wearing his apron, he had the smirk on his face of someone who’d just served a cold slice of justice. I assumed he was the one who’d called the cops.

  “Asshole,” I mouthed through the cruiser window.

  The bastard winked back at me.

  With so many spectators in such a tight space and no room for residents to get by, the police made the decision to move me to the local station. And although I had done almost nothing wrong and didn’t even know the people staring at me, I couldn’t help but feel some level of humiliation. What made it worse was that the officer had to execute a fifty-plus-point turn to get the cruiser pointed back toward the bottom of the hill. Navigating the narrow streets was apparently a local pastime because everyone got in on the act, calling out instructions, giving hand signals, and generally laughing at the officer’s ineptitude behind the wheel.

  Everyone had an opinion, except for one person standing away from the crowd, not quite hidden but not wanting to be seen either. It appeared to be a little old man in a baseball cap and a black jacket that was a raincoat in name only as it didn’t look like it could shed much water.

  As the officer finally cleared his front bumper, he headed the car down the hill. We passed the old man, who quickly angled his face away from us. I turned to watch the figure disappear between a set of homes like someone very familiar with the area.

  Julie St. Jean still knew her old neighborhood.

  A TOUCH OF HEARTH

  What took you so long?” Rebecca asked as I walked out of the Sierra Madre police station.

  “Some chatty rookie detective,” I said, pretending to be annoyed. What legitimately annoyed me was the five hundred bucks I needlessly agreed to pay on a trespassing charge.

  Despite what my attorney ex-wife ingrained in me during years of her shouting at the TV while we watched true-crime shows together, I declined the offer to obtain legal representation. Lawyers do one thing really well—they keep you from talking. But this time I wanted to talk, not so much to provide information to the police but to see what kind of information they had for me. I was operating in the dark and clamming up would only keep me from gaining clarity on what Julie was up to.

  But the questions I asked and the vague responses I gave to their questions succeeded only in raising their suspicions about me. Suddenly I found myself having to document my whereabouts over the last week, which then had to be confirmed. I wasn’t released until later that evening.

  I welcomed the cold air after so long in the infinitely recycled air inside the police station. The rain clouds were finally clearing and the moon shone through in a crispness that arrives only after many days of rain. Rebecca looked paler than normal in that light.

  “Have you been out here the entire time?” I asked.

  “No, I hung around the house up there. Spoke to some of the neighbors and police officers. They gave me a lift over here.”

  “You should have just gone home,” I said.

  “I have no home and you have all my stuff in the back of your car.”

  My ineptitude at pumping information from the police left this poor woman with nowhere to go. I quickly ordered a car to take us back to the coffee shop to collect my car, and then we made the short jaunt down to my home in Eagle Rock.

  “I got some good information out of the police,” I said on the drive. “A little bit on the dead man.”

  “Long way from Bakersfield,” Rebecca replied cryptically.

  “What’s that?”

  “Fitch,” she said. “He’s a long way from home.”

  I nodded as if I already knew this, but it was new information to me.

  “Fitch?” I repeated, as I recalled where I’d heard that name before. “That’s the name the man in the hotel was asking about.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “That’s who was killed?”

  “Didn’t the police tell you?” she asked, confused.

  “No, they didn’t go into that much detail.”

  “You were there for four hours,” she said.

  I felt the need to justify why my interviewing skills got me less information than Rebecca had gathered in one-fifth the time.

  “We were exploring other avenues,” I said.

  “They told you about the money, right?” she asked.

  I was clearly in the dark. It felt like one of those conference calls where someone asks you a direct question but you can’t answer it because you weren’t listening. Asking them to repeat the question is an admission that you weren’t paying attention. The trick is to ask a question back without tipping your hand that you’ve been staring out the window the entire time.

  “I want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing,” I told her. “What did they tell you about the money?”

  “I imagine the same thing they told you.” Rebecca wasn’t playing along.

  “Maybe,” I tried again. “But I’m curious to hear how they positioned it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just to see if it lines up with what my guy told me.”

  “They told you about it, right?”

  I started to feel like I was on that conference call again. Everyone pretends like nothing happened, but you can hear the shame in their voices. The only recourse is to turn on the questioner to get the heat off of oneself.

  “How can you be sure the people you spoke to have the right information?” I challenged.

  “It’s the same people who spoke to you, I think.”

  Mercifully, she finally shared what information she had gotten from the arresting officer and lead detective. Fitch was holding a check for a hundred thousand dollars, made out to him by Lois Hearns. The police wanted to know if Rebecca knew anything about it, but all of these developments were new to her. In their questioning they gave up more information than they got out of her.

  I tried to play it off like the information she had was nothing new to me.

  “That’s pretty much what they told me,” I confirmed, but inside I silently cursed the cops. They kept me in a room for four hours and told me zilch, but then all but opened the case file with Rebecca.

  We stopped off at my house before heading downtown to check Rebecca into her new hotel. The place was cold by Los Angeles standards. Anything below sixty-five degrees warranted a fire, so I placed more logs than were needed onto the grate and lit it from below with the gas burners. It was roaring in a matter of minutes. There was a lot to discuss and a nice fire felt like a good accompaniment as we tried to make sense of all that we had learned that day.

  But as I dragged a chair over to be closer to the hearth, Rebecca remained seated on the edge of the couch across the room. She didn’t look like someone who wanted to talk. If anything, the way she sat forward on the couch made it seem like she was about to leave.

  Every topic I threw out—the used-car purchase, the money paid to Fitch, the Sierra Madre home itself—was greeted with less interest than the previous one until we reached a point where Rebecca simply stood up and announced that she was taking off.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, I’ll probably just head home. Don’t worry about driving me,” she said, “I’ll call a car. I’ll just need to get my stuff out of yours.”

  “The way you say it sounds like this is it. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I was just thinking about it while waiting for you outside the precinct and decided it isn’t fair. You didn’t sign up for this,” she gestured with her hand at the night outside, in an attempt to convey two murders and someone on the run, all beyond the glass. “You were nice enough to offer to help me, and I’m really grateful. But this wasn’t a part of the bargain and I need to respect that.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Maybe you’re right.” But I couldn’t mask my disappointment. After a long day during which we learned many things, it seemed odd to just call it
quits like this. Despite my bumbling with the Sierra Madre police, I was able to uncover some important information to help this woman, who by any stretch of the imagination could use it. She was sick, alone, and in search of answers. And now that we’d found a couple of clues, she wanted to give up.

  “Just so you know,” I started, “one thing I’ve learned over the years is that anytime you ask someone what’s wrong and their first reply is ‘nothing,’ whatever comes next is complete bullshit.”

  Rebecca studied me but made no protest.

  “I saw Julie,” I told her.

  “You did? Where?”

  “The same place you saw her,” I answered.

  I had purposely withheld the detail about spotting Julie at the crime scene. Ever since the discovery of the tray of pills in her room, I began to tread lightly around Rebecca out of a fear of unnecessarily upsetting her. But illness or not, Rebecca was still human.

  “I think you hung around here because you wanted to know if I had seen her. Well, I did.” I let that hang out there because with this new piece of information, there were many more questions to be answered. She couldn’t leave now. “You probably want to know what I told the police.”

  She looked up expectantly.

  “I didn’t tell them anything.”

  Rebecca stared into the fire. I wanted to think it was a subtle act of contrition but I couldn’t be sure.

  “Were you going to tell me?” I asked.

  “No,” she answered.

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you supposed to meet Julie somewhere?” I asked. “I’m not a lawyer—but that’s probably a bad idea. It makes you complicit in some serious stuff. But whatever, you know what you’re doing. I don’t need to tell you what to do.”

  Rebecca let me ramble on and then had a question of her own.